that could be, and he said he didn’t know, but that there was no Navajo Project. He was scared, you see. It was clear to me that he was terrified.”
Van Vossen stopped for a moment and repeated the procedure with the tin in his lap. Puskis looked again at the stacks of paper that must have been the book that Van Vossen was writing. There were thousands of pages.
“And that was it for him,” Van Vossen continued, as if recounting a dream dreamt long ago. “I never saw him again. Not that it means anything happened. It is perfectly understandable that our paths would never cross again, particularly if he were trying to avoid me. And I would have most likely taken his disavowal at face value if it wasn’t for what happened afterwards.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing overt. Nothing obvious. I actually didn’t notice it at all. But a transcriber named Talley crabbed it by chance. I don’t need to tell you that each file has date stamps for when it is taken from the Vaults and when it is returned. What Talley realized was that it took some files longer to reach the Vaults from us than others. We might send ten files to you, and eight would get to you that day, and two would get to you the next. Do you understand?”
Puskis nodded.
“At first we weren’t sure. We thought that maybe we weren’t remembering the exact day or the exact run, you know—morning or evening—that we had sent them back. So we started keeping track and requesting the same files again to see what date you had checked them in. And it turned out that we were right. Some were taking longer than others.”
“And you assumed that someone was looking at the files after you sent them,” Puskis said.
“That’s right. Listen. We first noticed this—what?—two months or so after I had talked to Kraal. So this started to make me nervous, you see.”
“Did you notice if there were particular kinds of files that were being delayed.”
“We experimented with that, too. Talley and me. We requested certain types of files—homicides or gang-related crimes, for instance—to see if there was any pattern. If there was, they held back other types of files as camouflage. We couldn’t figure it out.”
Puskis rubbed the sides of his nose with his fingertips. “Who do you think was looking at the files?”
Van Vossen shrugged. “Does it matter? It was either the police or someone from the mayor’s office. Either way, you can understand that it had a chilling effect on us. But it seemed vitally important to get the message out about these criminals who were apparently part of the Navajo Project, whatever that was. I didn’t feel safe about openly contacting anyone, and there was no way to safely conceal anything in a file. It was a risk even to involve Talley. It’s no secret that the mayor had an ear in the Transcribers’ Room.
“So I came up with the idea of getting a duplicate file into the Vaults. It seemed like a good solution. I would plant the duplicate file, request it, and then when you noticed that there were two files, you would look into it. The genius of the approach was that if you approached the Chief or anyone else about the duplicate files, they would assume that it was just an inevitable mistake or that you were beginning to lose it just like Abramowitz had.”
“Why didn’t you request the file again?”
“They retired me. Almost immediately after I had the second file planted. Maybe they knew, or maybe they were suspicious that we were playing games with the system and decided to make me the example. Maybe Talley was the mayor’s man. I never knew. They sent me off and I didn’t have the nerve to ask any of the others to make the request. Who was I to trust? So it sat until a legitimate request was made, I suppose.”
Puskis was overwhelmed by this story. “How did you get the duplicate file into the Vaults?”
Van Vossen laughed without much pleasure. “That was simple. One of the women who cleans on our floor was married to one of the cleaners for the Vaults. I gave her twenty dollars to have her husband stick the file in the right spot. Apparently he did.”
Puskis searched the street as he walked back toward City Hall from Van Vossen’s house. Van Vossen had told Puskis that the police, or more specifically, the ASU, kept a