In the Realm of the Black Hats
Nico, the man dressed in black, rubbed his wrists and winced. Edwin Peach, nine years old with a penchant for knots, had bound his hands so tight that it took well over a quarter of an hour to free the man from his bonds; the ropes had left wide red welts crisscrossing his wrists. The man looked around the room, sizing up the children who had gathered around him, all observing him with a decidedly suspicious gaze. The boy with the machete who stood at his side held it threateningly, waiting for the strange man to make any sudden move.
“Can I have my hat back?” was the first thing Nico said.
The black beret was swiped from the head of a child and passed through the crowd to the owner. Elsie walked up to him with the hat; Nico bowed and Elsie set it back on his head.
“Thank you,” said Nico.
Elsie blushed.
The man adjusted the beret so it sat slightly askew on his balding head with its strawlike hair, which he tucked up into the back of the hat. He was a handsome man, possibly in his midthirties, and wore the frame of someone who likely followed a sensible diet. He reminded Elsie of a cashier at their family’s local co-op, the kind of guy who would look down his nose a bit if you hadn’t brought in your own bag. A bit of mustache colored his upper lip.
“So,” said Nico Posholsky, “you’re the Unadoptables, huh?”
“Yep,” said Michael. “And this is our home.”
“Nice place,” said Nico. “Could use some cleaning up.”
“We do our best.”
The man began to amble about the large room, studying the salvaged pieces of furniture, the ratty bedding, and the sad remains of the children’s meager breakfast. “Surprised the stevedores haven’t rooted you out yet.” He pulled away a waxed cotton tarp, revealing a portion of the Unadoptables’ food stores: a few greasy bags of sandwich crusts, what was to be their lunch for the day. “Maybe they know you’re here and they just don’t care.” He pivoted on his heels, gracefully, and glanced up at the high rafters, the light angling in through the tall leaded windows. “Good hiding spot, though. Can’t think of why they’d come out here.”
Rachel was the one who finally interjected, sounding annoyed by the man’s musings. “So we let you go. Now you have to help us. Two of our family. An old man and a girl. They were caught by the stevedores. We don’t know where they are.”
Nico stopped and chewed on this information for a moment before replying. “Old man? Was he blind?”
“Yes!” spouted Elsie.
“And the girl—she’s Asian?”
Rachel nodded. “Do you know where they are?”
“No,” said the man. “And yes. We caught word. There was some serious to-do, not long ago, at Titan Tower. We get intel, occasionally, from inside the Shipping Division. Something about a couple of hostages—a blind man and a little girl. Seemed weird that they were so high priority.”
“Intel, huh?” asked Michael, remaining suspicious of the newcomer’s intentions. “How do we know you’re not working for them—for the stevedores?”
Nico glared at Michael. “This’d be a pretty elaborate ruse, don’t you think? A bunch of angry stevedores chasing me down out here, just to get me talking to a bunch of ragamuffin orphans?”
“Ex-orphans!” one of the children exclaimed.
“Sorry,” said Nico. “Ex-orphans. Unadoptables.” He continued talking to Michael: “A good man died to bring us that information. It’s not easy infiltrating Wigman’s Division.”
“What’s a Division?” asked one of the younger children.
Nico frowned. “You guys are pretty new to these parts, huh? They didn’t tell you much at the orphanage, I imagine.”
“Only how to work,” said another Unadoptable.
“I’d heard that,” said the man. “That Unthank was using his orphans in his machine-parts shop. Pitoyable. There was a plan in place to free you guys, you’ll be pleased to know. Within the Chapeaux Noirs. One of the senior members suggested it—an action to liberate the child proletariat. Operation: Mass Adoption, I think it was called. But other, more pressing actions came up. Got put off. I’m happy to see you guys managed it for yourself.”
The room rustled proudly at Nico’s statement.
“You’re in the Industrial Wastes,” continued Nico. “That much you know. This used to be the old Science and Research Division, back when the Wastes were a sextet. Got pushed aside by the other Titans. Now it’s just a no-man’s-land. The Industrial Wastes was a Quintet for a long time after that, run by the five Titans of Industry, until a couple months ago. You guys brought down the fifth Titan, Unthank, in your little sabotage action. Knocked out a whole Division, something we’ve never come close to achieving. You worked from the inside, though. Brilliant.”
“So what’ve you got against the Titans, then?” asked Michael.
“Everything,” said Nico. “They’re the real evil that needs to be rooted out. This place needs to be leveled, brought down to its foundations. That’s what the Chapeaux Noirs are all about: a clean slate for the Industrial Wastes. Wipe out the oppressors, the wreckers, the looters. Finis.”
“That’s what the Chapeaux Noirs are all about: a clean slate for the Industrial Wastes. Wipe out the oppressors, the wreckers, the looters. Finis.”
“Good for you,” pressed Rachel. “But where are our friends? The blind man and the girl. You didn’t answer that question.”
“Somewhere,” said Nico, sounding unperturbed by Rachel’s impatience. “Somewhere deep in Titan Tower, would be my guess. Seems like Wigman has a keen interest in your friends. That is, if they’re still alive.”
A few kids gasped at this. Michael waved his hands dismissively. “I think you’re just trying to scare us,” he said. “Why would this guy want to kill them?”
“Oh, believe me,” said Nico. “Brad Wigman? He’s done worse things. Much worse things.”
“Say they are alive,” said Rachel, “and they’re in the tower. How do we get to them?”
“Well, that’s the trick, isn’t it? The place is impregnable. Ringed by an ever-changing phalanx of guards, an uncrackable security system. Il est impossible.” The man did this, peppered his speech with little French phrases, causing the younger among the Unadoptables to look confusedly at their elders. He didn’t seem remotely French.
“Are you, like, the boss of your—whatever you call it?” asked one of the children.
Nico laughed. “No. The Chapeaux Noirs have no leaders. Like I said, we’re an anarcho-syndicalist collective. Decisions are made by committee.”
“But can you help us get Carol and Martha back?” Rachel said, ignoring the man’s jargon. “I don’t care about your committee, your collective.”
“Rachel,” said Elsie, frowning at her sister. “Don’t be rude.”
“We’re all getting ahead of ourselves here, I think,” said Nico. “You guys look hungry. Are you hungry?”
A few of the younger kids nodded. It was true: They’d been living off grainy mush and table scraps for weeks now. Elsie’s stomach rumbled at the mention of food.
“Why don’t you come with me, back to our place?” said Nico. “Let’s see if we can’t get some food in these bellies. What do you say, champ?” This last question he directed to Michael, who, in the interim, had sat down in the chair where the black-clad man had so recently been restrained. The teenaged boy held his forehead in his hand, as if grappling with some bigger concern, like the weight of adulthood was pushing into him like the squeezing of a vise.
The following morning, once they’d determined that the stevedores were well and truly gone, Nico led a contingent of Unadoptables out of their warehouse and into the light of the graying sun, filtered through the seemingly permanent cloud of haze in this cold, clamorous region. The Forgotten Place had returned to its normal level of quietude, with only the faraway noises of industry coloring the air. Most of the children elected to stay behind, to mind the warehouse against any further intrusions, with t
he promise that the voyaging party would bring back food, preferably sweets too, to nourish their empty stomachs.
The man in the black hat led them through a boxy labyrinth of burned-out structures, areas with which the children were familiar from their scavenging expeditions. Soon, however, they traveled past the pale of their territory and into the heart of the inhabited Wastes themselves. Here they traveled carefully, with Nico scouting the horizon while the children remained behind cover, waiting for the man’s all clear. They arrived after a time at a dip in the ground where a giant concrete pipe belched effluent into a stagnant green pond.
“Let me guess,” said Michael, coming up behind Nico. “We go that way.”
“Intelligent,” said Nico, dipping into French again.
Elsie blanched. She’d joined Rachel on the trip, despite her older sister’s objections. She wanted to see the meeting place of this strange organization, the Chapeaux Noirs, and the comrades of the mysterious man who’d stumbled into their lives. Five other kids, including Cynthia Schmidt, rounded out the party. The youngest Mehlberg watched the brownish-green liquid pouring from the tall pipe and stifled a gag.
“Hold your noses, mes enfants,” said Nico.
One by one, they followed the man into the pipe, straddling the torrent of filth and holding their breath until they’d passed a branch that came in from the right, the source of the fast-flowing stuff. Beyond that point, the going was relatively dry, though the smell remained ever-present. Shafts of light played across the dirty surface, shining down from conduits in the ceiling of the pipe every fifty feet or so. The pipe broke away in many directions, and Elsie felt dizzied by the number of times they’d changed directions in the maze of the sewers. Finally, the channel they were following ended abruptly and the party found themselves high on a wall overlooking a large, subterranean chamber; the room was cold but dry and lit by small, caged electric lights affixed to the brick walls. A few rusted pieces of machinery stood at one end of the room, suggesting some sort of long-abandoned water treatment plant. Nico led the children down a tall ladder to the floor of the room; he stretched mightily after having been forced to walk stooped for so long. He then ambled over to an iron door in the wall and rapped out an elaborate knocking pattern on the surface.
Within moments, a voice sounded from behind the door.
“Qui is it?” asked the voice. “Qu’est-ce que c’est the password?”
“Je t’aime, Brigitte Bardot,” answered Nico.
“Bon,” said the voice. A pause followed, and then the door was pulled noisily open by the person within. He was a skinny soul, dressed identically to Nico in black turtleneck and beret, and he fixed Nico with a look of amazement. “We gave you up for dead!” he exclaimed, sizing up his comrade as if he were a risen spirit. “They said the stevedores had you cornered!”
Nico laughed. “I’m not that easy of a catch, Augustin.” He gestured to the seven children behind him, crowding in to see whom he was talking to. “These are the Unadoptables. Or some of them, at any rate. I’d be dead if it weren’t for them. They’re living in a warehouse in the old Science and Research Division. Living off scraps. They escaped Unthank’s last February. They were the ones who burned the place to the ground. Carbonisé.”
The Unadoptables looked at one another uncertainly, curious as to how this sort of news would be received. They were happy to see a wide smile break across Augustin’s face. “C’est bon,” he said. “Born saboteurs.”
“They saved my life,” continued Nico. “I owe them a decent meal, at the very least.”
“And some to bring home to the others,” interjected Elsie, who couldn’t help but think of the hungry lot they’d left behind.
“Anything for friends of Nico’s,” said Augustin, standing back from the doorway. “Come on in, Unadoptables. Welcome to chez Chapeaux Noirs. Don’t mind wiping your feet, it’s plenty dirty in here.”
They crossed over the threshold, all seven of the Unadoptables, following Nico and Augustin. The door let onto a hallway, which itself was broken up by narrow black doorways that branched off to either side every ten feet or so. As they walked, Elsie peered into the open doors and saw an incredible variety of activity taking place within them: black-bereted men standing at a table, poring over a large map held flat by empty green wine bottles; a man wearing a strange pair of goggles, carefully appending wires to a cannonball-like object; a group of men piling those selfsame bomblike objects in a box for storage; a long room filled with the black-clad men, drinking wine and throwing knives at the wall. When Elsie passed this latter scene, the men paused and watched as the congregation in the hallway walked by; they stared at Elsie with suspicious eyes.
The hallway ended at a large room, similar to the one they’d entered from the pipe; it seemed to have been intended at some point to contain a large amount of water. Massive bladed turbines were stacked against one of the walls, somewhat haphazardly, rusted in their discarded state, long-lying evidence of the room’s formerly intended function. A simple round table was set up in the center of the room, and several other members of the Chapeaux Noirs—near-identical in their uniform of black slacks, black turtlenecks, and black berets—sat around it, talking. When they saw Nico and the Unadoptables enter, they stood up, amazed.
“Nico Posholsky,” exclaimed one of the men. “As I’m standing here. I thought you were mort.”
“That means dead,” whispered Rachel to her sister.
“Quite the opposite,” replied Nico, “thanks to my friends here. Committee, meet the Unadoptables.”
One of the men, a tall man with a shaved head and a little downward-pointing arrow of a graying beard gracing his long chin, pushed himself away from the table and walked toward Nico, his arms extended. “Comrade Posholsky. You diable,” he swore under his breath.
The two men embraced mightily.
“How could you escape?” asked the older man. “You were cornered.”
“I blasted my way out, Jacques,” said Nico. “I still had two explosives. Managed to make a screen and I was able to open up an escape route. They chased me to the old S & R Division, where I found these kids, holed up in one of the old warehouses. They hid me. Saved my life.”
The man, Jacques, slowly shifted his gaze to fall on the children who surrounded Nico. “Children?” he said. “In that wasteland?”
“They were Unthank’s kids, Jacques,” said Nico. “The ones who overthrew the machine-parts factory. The ones who burned it to the ground.”
“Incroyable,” the man mused. And then: “Please, children,” he said, waving his long hands out in front of him. “Sit. If you’ve come from the old Science and Research Division, you’ve traveled a long way.”
Several benches lining the brick walls of the room were soon filled with tired Unadoptables, sitting and studying the strange layout of the room: the rusty turbines, the vast arched ceiling, the unused piping jutting in from some outside source. Jacques returned to his chair and, reclining, waited for the children to get comfortable before he began talking again. “It’s funny, drôle, that Nico should find you—or, rather, you should find Nico—in the S & R Division, of all places. I don’t suppose you know what that area is, do you?”
“The Forgotten Place,” said Elsie.
Michael interjected, “That’s what we started calling it. It’s our new home.”
Jacques smiled. “As it was once mine.”
“Yours?” asked Cynthia Schmidt.
“My name is Jacques Chruschiel, proud founding member of the Chapeaux Noirs. Sworn and committed to the destruction of the oppressive industrial state. But before I took on that name, my nom de guerre, I was Jack Kressel, head of development for the Science and Research Division of the Industrial Wastes. I was a Titan of Industry, as they say.”
Michael gasped. “You were a Titan?” As one of the older orphans, he’d been partially aware of the structure of the Wastes.
The man nodded. “Back when it was the Sextet: Shippin
g, Petrochemical, Nuclear, Mining, Machine Parts, and Science and Research. This”—here he gestured to the large, strange room—“this was my work. I designed this refinery, among many other things.”
Several other members of the Chapeaux Noirs had left their grottos in the hallway and had joined the growing crowd in the brick room, quietly watching the new arrivals.
“But you must be hungry, mes amis,” said Jacques.
“I did promise them food,” said Nico. “It’s the least of what I owe them.”
“And eat you shall,” said Jacques. “Comrade Posholsky, why don’t you bring some food for the children? I believe there’s some chocolate cake left over from the party last night, don’t you think?” He winked at Elsie, saying, “It was Xavier’s birthday.”
At the mention of chocolate cake, Elsie’s mouth began to water. She hadn’t had chocolate in months, not since her parents had left and she and her sister had been entrusted to the guardianship of the Unthank Home for Wayward Youth. The idea of it alone was enough to make her heartbeat quicken. She looked over at Rachel, expecting to share a celebratory smile, but Rachel’s attention was fixed on Jacques.
“We want more than chocolate cake,” said Rachel. “We need your help.”
Jacques seemed unflustered by the girl’s sudden impatience. “But chocolate cake is a good starting point, oui?”
The other six children on the benches muttered in agreement. Rachel stayed silent.
An incredible array of food was fetched and laid out on the table in the center of the room: veggie shepherd’s pie, mashed potatoes, seitan sandwiches (“The Chapeaux Noirs are strictly vegetarian,” explained one of the crew. “Explosive experts and animal lovers.”), and the promised chocolate cake, layered and luscious and coated in a thick shellac of creamy frosting. The children dug in with enthusiasm, heaping their plates with the food and filling their mouths with combinations of the available ingredients that they would have found repulsive before this, their most desperate time of life. Jacques spoke in his sonorous voice while they ate: