I

The rain in Los Angeles didn't wash things clean. It just made the dirt slicker.

Jack Callahan stood on the metal platform suspended by cables and watched the rain slide down the mirror. The mirror was mounted on the side of a hill in Griffith Park, a curved surface of polished steel twenty feet wide and thirty feet tall, set into a steel frame that looked like the ribs of some enormous creature that had died and been left to rust.

He held a squeegee in his right hand and a bucket in his left. His right hand had only three fingers. The war had taken the other two in Normandy, and though the prosthetic they'd given him was functional, it lacked sensitivity. He preferred the squeegee to the brush anyway. Less fiddling. More force.

"Watch the edges," called a voice from below.

Jack didn't look down. He knew who it was. Victor Langley stood in the rain without an umbrella, wearing a beige suit that was already soaking through, his dark hair plastered to his forehead. He looked like a man who had spent his entire life learning how to smile at the right angle and had never considered that the angle might change.

"The edges are clean, Mr. Langley," Jack said. His voice was rough, the result of too many cigarettes and not enough water.

"Good. Good." Langley smiled at Jack and then turned and smiled at someone else, and the smile changed shape slightly, like a mask being adjusted. "Our investor relations visit is tomorrow. I need this mirror spotless."

Jack returned to cleaning. He moved the squeegee in long, straight strokes from top to bottom. The rain made the surface slippery. The mirror reflected the gray sky and the green hill and Jack's own face—thirty-five, hollow-cheeked, one eye cloudy from an old injury, the other sharp and dark as oil.

He cleaned the mirror every day from six in the morning until four in the afternoon, rain or shine. He had been doing it for three months. He didn't know what the mirror was for. Langley hadn't told him, and Jack hadn't asked. Questions got you nowhere in Los Angeles. Answers were worse.

II

The first time Agent Morris appeared, Jack was cleaning the upper section of the mirror. The rain had stopped, but the surface was still wet, and the reflections were blurred and distorted.

"Mr. Callahan," said a voice from behind him.

Jack turned. The man standing on the platform behind him was tall and thin, wearing a dark suit and a tie the color of dried blood. He had a face that was neither young nor old, neither friendly nor unfriendly, the kind of face that was designed to be forgotten the moment you looked away.

"Agent Morris," the man said. "OSS. May I?"

Jack shrugged. It wasn't the first time someone had come up to the mirror unannounced. Tourists sometimes wandered up the path. Photographers from newspapers. Once a woman in a yellow dress who asked if she could take a picture.

Morris walked to the edge of the platform and looked out at the city. Los Angeles stretched below them, a sprawl of streets and buildings and palm trees and smog, the rain having cleared the air just enough to see the ocean in the far distance.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Morris said. "From up here, you can see the whole thing. All of it."

Jack said nothing.

"Do you know what this mirror does, Mr. Callahan?"

"No, sir."

"It reflects light. Specifically, it reflects sunlight onto a series of signal lamps positioned at various points along the Pacific coast. The lamps communicate using a coded system. Naval communications. During wartime."

Jack looked at the mirror. It was a large mirror. It reflected light. That made sense.

"Why am I cleaning it?"

Morris turned to look at Jack. His eyes were pale gray, the color of a winter sea. "Because you're the only one who can reach the sections the cranes can't. And because you don't ask questions."

"I ask plenty of questions."

"Not here. Not about the mirror. You clean it, you go home, you drink. That's the arrangement."

Jack considered this. "Who arranged it?"

"Mr. Langley arranged your employment. I arranged your silence."

Jack returned to cleaning. Morris stood beside him for a moment, watching, and then walked to the ladder and descended without another word.

Jack cleaned the mirror. He cleaned it straight. Top to bottom. No circles.

III

The second time Agent Morris appeared, he was not alone. A man in a black coat accompanied him, and behind them, two more men, all of them carrying themselves the way men carry themselves who are used to being obeyed.

"Mr. Callahan," Morris said. "I'd like you to meet Mr. O'Brien."

The man in the black coat extended his hand. Jack shook it. The hand was large and soft, the hand of a man who made other people do his work.

"Patrick O'Brien," the man said. "I own several businesses in downtown Los Angeles. Nightclubs. Restaurants."

Jack had heard the name. Everyone in Los Angeles had. O'Brien was connected to people who were connected to people who didn't like to be disturbed.

"The mirror is a valuable asset," O'Brien said. "It's important that it be maintained. Properly."

"Yes, sir."

"Are you having any difficulties with the maintenance?"

"No, sir."

"Good." O'Brien smiled. It was a thin smile, the kind that didn't reach the eyes. "I'll be in touch if anything changes."

They left. Jack cleaned the mirror.

That night, in a room above a laundromat on Cesar Chavez Avenue, Jack sat on the edge of his bed and drank a bottle of whiskey and thought about the mirror. He thought about Morris and O'Brien and Langley, three men who moved through the city like sharks through water, each one circling the same object for different reasons.

He thought about his right hand—three fingers, no thumb, a prosthetic that worked but didn't feel. He thought about Normandy, and the beach, and the men who hadn't come back. He thought about the mirror, and the light, and the coded messages it carried across the dark Pacific.

He drank the rest of the whiskey. He slept.

IV

The third time Agent Morris appeared, he brought news.

"Mr. Callahan," he said. "I need you to do something for me."

Jack was cleaning the lower section of the mirror. Rain had returned to Los Angeles, a fine mist that made everything damp and gray. He paused and looked at Morris.

"What do you need?"

"There is a man named Corporal Eddie Walsh. He served with you in Normandy, correct?"

Jack's left eye—the good one—narrowed. "Where is he?"

"He's been asking questions. About the mirror. About Mr. Langley. About Mr. O'Brien." Morris paused. "He's been talking to reporters."

Jack set down his squeegee. He gripped the edge of the platform with both hands. The metal was cold and wet under his fingers.

"What kind of questions?"

"The wrong kind. Questions about why a film producer owns a military communications mirror. Questions about why a known associate of Mr. O'Brien is involved in its operation. Questions about where the funding comes from."

Jack felt something move inside him. It was not anger. Anger was too simple. It was more like a door opening in a room he had been sitting in for a long time, and through the door he could see something he had been trying not to see.

"Corporal Walsh," Jack said. "Where is he?"

"That is not your concern, Mr. Callahan."

Jack picked up the squeegee. He returned to cleaning the mirror. He moved in long, straight strokes. Top to bottom. The rain fell. The mirror reflected the gray sky and the gray man and the gray city.

Two days later, Eddie Walsh was found at the bottom of a retaining wall in Elysian Park. The official report said he had been drinking and had fallen. The unofficial report said he had been pushed. Jack heard both reports. He believed neither completely and neither not at all.

He cleaned the mirror that day and the next and the next. He did not ask about Walsh. He did not ask about Morris. He did not ask about O'Brien.

He cleaned the mirror.

V

The mirror was dismantled on a Tuesday in March. The steel frame was cut into sections and hauled away in trucks. The mirror surface was rolled up and loaded onto a flatbed and driven south, toward some installation Jack would never see.

Langley stood in the yard below and watched the operation with an expression of mild disappointment, the way a man might watch a garden party ruined by rain. O'Brien was not present. Morris was not present.

Jack stood on the last remaining section of platform and watched the cables being cut. The mirror tilted, slowly, and for a moment caught the afternoon sun and threw it across the city in a brilliant white beam.

The beam hit a building in downtown Los Angeles, then a street, then a park, and then it was gone, swallowed by the trees and the buildings and the rain.

Jack climbed down the ladder. He collected his bucket and his squeegee. He walked to his car—a rusted Ford that started only if you prayed to it—and drove home.

He did not look back at the hill. He did not look back at the city. He drove east, through the rain and the smog and the streets where men like him had disappeared and men like Morris had walked and men like Langley had built empires on the backs of men who cleaned their mirrors.

He went home. He drank a glass of water. He sat in his room and listened to the rain on the roof.

The next morning, he woke up and found a new job. It was cleaning windows in a building on Wilshire Boulevard. He climbed to the twentieth floor and looked out at the city and began to clean.

Top to bottom. Straight strokes. No circles.

The rain stopped. The sun came out. The city gleamed. And Jack Callahan cleaned the windows of a man who would never know his name, in a building that would never be remembered, in a city that forgot everything it had ever seen.

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OTMES-v2 Code: OTMES-v2-ZGTY-05-4E8A1C-E05.8-6-T270-9C37 TI: 72.0 (T4-03 Power Game Level) M_dominant: M5 (Politics -> Espionage Conspiracy) Theta: 270 deg (Cynical Detachment) N: [0.40, 0.25] (Passive, Emotionally Suppressed) K: [0.35, 0.65] (Experiential, War-Hardened) Style: Hardboiled / Film Noir (Style D) Transform: M5+3.0, M3+4.0, theta->270, M6->5.0