Stories told in the lobby, at the Lucky Noodle and very quietly at meetings. Rated in fedoras for believability.
Fiction. The characters, diaries, legends and reports are invented. The lift and the lair are real.
Every lift engineer in Midtown
The building has eighteen floors on its plans and nineteen in its lift. In a storm, when the power surges, both the 7 and the 8 light up together, and the doors open somewhere in between. Volts says it is a wiring fault. Gus says he has never seen the plans. The Chair says nothing, and writes it in the minutes.
Verdict: The Club has been there. Many times. Most of us came back.
Members of Assassins Anonymous, quietly
There is a plaque on the wall of the office, and on it is the same Employee of the Month, every month, for longer than anyone can remember. The legend says he once took a month off, and nobody else dared accept the plaque, so it hung empty until he got back.
Verdict: The plaque is real. The Club will not say whose name is on it.
Lucky Noodle regulars
Frankie’s fortune cookies are famously accurate, and the most famous of all reads: “Take the stairs tonight.” Customers who found it in their bag, the legend goes, never got stuck in a lift. Customers who threw it away without reading it are how the Club gets its new members.
Verdict: Frankie denies writing it. Frankie writes all the fortunes.
Detective Calloway’s corkboard
Detective Calloway has seventeen names pinned to her corkboard and string running between all of them. The legend in the precinct is that the Hitman’s real name is on there somewhere, and that she pinned it up herself, years ago, without realising.
Verdict: Nobody knows his name. The Club likes it that way.
Gus Pagano’s night book
Midtown gets plenty of rain, but there is one storm that only ever arrives when a lift full of strangers is going up the building. Gus has noted it down for thirty years: clear sky, a group in the lobby with a bag of noodles, and then thunder.
Verdict: The storm is part of the story. The timing is suspicious.
Everyone who has ever seen the desk
There is a great deal of money on the desk in that office, and nobody can agree whose it is. The Chair says it is petty cash. Frankie says it is the noodle money. Volts says he is owed some of it for the lift. The Hitman, as usual, is not available for comment.
Verdict: Leave the cash. Find the way out. That is the Club’s advice.
