Shadow Dancers (47 page)

It was a thick bundle, wrapped in tarpaper, swollen large around the middle and bound by what appeared to be old shoelaces. Someone had scrawled the dates 1820-1840 in black crayon across the front.

“This may be something.” The archivist’s tremulous fingers undid the bindings with a solicitude that was oddly touching. About it was a sense that he felt it to be almost a desecration to rouse such old documents from the sleep of centuries.

“Just exactly what do you hope to find here?” Lydecker asked, his fingers riffling gently through the crumbling, faded papers he’d uncovered.

Pickering made a pained expression. It made him look a trifle distraught. “I don’t know. I guess I just need some idea of the layout of the place.”

“Such as whether or not there are exits and entrances to the place not visible from the outside?” Lydecker inquired shrewdly. He didn’t wait for an answer but plucked a thin sheaf of clipped papers from the stack. It had been part of a bundle of fading, dog-eared parchment bound together by some loosely tied brown twine. The words
“CRANE, BRIDGE STREET”
had been scrawled across its front.

“Ah — perhaps this is something.” Mr. Lydecker carefully separated it from the rest of the papers in the bundle, carrying it forward to the oak refectory table where they’d been working. Pickering shifted papers and cleared a space on the big wood surface while the archivist laid the documents down, spreading them out side by side.

“Well, there’s your blueprint,” Mr. Lydecker proclaimed. “Not much of a blueprint as contemporary plans go, but that’s what the place looked like a hundred and fifty years back.”

Not knowing exactly what he was looking for, and feeling Mr. Lydecker’s eyes on him, Pickering felt somewhat at a loss. The archivist had devoted five hours to the search. It did seem only fitting that something tangible should come of it.

Pickering bent above the blueprint and tried to appear deeply absorbed. There was, as Lydecker had indicated, nothing much to it. It consisted of four fairly unprepossessing sheets of parchment, raggedy with water stains. Time had turned them the color of weak tea. In the lower right hand corner, the original builder had drawn a rudimentary compass rose consisting of crossed arrows pointing N, S, E, and W, thus orienting the house.

Each sheet showed an elevation from a different side of the structure, plus a rather basic floor plan for each story. The handwriting on it was in ink and executed in an ornate, curly scrawl that looked Gothic and was all but illegible. It was full of figures and degree marks surrounded by innumerable arcane references to “rods,” “chains,” and “links.”

Pickering could make neither head nor tail of it. The tiny runic symbols swam before his eyes. But the single part of it that was intelligible to him made it abundantly clear that other than the front or side entrances, both of which he knew about, there was no other way in or out of the house.

Clipped to that was another document showing a plan for an extension to the house, submitted to the City Architectural Review Board in July 1878 by its then owner, a Mr. Mortimer Tyler, but never executed.

A sixth sheet of parchment was a new plan, drawn up in 1910 during the Taft era. William Gaynor was then mayor of New York. Lydecker explained that it was a plan for revision, submitted to the board for approval. But for the life of them, they couldn’t see how it differed from the first in any substantive way to justify filing for a revision.

They put the three plans side by side on the table and compared them meticulously. To both of them, the plans appeared to be identical. The more they studied them, the deeper was their puzzlement.

“Can you see any difference?” Pickering asked. Lydecker shook his head, clearly perplexed. “There has to be something different here, otherwise no revision would have been submitted.”

Pickering was tired. He’d not eaten all day, and by that time he was discouraged and more than just a little inclined to cash in his chips. “You have a Xerox machine here?” he asked.

“An old cranky one. But it works well enough.”

“Can I get a copy of these three plans?”

Lydecker appeared just as discouraged as the detective. “Why not? Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

Mr. Lydecker was as good as his word. He was back in little more than two minutes, grinning with a strange, sly delight. He was carrying the Xeroxed copies in his hand and flung them down at Pickering with a triumphant clap. “I’ve got it.”

Pickering wasn’t exactly certain he knew what it was Mr. Lydecker had.

“It was right there in front of us all the time.” His long, bony finger pointed to a broken fine shaded by hatchures, indicating the cellar level. “See that?”

“See what?”

“That broken line. Runs under the central elevation.” Pickering gazed up at him in blank bewilderment. “It’s a sewer line. That’s why they had to file a revision. They put in a sewer line under the house. Little stairway here runs right into it from the cellar.”

Pickering rubbed his chin thoughtfully as his eyes followed the path of the broken line. “Where does it go?”

“See for yourself.” Lydecker flared impatiently. “Out to the river. Easiest place for them to discharge the effluents.”

Pickering’s eyes swarmed over the parchment. “But where on the river? I don’t see.”

“There’s probably a drain someplace there. No doubt not far from the house itself.” Moving more swiftly than his wont, Lydecker strode across the room to a wall where a large topographical survey map of lower Manhattan hung. Pickering followed at his heels.

“Could be any of a number of places along the Hudson littoral in that vicinity.”

“Along the what?”

“The shoreline,” Lydecker snapped.

“Who’d you suppose could tell me where that sewer line comes out?”

“Well, I couldn’t. But I know just the fellow who could. Frank Merton. Chief engineer over at the Bureau of Sanitation and Sewer Maintenance.”

Pickering’s heart leaped hopefully. “Can we call him?” Lydecker checked his watch, then rose. “It’s three-thirty. He may be gone.”

It took him several calls, but at last he located the chief engineer. The conversation seemed to go on interminably. Pickering’s nervous fingers drummed the table as they chatted and laughed and traded municipal gossip. At last, Lydecker hung up the phone with a flourish and came back to where Pickering waited.

“Battery Park,” he proclaimed, like a man who’d solved the riddle of the Sphinx. “Runs right down to the foot of Bridge Street beneath the park and discharges through a drain cap into the river, just north of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.”

Pickering made a humming sound through his nose. His mind was racing. “You suppose I could get into that sewer?”

“Merton says that line was sealed off and abandoned fifty years ago. It was installed in the early nineteen hundreds. Sewers of that vintage are made of clay. About four to five feet in height. Same in diameter. Merton claims those tunnels were abandoned because they were in poor condition. Too dangerous and costly to maintain.”

“I have to get down into that line.”

“Be a bit dicey, I’d imagine. Particularly if it hasn’t been maintained in nearly a half century. You might get in through the trap drain.”

“Would I need authorization?”

“Probably. But who’s talking? I’m not.” The dusty, baggy figure of the archivist suddenly brightened with the smug satisfaction of the man who feels he’s done his job for the day.

He found the drain almost immediately. Just as Lydecker had said, it stood hard by the river, nearly directly on a line with the bottom of Bridge Street.

For obvious reasons, Pickering wished to stay well away from Bridge Street. For one thing, the place was crawling with Sylvestri’s men — some in mufti going up and down the block; others concealed with cameras in offices and rooms across the way from the Klink house. For another, Pickering had no authorization to be out pursuing the case on his own. But most important, if Koops was still actually inside the house, he was no doubt watching the street as intently as Sylvestri’s men were watching the house. Moreover, Koops now knew Pickering by sight from the several interrogations he’d undergone at police headquarters. He would certainly recognize him if he were to stroll past.

It was principally that line of reasoning that made Pickering park his car behind 14 Bridge on Pearl Street, then walk across Battery Park in the direction of the river.

The drain itself was not large — a square cast-iron grating of four feet by four feet that stood upright on its end, implanted into a small hill that dropped sharply from the park to the river. The water itself was no more than a few feet from the grating.

Pickering stepped gingerly downhill, the soles of his shoes sinking into the muddy earth. The air wasn’t cold, but a brisk wind blew off the river and carried on it a strong tidal smell. A long, low-slung tug plied northward against a swift current, whitecaps bursting into spray before its stubby prow. Bits of broken timber flowed past and a white condom undulated lazily in the water near the shore.

Pickering stood for a time, his back to the water, trousers ballooned and buffeted by the wind, regarding the drain. On closer inspection he found that the earth about it was damp and soft. It bore the impression of recent shoe prints. Even the claw marks of gulls that had used the strip as a promenade were still discernible in the mud around it.

When he approached the grating, however, he discovered that while the earth in front of it was wet, that which lay directly beneath it was dry and crumbling. The grating itself was heavy, but when he took hold of its bars and jiggled it, he found that it moved in its housing. The earth beneath it spilled freely down onto his shoes, giving the impression that the drain was not fixed permanently in the ground and that it had recently been moved.

Pickering stooped and peered between the rusty interstices. They consisted of small squares, no more than three or four inches on each side. Beyond the grating he could see a dark clay tunnel, roughly the same height and width as the grating out of which the dark, cool smell of mold issued.

Close to the edge on the inside of the grating there was a scattering of old candy wrappers and discarded beer cans. Pickering hovered there awhile above the grating, hands on knees, still stooped and squinting through the interstices as though trying to see around corners. In the next moment, he gripped the iron bars of the grating with each hand and hoisted. A shower of dirt spilled downward. The grating jiggled back and forth in its housing like a loose tooth.

It was heavy, at least a hundred pounds, but, surprisingly, it came off with little struggle. Pickering let it swing down from the top like a drawbridge and then fall freely to the earth, where it rang like a horseshoe on the sharp stones below.

For a brief time he stood panting outside the main drain, as if waiting to catch his breath. Then, hunching over, moving head first, he advanced three or four steps into the tunnel. Almost at once, he felt it start to descend into the earth on a shallow grade. No more than ten or so feet in, daylight fell quickly away. A few steps farther and Pickering could see nothing before him. He retreated back to daylight, trudged over to his car on Pearl Street, got a flashlight from the glove compartment, and started back to the river.

This time when he reached there, he removed his overcoat. Folding it into a tidy square, he laid it in a neat bundle on the slope just above the grating. Over his shoulder he glimpsed the Jersey shore. His gaze swept down toward the graceful arching span of the Verrazano Bridge. Then, with a wistful, rather despairing expression, he flicked on his flashlight and stepped into the hole.

For some thirty yards or so, he could feel from the backward pressure on his heels and calves the tunnel dropping down beneath his feet into the earth. After that, it seemed to level off, and he walked in a half-stoop, making good progress.

The farther in he penetrated, the colder and more dank it became. He regretted for a moment having left his overcoat outside. It occurred to him that the place was very quiet, except for a low, unbroken whooshing sound he took to be that of water, the timeless tidal flow of the river behind him, running out to sea.

A bit farther on, he was startled by a soft, scurrying sound, some tiny subterranean creature perturbed by the unwelcome approach of a stranger. Full of misgivings, Pickering moved ahead, penetrating deeper at a fairly brisk clip, anxious to reach the end, to confront whatever it was he imagined he would confront. He plunged after the beam of his light, which cast yellow swaying rings on the crumbling clay walls. From his position in the tunnel and his vague memory of the ground above, he tried to judge where he was in relation to Bridge Street. It seemed to him that he was somewhere beneath the park. Possibly halfway through. He had no way of knowing for certain.

A short time later, he began to approach an area from which a hollow rumbling sound issued. The closer he came, the more the rumbling increased in volume. He could see thin streams of dirt and sand spilling slowly through seams in the cracked clay ceiling and feel vibrations underfoot. It was the traffic above, of course, and then he knew he was somewhere under Bridge Street.

The deeper in he went, the more disquieting were the signs of rock and sand spills. In some places whole patches of the tunnel ceiling had dropped out, leaving gaping fissures out of which wet, porous earth dripped. All the while, through his mind the cautionary words of Mr. Lydecker whirled:
“dangerous … so badly undermined it had to be sealed off and abandoned.”

With traffic rumbling overhead, the showers of dirt and gravel seemed to increase. Pickering grew increasingly uneasy. Several times his courage nearly failed him. He kept telling himself that if he didn’t find anything within the next ten feet, he would turn back. But he didn’t. Something drew him on.

Slightly winded, his back aching from the unrelieved stooping, he suddenly picked out a low, squat object just ahead in the round beam of his light. For a moment he thought it was a box or a crate, but as he moved forward a step, it became apparent it was neither. A puff of air issued from his lungs like a gasp. His hand leaped to the gun holster beneath his arm. Quite clearly he could see now the outline of someone sitting there.