Gideon’s Sword
Page 23
“Top off that coffee?” the waitress asked.
“Thanks.”
And then a name came to him. Someone he could trust. Charlie Dajkovic. He hadn’t been in touch with the man since the death of General Tucker. The fellow had spent some time in the hospital, but last Gideon had heard he was recovering nicely. They weren’t friends—not exactly. But he was an honest man, a good man.
Gideon began to write, trying to control the faint shake in his hand. It was not easy. Dajkovic would get the cabin and everything in it, with the exception of the Winslow Homer. He appointed Dajkovic his executor and charged him with returning the drawing (anonymously) to the Merton Art Museum. In life he had escaped all suspicion; he sure as hell didn’t want to be fingered after death.
It didn’t take long to complete the document. As he read it over, his mind drifted to his secret fishing hole on Chihuahueños Creek. It had taken him years of lashing the waters of the creeks that drained the northern Jemez Mountains to find that one place—the most beautiful on earth. After a moment’s consideration, he turned over the letter and drew a map for Dajkovic, showing him how to get there, along with suggestions for what sort of flies to use at what times of the year. That would be his biggest bequest.
He hoped to hell Dajkovic liked to fish.
When he was done, he called the waitress over.
“More coffee?” she asked.
“A favor.”
She immediately brightened.
“This letter,” said Gideon, “is my last will and testament. I need two witnesses.”
“Aw, hon, you can’t be over thirty, what you thinking about that for?” The waitress filled up his mug anyway. “I got thirty years on you and I still ain’t thinking about that.”
“I’ve got a terminal illness.” As soon as he said it, he wondered why in the world he was confiding in this stranger.
The waitress laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. Nothing’s engraved in stone. Pray to the Lord and he’ll deliver you a miracle.” She turned. “Gloria? Get over here, this gentleman needs our help.”
The shop’s other waitress came over, a chubby girl of perhaps twenty, her face shining with happiness at being of service. Gideon felt moved by these two random strangers with big hearts.
“I’m going to sign this,” Gideon said, “and then I’d like the two of you to witness it and sign your names here, then print them below.”
He signed, they signed, and then, as Gideon rose, the old waitress gave him a spontaneous hug. “Pray to the Lord,” she said. “There’s nothing He can’t do.”
“Thank you so much. You’ve both been really kind.”
They moved away. Gideon wrote a cover note to Eli Glinn, asking him to make sure Dajkovic received the letter; he then sealed it and addressed it to Glinn at Effective Engineering Solutions on Little West 12th Street. He removed the brick of cash he had stolen from the drug dealer, slipped it under his overturned plate, and quickly left the coffee shop.
On his way to the subway he dropped the letter into a mailbox, feeling a huge wave of self-pity at his lonely, screwed-up existence, which was soon to end one way or another. Maybe the waitress was right: he should try prayer. Nothing else had worked in his sorry life.
60
Gideon took the subway to the end of the line and caught the bus for City Island. By noon he found himself standing outside Murphy’s Bait and Tackle on City Island Avenue, seabirds wheeling overhead. It was hard to believe this sleepy fishing village was part of New York City.
He pushed in to find himself in a narrow shop with glass cases on three sides and a gigantic man in a T-shirt at the far end.
“What can I do for you?” the man boomed out in a genial Bronx accent.
“Are you Murphy?”
“The one and only.”
“I want to rent a boat.”
The rental was quickly arranged, and the man escorted him through the shop to the docks behind. There a dozen open fiberglass skiffs were tied up, each with a six-horsepower outboard, anchor, and gas can.
“Got a storm coming in,” Murphy said as he readied the boat for departure. “Better be back by four.”
“No problem,” Gideon replied as he stowed the fishing rod and bait box he’d purchased as a cover.
A few minutes later he set off, soon passing under the City Island Bridge and entering the open water of Long Island Sound. Hart Island lay about half a mile to the northeast, a long, low mass, indistinct in the haze, dominated by a large smokestack that rose easily a hundred fifty feet into the air. The wind had picked up and the small boat ploughed through the chop, water slapping against the hull. Dark clouds scudded across the sky and gulls rode the air currents, crying loudly.
Gideon consulted the marine chart he had purchased earlier and identified the various landmarks by sight: the Execution Rocks, the Blauzes, Davids Island, High Island, Rat Island. He tried to get a feel for the waypoints of the journey: the next time he came this way it would be dark.
The boat, with its puny engine, moved through the water at a walking pace. Gradually, the island solidified out of the haze.
Almost a mile long, it was covered with a scattering of trees interspersed among clusters of ruined brick buildings. When he was about a hundred yards offshore, he turned the tiller and began making a circuit of the island, examining it with binoculars. The large smokestack rose from a ruined complex on the eastern shore that appeared to have once been a power plant. Reefs and outcroppings were everywhere. Giant, billboard-like signs placed every few hundred yards along the shore warned visitors away:
New York City Correction Department
RESTRICTED AREA
NO Trespassing NO Docking NO Anchoring
VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED
As he reached the northern end of the island, he saw some activity and threw the engine into idle, scrutinizing the scene with his binoculars. Through a screen of oak trees, he could make out a group of convicts in orange jumpsuits laboring in the middle of a field. A backhoe idled nearby. They were unloading pine coffins from the rear of a truck and laying them out beside a freshly dug trench. A group of well-armed corrections officers stood around, watching the activity, gesturing and shouting directions.
Allowing the boat to drift, Gideon continued his observations, occasionally making notes.
Satisfied at last, he fired up the engine again and continued down the western shore of the island. About midway, a long sandy beach came into view, covered with various jetsam, including trash, driftwood, and old boat hulls. The beach ended at a concrete seawall, behind which rose the old power plant complex and the great smokestack. Painted on the brick façade of the main building was a message at least a hundred feet long and thirty feet high:
P R I S O N
K E E P O F F
He decided to land his boat beside the seawall, next to a salt marsh and beyond a treacherous-looking series of reefs.
Gideon brought the boat in, angling it through the reefs, moving slowly. A moment later he cut the engine, hopped out of the boat into the chop, and, wading, pulled it up on the beach.
He checked his watch: one o’clock.
61
Gideon walked up the beach, climbed over the low seawall, slipped into the cover of some trees, then paused to take stock. To his left lay an open field, beyond which stood the ruined power plant. On the right, set back from the shore, stood a neighborhood of modest bungalow houses, complete with streets, streetlights, driveways, and sidewalks. It looked like an ordinary, old-fashioned suburban neighborhood—except that everything lay in ruins, the houses crumbling, window frames broken and black, roofs caved, vines smothering the streetlights and choking the houses, the street itself a web of cracks through which sprouted weeds and stunted trees.
He waited, senses on high alert. In the distance, toward the end of the island, he could hear the faint rumble of the backhoe digging a mass grave. But this middle section of the island seemed deser
ted. He took from his pocket a Google Earth image he’d printed and spent a few minutes reconnoitering. Then he began moving cautiously along an overgrown street and across the broad field toward the ruined complex of buildings he’d noticed earlier. A carved limestone block set into the brick façade of the first building announced its purpose and the date: DYNAMO ROOM 1912. Through the shattered windows, he could see massive pieces of equipment: iron flywheels, rotting belts, broken gauges, steam pipes, and a giant, riveted iron furnace and boiler wrapped in vines that grew up and out of a roof open to the sky.
Gideon walked northward toward the burial grounds, keeping hidden in the brush and trees along the side of the road, moving slowly, checking the Google Earth image and taking notes, committing everything to memory. It was a postapocalyptic landscape, an entire community left to rot. Nothing had been boarded up or secured; it was as if, perhaps half a century ago, everyone had just walked away and never returned. There were parked cars sunken in weeds, a general store with moldering goods still on the shelves, houses with sagging door frames, inside of which he glimpsed decaying furniture, peeling wallpaper, an umbrella sitting in a stand by the door, an old hat on a table. He passed a ruined chapel, gaping and open to the elements; a butcher shop with rusting knives still hanging on a pegboard—and lying in the central square, an ancient, headless Barbie doll. At the edge of town he came to an old baseball field, bleachers draped in vines and the field a small forest.
Gideon skirted the ruins of a tubercularium and rows of dormitories for a juvenile workhouse, with the motto GOD AND WORK carved into the decaying lintels. There were several pits in the ground, old basements and foundations, some exposed, others covered with rotting flooring. Everything was on the verge of collapse. Consulting the Google Earth image again, he located, beyond the dormitories, a huge, circular open area covered with concrete with several decaying metal trapdoors—the subterranean remains of the old Nike missile base.
As he neared the northern end, buildings gave way to large overgrown fields, dotted with cement markers, numbered and whitewashed. The sounds of the backhoe grew louder. He crept into some dense woods bordering the fields and continued moving north. Within a quarter mile, the woods petered out into yet another overgrown field, and here Gideon dropped and crept forward on his belly, peering through binoculars at the scene of activity, about a hundred yards away, in a freshly dug area of the field.
Rows of coffins had been lined up on the edge of a long trench, and the convicts were busily handing them down to others within the trench, who were stacking them in rows, six deep and four across. He watched as they laid down two courses of coffins, forty-eight in all. Each coffin had a number scrawled on the side and lid in a black felt-tip marker.
A trusty with a clipboard kept track of the work, backed up by several guards armed with pistols and shotguns. When the coffins had all been lowered, the men climbed out, laid pieces of corrugated tin over the top layers, and stood by as the backhoe fired up, ejected a dirty cloud of diesel smoke into the air, and pushed a wall of earth onto the tin, covering up the fresh coffins with dirt to ground level. The wind was blowing hard, tossing the treetops, and Gideon could smell, from time to time, the scent of fresh earth, mingled with an acrid odor of formalin and decay. At the far end of a field stood an open-sided brick shed, in which sat a second backhoe.
Gideon circled the field, seeking a better vantage point, trying to locate where the small boxes containing limbs might be buried. He found what he was looking for in a second, parallel trench, farther down the field. It had been partially covered with dirt, keeping the most recent boxes exposed and ready for more stacking; his binoculars revealed that these boxes were small—the right size for body parts—and also marked by scrawled numbers. A piece of corrugated tin had been laid over the exposed rows of mini coffins, weighed down with dirt at one end, evidently protecting them from the elements until the stacks could be finished.
He would need a better inspection. The trench was deep, and from his vantage point he couldn’t see to its bottom. He’d have to get close enough to peer in—very close. And there was no way to do that without being caught.
He stood up, shoved his hands in his pockets, and casually strolled into the open field.
62
They spotted him immediately.
“Hey! Hey, you!” Two of the guards drew their guns and came running toward him across the field. Gideon kept walking, moving quickly to the trench before they could stop him. By the time they reached him he was standing at the edge, looking down.
“Hands in sight! Keep your hands in sight!”
Gideon looked up, as if surprised. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t move! Hands in sight!” A guard dropped to one knee and covered him with his service pistol while the other approached cautiously, shotgun at the ready. “Hands behind your head.”
Gideon obeyed.
One was white, the other black, and both were pumped up and fit. They wore blue shirts with NYC CORRECTION SSD printed on the backs in white letters. One of the guards patted him down and emptied his pockets, removing the Google Earth map, the notebook, his wallet, and a piece of parchment Gideon had prepared earlier.
“He’s clean.”
The other officer rose, holstered his Glock. “Let’s see some ID.”
Gideon, his hands still raised, spoke in a voice high with panic. “I didn’t do anything, I swear! I’m just a tourist!”
“ID,” the guard repeated. “Now.”
“It’s in my wallet.”
The man handed the wallet back and Gideon fumbled out his New Mexico driver’s license, handed it over. “Am I not supposed to be here or something?”
They examined the license, passing it back and forth. “You didn’t see the signs?”
“What signs?” Gideon stammered. “I’m just a tourist from—”
“Cut the crap.” The black officer, who was evidently in charge, frowned. “The signs on the shore. Everywhere. You telling me you didn’t see them?”
The officer’s radio burst into life, a voice demanding to know what was going on with the intruders. The guard unholstered his walkie-talkie. “Just some guy from New Mexico. We got it under control.”
He holstered the radio and stared at Gideon with narrowed eyes. “Care to tell us how you got here and just what the hell you’re doing?”
“Well, I was…just out in the boat fishing, decided to explore the island.”
“Oh, yeah? You blind or something?”
“No, I really didn’t notice any sign…I was worried about the chop, I wasn’t paying attention, I swear…” He made his whine singularly unconvincing.
The white guard held up the parchment. “What’s this?”
Gideon turned red. He said nothing. The two officers exchanged amused glances.
“Looks like a treasure map,” said the white officer, dangling it in front of Gideon.
“I…I…,” he stammered and fell silent.
“Cut the bullshit. You were hunting for buried treasure.” The officer grinned.
After a moment’s hesitation, Gideon hung his head. “Yeah.”
“Tell us about it.”
“I was here on vacation from New Mexico. This guy down on, um, Canal Street sold me the map. I’m an amateur treasure hunter, you see.”
“Canal Street?” The two officers exchanged another glance, one rolling his eyes. The black officer struggled to keep a straight face as he examined the map. “According to this map, you’re even on the wrong island.”
“I am?”
“The X on this map here is on Davids Island. That’s the island over there.” He jerked his chin.
“This isn’t Davids Island?”
“This is Hart Island.”
“I’m not used to the ocean, I must’ve gotten mixed up.”
More laughter, but it was more amused than derisive. “Man, you are one lost dude.”
“I guess so.”
“So who’s th
e pirate who’s supposed to have buried this treasure? Captain Kidd?” More chuckling, then the black guard’s face became serious again. “Now look, Mr. Crew, you knew you were trespassing. You saw the signs. Don’t bullshit us.”
Gideon hung his head. “Yeah, I saw them. I’m sorry.”
His radio burst into life again, another voice inquiring about the intruder. He responded. “Captain, the guy was hunting for buried treasure. Got a map and everything. Bought it down on Canal Street.” He paused and Gideon could hear the crackle of laughter on the other end. “What should I do?”
He listened for a while and then said, “Right. Over.” He grinned. “Today’s your lucky day. We aren’t going to arrest you for criminal trespass. Where’s your boat?”
“On the beach down by that big smokestack.”
“I’m going to escort you back to your boat, understand? For your information, this island is totally off-limits to the public.”
“What, ah, do you do here?”
“Landscaping,” said the guard, to more laughter. “Now let’s go.”
Gideon followed him across the field and down to the road. “Really, what are you doing back in that field, burying all those boxes? They look like coffins.”
The officer hesitated. “They are coffins.”
“What is this, some kind of burial ground?”
“Yeah. It’s the public burial ground for New York City. Potter’s field.”
“Potter’s field?”
“When someone dies in the city, and they don’t have any family or money to pay for a burial, they get buried here. We got Rikers Island inmates doing the work, so we can’t have visitors landing in boats, you understand?”
“Yeah? How many bodies are there?”
“Over a million,” said the guard, with no little touch of pride.
“Holy cow.”
“Largest burial ground in the world. Been going since the Civil War.”