Bad blood

by Linda Fairstein

  “Are there guys who have trouble working here?” Mercer asked.

  “Plenty of them. It’s gotta be in the blood. There are men who come down once, realize that this creaky elevator that might squeeze eight of us in at best is the only way out from that hellhole, and that the tunnels stretch for miles in both directions, full of sandhogs. Some would crawl up the walls if they could. And then there’s the dripping. Constant sound of dripping water. That’s what gets the rest of ’em.”

  The Alimak operator called out, “Two hundred feet.”

  I craned my neck upward but could no longer see anything above.

  “Is the dripping from cracks in the old pipes overhead?” Mercer asked.

  Another fear I hadn’t considered. I could hear the pinging sound but wondered what could possibly be leaking this far below the surface.

  “There are leaks all right. But the water you see here is a natural phenomenon. It’s all in the landscape above us, pouring down through the earth and rocks, from riverbeds and underground streams. Another two minutes you’ll be five hundred feet below the Hudson River.”

  I shivered at the thought of the weight of an entire city pressing down upon me. There was nowhere for me to look but straight ahead, at the point of Golden’s nose.

  “You’re not cold, are you?” he asked.

  “Just a bit.”

  “People always think it’s gonna be freezing. The odd thing is that it’s mild the entire year all this way down. Fifty-five degrees.”

  “Three hundred feet,” the man at the controls said, and I knew we were halfway through the four-minute ride to the bottom, the Alimak creaking as we seemed to hurtle on our descent into the darkness.

  “So what do the guys do for fresh air?” Mike asked.

  “Fresh isn’t exactly the operative word. But air is pumped in all the time by fans, and then the stale air is pumped out through ventilation pipes. Got to be tested constantly for toxic gases and stuff like that.”

  Gases. Check. Something else to add to the short list of ways I hadn’t thought about to die in this water tunnel.

  “The ones that can’t take it,” Golden went on, “they just blanch before they’re out of this cage. Turn green, some of them, on the ride. Like a kid on his first crack at the giant roller coaster. Get all queasy inside.”

  Queasy would have been a good feeling. I was nauseous at this point, clinging to Mercer’s hand as the cage seemed to bounce against the wall and vibrate.

  “Four hundred feet.”

  “Think about it,” George said. “You go up to see that fabulous view from the Rainbow Room, over at Rockefeller Center. You can look up the Hudson and practically touch Canada from there. Another minute and you’ll be farther in the ground than that skyscraper reaches into the sky.”

  Smoke and dust, the residue from last night’s explosion, were still heavy in the air. I covered my mouth and coughed, hoping not to be sick in the crowded elevator.

  Golden reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out several small plastic bags-the kind used to store sandwiches or food-with something folded inside each. “You might want a mask,” he said to us, holding out his arm. “The fire will make it tougher to breathe today.”

  In another bag he had a package of cough drops, which he offered to me. “Everything has to come down here in plastic-the guys’ lunch, their cigarettes, their identification. The constant dripping gets to everything-and everybody.”

  “Five hundred feet.”

  The droplets had turned into running rivulets of water, streaming through the wire of the cage from the reinforced-concrete walls of the hole.

  I was willing myself to stay on my feet, thinking of the beautiful June day that was awaiting me on my return to the surface. As we neared the end of the descent, the artificial light source below us cast an eerie glow against the scarlet mesh of the Alimak.

  The operator cranked back the lever to bring us to a stop, blowing a shrill whistle to clear the landing platform and announce our arrival to the men in the tunnel. The cage shuddered on the enormous chain that tethered it to the winch.

  Golden reached back and unlatched the door, stepping out onto the top of a wooden staircase that led down to the floor of the shaft, six hundred feet below midtown Manhattan.

  “Welcome to the center of the earth,” he said, as Mike followed him out and started down the steps. Golden ran his hand across the wet surface of the wall as he walked. “Nobody but the sandhogs-and you investigators-will ever see this-this bedrock, this tunnel that will keep everyone in New York alive for generations to come.”

  Mercer kept hold of my hand and led me out behind him. I stopped to look up toward the top of the hole-the great void to the side of the Alimak-trying to discern the source of a terrible clanging noise over my head.

  “You okay?” he asked me, trying to disengage from my grasp. “C’mon, Alex. Let’s keep up. I promise to get you back up there in one piece.”

  I grabbed the banister, reluctant to take the first step off the wooden platform, struggling to keep from walking out of my borrowed boots.

  Golden was pointing out the tunnel structure to Mike, who was behind him, and to Mercer, who had started to descend the staircase after them as I stood frozen in place. The Alimak jerked upward from the base and started its noisy climb while the other dreadful banging in the hole seemed to get even louder.

  “Hurry up,” Mercer said, coming back up toward me and stretching out an arm to coax me down.

  Then I saw the expression on his face as he screamed at me to duck.

  I leaned over, my hard hat crashing down the steps, falling into the mudpile at the bottom. Behind me, a lethal metal spear-a tire iron that had fallen, or been dropped, from street level at the mouth of the hole-landed inches from my back and impaled itself into the wooden floorboard.

  13

  “Get her out of the way!” Golden ordered.

  I straightened up and plodded into the mud as fast as I could move away from the shaft at the bottom of the hole.

  “What the fuck was that?” Mike yelled at him. “Bring that Alimak back-I’m going up. The damn thing nearly killed her.”

  “Nobody could have seen Alex from up on top. It must have been-”

  “Don’t give me that crap,” Mike said, wrapping the end of the metal weapon in his handkerchief. “Somebody was sending a very clear message. You were the last guy to step on and the first one off, so whoever was watching knew you wouldn’t be the target. I’m guessing this was meant for one of us.”

  My heart was speeding again, the beat as loud to me as the tire iron had sounded as it had bounced off the rock walls. Mike was going nose to nose with Golden.

  “You stay and get this done,” Mercer said, separating the two men. “I’ll check out who’s up there.”

  “I’ll go with you. Let me get the cab back down,” Golden said, heading for the control booth at the head of the staircase. He pointed into the tunnel. “O’Malley’s waiting for you.”

  I squinted into the long black tube that stretched out in front of us-laid with train tracks as far ahead as I could see-and then made out Teddy’s hulk emerging from the haze about twenty feet away.

  “Step lively, Alex,” he said. “Last guy we lost had a bad habit of lingering near the Alimak door. Spring thaw came along and an icicle broke off in the shaft above him. Point of it split his head in half, like a watermelon.”

  Everything about the operation was dangerous. This was a world shrouded in darkness and mist, the occasional bulb hanging from wire that was taped overhead. The vivid colors of the hard hats and rain slickers were in sharp contrast to the tones of black and gray that dominated the landscape.

  “Sorry. I can’t go any faster.”

  “You’ve got to watch yourself on these railroad ties,” Teddy said. “It’s nothing but puddles in between.”

  “Why the tracks?” Mike asked, each of us trying to lift one foot at a time over the railroad ties, in single file, sinking
into the mud as we tried to advance.

  “Can you see ahead?”

  We both looked up into the shadowy cylindrical tunnel that seemed to be about twelve feet in diameter, with side-by-side tracks running through it.

  “Yeah,” Mike said.

  “This leg will go nine miles to the south of us,” Teddy said. “It’ll connect the water supply to an identical piece in Brooklyn. Everything moves around here on railroad cars, lugged down the same hole you came in, and then assembled once on the ground.”

  Mike turned to check on my progress. He looked over my head. “And behind us? What’s that?”

  “The other half of the tunnel-a thirteen-mile piece. It comes via the Bronx from upstate-that entrance we looked at last night-and connects to here through a tube under Central Park.”

  More than twenty treacherous miles of cavernous tentacles and only one way to get back out to Thirtieth Street. I looked down again as frigid water sloshed over the top of my boots.

  Teddy pulled a plastic bag from his pocket and removed a cigarette, lighting it as I caught up to him. “The crime-scene guys are waiting for you farther inside the tunnel, at the mole. That’s where the explosion was.”

  “What’s a mole?” I asked.

  “It’s the machine that actually bores the hole through the rock. Never been used in the States before,” Teddy said. “It’s how the Chunnel was dug between England and France. Until then, every tunnel in the world was built the same way the Romans did centuries ago-blast and drill, drill and blast. Slow as molasses.”

  “And with this?”

  “It’s a monster,” he said, his huge feet swallowed by the soft mud, water dripping from the ancient schist over our heads. “Weighs three hundred tons. Brought it below in parts and put it together just like we build the trains. You’ll see-it drills its way through the rock, leaving the walls as smooth to the touch as ice, and it’s three times as fast as the old system. That’s how come so many hogs are out looking for work.”

  I could see a moving beam in the far distance. It looked as if someone was holding a flashlight, waving it slowly around and around in a circle. Behind me a machine rumbled into motion.

  “Get off the tracks,” Teddy said. “Off to the side. That’s the signal to send one of the trains down to the mole.”

  I grabbed for Mike’s shoulder and stepped over to the rounded wall of the tunnel, pressing myself against the cool, wet surface. I coughed again as the residual dust from the blast was stirred up by the wheels of the railroad car. The small mask that Golden had handed me hung on a string around my neck. I couldn’t bear to put it over my mouth for fear-which I knew was irrational-that it would muffle any sound I might try to make.

  “Where’s he going?” Mike asked.

  “It’s a muck car. Once the mole drills into the bedrock, the debris-the muck-has to be hauled out of here. Goes up a conveyer belt behind the shaft.”

  “Why not just repair the old water tunnels?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that be easier than doing all this?”

  Teddy shook his head. His voice boomed back at me. “Call it metal fatigue or whatever you want, but the entire infrastructure that brings the water to the city could go at any minute.”

  I looked overhead at the giant bolts-supersize like everything else in this dark dungeon-that seemed to hold the bedrock in place above me.

  “They were built with valves back then, Alex. Think of big floodgates inside the tunnels that were supposed to be opened and closed whenever they needed fixing.”

  The mud was covering my boots up to the ankles. It felt as though I were walking in quicksand. “So-?”

  “Gets to the point, a hundred years later, where the valves can’t take the pressure of billions of gallons of water. Nobody’s even sure that if they could be turned off at this point, they could ever be turned on again. And nobody wants to try to find out,” Teddy said. “Hell, the aqueduct that services the old tunnels upstate leaks so bad it’s made a sinkhole that could swallow up half the town.”

  Check and check again. Manhattan without a drop of water, and the entire island sinking back down below the Hudson and East rivers.

  “So Duke Quillian wasn’t scheduled to man the evening shift last night?” Mike asked.

  “Nah. He wasn’t set to work again until next week. I don’t know what he was doing down here. But you’ll see the list of names. We gave it to your buddies this morning. Those two kids from Tobago were in working the blowpipes. They were the only ones signed out to be in this stretch of the tunnel.”

  “What’s a blowpipe?” I asked. “What were they doing?”

  “We did some blasting yesterday morning. When that’s done and it’s mucked out, then the next crew comes in with blowpipes. They wash the dirt out of the holes by blasting water and air into them. That’s what those cousins were doing when the explosion happened. No clue what Duke was up to, though.”

  We seemed to be walking for the better part of a mile, slogging through mud while water dripped everywhere. Huge ventilation pipes snaked along the curved walls of the vault, and below them, row upon row of black cable-the source of electricity that powered the dig-hung from hooks that had been drilled into the bedrock.

  I stopped when another coughing fit seized me.

  “You all right?” Mike asked, again expressing his concern but obviously anxious to press forward.

  “She’ll live. It’s just the dust, Mike,” Teddy said. “You need to be down here longer than this to get a real lung disease, like the rest of us have.”

  I knew he meant well, but his humor wasn’t comforting.

  “That odor,” I said, stifling a gag at the sweet, pungent scent. “Is that gas?”

  “Dynamite. Gelatin dynamite, it’s called,” Teddy answered. “Water-resistant. We use tons of it down here.”

  “Thank Alfred Nobel,” Mike said. “Nitroglycerin and diatomaceous earth. Now all you have to do, Coop, is figure out why the dynamite made an unscheduled appearance last night.”

  We were getting closer to the scene. Shovels and rakes and sifting screens, the tools of the bomb-squad investigators, were stacked against the wall.

  “There’s KD,” Mike said, calling out as he recognized another of the task force cops, Jimmy Halloran, a guy whose baby face had earned him the nickname Kid Detective.

  Mike and Teddy finished greeting the team that had been brought in for the site briefing, and I added my wet handshake when I caught up.

  The large men were dwarfed by the enormous piece of machinery that loomed behind them in the tunnel. This was the fantastic mole that was eating its way through the ancient bedrock under New York at the rate of one hundred feet a day.

  KD was bringing Mike up to speed. “Nope. No blast was scheduled last evening. So far as anybody knew, you had the two cousins up on this end with blowpipes, cleaning up the day’s mess. We got the names of the eight other men who worked the shift, but they all say they didn’t hear anything before the explosion.”

  “Somebody been talking to them?”

  “Yeah, they’ve been in interviews with guys from the squad the whole day.”

  “What would you expect them to have heard before it went off?” I asked.

  “You gotta excuse her,” Mike said. “Digging ditches wasn’t a required course at Wellesley.”

  “There are blasts in the tunnel almost every day,” Teddy said, reaching in his plastic bag for another cigarette. “The guys prep the walls by jacklegging a drill ten feet in and making a grid. It ain’t exactly a haphazard occurrence.”

  “And the site is cleared of all workmen, right?” KD asked.

  “You bet. You gotta be three miles down the tracks if you don’t want to wind up airborne to Brooklyn. There’s a three-minute warning that’s sent out, and a follow-up with a minute to go. Nobody in his right mind doesn’t get the hell out of range.”

  The empty railroad train that had passed us on the way down to this spot had coal cars like those on a Lionel train s
et. They were open on top, and when ready to dump their load, they tipped over on one side and poured out the coal.

  KD Halloran stepped sideways and tapped Hal Sherman on the back. The NYPD’s best crime-scene investigator was kneeling in the mud, meticulously photographing the splintered remains of the wooden ties that had caught fire in the blast.

  He looked up at Halloran-spotted us-and blew me a kiss. “What next?”

  KD told him the workmen were ready to load the already processed debris into the cars to be removed from the dig.

  One sandhog walked to the far side of the tracks and picked up a long black hose. He turned a spigot and water-more water-poured forth from the nozzle. The muck cars rolled on their sides to receive the first loads.

  As two other men began to shovel piles of rubble, the hog with the hose started to spray it all down.

  KD asked, “What the hell are you doing?”

  Teddy interrupted him, “They gotta keep the crap wet or we’ll choke to death. It’s routine.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ve got to sift through this again when we get it upstairs,” the detective said.

  Teddy raised one of his arms to stop the guys. “I thought you were finished.”

  KD looked to Mike for help. “We’ve gone through it twice the best we can in this light. We got a couple of tarps spread out behind the crane up in the yard. This all has to be examined more carefully.”

  “What have you found so far?”

  “Pieces of flesh,” KD said. “Can’t even smell it in here over the dynamite.”

  “Salt and pepper?” Mike asked, referring to the mixed races of the victims.

  “Yeah. Got some teeth, some strips of clothing. I’m telling you, shoot me the next time I complain about working a scene in some roach-filled ten-by-twelve room in a flophouse. This explosive stuff is a nightmare.” KD pointed down the tunnel behind me. “The bomb squad makes the focal point of the blast about twenty feet back, but the fragments go a helluva long way from that.”

  “You locate any device? Got any ideas?”