She wondered whether there might be any follow-up articles on the incident that would provide some clues, and turned on the microfiche reader once again. There was nothing in the October 9 edition, but in the following day’s, she found a related piece buried on page thirty-seven:
FUNERAL RITES AT TRINITY CHURCH
FOR SUBWAY VICTIMS
Reverend Jacob LeMasters of Trinity Church conducted funeral services yesterday morning for the twenty-two casualties in Tuesday’s subway disaster south of Astor Place. The failure to identify any of the bodies has been cause for much grief and confusion in the City Police Headquarters.
Sergeant Komlo, of the 3rd Precinct, stated that “circumstantial identification” is being made by matching all reports by relatives and friends of any and all persons reported missing since the morning of the 8th, especially those persons known to have used the IRT.
“It’s a sticky situation,” said the Sergeant. “We will just do the best we can.”
Efforts to gamer commentary from officials of the Medical Examiner’s Office, the Fire Department, and even the IRT have met with little success. “There’s not much we can say or do. Not at this late juncture,” said one City Hall official who wished to remain anonymous.
And that was it.
Although she combed the remainder of the month’s editions, Lya found no other mention of the incident. The lack of any information forthcoming from the various city departments seemed a bit suspicious, but there was no sense jumping to conclusions, no sense claiming that she had stumbled upon a government cover-up. Not yet anyway.
Still, Lya was becoming more and more fascinated with the odd little incident with each new shred of information she found. Turning off the microfiche reader, she leaned back in her chair and dug out the printout of names and addresses of retiring IRT employees. There were six other names on the list.
She would call all of them, arrange as many interviews as possible. Armed with this new information, she would find out what was going on. If there had been a cover-up, still continuing after all this time, she would have quite a story— and her position at the studio would be stronger than ever.
Lya smiled to herself as she sorted out some coins for her phone calls. She would also have to get in touch with Lane Carter; he might be able to help her avoid some unnecessary research. She would also get in touch with Michael Corvino, for two reasons—because he might be able to help her, and because she wanted to see him again.
Now it was time to find a phone booth.
CHAPTER 10
THOMPSON
Clifford “Whitey” Thompson made a routine check of his gear before entering the tunnel below 59th Street: two backpacks, each one filled with fifty poison-baits; an Evans Torchlamp and an extra battery; safety rope and harness; waterproof map; and a sawed-off, small-gauge shotgun, which he carried in a special holster that he had designed himself. Technically, Whitey was employed by the New York City Department of Health, but he was often “on loan” to other divisions of the city bureaucracy—sewers, transit, transportation—and even some of the big private companies like Con Ed, Ma Bell, and New York Steam. His job title was “exterminator,” but he saw himself as more of a bounty hunter, a soldier of fortune beneath the streets of the city.
His prey were the hordes of big, brown, greasy-haired Norway rats. Whitey knew the rats under the city as well as he knew his wife, Beatrice. In fact, when Whitey thought about it, he probably knew them better than Beatrice. He knew that he spent more time with the rats than he did with Beatrice.
Thirty-three years of marriage and, God, how that woman had gotten fat! It was in-fucking-credible, thought Whitey. It was about ten years ago that he started to notice the other married couples, their friends, and saw how the husbands were starting to look so much younger than their wives. Now Whitey was edging into his middle fifties, but he still looked forty-five. But Beatrice! Christ, she looked every bit of Social Security age. It was getting so he was embarrassed to go out with her, even just to the supermarket, because he was positive other guys were wondering what a young guy like him was doing with an old bag like that.
Whitey shook his head at the thought and started gathering up the tools of his trade. It was a goddamned good thing he had a job he loved, or life would be completely shit, he thought. Kids all grown, never see any of ‘em. Grandchildren all a bunch of little farts. Just him and Bea at home every night and nothin’ good on TV anymore … Jesus!
But at least he still had his rats. It was a love-hate thing with them. They were the most disgusting little fuckers in the world, but Whitey needed them. Sometimes when he was dealing with a “smart” pack, he couldn’t use the poison-baits because the little cock-knockers could smell the poison. That was when he’d get out his special traps—shingles covered with the stickiest, thickest-shit kind of glue he’d ever seen— and lay them out near the smaller bore-holes and bypass tubes. He’d stick a piece of burnt bacon on one of those shingles and the rats would come running. But that wasn’t the most fun part.
That was when Whitey would turn a corner and find a big sixteen-incher stuck to one of his shingles, its flat eyes glowing in the beam of his torchlamp. Man, would they go nuts when they saw him comin’! Whitey could almost smell the fear reeking from them, and he would smile and come up to them real slow-like. He carried an oak club like a policeman’s billy hooked to his utility belt. His club was reserved for the special times when he would find one of his rats stuck to a shingle— that was the best part of his whole job.
Whitey liked to watch them go crazy while he stood over them getting ready to smack their little brains in. They would jerk and twist and throw themselves around on that sticky shit like somebody had stuck an electric cord up their asses. They would stare at him and hiss and spit and shriek, their lips curled back and their pointed fangs shining demonically. But Whitey had to admire them some, because they were tough little suckers, and they would be brave right up till the end when he would bring that club down and hear the squishy thud. Bing-bang. Out go the lights for you, you greasy little fucker!
There were other exterminators who prowled the underside of the city, but he was sure that the rats feared none of them more than Whitey Thompson. He was the king down here, and the rats knew it. Oh, he was sure that they hated him and would love to sink their little teeth into his flesh, but they feared him even more. And that’s why he loved his job, plain and simple.
It helped, of course, to not be afraid of the rats, and Whitey wasn’t. Not in the least. Not most of the time, anyway. He could remember only one time when he was really scared down in the tunnels …
About seven years back, he had been working under Park Avenue, under what they call the “piecrust” and right up the block from the Waldorf-Astoria; he could hear the rumble of the trains coming and going from Grand Central. It was late in the day and he was just about finished laying his baits when he passed a junction box for a bunch of Con Ed’s high voltage cables. And that’s when he saw it.
Right under the junction box was one of the shingles he’d laid out about a week before, and there was a very big rat stuck to it, its eyes and its naked tail shining dimly. A huge rat, different from any he’d ever seen, and Whitey had been working underground for twenty-five years.
This guy was as big as a cocker spaniel and with a tail that made him seem twice that size. His fangs were as long as Whitey’s fingers, his eyes as big as walnuts. This one was the Man-Mountain Dean of the rats! The Godzilla of rats! Quite simply, it was the biggest fucking rat in the world, and just the sight of it scared the crap out of Whitey Thompson. For a minute, they just stared at each other—Whitey and King Kong Rat—then the sumbitch started growling and spitting and hissing like it wanted to bite Whitey’s throat out.
He reached for his club, but realized that it wouldn’t be enough, and for the first time in his career he knew he was going to have to use his small-gauge shotgun. King Kong must’ve known it too, because when that rat saw
Whitey start to pull out the gun, it went totally bug-shit! Flying around and twisting and throwing itself, and the shingle it was stuck to, all over the floor of the tunnel. The furious thrashing almost worked, too, because as Whitey pinned him in the beam of his torch, he saw that the rat had worked itself free all except for its front right paw, which was still hopelessly mired in the black glue.
Whitey smiled and raised the shotgun, pulling back the hammer slowly. He was going to enjoy this one; he wanted to savor every minute of it. King Kong’s eyes seemed to glow with recognition, and in a frenzy of desperate self-preservation, the rat attacked its own right forelimb, savagely gnawing it through like a manic chain saw. There was a gout of blood and the clatter of the shingle as the rat jumped away from it, hobbling crazily, scuttling with all its sapped energies toward Whitey with its lips curled back so far that it looked like half its skull was showing.
Whitey locked up like an engine suddenly drained of its lubricants. There was a blur of brown in the torchlight as the monster-rat lunged forward and a flash of cordite as the shotgun went off. Whitey couldn’t remember pulling the trigger, but some primitive part of his brain had taken control. Self-preservation, baby. It’s in all of us, he had told the guys at the bar afterward.
The blast from the shotgun caught the rat in mid-leap, disintegrating its hindquarters in the close-range swarm of pellets and sending the rest of its body pinwheeling across the tunnel to slap against the far wall. It fell to the floor of the tunnel, and even as Whitey advanced to inspect it, he saw that, for a brief instant, the nasty bastard was still alive, its eyes flaring one last time and its jaws snapping viciously at his boots …
Whitey still remembered how badly his hands had been shaking after that one. He remembered that he didn’t stop shaking till his third shot of bourbon at the Blarney Stone after he’d climbed out of the tunnels that evening.
That had been a taste of real fear, he thought as he entered the tunnel and started working his way down toward the Grand Central terminal. Along the dark walls of the access tubes, the cables of the phone company, the high-voltage lines of Con Edison, and the heavy, insulated pipes of the steam company paralleled Whitey’s passage. They were like the veins and arteries of a great, dark, slumbering beast, and he was somehow trespassing through its insides.
Every now and then Whitey would pause, unhitch one of his packs, and lay out a new bait, always picking a spot where he knew the rats traveled. You could always tell the places they moved because the oily creatures left “runways” along the bases of walls and the entrances to drainpipes—lines of smeary black marking their favorite routes. You could say that Whitey Thompson was a rat “expert”; in fact, as a joke some years back, he had had some business cards printed up with the words RAT EXPERT in the center. Whitey had always gotten a kick out of giving his card to stuck-up doctor or lawyer types he might meet at a bar when they asked in their typically tight-assed manner: “And what do you do, Mr. Thompson?”
Rats. Whitey knew all their habits, all their favorite places, their favorite foods. They would always eat oatmeal or cornmeal, any kind of animal fat, and fruit. But the bastards were choosy sometimes; they preferred their fruit very ripe, almost rotten. He had also noticed over the years that they had a particular fondness for rancid cantaloupes and honey-dew melons. Suckers’d go crazy for some of that. Laced with strychnine, too, ha-ha!
But the damnedest thing about them was the way they would go after the insulation around Con Ed’s high-voltage cables. Every once in a while they’d swarm all over them and chew the livin’ shit out of the insulation. Eat the stuff right down to the bare wires, not knowing when to stop. And Whitey could always tell when they’d been at it, too. He’d walk into a tunnel and suddenly his nose would be stinging with the essence of fried rat. Yep, it sure was some kind of job.
Slowly but surely, he worked his way south toward Grand Central. His beat was “the piecrust,” a huge eighty-acre area under the city along Park Avenue. Whitey was sure that most New Yorkers had no idea that when they were strolling down the swanky avenue, only a few inches beneath their feet sprawled a vast underground jungle. Those islands in the middle of the street where they planted all the pretty flowers weren’t much more than the flower boxes they used in the tenements. Way too shallow to plant any shade trees or even big bushes. Their roots would burrow right through into the tunnels.
Even the big buildings that ran down along the piecrust area didn’t have any basements. Most of them had foundations that stopped right below the sidewalks, and then were propped up on iron girder-stilts sunk into the bedrock of Manhattan. And Whitey Thompson prowled around right under their feet. It was a vast, dark world where the rats claimed a kingdom, a place where they scuttled and ran and capered about like careless children.
But there was one place where they would never go.
Whitey checked his map, even though after all these years he didn’t really have to, just to make sure where he was, and when he was satisfied that he had reached the whereabouts of 50th Street, he unslung his gear and got ready for lunch. Lunch was always a special time, ever since he discovered the hatchway at the corner of Park and 50th Street. There was a gangway ladder that ran up to a small platform overlooked by a grate in the sidewalk. Whitey always climbed up on the platform to eat his brown-bag lunch because it gave him a beautiful view of all the people passing by the corner.
All the women, especially.
No one had ever noticed him, hunkered down in the shadows beneath the street, but he had the best view in the world of the city’s thousands of fashionable young secretaries, receptionists, editors, and other career ladies. He longed for the return of the miniskirt, but from where he sat it didn’t really matter that much. And it was a real learning experience, because the average joe on the street, passing all those foxy ladies, had no idea what they were all wearing (or not wearing) under their skirts and dresses.
Whitey had always been a fan of lacy garter belts, and when panty hose became the big thing, something passed out of his life. But there were some more adventuresome women running around the city these days, and every once in a while one of them still gave Whitey a thrill. He saw them all as they stood on the corner of 50th and Park, waiting for the light to change, flagging down cabs, hanging on the arms of their young escorts. He saw their see-through panties, the crotchless panties, the ones with the little messages and cutesy sayings and days of the week printed across their tight little asses. He even saw some lace garter belts, and during the summer months, he was amazed at the percentage (about 30 percent) of ladies who strutted around town without any panties at all.
A real treat, that was. No shit.
So it was with pleasant expectations that he clambered up to the gangway platform and unwrapped his baloney and American cheese on white, tapped his thermos of Gatorade, and stared up through the grate. But for some reason, his mind wasn’t on the gash up above his head today. He kept having flashes of the memory of the big-mother rat on that shingle and the way it had chewed its own arm off to get to him. And that in turn made him think of the rats in general, and how he was heading south, closer to the one place where he’d never seen a rat or a runway or disturbed piece of bait.
The closer you got to Grand Central, the more complex things became down here. Trains from upstate, from New England, and from the subways all converged on the area. They came in on three levels, fanning out into forty-eight tracks. But there were also additional rail lines that weren’t being used anymore. Under the Biltmore and the old Commodore hotels, for instance, Whitey had been surprised to discover that there existed a large five-track turnaround loop that hooked into a hidden underground parking lot for private railroad cars, which stretched as far as the Waldorf-Astoria. None of it was used anymore, but it had once been an effective security measure for arriving presidents and other dignitaries who wanted to avoid the crowds and the press at Grand Central. Whitey often imagined the stuffed shirts in their top hats climbing o
ut of the fancy club cars and into elevators to ride up to their suites. But now the tunnels and tracks were abandoned and forgotten.
Just like the sidings and private rail lines that ran along Park Avenue from Grand Central to a bunch of uptown mansion subcellars. Fifty years ago, railroad executives used to pump along under the streets on handcars all the way down to their offices. Now those tunnels and tracks were as empty and decayed as the long-dead people who had once used them.
But Whitey Thompson knew about all those places, and he had discovered a very odd thing. The abandoned turnaround loop and the executive handcar lines were strange and forbidding places where the rats never went. And, man, the rats went everywhere. Whitey could never figure it out, because the entrances to the places were not inaccessible; they certainly weren’t sealed off. Besides, when had that ever been a hassle for those little oily shits? They could squirm into any damned place if they wanted to.
But they didn’t want to go down there. It was that simple.
In a way, Whitey understood perfectly. He didn’t go down to those track areas very often himself. Mainly, he always told himself, because there were never any rats down there, and he was a rat-man, plain and simple. But there are other reasons, aren’t there, Whitey? he thought as he chewed on the tasteless baloney and American cheese sandwich.
There was the clatter of high heels on the grate, and he looked up quickly to see a forest-green flared skirt covering the longest legs he had ever seen. Legs wrapped by over-the-knee leather boots that were fastened to a Christ-almighty leather garter belt. Whitey almost choked on his sandwich, staring upward beyond the boots and the flash of bare upper thigh, up to closely trimmed blond pubic hair.
Jeeezuzkrist! All the years I been down here and even I never saw nothin’ like this one! For an instant, he was struck by a purely animal urge to charge up through the grating and attack, a high-voltage blast of lust the likes of which Whitey had never known. It passed through him with such force and blood-pulsing power that when the light changed and the goddess in leather stepped off the curb, he was left in the shadows trembling without control and with a hard-on the size of an axe handle.
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