Zev and Curtis usually spent lunch giving each other shit about something trivial, like which one of them looked more like a Smurf in his blue hard hat, or whether women preferred Lee jeans or Levi’s.
“In your sitch-a-ation it don’t matter anyhow,” Curtis told Zev, “ ’cause you ain’t got no butt to stick in them jeans you do buy.” Curtis shook his head sympathetically. “Ain’t a woman alive trust a man with no butt!”
Sometimes we even ate breakfast at the lot, plopping down for a morning picnic on what remained of the scrap iron. I especially liked sitting on the pile of flat spandrel panels, facing the derelict piers with my legs dangling down. Across West Street, behind the serenely decaying corpse of the elevated highway they’d shut down last year (after a dump truck plunged through the roadway to the street below), an R had gone missing from the front of Pier 21: MARINE & AVIATION, it said; ERIE LACKAWANNA AILROAD.
I tried joining Dad in the cab of the truck a couple of times, but it was obvious it annoyed him. He didn’t fraternize with us enlisted men during meals. He ate alone up front with his New York Times, staying aloof from his crew the way Captain Scott did in his expedition’s Antarctic hut the winter before his doomed assault on the South Pole. It pissed me off, but I worried that if I complained he’d just send me home.
I wasn’t the best note-taker. Zev, who usually kicked me in the rear about it a bit, was working back at the warehouse today, so instead of taking inventory I was sitting in the back of the truck trying to draw a halfway-decent Tribble. Dad, Furman, and Curtis were loading a double-sunburst panel into the truck when we were all startled by someone shouting outside: “Hey! Hey! What’re you doing with that?”
Dad didn’t miss a beat. “Stay inside!” he hissed to his men. He gave an urgent nod in my direction: “Keep him out of sight!”
Outwardly calm then—acting almost bored—Dad stepped from the tailgate and ambled out of view toward the front of the truck.
“What’s that, bud?” I heard him say.
“You with the Commission?” the stranger asked suspiciously. “They didn’t tell me anyone—”
The truck’s cab door slammed. The ignition fired up and the truck lurched out of the lot, knocking me off my feet and churning up dust behind us.
“Heyyy!” the stranger’s voice yelled again. “Stop!”
I tried to get a good look out the back at the guy, but a big brown Curtis hand gripped my skull and shoved it back down like a clown head in a jack-in-the-box. The truck swerved right, then right again, sending all three of us tumbling. The engine gave a growl, the truck picked up speed beneath us, and we hurtled uptown, the scrap iron shifting and jittering all around us.
“Dude was writin’ somethin’!” old Furman, rising to his knees, told Curtis. “Mighta seen our plates, maybe.”
“Mighta?” asked Curtis. “Or did?”
Neither man said any more. Curtis was practically sitting on me now, but in the spaces between his limbs I saw Furman struggle to his feet and toward the back.
The overhead door clattered down and we were bumping along in darkness.
—
The truck shuddered to a halt. We had driven half an hour, maybe more. Curtis told me to hush, his callused hand oddly gentle against my chest. There was shouting outside—urgent, rankled—and someone out there rolled up the rear door, the sudden sunlight jabbing my eyes. A ferret-faced teenager in a dirty T-shirt poked his head inside, then vanished again.
Curtis and Furman immediately began unloading the scrap, tossing it, clanging, into a pile beside the truck.
We were in a vast, oil-stained yard with a trailer on one end and a mountain range of mangled metal on the other. A brick wall ran around it. Dad wasn’t in the cab of our brown truck. I found him inside the trailer, talking intensely to an unshaven fat guy who was eating a meatball hero at a metal desk. Farther back, a wiry old man in a filthy black-and-orange New York Giants baseball cap sat on a salvaged car seat, an ass divot in the upholstery beside him.
Dad’s eyes caught me in the doorway, expressing no interest before flicking back to the meatball hero guy. I wandered off to explore.
The scrap yard was outrageously cool, a land of ordered mayhem lorded over by two giant yellow claws. The entire topography of ruin, if you looked closely, seemed an elaborate sorting system, an outsize version of Mom’s mayo jars full of eggshells. There was no overlap among the mountains of smashed metal. Each had a different texture, and some had distinctive colors. The tallest one seemed to be a lot of sheet metal and auto bodies and silver kitchen ducts; a hill off to the side was darker and might have been iron; nearest me was a tortured alp of copper—twisted pipes and cables glinting in the sun.
The sound of sustained destruction was deafening, a layered clattering and groaning and beep-beeping. Now and then one of the machines would pause and give out a breathy sigh, then swivel over to renew the assault.
The truck in front of ours was a battered green pickup whose rusted wheel wells looked like astonished eyebrows. With help from the ferrety teenager, a slope-shouldered Puerto Rican guy in plastic sandals struggled to slide a refrigerator off the tailgate and onto a hand truck. His two little boys, too small to give a hand, shrieked with pleasure as their dad galumphed it onto the scrap yard’s big scale. The fridge had colored alphabet magnets on its door, and part of what looked like a child’s painting. While the dad and the scrap worker were haggling, one of the boys bolted from the safety of his father’s side and tried to grab the painting off the fridge. His dad chased him down and yanked him back, giving his ass a big smack and chewing him out in Spanish. The kid howled.
The ground at the yard’s edge sloped upward. I climbed it until I reached the back wall, which turned out to be an embankment on some kind of narrow river or canal. The sluggish water was slicked with oily rainbows. Three barges hugged the shore below, one empty, the others partly filled with scrap metal. One of the gargantuan yellow claws swiveled into position above a barge and dropped a clattering load of debris. Back near the scale, the second claw descended on the Puerto Rican family’s fridge, which slipped from its grasp ten feet in the air and smashed to the ground. The claw swooped down again to get a better grip, its pointy tips easily puncturing the fridge’s flanks and crushing it. The claw rotated abruptly and hurled the fridge onto one of the mountains, sending a minor avalanche of shredded metal skittering down its side.
Not far from the trailer, the ferrety teenager and two other workers had propped up several of our cast-iron panels against the brick wall and were going at them pretty aggressively with power saws, cutting each one into halves or thirds. Dad stood nearby, sometimes instructing them to cut up a piece further. He seemed anxious to make the panels unrecognizable.
Something was worrying me. If private investigator Jim Rockford were on our trail, it wouldn’t take more than an hour for his bald buddy at the force, Sergeant Becker, to run our truck’s plate number and then leave its owner’s name and address on the newfangled answering machine in Rockford’s mobile home. And once Rockford found the truck, it was only a matter of time before he found us. Wouldn’t any real-life detective be able to track us down just as easily?
“We’re toast!” I bleated at Dad when I joined him by the growing pile of destroyed iron panels. I pointed at our brown truck, which someone had pulled forward, near where we were now standing. “Our fingerprints must be all over that thing!”
Dad managed a joyless smile. “I’ve taken care of that. You might want to stand back.”
I followed his gaze just in time to see the claw close itself up into a huge tight fist, then slam directly down onto the truck—POOM!—ripping through its steel roof as easily as if it were canvas. In my terror, I leapt back needlessly and gave a girlish squeak I hoped no one could hear over the clamor. The claw rose again, lifting the truck off the ground a couple of feet as it shook itself free, then hammered down through the windshield, shattering the glass and caving in the truck’s hood and
engine.
As the claw continued its thunderous beat-down, Dad stuffed a wad of bills into Furman’s hand.
“Tell your cousin,” he said, “I’m sorry about his truck.”
30
BEFORE I EVEN KNEELED DOWN to lift the Times off our stoop the next morning, the headline leapt right out at me:
150-TON CAST-IRON LANDMARK FACADE PANELS STOLEN HERE
A horrible, pukey dread swept up from my stomach to my throat as I read:
Working in daylight under the startled eyes of a construction contractor, three thieves made off yesterday with a truckful of panels of a 150-ton city landmark—a 125-year-old cast-iron facade of a four-story structure described as an architectural treasure.
The audacious theft of the cast-iron panels from the Bogardus Building was spotted at 11 A.M. by Gerard Varlotta, the contractor, at a lot at Chambers and Washington Streets in lower Manhattan.
Mr. Varlotta told the police that he saw three men wearing blue construction helmets putting the panels into a brown truck at the site. He said he ran toward the three men, who, when they saw him, jumped into the truck and roared away. He said he was able to jot down the license number of the truck before it got away.
Last night the police disclosed that they had one of the three men in custody and were questioning him and that a search of a junkyard in the Bronx was under way. Capt. Paul G. Mannino, commanding officer of the First Precinct, said that the theft of the facade panels had taken place over several weeks, and he said he doubted whether all would be recovered.
“This stuff looks just like junk,” he said.
The market value of the cast iron was said to be about $100 a ton.
I couldn’t read any more. I was pretty sure I was going to throw up on my moccasins.
“Give that here!” Mathis said brightly as I shuffled into the dining room with the paper. “See!” he cried at Mr. Price, poking the headline with his index finger. “Here it is! A landmark they stole!”
He read the top of the story aloud, shaking his head in delighted astonishment. I listened without hearing.
“There!” Mathis said suddenly. “This is the part I was telling you about! It was all anybody at the A.P. could talk about yesterday.”
I tried to make myself invisible as he continued reading:
The theft became public when Mrs. Beverly Moss Spatt, chairman of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, dashed into the press room at City Hall yesterday and shouted, “Someone has stolen one of my buildings.”
She added: “It was an architectural treasure—the finest example of a cast-iron building in the city.”
The original building was designed by James Bogardus and built at 97 Murray Street in 1849. It was regarded as one of the finest examples of cast-iron structure in the world. A section of the facade of the architectural treasure is in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
The four-story facade, which could be disassembled, moved and reassembled at another location, was made a landmark in 1970. A year later, when the building was torn down to make way for the Washington Market Urban Renewal project, the facade was disassembled at a cost of $80,000 and stored in the lot.
Mrs. Spatt said that the federal government had given the city $450,000 in 1971 to reconstruct the facade as part of a new community college.
“I’ve worried so about this building,” Mrs. Spatt said. “I’ve pleaded with the Housing and Development Administration to store it in a safe place. Now it’s gone and I’m heartbroken.”
“Bloody unbelievable,” said Mr. Price, chuckling with horrified superiority. “You Americans’ve got little enough history as it is; you’d think you’d mind where you left what heritage you have got.”
“Oh, let’s not get so high-and-mighty here, Price,” Mathis said to him. “You’re telling me you don’t have bottom-feeders back in London?”
There was more to the story. Mr. Price stood up to read the paper over Mathis’s shoulder. Both were silent as their eyes darted back and forth across the columns of newsprint.
I was pretty sure I would spontaneously combust if I had to keep standing there pretending not to be too interested in the stolen landmark. So I hid out in the crapper at the base of the stairs until it sounded like everyone had gone. Then I raced to the dining room table to read the rest of the article:
The Bogardus Building was the first with a complete cast-iron facade constructed in the city, and it became a prototype for all subsequent cast-iron facades. It was said to have foreshadowed the eventual development of the skeleton-steel construction of the skyscraper.
The arrested man was identified as Furman Boyd, 46 years old, of 121 East 120th Street, Manhattan, who was booked on a charge of grand larceny.
(Fuck.)
The police said they expected to take two other men into custody.
(FUCK!!)
According to the police, the cast-iron pieces were found in a junkyard at 850 Edgewater Road, the Bronx, based on information supplied by Mr. Boyd. All were broken pieces, they said.
The police added they would look in the junkyard later today in an effort to find further parts of the structure. The police said the junkyard operator had had no idea of the historical value of the iron pieces.
Dad, it must be said, was not too thrilled to see me show up at his studio that morning.
“What are you doing here, son?” He shot Zev a nasty look for letting me in. “You should be staying as far away from me as you can right now.”
Dad looked awful. He was wearing the same dirty flannel shirt and jeans from yesterday. His eyes were shot through with red.
“Zev!” he barked. “Take Griffin to lunch! I’m trying to think here.”
Zev got up as if to lead me out, but I ignored him.
“The paper said that was a really important building we stole, Dad.”
“Hell yeah, it was important. Why do you think I was so upset when they booted me out of it so they could tear it down?”
“But they were going to put it back together! They spent a buttload of money saving the building so—”
“Saving it?” Dad asked bitterly. “Sure they were saving it—just the way Teddy Roosevelt ‘saved’ all those exotic animals by shooting them and putting them on display at his natural history museum. The city’s a living thing, son. You don’t save it by dismantling it.”
“But the paper said they had like half a million dollars set aside to rebuild it.”
Dad shook his head. “Son, I’m sure some of those people over at Landmarks mean well, but their plan was a farce.”
“It really was,” Zev agreed.
It must have been clear from my face that I had no idea what they were talking about.
“Look, the city has this powerful new landmarks law,” Dad explained, “which they could easily have used to keep the Bogardus standing forever, right where it was built. Instead, they tore down hundreds of historic buildings around Washington Market, including the Bogardus, to make way for the Twin Towers and the community college and those repulsive Independence Plaza high-rises. They piled the Bogardus fragments in an unguarded lot—you saw them!—and basically dumped the whole preservation problem in the laps of the poor architects designing the college.”
“Seriously,” Zev said. “It’s about the screwiest arranged marriage you ever heard of.”
“What is?” I asked.
“Landmarks has been forcing the college to incorporate the Bogardus into their super-duper-modern new campus,” Zev said.
“The best they’ve come up with is this ridiculous plan to reassemble the two cast-iron curtain walls of the Bogardus as a freestanding screen in one of the courtyards,” Dad said. “The kids could throw their Frisbees back and forth through its windows.”
I looked at his red face, weighing whether it was safe to say what I was thinking.
“Isn’t a courtyard kind of better than the scrap yard?” I asked.
“No!” Dad exclaimed. “It damn well i
sn’t.” A wide blue vein was standing out in the middle of his forehead. “The Bogardus is meant to be a building—a living structure you can get inside, make a home or a business out of! What they had in mind for it would be as phony as the bogus plywood town in Blazing Saddles.”
Man, did I love Blazing Saddles. It had come out back in February, and since it was rated PG, Kyle and I had gotten this nice bald guy on line at the Beekman to pretend to be our dad and take us in.
Dad went to his little bachelor’s fridge and took a swig from a milk carton.
“It’s basically pretty simple, son. The city didn’t respect the Bogardus, so I”—he shot me a pointed look—“we put the building out of its misery. And even though we got caught before we were able to scrap the whole thing, we still managed to make some pretty good money off this selfless act of mercy.”
I was not comforted. “They arrested Furman!” I said, my voice going all girly-high again. “Will you be arrested? Will I?”
“I doubt it. I paid those guys enough to keep quiet, and they’ll probably get off with only a few days at Rikers, anyway. For guys like them, that’s practically just a cost of doing business.”
“But how can it be for only a few days? The paper said it was grand larceny!”
Dad raised his palms toward me. “That’s ludicrous. All the iron we took over the past couple weeks was already trashed beyond recognition by the time the cops started snooping around the scrap yard yesterday. So they can’t pin those earlier thefts on anyone—no evidence. And grand larceny means you stole something worth a grand, which they didn’t, not in that single day’s haul.” He looked at me impatiently. “The Bogardus may have been priceless as architecture, but architecture has no street value. Scrap iron does: ninety-seven dollars a ton. So in the eyes of the law, those guys didn’t steal a treasure; they stole a pile of scrap. There’s no way Furman gets locked up for too long.”
The Gargoyle Hunters Page 23