The Empress of Tempera

by Alex Dolan

  “Just kick them away,” Humberto called back. “They can’t bite through the boots.”

  Her breath quickened as another scrambled over her toe. Heavier and substantial, maybe the size of a burrito. Her fear had subsided, and turned to anger. She spoke softly to Rosewood, trying not to sound volatile, lest the rest of the crew regret having a tag-along. “You knew we might have to escape through the tunnels.”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Honestly, I thought this would be a deal-breaker for you.”

  She remembered a furry gray rat she’d seen in Union Square with a hot dog nub in its mouth. Tried to remember how cute she thought it was at the time. “They carry disease,” she said, stunned that this didn’t rouse him.

  “It’s not my first time in a subway tunnel.”

  Every few steps, she felt something bombard her boot. Paire stepped on something soft, and it squeaked like a dog toy. She cursed to herself, too loudly, and lurched away. The squeaking magnified. Actual squeaks, chittering in the dark. A sonic irritant, like Styrofoam. Thousands blended together, possibly warning each other that intruders were tramping through their nest. The scraping of one hundred thousand toenails across the ground sounded like they might be tearing their own tunnels through the earth.

  Rosewood called out to the group, “I’m going to turn on a flashlight, so I can check the map. If you don’t like rodents, don’t look down.” A moment later a strong, wide beam burst through the darkness and up through the arched ceiling. He angled the light on a paper map of the subway grid. “The beauty of Wall Street station is that it’s a short jaunt to other lines. We crisscross the tracks and we’ll come up at another station. By this map, it won’t be more than twenty minutes or so.”

  She looked over his shoulder at the map, and then couldn’t stop herself from looking down at the tracks. The railway teemed with rats. All around them, hills of rodents tumbled over each other. They didn’t look cute anymore. Their humps undulated in oceanic ripples. The flashlight glossed the grime on their pelts. Paire suppressed her gag impulse so she wouldn’t seem weak in front of the others.

  “Like kicking through autumn leaves,” said Humberto, staying in the lead.

  Paire tried to imagine it that way, but the density of the pack made her feel more like she was trudging through snow. The rest of them pulled out their flashlights and shone them across the nest, revealing how far it extended down the tunnel. Humberto seemed to revel in the thrill. When he swept his boot through the mass of rodents, rats flew through the air, only to be absorbed somewhere else in the mischief.

  Paire flipped her spring baton to full extension and swatted at the rats by her feet. She batted away bodies, but more just filled the open spaces. She accidentally knocked her shin with the tip. At another time and place she would have paused to nurse the pain, but nothing stopped her from flailing the baton through the pack as she moved forward.

  Over the screeches of the rodents she heard a distant whine of heavy metal.

  The rats must have heard or felt it too, because a few moments later they skittered away from them, diving under the rails and finding holes wherever they could scoot, hidden except for earthworm tails. Vermin cleared a pathway on the tracks in just a few seconds. The absence of rat noises made the next shriek of grinding wheels that much louder.

  The tracks vibrated. Not just the two railways, but the ties in between. A deep, low rumble filled the passageway. A faint light began to illuminate it.

  “Stay high and avoid the rails,” said Rosewood, his voice elevated. He crossed the tracks first, bounding over the first and then the second electric rails. Lazaro followed a moment later with a few impala hops. With the rumbling growing louder, Humberto signed the cross over his chest when he jumped. Charlie skipped over the first rail, and then lost his balance, almost falling backward into the live wire before he found his balance again. He leaped as high as he could over the second electric rail, and Rosewood secured his landing by grabbing his forearm and slapping him on the shoulder.

  The whole passageway grumbled now, but Paire hadn’t moved.

  Around the bend, the first, then the second headlight of the train came into the view, rambling towards her.

  “Jump!” Rosewood shouted to her, more insistent than ever. Worried, even.

  She stood rooted to the ties and stared down the train. In that moment she considered her motivations for moving away from Abenaki. She thought that by fleeing Maine she might have a chance of outrunning the crazy, but given where she was, she wondered if crazy just clung to her. Maybe it was impossible to evade it.

  “Move!”

  The train raced toward her, lurching unevenly on the tracks, the way a runaway calash might teeter from the uneven draw of maniacal horses. A few more seconds and she might not even feel the impact.

  They were all shouting her name. Her new name. Not Katie Novis, but, “Paire!”

  This jogged her back to the present. She vaulted as high as she could over the first electric rail. As the train passed, its wind across her back gave her the added push to jump the second rail. As she launched over the electric current, she considered that just a few inches would mean the end of her. Not so different from the cliffs in Abenaki. Not so different from the near-death when she was a child. Her life had always been gifts of being in the right moment, at the right place.

  When she landed, Rosewood held her close and prolonged the embrace. “Please don’t do that again,” he said into her ear, just loud enough to be heard above the grinding of steel. Lazaro slapped her on the back. They all watched the train rush past them, one of the conductors staring wide-eyed at them as he flew by. The grumble faded, until the tunnel was again vacant.

  The group moved forward silently. A few rats scurried along the tracks, but nothing compared to the nest they’d trodden through. Paire didn’t have to swat any with the baton.

  A light appeared after a bend in the tunnel. Not as bright as Wall Street station, but definitely some kind of station, which meant they could climb out of the pit.

  Rosewood confirmed, “We’re here.”

  When Paire saw the platforms, she asked, “What stop is this?”

  “City Hall.”

  “It looks closed.”

  “It is closed. This station has been abandoned for years.”

  As they pulled themselves out of the ditch, Paire took a look around the station. A few electric lights illuminated the platform dimly, but they gave off a fraction of the light compared to an active subway stop. They reminded Paire of flaming sconces in a castle.

  “Someone must have found the lights,” said Charlie, pointing to a series of iron chandeliers that dangled above them.

  She asked, “Are they usually off?”

  He shrugged. “Hell if I know. I’ve never been here. None of us have.”

  Rosewood said, “Beautiful, though, isn’t it?”

  The station was magnificent, with the most elaborate tilework she’d seen in the New York underground. Its sweeping arches might have seemed more appropriate in a Tuscan wine cellar, and a portion of stained glass allowed filtered light to shine down from the street. Even at this hour, street lights found a way down here.

  “We’re under City Hall?”

  “At this very moment,” Lazaro said.

  Paire found an exit sign and headed toward the archway that might lead them back to the street.

  Rosewood stopped her. “We have to wait.”

  “For what?”

  “It’s about four thirty now. We’ll wait another hour or so, when the first commuters start hitting the sidewalk. Then we’ll walk out of here in plain sight.”

  “You’re worried the police are still following us?”

  He said, “They might not come after us in the tunnels, but we just vandalized Wall Street station. Someone’s going to call it in. If we pop up a few blocks away, and we’re the only people outside, someone’s going to find us.
It’ll pay to wait another hour.”

  “What do we do in the meantime? Trivial Pursuit?”

  “Take advantage of being in a place most people will never get to see.”

  Paire had to pee, but she supposed she could hold it a little longer. All five of them slid down the platform walls and stared up at the glow coming through the stained glass. It was cold, and she pressed against Rosewood for warmth. They listened to their own breathing. Now that they were safely cloistered, they all relaxed. Lazaro began giggling with relief, at first an accidental release, and then a fit of elation. Charlie joined him. Paire could still feel her heart close to bursting, but she gave in to it too. The laughter was infectious, all five of them releasing their tension in seizures of hysteria. Just like the LAUGHTER series.

  She asked, “So how close did we come to getting busted, anyway?”

  “Honestly? Pretty close.” Rosewood seemed at ease again, and that put Paire at ease. “But we’ve come close a few times.”

  Lazaro nodded, indicating that he’d been there for those occasions. His eyebrow piercing gave off a molten reflection.

  Charlie noticed something before the others. “Shit.” At the far end of the platform, a group of three men wandered toward them.

  “They did follow us,” said Paire, immediately terrified.

  “That’s not the police,” said Rosewood. He echoed Charlie’s sentiment, “Shit.” He stood and snapped to attention. Paire and the others stood as well. She wondered if they needed to run again.

  As the men came closer, she could see they didn’t wear uniforms. They dressed in tattered clothes, reminiscent of the bearded man who had barked at Charlie back at Wall Street station. From both the dirt and the dim light, they seemed to be sepia-toned, so that when they came toward them they created a mirage, as if a daguerreotype had come to life.

  “What is this?” she whispered.

  Lazaro leaned into her ear. “Ever hear that myth about the mole people who live underneath the city?”

  “It’s no myth,” said Humberto.

  The head man was taller than any of them. All three of them wore beards, but the tall one’s beard matted and corkscrewed more than the others. His muscles had atrophied slightly from age, but his shoulders were broad, and his jaw clenched. With his two men flanking him, he waltzed up to the group with hands folded behind his back. His musk soured in her nose.

  Of the two with him, the one on the right looked jumpy, not from nerves, but with a twitchiness that might have been a byproduct of drug use. Paire knew a fight would be five-to-three, but these men were tougher. She imaged how they must look to these people, five skinny college kids in their shiny beige uniforms with a spritz of stage dirt to act the part. They might seem cartoonish.

  The front man spoke in a low, whiskey-scarred baritone. “Are you really MTA?”

  “Of course we’re not,” said Rosewood, possibly trying to curry favor by hinting that they were all subversives.

  “Then you really have no reason to be here.” The man unclasped his hands from behind his back, and when he folded them over his groin, Paire saw that he held a sizeable hunting knife. Even in the dim light from the stained glass, the steel gleamed. The twitchy one darted his eyes, staring hungrily at Paire. She wondered when last they’d come across strangers down here, and what might have happened. City Hall station might have been a Venus flytrap where unsuspecting dupes were lost and digested.

  “We’ll be here for an hour, and then we’ll leave,” Rosewood declared firmly.

  “Not with those clothes and whatever you’ve got on you,” said the leader.

  For a fleeting moment, Paire hoped that this might all be one big joke, and that this was one of Rosewood’s many contacts in the art world. At any moment the two of them would bust up laughing and give each other man-hugs. In order to keep her skin from prickling, Paire dreamed they would shoot the breeze over a shared bottle of hooch.

  Charlie’s reaction dissuaded her of this fantasy. He whispered to Rosewood just loud enough that the rest could hear, “We’re dumping the clothes anyway.”

  Rosewood pretended not to hear him. “We’re just passing through. This doesn’t need to go wrong.”

  The man stared. Apparently he wasn’t planning on bantering with any of the soap-scrubbed surface folk. He stepped closer, with the knife pointed at Rosewood’s navel.

  Rosewood raised his arm and leveled his grandfather’s service revolver at the man’s chest. The skylight faintly glinted off the metal, but between the dim light and the speed of the movement, several seconds passed before everyone realized that a pistol had been produced, and in the quietude of this abandoned station, any number of men could be murdered without attracting any attention from above. When he cocked the hammer with his thumb, the mechanical double click bounced off the tiles and all the station’s hard surfaces with a wintery reverberation. “How wrong do you want this to go?”

  The twitchy one turned and sprinted down the platform. Moments later, the second man tapped the leader’s shoulder and backed away. After considering his options, the leader lifted his hands in a you got me gesture, and wiggled the blade in his right hand, as if to say that he could possibly have still driven the tip of that knife through Rosewood’s abdomen, if it were worth the bother. He paced backward a few steps, pivoted, and strolled in the opposite direction.

  Noting the expressions of the other men, Paire was convinced that none of them had known that Rosewood was carrying the weapon.

  Rosewood said to her, “That’s why I keep this.”

  They spent the remaining hour somberly watchful on the platform, with their backs against the wall, afraid to talk in case they drew more unwelcome attention. The adrenaline had ebbed, and they all seemed exhausted. Lazaro looked like he was on the brink of nodding off, his head between his knees.

  Around five thirty, the stained glass brightened as the sun came up. Rosewood walked to the platform edge, checking to make sure other mole people weren’t watching them. “Let’s lose the uniforms.”

  They kicked off their boots. Paire didn’t want to touch hers with bare hands because of the rats. She undid the laces with her cuffs over her fingers. They all unzipped their uniforms, letting them fall around their ankles, and then kicked them off into a jumble at the wall. Underneath, each of them wore some kind of business suit. Paire had a trim-fitting charcoal two-piece that she had worn to the Fern just the day before. She stepped out of the uniform, which rumpled in a cloth doughnut at her feet. Inside each of their uniforms, they had strung dress shoes around their necks, and they slid on the shinier footwear. Wing tips for Rosewood. Low heels for Paire. Rosewood tucked the pistol in his waistline, hidden by the suit jacket.

  Once dressed in office attire, they headed for the exit. A thick chain and padlock blocked the main entrance to the street, but they pried open a plywood door until the crack widened enough for a person to fit. Sunlight shone through the gap.

  They skipped up the stairs to the street, into a gloomy overcast morning. City Hall’s French portico stood steps away from them. Commuters already rambled down the sidewalks. Most didn’t look up.

  Without saying any farewells, the boys walked in three different directions. A half block away, Humberto hailed the first taxi. They were back to the plan, reconnecting later when everyone was home safe.

  Rosewood lifted his hand for a taxi, and one slowed for them. When they slid into the back, he asked, “How was it?”

  She fought for words. “Rat-tastic.”

  “It’s all right to be scared. That’s part of it. It’s what makes it fun. You’ll see in a day or two, when your nerves settle down. When you’re willing to step outside the bounds of convention, you can be exactly the person you want to be. You’ll be free.”

  She nodded, wondering how much of this was for her benefit, and how much Rosewood needed this to preserve his own sense of independence. She stopped thinking, and enjoyed the safety of sitting with Rosewood’s arm wrapped a
round her. Paire fell asleep on his shoulder on the ride back to Brooklyn.

  Chapter 8

  Abel Kasson paced next to the front window at the Fern. “How long?”

  A woman in a white lab coat answered him from the back of the gallery. “It won’t be any faster if you keep asking.” With a white mask strapped to the lower half of her face, she blended into the gallery walls.

  Mayer stood on the other side of the gallery from Kasson, talking to patrons. By now, almost as many people gummed up the Fern as had attended Rosewood’s opening reception.

  The open space in the rear half of the Fern had been transformed into a makeshift laboratory, complete with microscope, computers, and a tilted drafting table where The Empress Xiao Zhe Yi, Seated, was being examined through a macrolens. The images captured through the camera had been blown up and displayed on an LCD monitor. Dr. Sarabeth Friederichs, a forgery expert handpicked by Kasson, buzzed around the examining table. She’d set up her equipment yesterday, and was still conducting tests.

  Paire greeted anyone who looked in her direction, but most of the guests orbited around the authenticator. Kasson had just come in an hour ago, and she’d been trying to avoid him.

  The Wall Street station mural had gone up three nights ago. After the terror faded, the experience exhilarated her, emboldened her. But it made her feel more exposed. She wondered if the police would examine their scrims and the duffels they’d left behind, and somehow track them down to Brooklyn Heights. The press had covered the stunt, and New York’s mayor was debating whether to paint over it or leave it up. The police hadn’t been close enough to see their faces, and the sketch of Charlie that came from the moustached MTA attendant looked so generic it might have been a Harvey Ball smiley.

  Rosewood had pushed Paire to join the crew because he said she thought she needed pushing. He saw the way she longed to become someone other than Katie Novis, even if he didn’t understand why.

  Paire had indulged him because she hoped he was right. She still felt a little of Katie Novis in herself. When she stepped out of the shower naked, without the new clothes and without the makeup, the mirror told her that a simple costuming, even a legal name change, couldn’t completely alter who she was. The occasional stunt with Rosewood might, like a benign form of shock treatment, add up to a cumulative jolt that would leave Katie Novis dead and forgotten in Abenaki. At the Fern today, she felt foundationally different about herself. Tectonics were shifting.