Book of Judas--A Novel

by Linda Stasi

  I clenched my fists in terror as we watched the pram, perched on the edge of the unfinished subway platform, freezing, dirty water dripping down onto it. The hooded figure shone a light on a fat rat as it scurried by, followed by others.

  “Any deviation from the instructions and the boy dies. We will see you inside the tunnel. We’ll give you five minutes to get down.” The phone went dead.

  “There’s that construction elevator that takes workers down into the tunnel over there. I did a story on the Second Avenue Subway construction,” I told Pantera. “But the cops are parked across the street. And it’s gotta be locked up.”

  “There’s a guard in a booth there,” he added. “Must be armed.”

  “Well, guards never seem to be a problem for you. The NYPD is another story altogether…” I said, biting my nails, which were already so bitten down they were bleeding. I could see that the bartender was trying to pretend he wasn’t listening to our heated conversation in the nearly empty joint.

  I whispered to Pantera, “Do you think he’s filming us on a phone or something?” Are you my enemy or my friend? Do you want to save your son or become the most powerful man in the universe?

  “No,” Pantera said. “I took care of the barkeep, but he doesn’t have the ability to turn off the security cams. It’s a problem … I don’t know who he’ll alert the second we’re outta here.”

  “I can’t worry about that now,” I said, worried to death that the cops would show up in force and destroy everything. “Terry’s down there. He’s on the subway tracks! What do we do? What do we do?” I suppressed the urge to vomit onto the bar.

  Cool and unshaken, Pantera reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of Gauloises—which I thought didn’t exist any longer. He put one between his lips but didn’t light it. “Old habits die hard,” he said, as though we were having a romantic drink in Marseille or something. I couldn’t believe it! Then, “As for Terry, the subway is still under construction. Any trains they have down there would be just to test the tracks … there’s no actual service yet.”

  “How do you know that? You’re not even an American, let alone a New Yorker! You’re saying crap to calm me down.”

  “No. I’m not.” Period, the end, nothing else.

  “The cops don’t even know you’re back in the country—let alone sitting in a bar! You give them too much credit.”

  “And you don’t give them enough.”

  He said nothing more—well, not to me anyway—and instead picked up his phone and dialed it. Then: “Yes, correct. Right now.”

  Within a few seconds, the cherry atop the parked cop car started swirling and the cruiser took off at top speed with the siren blaring.

  I just looked at him, and he shrugged. “I know a guy.”

  This guy had a guy for every occasion.

  “Let me have the tube and the keys,” he said. “It’s safer in my bag than yours.” Then you’ll have nothing to barter.

  “They can grab you and take your bag. They can’t take it from me,” he said. Again, I was putting my trust in a man who had proved he wasn’t worth my trust.

  I reluctantly handed him the tube and the keys. My choice was—what?

  He paid the bill, left a tip, and we walked out as casually as possible. It was still dark at this hour, but the sun would be coming up soon. “Now what?”

  “We go down there,” he said, pointing to the immense aboveground housing of the Second Avenue Subway’s construction elevator.

  As we crossed the street I could see a guard was in a booth next to the elevator’s metal frame with his headset on, apparently listening to music—or so I thought. Lax for such an important guard station. Maybe that was good? I didn’t ask.

  Before we got to the booth, I stopped and turned to Pantera, choking back tears that were desperate to pop out from a combination of nerves, fear, and in no small part, terror.

  Pantera took both of my shoulders in his hands and squared them up. “I know this is the worst thing in the world for you. But it’s about to get worse. You need to be laser focused.”

  Who could I trust? No one, that’s who. What if…?

  This time it was his sat phone that rang just as we approached the guard booth. He let me listen as a modulated voice instructed, “Tell the guard you are here about rail AD three five four. That’s rail AD three five four.” Click.

  We walked up to the booth. The guard was saying something into the wire of his headset. Apparently he hadn’t been listening to music. I jumped ahead and said into the booth’s speaker, “We’re here about rail AD three four five.” As soon as it was out of my mouth I realized it might be a setup.

  The guard stood up. “What did you say?”

  “We’re here about rail AD three five four,” Pantera answered, as though I hadn’t made a mistake, my heart pumping out of my chest.

  “Roger that,” the guard answered like he was a real cop. He looked like a retired cop, actually. Within a minute or so, the construction elevator ascended and a burly guy in a hard hat inside the cage said, “Get in.” We slowly descended sixty feet down through a hole cut into the bedrock of Manhattan that had been reinforced on the sides with steel rods.

  We got out and stepped into the partially finished Second Avenue Subway tunnel—a Gothic cathedral of the modern age—a round, arched concrete ceiling that looked to be as high as that of any great cathedral but which was dripping water. Bare bulbs strewn along the sides lit the unfinished tunnel. It was more of the same as far as the eye could see in this dim light. A rat scurried by our feet, already making a home in the tunnel. It attacked a wet sandwich that had fallen into a puddle, which a construction worker must have left.

  We came to an area that was even more of a futuristic nightmare than the rest of the tunnel—hundreds upon hundreds of round steel poles that were supporting a wooden open floor above. It was like walking through a steel version of a forest out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The floor was thick and muddy, the mud soaking through my sneakers. It was also dank and damp and very cold and if I could have reached out and killed every one of the kidnappers for taking my Terry down into this hellhole I would have.

  Pantera grabbed my hand in the dim light and squeezed it, saying nothing. At one point, we passed an area where the stone from the original rock was exposed and a line of curved iron spikes that had been hammered in were protruding out menacingly. Familiar. Familiar—why? Then it hit me. The whole underground hole in the ground was so similar—again—to the Prison of Christ, where we’d been just hours before; where the clues had led us all the way back here to the prison of my son.

  As my eyes adjusted to the light, I squinted but all I could see ahead were thousands more feet of arched tunnel that looked like a nightmare mirror that endlessly reflects back upon itself. We must have sloshed ten blocks thru this hellhole before I heard it. It was a mere echo of a sound at first that grew a bit louder with each hundred or so feet. It was the unmistakable cry of a baby!

  I started to run on the wet floor, when the man in the hard hat grabbed my arm to stop me. I slipped and fell onto the wet ground. Pantera lifted me up.

  The man growled, and then said in what sounded like a Russian accent, “No more of that or you die right here!”

  “Understood.” The crying grew more intense. Was it Terry’s voice? His cry? It was impossible to know what was the real cry and what was the echo as the sound became like a solid thing—constant and constantly repeating in this echoing hall of mirrors sixty feet below the street.

  We waded through an area that was at least four inches deep with cold, black water before we came to the area where the tracks had been laid down thus far.

  There was even the beginning of a crude platform. And there they were—standing in the grim light on that half-completed platform—five people and a baby carriage with a screaming baby inside. They say a mother always knows her own child’s cry even in a roomful of screaming babies, but this baby’s cry was so throaty a
nd raspy I wasn’t sure. Accompanying the crying was a horrible croupy-type of cough.

  It didn’t sound like Terry, but Terry had never been as sick as this baby sounded, either. No matter whose baby it was, the little thing was very sick and had gone hoarse from coughing and crying. The sound nearly killed me on the spot.

  “What have you done to the baby?” I cried out.

  There was no reply, nor did any of them move to comfort the infant, to pick him up, to soothe him.

  “He sounds very sick! Please. Give him back to me!”

  “When the exchange is completed to our satisfaction,” a woman said. It was Raylene, no mistaking it.

  I could make them out a little clearer now. They were dressed for winter, each wearing a head covering. Was the baby dressed as warmly? Raylene wore a long women’s coat with a triangular scarf tied under her chin. Another person—must have been “Hoodie” himself—wore a ski jacket over a hooded sweatshirt. A third person was in a long black coat with the collar pulled up—Dane? A fourth man wore a flat-brimmed woolen cap pulled down low. He was holding an assault rifle by his side. The fifth one wore a trench coat, a woolen scarf over his nose and mouth, and a fedora on his head. All were wearing knee-high waders on their feet.

  I moved forward. I was so close …

  “Stop! Stay right there,” the Russian warned.

  “You take one more step and we kill the kid,” Hoodie added. That voice, unmodulated now, was so familiar. At that, the suited man with the assault rifle moved to the carriage.

  Then the man in the fedora very calmly spoke, his voice muffled by the scarf. “Give the tube and the keys to the man who brought you down, please.”

  Pantera answered, “Let me see the baby before we hand anything over,” even as the baby continued to scream and cough. My fury boiled up at him for negotiating at this point, but things were about to take an unexpected turn. Fedora said, “Ever the negotiator, Mr. Pantera? Even with your son’s life?” Pantera squinted to try to make out who was speaking but it was impossible.

  My God. They knew Pantera? The Judsons knew Pantera? So he supposedly wasn’t in on it, but the kidnappers knew him? And he had the ransom in his bag. Was this Pantera’s own scheme gone terribly awry?

  My confusion, fear, and frustration were mounting at these stupid cat-and-mouse games with my son’s life. I cried out, “Enough!” and tried to grab Pantera’s bag away from him but he threw his arm out to hold me back.

  I screamed into the tunnel, “Give me the baby! Please. We’ll give you what you want.”

  I knew I had subconsciously stopped referring to the infant in the carriage as “Terry.” Perhaps I was too terrified to think it wasn’t him, maybe I was too terrified to think it was and he was as sick as this baby sounded.

  “The baby. We must see the baby,” Pantera countered.

  “You can hear the baby, you don’t need to see him,” Fedora said as the suited figure with the cap and the assault rifle rocked the old-fashioned black pram back and forth over the edge of the rough subway platform, the front two wheels going over and then back again onto the platform.

  I threw my hand up to my mouth as someone started singing, “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word, Mama’s gonna buy you…” and then, “What are you going to buy him, Mama—a brutal death on a subway track?”

  Raylene spoke then: “Quickly now. The sun will be coming up. The workers will be coming down any minute. They can either find a dead baby on the tracks or they can find it’s just another day in paradise down here. Up to you,” she mocked as the pram was rocked farther and farther over the edge of the platform.

  I reasoned with Pantera, “Even if it’s not my Terry, this baby needs to be in a hospital.” He shook his head, squeezed my hand, and then carefully took the tube and keys from his bag.

  The Russian in the hard hat moved to grab the pages just as Fedora called out, “Hold on. C! Our associate will come to get them and we need to examine them to make sure they are authentic.”

  That would be the man in the hoodie, who immediately began to walk the seventy-five feet that separated us as the baby continued to scream and cough.

  This guy has a very weird, loping gait. Where? Where have I seen that before?

  It was so cold down there, and now the baby was coughing so hard that he couldn’t catch his breath. It sounded like pneumonia. “Please! Please, the pages are real—let me have my baby! He’s cold and frightened and sick. He’s so scared!” I pleaded, my heart breaking. I was so close to getting him back—if this baby even was Terry.

  Instead the approaching man in the hoodie—which was zipped up over his mouth and secured tightly enough so that just his eyes were showing—said in a gruff, clearly disguised voice, “Shut the hell up. This kid is fearless.”

  The kid is fearless? That’s what Donald had said when he left my apartment after babysitting. That’s what Donald said, goddammit! Could it be him? The only man besides my father that I really trusted in the world?

  I let out a cry, and Pantera looked at me and held my arm. “Steady now. Steady.”

  “I … I…” I tried to say but couldn’t get the words out.

  The hooded figure came nearer and held his gloved hand out. Pantera handed over the tube and the keys, and Hoodie turned to walk back to the others. I had to stuff my hand in my mouth to keep from saying, “Donald? Is that you, Donald?”

  As he loped away—it has to be a fake gait—I could see the pram was still being rocked back and forth precariously over the edge of the platform.

  He handed her the tube, someone took out a light, and Raylene quickly inserted the keys, inspected the pages without removing them completely, quickly locked the tube back up, and handed it to Fedora.

  After a minute or two—each one ticking by to the sound of the baby struggling now to breathe—one of them announced, “We will make the exchange.”

  I broke from Pantera and began cautiously making my way down the platform toward the baby. “Stop!” Pantera yelled as the man in the suit dropped the carriage with the coughing baby onto the tracks. They never had any intention of letting Terry live!

  The Russian got off a round and grazed me in the arm.

  I dropped and began crawling toward the baby on the tracks as all hell broke out. Pantera took out the Russian first, shooting him at close range—just as the elevator banged down. I could hear the voices of the sandhogs coming down into the tunnel to work. They must have heard the shot, because sirens went off. I heard an engine start up and a headlight turned on at the other end of the track. The test train!

  Pantera and Hoodie began firing at each other as Raylene took aim at the baby carriage, which was upside down on the track—the baby underneath it. I leaped toward her and knocked her back onto the tracks, where she landed facedown, inside the wet filthy track, unable to move for fear of being electrocuted, as what seemed like hundreds of rounds were exchanged. I saw the man in the suit with the assault rifle fall, then saw Hoodie fall, perhaps wounded, perhaps dead.

  I kicked Raylene out of my way, and she inched almost on top of the now-active third rail. The man in the overcoat screamed, “Raylene!” and jumped into the tracks to save her, grabbing onto her arm. An old carton of orange juice, which had been discarded by someone, was laying nearby and I grabbed it and threw it on top of them, remembering from chemistry class that acid was a good conductor of electricity. I heard a scream, then immediately smelled burning flesh as pungent as when I’d imagined it in Montségur.

  I tiptoed carefully, trying to avoid the same fate. My arm was gushing blood. I pulled the pram up and off the now-silent baby. I handed the lifeless little being up to Pantera on the platform just as the test train approached. Pantera pulled me up with one strong arm as he held the baby in the other. I heard the terrible crunch of the woman and the pram being crushed.

  There was carnage all around, blood mixing with the unfinished wet floor.

  “Is he alive?” I cried, taking him gently from Pante
ra.

  Pantera just looked at me. “Please God,” I whispered, “please.” No atheists— or agnostics— in fox holes. Yes, while it was my own sweet Terry, he was now hardly breathing—or maybe not at all. I laid him down on the platform, and could see he was battered, cut up everywhere, and very, very sick. He was barely alive, and he was dying.

  Frantically, using the techniques I’d learned in my well-baby classes, I tilted his head back and sealed my mouth over his tiny lips, pinched his nose, and blew in his mouth five times. I gave him thirty chest compressions—how hard could I press without doing further damage?—two more rescue breaths, and then suddenly, someone was pulling me off Terry as I struggled to hold on. The tunnel was filling up with SWAT cops. Then when they gave the all clear, down rushed firefighters and EMS. I remember screaming as they pulled me away from my baby amid the dead and dying all around us.

  I heard a voice—it sounded somewhat familiar, and it was coming from someone trying to hold me. “Ms. Russo, Ms. Russo? You’re wounded. You need to go to the hospital. It’s Detective Barracota—I’m here. We spoke on the phone from Israel?”

  I broke from him and ran to the EMS workers who were working on Terry.

  “He’s breathing, he’s breathing…” a female EMS worker told me. “He’s breathing, honey, he’s breathing.” They had put an oxygen mask on him.

  “Is his spine broken?” I screamed. “They threw him on the tracks.” He was covered in blood.

  Pantera’s arms surrounded me. The woman said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we don’t know anything yet,” as she and a man lifted his little broken body onto a tiny baby board and covered him with blankets. “We need to be in the ambulance!” I cried, grabbing onto her arm.