by Daniel Quinn
“I’m sure you know that life imitates art. The gangsters of the thirties and early forties learned all their moves from the movies. In the late forties, all the gangsters in the movies were Jews. No one was surprised if in real life the papers reported that police had ‘broken up a gang,’ and it turned out to be a ‘Jewish’ gang. Arresting Jews came to be seen as working against crime. The Jews were hiding out. Of course they were hiding out—they were criminals! By 1948 you didn’t have to have a specific crime to charge a Jew with. If he was hiding out—and they were all hiding out—then he was a criminal, and tracking him down and locking him up automatically made the world a better place.
“The Jews we knew were different, of course. These were artists, not criminals. Then one day Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb disappeared—both on the same day. Two or three of the guys said, ‘Well, this is some kind of mistake,’ and they went downtown to talk to the police about it. They ended up in the office of some captain, who looked at them with great interest and said, ‘Oh, so you know these two men, do you? Close associates, are you?’ He made his point very clear, and by the time the guys left, they were practically saying they’d never heard of Rothko and Gottlieb. Eventually all the Jews were taken—guys like Barnett Newman, Herbert Ferber, and Seymour Lipton. Lee Krasner wasn’t taken, she killed herself.
“By the late forties, as I said, the gangsters were all Jews, according to the movies—but their thugs were all blacks. They made very willing thugs, you see, being glad to have a chance to get back at their former slave-masters. The new language of film made it clear that blacks were all seething with rage and ready to rise up to murder white folks whenever their Jewish handlers gave the word.
“More and more white politicians and pundits were telling us that if us colored folks didn’t like it here, maybe we should get ourselves back to Africa, and more and more of us were thinking that maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea. Wholesale deportations began in 1950. The word was given out that the people of Africa were longing to have us back and were preparing a regular paradise for us. Of course, not all Negroes were going to be deported—that’s the word that was being given out. The worthy ones, the ones who were really contributing something, were welcome to stay. Naturally Roy and I saw ourselves as falling into that category—we were artists, after all, not thugs.
“But by the end of 1951 people like us were getting nervous. No one was hearing from friends and relatives who had returned to the Old Country, and it was beginning to be rumored that ships carrying deportees were never arriving. Government officials pooh-poohed all this, of course, producing carloads of happy letters supposedly received in this country from emigrants.
“Among the ‘worthy’ Negroes who were not being deported were officials of the NAACP—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. One of these officials, executive secretary Walter White, announced that he was going to pay a visit to Africa to see for himself what was going on. The government said it couldn’t give him a visa, because, as the law was written by then, if you left, you couldn’t come back, no matter what—if you were a Negro. White said, ‘All right, we’ll send Delia Tremayne. I’ll take her word for it.’ Delia Tremayne was a prominent white socialite who’d been a supporter of the NAACP since the thirties.
“The government now came back and said, ‘Look, this is all completely unnecessary. We’ve been making a film record of resettlement in Africa ever since it started. Once you see this film, all your doubts will vanish. Just give us a little more time. We weren’t planning to release it for a year or more, but we’ll start editing it together right away. Till then, for God’s sake, don’t rock the boat, because that would only make it worse for your people.’ We were always being told about what we shouldn’t do because it would ‘make things worse for our people.’ We shouldn’t hold protest meetings or take out ads in the papers or organize marches. We should be really, really polite and take it on the chin and smile a big smile and never complain, then we might go on being counted among the Negroes who were ‘worthy’ of being treated like scum in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
“The government now began offering special inducements to Negroes willing to emigrate immediately. They began filling ships with blacks faster than they’d filled them with troops during the war. Walter White continued to press for the promised film. The government continued to procrastinate. Finally White gave them an ultimatum. He was booking a March 1, 1953, flight to Africa for Delia Tremayne and two of her friends, and if the government wanted to stop them, they’d have to release this film. On February 28, White was arrested, charged with fomenting an uprising, the NAACP was formally disbanded, and Delia Tremayne and her friends were told not to bother showing up at the airport.
“Nothing had changed, the government said. There was no crisis. Everything was okay. What was vitally important was to get us back where we belonged as soon as possible, before the American people lost patience with us in a big way. The fact is, there were still too many of us to risk a direct and open confrontation.
“Roy and I were sure by now that no blacks were actually being resettled in Africa. We didn’t know what was happening to them, but they certainly weren’t ending up in the arms of distant aunts and uncles in their ancient homeland. We began to make our plans.
“Roy was a photographer, and an unusual one. People said he could see in the dark, and what you saw in his pictures was, in a sense, what he saw in the dark. There’s a bundle of his negatives here, though I don’t know whether they survived or not. We did what we could to protect them, but …” Mallory shrugged. “We weren’t thinking of two thousand years. We weren’t thinking of two hundred years. We were just doing the best we could. Anyway … Roy knew about New York underground. He was fascinated by New York underground, and he knew there was nothing in the world like it as a hiding place. He said we could disappear down here and never be found in a thousand years. He actually said that: a thousand years.
“We moved into the tunnels in April, but we weren’t anywhere near this deep at that point. The trouble was, we weren’t the only people with this idea. More and more blacks were slipping into the tunnels, but they weren’t prepared the way we were. They were in and out, in and out, and it didn’t take the police that long to figure out what was going on. In a way, it even made their work easier, because they could gun people down in the tunnels with no witnesses, no fuss. No one doubted this was justified. Those people wouldn’t be down there if they weren’t criminals.
“Roy and I kept going deeper and deeper …”
“Tell me,” I said. “What were you hoping for?”
“That’s a good question. We could never quite believe there was no hope. We kept thinking, ‘Somebody’s gonna put a stop to this. Somebody’s gonna say, “Wait a second, what’s going on here?” ’ We had friends up there, y’know? Or people we thought of as friends. We kept thinking, ‘They’re not gonna let this happen to us. Not to us!’ That’s why we had to hang on. One of those days we were gonna hear the ‘All Clear’ signal, and it’d be over. It had to happen. We just had to hang on. And this room is where we ended up hanging on.”
“But what did you live on?”
“That was the catch, of course. We couldn’t just stay here. We had to go back up to the surface every two or three days. I suppose we could’ve tried living on the rats. I don’t know. I think we felt that if it came to a choice between living on the rats or not living at all, we’d just rather not live at all.
“When you and I leave, we’ll take the route that leads to Grand Central Station. We’re literally just a few minutes away from the hotel. But Roy and I couldn’t use that route. The police had that covered. That’s why I never learned the route in from Grand Central Station. We always went in and out by the route you and I followed today. I know you didn’t believe me, but I could have followed it blindfolded. I knew every inch of it.”
“What was the situation on the surface by this tim
e?”
“By this time, it was all out in the open. If you were spotted by the police, you were whisked off to a concentration camp on Staten Island and you never came back.”
“So you couldn’t show your faces when you came up?”
“Christ, no.”
“But what did you do then? How did you find food?”
Mallory shrugged. “Tons of perfectly good food get thrown out every night in New York City, and at three o’clock in the morning, nobody’s paying much attention to where it goes. And there were still a few people who considered us friends. The trouble was, we became famous—or legendary. You know what New York City’s like. There came a time when there wasn’t a single black man, woman, or child left in the city—but what about those two living seven levels down under the tracks of Grand Central Station? This is what our friends told us. Half the city believed we were just a legend, like the alligators, but the other half believed we were real. The police liked the idea of finding us—or even just searching for us. It was great publicity. Someone got the bright idea of using dogs to track us. This was bad news, because we’d been leaving a trail for months, laying down a scent back and forth two or three times a week. We began spending our days laying false trails and circular trails, figuring they’d lose faith in the dogs eventually. Then the newspapers began promoting a rivalry between two professionals who were involved. Each saw a chance of getting some national headlines if he tracked us down.
“At this point we lost touch with what was happening aboveground. We knew we couldn’t risk going back. That was finished, so we got down to making some plans for how it was going to end. We knew we could buy a few more days or weeks of life by allowing ourselves to be taken, but neither one of us wanted that. Water wasn’t a problem. There are plenty of ways to get water down here. The problem was food. It was a strange situation. We didn’t want them to find us ever, but if they didn’t find us soon, we’d starve to death. We weren’t going to let them take us alive, but we didn’t want to starve to death. In the end we had to swallow our finer feelings and go for the rats. Of course, you can’t live forever on rat meat and water, we knew that. We thought maybe the trackers would give up. We didn’t think at all. We just got through one day at a time.
“We knew where the trackers were pretty much all the time, especially if they were getting close. Once they found the right tunnel, they’d spot the pipe right away. We tried filling in the gap but the only way to do that was to lay bricks on top of the pipe, and this would be spotted right away. We had to leave it the way it was and hope they’d miss it. After all, there are a million cracks and holes down here. But of course the pipe we’d crawled across going in and out hundreds of times would be like a beacon to dogs.
“Once they found the pipe they’d find the passageway inside. We had to give them somewhere to go once they were in the passageway. There’s a way out of the passageway to the north, and we laid down a heavy track to that exit and beyond, but there’s only so far you can take that sort of thing. Eventually you have to go back, and that’s where the track ends and the tracker realizes he’s been had.
“Rigging an alarm system was a little tricky, since it couldn’t just make a noise, it had to do something I could see or feel, but we managed it. We didn’t have anything else to do, after all. It had two stages. We’d know if someone came in on the pipe, and we’d know if he started climbing across the tunnel wall to the entrance to this room. We knew the first alarm would probably be tripped someday, but we hoped the second one would never be. We had a door we could close once we got inside here—a sort of a plug that looked like masonry from down below. It was impossible to spot visually, but if anyone ever got the idea of letting a dog check the area above the bulge of the tunnel, then we were finished.
“The day came when the first alarm was triggered. We had a gun, and after that it was always in easy reach. A week went by, then the second alarm went off and we used the gun.”
Seeing the question in my eyes, she shook her head. “I’m not going to talk about that.”
Almost involuntarily, I looked over my shoulder.
“They took the bodies away, obviously,” Mallory went on. “I suppose they could hardly leave them here. How would they be able to claim their great victory without the trophies?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, inadequately.
“I’m through calling you a murderer, Jason. It doesn’t do me any good, and it certainly doesn’t do you any good. You might as well apologize for killing Julius Caesar.”
We wouldn’t need the area lights again, so we left them behind to make room in our backpacks for the various bundles from “the treasury.” These included items like letters, address books, checkbooks, passports, diaries, photo albums, a bundle of news clippings that fell to dust at a touch, a few pieces of heirloom jewelry that might have brought two or three hundred dollars at a pawnshop, and a stack of photo-negatives in glassine sleeves. Flattened out at the very bottom were six drawings and nine lithographs from artists whose names I would later learn: Charles White, Augusta Savage, Arshile Gorky, and Adolph Gottlieb, among others.
In an obscurely symbolic gesture, we left the area lights burning when we left.
As Mallory had said, we were surprisingly close to Grand Central Station. It may, in fact, have been virtually straight up, though it wasn’t possible for us to take a route straight up. Well within half an hour, we were sauntering alongside platforms still populated with late-afternoon commuters, who stared at us as if we were visiting Martians. When we made our way into the lobby of the hotel, the reaction was even more dramatic, and it wasn’t easy to persuade the management that two people who would’ve been ejected from a coal-miners’ saloon could be a distinguished citizen and a paying guest. They wouldn’t have been happy admitting even an emperor who seemed to exude black filth the way a soaked sponge exudes water. I’m sure we dirtied the walls just by walking past them.
Once we reached Mallory’s suite, I was able to indulge in one of the simple pleasures of the rich. I called home and arranged for a servant to deliver a complete change of clothes and a suitcase with other necessaries.
From certain indications, spoken and unspoken, I’d gathered I was expected to spend the night.
RISEN
The dead, as we have seen, can quite literally emerge from their graves if the conditions are right.
LIKE DINNER the night before, we had breakfast served in the room. Over coffee, I asked Mallory what she thought we should do.
“About what?”
“Maybe that’s my real question. What is there we can do anything about?”
She raised her eyebrows at me innocently. “I have no idea what you’re getting at.”
I spent some time thinking about how to explain it, then finally said, “At the Gramercy Academy, you learned some things you couldn’t live without. You needed to know those things so you could get on with your life.”
“Very true,” she agreed.
“Yesterday I learned some things I couldn’t live without, though I didn’t previously know they were there to be learned. Now I’m wondering how I’m going to get on with my life.”
“I see. I guess I see.”
“So I ask you what you think we should do.”
“I don’t think I need to do anything, Jason. If you need to do something, you’re the only one who knows what it is.”
“That’s so,” I said. “I’ve thought of a couple things, and I wondered if you’d thought of any.”
“I’m not looking, Jason. To be honest, all I was thinking about was finding studio space in Manhattan.”
“We can do that,” I conceded. “But there are some things I have to do as well.”
She shrugged, as if to say, well, go do them.
I put in a call to the newspaper that advertises itself as the world’s oldest continuously published daily, where an acquaintance from school days, Ward Woolton, had attained some sort of editorial position on the city d
esk. When I got through the telephone net, I was informed (in a tone that suggested I should know better) that Mr. Woolton would not be available until ten-thirty at the earliest. Then I called Mother to see if she could give me the name of Dad’s bookseller.
“Which one? He has several.”
“I’m thinking of the one who provided him with the first-edition M.R. James that pleased him so much.” Among his other eccentricities, Father is a passionate collector of Victorian ghost stories.
“That was Edmund Dial. He has a shop on Lexington in the Fifties.”
With my mother, to inquire is to be informed.
I made a phone call and learned that the shop was open, though Mr. Dial wasn’t in as yet, his schedule being similar to Ward Woolton’s. No matter. I took a cab to Hell’s Kitchen, retrieved my car, and headed for Lexington and 54th. Dial’s establishment was far too grand to be called a shop, having six high-ceilinged stories packed solid with literary collectibles.
I didn’t have to do more than mention my name to have the clerk’s undivided attention. I asked if perhaps I could await Mr. Dial’s arrival in his office, if he had such a thing. Certainly he did have such a thing, and certainly I was welcome to have a seat in it. And use the telephone to make a local call? Positively.
Ward Woolton had reached his desk at the world’s oldest daily, though he didn’t sound overjoyed to hear from me. We hadn’t been bosom pals, just classmates. After exchanging the usual formalities and pleasantries, I asked if he was in a position to discuss a news story.