Reuben met my gaze with weary rebuke. “Laying it on a little thick this morning, aren’t we?” He peered down again and sat silently for ten seconds. Then he straightened, pulled back his shoulders, and surprised me. “Okay, I’m in—with a condition.”
“Really?”
“No more unilateral decisions, like… cracking open coffins because you’re dying to see what’s inside. From now on, we’re a democracy, got it?”
“It’s a deal. Ready to get started?”
“Might as well.”
I could’ve kissed him. We’d hit bottom less than twenty-four hours ago, but the smallest hope, even one tinged with darkness, felt like a new beginning. “Good,” I said. “You work on equipment and timing.” I ticked off points on my fingers. “Oh, and escape routes. What about Alpha Portal? There has to be an egress override so people coming up from below can get out.”
“I’ll look into it. You?”
“Access. We can’t go in blind. Gotta make an advance scouting trip.”
“Into Drax headquarters?” Reuben leaned back and folded his arms. The first test of our nascent democracy. “Risky.”
“No choice. If I hadn’t scouted the train station, we wouldn’t have known vent openings, guard schedule, blind spots.”
“We got caught.”
“We got photos.”
“Thanks to Alfred.” True. If not for the old man’s sleight-of-hand with film canisters, the whole mission would’ve tanked. I imagined him in a hospital bed, tubes snaking from his mouth and nose.
Reuben brought me back. “But they recognized you outside the museum.”
“Yeah, the lobby crew, but I won’t go through the lobby.”
“Service entrance?”
I considered. “Loading dock would be better. But timing is key. I’ve got to make sure whoever’s on duty failed his GED.”
“Playing what part?”
In the kitchen, a stack of aluminum trays hitting the tile floor sounded like a car crash. Reuben jumped in his seat. “Haven’t decided,” I said. “I’ve got to get to the basement, near the utility tunnels. I could do a phone company tech. Mom has a union jacket and I could doctor up an ID from her temp pass. Wish I could borrow one of those Ma Bell vans.”
Reuben blinked slowly. “They call that car theft. Try again.”
“Electric company?” But I didn’t like that either. “We need more authority.” Then it struck me. I grinned. Reuben looked irritated. “I’m reminded of a quote by N. Jefferson Chapel.”
Reuben pursed his lips. “He wrote those rules twenty years ago.”
“Jesus did his thing two thousand years ago and everyone still takes his word as gospel.”
“I don’t.”
I waved him off. “I quote, When a calm analysis of prerogatives proves boldness the prudent choice, be doubly bold. Audacity itself persuades, for whom but the true would be so audacious?”
“He might’ve sold a few more books if he spoke English. What the hell does that mean?”
“Ever see a little dog charge a big dog and the big dog tucks his tail and runs like hell? That’s the persuasive power of doubly bold.”
. . . . .
I followed a routine for the next few mornings. First, I made sure Mom would be safe for the day, either at work or Dorothy’s house; our own house was off-limits. Second, I visited the hospital where Alfred remained unconscious and on oxygen support. Third, I dropped by a greasy spoon called Mabe’s located on Torrance Avenue just across from the Drax loading dock. Between sips of coffee and time-stretching nibbles of lemon cream pie, I observed.
The core eight-to-five crew was an older guy backed by his younger and greener associate. Older Wiser presented done-it-all posture and know-it-all eyes. Greenie stood erect and habitually adjusted his pants and flexed his fingers. He was my target.
At 11:30 a.m. on the fourth day, following a now-familiar pattern, Older Wiser took his lunch break and left Greenie in charge of the loading bays. I made my move.
. . . . .
I stepped off the sidewalk and down the loading dock ramp armed with the urban explorer’s most powerful weapon against gatekeepers, a credibility prop. From N. Jefferson Chapel: When equipped with the accoutrement of a plausible profession, you hasten property stewards toward their own erroneous explanation of your presence.
My weapon was a clipboard topped by one of Reuben’s official-looking actuarial tables that only an authority could interpret, the authority being me, a mid-level inspector from the administrative offices of the Cincinnati Fire Department.
Fortunately, CFD bureaucrats didn’t wear uniform blues, so I’d dressed the part in soft-soled leathers, khakis, a rumpled dress shirt, and a windbreaker—a gear satchel hanging from my shoulder. I even had an ID card, my second credibility prop—only a last resort because the peel-and-stick laminate barely hid the cuts from my X-Acto knife. To complete the effect, I tucked a Bic pen behind my ear and mentally transformed myself into an overworked civil servant with one to-do item before lunch.
I scurried in a straight line with my head down because seasoned workers never rubbernecked. Once Greenie’s field of vision included my approach, I held the clipboard aloft and gave it a Miss Florida wave from the Citrus Day Parade.
N. Jefferson Chapel: Obfuscate with information to render unnecessary any questions about bona fides. “You guys swapped out a standpipe valve?” I asked.
“Huh?” Greenie looked confused.
I glanced at my watch. “Your man said you guys knew about this. There must be another loading dock somewhere.” I looked around.
“Not really. Who said?”
I scrabbled around in the pockets of my windbreaker. “Italian name—I’ve got it written down. Just a sec.”
Greenie stepped out from behind his checkpoint stand, hiked up his pants, and released them to his hips. “My boss went to lunch. If you could come back in a half hour—”
“What’s his name?”
Greenie gave a name.
I shook my head. “Nope, not the guy.” I gave up on the windbreaker and thumbed through clipboard pages. “I’ve got the work order right here.” I interrupted my search to look Greenie in the eye. “Standpipe inspection—won’t take five minutes—routine stuff.”
N. Jefferson Chapel: For property stewards, success is simply an absence of failure, and knowing is simply an absence of unknowing. Greenie would avoid admitting ignorance about anything routine.
As if recollecting, I looked off and chuckled. “A guy the other day asked me if the inspection was necessary. Can you believe it?”
Greenie flexed the fingers of both hands.
I continued to flip from one page to the next. “So I told him, if there’s a fire, our guys have to hook the hoses to something, and that something is the standpipe.” I glanced up. “I told him, if that standpipe valve doesn’t work… buddy, you got no building. You with me?” Greenie nodded. “So if Drax swaps out a leaky standpipe valve, we’ve got to inspect it.” I thumbed further. “Bingo!” From under the clip, I yanked out my third credibility prop, a standard pink telephone message slip, and pretended to give it a quick read. “Valentine! That’s the guy.” I handed over the phone message from a Mr. Valentine, supposedly scribbled by a CFD switchboard operator. The message said The loading dock crew can escort you. If they can’t handle it, have them call me. “You know Valentine?”
“Yeah,” Greenie said, looking uncomfortable.
“Buzz him down if you want, but I can show you right where the valve is. Won’t take five minutes.”
“We don’t need to call him,” Greenie
said quickly. “Show me where.”
As Greenie and I walked, we commiserated about flaky bosses and the shackles of the eight-to-five. We celebrated the Red’s strong bullpen and the promise of a frothy Hudepohl come quitting time.
We followed a route I’d memorized from Hamilton County records. We reached the standpipe, which I’d chosen for its closeness to the utility tunnels. Greenie watched on as I retrieved my Yashica, snapped an official picture, and began a little lecture. “Everybody assumes egress is all about fire escape. But fire crews gotta have egress into a burning building, with no obstacles to trip over. I’ve got to document that.” Greenie didn’t bat an eye.
From the depths until we returned to daylight, I flashed thirty-four photos of fire doors, stairwells, conduit-lined concrete tunnels, security cameras, locking mechanisms, ductwork, and ventilation grating. With every couple of flashes, I muttered, “Lookin’ good.”
Back at the loading dock, I shook Greenie’s hand. “Appreciate it, uh… what’s your name again?”
“Duncan.”
I smiled. “Duncan. I’ll tell Valentine you’ve been super helpful.” I eased up the ramp to the sidewalk and rounded the corner.
CHAPTER 23
By the time I made it to the hospital room, Alfred had fallen back asleep. According to the nurses, he’d regained consciousness around daybreak and observed their comings and goings most of the morning, nodding answers to simple questions. As for his lucidity, the nurse told me, “Comes and goes.”
I lowered into a chair and gripped the armrests as if pinning them down. Why was I on edge? Since Alfred couldn’t talk, I’d be delivering information, not debating it. Surely I could handle a monologue.
Alfred’s head rested back on the pillow, the bed semi-reclined. Not much of him was visible, not enough to represent an entire human being, only eyelids, eyebrows, and a patch of lined forehead above an oxygen mask. Everything else was obscured beneath layers of fabric as drab as the room. Other than our bouquet and a few green and yellow thumbtacks on a corkboard, the place was terminally neutral.
I glanced back at the bed. Alfred stared at me, eyes wide open and fixed. I lurched in my seat. His expression, however obscured, wasn’t welcoming.
“I—I hope they’re treating you well,” I said, which sounded stupid. To hell with hospital amenities, they’d kept him alive. “I’ve got news,” I continued, but stopped short, suddenly feeling like a cheat. Words had always been Alfred’s armor, but not now. Along with damage to his respiratory system and hands, the smoke and heat had scorched his vocal cords.
Nevertheless, I had things to say—some simple, some hard, but none easy.
I started with simple. “We’re going back into the subway to complete the measurements.” I wanted to tell more, that Tricia had contacted Smith’s former colleague at Ohio State, the one who provided the laser. That the man understood Smith’s complex calculations. That he would try to pick up where Smith left off.
But I couldn’t tell Alfred these things because he’d wonder Why not Mr. Smith? I wasn’t ready to tell him the hardest thing, that Smith was dead.
Alfred lifted his eyebrows as if they carried a question.
“How?” I asked, shifting my weight off a spring poking up from the worn furniture. “There’s another portal, under the Drax headquarters building.”
The eyebrows deflated with disinterest or skepticism, or maybe Alfred was mentally AWOL.
I pressed on, just in case something was getting through. “It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Drax HQ shares a single utility tunnel with a half-dozen downtown buildings, including the Emerson Hotel, which I know like my own closet. Guards don’t mess with tunnels. Too dirty.”
I felt a little silly, conversing with a man’s eyebrows and imagining what they might be saying: Utility tunnels got you into the train station, and you got caught.
“We didn’t have a spotter at the train station.”
A what?
“A lookout. This time we’ll have someone looking out for us.”
That appeared to reassure him, but only a little. Or maybe he was tired.
My gut tightened. Our bizarre chat had reached one of the hard things that needed to be said. Alfred couldn’t give informed consent in his current state, but he had to be informed.
I cleared my throat. “The lookout is Tricia.”
Alfred’s eyes shot open. He frowned, grunted, and raised a bandaged hand like a club, ending all speculation about his lucidity.
I stood to dodge the heat from his stare. “You don’t get it, Mr. Blumenfeld. She threatened to sabotage the whole thing if we left her behind. Said she’d rat us out.” We’d argued in front of my house with Tricia red-faced and balling her fist, and me terrified she’d get hurt or killed in a dangerous place where none of us belonged anymore, not even urban adventurers who once considered the subway the ultimate infiltration.
I sat down and clasped my hands to still them. “In case you hadn’t noticed, she can be stubborn as hell.” I risked a cautious smile. “She takes after her grandfather.”
Alfred settled back on his pillow and released his eyelids as if succumbing to exhaustion. He exhaled and almost sunk out of sight among the sheets.
“She’s doing it for you, you know.”
Alfred didn’t react.
“She loves you, even if she won’t say so.”
Again, no reaction.
If not Alfred, then who would she love? A sweetheart since graduation? I couldn’t imagine it. But how would anyone know? Her love wouldn’t be seen—she wouldn’t allow it—just gleaned from a fleeting expression when she assumed no one was watching.
His eyes open again, Alfred waved his arm in a drunken figure eight. After ten seconds of this nonsense, I flagged down a nurse from the hall. She peeked at Alfred from the doorway and returned a moment later with something like a Ouija board of letters and numbers. “He wants to say something,” she said, as if any moron could figure that out. She laid the board across Alfred’s lap and left the room.
Alfred began maneuvering his gauzed club among the letters.
With each pause of his hand, I sounded out the result. “H—A—S—S—E—L—B—” The Hasselblad. I glanced up. “You’d trust me with your favorite camera?”
He blinked wearily and angled his head, as if to say, I never said trust, but you may use the camera. He went on until he’d spelled out DON’T BOTCH IT, the same directive he gave before our infiltration of the old train station, which we botched.
“Okay.” I stood to go. “You take care of yourself, Mr. Blumenfeld.”
I stopped in the doorway, recalling my exchange with Alfred’s doctor the day before. We’re worried about infection, he’d replied to my hard question. At his age, with that lung damage, pneumonia would kill him.
I turned toward Alfred but lowered my gaze to the floor. “I know Richard was more than a colleague. I know you loved each other and that he’d never run off to South America like everyone said and leave you behind.” A nurse wheeled a clattering metal cart behind me and continued down the hall. “I’d never judge you for that. Never.”
By the time I gathered the courage to meet his eyes, they’d closed again.
. . . . .
I stepped softly from the fireproof stairwell, eased down the corridor to room fourteen twelve, and tapped twice with the knuckle of my pinky finger. The door opened a sliver and then wider once Tricia recognized me.
“Hi,” I whispered.
“Hey.” She turned and led the way into the hotel room, her brunette hair snaking into the draped hood of a navy blue sweatshirt. She was dressed for unfettered movement in
loose jeans, fitted enough to reveal the easy slope of her hips. Through the window over her shoulder, lights of downtown buildings shimmered against a black sky.
She stopped next to the writing table and tugged open the drawstring on her rucksack. “Any chance you were followed?”
“No.” I’d detoured and looped back through Cincinnati streets for almost an hour. I shrugged off my pack and lowered it to the bed, queen size with a purple spread. “If you have doubts about doing this—”
“I don’t.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. My boots made my feet look Frankensteinian. “The Drax portal might have a combination lock, and we won’t get in without codes.”
“Fine,” she replied curtly. “Then we wouldn’t have to worry about stink damp.”
Days earlier, Tricia had proclaimed, “I’m going with you,” and cauterized her declaration with a don’t-fuck-with-me glare. Reuben and I then taught her as much as we could about survival in forbidden places, including how to avoid hydrogen sulfide poisoning. “It triggers cortical necrosis,” Reuben had said, hoping she’d look confused so he could scare her off by describing how stink damp explodes brain cells like microscopic popcorn. But she stared back half-bored, unimpressed by Reuben’s mental encyclopedia.
A mass-produced hotel painting above the dresser showed moonlight bouncing off ocean waves in a crooked line of yellow smudges. “Or, assuming there’s no combination lock, we might climb down the ladder into a lake of toxin,” I said, a stretch—the Drax portal was far from river moisture. “So since we’re going to die together, can we sit together until Reuben shows up?” I patted the bedspread.
She turned toward me, flashed a humorless smile, and joined me on the edge of the bed. She dropped her gaze to the old-time carpet, a swirl of paisley like warring ghosts.
I stole glances at the side of her face, trying to detect nervousness. She was either the greatest actress or stone-cold fearless. “You’re determined to keep me in the dark,” I said, my attention drawn by the upsweep of her lashes.
Follow Me Down Page 21
