The Manhattan Hunt Club

by John Saul

  Jagger half rose from his chair. “Fuck you, old woman.”

  “Take it easy,” Jeff cautioned, putting a hand on Jagger’s forearm. The girl called Jinx was still standing near the door opening out onto the tracks, looking as if she might bolt at any second. The two junkies were eyeing Jagger balefully as they kept the knives steadily moving in their hands, flicking first one way, then another, like the tongues of snakes readying to strike.

  “You guys take it easy, too,” Tillie said, her eyes shifting from Jagger to the two addicts. “Lester, didn’t I explain the rules to you and Eddie before I let you join?”

  One of the men lowered his knife, but didn’t put it away. “I know the rules,” he growled. “And so does Eddie. But this guy gives me the creeps.”

  “So cut him up somewhere else,” Tillie said. Her eyes shifted to Eddie. “You got about two more seconds, Eddie.”

  For a moment Jeff wasn’t certain if the man named Eddie had even heard Tillie, but then he snapped his switchblade closed and slid it into his pocket.

  “Come on, Lester,” Eddie said. “Let’s go see if we can find Gonzales.”

  “Just don’t bring it back here,” Tillie told them. “You understand?”

  Though neither of them spoke, Lester nodded, and a moment later they were gone, disappearing through the door without a word to anyone.

  “So now that the muscle’s gone, who’s gonna back you up?” Jagger asked, dropping back onto his chair.

  “They’ll be back,” Tillie told him. “And even if they don’t come back, there’ll be plenty of other people around.” Jagger’s lips twisted into a contemptuous sneer, but Tillie only shrugged. “You think you’re pretty tough, don’t you?”

  Now it was Jagger who shrugged. He said nothing, but tilted his head slightly, as though the question wasn’t worth answering.

  Looking almost sad, as if she felt genuinely sorry for Jagger, Tillie scooped a huge serving of scrambled eggs out of the skillet, added half a dozen slices of bacon to the plate, and set it down in front of Jagger.

  Jagger eyed the food suspiciously. “Thought you wanted us out of here.”

  “I told you that you could eat first,” Tillie said. “I don’t send anyone away hungry. You can get enough of starving outside.” She fixed another plate and set it in front of Jeff, then filled a chipped mug with thick-looking coffee from a pot on the stove’s back burner. After that, as Jeff and Jagger began to eat, Tillie dropped onto a chair next to the drunk and put the mug into his hands. She had to shove it back when he pushed it away. “Swear to God, Fritz—it ain’t any worse’n the Sterno you drink.”

  “Come on, Tillie,” Fritz whined. “This stuff tastes like shit!”

  “Maybe it tastes like shit, but at least it won’t kill you,” Tillie retorted. Her gaze shifted to Jinx, who still hadn’t moved from her spot by the door. “Sit down and have something to eat. These guys aren’t gonna hurt you. Are you?” she added, glancing at Jeff and Jagger.

  Jagger looked up from his plate and seemed about to speak, but Jeff didn’t give him a chance. “We’re not going to hurt anybody,” he said, smiling at Jinx.

  Her fear appearing to ease, Jinx went to the stove, put what was left of the eggs and bacon on a plate, and warily took the seat next to Tillie.

  “Robby get to school okay?” Tillie asked.

  Jinx nodded. “But he didn’t want to go. He says some of the other kids are picking on him.”

  “Why would anyone want to pick on Robby?” Tillie asked. “He’s a good kid.”

  “Clothes,” Jinx told her. “He says the other kids tell him he looks like he’s homeless.”

  “Assholes,” the woman on the sofa said bitterly. The baby had fallen asleep in her arms, and now she laid him gently on the sofa, got up, and poured the last of the coffee into a tin mug. “Why can’t they just leave him alone?”

  “Who’s Robby?” Jeff asked.

  Nobody spoke, and everyone in the room except Jagger, Jeff, and the sleeping baby glanced at Tillie.

  “Just a kid,” she said. “He’s about eight. Been living here for a while now.”

  “He lives here?” Jeff echoed. “A little boy?”

  Tillie rolled her eyes. “What kind of dummy are you? Why shouldn’t a little boy live here?”

  “Do his parents live here, too?”

  Jinx and the mother of the baby exchanged a quick glance. “I don’t think you ought to tell him. If they get out—”

  “They aren’t getting out,” Tillie said. “Did you ever hear of any of them getting out?”

  “No, but—”

  “No buts,” Tillie cut in, and looked directly at Jeff. “They told you, didn’t they? About the game?”

  Jagger finished eating and pushed his plate aside. Jeff felt him tense, and again placed a restraining hand on the big man’s arm. “They told us if we get out, we’ll be free. They said all we had to do was get to the surface—”

  “Doesn’t matter what they said,” Tillie interrupted. “They’re going to kill you. That’s why you’re down here.”

  Jeff felt his stomach clench. “But why?” he demanded. “Why would anyone want to kill us? Who are they?”

  Tillie’s eyes bored into Jeff. “How would I know? Nobody sees them. Nobody even hears them. But we all know about them. And once they’ve made up their minds, that’s it.”

  “But if we get out, they’ll leave us alone?”

  Tillie shrugged. “That’s what they say. But I never heard of anybody getting out once the hunt’s started.” Her eyes flicked from Jeff to Jagger. “ ‘Course, I don’t ever remember them hunting two at a time, either. Maybe if you stick together, you can do it.”

  Jagger abruptly leaned forward, his fingers closing on Tillie’s wrist. “But what if we don’t go anywhere?” he asked, his voice low and menacing. “What if we just stay here?”

  If Tillie was frightened at all, she showed no sign of it. “I told you before—this is my place, and I decide who lives here. I got rules, and everybody has to live by them. Robby has to go to school, and Lorena here has to take care of her baby, and everybody has to look out for everybody else. We’re not too far down yet, and I figure Robby and Lorena and Jinx still have a pretty good chance of moving back to the surface someday. That’s why I don’t let anybody in here that’s going to mess things up—I want my kids to go up, not down.” Her eyes fixed balefully on Jagger. “People like you don’t go up,” she said. “They only go down.” Her eyes shifted back to Jeff. “That’s the thing about the tunnels. When people first come in, they think it’s only going to be for a little while—maybe a few hours, maybe just for the night. That’s how I got here. I got tired of getting run out of Grand Central for sleeping on the benches—back before they took all the benches out. I’d been watching people go down the tracks, so one night I tried it myself. First good night’s sleep I’d had in months. So I started going back. I had a little nest for a while, up in the pipes. And I’d go out every day. But then they started running us out of the station. So I started looking around, and after a while I found this.” Her eyes roamed over the dank concrete of the windowless walls, and suddenly she grinned. “I figured the rent was right, and it was deep enough in so the cops wouldn’t bother me.” She jerked a thumb at Fritz, who seemed to have dozed off. “And once I found this one, it got a whole lot better. When Fritz isn’t drinking, there’s not much he can’t do. He’s the one who figured out how to tap into the electricity, and the cable, and even the water pipes. One of these days, I’ll bet he even figures out how to bust us into the sewer.”

  “If his liver doesn’t bust first,” Jinx muttered.

  Tillie glared at the girl, who fell silent. She turned back to Jeff. “Everybody thinks there’s nothing but bums down here,” she said. “And I’m not going to try to tell you there aren’t a lot of those. But there’s all kinds of other people, too. Like Jinx here, who had to get away from her stepfather.” She tilted her head toward Lorena, who was once
again nursing her baby. “She was pregnant, and her husband beat on her. And Robby’s folks just left him.”

  “Left him?” Jeff echoed, now finished eating.

  Tillie nodded. “They got on a bus, and told him to wait at the station. But they never came back. Jinx found him on a bench, just waiting, and brought him back here.”

  “Why didn’t she take him to—well, to a shelter or something?”

  “You ever been to one of those places? All they’d have done is put Robby into the system, and God only knows what would have happened to him. At least here he knows he’s got a family that loves him. Up there . . .” She shook her head. “What am I even talking for? Everyone thinks it’s so great up there, and I guess if you got money, maybe it is. But if you don’t . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Things aren’t so bad down here, at least not right here. Soon as the baby gets old enough, Lorena’ll be getting a job, and I figure in a couple of years she’ll be back on the surface. And one of these days Jinx is going to go back to school—”

  “High school sucks,” Jinx said.

  “Being stupid sucks worse,” Tillie informed her. She turned her attention back to Jeff and Jagger. “I don’t know what you two did or didn’t do. All I know is what’s on that piece of paper. So I don’t mind givin’ you some breakfast, but that’s it—I don’t want you messin’ with my family, and you sure ain’t gonna be here when the hunters find you.”

  “So what are we supposed to do?” Jagger demanded.

  Tillie stood up and began clearing away the empty plates. “That’s not my problem. That’s your problem.”

  “Maybe it is your problem,” Jagger growled. “Maybe I’m gonna make it your problem.”

  Tillie shook her head. “Blacky?” she called out.

  Instantly, the door opened and a man even larger than Jagger stepped inside. Behind him were two other men, neither much smaller than Blacky himself.

  All of them carried knives, and they looked as though they knew exactly how to use them.

  “These two were just leaving,” Tillie said, nodding toward Jeff and Jagger. “Want to walk them to the corner?”

  Blacky grinned. “No problem. No problem at all.”

  Almost before Jeff and Jagger knew what had happened, the two men were behind them, and Jeff felt the tip of a knife against the back of his neck. Raising his hands and getting to his feet, he started toward the door. But then he stopped, and even though Blacky once more jabbed the knife against his neck, he turned back to face Tillie. “What about our stuff?” he asked. “The flashlights and Jagger’s spike?”

  Tillie mulled it over. “Fair’s fair, I guess—you had it when you came in, you can take it with you.” After sending Jinx to retrieve their things from the other room, she turned back to Jeff. She seemed to think something over, then appeared to have come to some kind of decision. “One thing you might want to keep in mind—in the tunnels, the deeper you go, the crazier people get. So if you have a choice, go up. But don’t plan on gettin’ out. Once the hunters are after you, nobody ever gets out.”

  Jinx reappeared and wordlessly handed Jeff the flashlights and the rusty railroad spike. A moment later they left the room, the door swung closed behind them, and the brightness was gone.

  All that remained was the darkness of the tunnels.

  CHAPTER 22

  Keith and Heather spent the entire morning downtown, moving from one public building to another, showing their identification and passing through the metal detectors so often that the process had become automatic. Everywhere they went, they met the same response—or, more accurately, the same lack of response.

  To the city bureaucracy, it was as if the homeless problem had simply been solved. “Oh, there are still a few of them,” they were told over and over again by blandly pleasant faces—both male and female—who sat behind bulletproof screens designed to keep them safe from the public they were employed to serve. “It’s the strong economy, you know—anyone who wants to work can find a job. There just aren’t as many as there used to be.”

  Or they heard: “The tunnels under the city? Are you nuts? You’d have to be crazy to live down there! I mean, there’s no light, or water, or anything, is there?”

  Eventually they gave up, grabbed hot dogs from one of the kiosks between the Municipal Building and Police Headquarters, then went down into the subway to head uptown.

  “You know, they’re right,” Heather said as she glanced around the platform where they waited for a train. There was one person softly strumming a guitar, its case open in front of him, but everyone else seemed to have somewhere to go, something to do. “There really aren’t as many of them as there used to be—a few years ago there were panhandlers everywhere. You couldn’t get away from them.”

  A train rolled into the station, and they stepped into a half-empty car. As they sank down onto a bench, Keith said, “I think maybe I owe you an apology.”

  Heather’s brows rose. “Me? Why?”

  “Well, you know I wasn’t too crazy about Jeff going out with you—”

  “We weren’t just going out,” Heather cut in. “We were going to get married.”

  Keith sighed. “And it didn’t matter what I thought, did it?”

  Heather shook her head. “We’d made up our minds.”

  “Well, as it turns out, I guess Jeff was right, and I was wrong.” His face flushed. “I guess that’s what I wanted to apologize for—I thought you were just a spoiled rich girl. I even thought you might have been using Jeff as a way to piss off your father—a little rebellion before you settled down with a Park Avenue lawyer named Skip. But that’s not it at all, is it?”

  For the first time since Jeff had disappeared, Heather found herself smiling. “Daddy’d hate to hear you say that. To hear that maybe he failed after all the years of trying to spoil me . . .” She almost laughed, but her smile faded as she remembered where they were going, and why. “What if we don’t find him?” she asked, her voice little more than a whisper.

  Keith had no answer. The silence that fell over them wasn’t broken until they emerged from the subway at Sherman Square and started west on Seventy-second toward the Hudson. The wind off the river put a snap in the air, and Heather buttoned up her light Burberry trench coat as they crossed West End Avenue. A quarter of a block farther they came to the foot of Riverside Drive. Directly ahead lay the entrance to the West Side Highway, and beyond the end of the ramp was the highway itself, a rush of traffic streaming in both directions. To the south lay one end of the huge new Trump development that stretched for nearly a mile along the river. To the north, Riverside Park stretched away into the distance, a belt of green that ran two and a half miles up to 125th Street.

  “She said she’d be south of the marina,” Heather said, ignoring the light and crossing Riverside Drive. “Come on.”

  Keith followed her into the park. She took them along a path that wound under the West Side Highway, and as they emerged at the top of a steep incline falling away to the river, Keith’s eye caught some movement on the railroad tracks that he could glimpse to the south. There were several pairs of them, running under the highway and the park, only partially visible through the columns that supported the highway that covered them. Though there was a tall fence separating the tracks from the narrow strip of parkland between them and the river, the concrete wall behind the tracks was covered with graffiti.

  “Those are the tracks from Penn Station,” Heather told him. Two shabbily dressed men who were sitting at the base of one of the columns looked up at them. “And those must be two of the people who live in the tunnels.” As if in confirmation, the two men lurched to their feet and walked along the tracks toward the mouth of the tunnel. Just before they disappeared from view, one of the men raised his left hand and extended its middle finger.

  The gesture was enough to tell them how they could expect to be received by the locals.

  They went down a steep ramp to the right. Halfway down Heather paused and poi
nted to a small tent that had been pitched on a level patch no more than fifteen feet off the path, separated from it by a metal railing. In front of the tent was a rickety-looking table holding a Coleman stove and a chipped enamel dishpan.

  A woman clad in a long, mud-stained skirt and a much-mended man’s flannel shirt was carefully sweeping the dirt in front of the tent.

  Keith felt embarrassed even to watch her attempt at housekeeping. The woman looked up as they passed, but when Heather smiled at her, she quickly turned away, pretending not to have seen them.

  Fifty or so yards ahead they saw Eve Harris. She was sitting on a bench, talking to a woman wearing a paisley skirt, a purple blouse, and a tattered Navy pea jacket. As Keith and Heather approached, the councilwoman rose to her feet, but the woman with her eyed them suspiciously. “These are the people I was telling you about,” Eve said to her, reaching out to take Heather’s hand and draw her forward. “Heather Randall and Keith Converse. And this,” she went on, turning to her companion, “is my good friend, Tillie.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ve told Tillie what you want to talk to her about, and she says she’ll listen. But there’s no guarantee she can help you. Understood?”

  “Understood,” Keith agreed.

  Apparently satisfied, Eve Harris leaned down, gave Tillie a hug, and kissed her on the cheek. “You take care of yourself now, hear?”

  Tillie made a shooing gesture. “Don’t you worry ’bout me,” she said. “I been taking care of myself more years than I can count.” But despite the gruffness of her words, she smiled, exposing a mouthful of ruined teeth. “You stay out of trouble, okay?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Eve assured her. “I can take care of myself as well as you can take care of yourself.”

  “Well, if that’s the best you can do, you’re in trouble. Now get on out of here and let me tend to these two.” Tillie’s smile vanished along with Eve Harris, and when she turned to survey Keith and Heather once again, her eyes were filled with suspicion. “She said you’re lookin’ for someone. Who?”