Between the Dark and the Daylight

by Ed Gorman

  “How many Jewboys would she have the opportunity to meet? How many darkies, if they weren’t carrying her luggage? How many wetbacks, or a plain and simple Catholic? How about a damn Chinaman? You’re barking up the wrong tree, Johnny You’ve said it yourself. It’s all about profits, and devil take the hindmost.”

  “No,” Johnny said. “It’s about tribes, Mickey.”

  That, I well understood, to my sorrow.

  The thing is, in New York it’s all tribal. Tammany and the Mafia, native born and immigrant, the privileged and the derelict. The hierarchy of neighborhoods, Jews on the Lower East Side, Italians in the Village, Negroes up in Harlem. The unions, the cops, Freemasons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Every one of them with their hand out and a mouthful of much obliged.

  So it should come as no surprise that a gang of forsaken children would jungle up in some little-used section of the IRT. Lexington Ave. has the heaviest ridership of any route in the metropolitan transit web, and when the platforms were lengthened to accommodate trains with ten cars, some smaller intermediate stations were abandoned. Eighteenth Street, between Union Square and twenty-third, for one, was closed down in late ‘48, and the stop between fifty-first and fifty-ninth had been shuttered only a few months later, this past February. The subway was just a part of it, of course. Beneath the pavement, the city is a maze of service levels that go sixty feet down or more. Sewers and aqueducts, steam tunnels and electrical, the New York Central tracks to upstate, gaslines, cast-iron water pipes to feed the fire hydrants, an entire arterial geography, a secret circulatory system known to urban engineers and sandhogs, but much of it unmapped or forgotten, lost to living memory, the original plans disintegrating in some dust-covered file cabinet, like papyrus.

  Judy appointed herself my guide to the underworld

  We started, oddly enough, at the Waldorf-Astoria, where Dede and I had met only two days before, but Judy didn’t take me to the lobby entrance on Park. We went around the corner onto East Fiftieth. Halfway along the block, access ramps went down to the basement. There was a guard shack at street level. Judy gave the guy a wave and walked right past him, but me, he gave the fish-eye and stepped out to block my path. He was an older man, overweight, in an ill-fitting uniform, a time clock on a shoulder strap, and a .38 revolver dragging down the right side of his garrison belt. I made him for a retired harness bull, hoping to catch his second wind. I slipped him a folded twenty and he let me pass, however ungraciously.

  Below ground, in the bowels of the building, there was a cavernous service area, big enough for tractor-trailer rigs to maneuver around in, and there were half a dozen backed up to the loading docks. Some of them were refrigerated trucks, with generators over the cab, their engines idling, and in spite of the high ceiling, the air was foul with diesel fumes. Judy scrambled up onto one of the loading docks and threaded her way through the traffic, not waiting to see how closely I could keep up with her. It was as busy as the sidewalks in the garment district, everybody in motion, pushing racks of hanging meat and stacking crates of iced seafood, checking in pallets of canned goods, dollying boxes of fresh produce and hundred-pound bags of pastry flour. Linens, glassware, soap and bath salts, shoe polish, candlesticks, light bulbs, match-books embossed with the Waldorf crest, mints for the pillow slips when the maids turned down your bedclothes at night. The entire enterprise seen from behind the curtain, the effort that made the hotel services seem effortless.

  Twenty or thirty paces out in front of me, Judy ducked into a stairwell. I followed her down. Concrete treads, an iron handrail made from plumbing pipe. My footsteps echoed. I found myself in a further subbasement, the laundry. Like the other big New York hotels, the Waldorf did its own wash. If you were a guest, you could get a suit dry-cleaned on the premises, or a shirt ironed, but the real work involved the thousands of sheets and towels, napkins and aprons, kitchen whites and dishrags. It was a factory operation, steamy, hot, and close. And enormous.

  Here, too, an unspoken question was answered. Judy moved through the environment unchallenged. The rent-a-cop on the ramp hadn’t given her a second glance. The guys on the loading docks had let her slip past with easy familiarity. In the laundry, I saw why. It was mostly women, and of every age, but there was an Italian gal of around fifty who was obviously the supervisor. She handed Judy a package, a thick manila envelope, and gave her a quick, affectionate cuff as the girl slithered by. Policy bets. They all played the numbers on a daily basis. Judy collected, and made the payouts. She was the next best thing to invisible. Or, say better, she was like a useful pet, one of a litter of feral kittens. She’d turned out to be a good mouser, and you left well enough alone.

  We went down yet another stairwell. This one led to the boiler rooms, three floors below street level, where stokers fed coal-fired furnaces. Here the stoop labor was done by Negroes, bare chested and glistening with sweat. They wore bandannas across the lower half of their faces, like bandits, to protect them from inhaling the coal dust that hung everywhere in the air they breathed, but the soot caked on their damp skin, dull as cast iron. They, too, let Judy pass without comment, although I drew their wary gaze.

  These, of course, were only the anterooms to Hades.

  Judy led me inside.

  In this day and age, coal deliveries were made by truck. The furnaces in the bottom basement of the Waldorf provided steam heat and hot water to a city block, and went through half a ton of coal a day, spilling out of gravity-fed chutes. But before the war, when the hotel was first built, it had been more practical to devise a different system, an underground shuttle from the freight yards. Long out of use, the abandoned railway line was narrow-gauge to accommodate smaller coal cars, which were then unloaded by hand. The original entry had been double doors, with a span of track passing underneath them, but they were long since rusted shut, tine hinges corroded. Judy knew a different way, an old maintenance access panel, out of sight. She slid it aside and skinnied behind it. I could barely squeeze my shoulders through. It took some effort. And once in, there wasn’t nearly enough headroom for me to stand upright. I had to move forward in a crouch, knees against my chest.

  It was essentially a crawl space, and it opened up after a few yards, giving out onto the old coal-shuttle spur. We were close enough to the Lexington Avenue IRT to hear the wheels of the trains grinding against the rails, but it was tricky, the way sound traveled in the tunnels. It seemed to come from every direction, and I’d already lost mine, but Judy knew the way, and beckoned me after her.

  We went deeper into the vaulted tunnels.

  It felt dark and close, although the overhead was high enough to let trains pass. It smelled of earth, but metallic, as well, and overheated, which I hadn’t expected. The air felt charged, with static or ozone. The noise level was intense, racketing in the underground space, a constant rumble, vibrating in your skull, the clatter of the cars, the shriek of steel on steel where the wheels met the rails, the clank of switches and the hiss of brakes. I guess you got used to it, the more time you spent down there, transit workers or squatters, but it was a tiresome erosion of your wits, unceasing, metronomic.

  Judy took a turning. Following her, the noise abated slightly. We were now in a utility corridor, steam pipes leaking hot vapor and electrical conduits as big around as man’s waist. There were blue bulbs, protected by wire mesh, set in niches in the wall about every fifteen feet, and the half-light was chilly, giving my bare hands a ghostly, fluorescent cast, although the passage itself was clammy and hot, the curved walls sweating condensation.

  I wasn’t sure of the distance, but it felt like a few hundred yards before we came out at the far end into what seemed like an older set of tunnels. The rails were tarnished, not shiny, and everything smelled of disuse. fifty-first Street is a transfer stop, local to express for the Lexington line, and a change of platforms for the Eighth Avenue local to Queens. I was disoriented, but I thought we might actually have come as far as fifty-third. Trains groaned on the levels above
us, and chips of rust filtered down from overhead. There was only ambient light, no blue bulbs or switching signals. It wasn’t entirely dark, once your eyes adjusted, but it was all twilit shadows, a permanent dusk, muted and ashen.

  Judy stopped abruptly, motioning me to stillness. There was something canine in her posture, alert as a dog scenting something on the wind, or hearing a frequency inaudible to the human ear. I couldn’t tell what she’d felt. I was deaf and blind, my senses smothered by the close, stifling darkness, the heat, the pressure of background noise. She glanced to her right, and I looked where she was looking. There was a slight movement, a shadow against shadows. It was a Norway rat the size of a small corgi. He watched us indifferently for a moment and then slid away. We were neither live prey nor carrion.

  Judy signaled me to follow her lead again.

  A few hundred yards down the tracks, she glanced back, and then shuffled a step to her right, slipping sideways between two vertical supports, and vanished. I was only ten feet behind her, but she simply evaporated, like a raindrop on hot pavement, and when I drew even with the columns, I couldn’t see where she’d gone. Nor could I see any sign that indicated a passage or an exit, but then I noticed a mark, in bright orange chalk or crayon, the kind of hieroglyphic bums and gandy dancers use to let each other know if a yard bull is a bully, or if it’s safe. I sucked up my gut and eased between the stanchions, the buttons of my jacket scraping the corroded metal. It was a tight fit for a grown man. And then I saw I’d have to get down on my hands and knees to go after her. A rough opening had been hacked into the bulkhead, but it was only big enough to admit a girl of Judy’s build, not some two hundred pound Irish thug with bad wind and joints that were no longer elastic. I worked my way through, nonetheless, my trousers and elbows catching on the rough edges of the concrete, and I felt fabric tear. Somebody was going to owe me a new suit when all was said and done. I got to my feet again, out of breath.

  It was a lateral transition into another set of vaulted subway tunnels, unused, but in this case, unfinished. It must have been dug and then abandoned. The roadbed had been graded, but no track had ever been laid. How many secret underground projects still lay beneath the streets of New York, orphaned and unremembered? I wondered.

  Judy stood stock-still. All around us was evidence of a hasty departure, disordered sleeping bags and blankets, cartons and corrugated cardboard, personal items discarded, toothbrushes and teddy bears. I realized we were being watched, but this time it wasn’t a rat. It was a child, a boy of eight or so, his eyes glittering. Judy coaxed him out of his hiding place, but his glance in my direction was full of apprehension, so I stayed where I was

  They squatted down next to each other, heads together, for all the world like two kids playing jacks. Both of them kept looking over each other’s shoulders, or glancing back over their own, keeping a weather eye out. I took up station downwind, so to speak, trying not to call attention to myself. It still took Judy a while to tease the story out of him.

  She came over. “Cops,” she told me.

  “Cops, who?” I asked, swinging around.

  “Suits, uniforms.”

  “So some of them were plainclothes?”

  “The kid can smell copper, uniformed or not,” she said.

  It figured to be Gallagher. “What happened7” I asked her.

  “They moved in, rounded them up, and cleared them out,” she said, waving a hand at the obvious signs of abandonment.

  “How did they find the place?”

  She gave me an up-from-under look.

  “No.” I shook my head “We didn’t lead them here, Judy, O’Toole couldn’t get his fat ass through the cracks you took me through, and Gallagher wouldn’t soil his suit. They had to come in from a different direction.”

  She went over to the boy again and they talked.

  Judy swung back. “From the East River side,” she said.

  “Where are we?” I asked. “Close to Grand Central?”

  She shook her head. “East of Lex, below forty-seventh “

  I was completely turned around. I thought we’d been moving north, or south, but we’d been going crosstown.

  “He can show us the way,” Judy said.

  I took a few steps in the boy’s direction, keeping my hands behind my back. He moved away from me, warily, staying out of reach.

  “My name’s Mickey Counihan,” I told him, introducing myself as if to an adult. “Judy will tell you the last thing I’d choose would be to rat you out to the cops or the youth wardens, but we pay each other’s tariff. Point us the way they went.”

  “What’s in it for me?” he asked, tilting his chin up.

  I grinned. “A hot meal, a safe bed, and a cuff on the back of your head, you scut,” I told him.

  He cut his eyes at Judy.

  She shrugged, as if to say I hadn’t yet played her false.

  The kid spat in his hand and stepped forward, and we shook on it, like Irish livestock buyers at a country market town.

  “What do I call you?” I asked.

  “Billy,” he said.

  “Billy the Kid?” I suggested.

  He smiled.

  I pointed. “Get on with you,” I said.

  On we went.

  I found it odd, the distance you were able to cover below ground. I’d have thought the opposite, but we weren’t walking the grid of streets and avenues. It still came as a surprise to me, where Billy led us, although I should have guessed.

  The old graded roadbed curved, and then straightened, and then curved again. Maybe half a mile, as the crow flies? It was hard to judge. Then the two kids stopped, alert to some new signal. I caught it, too, the touch of a cool breeze, not the fetid air of the tunnels, but it carried the smell of the river, damp and nearby, an oily scent, sweet with decay.

  I’d been content to follow, thus far, because the two of them were familiar with the secret byways, as if they were playing a game of Chutes and Ladders, but now I took over the lead. The breeze freshened as we edged forward, and up ahead I made out a lighter spot in the gloom. It flickered like a candle, but as we got closer, I realized it was the flare of an oxyacetylene torch. I raised a hand, and Judy and Billy went still behind me. I worked my way into a better position, moving up behind a corroded stanchion.

  It was a maintenance crew, four men. They were wrestling steel plates into place, and riveting them together to block off access to the tunnel behind me.

  I stepped out from cover and motioned the kids to follow in my wake.

  The first of the crew to notice me reacted with a terrified double take, and slapped the shoulder of the man in front of him. I must have looked a sight, hatless, my trousers torn, the jacket of my suit smeared with grease and rust.

  I adopted a jaunty air. “Chased these scamps up and down and all around,” I said. I took each of them by the ear, not playfully, and shoved them past the barricade. Judy played her part, whining aggrievedly. Billy didn’t realize he was supposed to be who he was, only more so, and tried to twist away. I bit down harder with my thumb and forefinger. Judy levered out with her left leg and popped him with her heel, just below the knee.

  “Who’s up top?” I asked the riveting crew.

  They took me for police, as I’d hoped they would.

  “Lieutenant of detectives,” the guy with the torch told me. “Big fella, almost your size, wearing a good suit.”

  “And a lard-ass sergeant with a long line of mouth,” one of the other guys put in.

  Gallagher and O’Toole. How not?

  I started to thank them, but I realized it would be out of character. Cops don’t thank anybody. What the subway crew expected of me was no more than I gave them. “Get out of my damn way, then,” I said, my manners as bad as possible.

  I ramrodded the kids past.

  “The cheaper the clothes, the tougher they talk,” I heard the guy with the torch say. It didn’t bother me. I’d heard the same patter before.

  “Keep mo
ving,” I muttered to Judy and Billy. I’d let go of her, and she took the opportunity to kick Billy again.

  “Cut it out,” he said to her.

  “Cut it out, yourself,” I said, letting go of his earlobe.

  “That hurt,” he complained.

  “You don’t know when you’ve got it good,” I said. I looked at Judy. “Billy the Kid’s your responsibility,” I told her.

  Judy rolled her eyes.

  “No,” I said. “Get him gone. Look ahead.”

  She did, and saw what I’d seen.

  There was a ragged hole at the end the tunnel, where earth-moving equipment had torn into the vaulted underground cavern and exposed the abandoned subway line, like breaking open a hive of bees. It was the excavation for the UN dig.

  “They scattered them like birds,” I said to her.

  “It wasn’t our fault?” she asked.

  “No,” I told her. “It was an accident. Fortunes of war.”

  She didn’t entirely trust me, that was evident.

  “I’m going out into the light,” I said. “But once I get in the clear, the two of you skedaddle.”

  She understood. “You going to be okay, Mickey?” she asked.

  “Not hardly,” I said.

  “Meet you in the sweet by-and-by,” Judy said.

  “Get lost,” I told her.

  She did, but she did it without haste, so as not to call any undue attention to herself. And she took the kid along with her. They were slippery bastards. They’d had enough practice.

  Me, a different story. I ducked past the plywood hoardings that had been erected to shroud the subway tunnels, and stepped out again into the sucking mud. I saw Judy and Billy scramble away, vagabonds on the streets, fugitives below ground, adapting for their own survival.

  The lights hit me. I was an understudy filling in for the lead actor, not knowing my lines. The hot, piercing glow pinned me like a butterfly.

  “Mickey.” It was Gallagher, calling down.

  He didn’t help me, he let me struggle, but when I managed to get to the lip of the trench, he held out a hand, and dragged me up the last few feet.