The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  I started thinking about how a real detective would get inside that room, someone like the go-it-alone smart aleck Jim Rockford from The Rockford Files (“Two hundred dollars a day, plus expenses”), or maybe Pete Cochran, that brooding, curly-haired member of The Mod Squad who Quigley thought was so cute. Rockford was my favorite, but Pete seemed to offer the more useful example. One of the Mod Squad’s recent adventures demonstrated that if you wanted to crawl from one room or floor to another and do some really good spying or rescuing, then air ducts were the way to go. Just a few weeks before, that slick black dude, Linc—the one with the amazing, Jupiter-size Afro—had gotten kidnapped by some foreign bad guys and locked up in the big printing press part of a newspaper building. But before they had a chance to off him, Pete had crawled down through the air ducts from the floor above to rescue him.

  I tried the doors of both rooms adjoining the one the gurney had been rolled into. But they were locked, so I made my way up a dirty, checkerboard-linoleum stairwell and slipped into the room above the one I needed to get into.

  The room was down-at-heel swanky, with iron columns and those rolly wooden chairs on casters you sometimes saw in old banks. It looked like an office or a showroom. The back wall was decorated with antique gold picture frames—some empty, others surrounding old paintings of constipated-looking dukes and baronesses.

  There was no sign of air ducts. But one section of the worn wooden floor did look different from the rest. Along the edge of the back wall, two holes had been drilled into the floor and a length of clothesline looped through them to form a makeshift handle.

  When I kneeled and gave the handle a tug, a pair of conjoined floorboards lifted right out to reveal a skinny rectangular slot, open to the room below, and a whoosh of musty air rose into my face, carrying a fetid smell and the low murmur of men’s voices. All I could see when I peered down through the hole was a strip of the floor downstairs and, just to the side of the slot, a floor-to-ceiling rack filled with old picture frames stacked sideways like volumes in a bookcase.

  The appropriate role model here, I realized, wasn’t Rockford or Pete at all, but Flat Stanley. Stanley was a kid in a children’s book who got brutally pancaked as he slept one night when the heavy bulletin board his parents had half-assedly hung above his bed ripped loose and squashed him. But instead of feeling resentful about his disfigurement, as any normal kid would, Stanley took his flattening as an opportunity for exploration, rolling himself up like a poster so he could get mailed to California in a tube for vacation.

  Flat Stanley had nothing on me. Without thinking it through, I mailed myself right down through the narrow slot in the floor, painfully scraping my stomach and nipples on its edge. For a few seconds I hung there with my rib cage wedged in that hole, half of me upstairs and half downstairs, until I managed to swing my legs over to the frame rack and lower myself onto its top shelf.

  The moment I got my bearings, crouching there just below the ceiling, I looked down and saw her. The woman from the gurney. She was flat on her back and stripped naked past the waist, her breasts breathtakingly full, the dimple of her belly button holding a tiny cup of shadow. She was made of stone, I now realized—how crazy of me to have thought she was a living woman. But in any event, she was incomplete. Below the two gentle knobs of her hips, her languorous body ended abruptly, flowing into a severe, angular bracket carved from the same beige stone. Though unquestionably beautiful, she looked freakish lying there with no legs, a magician’s stage trick gone awry.

  Once I’d clambered down the frame rack one more shelf, below the level of the dust-fuzzed ceiling pipes, I got a clear view of the whole room. The legless carved woman, it turned out, was a triplet. On a raised platform at the center of the room—part altar, part operating theater—lay three virtually identical half-naked half women in stone. Each one’s arms were raised above her head, palms upward, hefting an invisible burden. Each had that weird supporting bracket instead of legs.

  The two men from the hall were leaning over the figure farthest from me, working on her. A dark stain ran down the middle of her face and body, and the ponytail guy was scrubbing her eyeball with a toothbrush. The beefier guy kept slapping at the lower slope of her right breast with a square of sandpaper, blowing on it to clear the stone dust, then hitting it again.

  Dad came in and told them they were wasting their time.

  “That’s acid rain,” he said of the stain, after ascending to the platform on a stepladder. “You’re not gonna be able to do much with that.” He stopped a moment and regarded the three figures. “They really are beauties, aren’t they? Worth all the trouble.”

  “Absolutely,” said Ponytail. The knuckles of his left hand were stone-scraped and dappled with blood. He stuck his fist in his mouth and sucked on it in thought, peering closely at the discolored sculpture. “But don’t you think we should try the belt sander on this one, just a quick pass?”

  Dad shook his head. “Don’t worry, Zev, we’ll find her a home,” he said. “Some people like a little damage. Like at the pet shelter. There’s always one softie who goes straight for the one-eyed cat with a bite taken out of its ear.”

  That’s when Dad saw me. I’d thought I was hidden, crammed into the shadows of the rack between two sideways-stacked frames, but his eyes met mine and there was no getting away. He strode toward me on the platform, his face reddening.

  “What in God’s name—” he began, before losing the thread of his anger. He looked over at the room’s big metal door, slid shut as before. “Wait, how’d you get in here?”

  I lifted my eyes to the ceiling. He looked up, too.

  “You were able to squeeze through that skinny frame slot? How’s that even possible?”

  “Well, I just—”

  “Could you do it again?” He looked distracted, turning something over in his mind. “What I mean is, are you scared of heights? Do you get dizzy or anything when you’re high up like that?”

  “No, not at all. But, Dad, what are those things, those stone ladies?”

  He took a long breath, as if deciding how much to tell me. But once he started talking, he could hardly stop.

  “These, Griffin, are caryatids,” he said. “They’re basically stone columns, sculpted in the shape of women. Sometimes they’re used to support pediments, but these were just decorative. They were holding stone urns above their heads. You like ’em?”

  I nodded tentatively and climbed down from the frame rack.

  “Really finely carved ones like these are comparatively rare in the city—and getting rarer. More often on New York buildings what you’ll see are marvelous carved heads of goddesses or grotesques or mythological beasts.”

  Ponytail was nodding. “We usually just call them all gargoyles,” he said.

  “We do,” Dad agreed, a bit annoyed at the interruption, “although a gargoyle is technically a carved creature whose mouth is a water spout.”

  “Where’d they come from?” I asked, making my way over to the platform.

  “These three?” Dad said. “They were on the second floor of the Daedalus Life Assurance Building, on West Fifty-Third. Just off of Sixth.”

  “So they were knocking down the building, and they gave these things to you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “They weren’t knocking down the building, or they didn’t give them to you?”

  He considered the question.

  “Neither, actually,” he said. “Though they did kick out all their tenants, which is how my crew and I were able to get in there last night and remove such big pieces without getting caught. And you know, owners usually don’t boot their tenants unless they’re preparing to demo the building.”

  I thought this over as I climbed the ladder to join Dad on the platform.

  “So these carved ladies,” I said, “you stole them?”

  He looked at me a long moment, expressionless, until at last the corner of his mouth curled into the barest hint of a smirk.

/>   “I liberated them. There’s a difference. I rescue these things and I find them homes with people who actually appreciate them.”

  “You just go around town and take whatever you like?”

  “Only the good ones,” quipped Ponytail, chuckling.

  Dad heaved a big sigh. “Guys,” he said to his two workers, “I think you can knock off for the day. Just make sure one of you parks the truck back on the pier, okay?”

  When they had mumbled their goodbyes and gone, Dad leaned against the curved flank of the stained woman’s stomach and looked at me seriously.

  “Look, son. What I’m doing is saving these things. Gargoyles are an endangered species—a whole slew of endangered species, actually. Cherubs and satyrs, gryphons and sea monsters, goddesses and kings—they’re all just being wiped out. For years the city has been doing these gigantic urban renewal projects, tearing down great swaths of neighborhoods, and every time they demolish a row house or a tenement, its architectural sculptures get smashed into rubble and dumped in a landfill somewhere. So I try to get in there first and rescue them.”

  His middle and index fingers had found the finely wrought bones edging the stone woman’s throat. They worked the hollow there, then moved up one of the two slender tendons that extended upward in a V from her collarbone. Here her stone flesh, long protected from the filthy heavens by the awning of her chin, was unstained.

  “But you just said the building these came from was still standing. How do you know it was going to be torn down at all?”

  “You’re missing the big picture. If we wait until a building owner pulls a demolition permit, we may never get a shot at its gargoyles. The demo contractor will surround the site with fences and barbed wire, maybe even a guard. They don’t want the liability of people wandering around in the rubble and hurting themselves.”

  “I guess,” I said. There was a lot about how the city transformed itself that I didn’t understand.

  “Let me tell you, Griffin, it’s all going fast. Between urban renewal and all that soulless, homogenized Modernist crap they keep putting up—all those housing projects, those International Style office towers, the endless blocky apartment buildings in white brick and yellow brick and now red brick—it’s only a matter of time before the city’s everyday sculpture is lost entirely.” His fingertip had reached the subtle rise of the stone woman’s neck gland, where it lingered to explore the unexpected nuance there. “Ornament is dead, son, and it’s not coming back.”

  I was really getting light-headed and sickish from all the stripper fumes and the climbing and everything.

  “Can I go home now?” I asked quietly.

  “Sure, Griffin. Sure you can. But how do you think I pay for that home?” There was a weary defensiveness to my father’s voice. “You think it’s a breeze supporting two households in a recession? You think that whole good thing you’ve got, living in that brownstone, can’t collapse easy enough?”

  “I never said that,” I protested. But the truth was, I did think of the brownstone as a forever place. It had to be. Fathers went away, or occasionally mothers. Homes were supposed to stay put. Even Lamar’s apartment had survived the fire that had killed his mom.

  “The first of every month, Griffin, the fifteenth with the grace period. That’s when the brownstone payment is due.” He nodded toward the topless stone figures. “You have these ladies to thank that the bank will get what’s coming to it this month. But next month, who knows?”

  I understood as little about banks as I did about women. “The bank lets you pay them in ladies?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Dad said, annoyed. “But I’ve got to come up with the cash somehow, and nobody’s buying antiques anymore, not like they used to. The collectibles market’s been tanking for two years. Gargoyles, on the other hand—the living city—that’s another matter. Restaurants, interior designers, collectors, lots of people around the world want a piece of New York.” He seemed to be cheering himself up. “And you’d be amazed what good care they take of the stuff. Hell, they respect city artifacts more than the city does itself.” His fingertips had alighted on the delicate folds of the stone woman’s ear, darkly streaked by weather and slightly opened like a flower.

  I started making my way down the ladder to the floor.

  “I’ll finish that pulpit some other time, okay?” I said. “I don’t feel so hot.”

  “Never mind about the pulpit,” Dad said, turning away at last from the carved figure. “It’s the gargoyles I could really use your help with.” He gave me a broad smile that showed a couple of his gold molars; he had been joking lately that if the oil crisis kept driving our heating bills up, we could always raise cash by melting down his fillings. “I’m going out again next Friday night—I’ve got a big buyer coming in from Houston the following week—and it would be a great help to have a nimble fellow like you along. We can just tell your mother you’re having a sleepover at my place. She doesn’t need to know about all this.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Kung Fu is on.” This wasn’t true; Thursday was Kung Fu night. But I knew he’d have no clue about that. He didn’t even own a TV.

  “Well, just think it over. If you want to help me make that next brownstone payment, just show up here next Friday around six. We’ll get some spare ribs in Chinatown, maybe catch a movie, then go gargoyle hunting after midnight. Boys’ night out.”

  “But what help could I be? I don’t know anything about all this gargoyle stuff.”

  “There are things you can do, places you can get into, that I can’t,” Dad told me, glancing up, just for a second, at the frame slot in the ceiling. “I need you.”

  I could scarcely breathe. He had never said anything like that to me before.

  PART TWO

  THE GARGOYLE HUNTERS

  6

  MY MOTHER CALLED HERSELF a Manhattan orphan because every apartment house she’d lived in and every school she’d attended before age ten had vanished without a trace. Every candy store she loved, too. Every penny arcade. Every shoe shop that had dressed her growing feet in Mary Janes and canvas tennis shoes and saddle oxfords. Every Kips Bay five-and-dime, and every record store. Every soda fountain.

  The way she told it, she never blamed the city for its elbow-jostling relationship with time. For one thing, no matter how often New York reinvented itself, no matter how frequently she moved house, she always took herself with her. For another, change was the city’s nature. You might just as well rage at the ocean for breaking against the shore in its unending rolling rhythm, for smashing seashells into shards, then taking them back into itself as if they had never been.

  —

  When I got home from my father’s studio, shuffling into a skinny brownstone that suddenly felt malnourished and fragile, my mother was at the big lion’s-foot dining room table, sorting her eggshells. A dark-eyed, Gypsy-looking sort of a mom, she was an elegant sweep of shawls and scarves, jangling bracelets and two-dozen-plus-three rings.

  To the untrained eye, the tools of her trade would have looked like a street person’s eccentric treasures. About thirty Finast vegetable Baggies were heaped on the table in front of her, each filled with hundreds of eggshell fragments ranging in size from a sesame seed to a penny. Behind the Baggies, the table was crowded with giant Hellmann’s mayonnaise bottles, the size they used in our school cafeteria’s kitchen. The mayo bottles served as long-term storage for her sorted eggshell fragments. Every time our household finished a dozen eggs, she would peel away the inner membranes, toss the shells in a Baggie, smash them up inside it, and put them aside until the Baggies started to pile up. This had now happened, so the task at hand was to fill those oversize mayo bottles by matching each bag of fresh fragments with the bottle containing fragments of the same shade of white or beige or brown (and, if applicable, bearing the same subtly dappled surface). Mom and I were the only two in the family who could do it. Dad was too impatient, and Quigley couldn’t tell one shade of brown fro
m the next.

  “Where’ve you been?” Mom asked as I plopped down in a bentwood chair beside her and pulled off my Pumas and socks to clean out the lint between my toes. “And that’s revolting, by the way.”

  “School play tryouts,” I said. Lying to our parents was easy, since neither of them ever had the faintest clue what courses we were taking, much less what extracurriculars were on offer.

  “Yeah?” she asked. “Anything I’ve heard of?”

  “West Side Story. I hate musicals, but the fighting could be cool.”

  “West Side Story!” Mom chirped. “Lincoln Center.”

  “Of course not. It’s just a school play. They’ll perform it in the church like always.”

  “No, I mean the whole neighborhood where West Side Story was shot was torn down to make way for Lincoln Center and Lincoln Towers. I had a Puerto Rican friend in first grade, Felicia Vasquez, who I met at a puppet show in the park. She lived in a walk-up where the Vivian Beaumont Theater is now. But my mother was afraid to go there, so I could only visit when my father was willing to take me.” She held a Baggie of eggshell fragments above two mayo bottles, apparently pondering which tribe of shells the new fragments belonged to. “Then they tore down all the tenements and put up an opera house.”

  “Urban renewal?” I asked, liking how grown-up the new term sounded rolling off my tongue.

  “I guess so. Or maybe what they sometimes call slum clearance. I don’t follow the politics of it.”

  I began helping her sort the eggshells. I liked showing her how quickly I could identify the exact shade and pick out the right bottle for it.