by David Fuller
“For the first subway. You’ll see.”
“First subway, when was this?” said Longbaugh, thinking there had been a false start a few years back.
“1870.”
Levi set out ahead of him, as Longbaugh stood there, amazed, and counted out forty-three years in his head.
He had little idea of what surrounded him, his lamplight showing walls that were close. The dark made the tunnel snug, and the walls were rough to the touch. He shuddered at the unbidden fear of being buried alive. Levi dragged open a heavy door and the sound of the groan ran deeply out the tunnel behind him with the echo running back.
Levi led him into a large space. His light picked out a long steel shaft that ran overhead from an unseen room on the right to connect to a large gear on their left. For a moment his light stayed on that gear, which meshed into the teeth of a much larger gear mounted on the outside of an enormous steel machine. His light followed it up and then sideways to show it was more than twenty feet high and thirteen feet across. They climbed onto it and walked along the top, then worked their way down the other side, past a large opening, into a passage that served as an air flue. He was only seeing it in pieces via the carbide lamps, but he had a sense of its immense size.
“Okay, Levi, what is this thing?”
Levi looked back at the opening on the machine. “It’s a blower.”
“Not that compression chamber you talked about?”
“Naw, compression chamber’s under the river. I forget what this thing’s called, some kind of force blower.”
Longbaugh’s light found a sign on the machine’s side. “Roots’ Force Blast Rotary Blower?”
“Yeah, that’s it.” He looked at the sign Longbaugh was illuminating and laughed. “I was going to be impressed. There’s this thing inside, like a fan, only a lot more powerful, strong enough to blow an entire subway car to the next station. And to bring it back, they’d reverse it and suck her home. Designed to be a giant pneumatic tunnel for delivering people. That other room back there had the boilers and the engine.”
Levi’s light guided them along the air flue to a door. They went through it, and by the sound of the echo, had entered yet another large space.
“Wait here.” Levi’s light moved away, circles of lamplight sticking to individual spots, flash clues to the room that were just as quickly inked back in by blackness. If his eyes didn’t play tricks, they were surrounded by things that made no sense, windows, curtains, chandeliers, decorations. He heard the familiar hiss of gas being turned on. Levi struck a match, the flame twitched, and a gas wall fixture whumped alive, and light shaped the room. He had not hallucinated the splashes of decorations caught in Levi’s light. They had entered an oversized parlor that would not have been out of place in an elegant home.
“The old waiting room.” Levi’s voice echoed.
It did not seem possible. “A force-blast blower and now this?”
“Subway station built right after the Civil War. First time I walked in here, it was like discovering Machu Picchu.”
Longbaugh was never sure, because of his time in prison, if people were making things up to test him. “Machu Picchu,” he said.
“You know, in Peru. Discovered a couple years ago, it was all over the newspapers.”
The walls were painted a sterile white and were in decent shape, as it had been years since any crowds had contaminated it. Velvet curtains hung on the walls, and unless he was mistaken, covered windows. He reminded himself they were five stories underground, so windows to what? He walked to the closest velvet and pulled back a drape so old and flimsy that it seemed it would disintegrate in his hand. Behind it, a window frame had been painted on the wall, revealing a bucolic scene.
“Painted scenery,” said Longbaugh.
“Yeah, Beach thought people would be less claustrophobic if there was a view.”
“Beach?”
“Alfred Beach. Rich inventor, made his money publishing newspapers and magazines.”
Longbaugh looked at a chandelier over his head, under one of a series of decorated arched ceilings. In the middle of the room was a sculpture that he identified as a dry fountain. A piano was against the far wall.
“There were paintings, but they’re gone,” said Levi.
Longbaugh saw a large rectangular object that was shaped like a crate, only with glass walls.
“And that?”
“A tank for fish.”
Longbaugh walked to the edge of the platform. An unusual center track ran into a circular tunnel. The tunnel was nine feet in diameter and made of brick. Just inside the tunnel’s mouth sat a subway passenger car. It was a cylinder and fit snugly within the tunnel. While it had surely been impressive in its day, it was now rotting.
“It’s like a nightmare.”
“Beach’s daydream, actually. Traffic was so bad in 1870, he built his own subway to prove public transportation could work. Tweed and Tammany Hall were making money from the elevateds, so they were against it. Beach dug it out at night, in secret. It only goes a block, up Broadway. Old Beach sprung it on everyone, threw it open to the public, and the whole city came down for a ride. We should get moving.”
“Why isn’t it part of the IRT?”
“Money. Politics. Mostly money. And politics.”
“How do you know about it?”
“We mapped it a few months ago. Stay here.”
Levi went back and turned off the gas, bringing the dark back down on them, narrowing the room to the light from their lamps. He led Longbaugh through the subway car and out the far side into Beach’s tunnel. They traveled the one full block to the end and climbed onto the opposite platform. On the far side of that waiting room, they went deeper into an adjoining tunnel and found metal handholds and climbed. Levi’s light scanned the wall above them, located a small hole, and tapped just below it until he heard a hollow sound behind the bricks. He took a hammer from his duffel bag and expanded the hole until it was large enough for them to crawl through. They moved into a tunnel that appeared never to have been used. Time changed in the bowels of the dark, curving languidly into corners and decelerating in the blackness. They traveled on to a new juncture, then climbed an embankment that led to the sewer.
“Apologies to your nose.” Levi covered his with a sleeve.
Longbaugh used his bandanna. Light from the street dropped through overhead grates at curbside, creating a series of glowing patches in the tunnel that grew smaller and smaller in the distance. The faraway street sounds rang against the concrete, the echo inseparable from the original noise, and he listened deeply to each sound as it lingered, its beginning and end infinite, indefinite. Close by was a steady, percussive gurgle of water.
Levi led him to a narrower, perpendicular tunnel, and they bent down to travel under gas pipes, moving away from both sewage and the reassuring fists of light. They moved in a crouch, and after a short time his back screamed. Levi showed no discomfort, so agile that quickly he had moved far ahead. Longbaugh pushed to catch up, knocking his head and shoulder against protruding pipe joints.
They reached the tunnel’s end. The pipes kept going straight along the ceiling, as the ground dropped away, opening up on an excavation site.
“We’re now under Cortlandt Street,” said Levi.
The excavation was extensive. They appeared to be the only ones there, as it was early and work had yet to begin for the day. At the far end in the dark, an open tunnel connected to the larger passenger platform, but construction came to a stop at the wall beside them, awaiting dynamite that would blow open the next leg heading uptown. There was little light. The station was in the late stage of cut-and-cover tunneling, and wooden forms for concrete were in place overhead. Some of the concrete had already been poured, allowing street traffic to return to normal. Areas yet to be poured had been temporarily covered, and thin lines of whi
te leaked between the wooden planks. Dozens of vertical beams held up the street, and mounds of dirt waited to be hauled away by parked motorized dump trucks with the name Galion Buggy Co. on their doors. All these obstructions would help keep them hidden. Levi put out his lamp. Longbaugh did the same.
As Longbaugh scanned the area, he leaned against a thick hunk of wood. At first he thought it part of another support column, but the wood under his fingers was uneven and had been damaged by fire. On closer examination, he was touching the rib of a very old ship, attached to the curved keel of a prow, with the planks, deck, and masts long gone. The keel looked to have sailed right out of the partially excavated dirt wall.
“What is this?”
“Oh yeah, we found a ship.”
“A ship?!”
“Dutch sailing ship, it’s pretty old.”
“It’s buried!”
“This used to be the edge of the Hudson River. She burned and sank maybe three hundred years ago.”
“You care to tell me how you know this?”
“My foreman, Mr. Kelly, he’s a big history guy. He even knows the name of it, something like Tiger, but in Dutch.”
Longbaugh scratched his head. “First an air subway, and now there’s a ship in the tunnel.”
“Great city, huh?”
“And the rest of her?”
“Oh, she’s in there.”
“When do you dig her out?”
“Probably not in the budget, although Kelly’s trying.”
“Got to love progress.”
“So what now?” said Levi.
“Now?”
“Up to you. We’re here. There’s your dynamite.” Levi pointed at something down on the floor of the excavation near a motorized delivery truck.
It took Longbaugh a moment to see that he meant the pile of rectangular crates covered with a tarp. He climbed down to it. Levi followed.
Longbaugh pulled back the tarp. The crates were stamped with a logo, Spense Co. The top crate was open, and he moved it to see the orderly grouping of dynamite cartridges.
“This is when you get out of here,” said Longbaugh.
“And if you need me to get you out?”
“No offense, but if that happens, no one can help me.”
Longbaugh drew his weapon and checked it, spinning the chamber just to hear it whir. Levi watched his expert fingers in silence. Longbaugh replaced the piece in his belt.
“Thanks for getting me here,” said Longbaugh. “Go meet your wife.”
A loud scraping sound froze them.
Levi looked across and quietly explained the sound: “Temporary gate to the street.”
Longbaugh pulled him down to a crouch and they backed away from the crates and took refuge behind a support pillar.
“Go now.”
Levi leaned his head out to watch the silhouette of a man coming down the truck ramp.
“Security guard. I know him, Bill Marley.”
Longbaugh jerked his head sideways to send him off. Levi gave him a look, but went. Longbaugh did not watch to see where. He watched Bill Marley.
Marley ambled down the truck ramp with the light from his lantern dancing at his feet. Longbaugh knew he would go directly to the dynamite crates.
Marley reacted before Longbaugh heard the sound. Marley baffled the light from his lantern. A sizzle of energy animated his body, as if he listened with his chest, his shoulders, his whole head.
In the far corner of the site, a wooden plank above them was wrenched out of place. Longbaugh looked from Marley to the intruder. Marley was moving in the direction of the dynamite crates. The intruder pushed his legs into the rectangle of light he had just created, then lowered his body down. He scraped the plank into place above him. In the gloom, Longbaugh watched the man slide down the dirt side of the excavation to the ground. He then rushed toward the dynamite crates in a motion not unlike a jackrabbit’s.
Bill Marley waited quietly. Longbaugh heard the occasional curse as the intruder ran into unseen obstacles in the dark. He eventually slowed his pace. He had not bothered to listen for others, and appeared to have no idea he was not alone. Marley rose to intercept the intruder. The two shapes closed in on each other in the dark, a slow convergence, sailing ships on a collision course. Marley reached the crates and ducked down. The intruder arrived on the other side a few seconds later and put his hands on the tarp as if absorbing the magical emanations from a religious relic. Marley stood up across from him and shined his light in the intruder’s face. “Stop right there.”
Longbaugh was not surprised to see Prophet in the light, his eyes wide open, blue eyeballs surrounded by white, his hands on his goal, yet frozen, as if he dared not move.
“What do you think you’re doing?” said Bill Marley.
Prophet moved his mouth, but nothing came out, as if tasting Marley’s words to make sense of them.
This time, Longbaugh heard the others before Marley. Their dark shapes came from the mouth of the finished part of the tunnel, and Longbaugh tried to count them in the gloom. Four, five. Six. And one more over there, seven of them. No, six, hard to know for certain in this light. They were loud, and once Marley heard them, he dropped to a knee, turning his already baffled lamp completely off while gripping Prophet’s shoulder to control him. Longbaugh wondered why Marley didn’t hail them, as he assumed they were subway workers arriving for their shift.
The newcomers were out of the tunnel and crossing the long platform, approaching the dynamite. Longbaugh tried to figure some way to separate one nervous anarchist from six sandhogs and a subway guard. The newcomers’ lamps illuminated the dust kicked up by their shoes, creating a low, glowing cloud below their waists.
He heard their voices now that they were closer. He recognized one of them and was surprised. The lisp further identified Flexible, as Longbaugh had been the cause of that lisp. Levi had been right. Too many people knew about the small window of opportunity.
“Don’t come any closer!”
Bill Marley was standing. Longbaugh had expected Marley to be smart enough to stay out of the Black Hand’s way. The man was taking his job too seriously. The six Hands spread out.
“Stop!” yelled Marley, standing up with spread fingers in the air.
Snatches of white animated the pistol blasts in the dark, giving away their positions, one coming from a close angle Longbaugh did not expect. Marley threw himself down, getting out of the way.
Longbaugh soured. He had little interest in protecting the anarchist who was in love with his wife. If he hadn’t needed him, he would gladly have handed him over gift-wrapped to the Hand. They were closing in and would shoot Prophet in short order. While he imagined Moretti had sent his boys to steal explosives, it was possible—highly unlikely, but possible—that Moretti knew Prophet’s connection to Etta, and his boys were there to grab him. Longbaugh considered his quickly diminishing options.
He counted the lanterns he could see in the dark: Four, two of them close together. He could at least put some doubt in their minds about going after Prophet, maybe scramble them, or chase a few, improve the odds. He drew his Peacemaker and came up, firing off four rounds in rapid succession, so quick that the blasts roared almost as one, and two of the lights vanished, while broken glass tinkled from a third. That one flickered, wavered, but did not die until the owner squelched it.
He had their attention. Nervous yelling amid a paroxysm of return fire, then their inept guns paused. One of them barked urgent orders, warning them not to hit the dynamite. Longbaugh broke open the Colt, dug out the spent casings, replaced them, slammed shut the cylinder and listened with a full load. He picked each of them out as they shifted, scrambled, reloaded, whispered.
Marley snaked his forearm around Prophet’s neck and rose as he dragged him away from the crates. Longbaugh guessed that Marley thought Pro
phet was one of them, and was using him as a shield. Not the best idea, as he’d been protected by his proximity to the dynamite. When he was far enough away, a Hand risked a shot and Marley tumbled in a spasm of curses and pain. Prophet, now free of Marley’s grasp, crawled back to the crates. Longbaugh rose and fired at the spot of the shooter and heard a harmonic curse to Marley’s and knew the Peacemaker had done damage.
Longbaugh had forgotten about Levi until the sandhog decided to play hero. Down he came from safety to help the subway guard. Watching him run, Longbaugh understood that Marley was one of Levi’s men.
The Hands saw him, and the gloom lit up like a meadow of percussive fireflies, their guns flaming in concert. Longbaugh saw Levi tumble, and he pictured Abigail’s face when she learned his fate after finally getting him back, but then Levi was crawling, alive, rolling for cover behind the large tire of a Galion Buggy truck.
“Levi!”
“I’m okay. Damn! I’m okay,” said Levi.
“Do what I say next time!”
“Right. Next time.”
Longbaugh looked at Prophet by the dynamite crate. Damned fool, he thought. Not worth saving. Prophet leaned his back against the crate and reached up and over his head, grabbing dynamite cartridges as if they were forbidden candy, stuffing them in his coat pockets. Clearly he had given no thought to what a stray bullet would do to nitroglycerin.
Longbaugh focused on the Hands. He wanted better ground. He leaned and someone fired. He dropped and rolled, leveled his Colt, and fired on the position. A lamp flared bright white, capturing Silvio in his spin, mid-twist, hit twice, thigh and ass, filling the air with acid shrieks.
The shrieking gradually lost volume as Silvio dragged himself away with his face in the ground. “I’m hit, oh God, I’m hit, oh God, oh God, help me—”
The others marked Longbaugh’s position and were coming, determined to run him and anyone else down. His position was not good. Levi was pinned behind him, Marley to his left vocally hosting a bullet, while his favorite anarchist was lining his pockets with explosives.
Longbaugh was amazed that Prophet did not run, continuing to greedily swipe cartridges as the Hand closed in. Prophet may have deserved his fate from Moretti’s boys, but Longbaugh would not abandon him, not without getting the information he needed.
