Shadow Dancers

by Herbert Lieberman

  The car moved north, through the choked and snarling late-afternoon traffic.

  “You didn’t happen to get a look at her eyes, did you?” Mooney asked suddenly.

  The question brought Pickering up. “Looked like curdled cheese to me.”

  “I bet that old dame is on something. She was flying.”

  “On a broomstick, if you ask me.”

  “Looked like she was brewing a mess of pot there. Whatever kind of junk it is, she’s on it, too.”

  “Did you believe her?” Pickering asked.

  “About this Briggs character?” Mooney reflected. “I don’t know. Could be. Sure as hell wasn’t no Mercedes parked out front. The clothes in that attic closet didn’t look like her old man’s clothes, either.”

  They were moving up Chambers Street toward Nassau, making their way to Police Plaza.

  “What am I supposed to tell Mulvaney?” Mooney asked. He appeared uneasy at the prospect of reporting another “no progress” to the chief of detectives. He was sorely aware that by then, he’d used up nearly half of the ninety days allotted to him to close the case, and that Eddie Sylvestri, hot and eager, was waiting in the wings.

  “Tell him about the auto body shop and the line we got on the car,” Pickering suggested. “Tell him about Berrida and the description we got on the guy who sold him the software components. Tell him to hold his water, is what I say.”

  “You tell him that.” Mooney scowled out the window. “What about the old lady just now?”

  “Sure. Tell him all that. Sounds like progress, even if it’s not. What about the stuff we got from the M.E.?” Mooney made a disparaging sound with his lips. “He knows all of that by now. The broken front teeth. The fix on the blood types. The conflicting descriptions.”

  “And still he’s not satisfied?”

  “What’s to be satisfied? We’ve known all that for weeks.”

  They sat there smoldering in stalled traffic while horns blared all about them. “How do you like that old dame?” Mooney asked suddenly. “Living like a hedgehog in that dump. Owns three acres of New York’s financial district.”

  “Rich as Croesus.” Pickering laughed. “Living in a shit house.”

  “Let’s run a check on that registration you got from the body shop.”

  “We already did. How d’ya think we got to Bridge Street?”

  “Check it again. But this time for any stolen sixty-eight Merce two twenty. Any color. Not just green. Look for a name sounds anything like Donald Briggs.” Pickering looked at him gloomily.

  “You heard me, Rollo. Check it again.”

  Pickering flung his hands up in despair.

  The squad car wheeled left and swung down the ramp into the garage below Number One Police Plaza.

  “You heard?”

  “Most of it. They came down the cellar.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Top of the tunnel. Just pulled the lid down over me.” Warren’s eyes shone large and white in the kitchen shadows. “What’d they want?”

  “They wanted you, sonny.” There was a note of spiteful glee in her voice. “Kept asking for Briggs, though.”

  “How’d they find out about him?”

  “You tell me, Mr. Smart Guy,” she jeered. “Better go ask those fancy auto body guys you like to give your money to. You just better hope they don’t go checking up on Mr. Griggs and find out what a sticky finish he come to.”

  Comprehension dawned on Warren’s face. Pounding his fist on the side of the stove, he turned suddenly and started out, then rushed back. “You didn’t tell them about Griggs. I swear, Suki, if you opened your yap …”

  “If you were listening like you said you were, you know I said nothing.”

  “Jesus.” He slammed his head with his fist. “That car. That goddamned car.”

  “Didn’t you just have it painted?”

  Warren gaped at her. “I had to. They’d been looking for a dark green car. I painted it gray.”

  “Did they take your registration at the paint shop?” An expression like that of a hurt child crept over Warren’s agitated features.

  “That’s where they got Briggs from,” Suki went on harshly. “And that’s where they got this address from.” She seemed to be enjoying his fright. “Now you listen to me. I don’t know what they saw in your closet up there, but you best clear out of here for a while, sonny,” she panted heavily. “They’ll be back. Mark my words. They’re a little confused right now, but once they get a chance to sort it all out, they’ll put two and two together. Didn’t I tell you that car would be your undoing? A man in your line of work doesn’t want fancy cars.”

  Warren stared around the kitchen wildly, as if he were seeking exits for hasty getaways. “What do I do now?” He was angry and frightened. For a moment she thought he was about to strike her, but he could just as easily have fallen into her arms like a terrified child and wept. “What am I supposed to do now?”

  She started to pull cans of food out of the cupboard: tuna fish and soup. Little bags of greasy snacks, cramming it all in a bag with a kind of wild, scything motion.

  Outside dark had fallen. Through the grimy windows the lights from offices, factories, and warehouses twinkled with an almost festive heartlessness.

  “Where’s that car now?”

  “Over on Pine Street. In the garage.”

  “Go get it. Drive it somewhere far away. Up north maybe. Then dump it.”

  He gaped at her. “Dump it?”

  “Ain’t that what I just said? Drive it into the woods and just dump it. Or better yet, drive it off a pier.” She cocked an eye at him. “You got another registration?”

  “I got four, five others.”

  “Then make use of them.” She tossed a package of store-bought cupcakes into the bag and crammed the whole thing into his arms. The next moment she turned away and, with a curious modesty, hiked her copious skirts so he couldn’t see her spindly legs. She fumbled about in the enormous folds of ragged material, finally extracting from there a thick wad of bills. She peeled off a sizable number of them, all of one-hundred-dollar denomination, and jammed them into his pockets. “Now get out of here before they come back.”

  He hovered there, helplessly, until she started pushing him out of the kitchen back toward the cellar door.

  “Where do I go?”

  “How do I know? Where you always go. North. Buffalo. Canada, maybe. You can cross the border at Niagara. They never ask for identification. But first get rid of that car. Chances are they’re out lookin’ for that car right now.”

  All the while she spoke, firing instructions at him, she kept crowding him toward the cellar door. When they reached the small alcove beneath the stairs in which it was recessed, she reached around him and yanked the door open. “Now you get. Right through the tunnel and out.”

  He was already on the first step down when he started buck up. “First I’ve got to —”

  “Never mind.” She blocked his reentry. “You go now, sonny. Fast. Those good old boys meant business. They’re not so dumb they won’t catch on soon.”

  Warren stumbled back down three more steps. If she’d asked him to stay at that moment, he would’ve come right back. “How long do I have to stay away?”

  She could see the fright in his eyes. There was something sad and desperate about them, like someone trapped.

  “Three, four weeks. Not less. Now you get goin’, sonny.”

  “Shit.” Warren Mars staggered to his feet, clutching his knee where he’d scraped it when he’d fallen. The moment he was up again, his legs started scrambling somewhat in advance of the rest of his body. He’d already banged his head on the tunnel roof. It was no higher than four and a half feet and he had to run in a half crouch. When his head hit the clay roof, a shower of multicolored scintilla bloomed behind his eyes. The groceries Suki had given him scattered all over the tunnel floor, but he had no intention of stopping to retrieve them.

  It was inky dark in
the tunnel. There was, however, only one way to go, so there was little chance of his losing his way. He knew himself to be inside a narrow, semicircular ditch with clay siding.

  Though the tunnel was dry, there was a brackish, low-tide smell about it. Warren thought of the dangers of methane gas and ran faster toward the fresh air. He imagined he could almost feel it up ahead where the tunnel ended at a sewer grating near the edge of Battery Park.

  He stumbled again and plunged forward, feeling the warm, sticky sensation of blood seeping down the inside of his trousers from where he’d scraped his knee.

  He didn’t care much for this tunnel, or, for that matter, any tunnel. All small cramped areas in general, without windows through which you could see to the outside, tended to make him nervous. Nor did the feeling of being underground with tons of earth and concrete bearing down on him from above do much to lift his spirits. Even if there was sufficient ventilation about, he felt he was suffocating. Having to run doubled over in a crouch only served to compound the anxiety, and it made him short of breath. The steady rumble of traffic lie could hear overhead and feel vibrating in his stomach made him certain that the thin sheet of roadway above was about to give way and bury him alive.

  Warren tried to imagine what might happen in that event. He’d be crushed to death, of course. But would it be instantaneous or prolonged and agonizing, with him pinned beneath tons of macadam and dirt, still alive but slowly expiring for lack of air, like a hooked fish whomping out its final moments on the floor of a boat? As a way of dying, suffocation to him was undoubtedly the most horrifying.

  He had no way of knowing in that moment where he was in relation to the duct opening at the edge of the river. He’d been through this tunnel countless times, mostly as a child, then later as a young boy, but not recently, and never after dark. In the past, when he was younger, Suki would lead him down there and walk him through with a large battery lantern. She wanted him to be prepared, she said, for any and all emergencies. Regarding what form these emergencies might take, she was none too specific. As a child he had only a vague idea of what constituted an emergency. Now suddenly, the reality of one was all too clear.

  The tunnel was approximately a mile long from where he entered it beneath the house on Bridge Street to where he intended to emerge, somewhere on the Hudson River.

  Running doubled over for nearly three-quarters of a mile had cramped his stomach and winded him badly.

  He had to stop every several minutes to catch his breath, He slumped now against the clay walls and slid slowly down to the dank floor of the duct, using his hands to guide him and gauge distance. At last, sitting there panting like some winded creature chased by hounds, he felt the sharp abrasive sensation of pebble and dirt piercing up into the seat of his trousers.

  The discomfort didn’t matter that much to him. He knew it would pass the moment he stood up. It was rather the steady, unrelenting rumble of traffic banging overhead, sending waves of vibration through the old clay duct, that unnerved him. Tiny shards of stone and dirt drizzled down on his head and into the tunnel, making him virtually certain that the roof of the duct was about to crumble.

  While he crouched there against the wall, waiting for his breath to return, something curious occurred. For a moment he was six years old again. He was a little child in a damp, black hole, hiding from someone. He was cold and frightened, not at all certain what he was doing there, or how he’d come to be in that place. He was either hiding from someone or he’d been put there as punishment for something he’d done.

  It was not simple recollection, however. It went quite beyond mere memory, for as he squatted there in the close, almost palpable dark, he had the strange sensation of being half his size. His head and torso, his limbs and hands were no longer those of an adult. They’d shrunk to childlike proportions. He felt very small and alone, and from somewhere outside himself, he could hear a faint, high whimpering. In the next moment, he felt a rush of warmth between his legs and felt the front of his trousers sag and grow heavy with wet.

  He was on his feet the next moment, running again, stooped over, careening headlong through the dark, narrow tube, the unpleasant itchy feeling of wet woolen pants clinging to his leg. Up ahead a fresh breeze blew. From where he was he could feel it gusting through the tunnel, making a low, buffeting sound. Lunging toward it, his head preceding his body, he gulped air, filling his lungs like a diver who’d been submerged too long.

  Another fifty feet or so and he’d reached the grating. It was a heavy, reticulated square of cast iron set over the opening. Beyond it he could see the lights of buildings twinkling across the water on the Weehawken docks and hear the flow of the river, a steady lapping sound of small, angry waves chopping at the shoreline as they made their sullen way out to sea.

  The moment he reached the grating, he seized it with both hands, nearly swamped by a rush of panic born of the fear that he was trapped. The grating was not above him but at eye level so that it didn’t have to be lifted so much as pushed out. When he first tried, it wouldn’t budge. There was no play in it as there would be if it were separate from the earth. This was more like a part of the earth in which the grating was embedded. For several minutes he struggled with it, to no avail, the rush of panic mounting in him by the minute. To have to return the way he’d come, all the way back through the tunnel to Bridge Street, was unthinkable. By then, distraught, his imagination running rampant, he was convinced the police were swarming through the duct toward him.

  He put his shoulder against the grating and brought the full weight of his body to bear against it. He felt it give grudgingly, but only enough so that he could rock it back and forth, loosening the dry, packed earth that came spilling out from around it.

  Through the mesh he could see sky and stars wheeling overhead. On the shimmering dark water of the river the hulking silhouette of a garbage scow running out to sea loomed dark and immense.

  The sense of entrapment, first in the tunnel and then there behind the grating, freedom only inches away, was unbearable. In the next moment he flung himself back on the grating, with renewed ferocity, clawing at it with his lingers. He kicked and spat at it as though it were something alive and malign. Finally, with the last bit of strength he had, he braced his back against the duct wall, jammed a foot hard up against the grating, and heaved.

  What followed was a sucking sound, followed by a sharp clang. A cascade of gravel and earth came next, followed by a dark, hurtling figure emerging as though propelled by something from behind. Warren found himself standing hip high in marsh grass and cattails at the river’s edge, coughing and beating the dust off his jacket.

  The strong wind chilled him and ballooned his sodden trousers. Staring up at the starlit firmament, he looked like nothing human, but rather like some throwback to the dawn of time.

  PART IV

  TWENTY-TWO

  FERRIS KOOPS STOOD IN THE SHADOWS OF A furniture warehouse just across the way from 14 Bridge Street. He stood watching the blurred shape of a figure moving back and forth behind the curtained windows, trying to make out its identity. He assumed the figure was that of the young man he’d followed there from his own apartment several days before, all theway down from 81st Street. But he couldn’t be sure.

  The shadowing had taken time and a certain kind of dogged patience. But it wasn’t difficult. It was made easy by the fact that the young man who’d come to Ferris’s door that evening had decided to walk all the way home.

  Had he chosen to take a taxi or some public conveyance Instead, the job would have been vastly more complicated.

  The fact that there were people on the street, as there invariably are in New York at all hours, also helped. He had tailed him all the way from the Upper East Side down to the tip of Manhattan, where he disappeared finally into a side door of an old house hard by Battery Park.

  Why had he done so was the question. The trail was lung, the way arduous. What compelled Ferris to leave the comfort of his tiny apa
rtment on such a problematic, even risky, venture?

  The answer is that it was neither problematic nor risky to Ferris. Quite the contrary. Once it had started and was fully under way, nothing could have stopped him.

  As they’d stood there together, the door between them slightly ajar, and listening to each other’s breathing, it had occurred to Ferris who this person actually was. Nothing had been said. Ferris simply divined it with that strange sort of prescience he had been graced with from childhood. The revelation came to him complete and unqualified, just as if he’d had it on highest authority. Though he’d not even seen his face, this person Ferris knew perfectly well was the man they called the Shadow Dancer.

  How curious that this individual who had occupied so much of Ferris’s waking thoughts should now come to him, to his door. Even more curious, Ferris felt none of the fear or revulsion the fellow’s activities had inspired in others. He felt, instead, a strangely unaccountable affection for him, as if he saw within him some profound calling or mission for himself.

  Ferris had found the Dancer without even trying. The Dancer had come to him, and Ferris had had the uncanny insight to recognize him for who he was. It was providential. It could be nothing less. Whatever forces of fate controlled human destinies had now contrived to put Ferris and this lethal stranger in touch. Having found him at last, Ferris had no intention of ever losing him again. He had been singled out by the gods, charged with a responsibility to prevent further slaughter, and to save this star-crossed man from his own destruction. And for this he was grateful.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “WHERE DID YOU SAY YOU WERE?”

  “Pawling. Know where that is?”

  “I’m in no mood for mysteries.”

  It was 4:40 P.M. Mooney had just had an abusive phone call from the chief of detectives and had also crossed swords at midday with the medical examiner. One had again threatened his job and the other his sanity. He had little heart for games. “What the hell are you doing up there, anyway?”