by Otto Penzler
MacKenzie’s arms executed interlocking circles against the satiny metal face of the car, groping for the indented grip used to unlatch it. “Match,” he ordered. “Somebody light a match. I’m trying to get this thing open. We’re practically airtight in here.”
The immediate, and expected, reaction was a howl of dismay from the tough-looking bird, like a dog’s craven yelp.
Another voice, more self-controlled, said, “Wait a minute.” Then nothing happened.
“Here I am; here, hand ’em to me,” said MacKenzie, shoveling his upturned hand in and out through the velvety darkness.
“They won’t strike, got all wet. Glass must have cut me.” And then an alarmed “My shirt’s all covered with blood!”
“All right, it mayn’t be yours,” said MacKenzie steadyingly. “Feel yourself before you let loose. If it is, hold a handkerchief to it. That bulb glass isn’t strong enough to pierce very deep.” And then in exasperation he hollered out, “For the love of God! Six men! Haven’t any of you got a match to give me?” Which was unfair, considering that he himself had run short just before he left his office, and had been meaning to get a folder at the cigar store when he got off the car. “Hey, you, the guy that was fiddling with that trick fountain pen coming down, how about that gadget of yours?”
A new voice, unfrightened but infinitely crestfallen, answered disappointedly: “It—it broke.” And then with a sadness that betokened there were other, greater tragedies than what had happened to the car: “It shows you can’t drop it without breakage. And that was the chief point of our whole advertising campaign.” Then an indistinct mumble: “Fifteen hundred dollars capital! Wait’ll Belman hears what a white elephant we’ve got on our hands.” Which, under the circumstances, was far funnier than was intended.
At least he’s not yellow, whoever he is, thought MacKenzie. “Never mind,” he exclaimed suddenly. “I’ve got it.” His fingertips had found the slot at the far end of the seamless cast-bronze panel. The thing didn’t feel buckled in any way but if the concussion had done that to it, if it refused to open…
He pulled back the latch, leaning over the operator’s lifeless body to do so, and tugged at the slide. It gave, fell back about a third of its usual orbit along the groove, then stalled unmanageably. That was sufficient for their present needs, though there was no question of egress through it. The rough-edged bricks of the shaft wall were a finger’s width beyond the lips of the car’s orifice; not even a venturesome cat could have gotten a paw between without jamming it. What mattered was that they wouldn’t asphyxiate now, no matter how long it took to free the mechanism, raise it.
“It’s all right, fellows,” he called reassuringly to those behind him, “I’ve got some air into the thing now.”
If there was light farther up the shaft, it didn’t reach down this far. The shaft wall opposite the opening was as black as the inside of the car itself.
He said, “They’ve heard us. They know what’s happened. No use yelling at the top of your voice like that, only makes it tougher for the rest of us. They’ll get an emergency crew on the job. We’ll just have to sit and wait, that’s all.”
The nerve-tingling bellows for help, probably the tough guy again, were silenced shamefacedly. A groaning still kept up intermittently from someone else. “My arm, oh, Gawd, it hurts!” The sighing, from an injury that had gone deeper still, had quieted suspiciously some time before. Either the man had fainted, or he, too, was dead.
MacKenzie, matter-of-factly but not callously, reached down for the operator’s outflung form, shifted it into the angle between two of the walls, and propped it upright there. Then he sat himself down in the clear floor space provided, tucked up his legs, wrapped his arms around them. He wouldn’t have called himself a brave man; he was just a realist.
There was a momentary silence from all of them at once, one of those pauses. Then, because there was also, or seemed to be, a complete stillness from overhead in the shaft, panic stabbed at the tough guy again. “They gonna leave us here all night?” he whimpered. “What you guys sit there like that for? Don’t you wanna get out?”
“For Pete’s sake, somebody clip that loudmouth on the chin!” urged MacKenzie truculently.
There was a soundless indrawn whistle. “My arm! Oh, my arm!”
“Must be busted,” suggested MacKenzie sympathetically. “Try wrapping your shirt tight around it to kill the pain.”
Time seemed to stand still, jog forward a few notches at a time every so often, like something on a belt. The rustle of a restless body, a groan, an exhalation of impatience, an occasional cry from the craven in their midst, whom MacKenzie sat on each time with increasing acidity as his own nerves slowly frayed.
The waiting, the sense of trapped helplessness, began to tell on them, far more than the accident had.
“They may think we’re all dead and take their time,” someone said.
“They never do in a case like this,” MacKenzie answered shortly. “They’re doing whatever they’re doing as fast as they can. Give ’em time.”
A new voice, that he hadn’t heard until then, said to no one in particular, “I’m glad my father didn’t get on here with me.”
Somebody chimed in, “I wish I hadn’t gone back after that damn phone call. It was a wrong number, and I coulda ridden down the trip before this.”
MacKenzie sneered, “Ah, you talk like a bunch of ten-year-olds! It’s happened; what’s the good of wishing about it?”
He had a watch on his wrist with a luminous dial. He wished that he hadn’t had, or that it had gone out of commission like the other man’s trick fountain pen. It was too nerve-racking; every minute his eyes sought it, and when it seemed like half an hour had gone by, it was only five minutes. He wisely refrained from mentioning it to any of the others; they would have kept asking him, “How long is it now?” until he went screwy.
When they’d been down twenty-two and one-half minutes from the time he’d first looked at it, and were all in a state of nervous instability bordering on frenzy, including himself, there was a sudden unexpected, unannounced thump directly overhead, as though something heavy had landed on the roof of the car.
This time it was MacKenzie who leaped up, pressed his cheek flat against the brickwork outside the open panel, and funneled up the paper-thin gap: “Hello! Hello!”
“Yeah,” a voice came down, “we’re coming to you, take it easy!”
More thumping for a while, as though somebody were jigging over their heads. Then a sudden metallic din, like a boiler factory going full blast. The whole car seemed to vibrate with it, it became numbing to touch it for long at any one point. The confined space of the shaft magnified the noise into a torrent of sound, drowning out all their remarks. MacKenzie couldn’t stand it, finally had to stick his palms up flat against his ears. A blue electric spark shot down the narrow crevice outside the door from above. Then another, then a third. They all went out too quickly to cast any light inside.
Acetylene torches! They were having to cut a hole through the car roof to get at them. If there was a basement opening in the shaft, and there must have been, the car must have plunged down even beyond that, to subbasement level, wound up in a dead end cul-de-sac at pit bottom. There was apparently no other way.
A spark materialized eerily through the ceiling. Then another, then a semicircular gush of them. A curtain of fire descended halfway into their midst, illuminating their faces wanly for a minute. Luckily it went out before it touched the car floor.
The noise broke off short and the silence in its wake was deafening. A voice shouted just above them: “Look out for sparks, you guys below, we’re coming through. Keep your eyes closed, get back against the walls!”
The noise came on again, nearer at hand, louder than before. MacKenzie’s teeth were on edge from the incessant vibration. Being rescued was worse than being stuck down here. He wondered how the others were standing it, especially that poor guy with the broken wing. He thought
he heard a voice scream: “Elinor! Elinor!” twice, like that, but you couldn’t be sure of anything in that infernal din.
The sparks kept coming down like a dripping waterfall; MacKenzie squinted his eyes cagily, kept one hand shielded up over them to protect his eyesight. He thought he saw one spark shoot across horizontally, instead of down vertically, like all the others; it was a different color too, more orange. He thought it must be an optical illusion produced by the alternating glare and darkness they were all being subjected to; either that, or a detached splinter of combusted metal from the roof, ricocheting off the wall. He closed his eyes all the way, just to play safe.
There wasn’t much more to it after that. The noise and sparks stopped abruptly. They pried up the crescent-shaped flap they had cut in the roof with crowbars, to keep it from toppling inward and crushing those below. The cool, icy beams of torches flickered through. A cop jumped down into their midst and ropes were sent snaking down after him. He said in a brisk, matter-of-fact way: “All right, who’s first now? Who’s the worst hurt of yez all?”
His torch showed three forms motionless at the feet of the others in the confined space. The operator, huddled in the corner where MacKenzie had propped him; the scholarly-looking man with the rimless glasses (minus them now, and a deep gash under one eye to show what had become of them) lying senseless on his side; and the young fellow who had got on at the eleventh, tumbled partly across him, face down.
“The operator’s dead,” MacKenzie answered as spokesman for the rest, “and these two’re out of their pain just now. There’s a guy with a busted arm here, take him first.”
The cop deftly looped the rope under the armpits of the ashen-faced bill collector, who was knotting the slack of one sleeve tightly in his other hand and sweating away like a fish in the torchlight.
“Haul away!” the cop shouted toward the opening. “And take your time, the guy’s hurt.”
The bill collector went up through the ceiling, groaning, legs drawn up under him like a trussed-up fowl.
The scholarly-looking man went next, head bobbing down in unconsciousness. When the noose came down empty, the cop bent over to fasten it around the young fellow still on the floor.
MacKenzie saw him change his mind, pry open one eyelid, pass the rope on to the tough-looking mug who had been such a crybaby, and who was shaking all over from the nervous reaction to the fright he’d had.
“What’s the matter with him?” MacKenzie butted in, pointing to the floor.
“He’s dead,” the cop answered briefly. “He can wait, the living come first.”
“Dead! Why, I heard him say he was glad his father didn’t get on with him, long after we hit!”
“I don’t care what you heard him say!” the cop answered. “He coulda said it, and still be dead now! Nuts. Are you telling me my business? You seem to be pretty chipper for a guy that’s just come through an experience like this!”
“Skip it,” said MacKenzie placatingly. He figured it was no business of his anyway, if the guy had seemed all right at first and now was dead. He might have had a weak heart.
He and the disheartened fountain pen entrepreneur seemed to be the only two out of the lot who were totally unharmed. The latter, however, was so brokenhearted over the failure of his appliance to stand up under an emergency, that he seemed hardly to care whether he went up or stayed down or what became of him. He kept examining the defective gadget even on his way up through the aperture in the car roof, with the expression of a man who has just bitten into a very sour lemon.
MacKenzie was the last one up the shaft, except the two fatalities. He was pulled in under the lip of the basement opening, from which the sliding doors had been taken down bodily. It was a bare four feet above the roof of the car; in other words the shaft continued on down past it for little more than the height of the car. He couldn’t understand why it had been built that way, and not ended flush with the basement, in which case their long imprisonment could have been avoided. It was explained to him later, by the building superintendent, that it was necessary to give the car additional clearance underneath, else it would have run the risk of jamming each time it came down to the basement.
There were stretchers there in the basement passageway, and the bill collector and the scholarly-looking man were being given first aid by a pair of interns. The hard-looking egg was gulping down a large glass of spirits of ammonia between clicking teeth. MacKenzie let one of the interns look him over, at the latter’s insistence; was told what he knew already, that he was okay. He gave his name and address to the lieutenant of police in charge, and walked up a flight of stairs to the street level, thinking: The old-fashioned way’s the best after all.
He found the lobby of the building choked with a milling crowd, warded off a number of ambulance chasers who tried to tell him how badly hurt he was. “There’s money in it, buddy, don’t be a sucker!” MacKenzie phoned his wife from a nearby booth to shorten her anxiety, then he left the scene for home.
His last fleeting impression was of a forlorn figure standing there in the lobby, a man with a trim white mustache, the father of the young fellow lying dead below, buttonholing every cop within reach, asking over and over again, “Where’s my son? Why haven’t they brought my son up yet?” And not getting any answer from any of them—which was an answer in itself. MacKenzie pushed out into the street.
—
Friday, that was four days later, the doorbell rang right after supper and he had a visitor. “MacKenzie? You were in that elevator Monday night, weren’t you, sir?”
“Yes,” MacKenzie grinned, he sure was.
“I’m from Police Headquarters. Mind if I ask you a few questions? I’ve been going around to all of ’em checking up.”
“Come in and sit down,” said MacKenzie interestedly. His first guess was that they were trying to track down labor sabotage, or some violation of the building laws. “Matter, anything phony about it?”
“Not for our money,” said the dick, evidently because this was the last leg of what was simply a routine questioning of all the survivors, and he refused to differ from his superiors. “The young fellow that was lying dead there in the bottom of the car—not the operator but young Wesley Hardecker—was found by the examiner to have a bullet embedded in his heart.”
MacKenzie, jolted, gave a long-drawn whistle that brought his Scotty to the door questioningly. “Whew! You mean somebody shot him while we were all cooped up down there in that two-by-four?”
The dick showed, without being too pugnacious about it, that he was there to ask the questions, not answer them. “Did you know him at all?”
“Never saw him in my life before, until he got on the car that night. I know his name by now, because I read it in the papers next day; I didn’t at the time.”
The visitor nodded, as though this was the answer he’d gotten from all the others too. “Well, did you hear anything like a shot while you were down there?”
“No, not before they started the blowtorches. And after that, you couldn’t have heard one anyway. Matter of fact, I had my hands over my ears at one time. I did see a flash, though,” he went on eagerly. “Or at least I remember seeing one of the sparks shoot across instead of dropping down, and it was more orange in color.”
Again the dick nodded. “Yeah, a couple of others saw that too. That was probably it, right there. Did it light up anyone’s face behind it, anything like that?”
“No,” MacKenzie admitted, “my eyes were all pinwheels, between the coal blackness and these flashing sparks coming down through the roof; we’d been warned, anyway, to keep them shut a minute before.” He paused thoughtfully, went on: “It doesn’t seem to hang together, does it? Why should anyone pick such a time and place to—”
“It hangs together beautifully,” contradicted the dick. “It’s his old man, the elder Hardecker, that’s raising a stink, trying to read something phony into it. It’s suicide while of unsound mind, and has been all along; and t
hat’s what the findings of the coroner’s inquest are going to be too. We haven’t turned up anything that throws a doubt on that. Old man Hardecker himself hasn’t been able to identify a single one of you as having ever known or seen his son—or himself—before six o’clock last Monday evening. The gun was the fellow’s own, and he had a license for it. He had it with him when he got in the car. It was under his body when it was picked up. The only fingerprints brought out on it were his. The examiner finds the wound a contact wound, powder burns all around it.”
“The way we were crowded together down there, any kind of a shot at anyone would have been a contact,” MacKenzie tried to object.
The dick waved this aside. “The nitrate test shows that his fingers fired the shot. It’s true that we neglected to give it to anyone else at the time, but since there’d been only one shot fired out of the gun, and no other gun was found, that don’t stack up to much. The bullet, of course, was from that gun and no other, ballistics has told us. The guy was a nervous, high-strung young fellow. He went hysterical down there, cracked up, and when he couldn’t stand it any more, took himself out of it. And against this, his old man is beefing that he was happy, he had a lovely wife, they were expecting a kid, and he had everything to live for.”
“Well, all right,” objected MacKenzie mildly, “but why should he do it when they were already working on the roof over us, and it was just a matter of minutes before they got to us? Why not before? That don’t sound logical. Matter of fact, his voice sounded calm and unfrightened enough while we were waiting.”
The detective got up, as though the discussion were ended, but condescended to enlighten him on his way to the door: “People don’t crack up at a minute’s notice; it was after he’d been down there twenty minutes, half an hour, it got him. When you heard him say that, he was probably trying to hold himself together, kid himself he was brave or something. Any psychiatrist will tell you what noise’ll do to someone already under a strain or tension. The noise of the blowtorches gave him the finishing touch; that’s why he did it then, couldn’t think straight any more. As far as having a wife and expecting a kid is concerned, that would only make him lose his head all the quicker. A man without ties or responsibilities is always more cold-blooded in an emergency.”
