AHMM, October 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  We met at Jack Sharkey's later that afternoon.

  "How's life been treating you, Mickey?” he asked.

  "Not much, lately,” I said.

  We shook hands and took our seats at the bar. Both of us ordered Dewar's. It was a sentimental choice. In one of our previous lifetimes, we'd smuggled bootleg scotch in from Canada.

  "Not a social occasion, I take it,” he said.

  "We're not social equals, Johnny,” I said.

  He started to dispute me, out of politeness, and then chose not to. He raised his drink, his expression inward.

  "August van Rensellaer,” I said.

  His glass stopped halfway to his mouth.

  "I see I've come to the right person,” I said.

  "What's your interest?"

  "It's personal."

  "Mine is financial. Or, say better, my father's is."

  "Your dad's in bed with August van Rensellaer?"

  "Figuratively speaking. But understand, Mickey, compared to the van Rensellaers, my family's nouveau riche.” He shrugged his shoulders, ironically. “Not social equals."

  I picked up my drink. “Here's to unequal partnerships,” I said.

  He smiled, genuinely, and we touched glasses.

  "What about van Rensellaer, professionally?” I asked him.

  "He makes money for his stockholders,” he said.

  "The public be damned,” I said.

  It was a famous quote of Jay Gould's. Johnny took it in good humor.

  "It's an unhappy mischance, your father being involved,” I remarked. “Given that there's bad blood between us already, I'd sooner not cross him a second time."

  "That might be, ah, impolitic,” Johnny said. “I'd hesitate to call attention to myself, were I you."

  "Could be unavoidable."

  "Then again, if this personal matter were to have adverse financial consequences for the van Rensellaers—” He left the sentence unfinished.

  I thought I understood his meaning. “Your father might see advantage in it,” I suggested.

  "Two birds with one stone,” he said.

  I didn't much care whether or not I got back into the Black Cardinal's good graces, but it had a certain symmetry.

  "What's all this in aid of, Mickey?” Johnny asked me.

  "Jews,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  "Jews. Yids. Sheenies. You got a problem with it?"

  "Quit horsing me around,” he said, evenly. “Tell me what's going on."

  "Money and guns for Israel. Van Rensellaer's in a position to queer the lending policies of the major New York banks."

  "He would be,” Johnny said. “And he would if he could."

  "Apparently, he can."

  "Isn't that the damnedest thing,” he muttered.

  "Men with money make the rules?"

  Johnny laughed. “Since when did you become a Red? No. I meant this whole crazy notion of some secret enterprise, with Jewish capital pulling strings behind the scenes, using Gentiles for front men, when Israel's going hat in hand to survive."

  "What's your own attitude toward Jews, Johnny?"

  He stared at me. “I had Jews in my outfit in the Pacific,” he said. “We served alongside Negroes, for Christ's sake."

  "What's your point?” I asked.

  "Everybody bleeds the same color,” he said, primly.

  "How about your father?"

  He made a dismissive gesture. “My father's a creature of his class,” he said. “He's anti-Semitic by reflex. Does he do business with Jews? Of course. He'd do business with Hitler."

  He probably had, but I didn't say so.

  "It's about profits, Mickey,” Johnny said. “It's not about personal prejudice or social distinctions."

  I'd never seen Johnny squirm. I didn't like seeing it now. “Then what's van Rensellaer's game?” I asked.

  "Who the hell knows? Maybe he just doesn't need the money. Or he's fixated. It's irrational."

  "Could be,” I said. “Or he's in it for bigger stakes."

  "What've you got on him, Mickey?"

  "Sex with an underage girl, who then turned up dead."

  I watched him fold it over in his mind. “Nope,” he said. “One thing follows another. Doesn't mean the first thing caused the second."

  "I didn't say it did."

  "You're making a connection, though."

  "One thing happens, and then something else happens, or happens to be part of the mix, and then something else happens,” I said. “Guy gets his knob polished, and a girl gets killed. That's all I have. Let's call it the first thing, and the third thing. I missed out on the second act."

  I had him interested, I could see that, but maybe I'd made a mistake bringing Johnny into the equation because I didn't know if he was disinterested. It hadn't occurred to me that he might have his own horse in the race.

  "We've always been frank with one another,” I said. “If you've got reason to hold out on me now, all you have to tell me is that you've got a reason. I don't need to know what it is."

  "You've put me in a tough spot,” he said.

  "When did I ever betray a confidence?” I asked him. “Yours or anybody else's?"

  "We've never had a conflict of interest,” he said.

  "Let's say your father's made common cause with August van Rensellaer's banking combine. Let's say it's a conspiracy, in violation of the laws against restraint of trade. Let's further say it's simply a scheme to cheat investors."

  "For the sake of argument,” Johnny said, warily.

  "I don't care,” I said. “If you're robbing widows and orphans, that's between you and your conscience, or between you and God. My guess is that if it were widows and orphans, or war vets, you would have already stepped in. Which tells me it's players with a serious bankroll, real money. Money they're equipped to risk."

  "Nobody can afford to lose money,” he said.

  "Some people lose money, and they lose their homes,” I said to him. “Some people lose money, they have to sell the yacht."

  "You are going Red,” he said, smiling.

  "Two questions. If van Rensellaer's end of the partnership collapses, does your father sink or swim?"

  "If van Rensellaer sinks, my father treads water. He'll be in position to take a controlling interest. Second question."

  "Follows on the first. Why hasn't your father just cut van Rensellaer's throat?"

  "Old money, new money,” Johnny said. “It's a negotiation."

  I nodded. A place at the table.

  "It is about social distinctions, Mickey,” he said.

  "And no Irish need apply,” I said.

  He drew back, offended, and then realized he wasn't the one offended.

  I waved my hand at him. “Jesus, boyo, you're too sensitive to imagined slights."

  "Which one of us should be embarrassed?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Leave that be,” I said. “Riddle me this instead. Why is August van Rensellaer dead set on putting the kibosh on bank loans to Israel?"

  "He doesn't want his daughter marrying a Jewboy."

  "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. L
exington 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, gas lines, 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, matchbooks 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, the 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 t
o 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 gandydancers 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.