Enemy Within

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “I’ll go first.”

  “Why?” said his wife. “I got you into this. I’ll go first.”

  “No, because I’m the biggest, and if I can’t get through, no one else is going.” Cutting short further discussion, he slid deeper until only his head and shoulders showed. “Stay five yards apart and watch out for the Nazis,” he said, and vanished down the hole.

  Karp found that the hole led to a narrow shaft just a little wider than his shoulders, descending at an angle of about forty-five degrees, so that he proceeded downward in a kind of controlled slide. His flashlight was on, but useless, as he could not lift his head enough to see where his feet were going. The ceiling was two inches from his nose to begin with, and it got closer for a breathless while and then receded, as did his incipient panic. He tried not to think of New York pressing down upon him, or of getting stuck or being buried alive. Time seemed to slow down. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears. He thought, I’m a lawyer, this is not what lawyers do, and then he imagined a professor in a law school class saying something like, yesterday, you’ll recall we discussed the difference between strict and vicarious liability as expressed in Liparota v. United States; today we’ll deal with sliding down your ass through a narrow, gravelike passage down to a sewer to find a crazy witness.

  Giggling uncontrollably, he suddenly found himself falling through a blackness pierced by the wobbling beam of the flashlight. Something smashed against his thumb, and the flashlight was gone. Something grasped and skittered across the top of his helmet, and then his feet hit solid ground. The flashlight, still lit, had rolled some distance away. He went to get it and cast the beam around. He was in a cylindrical, brick-lined vault, perhaps eight feet high. The bricks were old, and the mortar was crumbling; there were heaps and spills of brick within the range of his beam, the results of abandonment and perhaps shoddy work—a typical grafting bid of the last century. There was a sound of flowing water and a penetrating stench he could not identify—decay maybe, and earth, and something sharper, a burnt odor on top of that. The air was absolutely still, cold and clammy against his skin. A noise attracted him to the hole he had come in by. He saw booted feet emerging and something else—some playful soul had jammed a skeleton’s arm and hand into a crack. That was what had struck his helmet when he’d come down.

  He pulled the thing out of the wall and was in time to grab Marlene’s arm as she dropped. He offered her the skeleton.

  “Need a hand?”

  She gave a gratifying shriek. “Oh, stop! I can’t take you anywhere.”

  “Bag it—it’s important forensic evidence,” he said, tossing it away. “Where’s your guy?”

  “Tran. He’s not coming.”

  “What! Jesus, Marlene! You mean we’re down here with just us? Where is he?”

  “I don’t now!” she said curtly. “Maybe he had to go to a bar mitzvah. We’ll be fine. Who’s this, Lucy?”

  Yes, and then the dog, and Father Dugan brought up the rear. After determining that everyone was all right, the priest marched off to the left, the rest following, Karp staying within arm’s reach of his daughter, who did not object. Marlene hung to the rear, occasionally turning and casting her light back the way they had come. She saw nothing unusual, except for the complete absence of rats. They moved in silence, clambering over brick-falls, jumping cracks. Their path seemed to go downward, although it was hard to tell.

  The sound of flowing water gradually grew louder, and then water itself glittered in their light beams. They saw that the brick casing of the sewer had been shattered, and the farther end displaced by several feet, as if some sideways force had pushed it over. Naked rock showed through in the gap, and a deep cleft in the floor was partially filled with cracked boulders, over which flowed a stream of dark water at least ten feet wide. What looked like tree limbs stuck up here and there among the rocks.

  “This can’t be right,” said Marlene. “Trees? We must be sixty feet below the surface.”

  “I’ve read about this,” said Father Dugan. “When they excavate for tunnels in the city, they occasionally come across tree trunks. They’re the remains of a preglacial forest, squashed into the earth by the ice. What this looks like is that someone was blasting up above and the shock waves cracked the casing there and released a buried stream. It’s really quite wonderful. This must be one of the original—”

  Marlene interrupted him and in a curiously flat voice said, “Look, there are human bones down here.” She pointed her beam, and there they were, dumped in the ravine, like something out of Cambodia: skulls and bones, and not only dumped, but arranged; skulls on fossil tree limbs, leg bones neatly stacked. As the priest voiced a prayer and started to clamber down toward the ossuary, the tunnel ahead was lit by a bright flash, followed an instant later by a painfully loud blast. They all ducked instinctively as small, hard objects flying at speed whined and clattered.

  “That’s Canman,” cried Lucy.

  “What? What?” they all gabbled.

  “He makes bombs, booby traps to guard his stuff. It’s him!” She had scuttled down the ravine, forded the stream, climbed the other side, and was away down the tunnel before they could stop her.

  Both Karp and Marlene raced over the gully; both tripped and scrambled up the other side, their boots sloshing with water. The mastiff cleared the obstacle in a bound and ran alongside Marlene, panting. Lucy was a winking yellow figure ahead, leaping like a doe over rubble. Both of her parents were in reasonably good shape, but they could not close the distance. The tunnel curved slightly, and the yellow blur with its light vanished.

  As Lucy rounded the curve, she saw the ruddy glow of a fire. She slowed and turned off her flashlight. She saw the shapes of people milling around and the sound of angry shouts and screams of pain. The people were waving sticks and what looked like spears. The fire was not in one place, but scattered around in burning clumps. Acrid smoke stung her nose.

  She saw one of the people pick up a brand and fling it toward the tunnel wall. It bounced and became a shower of sparks, but in the instant before it did she could see that the wall there was pierced by a narrow conduit, not more than four feet wide. This was barricaded two-thirds of the way up by what looked like bales of newspaper. In the opening thus formed she saw a face she recognized only briefly, for it ducked down to avoid a shower of missiles from the group below.

  Steps behind her, and the stabbing bright beams of flashlights. She spun around. “Turn off your lights,” she called out in a hoarse stage whisper. Too late. The beams illuminated the scene, the figures frozen for a moment like a tableau vivant in hell.

  Lucy, like all Americans a veteran of innumerable horror movies, found herself surprised at how normal they looked. Except for their weapons and the expressions on their faces, they could be waiting in line at any soup kitchen in the city. Karp, Marlene, and Dugan snapped off their flashlights.

  For a moment they were almost blind. Karp groped for his daughter’s arm and missed. Then a bright red spark appeared above them, flying in a parabolic arc over the heads of the mole people and landing ten feet away from them with a dull, metallic clatter, still sparking merrily.

  The word fuse popped into Marlene’s head, along with a colossal terror. “Bomb!” she yelled, and dropped to the ground. Karp made a grab for Lucy’s arm, clutched a fold of nylon, and did the same. A flash filled the chamber, followed instantly by the blast, and the hum of shrapnel overhead.

  “Oh, Jesus! Oh, God!” That was Dugan. Marlene switched on her light. The priest was on his back, writhing and clutching his thigh. Bright blood was spurting from between his clenched fingers.

  “Someone give me light!” Marlene shouted. Lucy rushed to her side and did so. Marlene knelt by the stricken man, unzipped her coverall, tore off her T-shirt, made a pad of it, and pressed it to the spurting wound. The fabric was black with blood in ten seconds. Marlene slipped out of her bra, wrapped it around Dugan’s leg near the groin, knotted it, and used his fl
ashlight barrel to wind it tight. The blood stopped spurting, but there was still a steady dripping from the wound.

  She zipped herself up and said to Karp, “We’ve got to get him out of here. He’ll bleed to death. Do you think you can—” She stopped because just then the dog snarled, half a brick spun by her ear and shattered against the sewer wall, and the mole people attacked. There were about fifteen of them, armed with bricks and lengths of sharpened rebar and pieces of steel pipe. Marlene shouted, “Sweetie! Ocideti!” which is “Kill!” in Sicilian, the mastiff’s command language, an order never before received but one he knew well how to handle. The dog charged.

  The Kel-lights made good clubs, except that after a couple of solid hits the bulbs went out, and they fought in virtual darkness, lit only by the dying fires reflected off the curved ceiling. Karp was in his homeplate stance, batting two-handed, wailing away, smashing faces and limbs, and all the time possessed by a sense of unreality: this is not really happening. Lucy was on his right, covering his right, covering his back. Marlene was on his left, standing over Dugan, striking at anything that came within range. Somewhere out in front the dog was doing good work, its progress indicated by shrieks of pain. The attack was uncoordinated—the attackers were not soldiers—but there were far too many of them. Karp felt something smash against the side of his knee, and he went down. A ragged, blood-spattered man stood over him with a weapon raised over his head. Karp found he could see remarkable detail, as in slow-mo in the telecast of a sporting event. The man who was going to kill him had chosen a piece of rebar about three feet long with a lump of concrete on the end of it.

  There was something strange about the light now, and Karp could see more detail. The man’s face, he was missing two teeth. He wondered if this was an effect of incipient death, or whether he was already dying. Karp tried to kick at the man to throw off his aim, and marvelously his attacker staggered back and disappeared. Karp’s ears had been ringing since the bomb blast, but thought he could make out a series of flat explosions. More hallucinations? He lifted himself up on his elbows. No, someone was holding a flashlight and shooting at the shapes in its beam. He saw men fall, and flee, until there were no more. The echo of running feet died away.

  The man with the flashlight came closer and shone his light onto Karp, who shielded his eyes with his hand. The light fell onto a corpse at Karp’s feet: the man with the rebar club. A familiar voice said, “How about that shooting? You gonna indict me for that one, too?”

  “Cooley,” said Karp.

  “Yeah, Cooley. What a fucking mess! Where’s Canman?”

  Karp was silent.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Karp! He’s the fucking slasher. Where is he?”

  Marlene stepped into the light and pointed. “He’s up there, in that side tunnel. We’ve got a man badly hurt here. He needs medical attention.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” cried Cooley after a brief inspection of the wounded priest. “You fucking people! Look, can the two of you get him out?”

  “No,” replied Marlene. “We’d never get him through that crack we all came down. Someone has to go out to the surface and get help—paramedics, lights, stretchers . . . Cooley, where’s your partner?”

  “Somewhere else, I don’t know—I’m down here alone.”

  “Alone? But . . . I . . . there was another man following us.”

  “Lady, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Cooley. “I came down here by myself.”

  Karp shot to his feet, his knee on fire, his heart leaping. “Where’s Lucy?”

  Cooley shone his light around, cursing. She was gone.

  Lucy woke in pain. Her head hurt, and she couldn’t remember anything after hearing the first explosion and running down the tunnel. Canman, and he was throwing bombs at . . . she remembered the men, the mole men. She opened her eyes. There was light, reflected off brick, electric light, dim with moving shadows. Someone was tugging hard at her coverall, and every time he did it, her head bounced against brick and a rocket of pain went through her head. She tried to sit up, but a weight was pressing her down. She felt air on her arms. A man was kneeling over her, pulling her coverall off. She could smell his stink, like the monkey house at the zoo, or maybe it was coming from the other man kneeling on her shoulders. The coverall was down to her waist. The word rape popped at length into her head. She started involuntarily and squirmed and kicked so that the man who was yanking her boots off fell over with a loud curse. The man kneeling on her punched her in the mouth. She blacked out again, and when she came to, her T-shirt had been ripped off, and one of the men was pulling down her jeans.

  Lucy’s hand moved over the ground, feeling for a loose brick, some weapon, but found nothing that would do. It hardly mattered. Given her mother’s trade, she knew a lot about rape, about violence generally, and she understood that it was hopeless, that a thin, unarmed girl, however clever, could not keep two average-sized men from doing whatever they wanted to with her body.

  Her jeans were off. She felt a tug at her waist, heard a rip, and she was naked. The man stood up and dropped his pants, then dropped the other pair he had under that. Lucy closed her eyes and started to pray. She didn’t pray for rescue, but properly for the strength not to despair and to survive with her spirit intact, and if they were going to kill her afterward, for God’s mercy and the forgiveness of sins. And she also prayed for the souls of the men.

  He was kneeling now, and she felt her legs jerked roughly apart. She knew it was going to hurt terribly. The man gave a peculiar bubbling cry, and Lucy felt drops of hot liquid fall on her thighs and belly. She knew what that was; her skin crawled.

  Then a shout, a sudden violent movement, a yell. She felt a heavy weight fall across her lower legs, and suddenly the man was no longer kneeling on her shoulders. She opened her eyes. The man who had just been about to rape her was flopping about like a landed fish, gurgling and clutching his throat. The gush of blood pouring past his hand looked black in the dimness. He arched his back once, collapsed, and lay still. There were noises behind her, grunting, gasping, the sound of feet on loose stones. Men, fighting. She could see the moving shadows of their struggle cast onto the ceiling by the glow of the flashlight lying there near the corpse. She rolled onto her knees and crawled until she found her coverall and clumsily dragged it on, willing her shaking hands to behave. She found a boot, put it on, hopped around to find the other one, stumbled, fell.

  A cry of pain from the darkness, and she also heard a little pattering sound as of droplets falling on something hard, and then the soft thump of a body falling. She snatched up the flashlight and was not entirely surprised when David Grale walked into its beam.

  Cooley said, “I better go look for her. One of you should stay with Father Dugan, and the other one should go back and get help. I got a radio, but it won’t work here.”

  “I’m coming with you,” said Karp and Marlene, almost as one.

  Cooley knelt and pulled a Smith Airweight .38 from an ankle holster. “Whoever’s gonna stay should take this. But there’s no point in anyone coming with me to look. It’ll just mean another person I got to watch out for.”

  “Butch, you should go for help,” said Marlene. “I’ll take the gun and stay with Mike.”

  Karp rose to his full height and said in a loud voice, articulating every syllable, “I am not leaving this fucking tunnel without my daughter. Let’s go, Cooley!”

  With that he walked off in the direction in which the mole people had retreated. Cooley gave Marlene the .38 and stalked off after Karp.

  She sat down next to the priest, checked his tourniquet, examined his face. He was pale and clammy. “Mike, how do you feel?”

  “Not that great. I’m cold.”

  “You’re getting shocky from loss of blood. I have to get you warm. Close your eyes.”

  She unzipped the coverall and pulled it down to her waist, then lay partly on top of him, her naked breast pressing against his chest, her cheek against his. />
  After a long moment he remarked, “They warned us about this in the seminary.”

  “I bet, and it’s every little Catholic girl’s fantasy, too. Meanwhile, I won’t tell the pope if you don’t.”

  He sighed. “Speaking professionally, do you think I’m going to die down here?”

  “No, provided we can get you out of here and you don’t go into shock. You’ll think this is nuts, but I can’t stop worrying about my dog. My daughter is God knows where, you’re bleeding like a pig, but I’m worrying about my dog. I must be some kind of monster.” She whistled again, provoking weird echoes.

  “No, that’s natural,” he said. “I once saw a woman embroidering a dress, working very carefully, like it was the most important thing in the world. That afternoon two of her children had disappeared. This was in Salvador. Everyone has their own way of coping with the enormities of life.” He was quiet for a while. “Speaking of which, I always imagined myself dying outside, looking up at the stars. If I start to fade, I want you to hear my confession.”

  “Can I do that? I mean, is it legit?”

  “Well, we’re a priestly people, including you. As an added bonus, though, you’ll get to find out what I did to get busted out of the upper zones of Jesuit-dom and stuck as assistant pastor for life in a little parish under the eye of a conservative archbishop.”

  “You’re not going to die, Father,” she said confidently. “You can’t, not when I just gave you forty-six million dollars.”

  “Are you okay, Lucy?” asked Grale, concern in his tone and expression.

  “I’ve had better days. Are those guys dead?” She saw that Grale was carrying a six-inch fillet knife with a heavy wooden handle, the kind they sell in little supply shops down by the fish market. He was wiping it absently with a rag.

  “Oh, yeah. It’s very fast, that way.” He sighed and grinned. “They know for sure now, the both of them, if it’s all true.”