“So you must have given this key to the owner of 537.”
“The guy before me did, long time back, yeah.”
I examined the metal sidewalk doors. The inside edge of each had a welded mount with a hole through it; a padlock could slip through each, locking the doors from the inside.
“You're telling me that when 537 was standing, this key, which the owner of 537 had, unlocked this padlock on the outside of the sidewalk doors, and that once inside them, then 537 was completely open? You could walk right in?”
“Yeah.”
“The police ask about this?”
“No.”
“Because it looks like the sidewalk doors serviced your building, not both buildings.”
Luis shrugged. “Probably.”
“Why didn't you tell that to the police when they were trying to figure out how the guy got killed in the building?”
Here he was indignant. “Because I didn't see nobody unlocking this door, you know? I didn't know this guy Simon. The lock was always here. Nobody cut it off or anything. It was right there for anybody to see. I don't tell the cops how to do their job.”
It was cold and we were done. “You mind if I use your phone, make a local call?”
We tramped back down to the basement, into the dark, oil-fumed heat. The only question was how the key got from Simon's hand into the cabinet over Caroline's refrigerator. I dialed her phone. She was probably packing for China. The phone was ringing when I heard a noise. The elevator was coming down to the basement, dropping into its bay. I studied it, feeling odd. It was a relatively narrow elevator with an ornate, arched ceiling like a birdcage and a door that accordioned back.
It was the elevator that Mr. Crowley had created out of cereal boxes.
Exactly. I saw this and remembered that McGuire at Jack-E Demolition had said the elevator company had “dropped the box” before he started tearing down 537. That elevator was sitting in its bay in the floor of the basement of what used to be 537. Simon Crowley had seen his father on the day he had disappeared. Simon Crowley's father had been an elevator repairman. Simon Crowley's father had, since his son's death, been constructing a scale model of the elevator in the building in which Simon Crowley had probably died. Elevator, elevator, elevator. Now it was sitting under tons of broken concrete about twelve feet or fifteen feet below the surface of Mrs. Garcia's winter-blasted garden.
I turned to Luis. “Was 537 an exact copy of 535? Or a mirrored copy?” I said.
“I don't get it.”
“Did the two buildings have the exact same floor plan?”
“Same, to the inch,” he said. “Same everything.”
“Hello?” came Caroline's voice now into the phone. “Hello.”
I was thinking now. I hung up. Softly.
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Capital, labor, and technology. Capital was easy. I stopped at a cash machine, took out a couple of thousand dollars, which you can do now. From there I took a cab down to Chinatown. My driver was a short, balding man, and the name on the license was Abdul Jabbar.
“Abdul Jabbar?”
The man nodded wearily. “I know, I know.”
On Canal Street, all the shops were locked up. But I talked my way into a wholesale hardware store where a light was still on. A Chinese boy came to help me, and I handed him a list made out on my bank slip. The boy stepped back.
“I must ask my father,” he said. “You please wait.”
The father, a bowlegged man in his fifties, returned frowning at the list.
“This is very long list.”
“I'm paying cash.”
The man nodded and called over several of his assistants and they began to fill my order. Then I asked him where I could rent a small truck or van until the next morning. The men conferred in Chinese.
“You do not mind very dirty van?” the older man asked. “Very bad dent, very bad graffiti.”
“As long as it works fine.”
“It will cost two hundred dollar.”
“Fine. I need it right now,” I answered.
Then my order was carried to the front of the store: four pairs of cold-weather work gloves, four heavy worker's sweatshirts, four wool hats, four pairs of size-twelve work
shoes, four pairs of wool work socks, a five-foot steel crowbar, three hundred feet of heavy-duty extension cord with a multiple outlet box at the end, four high-powered work lamps with tripods, a one-hundred-foot measuring tape, an acetylene torch with one tank of gas, a regular crowbar, an assortment of screwdrivers, heavy-duty double-jointed wire cutters, two sledgehammers, three large flashlights, and one folding aluminum ladder, eighteen feet long.
“I need some guys to do some heavy work for me.”
The men looked at one another. They were too old. The lot was full of big chunks of cement and pieces of steel.
“Never mind.”
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Twenty minutes later I was headed uptown. The van pulled to one side badly and the brakes were spongy, but it would do. The snow had stopped. I drove up Tenth Avenue, past the all-night garages and flat-tire places that the taxis use, then turned east around to the back of the Port Authority bus terminal. A homeless man watched me, munching his mouth.
“Hey.”
“Hey what?”
“I need three men who can work hard for about four or five hours.”
“Three men what?” He stood up and walked over. He had sore feet.
“I need a couple of men who can work. I'm paying.”
“When, tomorrow?”
“No. Tonight. Now.”
“You're crazy.”
“Each man will receive two hundred dollars cash.”
“Hey, you killing people or something?”
“No. Moving broken cement and bricks. It's heavy work.”
He looked at me. “Everybody's asleep in there.”
“I'll get coffee, food, whatever.”
He shook his head. “Shit.”
“I'm talking about some money.”
“Show me.”
And I did.
“You need two guys?”
“Yeah.” I was parked illegally, but it didn't matter.
He hobbled into the doorway and I looked at my watch. Seven minutes and one passing ambulance later, he came out with two men, both young, wisecracking. One was thick and the other was wiry. They came over to the van.
“You guys want some work?”
“What is it?”
“Moving bricks. Concrete.”
“It's pretty fucking cold out here.”
“I'll buy some coffee, food.”
“Shit.”
“I need guys who are strong.”
“We're strong.”
“Show me twenty push-ups.”
The two young guys each knocked off a cheap twenty. The older man with the sore feet did three, then collapsed.
“When we getting paid? That the main question of my agenda.”
“As soon as I get what I'm looking for.”
“What?”
“That's my business.”
“If we looking for it, too, then it's part of our business.”
I said nothing.
“What happen if you don't find it?”
“You'll get paid anyway.”
“Why can't you do this in the regular day? Police grab your ass?”
“They don't want it.”
“They want everybody's, way I look at the situation.”
“Then you still gotâ” I didn't like the smile on the man's face, the sudden eagerness. “Wait, how many times you been in Rikers?”
“Me? Never.”
The other man started to laugh. “Yo, they fucking got the permanent reservation!”
“Least I didn't jump a cop.”
“You jumped a cop?” I said.
“I was messed up.”
The other man cackled. “You was
transmogrified
, man.”
They moved off, insulting each other.
The old man looked at me.
“They no good. But I can go. Name's Richard.”
“You got pretty sore feet, I think, Richard.”
“I can do it.”
I doubted that. “All right.”
He climbed into the cab and I nosed the van into traffic. In the rearview I could see the men fighting. I had capital and technology but not enough labor. Where does one find grunt labor on a night late in January? It was past eleven-thirty.
“You know anybody else?” I asked the man.
“Man, I know all kinds of people, but you gotta understand not too many men in that place ready to go out and lift rocks. People be weak from drugs and shit.”
I had an idea, checked the time, then headed toward Broadway and Eighty-sixth. Ralph, the philosophy professor, stationed Ernesto at midnight to get messages. I had a few minutes and pulled up the van. Richard played with the radio, could only get A.M. stations. At three minutes past midnight Ernesto appeared. Richard leaned forward, wiped the windshield. “That there is one
big
fellow.”
I called across the street to Ernesto and he skulked warily over to my window. I reintroduced myself, then handed him a message to take to Ralph:
I NEED TO EMPLOY ERNESTO FOR A PERIOD OF ABOUT SIX HOURS. CAN YOU SPARE HIM? I'LL FEED HIM AND GET HIM HAT, COAT, GLOVES, ETC. LABOR INVOLVES MOVING PIECES OF CONCRETE. NOT ILLEGAL. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS, HALF UP FRONT.
“I hope he says yes,” Richard said.
Fifteen minutes later, Ernesto reappeared holding a piece of notebook paper:
1.
ERNESTO IS NOT A SLAVE WHOSE LABOR CAN BE BOUGHT OR SOLD.
2.
HOWEVER, FOR $1000 I WILL FORGO THE ENTIRE MORAL INSTRUCTION OF MY LIFE AND TELL HIM TO WORK FOR YOU FOR NOT MORE THAN SIX HOURS.
3.
IF THESE TERMS ARE AGREEABLE, SEND $500 DOWN NOW.
Ernesto nodded in comprehension when I gave him the money and then disappeared in the same direction a second time. This time he returned within ten minutes and climbed into the van. I could smell him now, and the odor was both original and familiar. I rolled down my window and headed south.
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I found Luis again and talked him into letting me run the power off a dedicated line in the basement of his building. Then I drove the van across the rubble of the lot, probably ruining the tires, and closed the gate behind me. We began to dig; it was slow going, but Richard and Ernesto warmed to the work. Using the tape measure and making trips into 535, I was able to estimate the location of the elevator shaft. Great slabs of brick wall were left from the demolition, and needed to be broken apart with a sledge-hammer before being moved aside. After nearly an hour, we had a pile of rubble but not much of a hole.
We kept going. Richard got tired. Ernesto did not. He and I lifted some large chunks of concrete. He lifted some by himselfâpieces very few men could have moved. Another hour. He worked in tight spaces, with Richard giving him directions. The long crowbar came in handy. I think Ernesto's hands were bleeding but he said nothing. He was not working for me; he was working for Ralph, his labor an act of loyalty. Down five feet, six feet, more. We passed strata of brick, plaster, wood lathing, brick again. I was breathing in cement dust. Past pipes and trash and shards of porcelain fixtures and bathroom tile that poured like coins into the hole.
Now we had the ladder in and were throwing the little pieces out of the hole and dragging the big ones up the ladder. Ernesto's chest rose and fell as he evaluated which piece of rubble to lift next. I climbed out for a rest; he kept working. At twelve feet there was nothing, and I began to worry that I'd missed it.
I had. Sideways. By three feet. Then I saw the elevator cable, a loop of it, lying in the rubble like a dead snake. We dug sideways, then down another foot. A piece of rubble shifted, fell on Ernesto's boot. He said nothing, and I helped him move it. I pulled off my gloves and looked at my hands. They didn't look good. I put the gloves back on. Then we found the roof of the elevator. It had been heavily damaged by the rubble that had fallen on top of it, but instead of being split open, it had merely crumpled like the top of a can attacked with a hammer.
“I see it but I don't believe it,” croaked Richard.
I had used an acetylene torch once when I was a teenager. I hooked up the hose to the tank, and twisted the knob to start the gas. I lit a match and touched the edge of the nozzle. A flame leapt forth, almost two feet.