I turned away sharply. I couldn’t look at the old guy anymore.
The constant visual digs Delgado kept throwing in my direction were nothing compared to the pain of looking at a man dying before my eyes. I didn’t want to see blue eyes in that near-dead face. As blue as the lakes of Killarney, Uncle Paul used to say in his mock-Irish brogue.
I focused on the teenagers making out in the rear of the car. A couple of Spanish kids, wearing identical pink T-shirts and black leather jackets. If I stared at them long enough, would they stop groping and kissing, or would an audience spur their passion?
Uncle Paul. After Daddy left us, he was my special friend, and I was his best girl.
I squeezed my eyes shut, but the memories came anyway. The red bike Uncle Paul gave me for my tenth birthday. The first really big new thing, bought just for me, that I’d ever had. The best part was showing it off to cousin Tommy. For once I didn’t need his hand-me-downs, or Aunt Bridget’s clucking over me for being poor.
God bless the child who’s got her own.
I opened my eyes just as the Lex passed through the ghost station at Worth Street. Closed off to the public for maybe fifteen years, it seemed a mirage, dimly seen through the dirty windows of the subway car. Bright color on the white tile walls told me graffiti bombers had been there. A good place to check, but not until after City Hall. I owed Manny Delgado a trip to the Black Hole.
“Uh, Sergeant?”
I turned; a patronizing smile played on Delgado’s lips. He’d apparently been trying to get my attention. “Sorry,” I said, feigning a yawn. “Just a little tired.”
Yeah, sure, his look remarked. “We’re coming to Brooklyn Bridge.
Shouldn’t we get off the train?”
“Right.” Leave Uncle Paul where he belongs.
At the Brooklyn Bridge stop, we climbed up the steps to the upper platform, showed our ID to the woman token clerk, and told her we were going into the tunnel toward City Hall. Then we went back downstairs, heading for the south end of the downtown platform.
As we were about to go past the gate marked NO UNAUTHORIZED
PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT, I looked back at the lighted platform, which made a crescent-shaped curve behind us. Almost in a mirror image, the old drunk was about to pass the forbidden gate and descend into the tunnel heading uptown.
He stepped carefully, holding on to the white, bathroom-tile walls, edging himself around the waist-high gate. He lowered himself down the stone steps, the exact replica of the ones Manny and I were about to descend, then disappeared into the blackness.
I couldn’t let him go. There were too many dangers in the subway, dangers beyond the torch killer everyone was on the hunt for. How many frozen bodies had I stumbled over on the catwalks between tunnels? How many huddled victims had been hit by trains as they lay in sodden sleep? And yet, I had to be careful. My friend Kathy Denzer had gone after a bum sleeping on the catwalk, only to have the man stab her in the arm for trying to save his life.
I couldn’t let him go. Turning to Delgado, I said, “Let’s save City Hall for later. I saw some graffiti at Worth Street on the way here.
Let’s check that out first.”
He shrugged. At least he was being spared the Black Hole, his expression said.
Entering the tunnel’s blackness, leaving behind the brightly lit world of sleepy riders, a tiny rush of adrenaline, like MSG after a Chinese dinner, coursed through my bloodstream. Part of it was pure reversion to childhood’s fears. Hansel and Gretel. Snow White.
Lost in dark woods with enemies all around. In this case, rats. Their scuffling sent shivers up my spine as we balanced our way along the catwalk above the tracks.
The other part was elation. This was my job. I was good at it. I could put aside my fears and step boldly down into murky depths where few New Yorkers ever went.
Our flashlights shone dim as fireflies. I surveyed the gloomy underground world I’d spent my professional life in.
My imagination often took over in the tunnels. They became caves of doom. Or an evil wood, out of Lord of the Rings. The square columns holding up the tunnel roof were leafless trees, the constant trickle of foul water between the tracks a poisonous stream from which no one drank and lived.
Jones Beach. Uncle Paul’s huge hand cradling my foot, then lifting me high in the air and flinging me backward, laughing with delight, into the cool water. Droplets clinging to his red beard, and Uncle Paul shaking them off into the sunlight like a wet Irish setter.
Me and Mo, we’re the only true Gallaghers. The only redheads. I got straight A’s in English; nobody’s grammar was safe from me — except Uncle Paul’s.
I thought all men smelled like him: whiskey and tobacco.
As Manny and I plodded along the four-block tunnel between the live station and the dead one, we exchanged no words. The acrid stench of an old track fire filled my nostrils the way memories flooded my mind. Trying to push Uncle Paul away, I bent all my concentration on stepping carefully around the foul-smelling water, the burned debris I didn’t want to identify.
I suspected Delgado’s silence was due to fear; he wouldn’t want a shaking voice to betray his tension. I knew how he felt. The first nighttime tunnel trek was a landmark in a young transit cop’s life.
When the downtown express thundered past, we ducked into the coffin-sized alcoves set aside for transit workers. My heart pounded as the wind wake of the train pulled at my clothes; the fear of falling forward, landing under those relentless steel wheels, never left me, no matter how many times I stood in the well. I always thought of Anna Karenina; once in a while, in my drinking days, I’d wondered how it would feel to edge forward, to let the train’s undertow pull me toward death.
I could never do it. I’d seen too much blood on the tracks.
Light at the end of the tunnel. The Worth Street station sent rays of hope into the spidery blackness. My step quickened; Delgado’s pace matched mine. Soon we were almost running toward the light, like cavemen coming from the hunt to sit by the fire of safety.
We were almost at the edge of the platform when I motioned Delgado to stop. My hunger to bathe in the light was as great as his, but our post was in the shadows, watching.
A moment of panic. I’d lost the drunk. Had he fallen on the tracks, the electrified third rail roasting him like a pig at a barbecue? Not possible; we’d have heard, and smelled.
I had to admit, the graffiti painting wasn’t a mindless scrawl. It was a picture, full of color and life. Humanlike figures in bright primary shades, grass green, royal blue, orange, sun yellow, and carnation pink — colors unknown in the black-and-gray tunnels — stood in a line, waiting to go through a subway turnstile.
Sexless, they were cookie-cutter replicas of one another, the only difference among them the color inside the black edges.
A rhythmic clicking sound made Delgado jump. “What the hell—?”
“Relax, Manny,” I whispered. “It’s the ball bearing in the spray-paint can. The vandals are here. As soon as the paint hits the tiles, we jump out and bust them.”
Four rowdy teenagers, ranging in color from light brown to ebony, laughed raucously and punched one another with a theatrical style that said We bad. We real bad. They bounded up the steps from the other side of the platform and surveyed their artwork, playful as puppies, pointing out choice bits they had added to their mural.
It should have been simple. Two armed cops, with the advantage of surprise, against four kids armed with Day-Glo spray paint. Two things kept it from being simple: the drunk, wherever the hell he was, and the fact that one of the kids said, “Hey, bro, when Cool and Jo-Jo gettin’ here?”