“No.”
“We’ll tell you about ’em, but before I forget, maybe Mercer can take over for me and stop by the hospital in the morning. One of us needs to keep the heat on Marley Dionne. Make sure he’s still with us.”
“Will do,” Mercer said before turning back to Teddy O’Malley. “What did you mean when you said bad stuff is going on among yourselves that could lead to this kind of thing?”
“You know our business?” Teddy asked, letting his third pizza slice rest on his plate while he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Not well.”
“First of all, you can’t ever rule out an accident when you’re working six hundred feet under the surface, blasting through bedrock with dynamite.”
“Six hundred feet below city streets?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am. Sixty stories down. What we do for a living is dangerous. And then there’s the politics of it. We’ve got a powerful union on one side, and you got your usual crop of corrupt officials on the other. A lot of hands have been greased to keep the men moving. There are scores of unhappy people on both sides-union guys, city councilmen, clubhouse politicians, mobsters trying to get a foothold in the union. Goes round and round like that, and bribery’s been standard operating procedure for a very long time.”
“Anything else?” Mercer said.
Teddy looked to Mike before answering.
“Nothing he hasn’t heard before, Teddy. You think Mercer could rise to the top of the detective division and not know what racism is?”
“Old news. Tell me about it. I thought you hogs were all very clannish-very band-of-brothers.”
Teddy exhaled and seemed to be through with his meal. “We are. Mostly. It’s two very different bands, and lately there’s been some ugly business going on.”
“Don’t Irish-Americans have a stranglehold on the sandhog work?”
“’Twas that way from the start, Detective, more than a hundred years ago. Who else would want it?” Teddy asked. “Uneducated immigrants with no skills and thick heads. They made great money doing the digs. But in short order they brought in some West Indians, for the very same reasons. In the old days they were known as the iron men. We were the miners and muckers-we did the shoveling-but the strong workers coming in from the Caribbean bolted together all the curved iron sections that formed the tunnel linings.”
“And there was never tension between them before this? Hard to believe.”
“From time to time, sure. But once you’re hundreds of feet down in the hole with someone, you trust him with your life every time you start a new shift, even if-you’ll excuse me, Detective-you wouldn’t necessarily want him marrying your sister.”
“What’s the beef now?” Mercer asked.
“So many of the jobs in the dig have been replaced by new, advanced machinery that not all the men can promise work to their sons anymore, like we did for generation after generation. The blacks are complaining that they’re being forced out first, even though as many of them have been there for generations, like we have. I’ll be giving Mike the names of guys he needs to talk to. It’s not everybody, you know.”
Mike went to the refrigerator and helped himself to a large glass of milk. He walked behind me and leaned against the dining room wall.
“You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me, you don’t,” Mike said, trying to imitate someone, although I couldn’t make out who it was. He went on with the accent. “That’s what the DA used to tell me-in Chinatown…Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
I rubbed my eyes. “What does this blast have to do with Chinatown?”
“Now you really do sound like a dumb blonde. Didn’t you get my best Jack Nicholson impression? My John Huston? Chinatown-the movie, not the neighborhood. The flick was all about stealing water to get it to Los Angeles, don’t you remember? You could tell the same story about New York-we had to steal the water from somewhere, only nobody remembers that.”
I walked to the den and checked the television before returning to the table. Julie Kirsch was still live from Tenth Avenue and still speculating wildly about the cause of the explosion.
“Can you put on a pot of coffee for Teddy and me before we get back to work?”
“Sure.”
“How old are you, Teddy?” Mike asked.
“Forty-three.”
“Same as Mercer. You married?”
He nodded and picked at the crust of another slice.
“Be on the lookout underground for a man who likes black coffee, English muffins, and a dinner of strong runny cheese and stale crackers. That’s all she knows how to cook. Coop’s available, and maybe a guy who packs a mean sledgehammer could handle her. Your wife from a hog family?”
“Course she is. Father, grandfather, brother,” Teddy said, smiling. “Nobody else understands what it’s like.”
“What exactly are sandhogs?” I asked.
Mike said, “Tunnel Workers Union. Maybe fifteen hundred guys total.”
Teddy gave the more elaborate answer. “Local 147, Compressed Air and Free Air Shaft Tunnel Foundation, Caisson, Subway, Cofferdam, Sewer Construction Workers of New York, New Jersey, and Vicinity.”
“So you save time just saying sandhogs-but why that name?”
“You know the Great Bridge?” Teddy answered my question with a question.
You couldn’t be a New Yorker if you hadn’t ever had a love affair with the Eighth Wonder of the World, the magnificent result of John Roebling’s 1867 plan to build the world’s longest suspension bridge across the East River, connecting what were then the separate cities of New York and Brooklyn.
“The Brooklyn Bridge, of course. I can see it from the window of my office.”
The bridge played a vital part in the life of the city, standing grandly at the foot of the harbor, its gigantic stone towers and elevated promenade remaining one of the most beautiful vantage points from which to enjoy the ever-changing Manhattan skyline.
“You know what a caisson is?” Teddy asked.
“Not really.”
“Roebling’s idea was a mighty risky one, Alex. The whole design plan balanced on the strength of the towers, and to build them meant sinking huge wooden boxes-27,500-ton caissons, each of them more than half the size of a city block-into the riverbed.”
“How did that work?”
“They were open at the bottom, these great chests, and then boulders were laid on top of them to force them down and keep them in the water. What was so radical at the time is that Roebling decided to use compressed air to sink them, then pack them with concrete so they’d be solidly in place forever.”
Teddy stopped to take a swig of his beer. “The men were then lowered into the caissons to excavate the foundations of the towers.”
“I don’t understand how they could do that.”
“Teddy, my lad, this is a girl who finds the toaster oven to be a real challenge,” Mike said. “The only tools she’s good with are an ice-maker and a razor-sharp tongue, so explain it to her nice.”
Teddy smiled and got up from his chair, turning it around and straddling the seat so that he could rest his crossed arms on its high back.
“Look, Alex, for as long as man had been building aboveground and tunneling below, nothing as large as these caissons had ever been seen-monstrous boxes they were-no less sunk into the treacherous waters of the East River. They needed men-really fearless men-to climb into steel cylinders-man locks, they called them-long metal tubes that were fed into the caissons. Once down there, the guys would dig out the river bottom in order to lay these foundations.”
“But what about the water?”
“Well, that’s it precisely, isn’t it? The compressed air I’m talking about was forced into the caissons from the top, also in tubes, meant to displace the water, meant to hold it back from coming in and drowning the men. That air was searing, like it came out of a blast furnace, like white-hot needles were pricking at your lungs and your eardrums, they used to say.”