“Nothing they could see or smell or touch,” Mike said, “but it was the compressed air that kept them alive.”
“Or killed them,” Teddy added. “You hear stories about working in the air from any of your folk from the other side?”
Mike nodded.
“Men would tell you their chests swelled to twice the size, their voices were high-pitched, if they could speak at all, and the headaches were blinding. Worst of all was what they called the caisson’s disease.”
“The bends,” Mike said.
“Crippled the joints, terrible abdominal pains, bad fever and sweats. Every shift in those boxes, only three or four hours was all they could stand, seemed a lifetime.”
“But why-” I started to ask.
“’Cause if you just got off the boat and had no way to put food on the table,” Mike said, “it’s what you did. It’s all you could do.”
“And when the air didn’t hold or the men struck a boulder fifty feet down, there’d be a great blowout spurting back the water like a geyser, and taking the workers with it,” Teddy went on. “Drowning them, squeezing them into the mud below, crushing their lungs with the pressure-hell of a lot of ways for a man to die down there, and many of them did just that.”
Teddy paused. “Work got under way on the Hudson River tunnels a few years later, our boys were digging out rock and earth-and then worst of all was when they got to the sand below the riverbed. Like quicksand it was, shifting and sinking-have you up to your neck in slime before you could count to five. They didn’t have a name for us until then. Sandhogs it was a hundred years ago and sandhogs it is today.”
Mike took his blazer off the back of his chair and slung it over his shoulder, his forefinger looped beneath the label. “There’s an entire empire built beneath New York by sandhogs for more than a century. Subway and train lines, water tunnels, car tubes, train terminals. They’re what keeps us in business, Teddy. They’re what makes this place possible. But it’s a city we don’t often think about, and it’s a city most of us never see.”
“There’s a reason for that, Mike-a good reason,” Teddy said, pushing up to leave the table. “That beast beneath us? It’s a city of death.”
9
Artie Tramm had been schmoozing with me since I walked into Part 83 at ten thirty in the morning. I had driven downtown, leaving my apartment at 7 a.m., although traffic aboveground was as slow as the West Side subway routes, which were tied up because of the investigation into the explosion. My normal twenty-minute ride had taken more than one hour.
“You wouldn’t catch me in one of those tunnels,” Artie said, leaning against the railing behind me, picking at something between his front teeth with the tip of a small pocketknife. “I’m a real-what do you call it? Claustrophobe? Papers say that dig is as far down in the ground as the tip of the Chrysler Building is high. Sixty stories deep. Could you stand being in someplace like that every day?”
I was organizing my files in the empty courtroom, waiting for the players to arrive so we could get on with the trial. It was Thursday, and we were already scheduled not to work tomorrow because of a personal day off that I had requested weeks earlier.
“Nope. I’m with you. Fresh air to breathe and lots of daylight,” I said, remembering my own reaction to being trapped briefly in an enclosed space during an investigation in Poe Park the previous winter. It chilled me even to think about it.
“A few years from now, we’ll be drinking water from that pipeline, wondering if those guys’ fingers or toes are still swimming around in it.”
“What guys?”
Gossip traveled through the corridors of 100 Centre Street faster than the speed of sound. I had listened to the car radio all the way downtown and heard nothing more about any loss of life in the blast.
“The poor schmucks that got blown up. The hogs whose DNA is gonna be dripping out of the HO and into your kitchen sink before very long,” Artie said, licking his teeth and folding the knife.
“What?”
“You know Billy, the captain in Part 62? He’s got a cousin whose wife’s brother is one of them sandhogs. Says there’s three guys missing. Says the cops found some pieces of flesh when they went down inside this morning.”
The door that led to the judge’s chambers opened and Gertz came in, lifting his robe up over his shoulders as he took the bench shortly before eleven o’clock.
Lem Howell followed him into the empty courtroom and perched on the edge of my table. There was no use complaining about whatever ex parte conversation he had been having with the judge. Their friendship went back longer than mine, and they would both deny that their conversation had included the Quillian case.
“Artie, how many jurors have we got?”
“Nine, so far.”
“Any of the missing call in?”
“Yeah, number two,” Artie said as he approached the bench. “She got as far as Penn Station on the IRT, then she had a panic attack while the cops were stopping kids all around her to search their backpacks. I told her to get out and take a cab and we’d reimburse her. The others must be stuck underground, Judge. The radio’s reporting lots of delays.”
“So, Mr. Howell, how do you propose we pass the time? Miss Cooper?”
Lem liked to use the subterfuge of personal chitchat to stick his nose in my pile of papers, hoping to pick up some clues to the nature of the evidence I’d be presenting in days to come.
“I’m hoping, Your Honor, that Ms. Cooper will tell us how she pulled that sleight of hand last night. Whatever did you do, girl, to create that midtown miasma? My Kate Meade moment lost in the headlines to this commotion in some big ol’ hole in the ground. I know Alexandra had something to do with it.” Lem lifted a blue folder from the table and waved it over his head. “Right here, Judge, it’s her ‘dirty tricks’ file.”
“The first of many, Mr. Howell. Something stayed with me from those early days under your tutelage,” I said to Lem before responding to the court. “Do we have a stenographer? Would you be willing to hear argument now, Judge, on the domestic violence expert I plan to call?”
“Good idea. Artie, see if the court reporter is in the hallway.”
Lem walked up to the bench and tried to sweet-talk the judge before we resumed the formal proceeding. “Seems to me there’s nothing beyond ordinary understanding that these jurors need to hear. We’re not talking scientific methodology, are we? She has no business calling an expert on this issue. Alexandra doesn’t have a scintilla, not a shred, not a speck of medical evidence suggesting any violence in the Quillian relationship. No injury, no police reports.”
“Help me make my argument, Lem. That’s precisely part of the reason I need this witness.”
Artie Tramm returned with the official stenographer, who carried her compact machine and its tripod toward the front of the room.
Lem was wise to ask for an offer of proof to try to knock my witness out of the case. By forcing my hand early in the trial, I would have to give the judge-and the defense-a preview of the points I hoped to make. If I lost the argument, it would be a major blow to the case I was trying to mount.
“Let’s have the defendant,” Gertz said, waving his robed arm at Tramm again. “Bring him in.”
Now, without jurors or spectators present, the court officers opened the door on the far side of the bench and I could see them unlocking Brendan Quillian’s handcuffs as they led him from the holding pen. He was compliant and cooperative with his jailers, unlike most felons being brought to court, offering up his wrists to them like a gentleman and thanking them as they freed him to enter the room.
Jonetta Purvis called the case into the calendar, the judge made a record of the reason for the late start to the day, and I rose to begin my argument. The legs of Quillian’s chair scraped the floor as he positioned it to look at me, and as I picked my head up at the sound of it, I fixed briefly on his cold, dead eye.