“What’s that?”
“Doesn’t anyone have a manifest for the damn thing?”
“It’s a slave ship, Alex. When we find our Simon Legree, I expect we’ll find the documentation too.”
There was definitely black ice underfoot on the unshoveled walk. I paused and grabbed on to the mesh fence so that I could take Mercer’s arm when he caught up with me.
As I swiveled to face him, my shoulder hit the mesh and ripped the two stakes closest to me out of the ground. I fell onto my side, taking the fence with me as I landed on the tarp. I heard it rip open as my back slammed against the ground through the hole I had made in the old, weather-beaten material. My bag flew from my shoulder and emptied onto the dirt around me.
“Alex!” Mercer shouted as he bent over to reach for me. “Are you okay?”
My neck ached and the cold, damp earth was caked against both my legs and head. I was in a ditch, flat on my back.
“Shaken, Mercer. Not stirred. And I don’t think anything’s broken. Just badly shaken. If you want to talk omens, I think I’m on a killer course.”
“What is it, girl?”
My head rested on a pile of dirt and I was staring at the jawbone of a human skull.
TWELVE
“What do you mean it’s been here a couple of hundred years?” I asked, standing a few feet back from the large hole in the ground. “Where’d you get that idea?”
Nan Toth had gone to my office and retrieved the gym clothes and sneakers I kept there for the occasional times we were able to get away at lunchtime to work out. The officers had let me back into the restroom at City Hall to change clothes, and I had thrown out the black pencil skirt that had been torn almost in half along a sharp rock, just like my pantyhose.
Alton Brady, the park supervisor, was on his knees next to Mercer, while his men had already started the task of reinforcing the structure surrounding the twenty-foot-square site where someone had been digging.
“It’s the anthropologists says how old the stuff is,” Brady said. “Besides, you wasn’t supposed to be in here, miss.”
“Nothing I planned. I can promise you that.”
“What’s that museum in Washington? The Smithsonian?” Brady asked. “That’s where they’re sending the bones. Supposed to be all hush-hush.”
Mercer stepped down into the ditch. The ancient roots of rotting trees dangled on the edges, and protruding from the dirt were pieces of bone that looked like fragments of skulls and other skeletal remains.
“Is this part of the African Burial Ground?” Nan asked.
Mercer knew the answer to that. “No, that’s two blocks north of here. I wasn’t even a detective yet when we handled those protests.”
Digging to build a parking garage for an office complex on Lower Broadway in 1991, construction workers unearthed the remains of almost five hundred bodies.
“Who protested?” Nan asked.
Mercer scratched at the soil just six inches below the street level and the remains of a human hand-long, thin ivory fingers-stretched out toward his own.
“My people,” Mercer said, winking at Nan. “Bones and bureaucrats don’t mix too well, as you may already know. Politicians don’t like to remind folks that their cities were built on the backs of the disenfranchised. African American New Yorkers-those who didn’t already know it-learned that outside of Charleston, South Carolina, we had the greatest slave population in the colonies. So the city fathers weren’t any too anxious to deal with the remains.”
Alton Brady reached out to pick up a fragment of bone.
“Don’t touch that, please,” Mercer said, as he flipped open his phone and hit a number. “Mike? You at the morgue yet? We’re still in City Hall Park-I’ll explain later. Well, as soon as you’re done with breakfast, tell the ME to send his bone doc down here to the park, behind the building. I’ll meet him at the gate. Alex stumbled onto something.”
The ME’s office had a forensic anthropologist, Andy Dorfman, who helped in the difficult analysis of old skeletal discoveries.
“Look here, Wallace,” Brady said. “This is my property. We’re getting this done without your help, okay?”
“Why don’t you think it’s connected to the African Burial Ground?” I asked.
“Not a chance,” Mercer said. “I’d like to claim credit for knowing this, but you understand I got all the history from Mike.”
“That figures. How is it different?”
“African slaves were brought here to New Amsterdam in 1626. But they weren’t allowed to be buried in any of the church cemeteries within the city proper. And in those days, when Manhattan started at the Battery and covered only the southern tip of this island,” Mercer said, “the northernmost part of the city ended right over there, a block away. There were palisades built-fences with stakes on top-to defend the settlers. The slaves were given five desolate acres north of that, outside the original city, to bury their dead.”
“Five acres?” Nan said. “Then there must have been more than five hundred bodies.”
“Something like twenty thousand. Many of them infants and children stacked on top of each other.”
I was still reeling from the fact of all the women and men being trafficked to the States, and how common modern-day slavery actually is. I’d never thought much about slavery in the North, in a place like colonial New York. “What became of all those other graves?”
“Dust and detritus, Alex,” Mercer said. “When the city moved past here, beyond its colonial walls, it just appropriated the cemetery and paved over it.”
I scanned the skyline. It appeared that the entire Civic Center that was adjacent to the north side of City Hall Park had been built on top of the remains of thousands of African slaves. “I’m embarrassed to say I don’t even know when slavery was abolished in New York.”
“Eighteen twenty-seven. Shockingly late, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.” I said. “So who are we looking at here, Mr. Brady?”
“This just for your information?” Brady was checking Mercer for an answer as he straightened up.
“Yeah, I’m a curious guy.”
“The mayor knows all about this, if that’s what you’re thinking. Been going on for years. It’s a historical project.”
“Pretty sloppy one,” Mercer whispered to me.
“This here City Hall was built in 1803. You can read that right on the sign over at the front gate. Before that, all this land was an almshouse. A homeless shelter, a poorhouse, and a jail, all balled into one part of town. Had its own cemetery next to it. For whites, of course. No blacks.”
Mercer nodded at me. “Of course.”
“I was working here when Giuliani was mayor. That’s the first time some bits and pieces of bone came up, all jumbled together. We was making over the park for the new millennium celebration-taking out the dead trees, fixing the pavement, putting in new lights. Holy cow,” Brady says, “one of the guys calls me over to show me this cluster of bones-like a whole human leg. Spooky as all hell.”