23
The rain had intensified to a deluge, and Isaac Bell could not see a full block. But the downpour had cleared the streets and sidewalks surrounding the Tombs of cops and pedestrians, and across that empty expanse he thought he saw on the farthest edge of his vision a single figure. The man’s long, loose coat was flapping as he headed west toward Elm Street.
Bell ran after him. Tall and long-legged, Bell halved the distance, when suddenly the man disappeared into a hole in the sidewalk. Isaac Bell jumped into the same hole and landed on a wooden scaffolding a few feet below grade. He saw a wooden ladder and climbed down it into a seemingly endless tunnel lit by electric lights. He found himself on the concrete floor of the covered ditch they were digging for the Rapid Transit Subway.
It resembled an orderly and much larger coal mine. It was ten times as wide as a mine and five times as high, and brightly lighted. Instead of rickety timber props, ranks of steel columns marched into the distance, holding up massive girders that spanned the tunnel to support the trolley line on Elm Street above and the stoop lines of the buildings along the sidewalks. Huge water pipes and sewer mains — from around which the ground had been painstakingly dug — were suspended from the girders with chains.
Bell looked downtown, where the lights were brightest, then uptown, where they faded. Far, far ahead in the uptown direction, he saw the man in the long coat weaving through the construction site, dodging workmen, steam hoists, and wheelbarrows. He stopped suddenly, handed something to a man pushing a wheelbarrow on a plank track, and broke into a run again. Bell raced after him. When he reached the point where he had seen him, the man with the barrow, and another burly workman who had dropped his barrow, blocked his path. Clutched in their fists were the dollars the man had given them.
“No cops allowed.”
“Don’t believe what he told you,” Bell shouted. “Get out of my way.”
“Why should we believe you?”
Bell hit the first high and low, kicked the legs out from under the second, and ran after the man in the long coat. He had a two-block lead. The concrete floor stopped abruptly. Ahead, they were digging through raw earth. Rainwater muddied the floor of the ditch. The space narrowed and grew crowded with workers with picks and shovels. Where steel columns had held the city above, here were temporary wooden beams, a rough-plank roof, and openings to the sky through which poured the rain and fading daylight.
Bell ran for what felt like miles, city block after city block, until he thought he could not run another step, nor lift his boots once more from the grasping mud. And still the man kept running, covering the broken ground at a strong pace, brushing past startled workmen, smashing aside those who got in his way and leaving Bell to dodge the angry ones still standing.
Bell heard thunder, and the ground shook. Streetcars rumbled overhead, high above, on temporary timbers. Lights flickered. The water pipes swayed in their chains. On he ran, ignoring shaken fists and shouts of foremen, air storming through his lungs. The tunnel changed abruptly. Gone in an instant was the muddy floor; gone the men shoveling and picking. The floors, the walls, the ceiling, had turned to stone. The builders had hit Manhattan Schist in their drive north to Grand Central Station. The bedrock beneath the city had risen to the surface, and the tunnel was boring into it. The space felt more like a mine, with jagged walls and low ceiling and the whining rumble of steam drills.
Free of the mud, Isaac Bell poured on the speed. The man ahead of him was tiring, stumbling occasionally, and Bell was catching up. Better yet, Bell thought, the tunnel would soon come to an end. It looked like the only way out would be up one of the shafts where steel buckets were hoisting excavated rock by steam derrick. That his quarry had at least four guns and he had only knives did not slow him.
Suddenly, the man scrambled up the side of the tunnel, where it opened into an exposed gallery, and ducked under ropes that had been stretched to block off the area. Light spilled down from above. It looked like there was an opening to the street. A foreman came running from the other direction.
“Get out of there, you damned fool,” he shouted. “That chunk of work is loose.”
A shaft of daylight fell on the man Bell was chasing and Bell saw his face was still covered by the bloody bandage and the hat. But his eyes were gleaming as if in triumph, and Bell knew that he had seen something to his advantage. Bell ran harder. The man scrambled up the slanting side of the gallery where a section of bedrock had broken loose from the wall and slid down on the floor.
Bell could see that layers of the bedrock slanted at a steep angle. An immense chunk was propelled like a toboggan about to slide down an icy slope. He caught up with the foreman, who was shouting, “That’ll kill you! Get down from there, you idiot! Hey, what are you doing? Don’t do that. You’ll kill us all.”
The man had found a heavy pick and was using it to dig into the crumbling rock and pull himself higher up the slope.
“He’ll start another slide!” the foreman wailed in despair. “Run, boys! Run for it.”
Bell scrambled up onto the slope. The man had reached the opening and was flailing away with the pick, trying to make it wide enough to fit through. Broken rock rolled down at Bell. The hole suddenly opened wider, and the man started scrambling up through it. Bell took one of the throwing knifes and hurled it overhand.
The blade flew true to its target and stuck in the heel of the man’s boot as he disappeared up the hole. Bell scrambled after him. Then the rock around the hole separated in a giant sheet of stone that slid down the slope, hurtled past Bell, and crashed to the tunnel floor. The impact shook Bell loose and sent him sliding after it. He hit bottom and barely had time to move aside as a slab of rock half a block long broke off and thundered into the tunnel.
It left in its wake a jagged slope that Bell climbed as easily as a flight of stairs. He emerged at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street just in time to see a full block of brownstone mansions shaking as if in an earthquake. A chasm opened in the sidewalk. The front walls separated from the brownstones and plunged into the subway tunnel.
Isaac Bell could see into the front rooms of the mansions as if he were at the theater watching a play on a stage. The occupants ran like actors who were exiting upstage as fast as they could. Bell ran to help. Motion caught his eye a short block across Thirty-seventh Street. A train on the tracks elevated above Third Avenue was accelerating downtown. Clinging to the back of the rear car was the man in the long coat, and as the El disappeared behind the buildings, he waved good-bye to Isaac Bell.
“He got away,” Bell reported to Joseph Van Dorn.
The Boss was seething.
“What happened to the young lady I ordered you to follow?”
“I lost sight of Mary in a riot. I was looking for her at the Tombs when I ran into him.”
“Was she arrested?”
“The police arrested a hundred women, so I thought I might find her there. But she was not among them.”
“The police,” growled Van Dorn. “Speaking of the police, I just had an unpleasant conversation by telephone with a deputy commissioner who informed me that his patrolmen received reports from the subway contractor that you were present at the street collapse. Apparently, there is speculation that you caused it.”
“I did not,” said Bell. “But I did ask the engineers to explain what happened. They refer to that section of the tunnel between Thirty-fourth Street and Grand Central Terminal as the hoodoo part. All sorts of terrible things have gone wrong with its construction — a deadly explosion of blasting powder, rockfalls, a contractor killed. What happened today was the result of an unforeseen geological fault. The man I was chasing precipitated the slide — either by accident as he tried to escape or deliberately if he had knowledge of mine engineering and recognized the flaw in the rock.”