“You men of Union Grove,” Adcock called into the cage, “your saviors have come.” The crewmen of the Elizabeth leaped from their places in the dimness to the wall of their cage.
“Robert!” It was Tom Soukey, the one I knew best, whom I used to play softball with on summer evenings in the old days. “Oh thank God, thank God!” he said, almost blubbering.
“Is it true?” Skip Tarbay said. “You getting us out of this hellhole?”
“Yes,” I said. “Bullock sent us down to find you.”
“Thank God…”
They didn’t look healthy. They were scrawny and filthy.
“It’s all trumped up crap!” Jacob Silberman said.
“I know, I know. But we’re here to get you out, don’t worry.”
“I can’t believe it,” Tom said. His sobs racked him and he shuddered, despite the heat-and it was very close down in that hole.
“Pull yourself together, Tom, for Chrissake,” Jake said. “We’re not out yet.”
“Aaron’s not doing so well,” Skip said, and canted his head at the bunks.
“Is he hurt?”
“Sick.”
“What with.”
“I’ve no idea. Shitting blood.”
“Who’s he?"Jake said, pointing to Brother Joseph. I explained who he and his people were, and how it happened the five of us were sent down to get them.
“We will get you out of here,” Joseph said. “Today. I promise.”
“They want money,” Jake said. “It’s all about grift-this nonsense about excise taxes and tariffs and all that. There never was such a thing before in the years we’ve been trading down here.”
“I know,” I said.
“Are they going to let us free now?” Skip said.
“We came down here to verify that you’re actually alive,” Joseph said. “We have some arrangements to make now for your release. We’ll come back later for you.”
“Please! Don’t go,” Tom said. “They keep saying they’re going to hang us.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll be out of this shithole and homeward bound before the day is over.”
“How you talk,” Adcock the jailer said, overhearing. He clucked at us. “Don’t let Mr. Curry hear you talking like that. He don’t like to be insulted. He’ll hang ’em just for spite, he gets wind.”
“We’ll be back,” I said again.
“Okay,” Jake and Skip said.
Just then, two other men, strangers, rushed up to the wall of the cage like bugs to a lighted screen. They were young, no older than twenty.
“Wait, please! Can you get a message to our father, Mr. Dennis Marsden of Greenport.”
“I don’t know how I could,” I said.
“I beg you, mister,” one said. Both were in tears.
“Greenport’s pretty far south of here,” I said. “We’re headed north today. I’m sorry.”
Adcock showed us to the stairs and shut the door behind us.
The stairs took us back to the ground floor. I asked the clerk at the front desk what time it was. He pointed to a big case clock over the door. One thirty.
“This is just plain gang rule is all it is,” I said to Joseph as we came back out into the sunshine. “It’s like a bunch of pickers have taken over the city, or what’s left of it.”
“Of course it is,” he said. “This Curry’s no better than a petty warlord. I know the type.”
“Look, I have an idea,” I said. “Maybe it’s a waste of time, but I want to make a side trip to the state capitol building to find out if there’s any government left in this state, any authority besides this Curry.”
“Everything I’ve seen tells me he’s running the show here,” Joseph said.
“Give me an hour,” I said. “It’s just up the hill.”
“All right,” Joseph said. “An hour. Meet up right back here. After that, we’ll do things my way.”
“Are you actually prepared to pay this guy?”
“Don’t you worry,” Joseph said. “I’m ready right now to pay him in full.”
Thirty-six
I took off in the direction of State Street, Albany’s old main drag, with my pulse quickening, worrying whether Joseph meant something other than payment of these fines and charges and how I might figure in the transaction.
It felt strange to be in a place that had been a functioning city last time I saw it, now transformed into a vast ruin. I walked past James Street, once the haunt of lobbyists and lawyers, to North Pearl Street, where a few shabby vendors sold salvage from carts, a sort of permanent flea market for the riffraff who lived in the ruins. The office buildings and old hotels on State Street, dating from the 1920s heyday of the business district, were desolate after years of neglect. Bricks had spawled out of the facades, and littered the weedy sidewalks. One actually fell from an upper story as I walked up the empty street and missed splitting my head open by a few yards. I wondered if somebody had lobbed it at me from above but didn’t see anyone skulking up there. The plate glass shop fronts were blown out, of course, and everything of value inside had been stripped.
The once meticulously groomed grounds of the state capitol building, an impressive limestone heap in the Second Empire style, were now choked with box elders, sumacs, and other woody shrubs. Knapweed, vetch, and blue chicory sprouted from the cracks between the broad front steps where a few ill-nourished layabouts sat listlessly surveying the scene. Inside the grand old building, every surface had been stripped down to the bare masonry. Carpets, draperies, chestnut wainscoting, metal fixtures, all gone, probably long gone. The stink of urine and excrement told the rest of the story. I would have turned and left had I not heard a familiar tapping sound seeming to come from distantly above somewhere up the southeast stairs. I ventured warily to the second floor. The tapping grew louder, echoing off the limestone blocks in the stairwell. I recognized it now as the sound of a typewriter, something I had not heard for a very long time, something that I had only really heard in old movies.
Off the stairwell and down the hall, I came to a set of rather grand arched oak double doors. They stood ajar. Gold-on-black lettering on the window said OFFICE OF LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR EUGENE FURMAN. I knocked on the glass. The tapping within stopped. A voice said, “Come in.” I shoved the door open. It creaked on its hinges. Inside at a large and ornate desk, bathed in glorious afternoon light from a ten-foot-high window, sat a man in a clean dark suit complete with a blue oxford button-down dress shirt and necktie, behind a pink portable manual typewriter. He was neatly barbered and even shaved and looked like he had come to life out of a photograph.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“Carrying on,” he said, cheerfully, without any guileful overtones. “I’d ask the same of you.”
“I came to see if there was anyone here.”
“I’m here,” he said. “Please come in. Have a seat.”
His office was tidy to a fault, an oriental rug on the floor, bookshelves groaning with volumes, a sofa and chair set arranged before a carved limestone fireplace on the far side of the big room, the U.S. and New York state flags deployed on standards in a corner, his desk full of documents and papers, all neatly arranged around the surface. The pervasive stink of decay intruded on the scene, but everything else gave the weird impression of decorum and normality. I sat down in one of a pair of tufted leather armchairs at a side of his desk.
“What’s your name and where from?” he said. His manner was smooth, practiced.
“Robert Earle. Union Grove, Washington County. Are you really,” I glanced back at the door, “the lieutenant governor, Eugene Furman?”
“Yes,” he said and nodded with a boyish smile. “I am.”