Part 98 (1/2)
Two headlights appeared ahead of them, several blocks off.
”Duck in here I ” Hammond instructed quickly. They stepped from the rails into a side booth, designed to protect workers on a track as a train pa.s.sed through.
They waited, out of sight.
”That one's early, d.a.m.n it,” snorted Hammond, panting slightly.
”With the cutbacks they're only supposed to be traveling twelve minutes apart at this hour.”
”Maybe the last one was late” Leslie suggested.
Hammond shrugged. The train pa.s.sed. Thomas watched it disappear toward the illuminated Eighty-sixth Street station. Hammond then urged them on a final block of tracks. Then they cut through a side corridor and slid upward through a small crawl s.p.a.ce under Eighty-ninth Street for at least fifty yards.
The pa.s.sage was unspeakably dirty and sooty. Hammond led the way with a flashlight he'd produced from his coat. The smell was foul and suggested stale urine.
”Don't mind the stench” said Hammond.
”We're above the sewer.
Not in it.”
”I'm grateful for the small amenities:' Thomas retorted. He glanced at Leslie, who, slid in front of him, between the two men.
”No place to bring a lady,” Thomas chided. No time at all to joke; Thomas was concealing his claustrophobia. All four walls were just inches from him on each side. He felt as if the walls would suddenly spring in on him in the shadows and darkness, gripping him and holding him. Apparently, it didn't bother Leslie. Compared with having your throat cut, he reasoned, it wasn't much, after all.
He saw light ahead. He was relieved.
Hammond had slid from the crawl way and was standing, proud that at his age he'd made it. Leslie followed. Thomas emerged third, coming up at the feet of the others in an illuminated chamber. He stood. There were two other men, both dressed in the blue work uniforms of New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority. Neither man was a subway worker.
They stood beside a hole in a brick wall, a hole large enough to step through sideways and crouching.
The underground chamber, illuminated by battery-operated lanterns, was against the pantry wall of the Sandler mansion. Thomas had traveled a city block underground since leaving the subway tracks. It had seemed like four blocks.
”Like I promised,” said Hammond, trying to gather himself.
”We're going in- ” ”Have you been in already?” asked Thomas.
”We've been waiting for you,” said Hammond.
”We didn't know whether you'd be able to guide us or not' Thomas looked at the hole that had been chiseled through brick that was four feet thick. A less awesome entrance than the front door, he thought, yet having more dignity than the servants' entrance. His mind then traveled to Zenger, his father's partner.
Zenger, one of the citys leading attorneys twenty years earlier, had entered this house through the front door and had reemerged, as his father termed it, 'a different man” A recluse, a man who'd retired soon afterward.
”We had a quick look around the ground floor after we knocked through,”
Hammond finally admitted.
”Now we'll have a more thorough look.”
Hammond nodded to the two gatekeepers. He stepped through the hole into a dark pantry. Thomas followed, then Leslie. Each picked up a heavy-duty battery lantern on entering. Leslie drew her service pistol and carried it in her other hand. Looking for her father? Thomas wondered.
Thomas, like Leslie and Hammond, had the sense of having stepped through a corridor into another decade. Out of the seventies, into the nineteen thirties. The wallpaper, once elegant and colorful, was now faded and yellowed. Heavy, solid furniture was in each room, and the kitchen appliances were relics of the Depression. Sagging drapes, often threadbare near the floor, shut out light from the windows, and the carpets were worn where Victoria Sandler had made her daily paths.