Enemy within

18

Marlene had bought them all yellow coveralls of some plasticized material, and white hard hats and Motorola two-way radios, and black gum-boots. The twins had been shipped off to their grandmother's. The dog was straying no more than four inches from his mistress's knee, well knowing some interesting events were in the offing. The four donned their outfits in the loft, and Marlene looked them over like a sergeant major on parade and distributed to each a four-cell Kel-light, the policeman's choice for both illumination and tuning up the skulls of malefactors. Father Dugan appeared the most authentic in the costume, oddly enough, more authentic than he usually looked in a surplice. His roughneck Irish face fit right in with the sandhog getup. He also seemed to be the most enthusiastic, which was perhaps not so strange since he was the only one who knew where they were going. He had spent the day in the chart room of the Department of Public Works, working out a rough map based on the instructions he had received from Spare Parts. It was a very approximate map since either Spare Parts was crazy or he knew a lot more about the underground than DPW did. The priest hoped it was the latter. As for the others, Marlene looked like the plumber's daughter she was; Lucy, pale, thin, and floating in the helmet and gear, resembled a breaker laddie sent down the pits at eight years old; Karp looked like a disguised distinguished attorney, miserable and awkward, and felt the same and said so more than once.

"Oh, stop," said Marlene after one of those comments. "Where's your sense of adventure? Didn't you ever read boys' books when you were a kid?"

"I did," said Karp, "and by the age of twelve I had identified them as unrealistic fantasies, never thinking I would marry someone who hadn't."

"How do you pee in these things?" Lucy asked.

"You let it run down your leg," answered her mom sweetly, "and then remove your boot to drain."

"I can't believe I'm doing this," said Karp almost under his breath. "All we need is a map that's been browned in an oven. And some peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches."

"The sooner we get started, the sooner we'll be finished," said Marlene in a leadership tone of voice, and headed for the door. Karp came close and said sotto voce, "Where's your guy?"

"His name is Tran. After the fuss you made, and on further reflection, I figured you would not be comfortable acknowledging the presence of someone you knew to be a suspected felon. You will not have to take cognizance of him."

"That's extremely and unusually considerate of you, my darling. But he'll be there? Backing our play if need be?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she said with an airy flip of her hand.

It was a dark, rectangular hole in the western flank of Manhattan, down among the shadows of old dead piers, just south of Seventy-second Street, guarded by a loose and rusted gate. They entered, switching on their lights, Father Dugan in the lead, then Karp sticking close to his daughter, and Marlene last, descending damp slate steps, stumbling on the many broken ones.

"This is an emergency exit for the crew that built this tunnel," Dugan explained at the bottom of the stairs. "It's a railway tunnel and not used anymore, which is why it's popular. I think we should switch these lights off now. I don't want to upset the residents."

They did so. At first the blackness was absolute. Karp reached out without thinking and squeezed Lucy's hand. Gradually, however, they became aware of a distant, ruddy glow, and as their eyes adjusted, they made out shadows moving across it. They passed through a sparse waterfall dropping from a great height, and beyond that they found themselves in the midst of a considerable settlement. The railroad had cut deep bays out of the rock for storing equipment, and these had been converted into apartments with beds and furniture and rooms separated by curtains. The place had a zoo smell, mixed with smoke from the several fires. A huge figure came out of the gloom and approached Father Dugan. As the figure came closer, Karp thought he was wearing a cheap Halloween mask and then, with a shock of revulsion, saw that it wasn't a mask. Lucy said in a whisper, "That's Jacob. Spare Parts."

"Our faithful native guide."

"He's okay," said Lucy reprovingly.

"If you say so," said Karp, suppressing the bourgeois in him who was recoiling from the knowledge that his little dearie was hanging out with people like this. The big man finished his honking conversation with the priest, of which Karp could understand not one word, and strode off into the tunnel, which debouched after a few minutes into a larger tunnel, with two sets of rusting railroad tracks on its floor. They all turned their lights on, but the narrow beams, strong as they were, did little to dissipate the blackness or to give any sense of scale, for they had to direct the light at their feet in order not to constantly trip over the uneven ties. Spare Parts, in the lead, was setting a brisk pace. He didn't have a light and didn't seem to need one. Father Dugan had his light angled to keep track of the guide's legs. He was feeling better than he had since leaving Salvador. This was why he had joined the Jesuits, to go into dark and dangerous places in the service of God and humanity. Nevertheless, his lips moved in prayer.

Karp followed the circle of light in front of him and kept his own lit circle small and tried, not always successfully, to keep his footing in the clumsy boots. In the part of his mind that was not controlling his feet or cursing, he was trying to put in order the chain of events that had led to his being here in a dark, wet tunnel with his wife and daughter, guided by the Son of Frankenstein into who knew what. He was angry, mostly at himself, but also at Brendan Cooley and the district attorney.

Close behind him, Lucy was feeling guilty about her father, sensing what he was going through, wishing he would stop worrying about her. She was fine. They were fine. She had absolute confidence in the ability of her mother and Tran to get them out of any conceivable problem. Bringing up the rear, Marlene was watching the lights of her family before her, thinking of nothing much but the current situation, in full action mode for the first time since the debacle at Kelsie Solette's, and starting to wonder when Tran would show. As she walked, she flicked her light beam from side to side, casting long shadows of her companions against the curved walls and vaulted roof. From time to time she spotted a scurrying shadow along the walls and thought that it must be some trick of light because, although she had heard that tunnel rats grew to prodigious size, she had not imagined anything quite that size. The dog trotted along by her side, snuffling when the rat smell hit his nostrils, perfectly content. He smelled and heard the people following them, but he had not been put on guard and so made no complaint.

Marlene felt the tap on her shoulder and let out a short, involuntary yelp.

"My God, Tran, you scared the shit out of me! Where have you been?"

"Following," he said, and something odd about his voice made her hold up her light to get a better look at him. She was shocked by what she saw. The always calm, competent, imperturbable Tran was sweating and wide-eyed and actually shaking. The plastic raincoat he wore made a slithering sound, and as she watched, he hugged himself tightly in an attempt to make it stop.

"Tran! What's the matter? Are you sick?"

"No, not sick. Or only in my head. I am devastated to have to tell you, Marie Helene, that since the war I am not very able beneath the ground, in the tunnels."

At once, and with a rush of shame, Marlene recalled the story he had told her years ago, of being buried alive for five days and then dug out and informed that his family had been vaporized by a bomb.

"Oh, you poor man! Why didn't you tell me?"

A shrug, a weak smile, a side-to-side movement of his head. "I thought I might have improved. It has been a long time. But I find that, despite the proverb, some things time does not heal. I cannot seem to control my limbs down here, and the deeper I go, the worse it gets."

"Christ! What are we going to do?" She shone her flash back the way they had come. A rat ran from the beam into the darkness, but otherwise the tunnel was empty.

"Where are your guys?"

"I did not bring them. They… it is a matter of face, you understand. They cannot see me like this. I am truly sorry."

She patted his arm. "Okay, no problem. Look, you go back topside and get yourself together. We'll be fine."

"I have a pistol. Do you want it?"

Marlene did, very much, but she declined. "Oh, hell no, we're just going to bring in some poor fool. He's not being held for ransom or anything. Really! Go on up, we'll be fine."

And more cheery words of this sort, which were interrupted by the crackle of the radio in her pocket. She took it out and held it to her ear.

"Marlene!" came her husband's voice. "Marlene, come in. Shit! This fucking thing doesn't work for…" She waited during more of this until his finger came off the button and she was able to talk.

"Butch, I'm fine. I'll be there in a second."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing, I just got a little tied up. Are you there yet?"

"We're at a switch-the tunnel branches off to the right, and Mike says that's the one we're going to take."

"Okay, be right there." She put the radio away. To Tran she said, "Go now. We'll be fine."

"There are two, at least two, other men in the tunnel besides your party. They are moving without lights, but I heard them. They passed me while I was sitting there paralyzed. I had to tell you…"

He looked as if he was about to collapse, and this sight was far worse than the thought of going into Rat Alley without him at her back.

She embraced him and kissed him on the cheek, then trotted off down the tracks and found the branching and took the right-hand tunnel. In a few minutes she saw the lights of the others ahead. They had stopped and were looking at the ground.

"This looks like it," said Father Dugan, indicating the floor with his beam.

Marlene saw that the floor and part of the wall had collapsed, making a pie-slice hole a few inches wide at the tip, swelling to no more than three feet at the widest.

Karp knelt and shone his light down the hole, but could see nothing but sparkling Manhattan schist.

The priest said, "According to Jacob, this goes down about twenty feet, and then you're in the old sewer tunnel. Canman lives up a side tunnel that branches a couple of hundred yards down."

"Is he going to lead us there?" Karp asked.

"No," said Father Dugan, "this is as far as he goes."

"So… just the one branch in there," said Karp, looking down the slit.

"No, a lot of them, he says. It's a sewer, or was."

"Then how will we know which branch is right?"

"Apparently, it's unmistakable."

Spare Parts let out a series of honks and grunts.

"What did he say?" asked Karp.

"He said, 'I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways,'" answered Lucy.

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know. It's from a poem called 'The Hound of Heaven.' Oh! He's going."

The tunnel king was indeed going, as usual without a kiss good-bye. They watched him move out of the circle of light and vanish.

Karp was by that time in a state that often occurs in unlikely adventures, in which everything seems giddily amusing and like a bad movie. Our cast, he thought: here was the kid who never got killed, and Marlene, the female star, ditto, and there were two guys, one of whom had to be eaten by the slime monster while the other rescued the ladies. Karp wondered which one he was. He said, "It's quiet. Too quiet. I don't like it." They all stared at him, but he was gladdened to see Lucy's teeth flash into a grin. Without further thought he eased his legs into the wide part of the slit.

"I'll go first."

"Why?" said his wife. "I got you into this. I'll go first."

"No, because I'm the biggest, and if I can't get through, no one else is going." Cutting short further discussion, he slid deeper until only his head and shoulders showed. "Stay five yards apart and watch out for the Nazis," he said, and vanished down the hole.

Karp found that the hole led to a narrow shaft just a little wider than his shoulders, descending at an angle of about forty-five degrees, so that he proceeded downward in a kind of controlled slide. His flashlight was on, but useless, as he could not lift his head enough to see where his feet were going. The ceiling was two inches from his nose to begin with, and it got closer for a breathless while and then receded, as did his incipient panic. He tried not to think of New York pressing down upon him, or of getting stuck or being buried alive. Time seemed to slow down. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears. He thought, I'm a lawyer, this is not what lawyers do, and then he imagined a professor in a law school class saying something like, yesterday, you'll recall we discussed the difference between strict and vicarious liability as expressed in Liparota v. United States; today we'll deal with sliding down your ass through a narrow, gravelike passage down to a sewer to find a crazy witness.

Giggling uncontrollably, he suddenly found himself falling through a blackness pierced by the wobbling beam of the flashlight. Something smashed against his thumb, and the flashlight was gone. Something grasped and skittered across the top of his helmet, and then his feet hit solid ground. The flashlight, still lit, had rolled some distance away. He went to get it and cast the beam around. He was in a cylindrical, brick-lined vault, perhaps eight feet high. The bricks were old, and the mortar was crumbling; there were heaps and spills of brick within the range of his beam, the results of abandonment and perhaps shoddy work-a typical grafting bid of the last century. There was a sound of flowing water and a penetrating stench he could not identify-decay maybe, and earth, and something sharper, a burnt odor on top of that. The air was absolutely still, cold and clammy against his skin. A noise attracted him to the hole he had come in by. He saw booted feet emerging and something else-some playful soul had jammed a skeleton's arm and hand into a crack. That was what had struck his helmet when he'd come down.

He pulled the thing out of the wall and was in time to grab Marlene's arm as she dropped. He offered her the skeleton.

"Need a hand?"

She gave a gratifying shriek. "Oh, stop! I can't take you anywhere."

"Bag it-it's important forensic evidence," he said, tossing it away. "Where's your guy?"

"Tran. He's not coming."

"What! Jesus, Marlene! You mean we're down here with just us? Where is he?"

"I don't now!" she said curtly. "Maybe he had to go to a bar mitzvah. We'll be fine. Who's this, Lucy?"

Yes, and then the dog, and Father Dugan brought up the rear. After determining that everyone was all right, the priest marched off to the left, the rest following, Karp staying within arm's reach of his daughter, who did not object. Marlene hung to the rear, occasionally turning and casting her light back the way they had come. She saw nothing unusual, except for the complete absence of rats. They moved in silence, clambering over brick-falls, jumping cracks. Their path seemed to go downward, although it was hard to tell.

The sound of flowing water gradually grew louder, and then water itself glittered in their light beams. They saw that the brick casing of the sewer had been shattered, and the farther end displaced by several feet, as if some sideways force had pushed it over. Naked rock showed through in the gap, and a deep cleft in the floor was partially filled with cracked boulders, over which flowed a stream of dark water at least ten feet wide. What looked like tree limbs stuck up here and there among the rocks.

"This can't be right," said Marlene. "Trees? We must be sixty feet below the surface."

"I've read about this," said Father Dugan. "When they excavate for tunnels in the city, they occasionally come across tree trunks. They're the remains of a preglacial forest, squashed into the earth by the ice. What this looks like is that someone was blasting up above and the shock waves cracked the casing there and released a buried stream. It's really quite wonderful. This must be one of the original-"

Marlene interrupted him and in a curiously flat voice said, "Look, there are human bones down here." She pointed her beam, and there they were, dumped in the ravine, like something out of Cambodia: skulls and bones, and not only dumped, but arranged; skulls on fossil tree limbs, leg bones neatly stacked. As the priest voiced a prayer and started to clamber down toward the ossuary, the tunnel ahead was lit by a bright flash, followed an instant later by a painfully loud blast. They all ducked instinctively as small, hard objects flying at speed whined and clattered.

"That's Canman," cried Lucy.

"What? What?" they all gabbled.

"He makes bombs, booby traps to guard his stuff. It's him!" She had scuttled down the ravine, forded the stream, climbed the other side, and was away down the tunnel before they could stop her.

Both Karp and Marlene raced over the gully; both tripped and scrambled up the other side, their boots sloshing with water. The mastiff cleared the obstacle in a bound and ran alongside Marlene, panting. Lucy was a winking yellow figure ahead, leaping like a doe over rubble. Both of her parents were in reasonably good shape, but they could not close the distance. The tunnel curved slightly, and the yellow blur with its light vanished.

As Lucy rounded the curve, she saw the ruddy glow of a fire. She slowed and turned off her flashlight. She saw the shapes of people milling around and the sound of angry shouts and screams of pain. The people were waving sticks and what looked like spears. The fire was not in one place, but scattered around in burning clumps. Acrid smoke stung her nose.

She saw one of the people pick up a brand and fling it toward the tunnel wall. It bounced and became a shower of sparks, but in the instant before it did she could see that the wall there was pierced by a narrow conduit, not more than four feet wide. This was barricaded two-thirds of the way up by what looked like bales of newspaper. In the opening thus formed she saw a face she recognized only briefly, for it ducked down to avoid a shower of missiles from the group below.

Steps behind her, and the stabbing bright beams of flashlights. She spun around. "Turn off your lights," she called out in a hoarse stage whisper. Too late. The beams illuminated the scene, the figures frozen for a moment like a tableau vivant in hell.

Lucy, like all Americans a veteran of innumerable horror movies, found herself surprised at how normal they looked. Except for their weapons and the expressions on their faces, they could be waiting in line at any soup kitchen in the city. Karp, Marlene, and Dugan snapped off their flashlights.

For a moment they were almost blind. Karp groped for his daughter's arm and missed. Then a bright red spark appeared above them, flying in a parabolic arc over the heads of the mole people and landing ten feet away from them with a dull, metallic clatter, still sparking merrily.

The word fuse popped into Marlene's head, along with a colossal terror. "Bomb!" she yelled, and dropped to the ground. Karp made a grab for Lucy's arm, clutched a fold of nylon, and did the same. A flash filled the chamber, followed instantly by the blast, and the hum of shrapnel overhead.

"Oh, Jesus! Oh, God!" That was Dugan. Marlene switched on her light. The priest was on his back, writhing and clutching his thigh. Bright blood was spurting from between his clenched fingers.

"Someone give me light!" Marlene shouted. Lucy rushed to her side and did so. Marlene knelt by the stricken man, unzipped her coverall, tore off her T-shirt, made a pad of it, and pressed it to the spurting wound. The fabric was black with blood in ten seconds. Marlene slipped out of her bra, wrapped it around Dugan's leg near the groin, knotted it, and used his flashlight barrel to wind it tight. The blood stopped spurting, but there was still a steady dripping from the wound.

She zipped herself up and said to Karp, "We've got to get him out of here. He'll bleed to death. Do you think you can-" She stopped because just then the dog snarled, half a brick spun by her ear and shattered against the sewer wall, and the mole people attacked. There were about fifteen of them, armed with bricks and lengths of sharpened rebar and pieces of steel pipe. Marlene shouted, "Sweetie! Ocideti!" which is "Kill!" in Sicilian, the mastiff's command language, an order never before received but one he knew well how to handle. The dog charged.

The Kel-lights made good clubs, except that after a couple of solid hits the bulbs went out, and they fought in virtual darkness, lit only by the dying fires reflected off the curved ceiling. Karp was in his homeplate stance, batting two-handed, wailing away, smashing faces and limbs, and all the time possessed by a sense of unreality: this is not really happening. Lucy was on his right, covering his right, covering his back. Marlene was on his left, standing over Dugan, striking at anything that came within range. Somewhere out in front the dog was doing good work, its progress indicated by shrieks of pain. The attack was uncoordinated-the attackers were not soldiers-but there were far too many of them. Karp felt something smash against the side of his knee, and he went down. A ragged, blood-spattered man stood over him with a weapon raised over his head. Karp found he could see remarkable detail, as in slow-mo in the telecast of a sporting event. The man who was going to kill him had chosen a piece of rebar about three feet long with a lump of concrete on the end of it.

There was something strange about the light now, and Karp could see more detail. The man's face, he was missing two teeth. He wondered if this was an effect of incipient death, or whether he was already dying. Karp tried to kick at the man to throw off his aim, and marvelously his attacker staggered back and disappeared. Karp's ears had been ringing since the bomb blast, but thought he could make out a series of flat explosions. More hallucinations? He lifted himself up on his elbows. No, someone was holding a flashlight and shooting at the shapes in its beam. He saw men fall, and flee, until there were no more. The echo of running feet died away.

The man with the flashlight came closer and shone his light onto Karp, who shielded his eyes with his hand. The light fell onto a corpse at Karp's feet: the man with the rebar club. A familiar voice said, "How about that shooting? You gonna indict me for that one, too?"

"Cooley," said Karp.

"Yeah, Cooley. What a fucking mess! Where's Canman?"

Karp was silent.

"Oh, for fuck's sake, Karp! He's the fucking slasher. Where is he?"

Marlene stepped into the light and pointed. "He's up there, in that side tunnel. We've got a man badly hurt here. He needs medical attention."

"Oh, Jesus!" cried Cooley after a brief inspection of the wounded priest. "You fucking people! Look, can the two of you get him out?"

"No," replied Marlene. "We'd never get him through that crack we all came down. Someone has to go out to the surface and get help-paramedics, lights, stretchers… Cooley, where's your partner?"

"Somewhere else, I don't know-I'm down here alone."

"Alone? But… I… there was another man following us."

"Lady, I don't know what you're talking about," said Cooley. "I came down here by myself."

Karp shot to his feet, his knee on fire, his heart leaping. "Where's Lucy?"

Cooley shone his light around, cursing. She was gone.

Lucy woke in pain. Her head hurt, and she couldn't remember anything after hearing the first explosion and running down the tunnel. Canman, and he was throwing bombs at… she remembered the men, the mole men. She opened her eyes. There was light, reflected off brick, electric light, dim with moving shadows. Someone was tugging hard at her coverall, and every time he did it, her head bounced against brick and a rocket of pain went through her head. She tried to sit up, but a weight was pressing her down. She felt air on her arms. A man was kneeling over her, pulling her coverall off. She could smell his stink, like the monkey house at the zoo, or maybe it was coming from the other man kneeling on her shoulders. The coverall was down to her waist. The word rape popped at length into her head. She started involuntarily and squirmed and kicked so that the man who was yanking her boots off fell over with a loud curse. The man kneeling on her punched her in the mouth. She blacked out again, and when she came to, her T-shirt had been ripped off, and one of the men was pulling down her jeans.

Lucy's hand moved over the ground, feeling for a loose brick, some weapon, but found nothing that would do. It hardly mattered. Given her mother's trade, she knew a lot about rape, about violence generally, and she understood that it was hopeless, that a thin, unarmed girl, however clever, could not keep two average-sized men from doing whatever they wanted to with her body.

Her jeans were off. She felt a tug at her waist, heard a rip, and she was naked. The man stood up and dropped his pants, then dropped the other pair he had under that. Lucy closed her eyes and started to pray. She didn't pray for rescue, but properly for the strength not to despair and to survive with her spirit intact, and if they were going to kill her afterward, for God's mercy and the forgiveness of sins. And she also prayed for the souls of the men.

He was kneeling now, and she felt her legs jerked roughly apart. She knew it was going to hurt terribly. The man gave a peculiar bubbling cry, and Lucy felt drops of hot liquid fall on her thighs and belly. She knew what that was; her skin crawled.

Then a shout, a sudden violent movement, a yell. She felt a heavy weight fall across her lower legs, and suddenly the man was no longer kneeling on her shoulders. She opened her eyes. The man who had just been about to rape her was flopping about like a landed fish, gurgling and clutching his throat. The gush of blood pouring past his hand looked black in the dimness. He arched his back once, collapsed, and lay still. There were noises behind her, grunting, gasping, the sound of feet on loose stones. Men, fighting. She could see the moving shadows of their struggle cast onto the ceiling by the glow of the flashlight lying there near the corpse. She rolled onto her knees and crawled until she found her coverall and clumsily dragged it on, willing her shaking hands to behave. She found a boot, put it on, hopped around to find the other one, stumbled, fell.

A cry of pain from the darkness, and she also heard a little pattering sound as of droplets falling on something hard, and then the soft thump of a body falling. She snatched up the flashlight and was not entirely surprised when David Grale walked into its beam.

Cooley said, "I better go look for her. One of you should stay with Father Dugan, and the other one should go back and get help. I got a radio, but it won't work here."

"I'm coming with you," said Karp and Marlene, almost as one.

Cooley knelt and pulled a Smith Airweight.38 from an ankle holster. "Whoever's gonna stay should take this. But there's no point in anyone coming with me to look. It'll just mean another person I got to watch out for."

"Butch, you should go for help," said Marlene. "I'll take the gun and stay with Mike."

Karp rose to his full height and said in a loud voice, articulating every syllable, "I am not leaving this fucking tunnel without my daughter. Let's go, Cooley!"

With that he walked off in the direction in which the mole people had retreated. Cooley gave Marlene the.38 and stalked off after Karp.

She sat down next to the priest, checked his tourniquet, examined his face. He was pale and clammy. "Mike, how do you feel?"

"Not that great. I'm cold."

"You're getting shocky from loss of blood. I have to get you warm. Close your eyes."

She unzipped the coverall and pulled it down to her waist, then lay partly on top of him, her naked breast pressing against his chest, her cheek against his.

After a long moment he remarked, "They warned us about this in the seminary."

"I bet, and it's every little Catholic girl's fantasy, too. Meanwhile, I won't tell the pope if you don't."

He sighed. "Speaking professionally, do you think I'm going to die down here?"

"No, provided we can get you out of here and you don't go into shock. You'll think this is nuts, but I can't stop worrying about my dog. My daughter is God knows where, you're bleeding like a pig, but I'm worrying about my dog. I must be some kind of monster." She whistled again, provoking weird echoes.

"No, that's natural," he said. "I once saw a woman embroidering a dress, working very carefully, like it was the most important thing in the world. That afternoon two of her children had disappeared. This was in Salvador. Everyone has their own way of coping with the enormities of life." He was quiet for a while. "Speaking of which, I always imagined myself dying outside, looking up at the stars. If I start to fade, I want you to hear my confession."

"Can I do that? I mean, is it legit?"

"Well, we're a priestly people, including you. As an added bonus, though, you'll get to find out what I did to get busted out of the upper zones of Jesuit-dom and stuck as assistant pastor for life in a little parish under the eye of a conservative archbishop."

"You're not going to die, Father," she said confidently. "You can't, not when I just gave you forty-six million dollars."

"Are you okay, Lucy?" asked Grale, concern in his tone and expression.

"I've had better days. Are those guys dead?" She saw that Grale was carrying a six-inch fillet knife with a heavy wooden handle, the kind they sell in little supply shops down by the fish market. He was wiping it absently with a rag.

"Oh, yeah. It's very fast, that way." He sighed and grinned. "They know for sure now, the both of them, if it's all true."

"How did you find me?" she asked.

"Oh, I was hanging out in the Spare Parts people tunnel trying to get a line on where Canman was, and I saw you come through, and I waited, and then that cop came by and then some guy who looked Chinese. It was a regular parade." He looked around and gestured to the space, smiling. "I've been hearing about this place for years. It's incredible, isn't it? A whole little world that no one knows about." He finished cleaning the blade and stuck it carefully into a leather sheath, then into the pocket of his jacket. His face and clothes were heavily spattered with blood.

She took a deep breath and said, "David, you're the bum slasher, aren't you?"

He nodded. "Uh-huh. Anyway, I came down the railroad tunnel, and the Chinese guy spotted me, I think, but I ducked into where it forked and lost him. Then I came through that hole in the floor, and I was there when those bombs went off. Was that Canman?"

She nodded. "Yes."

"I figured. Then the mole people jumped you all, and I didn't know what to do, and a couple of them grabbed you and dragged you away, so I followed them. And"-he hesitated, pulled uncomfortably at his chin-"I figured with two of them, I'd better wait until they were, you know, involved with you, so I could take one out right away. It worked out okay, but I guess it was worse for you. I'm sorry."

"That's all right, David. Thank you for rescuing me," she said as calmly as she could manage. She had started to shake, and the shaking got worse, as did the thoughts dashing themselves to fragments in her head, this Alice-in-Wonderland conversation she was having with good and beautiful David the mass murderer, down here in the tunnels with the cannibal rat people. He was good, he had saved her from, he was evil, I'm losing it, this is crazy, crazy, I will never, never…

It came out in a scream that echoed like screams do in horror movies, and she threw herself against him, sobbing hysterically. He hugged her and stroked her head, murmuring there, there, it's all right, no, it's all right.

When the sobbing had exhausted itself into disgusting, heaving snuffles, and she felt she could once again articulate language, she asked, "Why do you do it?"

"I'm not sure, really," he answered calmly. "I guess I just know. Not voices in my head or like that. I just know I have to. They're so miserable, they're suffering so much. It's mercy. Or they're evil, they're going to do bad things to the innocent. Like Doug. He was after little Lila for weeks."

"David, killing people is wrong." The phrase sounded absurd to her, but he seemed to take it seriously.

"Is it? I guess it depends who's doing the killing. God kills people all the time. St. James was called Matamoros, so it was okay to kill Moors back then and still be a saint. So many dead people. I saw whole villages murdered in Africa, kids, old grannies, chopped to pieces. And I couldn't do anything about it. It drove me crazy." He laughed. "I guess you think that's literal. I don't know. I don't feel crazy. And I prayed for guidance after Africa. Honestly, Lucy, I was so messed up. Give me something to do, I prayed, use me some way. I had a job on Fulton Street for a while, cleaning fish, so I had this knife, and one night I just followed this man. He was going through garbage bags, looking for pieces of food, and then I saw him picking up crack vials and crushing them and scraping the tiny grains that were left out so he could get enough to get high. But it was really low, not high. And it hit me: this soul would be better off released. And a kind of glow. I saw him kind of light up. I saw the soul part of him that hadn't been polluted by his life, and it wanted out, it wanted to be free, and I let it go. It's no pain, the way I do it. Just a little thrashing and then peace. I felt I was an instrument of God, like the kind of predator that takes sick animals that are suffering. Gosh, Lucy, you look awful. Your mouth is all bruised, and you're shaking."

He touched her lips delicately with his bloodstained hands.

"Are you going to kill me, David?"

She saw the startle, the shock on his face. "My God, no! Why would I want to kill you? You're beautiful and good and everyone loves you."

"Well, usually when you find out who the serial killer is," she said carefully, as to a small child, "he kills you to shut you up."

He seemed to find this amusing. "Is that what I am? I guess everybody has to have a label. But what if you're something that doesn't have one? You, for example. Or your mom. Is she a serial killer? No, you can tell them what you want. And I have no intention of hurting you. After you rest a bit, I'll take you back to the main branch. You can find your way back to your parents easy from there."

"Then I'd like to go now," she said, and struggled to her feet, wavering as dizziness washed through her. He gripped her arm.

They found her other boot under the corpse. He pulled it out and helped her on with it. Then they walked in silence down the dark passage.

"This is it," he said. "Just go to the right and you'll be-"

"Lucy!" came a shout. Her father. He'd seen her light.

She answered the shout. They heard running steps.

"I better go," Grale said. "Good-bye, Lucy."

"But what will you do?"

"Oh, I think I'll stick around here for a while. I like it down here. It's a simple life." He laughed. She could see his shining teeth, that glorious smile. "In fact, I think maybe I've finally found my ministry."

She kissed him then, on the mouth, pressing hard, and after a second or two of teeth-clunking surprise he kissed her back, and it was really her first real kiss, and very good it was, too, although the circumstances were not what she had dreamed of, and the person, while the right person, was not whom she had imagined him to be.

Then she was in her father's arms and crying again, but not for long. The cop hurried them back. When they arrived, everyone pretended to ignore Marlene's state of dress, but she was soon relieved of warming duties by Cooley's fleece-lined jacket.

"I should get that guy out of there," Cooley said, staring at the newspaper fort across the tunnel. "He could start tossing bombs again."

"Why would he do that? We're not attacking him," Lucy objected.

"Yeah, but a psycho killer like him, you can't tell what they'll do."

"He's not a killer," said Lucy. "David Grale is the bum slasher."

Simultaneous expressions of shock, surprise, and disbelief from the three adults standing.

"No, really," said Lucy over their objections, "he told me so himself. A couple of the moles had me in a side passage, and they were going to assault me, and he killed them both with his knife. And then he told me." She started to cry, then bit her lip to suppress it.

Marlene said, "In that case, Canman can stay there forever, for all I care. I'm going for help. Give me your radio, Cooley. I'll put in a call as soon as I reach the river gate. Keep looking for the dog."

After a moment's hesitation, Cooley handed her his radio, and she ran off.

Lucy went over to sit with Father Dugan. Cooley and Karp settled some distance away. The only light came from the wounded man's flashlight tourniquet, and it was growing dim. Time passed in silence but for the quiet conversation between Lucy and the priest. Karp's watch did not glow in the dark, so he lost track of time. It could have been twenty minutes or an hour. He was thirsty, and his knee hurt. Now Cooley was walking around flashing his light in both directions, and on the ground. He came back and sat down again. "There's four of them dead. No sign of the dog."

More silence. Karp cleared his throat and said, "Interesting development about Grale." Karp was glad that Cooley couldn't see his face, and that he couldn't see Cooley's. He was angry, embarrassed, and confused, angry at Canman, at Grale, at Cooley, at Marlene for concocting this expedition, at Tran, whose heavy artillery would have come in handy for once, but most of all at himself. He had gone down the wrong path many times before-it was a hazard of his occupation-but never as badly as this, and never in a way so void of the constraints built into the system, constraints designed to keep nasty prosecutors such as himself from screwing up the lives of the innocent. That the system had let him down badly was small comfort at this point, and certainly not to a seasoned self-flagellator like Karp.

"If it's on the level," said Cooley after a long silence.

"I think it is. Lucy wouldn't invent something like that, and if you noticed, the legs of her coverall and one of her boots are covered with blood, globs of it."

"Yeah, I guess. Does this mean you don't like me for it anymore?"

"Okay, Cooley, I was wrong," Karp snarled. "If you want, I'll kiss your ass in Macy's window. But I still like you a lot for the other thing."

Cooley made a disgusted noise and stood up. He switched on his flashlight.

"Where're you going?" Karp asked.

"I'm going over there and grab up that asshole."

"I'm coming with you," said Karp, getting up, too.

"No, you're not."

"Oh, yes, I am. I don't want my witness conveniently shot while escaping."

Karp heard a curse and a rustle of fabric, and suddenly he was looking at the butt end of a Glock 17.

"Take it, you fucker!" Cooley shouted.

"Don't be stupid, Cooley. Sit down, and we'll wait for the cavalry to get here."

Cooley took a step forward, and Karp put up his hands defensively, but the detective only grasped Karp's coverall and jammed the weapon into the big patch pocket on its breast. Then Cooley strode off, becoming a bobbing circle of light and the sound of trodden bricks.

"What's going on, Dad?" Lucy was standing by his side, only a voice in the dark.

"Cooley's gone off after Canman, the idiot!"

"No!" Lucy cried, and in an instant all Karp could see of her was a running silhouette against Cooley's light. Without thinking, Karp ran after her, stumbling on the uneven surface and on the dead mole people.

Cooley's beam made a white circle on the newspaper barricade. He tossed a chunk of brick at it and yelled, "Canman! You crazy bastard! Come out of there!"

Nothing. Then a scrabbling sound from behind the barricade.

Lucy came up and stood next to Cooley. "Let me go up there. He knows me."

"Are you nuts! Get the hell out of here!" Karp came staggering up, and Cooley yelled at him to take his daughter away, which he had every intention of doing, and taking Cooley as well.

But she ran away from Karp, and only stopped when Canman's head popped over the bales of paper. A red glow sprang up, lighting his face like a fun-house devil's. He stepped over the barricade, and they saw that he had a highway flare in one hand and a can grasped in the other. The flare was bright enough so that they could see that the can contained two pounds of Hercules Red Dot smokeless gunpowder, and that a short fuse was sticking out of the top of it.

"Get away!" yelled the Canman. "Get away from me or I'll light this off. I swear I will." The flare hovered around the tip of the fuse. Karp and Cooley instinctively backed away, although they knew at some level that if a pound or so of powder went off in this place, a few feet was not going to make any difference.

But Lucy went right up to him. "What are you doing?" she cried. "What are you doing? Haven't enough people been hurt?"

"Get out of my way!" he yelled.

"No! Where are you going to go? You're already in the most horrible place in the world. Living in a sewer! You idiot! Look at me! Do you want to kill me? Why do you think I'm here? Do you think I'm a cop? A social worker? I'm here because of you, John Carey Williams. I care about you, and you know it. It drives you crazy, but it's true."

And she lowered her voice and kept talking. Karp couldn't hear what she said, but the guy wasn't moving. He was listening, his mouth slightly open, his eyes fixed on Lucy. Karp didn't want to move either. None of them did. They were all fixed to the floor like stalagmites. It went on, Lucy talking quietly to the madman, the flare fuming, inches from the fuse, but not moving either. Something uncanny was happening, something outside Karp's experience, something out of a half-remembered myth: the Virgin and the monster in the deep cave. He tried to remember how it came out, what its deeper meaning was, but he could not. It was not his department, this sort of thing.

Then he became aware that Cooley was no longer by his side, although his flashlight was still there illuminating its circle of wall. It had been propped up on a pile of fallen brick.

A scuffling sound, and Lucy's scream, and Karp saw that Cooley had crept up behind Canman and grasped him from behind. The flare wavered and fell. Cooley and Canman went down in a heap, and Karp saw a tiny spark separate itself from the struggling men and roll toward him. It rolled almost to his feet. He could read the label by its sparkling red light. Time stopped. He thought about running, but there was nowhere to run, and there were Lucy and the others to consider. He could pick it up and throw it, but it looked heavy, and how could he be sure of the blast radius of such a bomb? It might bring down the whole rotten tunnel, burying them all under tons of brick. He could throw himself down on it, but he did not really want to do that.

Another second expired. He picked it up instead. The spark had almost vanished into its nail hole. There was no way to pinch it off. Karp lifted the thing to his face and stuck out his tongue. He felt a jolt of intense pain and heard a brief sizzle.