Hell Gate

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.”

“What did Giuliani do?” Nan asked.

“Sure didn’t like anybody talking about it. Guess he was afraid all those people would come back and protest again. Though it ain’t like slaves. Don’t know anybody who’d claim an old relative from the poorhouse or jail. Sent what was found to the Smithsonian. Can’t say I know what ever come of it. Now, whenever we come upon an area of the park that needs renovation, we have to put up this here fencing and tarp it over.”

“The city morgue has its own anthropologist, Mr. Brady,” Mercer said. “Gonna have him take a look too.”

“Kinda unnecessary if you ask me,” Brady said. “We got this here hole and the one just southeast of the front steps. Nobody pays ’em no mind.”

“Every now and again maybe somebody should,” Mercer said. “What else you find in these digs?”

“Dead animals get in. Sometimes you come across old buttons or shards of glass. Even some shroud pins.”

“And modern-day things?” I asked.

Brady studied me for a few seconds. “You police too?”

“Nope,” I said with a smile.

“You’d never believe she studies ballet,” Nan said, drawing a laugh from the wizened Parks Department worker. “Clumsy as she is to fall in your ditch.”

“All kinds of stuff gets tossed in by people heading into the building. Scraps of paper, tennis balls, empty cans. Sometimes we find a pocket knife or something out in front that wouldn’t make it through the metal detector. Then there’s your food and garbage. That’s what attracts the rats, what start draggin’ the pieces of bone around.”

“How sad is that?” I said aloud to no one in particular.

“You know what they say about cross-examining,” Nan said. “Never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer. Or don’t want to know the answer. Let’s head back. We’ve got so much to do.”

“You two go on ahead. I’ll wait to show this stuff to Andy when he gets here.”

“Not because it has anything to do with what we’re working on?” I asked. I didn’t see any connection.

“Course not,” Mercer said. “I just can’t imagine letting anybody’s folks spill out of the ground like this and not be treated properly. Shoo, ladies. I’ll be along soon.”

Nan and I walked back to my office, going over our checklist of things to do. I pressed the elevator to take us to the eighth floor.

“What’ll you give me for not telling anyone about your giant flop?”

“I’m running out of IOUs. I had to promise my life away to get Mike to take me to Salma’s apartment last night.”

“I’m much easier,” Nan said. “I’ll take lunch at Forlini’s when you come up for air. I want to hear how things are going with Luc.”

“Luc, Paris, and all the romance that went with the week seem light-years behind me,” I said as we approached Laura’s desk.

“Ah, Paris. Only the extra pounds remain. I have a feeling you’ll work it off in the next month.”

“You’re later than I expected, Alex,” Laura said. “And another casually chic outfit, I see?”

“Don’t ask.”

“Not even about the dirt that’s clinging to the back of your hair?” she said, following us into my office so that she could straighten me out before handing me my messages. “And don’t bother to look at these yet. Go see the district attorney. Rose said it’s ugly in there. He’s chewing her head off waiting for you.”

“See what I mean, Nan? The boss is gunning for someone. I hate to be in the crossfire until I figure out who the target is.”

“You’re all set with the conference room, Nan,” Laura said. I’d be lost without her self-starting efficiency and ease of operating in a maelstrom. “I’ve reserved it for the next couple of weeks, and there are actually two official Ukrainian interpreters able to start working with you today.”

“Great. All we need is a way to get our victims back to us. Go ahead, Alex. I’ll call Donny Baynes and get us on the same page.”

“Am I supposed to be knocking out subpoenas for the phone company?” Laura asked. “Mike left a message with some numbers for a Salma someone. Landline and cell, right?”

“Not until Nan opens a grand jury investigation,” I said, putting my hands together as if praying to my colleague. “Jump the line, Nan. Make it dinner, and all the gossip I know.”

“Last thing for the moment,” Laura said. “Lem called. Wants to know what you did with the congressman’s package. Something about what he was expecting this morning.”

“Package? Is that a new euphemism for piece of ass? Don’t call him back, Laura. Resist Lem’s charm and his persistent calls. Tell him nothing.”

“You know he’ll show up here if you ignore him.”

“I’ll take my chances,” I said, heading off to see Battaglia. “Lem would be comic relief by the time the boss gets through with me.”