Lethal Legacy

FORTY-FOUR

“Stay here, Alex,” Mercer said. “I don’t know how Mike thinks he’s going to get past this gate.”

Shalik Samson grabbed two of the vertical iron bars with his hands and tried to shake them. “You put me on your shoulders,” he said to Mercer, “I could be over that easy.”

“Getting you out might be the problem. Let go of those.”

Traffic was light on this part of the avenue, and there were no pedestrians to bother us.

“You think somebody inside?” Shalik asked, craning his neck to look up at Mercer. “It look like a little park in there.”

Mike was studying the lock, which was a single keyhole. There was no sophisticated equipment in place to protect the entrance, which seemed well groomed and tended.

“Pretty clever. If you’re going to break in to someplace right on the street,” he said, “dress Travis Forbes up like a cop to give you cover.”

Shalik was back against the bars, standing on the sharply pointed pieces that jutted up from the base of the heavy gate.

“Cut it out, Shalik. You’ll hurt yourself,” Mike said. “Coop, I told you to put him in the car.”

“Yo, look! It ain’t even locked no more.”

The teenager had reached his slim arm between the bars and retrieved a metal rod that must have temporarily held the bars in place. Someone had indeed broken in to the old cemetery, and in all likelihood was still somewhere inside.

Shalik pushed on the right side of the gate, and it creaked open against his weight. Before I could stop him, he ran ahead down the alleyway, which was bordered on both sides by brick walls.

Mercer gave chase and overtook him twenty feet away, where the passage opened onto a large grassy area, almost the length of a football field but half as wide. He put his hand up to his lips and told the boy to be quiet.

I closed the gate behind me and caught up with Mike, who had stopped to read a plaque on the wall.

“What does it say?” I asked as he turned away and headed toward Mercer.

“The oldest nonsectarian cemetery in the city. A hundred and fifty solid marble vaults,” he said, breaking into a trot. “All of them were built underground as a health precaution against nineteenth-century contagious disease.”

We were suddenly in a gardened oasis in the middle of the East Village that I had never known existed.

The tall walls around the open green space seemed to be made completely of stone, many parts obscured by the bushes and trees that had grown up around the borders.

Mercer was deputizing Shalik, trying to extract a promise from him to stay close and obey directions.

Mike jogged along the perimeter of the north wall, stopping at smooth marble tablets to note names of the occupants of the subterranean vaults. I was just a few steps behind him.

“Charles Van Zandt. Uriah Scribner. James Tallmadge,” Mike said, stopping to run his hand over the names, one above the other, as he read them from the engravings.

Ten feet farther along, another tablet, with numbers I assumed corresponded to the graves below. Some listed three or four vaults, though only one or two individuals’ names had been added to the list of the dead.

There were Auchinclosses and Randolphs, Phelpses and Quackenbushes, grand names that together created a history of New York City. I paused at the marker for the infant son of Frederick Law Olmsted, the man who had landscaped Central Park.

Mike crossed to the south wall and continued his search. Before he had moved very far along, he signaled me to join him.

“Here they are, kid. Jasper Hunt. Jasper Hunt Jr.,” he said, showing me the names of father and son, and their wives, the first dates for the family patriarch etched in the wall more than a century ago. “Four Hunts, six burial vaults.”

Beneath the neatly carved names and dates were the numbers: 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66.

“They were obviously buried here originally, before the reinterment,” I said.

“And Minerva must know what’s in Millbrook-and what isn’t. She’d certainly have access to the family digs up on the property.”

“So maybe when they moved the bodies, nobody gave any thought to whether there was anything in these other two vaults they owned-whether any books were interred with the Hunt bones. There was certainly no record of other descendants on this plaque.”

“Wait here with Mercer,” Mike said.

“What are you going to do?”

“There’s got to be a way to get below to the vaults.”

“Mike, let’s get help.”

“And if something bad’s going on right now? You going to live with yourself if somebody’s down there, left for dead?”

Mercer was motioning to Mike. “Check out that corner.”

The dim light filtering in from the street and wind blowing the bushes played tricks with my vision. It looked like Mercer was right-that there was a hatch open in the southwest end of the enclosed area, a wooden door of some sort, against the far wall of the garden.

Mike sprinted forward and I followed, practically slamming into him when he stopped short just ten feet from the spot.

He was fixed on something on the ground.

I knelt beside him and saw the body of a man-short, over-weight, middle-aged-slumped beneath a small evergreen bush, his feet protruding into the pathway from beneath the branches.