Terminal City

TWENTY-FOUR

“That’s the very place I made my movie debut, Ms. Cooper,” Ledger said.

It was after 8:00 P.M. on Thursday evening, and Mike had asked Ledger and Gleeson to take us through some of the physical plant, to explain to us the size and scope of the terminal. It was a good time to do it, with rush hour crowds already dispersed to their homes.

“Maybe that’s why you look so familiar to me,” I said, smiling back at him.

“You think I’m kidding, do you? Are you a Hitchcock fan?”

“My favorite.”

“North by Northwest? It was the first movie ever shot in Grand Central. 1959. My boss wanted a walk-on in a frame with Cary Grant, who was jumping on the Twentieth Century ’cause he was suspected of murder, so I tagged along in the shot.”

We were standing at the iconic information booth, which was crowned by an opalescent four-faced Seth Thomas clock, a priceless golden ball that had kept perfect time for a century.

“Good flick. Almost makes sleeping in the sleeping car of a train look sexy,” Mike said. “What are we looking at, Don?”

“The main concourse, all thirty-six thousand square feet of it. Larger than the nave of Notre Dame Cathedral.”

I remember, as a kid, thinking this was the largest indoor space I’d ever seen. That still held true.

“Nowhere to hide out here,” Mike said. “Wide-open.”

The room was enormous, with only the round information booth obstructing its center. The south side of the great hall, broken by the walkway to the old waiting room, was lined with ticket booths, most closed for the evening. Each one of them-if breached-could be a cubbyhole for someone looking to do evil.

The departure gates covered the north side.

“Yeah, but those gates are the portals to the unknown,” Mercer said, waving his arm across the length of that quarter of the room, a gaping mouth full of tunnels that led under- and aboveground to all of Manhattan.

We could see up the staircase on the west to the doors fronting Vanderbilt Avenue. The eastern end was much more troublesome. The staircase there, replicated in the restoration of the terminal, despite its grandeur, was a dead end, leading up to an Apple store that was one of the biggest revenue sources for the building. No exit.

But on either side of the staircases there were wide archways, one framing the entrance to the subway station and the other to an arcade of shops and services, then eventually to Lexington Avenue. Between the two sets of stairs was another one down to the lower concourse.

“Portals to the unknown kind of nails it, Detective,” Ledger said. “This terminal and its train yards actually cover seventy acres of territory.”

“What?” Mike said.

“That’s the amount of land that Vanderbilt and his successors bought up. Penn Station? That’s got less than thirty acres. We go on forever, or so it seems. We control track up to 97th Street, all buried now under Park Avenue. Try keeping your eye on that.”

“And below us? Is there something under the lower concourse? What’s the secret basement you mentioned?”

“The levels beneath are the deepest in New York City. Think of a ten-story office building turned upside down. We’re talking the underbelly of Manhattan.”

“Isn’t there a new subway coming in?” Mercer asked.

“Yes, the Long Island Railroad is building a link that will land even deeper. Sixteen stories down, not ready till 2019.”

“But digging right now?”

“Absolutely.”

“So there are men down there, connected to this terminal?”

“Every day. Hundreds of men working on that. It will enable another eighty thousand folks to come through here, from Long Island, without them having to go to Penn Station like they do now,” Ledger said. Penn Station was Amtrak’s facility on the west side.

“So when trains ‘terminate’ here,” I said, “how does that work? Where do they go if they don’t just pass through to the next stop, like all the other stations?”

Ledger told us. “They’re backed out onto another track, which takes them to a wheelhouse, where they turn around, make a complete loop underneath the terminal, and then get set up for the trip out.”

“And a wheelhouse is…?”

“Exactly what it sounds like. The trains pull out and go around-used to be called a ‘roundhouse’-on a circular track underneath the building, and come back facing north again, for the next ride.”

Mike’s eyes were scanning the room, now staring up at the zodiac figures on the celestial ceiling, until he shifted his gaze to the many-storied arched windows that stretched for the length of a football field above the concourse.

“Talk access up there,” he said. “What’s all that glass?”

I took several steps back to lean against the information counter and look up.

“Windows, Detective.”

“I know that, Don. But there’s a helluva lot of them.”

“When the terminal was built, there was only one way to ventilate it. Fresh air.”

“You mean that those things open and close?”

On either end of the concourse, east and west, were three gigantic windows, hundreds of feet overhead. I don’t think I had ever seen bays of windows as large as these.

“Had to be that way a hundred years ago. Light didn’t come from anywhere else but the street. It was the primitive days of electricity, so lighting the terminal was a daunting task. Not a bad place to hide up top, if you don’t get vertigo.”

“Hide? It’s all glass.”

“A bit of an illusion, Detective Chapman. Those are actually catwalks up there. Glass boxes, if you will.”

I strained to see what Ledger was talking about.

“So there’s one layer of glass, the windows that open over Lexington Avenue, many flights up, of course. Then there’s actually a walkway, made entirely of glass brick, which runs across the entire width of the building. Look down through it and you’d think you’re about to fall twenty stories to the terminal floor.”

I got queasy even listening to the description.

“But nowhere to hide,” I said, squinting to look up at the glass panes.

“You’d be wrong about that,” Ledger said. “The second long pane of glass faces the interior, over the concourse. Those windows open, too. So natural air flowed through, as well as a great amount of light. But see those pillars in between each of the arched windows?”

The pillars extended from the top of the staircases on either end of the building up to the arch where the vaulted ceiling rose over the concourse.

“Sure,” Mercer said.

“The catwalks go clear from one side of the building to the other. Easy to hide a small posse behind those pillars. Give you a bird’s-eye view of the entire floor, if your stomach doesn’t get butterflies from standing up there.”

“Butterflies?” Mike asked.

“Standing on a piece of glass in the sky? I never liked it much. One of the architects walked me through ages ago. I got kind of nervous midway out when I made the mistake of looking down. ‘Form following function,’ he kept saying, to move me along. ‘All done for a plan, Don. Air and light. Now just keep walking.’” Ledger imitated the man’s Southern accent, laughing at himself as he talked.

“But what do they connect? Why are they there, and how would one get up inside them?”

“Used to be several offices in the corners at the top, just beyond the windows. One end with desks for the station managers, another in which the engineers had a lounge. They could catch up on their sleep on cots. I don’t think anything up there is used much these days, since the big renovation. It’s too remote to be practical now.”

“Getting there?” Mercer repeated.

Ledger had to think. “You need a key, any way you look at it. That situation room you were all just in?”

“The imaginary seventh floor, the one that’s twenty flights up,” Mike said. “Those dark, snaky hallways leading to it?”

“Yes. You can climb down to the catwalks from the situation room. And there’s a stairwell that goes from landing to landing, but it’s kept locked on every level, too.”

“Add it to tomorrow’s list,” Mike said.

I took a few steps forward to turn around and look at the glass-enclosed, glass-bottomed catwalks on the other end of the terminal. A woman racing for a midevening train bumped against me hard and practically spun me around.

“Watch where you’re going,” she said.

“Sorry.”

Two suits carrying briefcases and walking briskly passed on either side of me. The automated lady on the loudspeaker reminded people to take all their belongings with them and not litter the terminal.

“Those lightbulbs,” I said, holding on to Mercer’s arm as I looked upward again. “They’re all bare. There must be hundreds of them.”

Where the celestial mural met the marble columns that held up the vaulted ceiling of the terminal, there was a string of bulbs that illuminated the entire circumference of the building.

“Four thousand of them up there,” Ledger said.

“But they’re bare. No shades, no covers.”

“In 1913, gaslight was still the way most of this city was lit. The Vanderbilts were showing off, as well they could.”

“They had just converted all their New York Central trains from steam to electricity,” Mike said, “and now they could make their grand terminal electric, too. Just leave the bulbs exposed. Was that the plan?”

“Indeed it was.”

“Somebody actually gets up there and changes them?” I asked.

“Not a job I want any more than you do,” Ledger said. “What looks like a layer of crown molding beneath the bulbs, edging the marble columns? Well, you can’t see it from this angle, but it would hold all of us inside that molding. You can climb out into those pockets-they’re man-sized, all right-from the catwalk. Walk the length of the terminal. Unscrew every one of those bulbs and replace them when they burn out.”

“I’ll pass,” I said.

“Where are all those people going?” Mike asked.

There had been a steady stream of walkers-not just businesspeople, but also teenagers and families with children, well-dressed travelers and scruffy-looking women and men-a typical cityscape in motion.

“I told you,” Ledger said. “That’s the way to the subway. Grand Central Station, the IRT line.”

Mike started off in that direction, to the southeast corner of the concourse, and we all followed behind him.

“How many ways up from that subway platform, from the station to the terminal?”

“A whole bunch of stairs, Detective. And elevators. Escalators from the lowest floors, too. Actually, the new LIRR feed is so deep it’s going to take passengers four minutes to get up to this level.”

“And ramps,” Mike said. “This place is full of ramps. Can’t imagine anyone was thinking about handicapped people in 1913.”

“They weren’t,” Ledger said. “These wide ramps were the genius of the original architects.”

I was trying to keep up with Mercer’s long strides, but it seemed I was constantly bumping against someone who was in a greater hurry than I.

“Think of it. A passenger gets off a train, whether a century ago, or today. It’s possible to get from the door of the railroad car to any level of the terminal-or to the street and even to a hotel or office building-without encountering a single step,” Ledger said. “It was ingenious for the period, and just as much so now.”

I’d been in this building thousands of times and made my way up the graded ramps, some as wide as a boulevard, to get to 42nd Street from commuter trains, without ever giving a thought to their purpose.

“This great terminal is all about movement,” Ledger said. “It was not only designed to be seen as a huge monument to the glory of commerce and transportation in its day, to be appreciated for its beauty-which it still is now-but also to be the most glorious example of moving people through spaces to their destination.”

Mike had turned his head to listen to Ledger, colliding with a young man determined to catch up with his traveling companions. He picked up the lead again. A subway train must have just pulled in and disgorged its riders, who charged toward us from steps below.

I felt as though we were minnows swimming upstream against a bigger pod of fish. Guys on their way home or to a second job or dinner or a club or a romantic assignation brushed against me from both sides.

“Keep up, Coop. Your ass is dragging,” Mike called to me over his shoulder.

“You want to know why I hate the subway? This is part of it. It’s not even rush hour and I feel like I’m caught in a whirlpool.”

Mercer was cool with it. “Mike just wants to see how many exits there are. This would be the fastest way out of Midtown if someone was up to something bad in the terminal. You wait here. We’ll grab a look and be right back.”

I stepped to the side and tried to catch my breath.

I could still see the top of Mercer’s head over the line of emerging subway riders coming from the opposite direction. Corridors led off three ways, like forks in a road. A large newsstand obstructed my view, so I started to move to the side of it.

From behind me I thought I heard someone call me. I knew Mike was several hundred feet in front of me, but I looked back to see who had said the word “Coop.”

As soon as I swiveled around, the man who had spoken was on me, pressing my body against the cold marble wall under the archway leading to the IRT steps.

He ripped off the do-rag that had been wrapped around his head and tried to grind his hips against mine, whispering to me as I pushed hard back at him. “Your time is almost here, Coop.”

I kneed him in the groin as dozens of people passed us by, probably assuming a suitor was keeping a rendezvous with me in the terminal.

I slapped him across the face, and he let go of me, laughing as he covered his forehead and eyes with the rag, and ran toward the same subway entrance that Mike, Mercer, and Don Ledger had gone to check.

“Mercer!” I screamed as loud as I could. There was no one near me now. There wouldn’t be a crowd till the next train deposited its passengers. “Mercer! It’s Raymond Tanner. Stop the bastard, will you? It’s Raymond Tanner!”