The World Beneath

Chapter 28

Joe took a last long look around the nearly empty room, wondering if he should check all the lockers to see if there was anything stored there that might help him. He rinsed his cup and set it upside down in the sink for the next guy. No point in stalling. It was already nearly seven. Most of the employees had probably gone home for the day. He hoped.

He gave Edison a two-fingered wave and a final injunction. “Stay.”

Edison gave him a dubious look, and he wondered if the dog would stay put.

Joe tried the door that led out of the basement. Locked. Several minutes later he’d established that none of his keys fit the lock. It made sense — the building itself wasn’t part of the underground network.

Undeterred, Joe circled the room. The door was the most obvious exit, but the steam pipes themselves left the room and vanished into the ceiling. He placed his palm on both pipes. Cold. Apparently, this building was too modern for steam heat. The hot pipes in the tunnels must have been carrying steam to another building farther down the line.

He studied the pipes. A gap between the pipe and the edge of the ceiling looked promising, but it would be a tight fit. An image of his mummified body dangling there forever flashed through his mind.

With one quick motion, he took off his backpack. He’d never fit through with it on.

“Wish me luck,” he told Edison, and he left the backpack by his front feet.

Edison turned his head away, clearly offended at being left behind.

“I don’t blame you, boy. But you’re never going to make it up the pipe. You’re a dog, not a monkey.” An image of the monkey skeleton bricked in so long ago flashed through his mind. “And it’s just as well. I like you better as a dog.”

Edison’s tail wagged once (cyan) as if he couldn’t help it.

Joe stuck the clipboard inside his shirt and tucked the bottom of the shirt in tightly so that the clipboard wouldn’t slide out during his climb. Then he transferred his small flashlight to his front pocket.

Hoping that it would hold his weight, he wedged his toes in the dusty brace that secured the pipe to the wall. He grasped the next brace and pulled himself higher. His sneakers slipped off the metal. He fell downward, but caught himself with his arms. Again, he searched for a toehold in the brace. His foot slid off.

With a sigh he climbed back down to the floor. Edison bobbed his head, looking as smug as possible for such a good-natured dog.

“I’ve got a plan,” he told the dog. “Just you wait.”

Edison wagged his tail.

Joe removed his shoes and socks, flattening out his socks and stuffing them in his pockets. His sneakers were a different problem. Where could he put them where they wouldn’t be in the way? In the end he tied the laces together and hung them around his neck.

Up the pipe again. He reached out and took firm hold of the first brace, hauling himself up. The metal dug painfully into his palms. His feet sought purchase against the sides of the pipe, slipping before curling like a monkey’s. The rusty surface felt rough against the soles of his feet.

He shimmied up a foot, then another, skinning the inside of his right ankle and swearing. If Edison had been a person, he’d have been laughing.

Finally, he got his head through the opening in the ceiling, but the room was so dark that he couldn’t see where he was. He pulled one arm up and braced his elbow on the floor. Leaning his weight on that arm, he threaded his other arm up through the small opening.

A few minutes later, he was sitting on the floor. Edison woofed once from below.

“Hush,” he called down.

He shone his flashlight around the room — a metal door, a bare bulb with a pull string above, painted concrete walls lined with plastic bottles of cleaning fluid. He was in a broom closet. Just one glamorous stop after another these days.

Sticking his head through the floor, he waved to Edison. The dog was standing at the base of the pipes, looking up.

“Stay, boy. Back soon.” He hoped that was true.

Reaching up, he pulled the string to turn on the light. The knees of his pants were filthy, and rust streaked the front of his orange safety vest. If nothing else, he looked as if he’d done a hard day’s work underground — the kind of authenticity that money couldn’t buy.

He took the clipboard out of his shirt and set it on the floor. When he put his socks and shoes back on, he noticed that his ankle was bleeding. He checked the shelves for a first aid kit, but didn’t find one. He’d just have to wash it as soon as he could and hope for the best.

In the meantime, he pulled his dirty sock over the wound as gently as he could.

Then he found a dry paper towel and used it to wipe his face, hands, and arms, leaning forward to shake dust and cobwebs out of his hair and onto the clean floor. Not the equivalent of a shower, but it would have to do.

He tried the door handle. Open. He poked his head through and looked right and left. A darkened empty hallway. Best-case scenario. In he went.

He was inside a new building, one that he had never seen. That was not to be taken for granted. He was over a mile from his house, and he’d come all the way without going outside. The tunnels under New York might be dank and full of rats, but they had given him a new sense of freedom. He had miles and miles yet to explore.

The hallway led to a door that opened onto a grimy set of fire stairs leading up. It was a universal law: Even the fanciest buildings had grungy fire stairs.

He hurried up the stairs. The first floor was marked by a giant number 1 painted in red on the door. The bright red 1 bothered him — it should have been cyan. One was always cyan.

He pulled open the door and entered a well-lit hallway lined with industrial gray carpeting. Offices with tall glass windows and closed doors sat on each side of the corridor. At least he was in the center of the building, away from the giant sheets of glass on the exterior walls that looked out onto the outside.

He had no idea if an autopsy had been completed on Rebar, although he imagined so. If so, he had no idea how to find it. Flaws in his plan bubbled up in his mind. First, he had to find a computer.

“What are you doing here?” asked a voice to his side.

Joe jumped. “I’m here about the problem with the heating.”

A woman with dark hair pulled into a bun eyed him sternly over a pair of purple reading glasses. She was tiny, about five feet, in a white lab coat. She seemed a little out of breath, as if she’d been hurrying from somewhere. “The heating? It’s about time. My office has been alternating between Antarctic wasteland and jungle swamp for six years.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Joe replied. “Where’s the head of your physical plant?”

He must have gotten the terminology right, because she scowled. “Marcus? Marcus Gruber? He’ll be gone for the day, I imagine.”

Joe shook the clipboard. “I need to have him sign the work order before I can start. Maybe I could wait awhile for him, just in case? We’re running late, and I hate to put this off until tomorrow.”

She sighed and glanced at her wristwatch. Joe upgraded her age to at least forty. Nobody younger than that wore wristwatches anymore, except for him. “You can wait in his office. I’ll see if anyone knows where he is.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

Joe fell in behind her as she trotted off at a good clip, clearly annoyed at him for wasting her time. He hoped that Gruber really was out of his office. Time in an empty office was what he needed.

They ended up inside a nice modern elevator with steel sides, completely unlike the antique rattletrap he rode every day. He thought about the modern safety features it must possess and smiled.

“Gruber’s on the third floor. I’m on the eighth.” She held out her hand. “Dr. Stavros.”

Joe wiped his hand on his pants and shook hers. “Buck Ornish.”

He had no idea where that name came from, but she nodded as if it were believable. Really? Did he look like a Buck?

Gruber’s messy office was two (blue) doors down from the elevator on the right-hand side. Papers covered a massive oak desk that looked as if it had sat in the same spot for a century. The papers at the bottoms of the piles had yellowed with age. Three (red) half-empty ceramic coffee cups held down a half-curled-up map on the right corner. A computer with smear marks on the dark monitor sat on the left.

Dr. Stavros pointed to an empty chair. “When you see him, remind him about the drain in the second autopsy room. It’s been draining slowly for a week.”

Joe had a flash of sympathy for Gruber. “What floor is that, ma’am?”

“Ground floor,” she said. “He’ll know.”

As soon as she had closed the door, Joe shot over to the computer and sat down in the creaky desk chair. One key tap brought it out of sleep mode. No password. Wonderful. He started walking through the network. He didn’t expect to find the computers that he was looking for, but at least he’d get a better idea of who worked here and what they did.

He got lucky and found Dr. Stavros’s computer. A quick search confirmed that she was a medical examiner. It took a few minutes with a password cracker to get her password, knowthyself. A literary choice pulled straight from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. A literary medical examiner with Greek roots.

He figured out how she organized her reports and her notes and, after a few false starts, found the autopsy for a John Doe killed by blunt force trauma on the same date as Rebar. A description of his clothes and location where the body was found told Joe that this John Doe was the man he’d met in the tunnels. Clearly, they hadn’t yet confirmed his identity as Ronald Raines.

Joe didn’t know what he was looking for, so he downloaded everything onto his jump drive while reading. The cause of death seemed clear — hammer to the head. Joe didn’t care about the time of death or what the man had had for dinner, but one item from her notes jumped out at him.

Brain tissue severely damaged, but there are several lesions present that seem consistent with toxoplasmosis.

The computer finished copying the files. He slipped the jump drive into his pants pocket and closed the files as fast as he could. Time to go. He’d made it. But he’d only started toward the door when a fat man opened it and entered the office.

“What are you doing here?” He glared at Joe from close-set brown eyes set in a bullet-shaped head.

“I’m waiting for Mr. Gruber.” Please don’t let this be him, Joe silently pleaded.

“That’s me.” Joe’s heart sank. “Why are you in my office? Do you have a pass from security?”

Joe moved toward the door. How could he keep Gruber from having him arrested? His heart raced. He wasn’t some glib action star — he was a programmer.

Clearly not willing to let Joe leave, Gruber folded his massive arms. “What did you want from me, Mr… ”

“Buck Ornish,” Joe said. He searched for a good lie. “A Dr. Stavros called my department about a slow drain.”

As Joe had hoped, an aggrieved expression flitted across Gruber’s face. He’d obviously tangled with Dr. Stavros before. “She needs to submit her complaints directly to me.”

Joe was glad to see the conversation shift away from him and onto Dr. Stavros. Time to add fuel to the fire. “They sent me right over. I heard she was pretty worked up.”

“I bet she is. It still has to go through me.”

“Look.” Joe tried to sound helpful, like someone who could solve Gruber’s problem. “I go off shift in a half hour, and I still have to look at some steam pipes under the building. I can do that now, and put off the drain problem until tomorrow, after a report is filed through proper channels. How does that sound?”

“That’d do,” Gruber said grudgingly. “I’ll take care of it myself.”

Joe shrugged. “If I don’t get a report to fix it, I’m happy. I’m on salary.”

“I’ll walk you down. You can’t be on your own.” Gruber cast a sidelong glance at Joe. “Who let you in here?”

“Dr. Stavros,” Joe answered truthfully. Gruber hadn’t asked him for identification yet, or even a name, and he hoped that Gruber would assume that he had checked in with Stavros first because she had filed the complaint. She seemed as if she’d be thorough. He hoped they didn’t run into her on the way out.

Gruber gestured to the open door, and Joe went into the hall. He followed the larger man down the hall to the elevator.

“I can get you into the sub-basement,” Gruber said. “I don’t have keys to the steam tunnel.”

Joe held up his massive key ring. “I do.”

Gruber raised an eyebrow. “Lots of keys.”

“Lots of doors,” Joe answered.

The elevator stopped at the sub-basement without a single jump or creak. There was a lot to be said for modern elevator technology.

Gruber led him down a corridor with cinder block walls, coming to a stop in front of a metal door. Joe was pretty sure that he’d left Edison in a room just behind this door. Gruber fumbled through his keys.

“I never open this one,” he said.

“If you don’t use steam heat, there’s not much call to,” Joe answered.

Joe was glad that Gruber would let him into the room and he wouldn’t have to climb back down the pipe. Gruber unlocked the door and pushed it open. Joe preceded him into the room and clicked on the light. He’d seen the location of the switch before he climbed up the pipes.

He hoped that Edison would not come running. That would be too much to explain.

“I’ll stay down here with the steam pipes,” Joe said.

Luckily, the yellow dog seemed to know what Joe wanted, and he stayed put.

“I’ll go see about that drain,” Gruber said. “So you don’t need to bother coming about it tomorrow.”

“OK,” Joe said. Things were working out for Dr. Stavros.

He was inside with the door closed behind him before he let out a sigh of relief.

“Edison,” he called. “Here.”

The dog walked over, wagging his tail, and stuck his nose in Joe’s palm.

“I think we got what we needed,” Joe said. “Let’s get home.”

Where was home, these days?

He put his hand on the warm door handle, ready to go into the steam tunnels. Wherever home was, it wasn’t here.

Edison crowded close to him, aware of his mixed-up state.

“Good boy.” Joe gave him one of the last treats in his pocket. He’d need to find food for the dog again soon, and himself, but he didn’t dare show his face at Grand Central. The killer must be staking it out.

He opened the door, and the clanking from the pipes pushed into the room. He had a fleeting wish that he could go outside and catch a cab instead of having to leave through the dark and loud tunnel.

No self-pity.