19 Purchase Street (55 page)

Gainer bent his knees slightly to arch higher his liquid ribbon. Piss on them.

He went over to the southeast dormer, glanced down and saw the old mattresses that covered the billion were in place. A billion was heavyweight, he thought. If ever again he had a chance to steal that much, no matter how easy or sure, he wouldn't do it. He got back under the mohair and snuggled Leslie, who made a little animal sound of pleasure.

It was Leslie's opinion that they should consider the money safe where it was, and while away the interim more at ease at her place on East Seventy-fifth. They could buzz over in the Riva every once in a while to check on the billion.

Gainer would not have it. He insisted on remaining close to the money, although he wondered what he would do if someone innocently happened upon it. Would he kill that person? He didn't know.

Gainer and Leslie spent most of that day, Saturday, exploring the island. The one time they were previously there to determine a suitable spot for the money, they'd seen only a fraction of the place. Now they realized the extent that it was given to decay. It was oppressive but at the same time intriguing. Powdery plaster from ceilings and walls lay thick on everything and filled every angle. In places it was mixed with the dust of brick into a pink coating. Painted surfaces were crackled like maps with no captions, enamel curls waited to fall at the slightest touch.

There were numerous animal tracks in the plaster dust, the marks of claws. Leslie asked what kind of tracks they were. Gainer diverted her attention.

Among a disarray of papers Leslie came across a well-drawn scheme of Ellis. And hundreds of reproductions of it. Evidently they had been handed out to immigrants to find their way around. The overhead-view outline showed that Ellis was almost divided equally in two by a ferry slip two hundred feet wide. Every part of every building was numbered and named according to purpose.

The room Gainer and Leslie were in at the moment had once been a medical examining room. In fact nearly all the structures on the southern part of Ellis had served as hospital facilities and wards. A corridor connected them, a seven-foot-wide corridor with casement windows along both sides. It ran almost the entire width of the island, eight hundred feet, straight as a shot. Gainer's perspective from the east end of the corridor gave him the impression that it was a sort of trap, the way it seemed gradually to diminish. Its long receding lines were interrupted only by vines that had grown in through broken panes.

At one time the corridor had probably been a pleasant place to walk, Gainer thought, as he and Leslie proceeded down it. A door on the right bore a small baked-enamel plate that said
Ward 26
in white on dark blue. There were hospital wards all along there, large, high-ceilinged rooms set at right angles to the corridor. Outside, the ground space between the double-storied ward buildings was thick with growth—tall locust trees, varieties of weeds such as pokewood and mullet, burdock and briars.

At the west end of the corridor, according to the scheme, was the morgue and the crematorium. The morgue was a twenty-by-twenty room with a concrete floor. A light and reflector hung from the ceiling to eye level, and there was an eight inch drain, just a hole in the floor directly below the light. A free-standing sink was near the drain. Those were overlooked by ascending levels of concrete tiers. At the facing end of the room were eight wooden doors like those found on old iceboxes. The doors were identical, two feet wide by a foot and a half high. They were arranged in two vertical rows of four so that the top doors were up seven feet. Each door had the kind of spring release handle and prominent triangular-shaped hinges old iceboxes had and, indeed, screwed to the exterior frame was a metal nameplate bearing the logo,
Frigidaire
. Here, of course, was where the dead were kept on ice. The concrete tiers had accommodated chairs so that in amphitheater fashion the sectioning of cadavers could be observed.

Gainer opened a couple of the morgue boxes, glanced in, saw they weren't individual enclosed spaces but one large space sectioned off by slatted platforms on rollers. The crematorium was adjacent. The door to the crematorium furnace was open and a shovel was sticking out of it. Alongside the furnace was a strange-looking metal contraption, a boxlike table three feet high by two feet square with a six inch square hole in its top surface. A turning handle like that of an old-fashioned meatgrinder, only sturdier, was attached to one side; it was locked with rust. Gainer looked down into the hole and found no clue to the function of this piece of equipment, which was a device to pulverize bones. Better not to have known
that
.

He and Leslie continued on. They were more acclimated to the deterioration now. They turned right into another passageway, this one of brick with fewer windows, twice as wide as the other and just as straight though not quite as long. This brick passageway was partitioned off on one side so that in effect it was two passageways—parallel, a narrow one and a wide one with ten foot openings between them at regular intervals, an arrangement something like the barriers bullfighters scurry behind. (Actually the narrower corridor was a storage area for stretcher-carts, wheelchairs and other such equipment.)

There were no wards off this brick corridor, only one huge hall that had obviously been used for entertainments. It had a stage and slots high up through one wall for motion picture projection and spotlighting. An upright piano stood in the center of the hall. Lonely, abused piano, looking as though half the world had plinked or pounded on it. A gilt decal on its face said it was a “James and Halstrom Transposing Keyboard” and that it was the kind that had been awarded a “First Premium, New Orleans Exposition.”

Gainer tapped several dead keys.

Leslie hit on a live one right off.

Elsewhere in other buildings they read faded graffiti on the walls of cubicles where immigrants had been detained. Some they were easily able to translate, such as
prendre la lune avec les dents
(to seize the moon with the teeth) and
la bonne blague!
(what a joke!), but they weren't sure of the meanings of
besser ein halb ei als eitel Schale
(better half an egg than empty shells) and
tutto di novello par bello
(everything new seems beautiful). They more or less figured out that
il danaro è fratello del danaro
meant money is the brother of money, and of course there were many
quelle affaire!
and
Eireann go Brat!
printed around in various sizes by different hands. A tiny inscription written vertically up the side of a bedpost said in plain English, “Fuck this place forever.”

They saw a pair of old black leather hightop shoes hung by their laces from an overhead pipe six feet out of reach. They came across a tipped-over wooden file cabinet, a large one with many drawers. The drawers were packed with five-by-five index cards and each drawer had an elaborate label on its brass-plated pull, designating Italian, Dutch, German, Irish, Polish and so forth. A number of drawers had the word “Denied” on them. Leslie pulled out one entire drawer of “Denied” and carried it back to the commissioner's house.

Before going to the attic, Gainer checked on the billion, was relieved to find it untouched.

“See what a lot of money will give you,” Leslie said.

“Give me?”

“The worries.”

“And first class everything,” Gainer said. “Anyway, I was checking mainly because
our
millions are in there.”

Leslie liked the
our
. “I'll bet being rich will change you,” she said.

“I'm counting on it,” he told her.

Gainer found a rattan porch chair in one of the second floor rooms of the commissioner's house. Its seat was broken through and it was dusty down into the crevices of its weave. He tied a rope to it and threw it into the harbor, washed it by yanking it around, put a board in its seat, and his pillow. Sat with feet up on the edge of a dormer, looking out.

Leslie screwed open a bottle of that thousand dollar Brunello di Montalano 1945. She moved the air mattress close to Gainer's chair. They passed the bottle, swigged from it. Leslie sat with her legs crossed tight to her, the file drawer of “Denied” in front of her. She pulled cards randomly from it. They had last names, first name, age, sex and nationality on them, and various notations. Such as: Ruzkowski, Matthew, twenty-nine, male, Polish, escaped convict.

“Take a card, any card.” Leslie held several out to Gainer.

He chose one and read it aloud. “O'Toole, Mary, twenty-three, female, Irish. Infected with moral turpitude.”

“Wonder who she caught it from.”

“Her resistance was low.”

“Probably a pretty lass who didn't believe she was.” Leslie read another card aloud. This one was a thirty-five-year-old Bulgarian polygamist, said to have eight, perhaps twelve wives. “Poor fellow,” Leslie sympathized.

Gainer agreed.

There were designated prostitutes, pederasts, scabs, anarchists, and all manner and variety of criminals in the file, but by far the most common reason for being denied entry was lack of money. Card after card had the word “Pauper” scrawled across it.

Leslie put the file aside, took two swigs of wine, stretched her back and said, as though she was talking to the atmosphere: “I'm pregnant, you know.”

“What?”

“Pregnant, me.”

“You're kidding.”

“That's another way of putting it.”

“I know you're not.”

“How do you know?”

“Hell, I can count. Only in the movies guys can't count when it comes to that.”

“Anyway,” Leslie said, “suppose I was?”

Gainer allowed his attention to be distracted by the Staten Island Ferry, yellow-orange, headed for Battery Park Terminal at the tip of Manhattan. He hadn't been on it since the great escape from Mount Loretto. Norma, as she'd been that day, came clearly to him, even the gray cotton dress she'd worn.

“Don't be evasive,” Leslie said.

“I'm not.”

“So, answer.”

“If you were pregnant, Rodger would be upset.”

It wasn't the answer Leslie wanted. She got up quickly, walked to the opposite side of the attic. Gazed out the dormer there at the roofs of the other buildings and skylights. On the ridge of an eave, a female pigeon was submitting to being hopped on. “This place is thick with spirits,” Leslie said. “Didn't you feel that today?”

“Sort of.”

“What were all those tracks?” she asked.

“Rats.”

“Maybe they were rabbits.”

“Only rats leave tail tracks like that. Probably brown rats, the
Rattus norvegicus
, or sewer rat.”

“I didn't know you were such a rat expert.”

“One whole week when I worked at the library I made rats my subject for research. New York is full of rats.”

A knowing scoff from Leslie.

“What it amounts to is two and a half rats to every person. Fortunately rats only have a three or four year life span. A four-year-old is older than a man at ninety. No animal wiser than a four-year-old rat. He can steal the bait out of any trap and seems to know exactly when to expect an exterminator. Old buildings like these are great places for them.”

Leslie hugged herself, but she was interested. “How big do they get?”

“Ten inches, not counting tail. But that size would weigh in at a pound and a half, maybe two pounds. That's a lot of rat.”

“I still think the money is safe without our staying here.”

“You go, I'll stay.”

“Rodger's rifle is in the Riva. Should I get it?”

Gainer didn't see any reason to.

That night Leslie moved the tin of Carr's water biscuit crackers, the oranges, especially the round of Edam and all the other eatables, to the furthest corner of the attic. She got under the mohair throw and pressed tight against Gainer while they watched the four inch portable Sony television. Cute little mice were one thing, big snarly rats quite another.

Several times she sat up and shined her little flashlight around the attic.

“I love you,” Gainer told her every half hour.

That helped

About three o'clock the following afternoon Chapin and Vinny showed up in a motored skiff they had rented from a place in Sheepshead Bay. They brought along an eight pack of cold Heineken, five pounds of barbecued ribs and some french fries. Chapin looked rested, relaxed and Vinny was in high spirits.

Vinny expressed his appreciation for the view out of the dormer on the harbor side. “Hey, you can see all the way to Wallabout Bay,” he said. (Wallabout is a spot in upper Brooklyn where the East River makes such a sharp bend it forms an elbowlike backwater. The ebb tide deposits all sorts of things in that backwater and anything loose that comes down river also gets carried into it—a lot of driftwood, lobster traps, fuel drums and particularly corpses. The bodies of bridge jumpers, unwanted newborns, out-of-favor wise-guys and what have you. Corpses tend to pop up in the spring when the water warms. Wallabout is the first place Harbor police look for anyone missing and believed to be dead. They pull out twenty-five to thirty bodies a year there.)

“We thought we'd take over for a couple of days,” Chapin said. “You must be getting tired.”

“That's okay, we're fine,” Gainer told them.

Leslie disagreed, made a face.

Chapin and Gainer watched the Dallas-Giant game. The tiny screen miniaturized the players, seemed to lessen the importance of their feats. Gainer and Chapin bet on completions and first downs at a hundred dollars a whack and on total yards gained, ten a yard. The field was hot and Dallas didn't strain, just kept ahead. The Giants believed they were good because they tried all out and were beaten by only eight points. Gainer came out eighteen hundred ahead. Chapin paid from a wad.

“New York should have a winning football team,” Chapin commented. “Could if they'd let the Mob own it.”