Stone 588 (40 page)

Springer experienced it differently. Now, as he surveyed the avenue, he understood the sense of power Con Ed and New York Telephone workers derived from causing such disruption: the wasting of precious time out of people's lives, the spoiling of strictly scheduled business deals. Springer assumed the role-appropriate attitude of enjoyable indifference and went about his chores.

An orange plastic tarpaulin was rigged from the rear of the van and extended out loosely above the manhole. A metal railing-like barrier was positioned around the opening to prevent anyone from accidentally stepping into it. Some ropes that had seen considerable underground service were slung over the barrier, along with a few other things just for show.

While Strand and Scoot were in the van starting the generator. Springer had a moment to look in the direction of Townsend's. From where he stood, the entrance to Townsend's was only about twenty-five feet away. His view was somewhat oblique, but he could see in through the ornate brass grillwork.

Lights were on in there but Springer didn't see anyone moving about. Of course, it wasn't the sort of store that encouraged just anyone to walk in off the street to browse. A nattily attired man always stood inside tending the door. The same man for two decades, he not only knew well the face of every Townsend client, he was also infallible when it came to sizing up a stranger who wanted to enter. Perhaps it was instinct as much as years of practice that allowed him to instantly tell a tastelessly dressed tourist from an indigently dressed socialite.

Springer glanced up to the second floor. The lights were also on in Townsend's office. Townsend was up there, no doubt, doing some slick business. Springer wished Townsend would come to the window so he could see that face if for only a second, the arrogant, censorious expression as if nothing smelled quite right. To see it today. Springer thought, would supply just that much more to go on.

Two heavy-duty utility cords were plugged into the generator and run out to the manhole. On the end of each was a three-hundred-watt bulb within a protective bulb-shaped wire cage. One of the lights was lowered into the manhole, so Springer could see where to step.

His feet found the steel rungs of the narrow ladder. Like a ship's ladder, it went straight down, deeper than Springer expected. He had to be careful, be sure he had a good solid foothold on each rung, because the ladder was dripping wet, slippery. The light was lowered along with him. Finally, after descending fifteen feet, he reached the bottom—and stepped from the ladder into water up to his shins. He was thankful now for the knee-high rubber boots they'd found in the truck.

He saw that he was in a chamber about twelve feet long by seven feet wide, with an overhead clearance of a foot or so. The walls and ceiling were constructed of concrete brick. They were wet with seep. The floor was level, probably a concrete slab. The atmosphere was dank, oppressive. Springer had the eerie sensation that he was trespassing in a tomb.

At one end of the chamber stood a transformer with power cables running in and out of it. The walls were crowded with cables, not all coiled up snakelike but an organized arrangement. Strand had shown him a six-inch section of cable like these. Each cable was an inch and a half in diameter, contained a hundred copper circuits embedded in rubber with a thick outer casing of neoprene. Brackets were bolted to the walls. These supported the junctions that the cables were connected to. The junctions were the type Con Edison people referred to as seven-way sevens, because they had seven connecting points on each side.

To Springer they looked like huge, black, fourteen-legged spiders clinging to the walls. And they were all around.

He saw how from the junctions the cables went to circular openings in the walls, ducts. He could not see, but imagined, the ceramic pipes that ran underground with the cables in them, thus distributing electric power to the buildings in the vicinity. The cables were identical. So were the ducts. They bore no designative markings. There was no way to tell which serviced Townsend's. Thirty or more ran in that general direction. It didn't matter.

Scoot came down the ladder.

Several wire baskets containing tools and other things they would need were lowered by a rope.

They started to work.

Above, on the avenue, Strand and Audrey didn't pretend to be busy. Characteristically, they just stood around. Every so often Audrey shined a flashlight into the manhole and peered down. She saw only murky water and heard sloshing.

To pass time and neutralize their nerves, Audrey and Strand talked about anything. About the fascinating contrariness of the city. About the deceit of abstract art. Why, really, women had resorted to exaggerating their shoulders and pumping iron. How beautiful was the Burmese belief that a person at the moment of death becomes an invisible butterfly. Audrey brought up the subject of bilocation, the metaphysical ability of some sensitives to be in two places at the same time. Strand was commenting on that, saying that over his last three years it would have come in handy, when he stopped mid-sentence. From his pocket he brought out the stub of a chewed-up cigar and stuck it in his mouth. He closed his right eye into a vacant-looking slit.

Audrey thought for a moment that she was being allowed the comical side of Strand, but then she too noticed the baby blue and white of the police patrol car that had pulled up.

Strand went over to it.

The cop on the passenger side had the car window down only a few inches, not to get wet. He was an older cop with a perfunctory attitude. "How long ya gonna be?" he asked out to Strand.

"I don't know," Strand replied through his teeth that had the cigar clamped.

"Ya got everything fucked up for ten blocks."

Strand quivered his slitted eye. Rain was running off his hard hat like a veil. "A couple more hours maybe. We got a wet transformer."

Duty done, the cop closed the window. The light rack on the top of the patrol car was turned on for a few flashes and a sharp fragment of wail intimidated the traffic to make way.

Strand returned to Audrey beneath the tarpaulin. "No problem," he assured her. There wasn't any reason for the cop to suspect an authentic blue, white, and dove-colored Con Edison van. And even if there was some blow-back later and that cop stepped forward with the incident, what he would remember was the bad eye and the cigar. It was a little something Strand had learned from a wise-guy in the joint.

A short while later, Springer and Scoot came up for a break. Being on the surface again made them realize how claustrophobic they were becoming down in that chamber. It was unnerving, to say the least, to be messing around with all that voltage while standing shin-deep in water. Their faces were smudged and their hands grimy. They said they had a bit more to do.

Audrey hurried to the corner of 55 th to a shiny vending cart that had a red and yellow umbrella over it. There wasn't room for her beneath the umbrella, so, while the vendor put the works on four hot dogs and got four Yoo-hoos from his cooler, Audrey waited in the rain.

Her yellow poncho kept her from getting wet but the drops drumming on her hard hat were something she wouldn't want to suffer for long. She carried the hot dogs and drinks back to the van and presented them to the others like a surprise treat. Like most such hot dogs these were mostly bun, but they had that unbeatable street-comer taste. Springer forgot to shake up his Yoo-hoo, so his last few gulps of it were thick and awfully sweet.

He and Scoot went back down to work.

For nearly an hour.

They emerged from the manhole then and said they'd done as much as they could and maybe it was enough. Strand and Springer with the lifting keys put the inner seal and the manhole cover back in place. The tarpaulin was taken down. The ropes, the power extension cords, the strings of pennants, everything was put neatly into the van. Last was the sawhorse barrier. Even before Strand and Scoot could get it disassembled, a bus was reclaiming that lane of the avenue, honking insolently and threatening to run them over.

By four o'clock that afternoon the van was unstolen.

One of Danny's people just drove it into the Con Edison garage at Avenue C and 16th Street, parked it among all the other identical vans, and casually walked away.

It hadn't been missed.

It was nearly night.

The rain had wind with it now, vagrant gusts that blew it into sheets.

The sidewalks were deserted. The few taxis and cars were like strays. A lot of fifty-dollar theater tickets would go unused, restaurants would suffer no-shows. The high-rises were decapitated and the bag ladies had taken to the deeper doorways.

Vince Fantuzzi, driving a white 1977 Chrysler with a stolen New Jersey license plate, waited for the light at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 55 th Street. On green he hung a right and about a third of the way down the block pulled into the Star Parking Garage.

A sign that Vince's eyes couldn't miss told him to turn off his engine and leave his keys. He did as he was told because he was doing what he was told. He was one of Danny's people, a knock-around guy whose hard and fast rule was ask no questions, need no lies.

A parking attendant came out of the office, grabbed the top ticket from a stack that was on a small shelf below a punch clock. He'd done it so many times he didn't have to look when he inserted the ticket in the slot of the clock and— chunk, chunk, chunk —imprinted the hour and minutes on it in three places. He tore the ticket, put the main part of it under the wiper on the wet windshield of the Chrysler, handed the stub to Vince, and asked, "When ya goin' out?"

"If I get lucky not until morning."

The attendant came as close to smiling as he ever did, but then it occurred to him this guy could be on his way to only a card game.

Vince put the parking stub in his shirt pocket where he was less likely to lose it. He didn't have a raincoat or an umbrella. He wasn't the sort to own an umbrella. He pulled up the collar of his jacket and walked out into the downpour.

The parking attendant started up the Chrysler and pulled it ahead into the industrial type elevator. He closed the elevator gate and took it up to eleven. The Star Parking Garage was fourteen floors. Which floor a car was put on depended upon how long it was going to be in. The cars that were going to be in for only a couple of hours were put on the lower floors so they were easier and faster to get to. The overnights and others were put higher up, where they'd be out of the way. A few cars had been up there four or five months. At what came to about a dollar an hour the parking bill on such cars was more than their worth. Usually it turned out they were stolen, either that or whoever owned them had disappeared or died one way or another.

The attendant parked the Chrysler on the back side of the building where there weren't any windows. Left it dripping. On the way down in the elevator he thought about the slow night ahead. There was no ball game to watch on the small black-and-white television in the office. Later maybe he'd try a few trunks and glove compartments. Week before last he'd scored a complete set of nickel-plated Cerman-made tools from the trunk of a Mercedes. Once, from a Pennsylvania car, he'd gotten a woman's Rolex watch and nothing had ever been said about it. He was always getting sunglasses.

By the time the attendant returned to street level two cars had come in. A blue Pontiac Bonneville and a gray Olds Cutlass Supreme. The manager had them already ticketed, so all the attendant had to do was take them up. They were both overnights. He arbitrarily put them next to one another on nine and took the elevator back down.

An estimated five minutes were waited, four hundred pulse counts.

On eleven the only sound was the rain dripping from the Chrysler, contributing to the puddles beneath it.

Then the contradicting sound of its trunk lid popping open, released from the inside.

Springer pushed the lid up. He and Audrey climbed out. They glanced around to get their bearings. The place was dark, had a strong automobile smell to it, every inch of every surface permeated with carbon monoxide. They knew from the elevator ride that they were on one of the upper floors of the garage but they didn't know exactly which. They removed their fishing vests from the trunk of the Chrysler and put them on. The vests felt snugger with every pocket bulging. They also now had on the taupe-colored work trousers and shirts and the sneakers and their work gloves, what Audrey called their burglary outfits.

They listened for the elevator. Its frictional whir would warn of anyone coming up. The atmosphere of the garage amplified every little sound, but their steps were close to silent as they went across to the front of the building to one of the windows. There were five windows spaced about ten feet apart. They were narrow casement type, intended merely for ventilation. Each was open to some extent, no regard for the rain.

Springer looked out and down and knew upon seeing the wide ledge one floor below that they were on eleven. The top five floors of the garage building were inset about twelve feet, no doubt for some structural reason, as otherwise it was an irrational waste of premium city space. Springer and Strand, during their street-level reconnoitering, had noticed the tenth-floor ledge created by the inset and it had been the decisive factor in their choosing the garage as a starting point rather than the Hotel Shoreham farther down the block.

All such buildings as the garage were required to have an interior stairway. Springer and Audrey found it and went down to the tenth floor to the rendezvous point at the front windows. Those windows were also open part way, must have been left as they were for years because the geared cranking mechanisms that would allow them to be opened and closed were bound with rust. Not one of the windows was open enough.

The third window from the left had slight play. Springer used force on it, put increasing outward pressure on its metal frame, and, more easily than he expected, the cranking mechanism gave way, snapped off entirely, and the window swung wide open. A strong wind could have done it.