Margo winced, then took a deep breath, dropping her hands to her sides and allowing the rocking of the boat to carry her thoughts far away. They moved out of the Cloaca, through the Spuyten Dyvil, and into the fresh air of the Hudson. Already the pale light of dawn was giving way to a warm late-summer day. D’Agosta stared off silently into the creamy wake of the cutter.
Idly, Margo realized that her right hand was lying over a bulge in her pocket. She reached in and pulled out the waterlogged envelope that Mephisto had given her in the black tunnel not so many hours before. Curiously, she opened it. A brief note lay inside, but whatever message it had contained was now washed into faint swirls and stains of ink. Enclosed by the note was a damp black-and-white photograph, faded and heavily creased. It showed a young boy in a dusty front yard, wearing coveralls and a pint-sized version of a train engineer’s cap, riding a wooden horse with wheels. The chubby face was smiling at the camera. In the background was an old house trailer, framed by cacti. Behind the trailer was a mountain range, low and distant. Margo stared for a moment, seeing in the happy little face the ghost of the man he would become. She carefully replaced the photograph and envelope in her pocket.
“What about the Reservoir?” she asked Pendergast in a quiet voice.
“The level hasn’t fluctuated in the last six hours,” Pendergast replied. “Apparently, the water has been contained.”
“So we did it,” she said.
Pendergast did not reply.
“Didn’t we?” she asked, her eyes suddenly sharp.
Pendergast looked away. “It would seem so,” he said at last.
“Then what is it?” she prodded. “You’re not sure, are you?”
He turned back to her, his pale eyes staring at her face. “With luck, the collapsed tunnels held and there was no leakage. In another twenty hours or so, the thyoxin will have destroyed the plants remaining in the Reservoir and in the tunnels below. But none of us can be sure—not yet.”
“Then how will we ever know?” Margo asked.
D’Agosta grinned. “Tell you what. One year from today, I’m gonna head down to Mercer’s on South Street and have one of those two-pound swordfish steaks, nice and rare. And if I don’t catch a good buzz, then maybe we can all breathe easier.”
Just then, the sun broke over Washington Heights, turning the dark water to the color of beaten electrum. Smithback, looking up from patting Margo’s face dry, gazed at the scene: the tall buildings of Midtown flashing purple and gold in the morning light, the George Washington Bridge swept with silver light.
“As for myself,” Pendergast said slowly, “I think I, too, will avoid frutti del marefor the foreseeable future.” Margo looked at him quickly, trying to read the joke in his expression. But his gaze remained steady. And, eventually, she simply nodded her understanding.
AND LAST
NO ADDITIONAL Take Back Our City rallies ever took place. Mrs. Wisher was given an honorary post in the city government as community liaison, and—when a new administration was elected the following year—worked closely with it to increase civic awareness. A vest pocket park on East 53rd Street was dedicated to the memory of Pamela Wisher.
Laura Hayward turned down an offered promotion, electing instead to leave the department and complete her graduate studies at New York University.
Bill Smithback’s firsthand account of the events of that night went on to spend several months on the hardcover bestseller lists, despite heavy prepublication editing by government officials under the direction of Special Agent Pendergast. In the end, Margo persuaded Smithback— bulliedmight be a better word—into donating half of his earnings to various homeless missions and charity foundations.
One year to the day after the flooding of the Astor Tunnels, Pendergast, D’Agosta, and Margo Green met for lunch at a famous seafood restaurant near the South Street Seaport. Although their conversation remains their own, when they left the restaurant D’Agosta was sporting a large—and apparently relieved—grin.
Author's Note
WHILE THE EVENTS and characters portrayed in this novel are fictitious, much of the underground setting and its population are not. It has been estimated that as many as five thousand or more homeless people have lived in the vast warren of underground tracks, subway tunnels, ancient aqueducts, coal tunnels, old sewers, abandoned stations and waiting rooms, disused gas mains, old machine rooms, and other spaces that riddle underground Manhattan. Grand Central Station alone sits above seven stories of tunnels, and in some places the underground works extend more than thirty stories beneath the city. The Astor Tunnels, with their elegant stations crumbling into dust, actually exist, on a smaller scale and under a different name. No comprehensive maps exist of underground Manhattan. It is a truly unexplored and dangerous territory.
Much of what is described in Reliquaryabout the underground homeless—or Mole people—is true. (Some prefer to call themselves “houseless,” for they consider their underground spaces home.) In many underground areas the homeless have organized themselves into communities. Some of the Mole people who live in these communities have not been aboveground for weeks or months—or even longer—and their eyes have adjusted to the extremely low levels of light. They live on food brought down by “runners,” sometimes supplemented with “track rabbit” as described in the novel. They cook on campfires or steam pipes, and purloin electricity and water from the many conduits and pipes that run underground. At least one of these communities has a part-time schoolteacher—for there are also children living underground, often brought down by their mothers to avoid having them taken away by the state and put in foster care. Mole people do communicate in the dark over long distances by tapping on pipes. And finally, there are homeless who claim to have seen a fabulous, decaying nineteenth-century waiting room deep underground, with mirrored and tiled walls, a fountain, a grand piano, and a huge crystal chandelier, similar to the Crystal Pavilion described in Reliquary.
It should also be noted that in certain important instances the authors have altered, moved, or embellished what exists under Manhattan for purposes of the story.
The authors feel that it is not asking too much of our wealthy country that the underground homeless be given the medical care, psychiatric help, shelter, and respect that should be the basic rights of all human beings in a civilized society.
The authors are indebted to the book, The Mole People,by Jennifer Toth (Chicago Review Press, 1993). Readers interested in the factual account of the subterra incognitaof Manhattan are urged to read this excellent, thought-provoking, and at times frightening study.