“You’re so obviously talented,” I said. “Why-what brought you-?”
“Why am I a mole? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?”
“Yes, please,” I said, while Mike brought up the photo of the dead man on his phone.
“I spent a lot of time riding subways doing my art. That got me into the tunnels, and I kind of liked it here. I used to shoot heroin. Big-time habit, and I was stealing all the time. In jail and out, on probation and off. Finally tested positive for HIV and now it’s full-on AIDS. I’ve been shunned for so long aboveground-lost all my family along the way-it’s just easier for me to live down here. Not so judgmental. Not so painful.”
“But there’s medical help we can get you for your condition. You don’t need to live like this,” I said.
“Speak for yourself, lady. This happens to suit me fine.”
“Smitty used to be the mayor of the Grand Central tunnels.”
“No more politics for me,” he said, holding up both hands and smiling broadly.
“You know everybody, don’t you?”
“Pretty much.”
“Need you to look at this picture,” Hank said, taking the phone from Mike.
“What you got for me? Something to eat or a good cigar?”
Hank took a pack of cigarettes out of his pants pocket. “For starters, okay?”
Smitty took the Marlboros and opened the box, reaching into his pocket for a book of matches. “Let me see.”
Hank handed him Mike’s iPhone.
“Sure, I know him.”
I felt better immediately. “What’s his name?”
“Down here, Ms. Alex, that’s the last thing you ask anyone. Nobody wants to be known-not by his street name.”
“Officer Sammen had a nickname for him. Called him Carl. Did he have another name?”
“Not that I know of. You need to understand, there’s groups of people down here. Folks who come in to get out of the cold.”
“Get in how?” I asked. “Through the station?”
“That doesn’t happen much. Security there is pretty tight,” Smitty said, punctuating his words with a few violent coughs. “But there are ladders hanging on some of the walls throughout all the tunnels in the city, rusty old things with thin iron rungs that workmen have used for decades. Gets frigid enough on the street and some people just find a broken grating, a manhole in the street. Let themselves in for the night and maybe stay a week or two. We call them wanderers. Not likely to stay very long. Not worth bothering to get to know ’em.”
“And your-your constituency?” I asked.
“Like you hear. Moles. Full-on moles. This is home. There are Grand Central moles, Penn Station moles, Bowery moles, Riverside Park moles, Dyker Avenue moles. We’re all straight out of the journey to the center of the earth, Ms. Alex. Only it’s not science fiction.”
Out of the darkness behind Smitty’s back, the shadowy silhouette of Dirty Harry reappeared. He was fully exposed now and still touching himself. Smitty knew it from the expression on my face.
“I hear you coming, Harry. Now I’ve got company, and this fine lady has no interest in you taking care of your nasty business while she’s talking to me. She’s sent people up the river for less than that. You go on to Ms. Sylvia’s nest and maybe she’ll tell you how pretty it is. Then you can put it away for an hour or two.”
Harry retreated, and Mike was back to pressing Smitty.
“So this guy,” Mike said, taking back his iPhone and shaking it in Smitty’s face, “he’s not quite a mole and more than a wanderer.”
“That’s right,” he said, drawing deeply on the lighted cigarette before coughing. “This boy’s a runner.”
“What’s that?”
“Just what it sounds, Detective. Me? I don’t like to go up to the street. Somebody might try to take me to a hospital or put me in some kind of sterile shelter. Cramp my style. Some moles, like Harry, can’t go up, ’cause they’d land in the Bellevue psych ward, where he busted out from two years ago. Wants to go up-show his stuff-but he just can’t. Ms. Sylvia? She’s got a load of warrants from when she used to have enough meat on her bones to turn tricks. Hank’s good to her. He just looks the other way and lets her be, so she sits tight, too.”
“And runners,” Mike said. “They’re the go-betweens, right?”
“Yes, indeed. Mostly, they live down here because we let them. Don’t plan to stay very long at first, but if their spirits are dark enough, compromised enough, they get used to our ways,” Smitty said, crossing his arms and resting his back against the platform. “But some of them-like your dead man-they still like the night prowl. Go up to steal food sometimes. Maybe swipe some clean clothes out of a Laundromat when no one’s looking. Take a shower in a summer rainstorm.”
“So this guy, who did he run for?”
“Anybody who asked him, Detective.”
“Someone stabbed him in the back last night,” I said, ratcheting up the urgency of our mission. “It doesn’t get more serious than that, Smitty. Was he a runner for moles, or for people above, on the street?”
“Stabbed to death was he? That’s sure as hell tied into his business.”
“What business?”
“Look, Ms. Alex,” Smitty said, coughing up enough of whatever was killing him to spit it out onto the tracks behind us. “When I was in charge of this tunnel-back when I had some juice-anything I asked the guy to get me from the street, he’d find a way to come back with the goods. Not my job to ask how, you understand? So you call him Carl or whatever you want, he was just a runner-boy to me. I had a craving for a Big Mac and fries? A carton of cigarettes? A new lightbulb or an old library book or a can of spray paint for me to draw with? He’d steal those things or hustle a few bucks to buy them. I don’t know whether he sold his sweet ass or knocked over your aunt Tilly to steal her purse. He got it done.”
Smitty realized he was snapping at me and backed off. “Now, he didn’t bother me and I didn’t know what he was up to. No doubt he was running up more regular in this heat. It’s a good time of year to escape the tunnels.”
“You called it business,” I said.
“I’m out of office, Ms. Alex. Kept my nose clean. Somebody on the street-your kind of people-somebody offered him a dime to do a job, that runner-boy’s likely to say yes. He liked to hustle. There are others here who’d know what he was up to. I didn’t much care.”
“So how do we find those moles?” Mike asked.
“Where runner-boy kept his crib,” Smitty said, taking the phone from Mike and staring at the lifeless image of his old neighbor.
“Where’s that at?”
“Last I knew, this runner-boy lived where it was easy to get in and out. Third tunnel ahead on the left, above the platform. There’s a great big hole in the concrete, almost gets you to the subway entrance if you can stand crawling through it, past the rodents and roaches. It’s got one of those old iron ladders-missing a few rungs.”
“Can you take us to it?” Mike asked.
“I don’t like to leave home. Officer Hank can find it,” Smitty said, turning to our underworld guide. “It’s near the wall where the concrete crumbled a few years back. Crushed that girl who was trying to get herself out. The city never patched it up, ’cause one less mole didn’t make the least bit of difference in the scheme of things.”
“I can probably get us there.”
“You know it, Officer Hank. Just south of that entrance on 47th Street. It’s the hole that connects to the Northwest Passage.”
FIFTEEN
I doubled back with Mercer, into the great train station, stopping in the restroom to scrub my hands and face before going outside and walking-first north on Lexington and then west to the corner of Madison and 47th Street.
The Northwest Passage was the entrance to the train system where the antique steamer trunk had been found-bleached out and abandoned.
Mike took the tunnel route along with Hank Brantley and Joe Sammen, hoping that Sammen might recognize other moles, men who were geographically closer to Carl’s turf in their underground lairs. Mercer told them we’d find a coffee shop near the corner of 47th Street and wait for them.