Smitty turned to face us, making sure we all made it past the cardsharps.
“You heard about the other body they found last night?” Mike asked him.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the third rail, which was painted a bright neon orange and was painfully close to the trail we were taking.
“Yeah.”
“You know anything?”
“Like I told you, Mr. Detective, it’s not good to know too much down here. Private railcar, dead girl, big commotion. Anything that brings the man into the tunnels is a bad deal for us. We try not to bring trouble on ourselves.”
“That’s two bodies in as many days, Smitty. Must be some kind of talk.”
Smitty started to cough, grabbing his chest as he did. “Not so much. She wasn’t one of us, is all I know. The whole NYPD wouldn’t be taking such an interest if she was.”
“Not true. Carl came from your world.”
“So-so.” Smitty spat across the tracks, dislodging a gaggle of roaches. “Half up, half down.”
“You’ll let Hank know if you start getting information?” Mercer said. “We can pay you for it. Feed you and your sources.”
Smitty laughed. “That’s a whole lot of food you’d be haulin’ in. All I know so far is that the young lady here, she gave Dirty Harry a pass.”
“I-I didn’t really do-”
“You’re down with me, Ms. Detective. He didn’t hurt her.”
I was rethinking my own decision to tell the cops not to bother with Dirty Harry. My sympathetic instinct for a mentally ill man had overruled my usual concern about thoroughness.
Smitty had stopped talking and moved on his way again. We all had our flashlights on, stepping carefully on the tracks that skirted the active train line.
I thought of both young women, Corinne Thatcher and Lydia Tsarlev, and wondered whether they had been subjected to the torture of spending time in this underground hell. It was truly an inferno in this part of Terminal City. Filth and stench, rodents and insects, the mad and the disenfranchised, all dancing around a third rail that supplied a constant flow of electricity to the hundreds of trains coursing through here every day. The throbbing vitality of Grand Central and its busy concourses was turned upside down in this strange underbelly of Manhattan.
The path forked once more, and we again took the western route, separating slightly further from the incoming and outgoing commuter trains.
We trudged on, occasionally rattling some living thing-large or small-that got out of our way.
“What’s that?” I heard Mike ask, as he came to a standstill almost half an hour after we had started our exploration.
He moved to the left, one foot underneath the track and the other on one of the old ties on which we’d been walking. Then he reached back to grab my hand and move me forward so I could see-and Mercer behind me-what was directly in front of us.
“It’s a railroad car, Detective,” Hank Brantley said.
“I can tell that for myself.”
The enormous, windowless train looked like an armored tank on steel wheels. It was dark green, like a military vehicle, old, and covered with layers of dust.
The tracks on which we were walking had broken ties and didn’t appear able to support the weight of this mysterious train.
Mike approached it, running his hand across the side of it as though to remove a layer of grime. “It’s a relic, isn’t it? It must have been sitting on this siding for decades.”
“That’s because it was built for just one man, Mike.”
“The armored train?”
“The armored train and the special siding here. Track sixty-one.”
“Who was the man?”
“The president of the United States.”
Mike whistled. “Well, if he’s counting on this to spirit him out of Manhattan in case of a terrorist attack, he’d better send in a team to spiff it up. This iron horse isn’t about to make a run, Secret Service be damned.”
“Not for this president,” Hank said. “This train was designed for Franklin Roosevelt, during the Second World War. And so was this secret entrance to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.”
“We’re right below the Waldorf?” Mike asked. “And there’s a secret entrance?”
Hank pointed to an unusually narrow elevator shaft. “Terminal City ends here.”
THIRTY
“This was originally a spur that ran below an old warehouse and a railroad power plant,” Hank Brantley explained. “Those buildings were torn down to be replaced by a luxury hotel to anchor the terminal.”
“The Waldorf-Astoria. The Manhattan White House,” Mike said. He had disappeared out of sight, making his way around the presidential train.
There was a small platform between the train and the elevator shaft. Smitty sat on the edge of it, taking in all the conversation while eating one of his sandwiches.
Mike returned to the front of the machine and climbed the three steps to the door. He pulled on the handle, but it didn’t move. “Hank, how fast can you get someone to open her up?”
“There’s supposed to be a Metro-North security head meeting us. He’s just late.”
“Bad time to be late. We need to see whether Houdini made his way in here.” Mike kicked at the door and pulled the handle again, with no success. “I knew there was an armored car built for Roosevelt during the war.”
“First passenger railcar built for a president,” Hank said.
“The second, actually. The War Department had a special one made for Lincoln. Just too bad he didn’t take it to the Ford’s Theatre and sit inside it. What else do you know about it?”
“I’m afraid I’ll get it wrong, just like that fact.”
“I been on the tour,” Smitty said. “I know about it.”
“You what?” Mercer asked.
“Metro-North has a PR guy. He gives tours to bigwigs and stuff,” Smitty said, devouring a bag of chips. “I’ve heard his bit.”
“Like what?”
“This here is track sixty-one, like Hank says. Right through that hole is track sixty-three,” he said, pointing through an archway beyond the front of the train. “See that blue boxcar?”
There was indeed another rusted machine, which appeared to have been abandoned just next to the presidential one.
“Roosevelt was crippled,” Smitty said. “Y’all know that. But he didn’t like anybody to see that he couldn’t walk. So during the war, they made up this special train for him. Armor plating on the side and bottom and both ends. There’s only tiny little windows you can barely see, done with bullet-resistant glass.”
Mike walked along the side of the train till he found the slits of glass, wiping them with his fingers and trying to look inside. “Thick as mud. I can’t make out anything.”
“The blue boxcar held Roosevelt’s fancy automobile.”
“A Pierce-Arrow, if I’m not mistaken,” Mercer said.
“I’m impressed,” I said to Mercer.
“Whatever it was, that boxcar was coupled to this train,” Smitty said. “Last time she was used was the fall of 1944.”
“Glad you listened up, Smitty,” Mike said. He was back on the front platform, climbing on the railing to get on the roof of the car.
“See these wide doors on the side of the armored train?”
“Yeah,” Mercer said. “They look like they belong on the side of a barn.”
“They slide apart and a lift comes down. The president’s limousine glided right onto that and got hoisted up into the railroad car.”
“So nobody got to see that Roosevelt couldn’t stand up or walk unassisted,” Mercer said.
“There are actually gun turrets up here,” Mike said, pounding against the roof of the old railroad car. “You gotta take a look at this, Mercer. This mother was really loaded for war.”
“What happened in the fall of ’44?” Mercer asked Smitty. “That was six months before the president died.”