“It’s about time,” said Edward, whose interest in the entire kidnap affair was rapidly playing out. “We’re as rested as we’ll ever be. Let’s move on up to Patchen and see this thing through.”
William hauled out the charts of Pince Nez and pointed toward the thin blue line that represented their path. They trudged along, each of them calculating the distance in his head, until, five minutes later, they stopped once again beneath the street to reconnoiter.
“How do I look?” asked Latzarel, dusting at the insignia on his khaki shirt. “Southern California Gas Company,” it read. He pulled off his helmet and handed it to Edward. “I’ll scout this out and either give you the all clear or the danger signal. Be ready to act. Timing here is everything.”
“I’m still a little leery,” said Edward, “about the gas company costume. It’s a fine thing to wear when you’re pretending to be messing with a broken gas line, but what’s a gas company man doing popping up out of the sewers?”
“Nobody cares,” said Latzarel, waving his hand to illustrate no one’s caring. “It’s the uniform that does it. That and the key ring on the belt. Give me a clipboard and I could conquer the world.”
Edward shrugged, still skeptical. They listened for a moment for cars approaching up Patchen, but heard nothing but children, involved, perhaps, in a game of ball in the street. They heaved the lid off the manhole, and Latzarel climbed out into the day, flooding the tunnel with eye-searing sunlight. The lid clanked down, leaving them in blackness, pierced by the suddenly ineffective lamps,
The two of them stood without speaking, waiting for the signal from Latzarel. Slowly the darkness paled again. William crouched abruptly, aiming his headlamp down the tunnel. He pointed toward the ceiling. “Look there.”
Edward looked but saw nothing.
“There. About ten yards down.” William set out in that direction. Edward followed, still not certain about their destination. But there, not quite in the ceiling of the vaultlike pipe, was a trapdoor. Another was set dead opposite in the wall.
William pulled himself up the iron rungs and wrenched at an iron latch. The trap dropped inward, nearly knocking him loose. The bottom of an Oriental carpet sagged into the hole, and William ducked, reacting to its suddenly pushing in at him. He poked at the carpet tentatively, then, throwing caution out the window, pulled himself up, pushing up the edge and peering beneath it. He dropped it again almost at once. ‘This is it” he whispered over his shoulder.
“What?” asked Edward.
But William was already shoving farther up under the rug, yanking the thing aside finally and hoisting himself through the trap. Edward followed, finding himself in a basement room, musty and wet and smelling of damp vegetation. A circular pool built of cast concrete took up most of the dim room. A spindle-sided Morris chair sat beyond, beneath a tulip shade hung from a copper sconce.
When Professor Latzarel poked his head out he fully expected to see a surprised motorist bearing down, threatening to squash him. But the afternoon street was deserted except for three children who were busy knocking a ball back and forth with sticks as if it were a hockey puck. All three dashed toward him shouting, astounded at the marvel of his appearing, as it were, from out of the street. In a rush Latzarel hauled the lid across the hole, fearful that they’d get a glimpse of William and Edward below. They couldn’t afford publicity.
“Hello, hello, hello,” he said to them, at a loss, really, for conversation. Children had always been a mystery to him; they seemed incapable of speech. He pointed at his insignia to authenticate himself. He regretted almost at once that he hadn’t undertaken a more threatening demeanor, that he hadn’t attempted to put them off, but it was too late. One of them, a boy it seemed, whacked at the manhole cover with his stick, to show it he meant business, possibly.
Latzarel, in a sudden sweat, waved him off, fearing that his friends would understand the whacking to be some sort of signal. “No sticks now,” he said, feeling immediately foolish and hoping that children of such a tender age would simply react to his intent and not give much thought to the words.
“Why not?” asked the boy, angling in at it again with his stick upraised. The other two — a startlingly thin boy with almost no hair and wearing a shirt that read, inexplicably, “Meet me in Pizza Italy,” and a moony-eyed girl of two or three — went for the lid themselves, seeing that Latzarel’s emergence had become a sort of game. Latzarel took a swipe on the shin before waving his hands and stomping and chasing them off. They regrouped near the curb.
He smiled cautiously, fearful that his smile would be taken for enthusiasm, and wondered suddenly if the man in the t-shirt who had chased them to Squires’ house might be lurking somewhere, still caught up in the past night’s doings.
Surely the man was at work. But what if he wasn’t? How good a look had he gotten at Latzarel there in Squires’ dim living room?
The boy in the Pizza Italy shirt took a tentative swipe at the ball, sending it rolling toward Latzarel — quite likely as an excuse to rush at the manhole cover again. Latzarel scooped it up and tossed it back. “Very delicate equipment down there,” he said, advancing on the three, hoping that they could imagine equipment as delicate as that. The older of the two boys stepped in front of the little girl who promptly began to cry. The boy menaced Latzarel with his stick. “You old fatso,” he sneered.
The girl peeked out from behind, echoing the boy’s witticism. “You owd fatty,” she said.
Latzarel was getting nowhere fast, but the more time that passed, the more likely it was that any banging on the manhole cover would be taken as a sign. He held out three dimes on his flat palm, grinning — stupidly he thought — in their direction. It wouldn’t do to have an altercation. Better to let them beat the devil out of the lid. But they weren’t interested in his three dimes. They’d heard about that sort of thing. The boy with the enigmatic shirt howled, then broke and ran for it, disappearing into the door of a house some ways down the street.
“Christ,” said Latzarel aloud. He’d be taken for another Pinion, masquerading his advances to children with a false uniform. He tossed the dimes onto an adjacent lawn, turned, and hurried toward Frosticos’ house, straightening his uniform. The children, seeing him retreat, went for the coins, and were fighting like mad things over them when Latzarel disappeared into the bushes.
As far as he could tell, there was no one home. All blinds woe drawn, upstairs and down. The house was utterly silent. Ahead of him was the broken window and the meter box, the gas pipe newly repaired. He bent over in front of the window and pretended to inspect it, looking first back over his shoulder toward the street where some sort of commotion was progressing. “Damn all children,” he said to himself, and peered in through the window. Inside it was even darker than it had been the night before, now that the lamp was switched off. There wasn’t enough sunlight filtering through the dirty window to do anything but gray a little patch of floor.