He got up and walked to a huge box on the wall spilling over with keys of every imaginable size and shape. “One of these in here …” The voice faltered a bit. “Right here, someplace.” He began to scratch his head. For over three minutes, he stood there studying the board, fondling, then rejecting one key after another. “I know they’re here. Gotta be here someplace. Harryl” he shouted in exasperation. “Where the hell’s the key to the fucking air-raid shelter?”
A black assistant custodian came over and gazed with equal consternation but, apparently, no greater sense of enlightenment at the cluttered key box. “Yeah,” he said, his head moving back and forth as though in prayer, “it’s gotta be here somewhere.”
Oglethorpe’s eyes were on the clock on the wall. By now, five minutes had gone by and no key. Five minutes during which, in a crisis, his planner’s mind told him pandemonium, sheer pandemonium, would be building up in the corridors outside.
“Here it is!” the janitor announced triumphantly.
“Man, you sure that’s the key?” his aide asked, squinting at a heavy key hung on a red plastic ring. “It don’t look like the key to me.”
“Gotta be,” his superior rejoined.
It wasn’t.
By the time they got back, over ten minutes, Oglethorpe noted, had elapsed.
Finally the janitor found the missing key skillfully concealed under three others dangling from the same bank.
It unlocked a huge, cavernous area, the ceiling interlaced by heating ducts so low Walsh had to bend in half to pass under them. Hung on the wall was a clipboard with a yellowed piece of paper flapping from it. It was a Civil Defense inventory dated January 3, 1959, listing the materials stored in the room: 6,000 water drums, 275 medical kits, 500 miniature Geiger counters, 2.5 million protein crackers.
Walsh’s flashlight swept the huge chamber’s horizons, its gloom unmolested by the few fight bulbs hanging from the ceiling. “There they are!”
Along one wall, under his flashlight’s beam, were thousands of khaki barrels and cases and cases of protein crackers. He tapped a barrel with his knuckles. It gave out a hollow echo.
“Funny,” he said, “they’re supposed to be full.” He tapped another. It gave up the same unpromising sound. The men began to tap cans at random along the darkened walls until it seemed to shimmer with the hollow echoes they produced. Not a single barrel was full. Some Civil Defense expert on that January day two decades before had carefully lined up all those barrels-and then gone away leaving them empty.
Walsh and Oglethorpe exchanged dismayed glances. “We better take a look at another one,” Walsh said, consolingly handing Oglethorpe the list of shelters in the neighborhood. “Pick one. Any one.”
The one Oglethorpe chose was in the cellar of the MacKenzie Explosives Company at 105 Reade Street. Their arrival was greeted with a certain undertone of consternation, the natural reaction, perhaps, to a visit from the police in an establishment of that sort. Its office manager, a young man in his middle thirties in shirtsleeves and a striped tie, smiled in evident relief when Walsh told him why they were there.
“Oh sure, that Civil Defense stuff. My father told me about that once. It’s down in the cellar.”
He guided the trio down two flights of wooden steps into a sub-basement.
They spotted what they were looking for immediately, neatly stacked against the wall in the midst of a bunch of old filing cabinets and broken desks.
Walsh stepped over and thumped a water barrel. It gave out a resounding bonk.
“Full up,” he reported.
Walsh studied the wall. Three quarters of the way to the ceiling, just above the level of the cases of protein crackers, was a wiggly yellowish line. The surface of the wall below the line was notably darker than that above it.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Oh, that,” the office manager replied. “That’s the high-water mark of the flood we had a few years back.”
“Flood?”
“Had water that deep down here for three weeks almost.”
Oglethorpe looked at Walsh. Then the bureaucrat ripped open the top case of protein crackers and thrust his hand inside. He drew out a sodden mass of yellow-brown sludge.
Any last illusions Jeremy Oglethorpe had about the current viability of New York City’s shelter system faded as they entered the next shelter on their sample, the Hotel James at 127 Chambers Street. The room clerk’s alcove was the clue to the kind of place it was. It was screened off behind bars and a partition of bulletproof wire-meshed glass. The half-dozen young men lounging in the lobby were out the front door before Walsh had completed his introductory remarks, which he had.begun with the word “Police.” The desk clerk had never heard of an air-raid shelter in the Hotel Jamesor, for that matter, any place else.
Walsh suggested that what they were looking for might be in the cellar. The clerk paled at the notion that anyone would be crazy enough even to think of going into the cellar of the Hotel James. Walsh persisted. With a shrug of incomprehension, the clerk pointed to a door across the hallway.
The two started down a flight of creaking wooden steps, ducking under heating pipes from which torn cobwebs and shreds of asbestos stroked their faces. Out of the darkness ahead came a series of quick, rustling sounds.
“Rats,” commented Walsh. “Nice place to spend a few nights.”
The lights switched on and a skinny little guy emerged from the shadows. He was wearing a baseball cap and a warmup jacket. All of the athletic insignia that had once decorated it had been removed. Now the jacket was covered with buttons, medallions, decals, sew-on badges carrying messages like “Jesus Is Your Savior,” “The Redeemer Is Coming,” “Let Christ’s Way Be Your Way.”
Walsh spoke to him. He replied in Spanish, a tongue made no easier for Oglethorpe to comprehend by the fact that the man had a cleft palate.
For several minutes he and Walsh exchanged words in Spanish. “He says he’s never heard of the Civil Defense stuff,” Walsh reported. “But he remembers seeing some stuff he doesn’t know anything about out in a back room somewhere.”
The little Puerto Rican led them through several back rooms stacked high with old hotel furniture until he came to the one he was looking for. Like a Swiss mountain guide trying to dig out a skier buried under an avalanche, he attacked the mound of junk before him, heaving his way through, mattresses littered with rat droppings, old bedsteads, box springs, bits and pieces of chairs and tables. Finally, with a guttural shout of victory, he flung away a last shattered chest of drawers and stood back. There, buried at the bottom of his pile of rubble, were the familiar khaki barrels and cracker cases of the old Civil Defense program.
Oglethorpe gasped in dismay. Walsh moved over to him and draped his heavy arm around his shoulders. “Jerry, listen,” he whispered. “Up there, in the Police Commissioner’s office, I didn’t want to say anything, you know? In this town, you got to let the big guys down easy. These shelters, ten, fifteen years ago, maybe they might have saved somebody. Today? Forget it, Jerry. They ain’t going to save anybody today.”
The Puerto Rican spoke up. “He says it’s his lunch hour,” Walsh reported.
“He’s got to go over to Brooklyn to hand out pamphlets for his church.”
“Certainly,” Oglethorpe said. “We’re.finished.”
The little Puerto Rican smiled and started off. Then, as though he’d forgotten something, he stopped and pulled from his pocket two of the pamphlets he’d be giving away in a few moments. He gave Walsh and Oglethorpe each one.
Walsh looked at his. “Jesus Saves,” it read. “Bring your problems to Him.”
He turned to the shattered bureaucrat. “You know, Jerry,” he remarked, “I think maybe the guy’s got something here.”