City of the Dead

»47«

A shaft of sunlight streaming through a barred window. The floor beneath it strewn with rubble. The sound of water dripping somewhere, and, all about, the damp, rather moldy odor of a building long shut up.

Sergeant Edward Flynn wanders through a labyrinth of empty rooms, the slow but regular clicking of his footsteps ringing upward through the four stories of dusty halls and furniture-crammed corridors above him. The building is an old one, built sometime in the final decades of the last century. Four stories. Red brick. Old pipes, festooned with cobwebs, traveling the length of the ceilings. Joists exposed. Paint peeling down the walls.

Beyond the dust-blown iron grating of a window, Flynn can see a jagged sprawl of skyline, a broad brown swatch of river, people rushing headlong about their business. Here, on the first floor, it is quite easy to hear the din of traffic, gulls shrieking and wheeling above the water, the great clanking sound of steamships, tied up in berths, being off-loaded onto the barnacle-encrusted piers all along the Lower East Side waterfront.

Flynn is standing now in what was once a recreation room. Broken furniture, one piece atop another, is stacked all along the walls. Here is a large, ancient console-model television, its wires disconnected, innards eviscerated and pillaged. There, in the center of the floor, is a Ping-Pong table, net sprung, listing precariously on three legs. Stacks of old magazines are tied up in cords and stashed all along the walls—Life, Look, Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post—publications long-extinct, out of whose faded covers peer glossy portraits of celebrated people, long since dead.

Flynn’s lagging footsteps take him out into another long corridor. More furniture stacked in the cool, dusty, mote-filled shadows. Steel desks, file cabinets, swivel chairs, water coolers, wastebaskets stored one inside the other.

Another turn, a twist, and then a long, greenish dining hall veers suddenly into view, rows and aisles of refectory tables, wood benches piled upside down upon them. At the head of the room, serving tables, steam tables, glass display cases, huge aluminum coffee urns, the scene, Flynn imagines, of many a Christmas past. The long lines of derelict and outcast, shaggy and unwashed, shuffling quietly past the steam tables, cup and plate outstretched. A bit of turkey and cider, a slice of mince pie, some warmth and companionship, a brief furlough from the cold, mean streets.

Flynn moves on slowly, almost dreamily, through the room. It is full of that musty forlorn air of places long deserted and fallen into desuetude. But the hushed gloom of it all is strangely comforting. His footsteps lead him nowhere in particular. What he’s looking for he cannot say.

On past the steam tables, through the swinging door, and into a huge kitchen in the back. More barred windows, these so high you cannot see out them. Scullery and cupboards, big, old gas ranges, zinc-lined walk-in refrigerated lockers, their doors hanging open. Then aisles of cabinets full of cheap white crockery, much of it cracked; shelves from floor to ceiling, with still an occasional pan, skillet, poacher—all battered, punctured, deemed even unworthy of common pilferage.

A sudden bang. Flynn wheels in time to see a board clatter to the floor and a huge gray rat wamble off into the shadows.

Now a dormitory, that saddest of rooms. Here numberless people, strangers all, lay down together for a night or two of rest. Aisles of rusty steel cots. Rusty springs. Mattresses thin as pancakes, with urine-stained ticking, rolled up neatly at the foot of each cot. An old shoe on the floor beneath a cot; a moldering suit jacket hanging limp and disembodied on a wire hanger. Naked light bulbs depending from long, frayed wires. At the head of the room a large plaster crucifix; an infinitely sorrowing Christ, His nose broken off, His toes nibbled by rodents, gazes down upon the scene.

The place still has the sour, fetid smell of the flophouse. Strong disinfectant, human perspiration, and filth. Flynn fancies he can even hear the endless hacking coughs through the night, the stifled cry of bad dreams or delirium tremens. He moves on, drawn ever upward into the thickening shadows.

Why am I here? he asks himself. What do I expect to find? This alleged Salvation Army figure seen by several shopkeepers as well as a resident of the neighborhood? They’d all said the same thing. They’d seen such a person going in and out of the shack near Coenties Slip. How in God’s name was he to find this person? And even given the miracle of turning up such a person, it was highly improbable that this would be his man. If such an individual did actually exist, then most probably he was a legitimate Salvation Army officer who’d stumbled inadvertently into that desperate little warren of outcast men and tried in some small way to help them.

No, the man he was looking for was undoubtedly one of the residents of that shack. One of the desperate, harried men who cowered there through the long, dismal winter months, feeding on scraps, panhandling an occasional pint of muscatel, and waiting for a break.

There must have been at least a half dozen of them living there at one time, Flynn speculates. They’d found at least that many sets of separate and distinct fingerprints. Starving, freezing to death in that unheated little shack, without sanitary facilities, no doubt they became increasingly desperate, quarrelsome, ultimately preying upon one another for small treasures—a crust of bread, a few coins. At a certain point they fought. Two of them were unlucky. Those were the two poor bastards they’d exhumed from the mud along the river. After the awful thing was done, the others must have then fled. Each going his own separate way.

So the man he was looking for, he was reasonably certain, would be an itinerant, a drifter. A man with no address, no next of kin, and a record of arrests ranging from common vagrancy right on up to assault and manslaughter. He’d seen enough of such men in his time to know the type.

Upstairs, on the fourth floor, he stumbles into an old music room and startles a fat, sleek grackle that had, no doubt, entered through one of the numerous broken windows. The frightened bird rises, the awful drumming of its wings whirring past the detective’s shoulder, and soafs upward to the high, pitched ceiling where it bats about, making its awful chugging sound and skirling beneath the eaves. Finally it comes to rest on an overhead pipe and, perching there, turns its yellow beady eyes down upon the detective. They stare at each other for a while, as if carefully taking the measure of each other. “Sorry, pal.” Flynn chuckles softly and waves at the bird. “Didn’t mean to disturb you.” He shrugs and turns. He really hadn’t expected to find anything there. But after days of checking fingerprints, studying mug shots, checking out leads that invariably terminated in dead ends, he was ready to try anything.

Out in the corridor once again, he starts down through the gloom, his slow, descending steps reverberating on the floors below.

Curious, how ghastly noise sounds in a deserted place where none should be. Especially one’s own noise, as if the mere sound of it made one suddenly vulnerable. Flynn tries to step more lightly, to go down more slowly, to reduce his own noises.

Down he goes, and still there is that sound of dripping water, loud, regular, and echoing through the cavernous structure. But here, on the third floor, it seems loudest of all.

Inexplicably he veers toward the sound, never having intended to, drawn toward it as if tugged forward on some invisible leash. For Edward Flynn is a finicky man. Parsimonious and rather compulsive. The sort of man who straightens wall pictures and turns out electric lights in unoccupied rooms. The dripping, profligate water tap needs his immediate attention.

His steps lead him past a succession of small, cell-like rooms, austerely furnished but better appointed than the dormitories. Better beds, thicker mattresses, a small bureau, a night table, a standard mail-order lounging chair, and a floor lamp in each. Identically furnished; one indistinguishable from the next. And each with its own private lavatory.

Undoubtedly staff quarters, Flynn reasons, and enters one of the lavatories. A sink, a wall mirror, a toilet, a stall shower. All very correct, utilitarian. All as uniform and unimaginative as the bedroom. Smiling, he gazes at the dripping faucet, as if he, the detective, had tracked the criminal to his lair. He walks slowly toward it. The spigot is cold and clammy to the touch, beaded with sweat. “Washer’s shot,” he murmurs to himself, twisting back hard on the faucet handle as far as it will go. Still he cannot get the drip to stop.

Although he’s late now, due to report back to the precinct within the hour, the drip has nevertheless become something of a cause for him. He stands there, scratching his head, pondering a solution. If only he had a wrench—

In the next moment he twists the faucet full on and a rush of clear cold water gushes noisily into the sink.

“Now that is odd,” he muses, turning the spigot off so that it settles once more into its steady drip. Not the gush, of course, but the fact that the water in a building shut up for ten years has never been turned off. And something more—that clear cold gush of water. Taps that have gone unused for a decade are invariably rusty. When first turned on, they tend to cough and spit. And the first water to flow out of them is usually rusty, full of sediment, and putrid.

“Odd,” he murmurs once more, suddenly seeing his own gray, puzzled face peering back at him from a mirror above the sink. The mirror is the door of a medicine cabinet. Jerking it open, he sees a half-dozen roaches disporting themselves on the back wall of the cabinet. The sudden intrusion of light sends them all off in different directions, scurrying for cracks.

Left there now are three dusty glass shelves with a meager scattering of abandoned toiletries—old bottles of prescription medicines, an eyecup, a mug of shaving cream, an injector razor, a beaver-brush applicator, and a toothbrush.

It is the injector razor that first attracts Flynn’s eye. Not that it is in any way an unusual inject razor. The model is a fairly common well-known brand name—a Gillette Trac II. Ordinary enough, but not the kind of razor one associates with a decade ago. This, to Detective Sergeant Edward Flynn, has a fairly current ring to it. Also, the blade is by no means rusty. On the contrary, it looks rather fresh.

And then, the beaver-brush applicator. Damp, rather wettish to the touch. Now that is odd, he thinks.

Shortly after he leaves the old South Street shelter, clapping shut the big brass padlock on the front gate, Flynn ducks into a coffee-shop phone booth. In the next moment or so he is talking once more with General Pierce at the Army’s division headquarters. Had the Army made any provision for keeping a watchman on the premises of the old shelter at night, he inquires of the General, and is promptly informed that no such provision is now or, indeed, was ever in force.