“Sure, plenty of them. Why? What’s up?”
“I just got off a plane out at Kennedy. My grandfather, Seamus Bennett, has been missing since around ten last night. He’s eighty-one, white male, white hair, five seven, around a hundred and seventy-five pounds, probably wearing black priest’s clothes. He left the Holy Name rectory on West Ninety-Sixth and Amsterdam last night around nine thirty, probably heading west for my building on West End and Ninety-Fifth. We’re especially worried about him because he recently had a stroke.”
“Seamus?” Brooklyn said. “Oh, no. I remember meeting him at Naomi Chast’s wake. I’m on it, Mike. I’ll check all the local hospitals and precincts.”
I finally went through some sliding doors into the cold, grim predawn street. Above the curbside taxi stand, rain pelted off a fading rusted sign from maybe the eighties-era Koch administration.
WELCOME TO NY. HOW YA DOIN’? it said.
Luckily, I didn’t have my service weapon with me because I might have emptied a magazine into it in reply.
“I’m stressed-out, New York,” I mumbled. “As usual. Fuhgeddaboudit!”
Chapter 3
I was stuck in my taxi on the 59th Street Bridge staring at the towers of Manhattan in the honking suicide evening rush-hour traffic when Brooklyn called me back.
The good news was that she thought she’d found Seamus, but the bad news was where she’d found him. I had the cabbie take me straight to West 106th between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. Brooklyn was actually waiting for me on the sidewalk twenty-five minutes later, when my cab finally made it to the Jewish Home Lifecare facility.
“He’s fine, Mike. I was just in there. He’s up on eight, and he’s fine,” Brooklyn said in greeting as I flew from the taxi to the facility’s front door.
“He’s in a nursing home, Brooklyn!” I snapped at her as I went inside and showed the security guard my shield. “I don’t call this fine. What the hell happened?”
“Twenty-Fourth Precinct was called at around ten fifteen,” Brooklyn said as we maneuvered around an old lady in a wheelchair and another one lying on a bed in the hallway. “Somebody reported a confused old man on the uptown platform of the Ninety-Sixth Street number one subway line.”
I shook my head picturing it. Seamus helpless on a subway platform, wandering around as the trains blew past. Dear Lord, did that hurt. No, please, I thought, not wanting it to be true.
“He wasn’t wearing his priest’s clothes, Mike. He was in sweats, and he didn’t have any ID on him. When police questioned him, he got emotional, so they brought him here. It’s the biggest old-age home in the area, so they thought he might have wandered away from here. They also have an Alzheimer’s special care unit, so it was actually a smart move,” she said as we arrived at the elevator.
“Alzheimer’s?” I said, panicking some more as I pushed the elevator’s call button about eighty-six times. “Seamus does not have Alzheimer’s.”
“I know, Mike,” Brooklyn said. “I just spoke to him. He just woke up. They sedated him when he came in, but he’s lucid now. You’ll see.”
Brooklyn surprised me by squeezing my hand.
“Listen, Mike. My grandmother is ninety-one. She’s usually fine, but every once in a while, she forgets things. Stuff like this is going to happen going forward. It’s natural.”
“Dad?” called a voice.
I turned around and saw Juliana coming in through the doorway of the facility with her siblings in their school uniforms. Behind her were Ricky, Eddie, Trent, Jane, Fiona, and Bridget, holding Chrissy and Shawna’s hands.
“Look! Daddy really is home!” Chrissy said, grabbing Shawna as she jumped up and down.
“Juliana, what are you doing?” I said as I hurried toward the children and convinced the utterly confused guard that they were all with me.
“I thought everybody was supposed to be in school,” I said to Juliana.
“They are, but then when you texted me about Seamus being here, I went and got everyone out. Brian just left from Fordham Prep, too. He’s on the train now. We all need to be here for Gramps. Is he sick?”
“Is Gramps going to die?” Shawna said, tears springing up in her eyes.
“No, no. He’s okay, honey. He just got a little confused, and they brought him here. He’s upstairs on eight,” I said as I lifted up Shawna and gave her a kiss.
“Where’s Mary Catherine? Upstairs with Gramps?” Juliana said after I thanked Brooklyn profusely and convinced her that I had things under control so she could go back to work.
“Wait,” I said, changing the subject. “How did you get everybody out of school?”
“I cannot tell a lie, Dad. I had to forge a note with your signature. Well, actually two of them. One for me and one for all the munchkins. You have to call Sister Sheilah, by the way. She didn’t want to release them to me, but I was kind of pushy, I guess, and she finally relented.”
Under normal circumstances such chicanery would, of course, be a no-no, but this was a four-alarm Bennett family emergency. Juliana knew as we all did that rule-bending was allowable when it came to being there for a family member in need. Especially Seamus.
I gave my oldest daughter a hug and a quick fist bump as we walked toward the elevator.
“Forgery and lying to nuns?” I whispered to her. “Right out of the old Bennett playbook. I admire your technique.”
Chapter 4
“Michael Sean Aloysius Bennett!” Seamus said as we came through his eighth-floor room’s open doorway to find him sitting in a chair laughing with a pretty young black woman in Tiffany-blue hospital scrubs.
“And the whole squad! The Lord save us all, you’re all a sight for sore eyes! You’ll not believe what’s happened to me, gang. I headed to your apartment house yesterday evening and lost my way, and now here I’ve woken up Jewish!”
We all laughed as we surrounded him in a group hug.
“Well, it’s nice to see you, too, Father. Believe me,” I said, choking back tears as I hugged this old man whom I loved as dearly as anyone on earth. I could admit to myself now that I was convinced that he was dead. Bonked on the head by a mugger or fallen down into a Con Edison manhole. To see him in one piece was truly a miracle.
“I hope everyone wasn’t worried. I must have given you all quite a scare. I tried to call the house when I woke up, but it just kept kicking into voice mail.”
“It’s fine, Seamus. It’s all going to be fine. First let’s get you out of here, okay?”
“Mr. Bennett?” the nice young black woman said to me. “I’m Dr. Blair Greenhalgh, head of the special care unit. Can I speak to you in the hall?”
“Sure,” I said. “Kids, keep Seamus company while I talk to the doctor.”
“Mike, wait. Come here,” Seamus said, embracing me again. “I knew you’d come and get me.”
A scared look came over his face. I hated seeing it.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I don’t know what happened to me. I just got confused. It won’t happen again. Please don’t stick me in this place or any other place, okay? I’m fine.”
“I’ve got you covered, Gramps,” I said, giving him another hug. “I promise.”
I finally got out into the hallway with the doc.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bennett. I know this all must be quite a shock,” Dr. Greenhalgh said. “I saw from your grandfather’s preliminary medical history that he recently had a stroke in the right hemisphere of the brain. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” I said. “About three weeks ago.”
“Stroke survivors often experience multiple types of memory loss—verbal, visual, informational. They sometimes wander and get lost even in familiar places. Is Mr. Bennett on any medications?”
“Just cholesterol stuff.”
“Okay,” Dr. Greenhalgh said, nodding. “This could have been an anomaly. Sometimes memory problems just go away as part of the healing process, but in the meantime, you should try to really help you
r grandfather with establishing routines. Perhaps you could draw up a small notebook with emergency numbers in it to keep on his person in case he gets confused again. Exercise is great, as is keeping him engaged. That’s about it. I’ll get the nurse to give you my contact info and get you guys out of here.”
Oh, he’s engaged, all right, I thought, watching him through the glass in the door after the kind doctor left. He and all the kids were standing in a circle holding hands, heads down, their lips moving in prayer. I smiled as I stood there watching them. You can’t keep a good man down.
Thank you, God, I prayed along with them as I closed my own eyes. For all of us being safe and back together again.
Almost all of us, I thought, patting the note in my pocket.
That’s when it happened. Right then and there in the corridor, jet-lagged out of my mind.
I opened my eyes and was suddenly home.
Chapter 5
The forty-foot-long utility truck called a Supervac gave off a low grumble as it weaved slowly through the Broadway traffic in the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights around noon.
The size and appearance of a high-tech garbage truck, with a huge hose attached to one side, the fifty-thousand-pound industrial vehicle was used to clean manholes and construction sites. Fully loaded, it was tricky to maneuver in the congested city traffic, especially in terms of braking, which was why the driver was keeping it at a slow and steady twenty-five miles per hour.
The truck itself was about ten years old and on its last legs from wear and use. The newest thing about it was the fake decal on its cab door that said it was from Con Edison, the New York City–area gas and electric company.
The driver was a doughy, vaguely Italian-looking guy in his forties wearing a blue Con Ed hard hat with matching baggy blue Con Ed coveralls. The con was definitely on, he thought, raising his stubbled jowls with a quick grin.
Then, as the truck finally approached its destination at the southeast corner of bustling 168th Street, he suddenly pointed ahead through the windshield.
“Uh-oh. Problem, Mr. Joyce,” he said to the man in the passenger seat beside him. “There’s a cop car parked right over our manhole. What do I do? Keep going?”
Mr. Joyce glanced up from the cluttered clipboard in his lap. Like the driver, he also wore bogus baggy Con Ed–blue coveralls and a matching hard hat. With the Oakley Sport sunglasses he wore under his hard hat, all you could tell about him was that he was pale and had a dark, reddish-brown goatee.
“Of course not. We’re on a tight schedule, Tony. Just pull alongside,” Mr. Joyce said calmly.
“Pull alongside?” the driver, Tony, said nervously. “Are you sure we shouldn’t just come back a little later? It’s the cops!”
“Listen to orders, Tony. Just pull alongside and let me handle it,” Mr. Joyce said as he rolled down his window.
There was only one cop in the cruiser. He was a lanky middle-aged black officer, and he looked up none too happily as Mr. Joyce gave him a friendly wave from the truck window. The cop had his hat off and a sandwich unwrapped in his lap.
“Sorry to bother you, Officer, but you’re parked over a manhole we need to gain access to,” Mr. Joyce explained, trying to make his voice sound as American as possible.
“Gimme a break, would you?” the cop said, flicking some five-dollar-foot-long lettuce off his chin. “Why don’t you go and take a nap somewhere for half an hour? When you come back, I’ll be gone.”
“I wish I could, Officer, honestly. But this one’s a real red ball. Apparently there’s some kind of power problem at the hospital,” said Mr. Joyce as he gestured at the multibuilding NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center complex across Broadway.
The cop gave him a savage look, mumbling something about red and balls, as he lowered his lunch and finally pulled out.
After Mr. Joyce hopped out of the cab, it took them less than a minute to maneuver the massive truck into position. As Tony got the manhole open with the hook, Mr. Joyce removed a blueprint from his clipboard and knelt with Tony at the rim of the hole.
“Start jackhammering right there,” he said, pointing into the manhole, a little left of the center of its south wall. “Should be about six feet in. It’ll look like square aluminum ducting, the same you would see in an HVAC system. Text me immediately when you see it. Oh, and watch those electrical cables at your back while you’re working, if you don’t wish to get fried. Half of them are uninsulated, and all of them are quite live.”
“You got it, Mr. Joyce. I’m, uh…on it,” said Tony, repeating an advertising expression that Con Edison had used in their commercials a few years before.
“This is no time for joking, Tony. Just get to work,” Mr. Joyce said.
Chapter 6
When Mr. Joyce got to his feet, the other Supervac truck they had stolen was just pulling up to the curb. His partner, Mr. Beckett, climbed down from the cab in the baggy nondescript Con Ed getup with sunglasses. He could almost have been Mr. Joyce’s double, except his goatee was jackrabbit white instead of reddish-brown.
Without speaking, both men crossed the sidewalk and descended the steps into the 168th Street subway station. MetroCarding through the turnstile, they bypassed a sign directing them to the A train and found the concrete corridor for the number 1 line elevator.
“This station is one of the deepest in the entire system, Mr. Beckett,” Mr. Joyce said as they stepped off the elevator onto the bridge that connects the uptown and downtown sides of the massive arched number 1 line’s underground station. “We’re presently ten stories below street level.”
Mr. Beckett nodded. He was pleased with his partner’s automatic use of their code names now that they were finally operational. All the exhaustive lessons he’d given his young partner about tradecraft had definitely sunk in.
“Why does it say ‘IRT’ here while upstairs, on the A line, it says ‘IND’? What do the initials mean?” Mr. Beckett wanted to know.
“It doesn’t matter for our purposes,” Mr. Joyce said, frowning. “You will find it boring.”
“No, I won’t. I promise. We have time to kill before that fool Tony gets to the air shaft. I’m curious. You don’t think I enjoy your little history lessons, Mr. Joyce, but I actually do.”
Mr. Beckett was right. Science was Mr. Joyce’s forte, but history was his true passion. Since he had arrived in the country years before, he had found the history of America, and especially New York City, surprisingly rich and fascinating. He was looking forward to delving into it more deeply at his leisure once all was said and done.
Especially, he thought, since he was about to make a great deal of the city’s history himself in the coming days.
“The abbreviations actually mean nothing anymore,” Mr. Joyce explained. “They’re just old subway nomenclature, remnants of the time when the city subway system was divided into lines run by separate companies instead of the current unified Metropolitan Transportation Authority. IRT stands for Interborough Rapid Transit, while IND stands for a company called the Independent Subway System. You may have noticed the abbreviation BMT on other lines, which stands for the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation. I could go into detail about the three lines and how they fit into the subway system’s famous color-coded numerical and alphabetical signage if you wish.”
“No, that’s okay. I need to stay awake,” Mr. Beckett said and laughed.
“I told you that you would find it boring,” Mr. Joyce replied with a sigh.
“On that, as on most things,” Mr. Beckett said as he clapped his protégé playfully on the shoulder, “you were annoyingly correct, my friend. How does it finally feel to be out of the lab and into the field?”
Mr. Joyce watched as a pigeon suddenly flapped out and down from a tunnel ledge above them and started pecking at some garbage between the uptown rails. Then he shrugged.
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t feel. I think.”
Mr. Beckett smile
d widely.
“That is why you are so valuable. Now, give me damage estimates again in tangible human terms.”
“At the minimum, we’re looking at massive damage to the tunnel, shutting down service for months, and obviously terrifying this city like nothing since nine eleven.”
“And at the maximum?” said Mr. Beckett, hope in his bright-blue eyes behind the shades.
Mr. Joyce folded his hands together as he closed his eyes. Mr. Beckett thought he looked almost Asian for a moment, like a pale, goateed Buddha.
“We collapse a dozen city blocks, destroying the hospital complex, much of Washington Heights, and killing thousands,” Mr. Joyce finally said.
Mr. Beckett nodded at this pensively.
“And we go when, again?” he said.
“Tomorrow night.”
“So many decisions,” Mr. Beckett said, gazing north as a downtown-bound 1 train pulled, clattering, into the station. “So very little time.”
Chapter 7
“Dad, do I really have to wear this?”
Sunday morning around ten thirty, I waited until I heard the question repeated two more times before I looked up from an open old tin of black Kiwi shoe polish that I was using to teach Eddie how to shine his shoes.
The question was posed by Jane, who stood there in her lavender flower-print Easter dress. Her Easter dress from the previous year. Considering she’d grown about two inches in the meantime, she looked a little like Alice in Wonderland, suddenly enormous after consuming the “eat me” cake—or was it the “drink me” drink?
“It is a tad formal, I guess,” I said as I buffed at Eddie’s school shoes, “and, um, weird-fitting.”
“Gee, Dad. That’s really what a girl wants to hear. ‘What a weird-fitting dress you’re wearing.’ You really know how to pay a compliment.”
“Give me a break, Jane, will you, please? I’m up to my neck here. Do you have another nice dress?”