Agnes Among the Gargoyles (48 page)

   "What
is
that?" he asks.

   "City Hall," says Agnes. "The original station. First one in the subway system. It's too small to be used now, but trains pass through it every day. God, isn't it beautiful?"

   With its barrel vaults and faded mosaics, it is a fascinating bit of frozen history. It looks like no other subway stop Agnes has ever seen. It seems to have been built on a smaller, more delicate scale.

   "I've always wanted to see this," says Agnes. "I need a better look."

   Tommy follows as Agnes slips between cars. She cranes her neck to see as much of the platform as she can. Tommy disconnects the safety chains strung between the cars, and they step out onto the platform.

   Agnes giggles with excitement. "Are we allowed?"

   "You forget that I'm the law."

   The basketwoven vaults give the station a Moorish feel. Purple light enters from the glass windows in the roof; Agnes knows the windows to be embedded in the grass of City Hall Park.

   "It's stunning," she says.

   "You don't have to whisper," Tommy teases her. "We're not in church."

   In his formal dress, Tommy looks as though he just stepped out of a turn-ofthe-century postcard.

   The train pulls out of the station.

   Agnes doesn't care. She doesn't care if she misses No Diamonds Please. She doesn't care if she ever gets out of the City Hall station. With the modern train— and its garish fluorescent glow—gone, the experience is complete.

   Agnes examines some carvings, and comes upon a half-opened steel door. She peeks inside. There are three workmen crouched around an opening in the wall. Agnes notices a suitcase and gym bag. The workmen all wear blue denim shirts.

   "Excuse me?" says Agnes. "Is there an emergency exit?"

   One wheels around. He is wearing a stocking mask. Agnes thinks of every possible explanation, from the chilly air in these old tunnels to the need for protection from asbestos fibers. She only arrives at the correct hypothesis when a long pistol is taken out and pointed at her.

   Not a word is spoken for a long time.

   Another man in a blue shirt and stocking mask enters the passageway. He doesn't see Agnes at first. When he nearly knocks her over he lets out a started cry.

   His four-fingered hand flies to his chest.

   "Blimey!" he cries.

Mr. Parker leads away the man and woman who have stumbled into them. When they are gone, Spock slaps Bezel on the shoulder.

   "You and your vow of silence," says the kid. "I should have known."

   "I lost my head," Bezel admits.

   "Why do I listen to you?"

   Bezel squats down beside Faure. "What's the matter?"

   "I can only push this panel in a crack," says Faure. "Something's blocking it."

   Bezel turns to the kid.

   The kid shrugs. "There was a flood here in the Sixties. Probably lots of water damage. The TA might not have had the money for a complete repair. They probably put up a false wall."

   "Do we need to blast?" Bezel asks Faure.

   "We should drill first."

   "Okay," says Bezel nervously. "We're running late. Fifteen minutes of drilling, the we blast."

   Faure looks at the ceiling. "I'm afraid of a cave-in."

 "Are you kidding?" says the kid, indignant.    "These stations are stronger than that. Cave-in? I ought to kick your ass for saying that."

   "What time is it?" says Bezel.

   "Seven-oh-four."

   "In three hours we'll be rich," says Bezel. "In four we'll be safe. In six we'll be asleep."

Instead of drinking champagne at No Diamonds Please, Agnes finds herself in the hands of thugs, lying on the cold tiles in a dark corner of the station, tied so tightly that it hurts, with what must be a whole roll of tape wrapped around her mouth and eyes.

   She knows that she will die.

   Hours pass. Trains continue to roll through the turnaround loop.

   Eventually there is quiet. Agnes writhes on the station floor. She grunts at Tommy, who grunts back. The tape is loose from her eyes; Agnes can peer down her cheeks and see the dim station and the heap that is Tommy. The thought of freedom has reasserted itself in her mind. She thinks that perhaps they will be spared.

   Tommy struggles to his feet. He's loose, thank God.

   He unwraps the tape from around Agnes's ankles. He pushes her legs apart and pulls down her underwear and fucks her. He really does fuck her, full penetration and everything. Agnes tries to tell him to stop, but she can't make herself understood. He doesn't seem to be listening anyway.

On the evening of September 10
^th
, in a daring strike on the Herald Building on Park Row, four—or perhaps five—men in identical stocking masks and denim shirts descended on a set of fifth floor offices and stole 2.4 million dollars worth of jewelry from a vault being used by the jewelry firm of Oscar Heyman & Brothers. The jewelry was on loan for that evening's No Diamonds Please affair. Security in and around the building was heavy, but that was of no concern to the gang, who bypassed it all. entering and leaving via a staircase whose existence no one else was aware of.

   "It's hidden behind a wall, at the southeast corner of the building," explains J.B. Barry, the maintenance chief, after the heist. "It's narrow and steep, like stairs going up to an attic. None of the ducts or plumbing or wiring are near it, so no one ever ran across it. The oddest thing is that it's not even on the original blueprints."

   The answer to that puzzle comes from Irving Koenitz, the August V. Heckscher Professor of History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. "James Bennett Jr., who built the Herald Building in 1875, considered selling it twenty years later. To get a better price, he did some quiet renovations. He put in elevators, and sealed off the stairway in question, which had never been used much anyway. He changed as many documents as he could so the building would appear to have been constructed in 1880. He even had the blueprints redrawn. In those days, you could get away with that sort of thing."

   The mechanics of the robbery were simplicity itself. After ascending the hidden staircase and emerging on the fifth floor, two gang members wearing the uniforms of the Excelsior Security Company appeared at the offices being used by Oscar Heyman & Brothers a little before six o'clock, when a relief crew was due to arrive. Once inside, they waited for the genuine relief men. It took no more than ten minutes for the robbers to handcuff everyone, sweep up the jewels, and vanish.

   "They had an easy time of it," says Mr. Barry. "Those fellows didn't break a sweat."

   And how did the gang reach the hidden staircase in the first place? Through a passage connecting with the old City Hall subway station, no longer in use. Professor Koenitz again: "When the IRT subway was built, Bennett was convinced it would be a failure. He thought that once it failed, he could arrange to keep his private railroad car on the tracks, and navigate around the city as his whim dictated. Of course, the IRT was an immediate success, so nothing came of the plan. But a tunnel from the Herald Building was built.

   Though the City Hall stop is not in regular use, trains do pass by it on a turnaround loop, and police theorize that the gang may have ridden one of those trains into the station.

   "Maybe one of them works for the MTA," says Chief of Detectives Larry Codd. "We haven't ruled it out. A man on the inside would be very helpful for this kind of job."

   "Maybe a transit cop," counters a reporter.

   "Maybe," says the Chief, then thinks better of it. "Now don't you go printing that or anything."

   "After the robbery, we think they went back to the City Hall station," says Michael Harrington, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transit Authority. "They probably walked the loop tracks and strolled into the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall IRT station. Anyone who took any notice at all would have assumed them to be a work gang. At that point, they probably split up. Maybe they took the subway home! It is convenient and quick."

   The gang got away with twenty-one pieces, including an art nouveau gold, enamel and ruby water nymph brooch signed by Rene Lalique; an art deco jade, lapis lazuli and emerald pendant; a pair of chandelier design caliber-cut emerald and sapphire ear pendants; and a sapphire cocktail ring. Ironically, the haul was smaller than it might have been on some other night, as the theme of the evening's festivities was No Diamonds Please. The purpose of the cotillion, according to Sarah Wegeman, daughter of Madelaine and Ronald Wegeman and vicepresident of the No Diamonds Please Association, was to call attention to the plight of South Africa. The robbers did get away with one diamond piece—an art deco diamond-encrusted garter, which was to be worn secretly as a kind of silent protest by one of the guests who was not in complete sympathy with the politics of the evening.

   The figure of 2.4 million dollars puts this robbery at 17th in New York City's history.

Newspaper in hand, Bezel approaches the apartment building with the slateblue bricks and fire escapes like Neapolitan terraces. The landlady, Mrs. Edison, lets him in and shows him the room.

   Bezel is having a grand joke at the Frenchman's expense, for this is the Frenchman's old room.

 "Lovely," says Bezel. "I'm surprised it's available."

   Mrs. Edison frowns. "Sad to say, Mr. Bezel, I've had a run of bad luck with this rental, tenant-wise."

   "How unfortunate. You have some fine pieces here," says Bezel as he examines a rolltop desk.

   "That belonged to my last tenant, Mr. Maxwell. Died of a stroke or something while he was sitting at it. He was paying his Con Ed bill. There was no family, so I had to take care of everything." She looks at Bezel with suspicion. "You have a family, I hope, Mr. Bezel."

   "Oh yes," he says brightly. "Children and grandchildren scattered everywhere. The sun never sets on the Bezels."

   "That's a relief."

   "I admire that end table greatly," says Bezel. In truth, he thinks it grotesquely ugly. It is a three-legged table. each leg is the tail of an snake; the central shaft is a braid of the three bodies. The tabletop sits like a mortarboard on the snake's heads.

   "That belonged to my last fellow but one," says Mrs. Edison. "French guy. Skipped out. Left one day and never came back. Because of him, Mr. Bezel, there can be no advances on room rent. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is."

   Bezel pays three months rent in advance and Mrs. Edison coos like a schoolgirl. He unpacks and showers and, flagrantly violating Mrs. Edison's antismoking ordinances, lights a victory cigar.

   They really pulled it off. The police don't seem to have a clue. Each member of the group holds five pieces of booty except Bezel, who holds six.

   Bezel and Mrs. Edison get along famously. The other tenants are typical residents of the Lower East Side—waiters from restaurants even worse than Barnett's, elderly Polish men, drag queens, transients, outcasts. On Bezel's floor like a pair of Orientals—Chinese? Japanese? Bezel hasn't the vaguest notion which— somehow involved in the arts. They dress in black and carry those big portfolios and wear shoes like cinderblocks. They must be queers. One is pleasant, one moody. They fight a lot.

   One afternoon, Bezel steps into the hallway to make a call. The moody one is on the phone. Bezel sits in the armchair and waits his turn.

   "...I know the rent is cheap. I know this is what I can afford. I know an artist has to make sacrifices. But I look at everyone around me and I want to commit suicide. Surely this isn't a healthy environment for creativity...No, I'm not exaggerating. It's like living in the morgue...I'd like to move back to the Village or Soho or someplace. Anywhere but this outpost of slow death...I know it's expensive. I know I'll have to work more, I know that. But I'd be revitalized. What I painted might be worth something...Chloe, can you hang on a second?"

He turns to Bezel. "I'll be on quite a while."

    "Fine. I'll wait."

   "Can I call you back?" he asks Chloe. He is miffed. He hangs up and shuffles back to his room.

   Bezel dials Mr. Parker's number.

   "Hello?" Parker sounds more nervous than usual.

   "It's me."

   "I've been waiting."

   "These things take time," says Bezel. "But we're ready."

   Mr. Parker has a fit of coughing.

   "Excuse me," he says. "Where and when?"

 "Three o'clock tomorrow morning. In Staten Island. Near the slip—you know the place."

   "Oh, man. I hate it there."

   "It's remote. It's good," says Bezel.

   "What's with Staten Island? We're
always
going to Staten Island."

   "Just once more. And for God's sake, don't forget to bring your five-pack."

   Bezel goes out for dinner at a little Italian place. He has spaghetti with red clam sauce and a bisque tortoni. It really is too bad about Mr. Parker. It is an unfortunate axiom of the business that the inside man is always a potential liability. It would have been better for Mr. Parker to have stayed a subway conductor, minded his business, collected his pension.

   Bezel bears Mr. Parker no ill will. He was actually hoping that Mr. Parker would take his share of the jewelry and run off. It would have saved him some trouble.

   At two o'clock, when he is sure Mr. Parker is on his way to the meeting place, he calls Faure and the kid. They arrange to meet tomorrow. And Bezel will have a surprise for them: they will both get two extra pieces. Bezel will take one more. They will then each have seven. What could be fairer?