Edison's Gold (20 page)

“Oh, this?” Tom's dad twisted it off his pinkie finger to show Noodle the golden, circled rose pattern beneath the many-sided emerald. “It's a family ring. Never wore it before, but with everything that's happened, I thought it might bring us luck.” And with another nervous glance at the fare, he added, “But it sure won't pay for this cab ride, and we're losing time.”

He leaned forward toward the cabbie again. “I'm sorry, but would you mind getting off at the next exit?”

“Sure thing,” said the cabbie. “But I don't know how else you plan on getting to Fleetwood.”

“Don't worry about us. We'll figure something out.”

Once they were off the highway, Tom's dad grabbed his few bills of change from the driver and swung open the door. He now wore a determined expression on his face. Like a superhero.

“I have to get to my son, Noodle,” was all the explanation he gave.

“I couldn't agree more, Mr. E. But how're you planning to get us to Grand Central—flying carpet?”

“Just follow me.”

T
ogether, Noodle and Tom's dad raced across Yonkers Avenue, then took another left, which put them on Hayward Street, a narrow road just a few hundred yards from the parkway.

Halfway down the block, Tom's dad stopped. His eyes cut back and forth in search of something. Then he stepped off the sidewalk and knelt to examine the tiny opening in the top of a manhole cover.

Noodle scooted closer to watch. “Are you ever gonna tell me what we're doing?”

“If I explain it to you, Noodle, you'll back out.”

“Oh, that makes me feel a whole lot better.”

Mr. Edison pulled out his ring of house keys and sifted through them until he found what looked like a small,
nondescript key, the kind that might open a jewelry box.

“City workers enter the utility vault by using a lock pick.” Tom's dad hooked the key underneath a small opening near the edge of the manhole cover. “We'll have to improvise with a regular key. It's just a matter of pushing back … the … catch.”

Then he jiggered the key until something underneath the cover clicked, and he was able to wedge it up a few inches with his fingers.

“Here. Come lend me a hand.”

Noodle squeezed his fingers in next to Tom's dad's and helped lift the cover a little bit higher. The metal was heavy, almost a hundred pounds, Noodle guessed, and it took all their combined strength to drag it over to the side.

Below the street, a paint-chipped ladder disappeared down into the darkness. Noodle leaned over and could barely make out a maze of pipes, ranging from a couple centimeters to about four feet in thickness.

“I used to work for the city as a low-level engineer before I started at Alset,” Tom's dad explained as he descended the ladder, “so I know the whole infrastructure back and front. Up and down.” He was gone from sight
now, but his voice rose, echoing up from the depths of the cavern. “Noodle, hurry up.”

Noodle wasn't thrilled about this odd change in plans, but he didn't have a choice if he wanted to get to Colby and Tom. He closed his eyes, grabbed hold of the ladder, and began to climb down. If there was one thing he was accustomed to doing, it was following an Edison down a blind alley toward almost certain trouble and probable injury.

“Wowzie,” he said as he joined Mr. E at the bottom of the ladder, which opened up into a tunnel. “We're, like, in the city's basement.” It smelled like a basement, too—wet and mildewed, cast in concrete, with pipes crisscrossing all around him and leading out in all different directions.

Tom's dad was busy checking all the markings and symbols that were painted on the various pipes. “Gamma line, check. But we need to follow the beta line. Both empty into the Hudson River,” he muttered to himself.

“What do you mean, ‘empty into the Hudson River'?” asked Noodle, coughing through the dry lump of fear that had just formed in his throat.

“Each of these submains feeds into a main pipe. Just keep looking for the beta line.”

Noodle wasn't sure how that answered his question, but he did what he was told, brushing some rust off one of the smaller aqueducts. Its symbol was a Greek letter that looked sort of like a cursive
E
.

After a few more minutes of searching, Noodle broke the silence. “I see B,” he called, as soon as he spied a large letter B chalked in white across the side of one of the tunnel's larger pipes.

“Brilliant!” Tom's dad answered. “You found it.”

With zero regard for his jacket, Tom's dad bent below the dirty pipe to inspect its pressure gauge, his face and hands now completely covered in fine red powder.

“And when will it be an appropriate time for you to tell me what the heck we're doing down here, Big T?”

“We're going to get Tom and Colby, of course.” Mr. Edison reached toward a steering wheel–type device that was connected to a small circular door at the top of the pipe, and began to yank it left. “And we're not waiting in an hour of traffic either.”

Hissing sounds filled the tunnel. A thick jet of steam shot out from the top of the aqueduct as Tom's dad creaked open the rusty hatch.

“Ah!” he said as he took a deep inhale. “Brings me back
to my days as a junior engineer. Weekends, we'd all get together for aqueduct races.”

Inside the pipe was a rushing stream of water.

“Ready to give it a go?”

“I don't even know what an aqueduct race is, but it sounds exactly like something your kid would make me do.” Noodle took a couple steps back, unsure if Mr. E was serious with this plan. “And he usually has some pretty crazy ideas.”

“Just lie back and relax.” Tom's dad grinned. “It's easy.”

“Yeah. Piece of cake.”

U
h-uh, Mr. E.” As he stared down at the rushing water inside the anaconda-sized pipe, Noodle was starting to have second thoughts. “I love Tom and all, but a man's gotta draw the line.”

Without paying much attention to his protests, Tom's dad stuck one foot through the opening at the top of the aqueduct, then lowered in the rest of his body. Another moment, and he'd disappeared inside the pipe completely.

“Come on. The water's not even cold.” His voice sounded tinny and hollow.

“This is really happening.” Noodle shook his head in disbelief as he took a hesitant step toward the aqueduct.
He couldn't wimp out now. Tom and Colby would never let him live it down.

Eyes closed, he placed a cautious foot through the opening. Water rushed into his shoes. Its biting cold numbed his whole leg in a matter of seconds.

“Hold your breath and plunge right in,” Tom's dad instructed from the darkness. Like it was that easy.

“Hawwwwhhhh
 …
”
Shin-deep in the foot-high water, Noodle shivered to his core. He swung in his other leg, then plunged himself beneath the opening. Inside the aqueduct, Tom's dad, now shrugging off his Windbreaker jacket, kept himself anchored as the water rushed past his body.

“Double-knot the end of this around your wrist,” he said, offering one of the jacket sleeves. Noodle grabbed it, gritting his teeth as icy liquid pooled up around his waist and into his shirt.

“Keep your toes up and your body relaxed,” Tom's dad instructed. “Anchors aweigh!”

Noodle sat back in the slow-moving current and let it carry him into the darkness. Soon their bodies were moving through the water at a leisurely pace.

“Huh. Once you get past the initial hypothermia shock,
it actually isn't so bad,” Noodle remarked. He was even beginning to relax and imagine how fun aqueduct races with his friends might be, when a faint rumble began in the distance.

“What was that?” he asked, averting his face from the slap of steadily higher-rising wavelets.

“Hold your breath!” Tom's dad shouted. “We're about to merge onto City Tunnel Number One.” The water's flow quickly accelerated. At the last second, Noodle gulped in a huge mouthful of air, just as his body whipped down a steep thirty-foot drop, then swooshed around another sharp corner. Water shot up into his nose as he flipped and spun along the pipe's walls, clutching on to the Windbreaker for dear life.

“Half of New York's water … travels through … this very pipeline,” he heard Tom's dad yelling between submersions. “It feeds … over nine … hundred different—”

Noodle's head was dunked under the water. He frantically tried to resurface but was becoming disoriented, unable to tell up from down.

“Aaaagghhhh!”
He scooped some air into his lungs, then was swept into a rapid current.

The aqueduct fed into a massive pipeline over ten feet
in diameter. As Noodle's head broke the surface again, he began to cough. He was dazed, waterlogged, not a very good swimmer, and somehow he had managed to let go of Tom's dad's jacket. All around him, rapids roared past like liquid mountains.

“Noodle!” He followed the voice. In front of him, he could just make out the bobbing shape of a head as it disappeared, then reappeared between the foaming swells.

“Mr. E!” He coughed as water filled his mouth.

An undercurrent pulled him beneath the river surface, then hurled him down the pipe. He paddled against the heavy force, losing breath. His hands and feet churning like a blender, he felt like he was going to drown for sure.

“Don't fight the current,” yelled Tom's dad. “Just let it pull you.”

His body was telling him to panic, but Noodle went against his instincts and stopped fighting. To his surprise, the water spun his body calmly and dragged it with the current.

Out of nowhere, a hand reached through the frigid water to grab and pull him close. Noodle hacked and choked on the air.

“It's almost over,” said Tom's dad, just as the pipe took another hairpin twist, then another bend. “My apologies, bud. I assumed you were a stronger swimmer.”

“The Zuckerbergs are strictly land dwellers.”

Soon, a pinpoint of light appeared in the distance, and the stream rushed them swiftly toward the tunnel's opening.

As they sailed out of the pipeline's mouth, Noodle closed his eyes, held his breath, and prepared for the impact. His body slapped against the water like an awkward cannon-ball. His arms and belly stung as if he'd just taken a nose-dive into a nettles patch. Noodle doubled over in pain as he sank into the muddy depths of the water.

“Land!” He whooped the moment his head bobbed to the surface.

Several yards to the right of him was a long pier where a huge luxury yacht sat anchored at the far end. Stunned restaurant patrons at a riverside restaurant laughed and pointed at the boy who'd just surfaced.

Beyond the pier, Noodle could make out the sprawling skyline of midtown Manhattan.

“Where exactly are we?” he asked as he awkwardly treaded water.

“Pier Eighty-one,” said Tom's dad, seconds before
dunking his head into the river and swimming toward the shore. “Just a quick shuttle ride to Grand Central.”

“I hope the MetroCard machine accepts soaking bills,” Noodle called as he dog-paddled after him.

They hoisted themselves up onto the wooden-planked dock, and as Noodle staggered to his feet, he could feel his trembling legs almost give out.

“That was …” He sighed, unable to rouse enough energy to speak.

Tom's dad stared off into the distance.

“Let's go get my boy.”