Suspension (66 page)

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Authors: Richard E. Crabbe

BOOK: Suspension
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M
att Emmons and Earl Lebeau had been working faster than they had anticipated. Using clay to anchor the charges was working better than they had hoped. They had their charges set and wired on all thirteen beams on the upstream center cable before Pat and Jus were down from the stays. They moved over to the upstream cable after the drunks had passed but found that to be slower work. They had to work hanging on to the outside of the roadway railing, using whatever handholds they could find on the cable and beams. They started to fall behind immediately. Matt was more terrified than he'd ever been. Not even the caisson scared him so much as clinging like a fly to the edge of the bridge at night. A ship hissed by below him, its side wheels churning the black waters into a milky gray wake. He looked down at it and was almost sick. He reeled and clutched at the cable, holding on till his panic passed. He and Earl worked their way slowly toward the middle. They had to keep climbing back over the side to get more explosives and clay.
Earl and Matt had just run back with a third sackful when they heard the wagon coming at a run. Not knowing who it was, they ducked down behind the cable to wait. The whistled signal brought them up like gophers from their holes. They couldn't see the cop but there was no doubt he was coming. Earl saw Matt looking at him questioningly. To stay put, or risk a run across the roadway to the cover of the promenade? Earl figured it was better to stay put, as uncomfortable as it was. The main cable concealed them pretty well, and
they could actually sit on the very end of the beams until the cop was gone. It seemed the better choice. He held his hand out, palm down motioning Matt to stay put.
The cop was taking his time. It was another couple of minutes till he reached center span. Instead of walking on, through, he stopped, leaning on the rail of the promenade. They could hear the striking of a match in the silence above the river. Maybe that's why the cop loitered there. The view at night was magical. Waiting for the cop to leave, Matt hung on, his fingers stiffening, muscles aching. While the cop smoked, Earl and Matt sat, feet swinging loose over the river. Not more than twenty feet separated them. Up in the tops of the main cables, cloaked in woolly blackness, Pat on one side, Justice on the other, lay flat on the cables, reducing their profile as much as possible. Neither of them moved a muscle. Even the mask of the night wouldn't hide movement, so they did their best to become part of the bridge.
Matt was almost afraid to breath at first, but the longer the cop smoked, the more at ease he became. The trouble was that his hands were cramping and his feet were going numb. The hard edges of the beam he sat on were cutting off circulation. The constant grip he had to maintain had his hands burning. His seat on the edge of the beam was so precarious that he had to lean back just a bit to stay on it. The minutes crawled by and his panic slowly increased as his grip weakened. To distract himself, Matt hummed old tunes, barely audible even to himself. Tunes from around the campfires of the war and from the long marches all chorused inside his head. He needed to do something to get his mind off his predicament. He hummed softly, desperate for relief. He hummed “Lorena.”
It was another couple of minutes before the cop continued his stroll toward New York. He went so slowly though, that it was more tortuous minutes before he reached and passed the New York tower. Earl scrambled up first, shaking the blood back into his cramped muscles. He walked unsteadily down the roadway toward Matt's hiding place, wincing at each step on his pins-and-needles feet.
“Shit, Matthew—thought that bastard was gonna camp out all fuckin' night!”
“Ooh, Christ … I'm stiff.” Matt groaned.
“Need a hand?” Earl offered.
“I guess. Not sure I can get up. I'm all cramped up in my hands … legs are numb too.”
“Hold on,” Earl said, hearing the scare in Matt's voice. “Wait till I get a grip on ye.” Earl hung over the big cable and reached down for his hand. Matt put
one foot on the lower lip of the beam and started to stand. His legs felt dead. He couldn't feel his feet at all. “Give me yer hand, partner.” Matt reached but as he did, his sleeping foot slipped from the lip of the beam. He went down hard on the steel edge, then off, into space. The one hand he still had a grip with couldn't withstand the jolt. Earl stood frozen, transfixed by Matt's eyes. They stared, wide as they would go, black holes surrounded by white. It was only for an instant, but Matt's eyes spoke of an eternity of terror. His hands, thrown out to Earl as if throwing a lifeline, couldn't span the widening gap. Earl watched as, in a flash, terror turned to resignation. Falling back into the blackness above the East River, Matt Emmons disappeared. Earl stared in disbelief. Matt had not screamed, as another man might. He made no sound at all, save the distant splash of black Yankee waters. Pat and Jus came running a second later. They had scrambled down too when the cop passed out of sight.
“Oh, Christ! Oh sweet Jesus, Pat,” Earl cried. “He was right here, he was right here. I had ‘im, I was lookin' right at ‘im, he was giving me his hand. Oh, Christ! We got to do somethin'.” Earl moaned, hopping from one foot to the other. “We got to get 'im, oh sweet Lord!”
“Jesus! He went without a sound,” Jus said, looking over the side. A slight grayish-white foam was all there was to see on the smooth black surface. “He's gone, boys. Just gone.”
“Don't we got to find him?” Earl said, looking from Pat to Jus. “We got to, right? He might be alive, he might—” Earl put his head in his hands, his fingers spread out through his wild hair as if to hold his head on. “I almost had ‘im too.” Earl said, reaching his hands out with his fingers spread. “He was just reachin' up when he slipped. Oh, God, I saw ‘im go! I saw his eyes.” He covered his own to block out the vision. “I looked right at 'im.”
“Earl, there isn't a damn thing we can do. He's gone,” Pat said softly, putting his arm around Earl's shoulders. “Damned if he didn't go like a soldier too!” Pat was amazed.
“Fuckin' right!” Jus said, the admiration clear in his voice. “Kept his tongue for fear of giving us away.
Jesus, that took sand!”
“He … set us an example,” Pat said softly. “After what he did, we can't quit. Got to finish.” With a last look over the side, Sullivan said softly, “Let's get moving.”
“Time for grief later,” Justice added solemnly, suppressing the chill that went through him.
Pat turned and headed back up the cable. He had almost been done when Matt fell. He needed to wire three more sticks then run his lead down the cable. That took another few minutes. They weren't good minutes. He found
himself clinging tighter. There was a tremor in his hands that he could not command. Within ten minutes he and Justice were done and helping Earl finish the charges on the roadway beams. Once they had been wired, there was one task left. Earl took the spool of wire, which tied in to all the charges on the upriver side, and hooked it to a long, bent wire hook attached to his belt. It was designed so the spool could unwind by itself as Earl made his way across on one of the beams beneath the roadway.
“You ready?” Pat asked, looking closely at him.
Earl, who had been silent as the grave once he had gotten control of himself, took a couple of deep breaths and flexed his hands before saying “Yup.”
Without another word, he went over the side, climbed down under the roadway, and disappeared. His feet were the last to go. He had them hooked on either side of the beam as he went across, hand over hand. Pat and Jus ran over to the other side, waiting by the beam, bent low, ready to grab Earl when he came back into sight. Carriages went by, but in the shadow of the promenade, the men weren't seen. A second later they heard Earl, grunting with the effort as he neared them.
“Give me a hand. I'm 'bout played out.” He panted. They reached and grabbed him by his shirt, one on either side, holding on as he carefully pulled himself atop the exposed beam. He lay there hugging it, breathing hard and staring down at the river. “Christ!” He gasped. “Christ!”
They finished the final wiring about ten minutes later, tying their leads into the main wire coming from the dynamo room. Pat was to be the last to go. The plan was to simply walk off the bridge one by one once they were done. Earl had gone first. He disappeared toward New York, vanishing like a ghost in the gloom.
“Can't believe Matt's gone,” Jus said as he and Pat waited for Earl to drop out of sight.
“In all the years in the cables … not one man fell,” Pat said almost to himself. “Now here we are … and we lose a man within an hour.” He shook his head slowly.
“He slipped,” Justice said to the unasked question.
Pat didn't say anything. He looked at his watch. “Well … Earl's been gone five minutes. Guess you better get along.”
Patrick Sullivan sat on the top of the truss that formed the railing of the promenade, watching his old confederate go marching down the slope to the city of the Yankees. This would be their last march. Watkins was gone. Now Emmons wouldn't walk away either. Pat wondered how many might die tomorrow. He looked up to the circle of stars, like a crown to the bridge. He
had helped build this thing. Was this how God felt in creation? Did the Almighty somehow share his pride? He thought that maybe it was so. It was like a living thing, this bridge. He could feel its vibrating heart through the cables. He wouldn't have a hand in killing it.
He couldn't thwart the others, but he'd take no hand in it himself. Justice felt the same, he knew. He'd said as much. Pat checked to see that Jus had disappeared beyond the New York tower, then turned, his pocketknife in his hand. He'd have to be careful how he cut Jus's wires. It would be bad if it was discovered tomorrow. Maybe with the stays in place, the bridge wouldn't fall. Pat was leaning over the truss, reaching under to cut the wires, his knife poised when he heard the creaking of promenade boards behind him.
“Just what the
hell
are
you
about, if I might ask?” a voice boomed in the dark, startling him with its closeness. Pat didn't need to look around to see it was a cop. He'd been so intent on watching Jus walk off and then feeling for the wires, he hadn't checked to see if anyone was coming from the Brooklyn side. He stayed for an instant, doubled over the truss, his face fairly hidden as he slipped his knife up one sleeve and tried to think of what to do.
“
Speak up, man!
What were you doing there? You sick or something?” the cop demanded.
Pat's mind, which had been racing to find a way out, latched onto the phrase as if it were a life preserver. He groaned in the dark, hoping it sounded sick enough. The prod of a nightstick in the ribs was his reward.
“Eh … what's that?” the cop asked, clearly not satisfied. “You're not sick,” he said skeptically. “What were you doing there?”
Obviously they were on alert, Pat thought. Playing sick wasn't going to be enough. He felt the knife in his sleeve but held that back as a last resort. A heavy hand slapped onto his shoulder, trying to spin him around. His panic doubled … tripled in the night. Turning away so his face wasn't seen, he rammed a finger down his throat as far as it would go. It was magic.
With a spasmodic heave his stomach emptied itself over the side of the trusswork, covering the wires underneath, where he'd tried to cut them. He turned toward the cop, vomiting on his shoes and himself too.
The cop jumped back as if scalded. “
For the love o'—
” he shouted as Pat staggered toward him, holding his gut with both hands. “Get the fuck—” the cop held out a hand to stop him from getting any closer. A second heave splattered on the promenade.
“Christ! Goddamn drunken bastard. Get the fuck off the bridge!”
Pat waved his hands apologetically. “Sorry.
Really …
sorry, Officer,” he said, holding back a third retch.
“Yeah, just get the hell out of here,” the cop said, stamping the vomit off his shoes. “Go back to the Bowery where your kind belongs.”
Pat staggered a little more, still holding his gut.
“Go on.
Git!”
the cop shouted, prodding him again with his nightstick from long distance.
Sullivan apologized again, then turned, weaving his way down the promenade to freedom.
And I a missile steeped in hate,
Hurled forward like a cannon-ball,
By the resistless hand of fate,
Rushed wildly, madly through it all.
—MAURICE THOMPSON
May 31, 1883, 5:30 A.M.
T
om stood before the door to Sangree & Co. The dream still lingered, the horror still strong like a smell he couldn't get out of his clothes. He had gotten up, needing to do something, hoping that by activity he could put his demons to rest. He had to go over the office once more. Actually, he'd taken the El south at about 5:00 A.M. with little notion of what he would do, just an idea that he needed to do … something. He'd ended up going to Peck Slip first, where he stood for some time in front of Paddy's, while the street came to life. Perhaps by going back to the beginning he could raise old ghosts or come up with new ideas. He wasn't sure. It hadn't taken long to get himself moving in the direction of Sangree & Co. He'd see what there was to be seen once more, he thought as he looked at the frosted glass of the front door. Then he'd go to work over at the bridge offices. He had to be missing something. These men couldn't be that good. Pat and Charlie had gone over this place before, and they were as thorough as any men he knew … but.
“What the hell,” Tom muttered, and kicked in the door with a tremendous crash of splintering wood and shattering glass. He didn't feel like going to fetch keys.
He stood in the doorway for a moment, surveying the place. There wasn't much to survey: A big roll-top desk in one corner, a couple of chairs, a coat rack, a shabby rug, and a couple of ordinary-looking framed prints hanging on the walls outfitted the front room. Everything was shrouded and indistinct in
the early morning light, giving the place a dreamlike quality. He took a deep breath and stepped into the dream—or was it the nightmare? This place seemed home of the nightmare. Things were planned and done here that he could only imagine. If such plans left a residue, some lingering trace of negative energy, they'd be here. Sangree planned right in this room, a room that echoed with the crunch of Tom's feet on the door's broken glass. There had to be something left, some lingering trace of insanity from thoughts and plans like that. He started to search.
It was dawn when Tom quit his search of the office and started on the meeting room behind. The desk had yielded nothing but a few pencils and an ink bottle, half empty. He'd even take the prints from their frames, hoping for some hidden information. He'd been disappointed. The meeting room showed even less promise. Its only contents were a table, maybe six feet long, and eight mismatched chairs. The sun slanted through the dirty windows, throwing a bright slash of color across the dim, gray room. Tom went about moving chairs and checking under everything. A look under the table revealed that there was a drawer on both ends. Tom's hopes rose for an instant, but there was nothing in one drawer and only a blank pad in the other. He flipped through the empty pages. They seemed to laugh at him as they fluttered in his hand. He tossed it on the table in disgust, raising a golden dust storm in the yellow slanting light. Tom watched, momentarily fascinated, as the dust drifted and swirled on invisible currents of air. Interesting, he thought … how a thing sometimes doesn't have to be seen to know it's there.
Tom looked at the pad, shining with the reflected light of dawn. Perhaps it was the angle of the sun, perhaps he was just ready to see what had always been there, but he saw the writing now, or at least its ghost. He picked the pad up again, turning it this way and that, angling it to the light to highlight the faint impressions on the paper. There seemed to be multiple impressions, one overlaying the other. He thought he could make out a word or two but wasn't certain. Tom went back to the front office and looked for one of the pencils he'd pulled from the desk. Softly he lay the pencil on edge and drew it back and forth across the page, highlighting the words. There was a lot he couldn't make out but some that he could. Most of it was disjointed: a word here and there and a jumble in between. But the words that stood out were like gold to him nonetheless. One word seemed to shine brighter than the rest: “dynamos.”
Within twenty minutes, Braddock was bounding up the front steps of police headquarters. He noticed the large yellow envelope on his desk from across the room. It must have been dropped there late yesterday.
“Hmm, could be your Uncle Sam finally came through with those service records, Tommy boy,” he said softly to himself. He'd guessed right. They were copied in a fine hand, in neat columns, with headings for date of enlistment, deaths, missing in action, capture, wounds, release from service, and date of parole. There were a number of pages. The writing was small and tight. It looked like it might be a long read.
The first name to catch his eye was Thaddeus Sangree, which was no particular surprise.
“The goddamn captain of the whole bunch!” he exclaimed, realizing for the first time just how far in the past these men had been bound together. A minute later he burst out “Fuck! That little clerk too!” A couple of the men looked over as he pounded his fist on the desk. “Son of a bitch! Been with 'em since the beginning,” he said to the papers. One thing was sure: He'd have to check these names against the list of bridge employees. There was no telling how many others there might be. He knew of six now, but there could easily be twice that.
By seven-thirty he'd rounded up Pat Dolan and Charlie Heidelberg, after telling Byrnes what he'd found. After his close call at capturing the two with the explosives, one of which was certainly Patrick Sullivan, Byrnes was taking the case more seriously. Tom told Byrnes too about the attempts on Mike Bucklin's life and the pad he'd found in Sangree & Co.
“Chief, what I'm afraid of is that maybe they've moved up their timetable.”
Byrnes nodded, stroking his mustache.
“We've got them on the move, sir. They've had to pack up and clear out. They're in hiding. They wouldn't be acting that way if they were confident.”
“Agree with you there,” the chief muttered.
“Remember,” Tom went on, “symbolism is extremely important to them. Why else choose the bridge?” He paused to let that sink in. “Chief, I think they're going to try and blow the bridge soon, regardless of what that clipping seems to indicate.” Byrnes didn't say anything at first. Tom sat silent while the cigar smoke swirled from Byrnes's first of the day. The chief got up from his desk and paced by the windows, his hands behind his back.
He turned to Tom after a minute.
“Take Pat and Charlie. I'll send word to the bridge police to render whatever assistance you need. And take Jaffey with you too.” Eli was chatting with Pat and Charlie when Tom came out of Byrnes' office. They could see right away that something was up.
“Let's go, gentlemen,” Tom said. “Pat … Charlie, you're assigned to me again today. Any of you know anything about electricity?”
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “Ben Franklin discovered it.”
“Great,” Tom said over his shoulder as they followed him out. “Ever consider vaudeville?”
The four set about skimming the employee list for matches with the service records of Company B, Fifth Texas. The lists of employees went on for pages. The clerk who'd let them in said he guessed over two thousand or more had worked on the bridge over the years.
“Christ,” Jaffey grumbled, “we're going to go blind looking through all this.”
“Don't have to really, Eli. We know that Matt and Earl were on the job until recently. Maybe there were others in the group that we never even guessed at. They could have just left, like Jacobs, for all we know. Any way to narrow this list down to the most recent employees?” he asked.
“As a matter of fact,” the clerk said, “Maybe the best place to start would be the list of men who were paid off and let go earlier this week.”
“Think we ought to take a peek at that, eh, Eli?”
Within two minutes the policeman had confirmed Patrick Sullivan and Justice Lincoln. Tom dispatched Pat and Charlie to check out their addresses. telling them to rendezvous later, out on the bridge. He had little hope of their finding anything, but it had to be done.
T
om was on edge. He needed to be out on the bridge, not cooped up in an office, looking over lists. They agreed to meet in a couple of hours. First Tom and Eli checked with the cop on duty in the New York terminal. He had only come on duty at six and said everything had been normal this morning. Looking at the night log, he said “Nothing much last night. Some drunk puked on Bob Brenner, but that's it.” Tom made sure the cop had the sketches of Earl, Matt, the captain, and Jacobs. He knew the chance of him spotting any of them was slim, but it was worth a shot. They headed back toward Brooklyn then. The cop had said they'd find his sergeant in the terminal there, and he had the keys to the power plant, generator, and dynamo room.
It was well after nine by the time they found the sergeant and convinced him that he needed to give them the keys to the engine room and the power plant. Even though he'd seen the telegram from Byrnes, he hadn't been easy to convince.
“Listen 'ere,” he said at one point. “Me men been patrolin' night an' day. We stepped up the schedule. Mr. Martin, 'e insisted on it. Nothin's goin' on 'ere me or me men' aven't seen nor won't see. Don' see why you boys snoopin' about is goin' to do any more'n we been doin' all along.” Eventually the Sergeant gave them the keys but sent a patrolman along to keep an eye on
things. The cop, Dan Monzet, was as new as all the rest of the bridge force, but he'd at least had some experience. He'd been a cop before, working way out on Coney Island, but it was too dull for him in the winter, he said.
“When I heard they were looking for men here on the bridge, I figured it would be a little more interesting than Coney Island in January. Well, here we are,” he announced. They stood before one of the huge arches, under the Brooklyn approach, near Prospect Street. “This building here's the power plant. The boilers are in there.” He pointed to the building beside the approach. “The engine room's through there.” He motioned to a heavy door in the brick wall under one arch. “That's where the steam engines are.” Monzet opened the door. “Nobody's here this time of day. They come in around four and get up steam in the boilers,” he said over his shoulder.
Tom looked around the big, vaulted room. Ten-foot-tall cast-iron wheels, with yard-wide belts running round them, dominated one side. Wires, levers, and a dozen different contraptions gave the place the look of a mad scientist's lab. He could imagine Dr. Frankenstein feeling right at home. He suppressed a shiver; the feeling of menace seemed stronger here.
Tom didn't have a clue what he was looking at, let alone what exactly he was looking for. He turned to Jaffey. “Any guesses where we should start?”
“Not me, Tom. Electricity gives me the willies. I don't understand it, to tell the truth.”
“Well, let's look around anyway. Obviously there's no goddamn anarchists in here, but let's see what we can see.” Even if they had thought to look in the junction box on the wall, they never would have spotted the extra wires or known their real purpose. They checked through the engine room too. The two massive steam engines sat silent, their pistons seemingly caught in midstroke. Each was attached to a cast-iron wheel that Tom guessed had to be about twelve feet in diameter, with spokes as thick as his leg. They drove the cable that would pull the trains.
“Tom, this is all very interesting, but there's nobody here.” Eli stated the obvious with a shrug.
“We don't know what the hell we're looking at anyway.” Tom sighed his agreement. “There's one thing we can do though.” He turned to the cop. When Tom and Eli trooped off, Officer Dan Monzet stood guard at the engine room door.
With Officer Monzet on guard, Tom felt a bit more secure. He didn't know how much use he'd be against the likes of these men, but at least he was a deterrent. They set out to go back over the bridge once again. Tom figured the more they were out on it, the better. They had walked slowly over to the New York side, where they carefully watched the strollers and sightseers parade by.
There were thousands, and after a while the faces started to blur as their concentration slipped.
“Sure would be a good day for sabotage,” Eli observed. “As if there was ever a
good
day for such.”
“Yeah,” Tom agreed. “Memorial Day's a big enough holiday as it is, but this bridge is like a magnet. Looks like half the damn city's here.” He wondered if he'd see Mary. He half hoped he would, half hoped he wouldn't. He didn't have a good feeling about this and preferred that she kept away. But he couldn't keep her from it on a hunch, not even a nightmare. He didn't tell her about that; he'd have felt silly for using that as a reason.
“How many died in the war, Tom?” Eli asked.
“What?” Tom replied, confused at the change of topic.
“That's what Memorial Day's all about, right, remembering the dead, I mean? So, I was just asking how many died.”

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