The Equalizer (67 page)

“Coming along nicely,” McCall said.

The man nodded and went back to work.

McCall ran faster, time eating away at him. He had just over an hour to get to City Hall subway station.

He transversed the bigger spaces, like metal parks, but all of them were deserted now. He climbed up onto the next half level and knew where he was. He ran down the dimly lit tunnel and turned into Candy Annie's dwelling.

She was sitting on her bed watching a
Dr. Who
episode where a young Doctor and his companion Clara were fleeing from monsters down a series of tunnels not unlike the ones McCall had just run down. When she saw him, Candy Annie grabbed her remote, froze the picture on the TV screen, and jumped up.

“Mr. McCall! You came back!”

She threw herself into his arms and hugged him.

McCall dropped the sports bag to the cement floor and put his arms around her.

“You want to watch my
Dr. Who
episode with me?” she asked him. “Matt Smith, he's the best one, so much energy, such great acting.”

McCall pulled her from him. She was dressed in her usual white blouse and long diaphanous skirt. The amber light shone through them. Full set of underwear. Her hair was freshly washed and smelled of lavender. The light haloed her hair and face. Her eyes were shining. McCall held her at arm's length.

“Annie, I need to find Fooz. It's very important. People's lives are at stake.”

Now her eyes grew troubled. “I haven't seen him since we came back from the cemetery. When was that? A week ago? Time gets a little fuzzy down here. I think he's been sick.”

“I need him, Annie. Do you know where he lives?”

“I've never actually been there. Fooz discourages socializing. Unless you're a Sherlockian.”

“Can you take me to his place?”

“Sure. I know my way around the tunnels. It's my home,” she said simply. “Come with me.”

She threw a multicolored wool shawl around her shoulders, one McCall thought she probably had made herself, grabbed a handful of Hershey's Kisses and a couple of Snickers bars, and moved quickly out of the narrow space. He picked up the sports bag. She led him down the long tunnel and then through a heavy iron door McCall had not noticed in the tunnel wall. She ran down some steps and along an abandoned subway tunnel filled with fallen bricks where part of it had caved in. She skirted around them, McCall right behind her, and climbed up some metal stairs to another door, this one made of warped wood. She heaved it open and McCall followed her into one of the big open spaces.

There were several people sitting in deck chairs on a steel shelf as if they were at the beach. Pale light sifted down from above. Some of them were reading, others were stretched out on blankets, a young couple in torn jeans and T-shirts were throwing a Frisbee around. The young woman waved to Candy Annie. She waved back, but didn't pause in her headlong rush through the echoing space. McCall felt eyes burning into his back.
Upworlder
. He gave the surrealistic scene barely a glance as he followed Candy Annie.

She ran down several more subway tunnels, looking up at the gray and green pipes that snaked through them along the ceilings, some of them very low. She was counting softly to herself. Finally they came to a set of concrete stairs that led up to another iron door. McCall found his breathing was constricted. Partially due to the fractured ribs he had taped up on both sides of his lungs. But mainly because of the air down in the tunnels: putrid, humid, and stifling. Although it didn't seem to affect Candy Annie in the slightest.

Once through the iron doorway, McCall found they were in a tunnel with brick walls on both sides. It was larger than most of them and had bright graffiti painted on the tunnel walls in a language McCall didn't recognize. It was like some kind of pigeon English. None of the words made any sense. But he wasn't reading them; they were just a blur of vision as he ran through the echoing tunnel after the girl.

She stopped halfway down where another tunnel was blocked off by large sheets of plywood.

“This should be Fooz's place,” she panted, finally stopping to catch her breath.

McCall set down the sports bag and helped her move aside the plywood, which was not nailed down, but just leaned against the opening. Fooz had to have easy access, but he obviously didn't want Subs wandering in for a cup of coffee or to shoot the breeze.

Candy Annie went in first. McCall picked up the sports bag and entered the gloomy, narrow space, lit only by the work lights from the big tunnel behind them.

It was like he'd stepped into a Victorian parlor.

There was a Victorian curio cabinet in one corner filled with porcelain bells of all kinds, at least a hundred of them. There was a Hammond Accent Chair, a Victorian chaise longue, a Coaster Victorian seven-drawer jewellery armoire in antique white, the drawers open, filled with junk. There was a Queen Anne Cheval six-foot mirror, a Pulaski Victorian cherry cabinet, an antique wooden trunk, and a Victorian rolltop desk with little cubbyholes stuffed with papers and maps and faded photographs. There was a Lucinda sleigh bed along one wall with a Victorian oak wine cooler beside it. Along one wall was a kitchen stove, a sink, and an old-fashioned refrigerator from the fifties when they called them iceboxes. Incongruously there was a large TV set, circa 1995, in the Victorian cherry cabinet, its glass doors open. On top of the antique trunk was a remote along with discarded editions of the
New York Times
from that month. There were several DVDs, all about Sherlock Holmes: the old Basil Rathbone series of movies, the
Elementary
TV series, three seasons of the British
Sherlock
series, and a half-dozen DVDs starring actors McCall never knew had played Holmes: Jeremy Brett, Peter Cushing, and Ronald Howard. There were floor-to-ceiling shelves along three sides of the room with a mixture of leather-bound volumes and stacks of paperbacks. The walls themselves looked like dark oak, but McCall knew they were laminated onto the concrete. There was a small passage that led to the back. McCall caught a glimpse of a tiled bathroom and a shower stall.

Jackson T. Foozelman was lying on the chaise longue, in his signature black jeans, black NYU torn T-shirt, and heavy brown workmen's boots. There was a bottle of Jim Beam Devil's Cut bourbon on top of the Victorian trunk, almost empty. A few cartons of takeout Chinese were littered on the floor, what was left in them rotting and even more rancid than the air inside Fooz's place. Candy Annie made a face and started to pick them up.

“Look at this! I ask him over to dinner all the time! I'm a good cook. Simple dishes, you know, I can't get fancy down here, but you'd be surprised what I can whip up.”

McCall wasn't listening. He moved to a kerosene lamp on a small Victorian side table. A box of matches lay beside it. He lit the lamp and turned up the wick. The yellow light cast a warm glow over the furniture in the makeshift Victorian room. Then he walked to the chaise longue where Fooz was lying and leaned down and shook him. He stirred, his eyes half opening. McCall shook him harder.

“Wake up, old man!”

Candy Annie dumped the Chinese takeout cartons into a plastic trash bin under the sink. She looked over at McCall, as if shocked.

“I told you, he's sick!”

“He's not sick, he's drunk himself into a stupor.”

McCall shook him one last time and Fooz groaned and half sat up. His skeletal face seemed more taut, as if the skin had been stretched even tighter across his cheekbones. He put a shaking hand to his head, his eyes closed in pain. McCall was familiar with the feeling, but at this moment he didn't care.

“I need you awake and sober, Fooz.”

Fooz opened his eyes, still groggy, looking up at him in his carefully appointed Victorian room right out of a Strand picture in a Sherlock Holmes volume. He tried to focus on McCall's face. He stuck out a trembling, gnarled hand.

“Dr. John Watson,” he mumbled. “We … we don't know a thing about each other.”

“Afghanistan or Iraq?” McCall asked, stopping the old man from tumbling back down into a prone position again.

“Afghanistan, how did you…”

Fooz broke off as pain obviously pounded through his head.

McCall turned to Candy Annie.

“Make him some coffee.”

“Sure.”

Fooz had a very modern Tassimo coffeemaker on the counter beside the sink, the kind that makes one cup at a time. Candy Annie opened the shelves above the sink, found some scattered Tassimo coffee disks, chose a Maxwell House and put it into the top slot in the coffeemaker and shut the lid. She took a Yankees mug from the small counter beside the sink and washed it and put it into the slot at the bottom of the coffeemaker.

By this time McCall had Fooz sitting up again.

“We don't know a thing about each other,” Fooz said again, his voice raspy and dreamy. It had taken on a distinctly London accent.

He wasn't quoting from the classic Sherlock Holmes story
A Study in Scarlet
where Holmes, upon meeting Dr. Watson for the first time, says, “How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” Fooz was quoting from the first episode of the brilliant
Sherlock
series “A Study in Pink,” where Dr. Watson, played by Martin Freeman, first meets Sherlock Holmes, played by Benedict Cumberbatch.

McCall said, “I know you're an army doctor and you've been invalided home from Afghanistan, I know you've got a brother who's worried about you but you won't go to him for help because you don't approve of him, possibly because he's an alcoholic, more likely because he recently walked out on his first wife.”

McCall didn't attempt Benedict Cumberbatch's brilliant Holmes's ironic throwaway monotone, but he knew the opening scene as well as Fooz did.

Fooz nodded. His breath stank of bourbon. His eyes were still half closed. McCall slapped his face.

“Wake up! You know who I am?”

“Mr. McCall,” Fooz said. “Of course I do.”

The coffee was ready. Candy Annie removed the Yankees mug, filled now with Maxwell House.

“Pour some salt into it,” McCall said.

Candy Annie looked at him, then found a package of salt in one of the shelves above the sink and poured a little into the mug.

“More than that,” McCall said. “Fill it up.”

Candy Annie made a face and poured more salt into the mug. She brought it over to the chaise longue. McCall thrust it into Fooz's trembling hands. He took one swallow and spit out the coffee.

“That's terrible. I'm taking that machine back to Sears.”

“Drink it.”

McCall took Fooz's trembling hands and held them steady. He forced him to drink the coffee. He gagged and spluttered, but got it all down. McCall took the Yankees mug from him and set it onto the trunk. Fooz's breathing had calmed. His eyes were clearer. He stared up at McCall, looked over at an anxious Candy Annie, then back to McCall.

“What can I do for a fellow Sherlockian?”

McCall and Jackson T. Foozelman had walked the subterranean tunnels many times, both of them discussing Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the merits and quirks of the particular Holmes's stories.

But not tonight.

“I need to get below City Hall station,” McCall said. “Right now.”

Fooz shook his head.

“Can't take you there.”

“Another cup,” McCall said to Candy Annie. Fooz looked at him. “No salt this time.”

Candy Annie found another Tassimo coffee disk on the shelf, Gevalia Morning Roast. She grabbed a chipped white china mug and put it in the slot, then popped the Gevalia Morning Roast disk into the top of the coffeemaker.

“You mean there are no tunnels that go that far?” McCall asked.

“Oh, sure,” the old man said. “We got tunnels going way beyond the Brooklyn Bridge. There are tunnels right beneath City Hall station. It ain't in use no more. Damn shame. Most beautiful subway station in Manhattan. Like it was a metro in Paris or somewhere. But some damned bureaucrat decided it would be cheaper just to shut 'er down.”

“Why can't you take me there?”

Jackson T. Foozelman didn't respond. The coffee was ready—twenty seconds. Candy Annie lifted the china mug off the coffeemaker and came back and put it into Fooz's still trembling hands. He sipped at it.

“Fooz, I don't have much time,” McCall said with soft urgency.

“That's Brakers' territory over there,” Fooz said, and he averted his eyes from McCall's face and took a swallow of the coffee.

“What does that mean?”

“Brakers. Not exactly a tribe, but there's a whole gang of 'em. Been living in the tunnels and passageways around that area since the 1980s. They're very territorial. They don't let any of the other Subs into their domain. You wander in there, like you're lost, and you don't come out again.”

“How many of them are there?”

“Don't know. Fifty, maybe. We leave them alone, they leave us alone.”

“Then draw me a map,” McCall said. “How to get there. Exactly where I can find a way up into City Hall station.”

The old man shook his head again. “You wouldn't be able to find it. The tunnels go every which way. Damned confusing, unless you're someone who really knows how to walk 'em, and you don't.”

“So you have been there?”

“When I was younger. Got into a hassle with some of the Brakers. They're all young, wild. Criminals, I'd say, forced underground.”

“Not an entire society.”

Fooz shrugged. “Probably some good ones, too. I don't know. I never went back.”

McCall stood up. He paced for a moment, his hands clenching and unclenching in frustration. Then he turned back.

“What if one of them gets sick?”

“They'll let Doc Bennett in.”

“Go get him. I need to talk to him.”