Liberty Falling-pigeon 7 (12 page)

"Nobody claimed her." Hatch took another lungful of smoke.

"So you said."

"Did you hear anybody has ID'd her?"

"I haven't," Anna replied.

"It bothers me, her layin' in a morgue somewhere all naked and cold and nobody to take her home. Know what I mean?"

Anna didn't. Dead was dead. What difference did it make how the body was dressed or where it lay? To be polite, she made a friendly noise.

"Not even a name to put on a headstone. You hear a name at all?"

Anna shook her head.

"You'd tell me if you heard?"

"Sure. I'd tell you."

"Not even knowing who she was, it's kind of got to me."

Anna could see that it had. Hatch's hands trembled, palsied like a very old man's, as he smothered his cigarette butt in the tin of Waldorf sand and buttoned it back into his breast pocket. He had all the symptoms of a deeply troubled soul. Anna ran her hand down over the back of her neck, but the little hairs wouldn't lie all the way down. This fixation of his, the child's identity--Anna couldn't tell if he was genuinely obsessed with finding out who the dead girl was or desperate to ascertain that others had not.

Either way, she didn't much want to be alone with him in the dark any longer.

8

Patsy was waiting when Anna got back to the house. Either by choice or circumstance, Mandy was marooned on Manhattan Island for the night. Both developments suited Anna. She was glad not to be alone, but in no mood for Patsy's roommate. Patsy brought some excellent rigatoni left over from her supper at the Supreme Macaroni Company on Ninth Avenue and a summons from above. Trey Claypool requested Anna's presence in his office on Ellis Island "at her convenience no later than eight-thirty" the following morning.

Sleep kindly stopped by for Anna shortly after midnight, and such was the wimpiness of the Bud Lights that she slept undisturbed by alcohol jitters. Curious what transgression had gotten her called on the Assistant Superintendent's carpet, she rode over to Ellis on the eight a.m. staff boat with Patsy.

Because of the recent and beautifully executed renovation and restoration of the building housing the Registry Hall, the work spaces were nice enough by normal standards and positively lavish by NPS standards. Offices were situated on either side of a wide, high-ceilinged hall that led from the old powerhouse, through the nonpublic areas, to open onto the famous "kissing post." The kissing post was a pillar at the bottom of an open staircase connecting the second-floor Registry Hall with the first-floor business section where train and boat connections to a new life were made. Families meeting immigrants weren't allowed into the registry area. The first time they saw their loved ones was descending those stairs. The first chance they had to lay hands--or lips--on them was the pillar at the bottom. Hence, the "kissing post."

Two sets of double doors, like the air lock in a submarine--or, according to the noise-bedeviled interpreters who worked in the museum, a noise lock cutting off the din of excited voices echoing in the enormous tiled room--separated the pragmatic infrastructure of the island's management from the drama and romance of its past.

The official parts of the building were carpeted in a surprisingly un-bureaucratic peach color. Walls were off-white, rooms well lighted, desks modern and made of metal.

Feet up on his desk, coffee mug in hand, Trey was waiting in his office. He was speaking in a low monotone and at first Anna thought he was dictating into a tape recorder. When he broke off and waved her in, she saw he was not alone. Looking ashen and impossibly young, Officer Bon-ham sat in the visitor's chair, hunched over, his forearms resting on his knees.

"Glad you could make it, Anna," Trey said, generously pretending she'd had a choice. "Billy here has offered to stay an hour over and help us find your stairwell." Anna suspected the "offered" was another illusion of freedom granted by the Assistant Superintendent. Billy, for all his youth and honey-brown hair, was haggard. Either night shift or personal worries were sapping his energy.

Claypool swung his feet down. "No time like the present. This thing's been driving me crazy. Yesterday I went all the places we've got boneyards, and no wrecked stairs."

Anna was getting the unpleasant feeling that a black mark was going on her record, that she would forever be known as the ranger who destroyed examples of our precious national heritage on Ellis Island. This dismal future must have showed in her face. Claypool said, "Not that we care about the ruined structure--I mean we care, of course we care, but once it's that far gone there's no salvaging it. A lot of Islands Two and Three is beyond hope of stabilizing. It's been let go too long."

Letting her off the hook was an act of kindness. Someday Anna might have to reassess her opinion of Trey as a cold fish. Not today. He'd made her get up too early.

A spring in his step, a man of action now that the smallest of goals was in the offing, Claypool led the way down the hall and into the brick and glass passage connecting Islands I, II and III. Liquid green light and weathered brick embraced them, the curve of the passage destroying perspective so there was no beginning and no end. The hypnotic timelessness of Ellis closed around Anna and she drifted along in Trey's wake, her mind in neutral.

At a T-shaped intersection the passage joined the hall that formed the spinal cord for the ward buildings on Island III. Unlike the rest of the covered walkways, here it was open at the sides as in warmer climates. To the left, over the brick wall edging the walk, tucked in a tiny jungle of its own, was a square building: small, one room, one story, very different from the interconnected functioning units of the hospital.

"The jail?" Anna asked, unable to think of any other use for the stalwart structure.

"Who knows?" The Assistant Superintendent walked back to where she stood. Resting his elbows on the wall after a careful removal of the ubiquitous glass shards, he stared at the square of brick, though he must have seen it a hundred times before.

This was a different man from the one Anna had met her first day, crossed paths with on shipboard. In the backcountry of his urban wilderness a keen intelligence shone out of his carp eyes. Anna could almost see the images his mind must be forming: reconstructing, restoring, ferreting out the secrets of the past.

"It's called the Animal House," Trey said. "Could have been used for storage or office space. The name and some of the stories suggest it was used to house research animals for the medical facility."

"I've heard--" Bonham said.

Anna had forgotten he was with them. He'd been so withdrawn his very corporeal self had faded from view.

"What?" Trey prompted.

Fear skittered across Billy's weary face. "Just the stories. Same old," he said, and Anna wondered why he was lying.

"Are you okay, boy?" Trey asked.

If the term "boy" offended the Park Policeman, he didn't let it show.

"No sir. I mean, yes sir, I'm fine. Tired. Night shift and all." North Carolina, Patsy had said. Anna could hear the faint drawl under the words. She hadn't noticed it before. Maybe, like Hatch, he hid the sounds of home for fear he would seem a bumpkin to the sophisticated ears of the Big Apple.

Claypool eyed him narrowly, came to some conclusion he didn't intend to share and brought his attention back to Anna. "Want to see the morgue? It's right here."

Unable to resist the inducement of a genuine turn-of-the-century New York City morgue, Anna followed him, picking her way over the litter of glass and plaster.

"A little something for the spelunker," Trey said, apparently apropos of nothing. Then Anna's eyes lit on a fringe of stalactites creeping like icicles from the roof of the walkway. Leaves, ocean storms, mineral deposits, pigeons: all the forces of nature--earth, water, land and air--vied for the privilege of being the first to wrest back the island from the clutches of man.

Claypool led them around an immense incinerator and back into the bowels of the building. The last door on the left opened into the morgue. Anna and Trey enjoyed it with the ghoulish delight of children. Billy Bon-ham stood in the doorway, bored or trying to look that way. The facility was as grim and Victorian as any fan of Dickens could wish. A row of concrete steps descended to a tiled floor eight feet below. Beside them, three concrete terraces the width of the room: the gallery where medical students once gathered to watch autopsies.

At the bottom of the room, over the staging area, a rectangular lamp two by three feet in size was suspended on a long metal arm. Directly below was a deep porcelain sink. With very little imagination Anna could see blood dripping down the white sides, hear the rasp of saw through bone.

"This is the best part," Claypool said. In the classic pose of a circus ringmaster, he stood before an immense cupboard built into the wall to the left of the sink. Eight square wooden doors were stacked in double rows. The bottom doors were at floor level, the top two a foot shy of the ceiling.

Trey opened the one on the bottom right and pulled out a wooden rack made of slats, the sort of thing used to dry jerked meat. "The cooler," Trey said. "They could keep up to eight corpses at a time for research."

"Ever get in one?" Anna asked.

"Sure. You want to try it?"

She did, just because it was one of those opportunities that seldom knock and she hated to miss anything. But her clothes were clean and Columbia-Presbyterian was her next stop. "I'll take a rain check," she said regretfully.

Crossing broken gray tiles fitted with floor drains to carry away splattered effluvia, she opened another of the cupboards and peeked in. "A much more amiable place to lie than the steel filing drawers of a modern morgue."

"I'd think so," Claypool said.

Anna opened the door next to it. "Jesus Christ." She slammed the door.

"A mouse?"

"Not a mouse." Recovered from the initial shock, she opened the cupboard again. The image burned into the back of her eyes was that of a child as shriveled and desiccated as a body mummified by the New Mexico desert.

Claypool was at her shoulder. "One of the little people, a Ratner. I'll have to have a talk--another talk--with the head of Interpretation and that woman in charge of our troupe of theatrical immigrants. That little blond snippet is the practical joker of the bunch." Reaching past Anna, he said, "Give me a hand. These little buggers are heavy. Solid bronze."

Dragged into the light, Anna's child mummy turned into a
sculpture of an immigrant. Age, race, country of origin, were glossed over with a generic motif of bonnet and ankle-length dress.

"Why is she two and a half feet tall?" Anna asked.

"Beats me. There are dozens of these around. They were done by an artist named Ratner. Everybody calls them 'the Ratners.' A race apart. The interpreters swear they breed in the dark, and I'm beginning to believe them. Most of them are stored in the old recreation hall on Island Two. For reasons that are a mystery to me, the seasonals have taken against them. We find them in the strangest places."

"The morgue?"

"This is the first here, but it's not an original idea. This is a popular place. We've found mannequins dressed in NPS uniforms, unpopular SOP manuals. Once--before my time--two curators were caught in flagrante.

"Billy," Trey barked. "Was this Ratner here when you did rounds last night?"

There was a hesitation just long enough so Anna guessed Billy didn't check the morgue.

"I don't think so," Bonham said, and Claypool let it go. The Park Police had no directive to check the buildings room by room. Not only would such an expedition take all night, but after dark it would be foolish from a safety standpoint, too much to trip over and fall into.

They left the midget immigrant at the intersection of hallways to be retrieved on the return trip, and continued on to the infectious disease wards on the southeast corner of the island.

After three false leads and an increasing feeling of unreality, Anna found the ruined stairwell. It was as she remembered, with the exception of size. She would have sworn the one she'd dangled from was three times as high and the splintered wood and metal far more piercing in aspect.

"I didn't think to look here," Claypool said accusingly. "There's never been anything stored in this part of the building. What there is, is upstairs in what used to be the nurses' quarters."

"I could have--" Anna stepped gingerly over the debris, having no desire to skewer herself on a nineteenth-century nail steeped in fifty years of bird shit. Beneath what remained of the upper landing she picked through the fragments of plaster, what looked like wax shavings, nails, pieces of rusted metal and mouse droppings. There was nothing under the mess but interlocking circles where paint cans or nail kegs had once been. "It could have been somewhere else, I guess," she said, but she didn't think so. "Could it have been moved? Dwight saw somebody here at about the same time I was."

"That was you," Billy said, the first words he'd spoken since they made their unscheduled stop at the morgue.

"Not me. Dwight saw somebody dressed in black. I wasn't. And I wasn't outside."

"Why didn't you report it?" Trey asked.