The Deed (42 page)

At last it appeared, unmistakably: a small white door off to one side. Two or three more orbits up around the vertical axis and they’d be there. He squeezed Amanda’s hand in a prearranged signal, and they stopped traveling together; he went on several steps ahead, where he’d listen for her action before making his move. He let himself be carried by the throng, stared at the unassuming little door whenever their winding brought it back into view. There was a handle, but no obvious lock on the door, though there was no real way of knowing. He wondered whether he could bust the latch with a hard enough shoulder slam. Was the door frame wood or steel?

He heard Amanda’s small fainting cry behind him, seemingly too soon, and for all the mission-critical importance of exact timing, he couldn’t help turning to look. Amanda had fallen dramatically back into the crowd, twenty or so steps behind him. Her faith in the absolute predictability of mass behavior proved justified: Some tourists caught her, others stumbled and created a general clatter, and various shrieks of alarm brought every eye in the vicinity her way.

Time for action.
Jason wrenched his eyes away and covered the remaining twelve feet to the door, now passing the shocked faces of tourists staring at the scene behind him. He tried the handle; the door was indeed locked, but without any apparent dead bolt. He spared another glance back, but could no longer see Amanda in the press; at least nobody was looking in his direction. Now or never. He threw his weight against the door, snapping the strike plate out of the doorway, pushed open the door just wide enough to slide inside, and shut himself into the arm’s eternal midnight.

There he waited, heart racing, for what must have been several minutes, eyes bugging in the blackness like the wasted orbs of a blind cave fish. The metal door (for it
had
been metal, his already sore shoulder informed him) muffled the commotion below into incomprehensibility, increasing the likelihood of total, underwear-wrecking surprise should some hawkeyed authority burst in after him. He had no idea whether he’d been seen, and no way of finding out. Jaded New Yorkers wouldn’t bother disrupting their day by turning him in, of course, but the population here was all gentle Midwesterners and well-meaning international types. As each second ticked by, he fully expected the door to swing open, but couldn’t focus his racing mind long enough to clap together a simple alibi.

Claustrophobia and paranoia were spiraling into panic, here in the impenetrable dark—he had to keep moving.

“‘To be or not to be,’” he muttered, and the space was so small that even this whisper echoed, adding unwelcome detail to his growing sense of being locked in a cold copper coffin.

He retrieved the flashlight with a minimum of fumbling; its pathetic glow revealed a closetlike space centered around a simple black-iron ladder stretching up into shadow. It was surprisingly narrow inside Lady Liberty’s arm, less than five feet or so across even down here at the meat of the shoulder, and tapering off, with the ladder running straight up the middle, into a darkness his puny beam couldn’t begin to penetrate.

Jason took a deep, whistling breath and felt his jacket pocket, making sure the spare batteries were there. If he were caught, the college-kid-on-a-lark excuse was going to fall pretty flat, considering the fat wad of destructive tools he was sporting. No, it was all or nothing.

Gripping the ladder halfheartedly with one hand, Jason played the light along every inch of the walls, as if hoping to expand the space through sheer photon pressure. He could feel anxiety tugging at him, begging for audience. Here, as out in the main part of the statue, the copper skin that stretched smoothly across the contours of Lady Liberty’s musculature was held in place with a mesh of iron reinforcing bars. His high beam gamely chased darkness out of corners, and threw crazy diagonal grids dancing all over the interior whenever it crossed the ladder.

“Right,” he said aloud, to calm his nerves with the familiar sound of his own voice. “Like it’s going to be taped to a wall right here.” But the echo unnerved him, and he fell silent.

Fifty-four rungs,
he reminded himself. He began laboriously to make his way up the ladder, flashlight and briefcase compromising his hand-holds. He wondered idly how many people were looking at the statue’s arm at this very moment—from the air, from the sea, from cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, from the line outside the statue itself. Five thousand? Ten thousand? It was one of the most obvious focal points of planet earth, and not one of the viewers could know there was a man inside here, inching his way up the inside of the arm like a blood clot on the move.

He passed the elbow, his only landmark; on a whim, he paused, pinned the briefcase to the ladder with one knee, and shone the light straight up. The vertical tunnel closed in even farther, tapering off toward Lady Lib’s shapely wrist—already he could reach out and tap the flashlight on any point of the interior wall, and it was only getting tighter. Dimly, he could see the top of the ladder, where it bumped up against a small Alice-in-Wonderland trapdoor: the torch proper.

He was checking his watch by the flashlight when the ladder suddenly swayed under his legs and he nearly fell. He clumsily threw his off-balance torso back into the ladder with such a jolt he almost lost the pinned briefcase, then nearly dropped the flashlight in his spastic grab to save it.

Holy shit,
he thought.
This simply cannot be allowed to get worse.
He pictured the flashlight eluding his grasp and clattering down, down, down all the way back to the base of the ladder, putting out its eye on some stupid rivet and leaving him in total blackness.

“I am really out on a limb, here—no pun intended,” he said aloud, feeling his heartbeat vibrate his body on the ladder. He wondered how good the oxygen flow was in here, wondered if the dizziness he felt were real or psychosomatic.

Back to work, back to work. He looped one hand around the ladder—
now stay
still,
ya hear?
—and painted the inner walls with light again. The skin seemed smooth and contoured; he didn’t come across any anomalies that would suggest a likely spot for a hidden document. Some bundle of arteries—power cables for the torch, no doubt—ran through a series of metal hoops along the arm’s upper side; he made a mental note to avoid them.

Jason reached the tiny door at the top of the ladder without finding anything. He knew with absolute certainty that the deed wasn’t out there—this was the part of the torch that had been replaced in the eighties. Still, here he was…He reached up, turned the latch, and flopped the door up onto the torch platform. Sunlight poured in like bathwater. A moment later he was outside.

The torch rose imperially above him, in a sea of dazzling blue sky. The claustrophobia dissolved instantly, but the vertigo hit him like a hammer. He set down the briefcase on the metal platform, clicked off the now quite useless light, and steadied his nerves before heading to the iron rail that girdled the platform.

The view was truly, literally breathtaking, the swaying of the arm terrifyingly pronounced. Every gust of wind seemed to bend it four or five feet out of whack. Far below, across the blue ribbon of water, Manhattan’s skyline glittered fantastically in the morning sun, like a slumbering steel dragon.

“Hello, my people!” he shouted aloud.

A little despair intruded on his exuberance; he’d found nothing, and for the first time since his epiphany of the night before Jason allowed himself to wonder what it would mean if the deed wasn’t here after all. He could all too easily see himself crawling sheepishly out of the lower door empty-handed. And then what?

Maybe it was for the best, anyway. If he
did
find the deed, could he ever be totally sure of Amanda’s affection? It would have to change them, one way or another…and frankly, he liked things just the way they were.

Funny, he decided as he looked over the city. In the beginning they’d absolutely needed the deed to hold them together, and now that they seemed on the edge of discovering it, it had become a sort of threat. Was this a partnership or a relationship?

He knew which one he wanted, and time was wasting. Reluctantly, he drank in the once-in-a-lifetime view one last time, then picked up his briefcase and headed for the door.
I can handle this,
now, he told himself as he looked down the length of the ladder, this time taking advantage of the illumination streaming in from above. And the extra light turned the tide—suddenly, Jason saw the answer.

It was the bottom of the torch, revealed by the light from above as a little hollow cup dipping below Lady Lib’s curled fingers around the shaft. That was it—had to be, if it was here at all. There was no question that this was the safest spot in the whole arm/torch assembly, the only place that would never be brushed on the way past by tourists’ hands.

Briefcase in tow, Jason clambered a few steps down the ladder, craning his body to one side so as not to block the light. As he approached, filled with excitement and dread, the torch bottom took on the shape of a copper octagon, nearly a square but with nipped-off corners, the whole of it no more than a foot and a half across.

Okay,
he reassured himself, stretching one foot off the ladder and testing his weight on the iron superstructure.
This, then, is the stage on which my madness is going to play itself out.
He was literally in Lady Liberty’s hand now, kneeling inside a finger and reaching into the well-lit recess of the torch bottom. He ran one hand along the edge of the copper seam, then stared at the black ring of ages-old dust on his fingers.
What’s here?
he wondered.
A speck from a Rockefeller’s boot? The dandruff of a king?
He wiped it on the ass of his pants, cracked open the briefcase, and plucked out a regular screwdriver.

“This isn’t what it looks like, Officer,” he said aloud, voice echoing eerily as he forced the screwdriver into the seam, midway between two thumb-size rivets. “Yes, I suppose technically I am desecrating a national monument. But you see, I met this girl…”

He hit the screwdriver with the heel of his hand, leery of risking the noise of the hammer; the copper, defiant but thin, tented up agreeably at the wedge. It was slow work, digging little channels around the rivets. But at least his efforts weren’t opening up a hole to the outside—this was, indeed, a false bottom, and that alone was grounds for optimism.

After five minutes of frenzied work, he’d broken the panel away from the rivets along only two walls of the square, not the three sides that would allow him to peel back the whole sheet, but enough to try turning one corner back. He took a break to check his watch and discovered he’d been in the arm for nearly fifty minutes.
Christ—tempus fugit.

Replacing the screwdriver in his briefcase, he yoked pliers and monkey wrench together at the single freed corner and tried to fold the copper back on itself. It proved more resistant than expected, a difficulty compounded by the lack of leverage in the narrow space. He kept tugging, and succeeded in pulling up the edge a couple of inches, and then the copper would not budge farther. He’d gained just enough space to reach a hand inside.

It would have to do.

He pictured Amanda waiting somewhere below, being fanned back to health by a concerned Ohio couple, and wondered if he was doing the right thing. He could just turn now and walk away, tell her there was nothing here…couldn’t he?

“If I don’t reach in there, it’s not there,” he mused aloud. “But is the reverse true?”

It’s probably some access panel or something,
his brain warned him.
You’re going to electrocute yourself in the freaking arm of the Statue of Liberty.
But there was no turning away now; he’d never even make it to the bottom of the ladder without finding out for sure. Mentally crossing himself, he closed his eyes, flattened his hand into a shark fin, and slid it sidewise into the hollow.