He was alone with the sound of his shovel cutting dirt. The clink of metal chucking rock. The flame sizzle of a lantern with condensation on its wick. There was constant vibration from above, something nearly silent, an inner-earth rumble he didn’t notice if others were there. He liked to inhabit this noise when he was alone, to estimate how many thousand vibrations from around the city merged to make one growl. He’d worked a couple hours. The others would be there before long, hungover but ready to go. He tried to get as much done as he could first. Fixed a rhythm with the pick, sliced its blade into deposits of clay. Took his shirt off when he got going. Leveraged rocks loose with an iron rod and relied on the work to calm his mind. The cadence of digging, the feel of metal and wood tools—they reminded him of home. He’d be farming now if he hadn’t run off, so it was a comfort to imagine piloting a mule plow and turning over furrows, the sun not yet full over the horizon. Jake missed his animals, his trees. He pictured rolling green hills, his stomach muscles tight, and a horse at full gallop climbing the angles of a pasture. There was the mound of sod where the old dugout had been. The corn up past his knee now that it was July. He recalled picking beetle bugs off potato leaves to drop in the kerosene can and fishing milkweed out of the soil with the tip of a spade. He just about felt light strike his skin at sunrise, a warm embrace around his shoulders and neck. Nothing could make him forget his connection to the land, the farm and his family, the woods and streams he played in as a boy. He’d have given anything to keep the kind of peace he experienced in the woods as a child, his mother near him, before he lost her. He’d felt extraordinarily alive. Connected to the world as he knew it then. That peace was lost to him now. How he’d planted a line of bur oak along the road one summer. Grew them from acorns. How there was rhubarb and artichoke in the forest. Wild strawberries. He owned these things. They owned him too. The bur oak, the rhubarb, the woods, the hills. They all laid claim on Jake.
He almost felt like he was back there, the sun on his neck, when he heard a noise behind him in the tunnel.
A man was groping along the wall in the dim glow of the lanterns. Jake heard feet shuffle over the rocky floor, something dropped to a plank, and pebbles scattered. He tipped the beam of his lantern, angling its housing with the spade he held to see a stranger turn into the apse. “Nobody’s supposed to be down here,” Jake said. His voice was quiet and shaky, he was embarrassed that he’d been caught dreaming. He let the lantern swing from its hook. The flame flickered as a man came into the light, a man who leaned close and squinted to see who was there.
“If that is true,” the man replied, “then why are you here?”
Jake held the spade crossed over his chest, showed it to the man to answer. The man’s eyes changed shapes as he tried to see, half-blind without his glasses.
It came together in a flash. That this was the Cypriot. He’d hid in the tunnels, a bounty on his head. It didn’t occur to Jake that he might be wrong. This was the Cypriot.
The man was in bad shape, his fine costume torn and muddy from scrabbling in the tunnels. Bruises marred his jaw, only partly hidden by his beard. He wasn’t as big as the rumors said he was. His body was soft and round. He looked prissy, the way he lowered gingerly to his knees to feel along the tunnel floor.
Jake saw the glint of a lens further down, but he didn’t move to pick up the glasses. He backed into the apse and gripped tighter the spade in his hands. His breath stuck in his throat. He wanted to leave but would have to cross the Cypriot to reach the open end of the tunnel.
“They were crazed up there,” the man said, back on his haunches. There was liquor on his breath. “Is it all finished? The fighting?” He looked for his glasses again, edged the wrong way, closer to Jake and the tools. “Is there a way out of here?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” Jake said. “These tunnels aren’t open.”
“I slipped down a window. A stroke of luck, getting away. At least till I got lost.”
The man scrabbled on his hands and knees to search for his glasses. He skimmed over the handles of shovels, picks, axes, each one strapped tight in a bundle.
Jake wrung his palms over the shovel he held. He wouldn’t cross the man. “Why were they after you? Did you do something to start all that?”
The man bent forward to grope the wood handles. He loosened the strap.
Jake wanted out of there. His legs weak. A streetcar rumbling above them, its vibrations coming, making the lights flicker. The man lunged as Jake blinked with the lights, and Jake was hit, struck across his forearm. His air escaped. The man swung again, but too high. The handle he swung scraped the tunnel ceiling and stuck a second, so Jake pushed the man back.
It felt like Jake’s arm was broken. But he wasn’t blind in agony. He felt the pain-thrill rise in his heart. When the man came back he dodged the slashing handle. He drove into the man again with his spade and this time shoved him over the bundle of tools.
The Cypriot opened his mouth to speak but Jake swung and connected on the ribs. An echoless thump forced air out. He got the man good.
Nine more times Jake did this. Spade levered across his hip. He felt ribs disconnect from meat. The Cypriot grasping a tool handle between strikes. Then the Cypriot, the Cypriot’s grasping hand, released without grabbing.
Jake thought he’d killed the man. He’d felt the body give even on the first blow. But he touched the man’s throat and felt blood pump. He turned the body over. The eyes gazed out with animal fright, like the body would rise up and run down the tunnel. The body didn’t move. The eyes followed Jake as he dropped to his elbows.
“He’s dead,” Jake said to no one. He watched the body rise and flounder. There was gurgling from the mouth. The head tried to rise but then sunk. Jake saw his own bloody hands. He cupped dirt from the apse and rubbed until there was mud.
The others arrived. They turned pale when they saw the man on his stomach. His mouth bubbled blood. Jake sitting there with the spade over his knees.
“There was an accident,” he said.
They didn’t accuse Jake of anything. They carried the body to the foreman’s office, where a telephone hung on the wall. Tom Dennison would need to know.
A BRAND FROM THE BURNING
Winter 1918
Karel was sore the morning after his father found him at Mecklenburg’s. Sore from his fight with Ignatz, in his face and ribs, and in other ways. His head hurt. His stomach was upset. Silke and Theresa explained it to him. Karel smiled, a sick smirk he felt twist on his face. “I’m not joking,” Silke said. “You were drunk.”