The dark man palmed his hat and crunched his unlit cigar. He surveyed the entire room, fixing his eyes into its soft, webby corners.
Hello? he asked. His accent started from a growl and slid upward.
The room smelled of damp cement, wood, and oil. Two other men followed him in. One was enormous. The other was short and wore overalls. That one looked at everything with keen, moving eyes. He was looking for shiny nails. The fat man perspired. As the dark man searched, the short man knocked on the walls with his knuckles. He listened to the walls as if they were speaking to him.
He held up a hand and they all stopped.
There were pipes and a tin sign and some saws on the floor, but otherwise the room was more or less empty, except for a large bench against the wall. In the corner of the room was a bag that they were all staying away from. After a moment, the dark man began stepping in slow circles on the planked flooring. The others followed him into a corner, where exposed brick lay against the bottom half of the wall. The fat man took off his coat, then his vest.
The short man in overalls examined the large table. He motioned, and everyone helped him move it. They pushed it to the side and stared downward. The floorboards were missing. Instead, in the cement floor, they saw a door, set into the ground like a gate to hell.
The dark man dropped to a knee. He pulled back the door and stared down into a black hole in the ground. They listened again for voices. There was no telling where it went.
Call her, the man said, as he jumped in.
2
The Missing Skater
February 13, 1917
From the front window of her family’s second-floor apartment, Christina Cruger pressed her face against the glass, looking out on the street below. There was the usual mix of afternoon people in hats and coats on the sidewalk. They were walking with their bags and babies in the bitter February cold. The sun flashed through the clouds over the Hudson and onto Harlem. The snow fell when it wanted to.
Twenty-year-old Christina wiped away the steam and scraped at the spidery frost on the window. Her lungs strained this close to the cold air, a side effect of her illness. But her worry was growing elsewhere. She could feel it in her stomach.
When her little sister Ruth had left two hours ago, she was wearing layers of old winter clothes and a floppy hat. She had to run an errand, Ruth told her. So Christina, who was named after her mother, watched her sister leave, as she always did, from the same window: Ruth walked briskly up the hill on Claremont Avenue before she turned east, then crossed Broadway before disappearing behind the wooden buildings. Christina watched those same corners now, looking for her sister’s blue coat, swinging into the scene, framed by the peeling paint of the window frame. But the coat never appeared. This wasn’t like her, thought Christina. Not Ruth, who had just graduated high school with good grades and taught Sunday school. She would just be a minute, Ruth had assured her, with that smile of hers.
Just a minute.
Looking out on the falling snow, it occurred to Christina that her sister might have gone ice-skating. A huge sense of relief filled her. That made sense. Christina scolded herself for not seeing it sooner. Ruth loved skating more than anything and had said her errands included picking up her ice skates from getting sharpened. And Ruth had let it slip that there was a new boy from Columbia University whom she liked. That made Christina feel better. With their parents up in Boston, now would be a good day for ice-skating. Ruth could keep secrets; Christina knew that. At the same time, her sister wouldn’t let her worry like this, either. And Ruth wasn’t dressed for ice-skating, certainly not with someone from Columbia. Christina couldn’t remember his name.
Christina coughed, steaming up the window again. What if Ruth had become sick again herself? What if she was in a hospital somewhere? Christina shuddered; she had just left the hospital herself not that long ago. Or, worse yet, was Ruth passed out on a frigid sidewalk somewhere down there? Christina watched the clock. It clicked and whirred in the still room. What if she had been run down by one of those filthy automobiles on Broadway? Christina looked down. The shadows of the streetlamps were getting longer, like candles. She could see Ruth in her mind, smiling. Everyone thought of Ruth that way. Christina could not picture where her sister might be.
Christina picked up the receiver on the phone and pushed twice on the switch to call down to the operator. As she waited for her voice, Christina saw the people who had left their homes hours ago now returning, their shoes finding their earlier footprints. Christina was finally connected on the phone to her other sister, Helen. She worked as a bookkeeper at the Mexican Petroleum Company on Broadway and was three years older. Helen listened intently through the small black cone she held up to her ear. Like her father, Helen was very businesslike. She asked Christina to remember everything that Ruth had told her before she left. Christina recited that Ruth had left just after eleven o’clock to do some marketing for their mother. She then went to a store to cash a check for twenty-five dollars. After paying some bills, Ruth had come back home to give her sister the receipts and to have lunch. Ruth then said she was going to the bank at 125th Street and Eighth Avenue. Then she was going to pick up her sharpened skates, which she had dropped off in the morning.
Ruth had gone ice-skating, Helen said quickly, instantly arriving at the same conclusion as her sister. Probably at Notlek, Van Cortlandt, or the indoor rink at Saint Nicholas. This reassurance made Christina feel better.
But once Helen hung up, she packed up her things and left work. The air was chilling. There was a bit of snow on the ground. Helen finally reached the neighborhood and began retracing her little sister’s steps. The family’s bank, the United States Mortgage and Trust Company, was a big building on the corner with dark glass doors. It was closed. Helen looked around. Could someone have seen Ruth come in with the money she was going to deposit? Had she been the victim of a robbery? Helen glanced around at the people lost in coats around her. Helen tried to see inside the bank. The footprints by the door made one, uneven shape.
Helen then made a round of the shops along Eighth Avenue near 125th Street. She went to Soames Dry Goods, but no one had seen Ruth there. She saw a neighbor, John Gerbige, and quizzed him, right there on the street.