Grace thought about Kron’s comparing this all to the cup of Tantalus. He was always a surprise. In mythology, Tantalus was invited to Zeus’s table, where he overindulged and stole the food of the gods, sharing it with mortal people. In an attempt to make amends, Tantalus killed his own son, chopped him up in a pot, and served him to the gods as a sacrifice. The gods were most displeased. As punishment, Tantalus had to stand in a pool of water in the underworld beneath a tree filled with luscious, dangling fruit. Every time Tantalus reached up for a bite, or scooped a hand below to slake his thirst, the fruit or water eluded him. It was a myth, or more like a lesson, about needs versus wants. The cup of Tantalus was an actual drinking vessel that embodied the same lesson. If overfilled, the cup would cause the liquid to disappear completely from the cup. Grace was as frustrated by the clues she was getting in this case as she would be drinking from such a container. Everything led back to that store—every story, every clue, and every imagined footprint—and Grace was frustrated that she couldn’t get in to search it herself. The overflow of clues notwithstanding, the trail had run dry.
But the cup wasn’t really magic. It was invented by the ancients as a practical joke—or perhaps as a way of keeping their servants from stealing their wine. There was a hidden space inside the base where the liquid was held. The cup cheated. Grace knew someone was cheating here, too.
They needed to do the same.
11
A Door to the Underworld
Julius Kron and Detective McGee, who told Kron to call him Frank, searched and dug through the old building next to Metropolitan Motorcycles for a week, but all they found was garbage and dirt. Everything stuck to everything else, and the dust clouded the air. When Kron and McGee would come back out onto the street, it looked as if the building itself was swaying in the heat. Nothing seemed completely certain here.
As they came up empty-handed, day after day, Kron chomped his cigars, and McGee’s massive body was drenched in sweat. The neighborhood hawks would poke their heads out of their windows and jeer at the unlikely pair. Many of them were friends of the Cocchis.
“Don’t mind them, Kron,” McGee said, tucking his tie into his shirt. “We’ll have the laugh on them all yet.” But that laugh seemed a long way off.
Meanwhile, Grace had opened up a temporary headquarters in the back of the candy store on the corner. She knew they had to be as close as possible to Cocchi’s store in case an opening presented itself. Grace told Kron to hire some local day laborers to be at the ready in the candy store. They sat there with picks and shovels leaned against the wall, eating Squirrel Nut Zippers and popping Necco wafers. Mrs. Cocchi was still barring any entry to the motorcycle shop so they drank Jersey Creme sodas, biding their time.
After a week of digging, Kron stood with McGee outside Cocchi’s place, both of them sore and weary. Kron was at least glad he could wear his wool pants again. As he looked down, he noticed the lid of a coal chute, large and heavy. He followed its invisible trail under the sidewalk and stopped.
“Frank,” Kron said, stooping down to lift the lid.
McGee saw the same invisible trajectory in his mind. This chute emptied into the vault under Cocchi’s sidewalk to deliver the coal. Right next to the cellar. McGee helped Kron open the iron circle to see a dark entranceway. Kron lit a match and saw some coal lining a tunnel of darkness. As guessed, it looked as if it ran down under the sidewalk at a slow angle. He ran his fingers through the coal. It was mixed with dirt. Kron lit another match and saw flecks of something in the black, flaky substance. Chloride? Lime? Kron started to move his hand in when the shadow of Mrs. Cocchi appeared over him.
“Steady there, Mrs. Cocchi,” said Frank in a soft voice.
“This is a public highway,” Kron shouted, scrambling to his short, full height. He had finally had enough. “I am at perfect liberty to go down there—and I’m going. Frank, arrest her if she makes any more monkey-shines. Right now give me a lift down this chute.”
Mrs. Cocchi narrowed her eyes but retired to the door of her shop. She knew that Kron was right—he was technically on public property. She watched them from the doorway.
Kron shifted himself down the narrow chute as McGee stood up top. Inside, Kron saw more of the white specks on the walls, though just little flecks here and there. The floor was lost in what looked like several feet of newly dug earth. Kron tried to clear the floor with his feet, then more hurriedly with his hands and arms. He turned black as night. As Kron lit his last match, he felt something hard under the floor. As the match sputtered out, Kron’s eyes widened.
“What have you found down there?” asked McGee.
Kron was covered with black coal, and he was worn and hollow-eyed, but his smudged face wore a look of satisfaction. “What we’ve been looking for,” he said. Kron instructed McGee to get everyone down here at once. And to bring a searchlight. McGee left, leaving the lid open, letting in a beam of hot sun.
A few moments later, the lid clanged closed and Kron was again shut in darkness.
He heard a laugh and realized that Mrs. Cocchi had sneaked over and replaced the lid on the street. It was dark and quiet and there was a door beneath his feet, and he had no idea where it went. He listened to the scampering of something and hoped that Frank would come back soon.
*
“Hey, are you there, Kron? What the devil happened?” It was McGee, pulling open the lid. Some time had passed, though McGee had only gone up the street to the candy store.
“Mrs. Cocchi,” Kron replied, disgusted. “Get the men down here as fast as you can before I pass out.”
Grace walked up to the opening and looked down, amazed. There was a door set in the bottom of the dirt. It was battered and almost destroyed, but it was a door. They brushed off the dirt and coal and lifted it up before setting it into a corner. It was not on any hinges. But it did cover an oblong hole, a vault, six feet by six feet, which someone had broken into the cement floor. The flash lamps glinted at its rounded corners.
“Bully for you, Kronnie,” Grace said.
After her detective was hoisted out, Grace told everyone to hold tight and wait at the candy store. She then went to the borough president, then the Bureau of Sidewalks and Vaults to apply for the right to tunnel under the sidewalk through the coal vault. She knew there would be a legal question over this eventually, and she wasn’t going to take any chances. Grace also asked around to see who the plumber was who had installed the pipes in the cellar.
“He’s dead,” said Mrs. Cocchi.
But Grace didn’t believe it; she still suspected that Mrs. Cocchi always knew more than she was saying. After searching through building permits and talking to construction company officials, Grace indeed found the plumber. He gave Grace a diagram of the building, but it didn’t have what she was looking for—a way into that damned cellar. Grace had to think.
When Grace returned, she walked past the candy store and made a quick, prearranged sign with her hands. The two laborers, Peter McAntee and John Spittle, saw her through the window. They grabbed their tools.
As they turned the corner, they walked directly down to the motorcycle shop in a group. For the first time, there was no subterfuge. They were going in under Grace’s direction. Mrs. Cocchi appeared with her baby in her arms and shouted, “Where are you going?” Just as her men approached the coal chute with their tools, Grace reached into her dress and waved the permit she had just obtained from the borough president in Mrs. Cocchi’s face. People from the neighborhood began to gather and point. Grace gave the order, and the flash lamps lit an area almost too narrow for a child.
Mrs. Cocchi returned to her chair in front of the store. Defeated, she sank into it. But then she started smiling. She began bouncing her baby on her knee.
“They won’t find anything,” Mrs. Cocchi said, to anyone who would listen.