The Sandler Inquiry Part 98

Two headlights appeared ahead of them, several blocks off.

"Duck in here I " Hammond instructed quickly. They stepped from the rails into a side booth, designed to protect workers on a track as a train pa.s.sed through.

They waited, out of sight.

"That one's early, d.a.m.n it," snorted Hammond, panting slightly.

"With the cutbacks they're only supposed to be traveling twelve minutes apart at this hour."

"Maybe the last one was late" Leslie suggested.

Hammond shrugged. The train pa.s.sed. Thomas watched it disappear toward the illuminated Eighty-sixth Street station. Hammond then urged them on a final block of tracks. Then they cut through a side corridor and slid upward through a small crawl s.p.a.ce under Eighty-ninth Street for at least fifty yards.

The pa.s.sage was unspeakably dirty and sooty. Hammond led the way with a flashlight he'd produced from his coat. The smell was foul and suggested stale urine.

"Don't mind the stench" said Hammond.

"We're above the sewer.

Not in it."

"I'm grateful for the small amenities:' Thomas retorted. He glanced at Leslie, who, slid in front of him, between the two men.

"No place to bring a lady," Thomas chided. No time at all to joke; Thomas was concealing his claustrophobia. All four walls were just inches from him on each side. He felt as if the walls would suddenly spring in on him in the shadows and darkness, gripping him and holding him. Apparently, it didn't bother Leslie. Compared with having your throat cut, he reasoned, it wasn't much, after all.

He saw light ahead. He was relieved.

Hammond had slid from the crawl way and was standing, proud that at his age he'd made it. Leslie followed. Thomas emerged third, coming up at the feet of the others in an illuminated chamber. He stood. There were two other men, both dressed in the blue work uniforms of New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority. Neither man was a subway worker.

They stood beside a hole in a brick wall, a hole large enough to step through sideways and crouching.

The underground chamber, illuminated by battery-operated lanterns, was against the pantry wall of the Sandler mansion. Thomas had traveled a city block underground since leaving the subway tracks. It had seemed like four blocks.

"Like I promised," said Hammond, trying to gather himself.

"We're going in- " "Have you been in already?" asked Thomas.

"We've been waiting for you," said Hammond.

"We didn't know whether you'd be able to guide us or not' Thomas looked at the hole that had been chiseled through brick that was four feet thick. A less awesome entrance than the front door, he thought, yet having more dignity than the servants' entrance. His mind then traveled to Zenger, his father's partner.

Zenger, one of the citys leading attorneys twenty years earlier, had entered this house through the front door and had reemerged, as his father termed it, 'a different man" A recluse, a man who'd retired soon afterward.

"We had a quick look around the ground floor after we knocked through,"

Hammond finally admitted.

"Now we'll have a more thorough look."

Hammond nodded to the two gatekeepers. He stepped through the hole into a dark pantry. Thomas followed, then Leslie. Each picked up a heavy-duty battery lantern on entering. Leslie drew her service pistol and carried it in her other hand. Looking for her father? Thomas wondered.

Thomas, like Leslie and Hammond, had the sense of having stepped through a corridor into another decade. Out of the seventies, into the nineteen thirties. The wallpaper, once elegant and colorful, was now faded and yellowed. Heavy, solid furniture was in each room, and the kitchen appliances were relics of the Depression. Sagging drapes, often threadbare near the floor, shut out light from the windows, and the carpets were worn where Victoria Sandler had made her daily paths.

An ornate art-deco clock, capped with a cupid with bow and arrow, was stopped on a table. A mirror was thick with dust. The entire house smelled of both mildew and time. The interior of the mansion wore the years with a morbid pallor.

"Anything in particular you want to start with?" Hammond asked.

"Ground floor," said Thomas.

"Then the bas.e.m.e.nt" Hammond nodded. The main floor was the first floor fully above street level, he explained. The ground floor, the one they were on, was almost completely below sidewalk level. Beneath was a bas.e.m.e.nt.

"Why the bas.e.m.e.nt first?" Hammond asked as an afterthought.

"I'm sure that's where she kept the skeletons' said Thomas, sober faced then somehow managing a laugh. Hammond looked displeased, a don't-joke-at-a-time-like-this expression. Daniels couldn't be sure, but he thought Leslie, who was standing so close that their arms were against each other, shuddered.

Together the three explored a ground floor library. When Hammond expressed desire to glance through the second of the five floors, they separated. Leslie went with Thomas, both holding lanterns, she alertly holding the pistol. One never knew, though Thomas thought the armaments vaguely melodramatic.

"Where's the door to the bas.e.m.e.nt Thomas asked.

She led him. He followed closely, realizing that she'd been there before, at least briefly and probably with Hammond.

Thomas pointed the lantern down the narrow stairs. The first step creaked and almost seemed to sag beneath his weight. He pressed gingerly with one foot, then the next.

The light shone ahead of him, a dusty maze of shadows and cobwebs. It occurred to him that Victoria Sandler might never have been down here any more often than she'd been in her bathtub.

Which was to say, seldom in the last twenty years.

Followed by Leslie, he reached the bottom of the steps. He flashed the light around and saw nothing move, except for the shadows dancing under the beams of their two wavering lanterns.

They stepped forward, walking among the faded, forgotten belongings of two generations of Sandlers. They stepped through a large cluttered room, perhaps thirty feet by forty feet, crowded with dust-laden white sheets over unused or retired furniture. A walking s.p.a.ce,. such that it was, was along the wall, a wall lined with old portraits from nineteenth-century Germany. The forgotten progenitors of the Sandler clan.

Then from across the room a noise and two red eyes.

Thomas felt his heart leap and whirled with the lantern.

"Leslie!"

he blurted quickly.

But she'd already turned and the pistol was upraised. Two red glimmering eyes reflected back at them. A large rat sat on top of an old steamer trunk, the latter bearing stamps from voyages in the 1920s.

Brazen and defiant as any Sandler, the rat ignored the intruders into his domain. A second or two later he leaped to the floor and disappeared. Thomas began watching his own feet and ankles as he walked.

"You're jumpy," she said.

"This isn't my ordinary sort of legal work," he explained.

She flashed her light on ahead to a pa.s.sageweay.

"What's that?"

she asked aloud. The pa.s.sage led to a separate room, one apparently clear of storage.