19 Purchase Street (53 page)

Horridge reintroduced himself.

Darrow recognized Horridge before hearing his name. They had met several years ago in Newport during America's Cup Week.

Handshake.

Chair offered.

Horridge conveyed with a brief downcast of his eyes that nothing would follow until that New York
Post
was out of sight. He looked aside long enough for Darrow to drop it into a wastebasket.

“I understand you had somewhat of a calamity,” Horridge began.

“Can I get you a drink?”

Horridge declined but then on second thought decided he'd have some port. “Any kind not Spanish,” he said.

Darrow called for it.

“Is that correct?” Horridge asked.

“I beg your pardon.”

“You've had a calamity.”

“Nothing that can't be dealt with.”

“A robbery, I believe.”

“A robbery.”

“How much was taken?”

Darrow had received the figures from Hine just a half hour ago. It had been painful enough reading them, now he had to say them aloud, “One billion, eighty-two million.”

“That's distressing,” Horridge said with about as much emotion as someone observing a dented fender.

The port was brought.

Sips.

That bastard Hine, Darrow thought. Couldn't wait to pick at his bones, had to call Boston. Well, on the reverse side of every problem was an opportunity. He'd always gone by that, at least said it. Perhaps this would turn out to be a chance for him. To demonstrate his efficiency at dealing with crisis. If … no,
when
security recovered the stolen money. “We're rectifying the situation,” he told Horridge stiffly. “In fact, only minutes ago I received a report from my security people telling me they were onto something that looked very promising.” That was a lie. When Horridge arrived Darrow was anxiously awaiting word from Poole.

“How long is it now that you've been with us, Edwin?” Horridge asked.

“Twenty-two, going on twenty-three, years.” Horridge knew damn well, Darrow told himself. He would have been briefed.

“How many years here at this installation?”

“Since 1970.”

“And before that?”

“With Coville, Blankhard and Biggar.” The Boston law firm.

“Then surely you're aware of how we prefer to handle such nasty matters as this.”

“Yes.”

“It's just not prudent to go chasing after people, stirring a private mess into a potentially public one.”

“I hope to have it tidied up in a day or two.”

“But the question and the point is how tidy?”

Darrow knew how precarious the line was under him. The most he could do was buy time from Horridge. Horridge had the authority to grant that. He wasn't High Board, never would be, but he was its direct emissary, its secretary of state, so to speak. “I've kept that in mind, of course,” Darrow said.

“Have you now?”

“I've always carefully abided by our procedures. There can't possibly be any marks against me, certainly no major ones—”

“Until now, no.”

“That ought to count for something—”

“There you go, thinking like an outsider. That's exactly what I'm apprehensive about.”

“I didn't mean that the way it sounded.”

Horridge tilted his head back and looked down his nose at Darrow. His eyes became magnified by the bifocal-lensed lower portion of his glasses. “It's most distressing,” he said. “How much did you say was taken?”

“One billion, eighty million.”

“Eighty-two million,” Horridge corrected. He cleared his throat, his fingers were precisely laced in his lap. “The loss itself, even though it is a sizable amount in this case, does not concern us that much. In fact, we'd prefer to just forget the money part entirely.”

Darrow wished it could be as easy as that for him.

“Money,” Horridge continued, “has a way of replenishing itself, particularly money of this sort. A cash loss is only a temporary wound that more cash quickly heals. Do you understand our thinking, Edwin?”

“I believe so.”

Silence hung between the two men.

Darrow couldn't read which way Horridge was leaning. If his way, it was only very slightly.

“I did not come expecting to settle this in an hour,” Horridge said. “I'll be staying on a day or two. If in that time you happen to recoup the stolen amount, then we'll take a look and see how trimly you've managed to do it. Yes, we'll see …”

That was Friday.

On Monday, Poole made his summary report.

The hoist-truck was traced back to Teeterborough Airport in New Jersey. No one had witnessed it being stolen. It had just been there one night and not there the following morning. Number 19's security men had gone over every inch of the truck inside and out. There were palm and fingerprints all over it, some old, others recent. The problem was too many prints. It would take months to lift them all and run them through for identification. Security had, at random, lifted eight recent prints. All eight, as it turned out, belonged to Federal Aviation Administration maintenance personnel. Poole had connections inside who verified that.

A second truck had been used in the robbery. Evidently a heavy transport van of some sort, an eighteen-wheeler. Tread marks identified its tires as Michelin II-245's. There were no usable footprints either on the airport side or the garden side of the wall, on account of the rain.

The guards at the airport gate were questioned on the pretense that there had been a theft of some radar equipment from one of the corporate hangars. One guard recalled admitting the hoist-truck, had it entered in his log, but could not give a helpful description of the men in it. The log showed no entry for the transport van, only normal airport vehicles. Poole had thought it best not to go nosing too deep around the airport.

However, he had taken the swimming pool slides all the way. Traced them to Elite Products, a plastic manufacturing firm in Brooklyn. The owner of Elite had excellent recall of the sale of the slides. They were bought with cash by a man named James Bishop. Forty-five to fifty years old, gray hair, gray bushy mustache, a bit on the plump side, stoop-shouldered, sloppy dresser, dirty-collared shirt, ketchup stains on his tie. Bishop had taken the slides away in a station wagon bearing North Carolina license plates.

The electronic looping devices used to neutralize the alarms were especially designed for that purpose. Poole considered himself highly knowledgeable in the area of surveillance and alarm systems, but he had never seen anything like these loops.

Poole himself had put the word out discreetly to key informants in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. A hundred thousand dollars was promised for a substantial lead, proportionately as much for any lesser information. This, in Poole's opinion, was where their best chance lay. Predictably, criminals let money burn holes in their underwear. They would be spreading it around, making impressions. Someone would take notice and capitalize on it sooner or later. One might be able to physically hide a billion eighty-two, but to psychologically keep it from surfacing was impossible, Poole said.

Nothing.

Darrow sat there feeling hope abandoning him.

“You don't intend to pursue this any further do you?” Horridge asked.

“Whatever you advise,” Darrow replied.

“I believe it best to drop the matter. We certainly don't want a network of dubious types chattering about us, no matter how subterranean they happen to be.” Horridge addressed Darrow as though Poole wasn't in the room.

Darrow nodded submissively, told Poole to resume his regular duties, get security back on normal schedule.

“There was no robbery,” Horridge put in.

Poole said two “yes sirs” and left.

O
VER
the next two days Darrow did everything possible to charm Horridge. They had lengthy conversations that Darrow subtly steered to topics Horridge knew most about. Dogs, for example. Horridge owned and bred water spaniels, proudly recited the geneaology of his champions. Horridge also recited Emerson, whom he referred to as Ralph Waldo. He'd read Emerson entirely, many works over and over. Some of the essays were canon to him. His favorite was “Conduct of Life.”

Darrow was not normally a good listener, but as Horridge went on and on about water spaniels and Ralph Waldo, he remained apparently interested, his eyes directly on Horridge's, and managed not to fidget. After all, he was listening for his life.

Monday came.

Horridge had said he'd be leaving on Monday. Darrow expected that at any moment Horridge would just pick up and go, with a handshake and a thank you like any other guest. Probably no mention of Darrow's fate. Darrow wondered exactly how it had been handled with his predecessor, Gridley.

They were in the library. A smaller room than the others on the ground floor, seldom used. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling leather bound books, a fireplace of Antique Verde marble, leather upholstered chairs. At the moment Horridge had his collar unbuttoned, tie knot slipped loose two inches. Darrow believed that a good sign. He thought if only he had time he'd go into the city for a goddamn first-edition Emerson, possibly one that was autographed.

A bird flew onto the window screen, clung to the wire mesh with its talons. Common sparrow, white underside exposed.

“Well …” Horridge said within a sigh.

Silence.

“Edwin?”

“Yes?”

“Leave the room.”

“Certainly.”

Darrow went out, closed the door behind him. He walked down the hall to his study, through and out to the south terrace, down the wide stone steps and across the lawn to a huge copper beech. Paused beneath it, touched the bark of it, gray and textured like elephant hide. It had been thirty years since he'd touched any part of a tree, Darrow realized.

He returned to the house.

The library door was open.

Horridge was seated in a different leather chair now, nearer to a window. He had a book resting open on the thigh of his crossed-over leg.

Darrow noticed the telephone, a change in its position on the side table.

Without looking up, Horridge told him: “Don't get your hopes too high, but I've arranged for an appeal. We leave for Florida in the morning.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

T
HE
U.S. Department of Commerce's national oceanic map number 12327 is like a look at New York Harbor from ten miles up. Viewing that map with a somewhat bizarre imagination one is brought to realize the remarkable similarity between the harbor and a cross-section of the female genitalia.

The Upper Bay, as it is designated, is the vaginal cavity. The only way in or out of it is below, where the pelvic structure of Staten Island and Brooklyn squeeze nearly together to form what is appropriately known as The Narrows. Manhattan, the way it extends downward into the Upper Bay, is of course the uterus and ascending right and left from that are the fallopian tubes—the East River and the Hudson River.

There are three islands in the vaginal Upper Bay. Of the three, Governor's Island most suggests a plump spermatozoon headed upstream. The other two, Liberty and Ellis, appear to be the same but, by comparison, seem frail, weak, lagging. Particularly Ellis Island, which favors the New Jersey waterfront and appears close to splitting in two.

Ellis, like everything else, once belonged to the Indians. The Mohegan tribe called it Kioshk or Gull Island. It was only about three acres then, but when the trading ships came they dumped their ballast close to Ellis and that about doubled its size. There were many oyster beds around Ellis, really fine oysters, so during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the British would boat out to the island and rake about. In fact, it became such a favorite spot for such activity that for a time it became known as Bucking Island. It is not difficult to picture certain lords and ladies chasing through thickets with paste-studded buckles flashing and garlands flying, finally getting down to a state of complete
dishabillé
on some sufficiently soft spot where they would open and slurp oysters, and conceivably one another. More likely, though, there wasn't all
that
much wasted frolic in it. There was also a pesthouse on the island where numerous pirates literally had the floor knocked out from under them.

In 1890 the federal bureau of immigration became interested in Ellis, took it over from New York and spent five hundred thousand dollars to build on its facilities to process immigrants. The project was completed on June 13, 1897. It burned down the following day. The architectural firm of Boring and Tilton redesigned the place on a larger scale. Featured was the main building three hundred and eighty feet by one hundred and twenty feet constructed of red brick and with a broad ashlar of gray limestone and four identical towers each one hundred and twenty feet high. Together with the expansive roof of the main building and its towers of green-and-gilt copper, its style was French Renaissance, adulterated slightly by Greek Byzantine. Quite imposing, considering its purpose.

From the year it opened to its official closing in 1954 Ellis Island grew to thirty-five similarly styled buildings on twenty-seven and one-half flat, filled acres. Over those years it processed fourteen million immigrants. Not all immigrants, however, passed through Ellis. Those steamship passengers who arrived in first class and those in second class who shook hands with a twenty in their palm were never so inconvenienced. They were given perfunctory medical examinations and had their entrance papers approved while their ship was in the Lower Bay. Stick out your tongue. Ink pad, rubber stamp, swak swak was, for them, the most there ever was to it. First classers and others of means never set foot on Ellis. They went straight down the gangplank ahead of their trunks to the Astor or the Ansonia, where suites awaited.

The rest came knotted and dazed out of steerage with everything they owned on their shoulders and in their hands. Frightened to the point of paralysis as they were barged from a West Side pier to the island they had heard about, where they might fail examination by merely displeasing an official's eyes. Be turned away, shipped back for smiling at the wrong time or for not answering a question asked in a language they did not understand or for being pretty and refusing to open mouth or legs behind some locked door.