19 Purchase Street (54 page)

The United States stopped taking people in on a mass basis in 1924. From then on, Ellis stood out there looking to be used. During World War II it served well as a detention center for enemy aliens and saboteurs. That was its last function of any importance. There were proposals to convert it to a middle-income apartment house, a school for retarded children (back to the pesthouse?), a narcotic and addiction treatment center, a liberal arts college, a museum. Groups lobbied. Congressmen and senators used the place for years and years of patriotic debate. Ellis Island deteriorated. Ran down so much the cost of renovating it exceeded its value.

The bureau of prisons and the army and the navy raped the place, removed from it whatever equipment they thought usable. Then came the petty scavengers. Came by boat by night to pull out all the copper wire and switches and sold them by the pound. They also took anything of brass and porcelain and every piece of furniture that was still sturdy. As the months went by they repeatedly pilfered the place of increasingly less valuable things.

Then there also were the vandals that came for the excitement of smashing, practiced their pitching arms with rocks on glass panes, thrived on the sound of shattering, demonstrated their strength and let out their hostilities by demolishing already crippled chairs and disabled desks and file cabinets.

Until Ellis Island was there, but nothing was there.

Until Ellis Island was an ideal place to hide a billion eighty-two million.

One of Rodger's yachts was used for transport. A one hundred and eight foot power cruiser designed by Bennetti that Rodger kept berthed at the Indian Fields Yacht Club in Greenwich. Leslie didn't need permission to use it. She had operated the yacht a number of times and despite its good size she found it only a bit more complicated than a Rolls. Standing at the control console up in its wheelhouse, she merely had to turn a key and press a button to start the vessel's GM-V-16 engines. Her left hand minded the wheel and made turns while her right tended to the throttle lever. It was a kind of coordination that involved both hands but nothing of her feet. No brake for fast stopping. Better she should remember that than run this two million dollar beauty up the stern of a scow or something.

Chapin was with her. He freed the mooring lines and took in the bumpers. Leslie maneuvered the yacht into the channel, minded the buoys, proceeded at a restrained speed to the open water of Long Island Sound. She executed a sweeping quarter-turn starboard and shoved the throttle full forward to have the sleek, slicey yacht doing twenty-five nautical miles per hour.

At that rate and with an easterly wind, it took less than two hours to be in The Narrows, passing beneath the Verrazano Bridge and headed on a course due north.

Gainer had stayed with the money.

He and Vinny in the gasoline tanker truck crossed over the George Washington Bridge and picked up the New Jersey Turnpike southbound. He kept to the far right lane and exactly on the speed limit all the way to where the silver underbellies of 707s and 747s coming into Newark were intimidating, the way they roared not very high above them, reminding them of the close call they'd had at Westchester Airport the night before. They turned off onto an extension of the thruway that served the harbor area.

Along there were the enormous spheres and stumpy cylinders of oil storage tanks, and the ugly sulfur odor. Off to the right beyond a flat of spiky marsh grass were ships tied up in the Port Newark Marine Terminal and along the Pierhead Channel. Cranes at work on freighters, emptying one hold while filling another, clearing deckspace only to restack it neatly with identical containers nearly the size of boxcars. White, silver and for some reason, a few bright yellow.

Gainer and Vinny continued on the turnpike extension as it cut back and ran north around Bayonne. Off to their right was the Upper Bay of New York Harbor, a khaki color, patched near shore with the black mud of tidal flats. After a couple of miles they came to Interchange 14B where they paid what toll they owed and took a sharp left. A minute later they were well within the digestive tract of the old waterfront; were the only moving thing along those cobbled ways. Every warehouse was as closed as a fortress, rust on rust on everything of metal, including the miles of railroad tracks that ran down to the docks. The Central Railroad of New Jersey, the Lehigh Valley, others.

A sewage disposal plant was a landmark for them.

They found it, turned right and rumbled over sixteen sets of tracks to get onto a dirt road. Nearly a mile of deep, rutted, bumpy road that ended when it turned and came parallel with a cement seawall. Jutting out from the wall every two hundred feet were old wooden piers, collapsed in several places.

Vinny backed the tanker in under a railroad shed, cut its engine.

Their view directly ahead was Ellis Island. The backside of it only five hundred feet from the tip of the old New Jersey piers.

They had hours to wait.

They napped, got out, stretched and walked a bit. Gainer was grateful for the cheese and sprouts on seven-grain-bread sandwiches Leslie had packed for them. And the big thermos of honey and vinegar drink. He even voluntarily took a hefty pinch of cayenne because if she'd been there she would have wanted him to. Vinny had a sandwich but wouldn't even try the honey and vinegar although Gainer assured him it was a lot like lemonade.

They passed some of the time talking sapphires. Vinny was never without his loupe and had brought along sapphires that had been part of his most recent package. The stones, “popped” from their settings so they could not be identified, were contained within the folds of a piece of waxy tissue that was contained within the folds of a heavier white paper about two inches square.

Vinny explained that these were blue stones, although sapphires came in all different colors. The cheapest was the white or clear, the most precious an orange-red called a
padparadschah
. There were two main varieties of blue, the lighter blue Ceylon and the darker Burmese. The latter, when it was bright like a cornflower, was the most desirable. Most sapphires, Vinny said, had tiny white fiberlike flaws in them that were referred to in the trade as “silk.”

Gainer used the loupe on one of the stones, saw for himself. For a few moments he was in a sterile blue atmosphere. Vinny said he wouldn't trust a stone unless it had at least a little “silk” in it. Fifty, sixty years ago a lot of very believable synthetic sapphires were made and sold and many were still around passing for genuine. The thing was, they made those synthetics too perfect. Whenever he was buying a package from a thief that included sapphires he was always glad to find some “silk,” Vinny said.

Gainer recalled that twelve carat Ceylon sapphire Darrow had wanted to buy at Parke-Bernet's auction in October. A Tiffany stone, Darrow had said. Gainer imagined it, saw himself standing in the back of that place where he had once worked, casually, subtly gesturing another thousand with his rolled up catalogue to outbid everyone for that special chunk of blue. He would give it to Leslie, of course, not for Christmas or her birthday but as a little everyday gift to show that his heart and head and balls were in the right place.

At five-twenty, when the sun looked as though it was only two inches from touching the horizon, the sharp pristine prow of Rodger's yacht appeared beyond the end of the pier, cruising at only a couple of knots. It almost ran past, shuddered and made the water rile as its engines reversed. Leslie backed it slowly into the slip between the piers all the way to the seawall.

Vinny started the tanker truck, maneuvered it so it stood parallel with the pier, only inches from the edge. Meanwhile Gainer was up on the ramp that ran along the top of the tanker. He opened all three of its hatches, and the gasoline fumes that rose from them made the air look watery. He held his breath as he reached in, grabbed up one of the black laundry sacks of money and heaved it down onto the aft deck of the yacht.

For two hours it was quick, hard work, lifting and heaving. The black bags piled up on the deck. While Gainer and Chapin threw them down, Vinny and Leslie tried to keep them organized. Three bags went overboard, Leslie managed to recover them with a gaff. She was tempted to allow one to get out of reach and out into the current so some poor old guy fishing from a pier in lower Brooklyn might snag the catch of his life. However, more likely, she thought, a Wall Street type coming in on his eighty foot flush deck Trumpy would scoop it up.

It had been dark for an hour by the time all three hundred and fifty-seven bags of money were aboard. Vinny backed the truck into the railroad shed and they leaned up some old boards to conceal it.

Leslie started the yacht, snapped on its running lights and gave it a little forward. There was no reason to take in the bumpers. The yacht moved slowly from the old slip. When it was surely clear Leslie made it do a ninety degree turn to the starboard and a minute or two later repeated the turn to port.

She hadn't missed it by much, they saw. The beams of the yacht's spotlights hit on the texture and hue of granite about a hundred feet away—the seawall that ran straight along the entire south side of Ellis Island.

Leslie maneuvered the yacht to the seawall, brought it in closer and closer. She was not sure there was enough depth along there. It certainly looked as though it would be shallow. Any moment she expected to hear the keel of the yacht scraping bottom. Finally, the bumpers collided with the wall. She steadied the wheel and worked the throttle alternately forward and reverse to keep the vessel in place while Gainer and Chapin jumped over onto the seawall to secure the stern mooring line to a maple tree and the bow line to the building situated on the island's southeast point—ran the line in through the space where a window had once been and out where there had been a door.

Leslie switched off all lights.

No point in inviting a harbor police patrol.

At once they set about transferring the money, bag by bag, into that building on the point. They stacked it up in the corner of one of the first floor rooms, found some old mattresses that they layered on top so the heap looked like it was all mattresses.

By then it was eleven-thirty.

Chapin wanted a drink, and although tired, a working girl.

Vinny wanted home and bed.

Gainer would stay with the money.

Leslie got the yacht under way. Did not exceed the night-limit harbor speed as she went up the Hudson to the Seventy-ninth Street Basin. Moored the yacht neatly and exchanged it for a Riva 2000 speedboat that Rodger always kept there.

Feeling more in control and closer to the swiftness she could cause, she put the Riva in gear and growled it loudly out of the Basin and down river.

To Ellis Island.

That same seawall.

But to a spot along it where wild sumac grew out over the water. She steered the Riva in under the leafy branches, where it could not be seen.

Gainer was right there, waiting.

Leslie had packed the Riva two days earlier with things they would need and a few extras. It took them three round trips to carry everything to the location they had chosen for their post, which was not in the building with the money but in the building adjacent, once the residence of the commissioner of immigration and his family.

Gainer and Leslie climbed the three flights of stairs to its attic—a forty-by-forty space with high, raw rafters. It was cleaner than elsewhere because it was free of plaster dust, and ordinary dust as well. The windows of its large, arched dormers were gone, frames and all, and the wind often swept fiercely through. The attic also offered an excellent vantage point from which to keep watch over the money. From the southeast dormer one could easily see into the building next door, in fact right down into the room where the money was heaped.

Leslie inflated the double air mattress. Exhaled into it so rapidly she got light-headed, had to stop four times, refused to let Gainer contribute. Finally it was firm enough. She positioned it on the floor near a window, covered it with a sheet that she tucked tight. Pulled the cases onto two down-filled pillows, plumped the pillows and spread a light mohair throw.

The ASPs.

She placed his on one side at the head of the mattress, hers on the other side.

“Hungry?” she asked.

“Tired.” His shoulders and arms especially. They were burning with fatigue from having hefted all those bags of money.

“Undress.”

“I'd better not.”

“Don't worry lover, we're safe as a couple of birds here,” she said.

He glanced at the ASPs, but then thought she was right and that he was just overedgy because he was tired. Where, he wondered aloud, was she getting all her energy.

“I didn't do nearly as much as you,” she told him.

He took off his clothes and so did she. He sat on the mattress and she knelt behind him, kissed him lightly on the neck and behind the ear and hugged her breasts against the muscular flat of him for a long moment before beginning. Massaged his shoulders, used her fingers to knead the tension from him, seemed to know where he had knots of it and firmly, lovingly untied them. Squeezed his trapezoidal muscles left and right and held pressure on them. When she let go the tightness also let go and his shoulders dropped a couple of inches, relaxed.

She guided his head down to his pillow, made sure his position was comfortable, then covered him with the mohair throw. Kissed him on the cheekbone, the sort of brief but assuring good night kiss a boy would get.

“You need a shave,” she said.

The mohair lay lightly, slick and luxurious on him. The down pillow seemed a bottomless sinking place for his head. He reached out and touched the cool steel of the ASP. That he was literally floating on the breath of his love was his last thought before going under.

A
T
dawn there were doves in the rafters.

Leslie had her pillow over her head trying to escape their cooing.

Gainer threw one of his sneakers at them and they flew. He got up and went to one of the dormers, took himself in hand, aimed and urinated out. The city was only a mile away but seemed closer, almost looming. The harbor made it look as though the city was presenting itself on a silver tray. The variation of spires appeared lifeless, no movement discernible. The money buildings, the twin towers of the Trade Center and those mainly black ones of the financial district were most prominent.