Styx & Stone (24 page)

I followed the woman’s directions to a dark, narrow stairway leading down half a flight below the sidewalk. The passage smelled of urine, and there was loose trash in front of the door. The name on the dented, black mailbox read
Gualtieri Bruchner
.

That there could be two men named Gualtieri in New York was possible, but two Gualtieri Bruchners? I had found only four Bruchners in the entire Brooklyn phone directory. How was it possible, then, that a visiting professor, in the country for no more than six or seven months, could have found the time to rent a walk-down in Brooklyn? Or, indeed, why? Professor Bruchner seemed a refined man to me. He kept an apartment on East Thirty-Eighth Street in Murray Hill, dressed well, and never strayed outside the lines of proper, albeit stony, behavior.

The bricks and mortar of the stairwell shook as another train passed overhead. No one answered the door when I knocked, so I returned to the super’s apartment on the ground floor.

“Do you know when I might find Mr. Bruchner at home?” I asked.

The lady eyed me suspiciously, looking me up and down. “Who wants to know?”

“My name is Ellie Stone,” I said. “He works with my father, and I wanted to have a word with him.”

“Your father works in the subway?” she asked, screwing up her face. “You don’t look like a transit worker’s girl. A little too fancy for that.”

“Pardon me?”

“You sure you got the right guy?” she asked. “Little, mole of a man, he is. Quiet, never says a word. Just comes home and goes to work.”

So far the description she had given could fit Bruchner, but the subway?

“Maybe I am mistaken,” I said. “How old is Mr. Bruchner?”

“Well, he looks a lot older than he is. I know for a fact he’s just a little over fifty. Been here since ’48; you learn things about a tenant in twelve years.”

“Since ’48?” I asked, subtracting in my head December 1908 (the date in Bruchner’s file at the department) from 1960: fifty-one or fifty-two.

“Where does Mr. Bruchner come from?” I asked.

The woman shook her head in woe. “A sad story. He doesn’t talk about it, but he was one of them deported Jews in the war. Was in Auschwitz.”

“But where was he from originally?”

“You’d never guess it by the name, but he’s from Italy.” (She pronounced it
It-ly.
)

“What does he do in the subway?” I asked, interrupting her musings.

“He’s a motorman. Drives the F-Train.”

The dispatcher at the Stillwell station on Coney Island told me Gualtieri Bruchner was indeed driving the F-Train.

“Karen knocks off at three,” he said.

“Karen?” I asked through the glass. “Is that a woman? I thought his name was Gualtieri.”

“Could be,” said the dispatcher. “I suppose he’d have to have a real name, but nobody around here calls him that. It’s been Karen for as long as I’ve been here, and that’s nine years.”

“Why do you call him Karen?”

The man shrugged. “I call him that because that’s what everyone’s always called him.”

I looked at my watch: five past noon. “Which train is he driving?” I asked. “I’ve got to go back into Manhattan anyway; I might as well take his train.”

The dispatcher flipped through some papers. “The 1502,” he said finally. “But if you ride his train, girlie, don’t you go talking to him. It’s against regulations.”

Forty-five minutes later the 1502 finally rolled into the station, probably for Karen Bruchner’s last run. I boarded the front car and stood by the porthole that looked out on the tracks before the train. When we pulled to a stop in the Avenue U station, I knocked on the motorman’s booth.

“What?” came a muffled voice from inside.

“Open up, Karen,” I said. “I got a message from the dispatcher.”

The door popped open, and I peered into the dark room. A gaunt, little jerboa of a man sat at the controls of the big train, looking to me expectantly.

“Are you Mr. Bruchner?” I asked him.

He nodded. “Who are you?” He had a foreign accent, but I couldn’t exactly place it. His voice sounded barely stronger to my face than when it had been muted behind the door.

“I’m not from the dispatcher,” I said. “My name is Ellie Stone.”

He squinted at me. “What do you want? I’m working.”

“I thought I knew you,” I said. “You’re Gualtieri Bruchner, is that right?”

“Yes,” he said. “What do you want?”

“I’ve got to ask you about your past.”

The little man gaped at me, silent for half a minute. “What are you talking about?” he asked finally.

“I’m asking because I know another man here in New York named Bruchner. Gualtieri Bruchner.”

He seemed unnerved.

“He’s fifty-one years old.”

The gray man said nothing. He just stared at me.

“And he was born in Merano, in the Alto Adige,” I said.

“
Non è proprio possibile,
” mumbled Bruchner, staring down the tracks into the dark tunnel.

The radio in the motorman’s cabin rasped at the driver: “Hey, Karen, when we gonna get moving?”

Bruchner came back to life, picked up the mike and said, “I’m going, Ralphie.”

He turned to me as the doors to the platform slid shut. “Don’t go away,” he said. “We’ll talk at three. I’m off duty then.”

He closed the door to his cabin, and the train eased out of the station, then picked up speed as it rumbled down the tracks. I stood at the front window, watching the railroad ties disappear beneath the train. Station after station appeared as a small light at the end of the dark tunnel, looming ahead, then rushing forward to meet us. The hole was an eerie place; I’d never ridden in the first car before, never shared the motorman’s view. We streaked past endless columns of huge support beams that held the city on their shoulders. We rolled over trash, we switched tracks, and slowed for signal lights. We were in the belly of the city, traveling through a netherworld of soot and foul air, illuminated only occasionally by the blue flash of some nub of metal scraping the electrified rail. Outside the shell of the subway car, the subterranean landscape was a black and desolate highway, punctuated every so often by rank, decaying orifices, known as stations, which spat the itinerant souls back up onto the streets to the light of day. I watched without realizing the passing time.

An hour later, we turned around in the 179th Street station in Jamaica, Queens, and ran the same route in reverse: Kew Gardens, Forest Hills, Woodside, into Manhattan, down the West Side, back east again into Brooklyn, under Prospect Park, and out of the hole onto the El to Coney Island. Terminus.

It was 3:20 when Bruchner emerged from a door marked
Personnel
. The top of his ratty tweed cap barely reached my chin, and I thought him better suited for riding horses at Aqueduct than jockeying trains beneath the streets of New York’s three largest boroughs. He looked up at me, trying to read my soul through my eyes.

“What is this, Miss Stone?” His accent was clearer now, similar to Bruchner’s, a little heavier perhaps.

“I’m as confused as you,” I said. “I found your name by accident in the phonebook this morning, and I couldn’t believe there were two Gualtieri Bruchners in New York.”

“But why are you looking for Gualtieri Bruchner?”

We began walking down the platform toward an exit. “My father was attacked in his home last Friday night and has been in a coma ever since,” I said. “Earlier that afternoon, he’d argued with this Bruchner fellow. I wanted to ask him what had caused the disagreement.”

The little man seemed to darken as I explained the details and outlined the coincidences between him and the visiting professor from Padua.

“I don’t know what this is about,” he said, “but I am Gualtieri Bruchner. I was born December 21, 1908, in Merano, Alto Adige. Not this other man. I have naturalization and citizenship papers.”

“What about an old Italian passport?” I asked.

He shook his head and clicked his tongue. “No, I never had an Italian passport.”

“Then how did you get into the United States?”

His eyes trembled in their sockets. “Come to my home; I don’t like to talk of it outside.”

Bruchner’s one-room apartment was stark, nearly bare. The place was clean enough and ordered—how much clutter can two folding chairs, a table, and a bed make? It was ponderously depressing. No light from the street could cut through the grime that covered the two barred windows in the front. In the back of the room, Bruchner had long since covered the only window with yellowed newspapers. I couldn’t fathom a guess.

“When did you come here?” I asked, offering him a cigarette. He shook his head wearily.

“In 1948,” he said.

“War refugee?”

He cast his eyes down, then spoke softly. “I was a proud man, Miss Stone. Second engineer on the Venice–Trentino line at the age of twenty-four. The
podestà
decorated me for service during the winter of 1942. I was too small for the army, but I knew the trains. I drove through snow, damaged tracks, and under bombs from British and American planes. Then, after Mussolini was executed, the Germans took northern Italy.” He swallowed hard, and I could almost see his temples throb in the dim light. “On December 30, 1943, the SS took me from my train and put me in a camp. Three weeks later they locked me inside a closed cattle car with a hundred others.” He paused, his face as rigid as a dike holding back the sea. “They said they were sending us to a new home, a place where we can be with others like us. Men, women, children, babies, all jammed together like . . . animals.
Sono un uomo, io!
” His last outburst released the tears he’d been holding in, but the cathartic effect returned him to calm in short order.

“The shame was heavy, and the conditions were hard,” he said, resuming his story. “Three days we traveled, through freezing cold, locked inside with the filth,
la merda, la piscia, la morte.
Twenty-five of us died in that hell.”

Karen Bruchner crossed the room and meekly held out a broad, coarse hand. I looked at him, unsure at first what he wanted. Then realizing he’d changed his mind about the cigarette, I passed him one. He turned around again and retook his distance from me. He lit the cigarette with a wooden kitchen match.

“Thank you,” he said softly, barely more audibly than his deep inhale of the cigarette. He closed his eyes and savored the smoke’s burn in his lungs, then let it out slowly, his nostrils fuming like an idle locomotive for the next minute. “I don’t smoke much no more,” he said. “Too much bad air in the hole. I spent most my life in trains. The smoke is very strong. Now, I drive an electric train,” he laughed and took another drag. “But the air is more worse down there. That’s why I don’t smoke no more.”

“Where did they send you?” I asked. “The Germans.”

He looked at me. “Auschwitz.”

Then he did something I almost wished he hadn’t. He approached me again. Again, he held out his hand. But this time, he pulled back the worn sleeve on his left arm to expose his wrist. The dark skin was rope-tight, stringy muscles underneath. Then he turned his arm over, and I saw the two-inch line of blue numbers on the outer side of his wrist.

“They give me this tattoo when I arrived,” he said, rubbing the deep mark hard with his right thumb. “It don’t come off. They branded me like a cow, then worked me like a dog.”