Liberty Falling Read online

  Riding down in the elevator, she reassessed Bonham. Park Police: trained, educated, professional. That didn’t rule out superstition, but it did render it highly unlikely that a man trained to watch for intruders would, when faced with a classic black-clad skulker, chalk it up to an otherworldly visitation. Anna would pass the gossip on to Patsy. It was her park; she could decide if the boy needed therapy, drug intervention or a spanking.

  MANDY NOT YET back from her interpretive duties at the Registry Hall on Ellis, Anna drew every drop of hot water from the aging water heater and soaked till her muscles grew loose and her skin turned rosy and began to shrivel. A bar of hand soap and vigorous scrubbing removed the bloodstains from her trousers. With a fresh dressing over her scratch and clean sweat clothes on, she felt renewed.

  Five o’clock came and went without producing either Patsy or her roommate. Anna was grateful for the prolonged solitude. Six o’clock, then seven were marked off by the wall clock in the kitchen before she began to tire of her own company. Having yet again forgotten her duties to Bacchus, she helped herself to a Bud Light and munched on French bread and salmon pâté left over from the day before. By eight o’clock she was feeling abandoned and telling herself she was not a guest but a friend in need and Patsy had every right to a night on the town without asking her along—or asking her permission. Besides, she would have turned down an invitation. She had had her fill of Manhattan for one day. Pacing the living room, she stared out at the coming evening, then the perverse dawn of electric lights on the horizon. For the first time since arriving on Liberty, she noticed Patsy didn’t have a television. Positively un-American. On nights such as this, reruns would be just the thing: the mental equivalent of giving a feather to a baby with sticky fingers. Synapses could be kept busy plucking the treacle of sitcoms off of one another. A brief peek into Mandy’s lair located a small TV squashed in amongst alternative press newspapers and a framed picture of brother or boyfriend with his army unit grinning out from a spiky forest of rifles. Kids and dogs crowded around, wanting to play war. Desperate as she was, Anna closed the door. The room was a wreck, clothes knee-deep on the floor and a refuse of papers, cosmetics and underwear skidding off every elevated surface.

  Back in the living room, the telephone tempted her but there was no one to call. Not even Frederick. She hadn’t bothered to ask for his friend Emmett’s last name or phone number. Tomorrow she would rectify that. Fate had made them partners in Molly’s recovery. Life would be easier if they became friends.

  Should Frederick stick around—and apparently it would take an act of Congress to get him out of the ICU—he might take up where Molly had brutally left off two years before. With Anna’s blessing, Molly might give in to his siege of affections. How weird would it be to have slept with your brother-in-law?

  Jump off that bridge when you come to it, Anna told herself. Molly was not yet out of intensive care. It was presumptuous to be marrying her off to an ex-boyfriend.

  Nine o’clock brought no relief in the form of mental distraction. Anna decided to take her evening constitutional around Liberty Island, then try for an early bedtime.

  The expected blessedness of the outdoors failed to soothe. Either the eternal hum of the city grew louder or Anna’s filtering mechanism grew weaker. The harbor had lost its ability to buffer Liberty from the surrounding congestion. Indeed, the black water seemed but a different kind of pavement bringing the flotsam of noise and tension to the shore. Anna longed for the simple call of a night bird, the sweet cacophony of cicadas in the pines, for a night that was truly dark, pricked only by stars, and those confined to the purer shades of white. Urban nights were garish, without rest. Fervently, she hoped Molly would get well soon. Much longer in New York City and Anna knew she would be in need of a good psychiatrist.

  Narrow wheels rattling on brick brought her out of her black study. Cleaning crew had finished the lady’s ablutions and were putting away their equipment for the night. That meant the staff boat would be coming in an hour or so. Cleaning crew rode back to Manhattan on the last boat of the day. If Patsy and Mandy didn’t arrive on it, Anna would have the house to herself till morning.

  Men in groups made her leery and she faded into the shrubbery as they clattered near. Three of them were dark-skinned, two African-Americans and one Puerto Rican or Mexican. The fourth was almost painfully white, big and oafish with a neck nearly as thick as his head, which was either shaved or naturally bald from the edge of his green ball cap down. There was something tantalizingly familiar about him, but Anna knew she’d never seen him before. The type was familiar.

  Alongside the smaller, wiry men, chitchatting in East Coast accents both Brooklyn and Bronx, he looked out of place. A big, dumb farm boy out to see the world. As they passed Anna’s hiding place, he spoke. No accent, none. Like Anna, he wasn’t from around here.

  The four men wheeled their cart under a light and she noticed that the white boy had an unpleasantly large spider crawling beneath his collar. She was considering whether or not to warn him, when he turned his head and she realized it was something infinitely more poisonous than a spider. Two inches below his right ear a swastika the size of a nickel was tattooed. That must endear him to his coworkers, she thought.

  Enjoying as she always did—as she had since she was a child—the simple act of hiding and watching, she let the men rattle and babble to a nearby building that was kind enough to swallow them from sight. Stepping from the concealing branches of the bushes, she continued her walk across the plaza and up the foreshortened mall. For three nights she had walked the island. Anna had seen Lady Liberty from inside and out, from sea, land and air, yet the statue never failed to make her feel, in some indefinable way, proud.

  Tonight an invisible stage manager was calling the cues to Anna’s personal show. As she walked up the center of the paved area, the two great bronze doors in Liberty’s base swung open and a shaft of gold spotlighted her.

  “I wish I could sing,” Anna said.

  “Give it a go,” Hatch invited. “Who knows? Maybe Broadway’s been waiting for youse all these years.”

  Hatch was smiling, standing in his usual laid-back stance, but Anna could see the pull of nerves around his dark eyes, hear it in his lapse into the neighborhood “youse,” a habit he’d kept out of his conversation the last time they met.

  “Broadway’ll have to go on waiting,” she said. “My husband was an actor,” she told him, in an unusual moment of confidence. “Zach was dying to get on Broadway.”

  “I didn’t know you was married,” Hatch said. He held open the inner security door to the statue and Anna joined him as if it had been prearranged. “He still dying to get on Broadway?”

  Zach had died trying to get across Ninth Avenue, hit by a cab, but Anna didn’t want to get that personal. “He went on to better things,” she said.

  Hearing what he must have thought was the flippancy of a slightly bitter divorcée, Hatch dropped the subject. “You come to help me with the sweep?”

  Merely thinking of those 354 steps made Anna’s thigh hurt, but there was such hope in his voice, and she had to admit, it wasn’t like she had anything better to do. She gave in gracefully and followed him into the orgasmatron.

  “How do you use this for medical emergencies?” she asked as they squeezed in, sardine fashion. “No room for a backboard, wheelchair, nothing.”

  “It’s to get us to them. Then we carry them or whatever.”

  “How often does it happen?”

  “Not often. Hasn’t while I been here.”

  A miracle in itself. With the high-density traffic and no way to clear a path from level S-1 to the crown, it was a wonder there had not been at least a handful of heart attacks and strokes. “What a mess,” Anna said, picturing the situation.

  “You got it,” Hatch replied. “If some old guy croaks up high, you got all of PS 191’s third-grade class steppin’ over the corpse to get down the stairs. We been lucky.”

  Anna f
ollowed him up the spiral staircase, through the light-drenched frontal lobe of the lady and back down to the orgasmatron. The climb had tweaked at her gash and she could tell it was bleeding again, but it was well dressed and the seepage wouldn’t amount to much.

  Keeping to a pattern too predictable to be desirable in a law enforcement officer, Hatch stopped at the top of the pedestal and went out to the same place he had the first time Anna had accompanied him. “Time to do drugs,” he said.

  There was a faint breeze. Anna welcomed its tickle in her hair. Hatch, ahead of her on the high balcony, turned when he reached the parapet. Indicating the crenel facing Manhattan, he said: “You want to sit? You being company, I don’t want to hog the best spot.”

  Self-preservation, dragged from dormancy by the gang of cleaning men, reasserted itself. Backlit, faceless, Hatch no longer seemed utterly harmless. Alone, sixty feet above an unforgiving surface, it was not unthinkable that he had pushed a girl to her death.

  “No thanks. Afraid of heights,” Anna lied, and planted her back firmly against the wall beneath Liberty’s big toe.

  Hatch was quiet for a moment and still. For the latter Anna was grateful. With his face in darkness and his uncharacteristic failure to speak, if he’d started toward her she might have embarrassed them both by making a run for it. Was this how the little girl felt? Confronted by a nameless threat? Or was he nameless? The child was not identified. Nothing existed to prove she hadn’t known Hatch, or he her.

  “You’re afraid of heights?” Hatch said after too long a silence. “You was okay in the elevator and it’s all glass. That gets to most—what do you call ’em? Acrophobes? Agoraphobes?”

  “Acrophobes.”

  “I get it,” he said, and there was a change in his voice that made her uncomfortable, an undercurrent of anger. “It’s okay.” He turned away, swinging himself up onto the chest-high parapet.

  Anna sucked in her breath, took two steps toward him, thinking for an instant he meant to jump.

  He settled himself, legs dangling, and fished the foil packet with its Gauloises from his shirt pocket. “You’re thinking of that little girl. I’ve about thought of nothing else.” He seemed himself again. His anger was at the child’s death; nothing to do with Anna. Prickling subsided from the back of her neck and she walked over to lean on the wall, close enough to be companionable but not so close she could be grabbed had she misguessed his intentions.

  Hatch smoothed out his cigarette and lit it, cupping the match against an imaginary windstorm. “She didn’t go off here. It was over on that side.” He waved smoke in the general direction of Wyoming. “I been over there maybe a hundred times tonight. The cleaning crew probably thinks I’m dingy. I been trying to figure it. Why she ran. And jumped. Jeez, she was just a kid. I thought she was a boy, maybe ten years old.” He looked at Anna. She managed not to flinch at the sudden movement. “They don’t know who she was, you know that? This beautiful little girl and nobody claims her. I don’t get it.”

  Anna had no response and no way to help with whatever demons he was exorcising but to let him talk.

  He took a drag, tapped the ash and leaned out, watching it fall through the beams of light trained on the lady from the ground. “Long way,” he said.

  “Long way,” Anna agreed.

  He smoked and she shifted her weight, trying to ease the ache in her thigh.

  “This punky pimple-faced kid said I pushed her. You hear that?” he asked, his eyes still on the ground.

  Several lies occurred to her, but she could think of no reason to employ them. “I heard,” she said, and told him she’d been the first to get to the body—first in a semiofficial capacity. A hundred others had milled around before she arrived.

  “Did you see her go over—jump? Her or me?” Hatch asked. Hope, or alarm, tightened his throat and Anna felt the little hairs on her nape stir again.

  “I didn’t,” she said truthfully, and waited for him to believe her. “I came when I heard the crowd beginning to stampede.”

  “Nobody claimed her.” Hatch took another lungful of smoke.

  “So you said.”

  “Did you hear anybody has ID’d her?”

  “I haven’t,” Anna replied.

  “It bothers me, her layin’ in a morgue somewhere all naked and cold and nobody to take her home. Know what I mean?”

  Anna didn’t. Dead was dead. What difference did it make how the body was dressed or where it lay? To be polite, she made a friendly noise.

  “Not even a name to put on a headstone. You hear a name at all?”

  Anna shook her head.

  “You’d tell me if you heard?”

  “Sure. I’d tell you.”

  “Not even knowing who she was, it’s kind of got to me.”

  Anna could see that it had. Hatch’s hands trembled, palsied like a very old man’s, as he smothered his cigarette butt in the tin of Waldorf sand and buttoned it back into his breast pocket. He had all the symptoms of a deeply troubled soul. Anna ran her hand down over the back of her neck, but the little hairs wouldn’t lie all the way down. This fixation of his, the child’s identity—Anna couldn’t tell if he was genuinely obsessed with finding out who the dead girl was or desperate to ascertain that others had not.

  Either way, she didn’t much want to be alone with him in the dark any longer.

  8

  PATSY WAS WAITING when Anna got back to the house. Either by choice or circumstance, Mandy was marooned on Manhattan Island for the night. Both developments suited Anna. She was glad not to be alone, but in no mood for Patsy’s roommate. Patsy brought some excellent rigatoni left over from her supper at the Supreme Macaroni Company on Ninth Avenue and a summons from above. Trey Claypool requested Anna’s presence in his office on Ellis Island “at her convenience no later than eight-thirty” the following morning.

  Sleep kindly stopped by for Anna shortly after midnight, and such was the wimpiness of the Bud Lights that she slept undisturbed by alcohol jitters. Curious what transgression had gotten her called on the Assistant Superintendent’s carpet, she rode over to Ellis on the eight A.M. staff boat with Patsy.

  Because of the recent and beautifully executed renovation and restoration of the building housing the Registry Hall, the work spaces were nice enough by normal standards and positively lavish by NPS standards. Offices were situated on either side of a wide, high-ceilinged hall that led from the old powerhouse, through the nonpublic areas, to open onto the famous “kissing post.” The kissing post was a pillar at the bottom of an open staircase connecting the second-floor Registry Hall with the first-floor business section where train and boat connections to a new life were made. Families meeting immigrants weren’t allowed into the registry area. The first time they saw their loved ones was descending those stairs. The first chance they had to lay hands—or lips—on them was the pillar at the bottom. Hence, the “kissing post.”

  Two sets of double doors, like the air lock in a submarine—or, according to the noise-bedeviled interpreters who worked in the museum, a noise lock cutting off the din of excited voices echoing in the enormous tiled room—separated the pragmatic infrastructure of the island’s management from the drama and romance of its past.

  The official parts of the building were carpeted in a surprisingly unbureaucratic peach color. Walls were off-white, rooms well lighted, desks modern and made of metal.

  Feet up on his desk, coffee mug in hand, Trey was waiting in his office. He was speaking in a low monotone and at first Anna thought he was dictating into a tape recorder. When he broke off and waved her in, she saw he was not alone. Looking ashen and impossibly young, Officer Bonham sat in the visitor’s chair, hunched over, his forearms resting on his knees.

  “Glad you could make it, Anna,” Trey said, generously pretending she’d had a choice. “Billy here has offered to stay an hour over and help us find your stairwell.” Anna suspected the “offered” was another illusion of freedom granted by the Assistant Superintendent
. Billy, for all his youth and honey-brown hair, was haggard. Either night shift or personal worries were sapping his energy.

  Claypool swung his feet down. “No time like the present. This thing’s been driving me crazy. Yesterday I went all the places we’ve got boneyards, and no wrecked stairs.”

  Anna was getting the unpleasant feeling that a black mark was going on her record, that she would forever be known as the ranger who destroyed examples of our precious national heritage on Ellis Island. This dismal future must have showed in her face. Claypool said, “Not that we care about the ruined structure—I mean we care, of course we care, but once it’s that far gone there’s no salvaging it. A lot of Islands Two and Three is beyond hope of stabilizing. It’s been let go too long.”

  Letting her off the hook was an act of kindness. Someday Anna might have to reassess her opinion of Trey as a cold fish. Not today. He’d made her get up too early.

  A spring in his step, a man of action now that the smallest of goals was in the offing, Claypool led the way down the hall and into the brick and glass passage connecting Islands I, II and III. Liquid green light and weathered brick embraced them, the curve of the passage destroying perspective so there was no beginning and no end. The hypnotic timelessness of Ellis closed around Anna and she drifted along in Trey’s wake, her mind in neutral.

  At a T-shaped intersection the passage joined the hall that formed the spinal cord for the ward buildings on Island III. Unlike the rest of the covered walkways, here it was open at the sides as in warmer climates. To the left, over the brick wall edging the walk, tucked in a tiny jungle of its own, was a square building: small, one room, one story, very different from the interconnected functioning units of the hospital.

  “The jail?” Anna asked, unable to think of any other use for the stalwart structure.

  “Who knows?” The Assistant Superintendent walked back to where she stood. Resting his elbows on the wall after a careful removal of the ubiquitous glass shards, he stared at the square of brick, though he must have seen it a hundred times before.