Linda Fairstein - Bad blood

The surly-looking workman kicked back from the table and stood up, letting his chair fall over on its side. “Not if she’s comin’ down,” he said, cutting the air with a thick brogue and a sneer in my direction.

I started to say I’d prefer to wait right here, my usual eagerness to visit a crime scene-in order to understand every dynamic and detail of it-overcome by my fear of journeying so far into the ground.

“What’s your problem?” Mike asked. “She’s been places you wouldn’t have the balls to go to if I walked in front of you with an AK- 47.”

Golden waved off the hog with one hand and pulled on the doorknob with his other.

“Ignore him, Alex. It’s an old wives’ tale. These guys all cling to their myths and their macho bullshit. Bad luck to let a woman in the tunnel.”

From the reaction Golden’s request had drawn, it was a tale that still had legs.

“’Tisn’t bad luck,” the man said to him, striding past Mike out the door. “It’s no luck. No luck at all. It’s death to us down there, Georgie. We’ve already lost over thirty men since we started the dig for this job. How many more have to die?”

“I’ll wait up here if we all won’t fit in,” I said.

Three wooden crates were near my feet, each stamped on the side with the words explosives-30 LBS. In front of me was an eight-foot-tall metal cage that looked like the kind in which divers are lowered into the ocean to photograph sharks. Its open grid-work was painted red, and it dangled over the top of the hole from a giant winch. The sign on its door read: DANGER: AMPUTATION-KEEP HANDS AWAY FROM DOOR.

George Golden smiled at me. “Step in, Alex. It can hold us.”

Mike nudged me in the back and I reluctantly entered the Alimak-the tiny elevator that would carry the four of us to the floor of the deep shaft below. We were all wearing the obligatory yellow slickers, plastic hard hats in a variety of primary colors, and steel-tipped rubber boots that George had appropriated from the shack. Mine were way too big, and I shuffled forward to avoid stumbling out of the borrowed footwear.

The fifth man was at the controls of the machine, which ran up and down along the inside of the gaping, thirty-foot-wide mouth. He was dressed as we were and had large plugs protruding from his ears. “Do we need those?” Mercer asked.

“Only according to the law,” George said. “The guys never use them inside the tunnel, even though they’re supposed to. In the long run, they’ll have permanent hearing damage anyway-the blasts can split your eardrums. But it’s even more dangerous to take a chance that they can’t hear what’s going on down there.”

I clasped the honeycombed grid with one hand, bracing my back against the rear of the cage. The metal box rattled and shook when Mercer and Mike added their weight to it, and then again as the chief geologist entered last.

“You look nervous,” George said to me. “There’s nothing to worry about, really. You’ve got to keep your fingers in though.”

He reminded me of the DANGER sign and I dropped my hands to my sides. Mercer took one of mine in his own and squeezed it tightly.

Mike saw the gesture and laughed. “Coop’s tribe? Let’s just say it wasn’t the Stoics.”

The operator of the Alimak flipped the switch and the machine lurched into its descent.

Golden ran a finger down the length of his nose, watching my reaction as the noisy cage picked up speed. I didn’t want his attention centered on me, so I leaned my head back, concentrating on the circle of daylight over my head.

“You can always tell when someone isn’t going to like it in the hole,” he said.

“I’ll be fine.”

“If you got room down there for a wet bar, a mirror, and a tube of lipstick, then Coop is good to go,” Mike said.

By the time we had descended a hundred feet, the opening above had narrowed considerably and I felt constricted by the thick, dark wall surrounding us. I closed my eyes and lowered my head. Pinpoints of light-probably the naked bulbs at the bottom-were all I could see through the metal grating.

“You don’t want to look down, Alex,” George said, his voice echoing off the surface of the rock, which glistened with water.

“Are there guys who have trouble working here?” Mercer asked.

“Plenty of them. It’s gotta be in the blood. There are men who come down once, realize that this creaky elevator that might squeeze eight of us in at best is the only way out from that hellhole, and that the tunnels stretch for miles in both directions, full of sandhogs. Some would crawl up the walls if they could. And then there’s the dripping. Constant sound of dripping water. That’s what gets the rest of ’em.”

The Alimak operator called out, “Two hundred feet.”

I craned my neck upward but could no longer see anything above.

“Is the dripping from cracks in the old pipes overhead?” Mercer asked.

Another fear I hadn’t considered. I could hear the pinging sound but wondered what could possibly be leaking this far below the surface.

“There are leaks all right. But the water you see here is a natural phenomenon. It’s all in the landscape above us, pouring down through the earth and rocks, from riverbeds and underground streams. Another two minutes you’ll be five hundred feet below the Hudson River.”

I shivered at the thought of the weight of an entire city pressing down upon me. There was nowhere for me to look but straight ahead, at the point of Golden’s nose.

“You’re not cold, are you?” he asked.

“Just a bit.”

“People always think it’s gonna be freezing. The odd thing is that it’s mild the entire year all this way down. Fifty-five degrees.”

“Three hundred feet,” the man at the controls said, and I knew we were halfway through the four-minute ride to the bottom, the Alimak creaking as we seemed to hurtle on our descent into the darkness.

“So what do the guys do for fresh air?” Mike asked.

“Fresh isn’t exactly the operative word. But air is pumped in all the time by fans, and then the stale air is pumped out through ventilation pipes. Got to be tested constantly for toxic gases and stuff like that.”

Gases. Check. Something else to add to the short list of ways I hadn’t thought about to die in this water tunnel.

“The ones that can’t take it,” Golden went on, “they just blanch before they’re out of this cage. Turn green, some of them, on the ride. Like a kid on his first crack at the giant roller coaster. Get all queasy inside.”

Queasy would have been a good feeling. I was nauseous at this point, clinging to Mercer’s hand as the cage seemed to bounce against the wall and vibrate.

“Four hundred feet.”

“Think about it,” George said. “You go up to see that fabulous view from the Rainbow Room, over at Rockefeller Center. You can look up the Hudson and practically touch Canada from there. Another minute and you’ll be farther in the ground than that skyscraper reaches into the sky.”

Smoke and dust, the residue from last night’s explosion, were still heavy in the air. I covered my mouth and coughed, hoping not to be sick in the crowded elevator.

Golden reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out several small plastic bags-the kind used to store sandwiches or food-with something folded inside each. “You might want a mask,” he said to us, holding out his arm. “The fire will make it tougher to breathe today.”

In another bag he had a package of cough drops, which he offered to me. “Everything has to come down here in plastic-the guys’ lunch, their cigarettes, their identification. The constant dripping gets to everything-and everybody.”