“Impressive, isn’t it?” he called.
Before they could answer two men stepped out from behind them, crowbars and wrenches in hand, and fenced them back.
“What’s this?” said Hayes. “What the hell are you doing?”
“My apologies, Mr. Hayes,” called the stocky man at the far end of the tunnel. “I’m afraid in the interest of my security we have to keep you as far away from me as possible.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have your informants. I have mine,” said the man, and saluted. Then his face grew solemn and he said, “I know what you are. And you’ll not come within a hundred feet of me.”
The hall was silent for a good while. Samantha tried to see Hayes’s face in the dark but she could read nothing there.
“You would be the famous Mickey Tazz, then,” Hayes said, and stepped back and brushed himself off.
“I would,” said the man. “And you would be Cyril Hayes. The least famous of all McNaughton employees. As intended. And there next to you, is that Miss Fairbanks?”
Samantha nodded but did not speak. She glanced to Hayes again to see how he took this but his face was closed and still.
“There’s no need to be afraid,” Tazz said.
“I’m not,” she said.
“Well, that’s good. I’m surprised Mr. Hayes has brought you to such a meeting. Then again, I’m not sure why I’m here, either. Though he seems to have made it impossible for me to avoid.”
“What is this place?” asked Hayes.
“Don’t you recognize it? After all, it’s one of yours,” Tazz said. He pointed behind them at the corner where the pathway ended. Inlaid in the wall were the rungs of an iron ladder leading down into the dark, and stamped at the top of the ladder was the imperial M of McNaughton.
“Have you never seen it? Or heard of it?” asked Tazz.
“No. I haven’t,” said Hayes.
“I’m not surprised, Mr. Hayes. Your company keeps its secrets close, and they only share what they have to. Such is the way of all industry. But to keep such a secret from you, their personal secret-keeper? Well. I suppose they didn’t have to tell you, now did they? You’re more of a personnel watchdog. The real treasures they keep far from you, maybe intentionally. As to what this room is, I mean really is, I don’t know. It’s just another one of McNaughton’s many secrets, to me. Though by no means the worst. Fascinating, isn’t it, though?”
“Maybe so,” said Hayes. “But I’m afraid I didn’t come here to talk just about rooms. Or McNaughton.”
“That’s plain,” he said. “Then what about, Mr. Hayes? Politics? Fishing? Cabbages and kings?”
“About the murders.”
Tazz’s eyebrow twitched. “The murders? Just the murders?”
“Just the murders,” said Hayes calmly.
“Are you serious, Mr. Hayes?”
“Yes.”
“What do you expect for me to say about them?”
“Anything. Anything about what you think of them. About who did it and what they mean,” said Hayes. He smiled as though he’d said what he’d come to say, but Samantha got the strong impression he was improvising.
“I think it should be obvious what I have to say about the murders.”
“Then say it anyway. I want to hear it. After all, no one else has heard it yet.”
“That was in the interest of my security.”
“So I’ve been told.”
Tazz placed his hands behind his back. “What do I think of what’s happened? I think that this is no longer a struggle. No longer just class tensions. I think it’s warfare now, Mr. Hayes. Pure and simple.”
“You blame McNaughton.”
“Of course. Of course I do. Who would profit most from their deaths? McNaughton, and those in their pay.” He nodded, as though satisfied with his claim.
“You would profit as well, Mr. Tazz,” said Hayes.
“Me? How would I profit?”
“You get a dozen martyrs. A dozen proud deaths for your cause. And you lose some undesirables. You see, I know what the men in the Bridgedale trolley had been doing. I know about the sabotage. About the murders they did in their own right. We never made it public. But I know they were killing in your name.”
“I know nothing of this,” Tazz said, his voice still even. “And besides, I cannot control what men do. I cannot influence every decision they make. But I do not kill, either. I do not wantonly murder, nor do I condone it. I am not like McNaughton. I would harm no man unless he planned to harm me.”
“And your current residence?” asked Hayes, gesturing to the room around him. “This has nothing to do with it?”
“The trolley lines, you mean?” said Tazz. He laughed. “You think I may have somehow planned the murders myself, through these tunnels? You don’t know much about the Dockland trolley, then. It was never connected to any of the other lines. It’s a mere fragment. Another project started by the rich and halted by the deaths of the working poor. It is an interesting place to hide, though, isn’t it? But it’s the smartest one. The last place the union trolley killer would look for me would be in the trolley lines themselves.”
“Maybe so,” said Hayes. “Unless Naylor and the rest were killed for other reasons. So you say you have no more knowledge of them? You claim no kinship with them at all?”
“Only in their fates. They were men who suffered needlessly, all their lives. They were drawn to my vision of a new city, perhaps. They may have come to my rallies, but they did not have my approval. In anything they did.”
“So they were never close to you. Never close to your organization. Your movement.”
“You make us sound like a cult,” he said. He waved a hand at the plainly dressed men standing around him. “We are just men. Men of a city. And we are dying. Surely you cannot criticize us for merely wanting to survive. And I do not speak in metaphors here, Mr. Hayes. Our lives are at stake, and each day lives are lost. You have seen it. I am certain of it, you have seen it out in the veins of the city. You have seen the dead and the dying.”
“I’ve seen it in this city, and the next, and the next,” said Hayes. “In cities older than this country.”
“Perhaps so, but on this scale?” Tazz walked to the wall of the room and ran one gloved hand along its smooth side. “Do you know how many people have died here?”
“Here?”
“Yes. Here in this place? Underneath this city? Do you know? No one can say. Not for sure. No one counts a corpse if its life was a poor one. But below the factories, here in the tunnels and the machinery down below… I would say over fifty thousand men have died here since the beginning of the new century. From accidents and overwork and ignorance. That’s not just workplace hazard. That’s a war. It’s a real war.”
“And you plan no violence for this war?”
“Would you say we need any?” Tazz said, walking back into the light. “Look around you. This city is dying. Even as it grows, it dies. It ripens to the point where it is sure to rot. And the people above, the people who live their quaint little lives, they live without ever thinking of what goes down below. But us down here, who can’t avoid it, we watch. And we count. Someone must watch. Now I ask you, what if we showed them? What if we showed the people this world below? What if we showed them the bones of the men this city is built on, piled down here in heaps, trapped in the gears?”
“You think they would care?” Hayes asked.
Tazz was quiet for a bit, kneading the flesh at his chin with one thumb. Then he said, “They have to. They must.”
“I think they would prefer not to look at all, Mr. Tazz.”
“Then we will make them.”
“And you will do this all without a single blow?”
Tazz shook his head. “We do not need violence. We just need people to see.”
“So you’re a peaceful revolutionary. And there was nothing between you and the saboteurs. Between Naylor
