claiming not to have known his young accomplice was going to use violence. It would make no difference to a jury, but Herrick must have thought it would save his neck.
Mike was gaining on him. “You wanna cut somebody? Cut yourself, Forbes. Slice your own throat.”
Over my shoulder, I thought I saw a sliver of light in the farthest remove of the room. I looked again down the dirt corridor of death, but all was darkness.
Had there been movement, or was my mind frozen with fright? It was getting harder to breathe in the dank, airless space. I knew there was a chance that none of us would make it out alive.
Suddenly, I heard a loud grunt from Travis Forbes. He lifted Minerva Hunt off the ground and threw her at Mike. She couldn’t even brace herself for the fall, her hands still bound behind her.
It looked like Mike’s gun-the glint of silver flashing against the black backdrop-fell to the ground as he tried unsuccessfully to catch Minerva. He was knocked backward by the impact of her body against his own.
Forbes was running in the direction Herrick had sent him, un-burdened by his captive. And Alger Herrick was moving faster, too, pulling me with him, while Mike tried to extricate himself from beneath Minerva Hunt.
I was coughing now as dust particles from the ground scuffed up by the skirmish seemed to choke my airway. My own sense of panic made it harder for me to regain control.
“Forbes,” Herrick yelled out. “Are you there?”
I could still hear his footsteps running away from us. I reached in my pocket for a handkerchief to cover my mouth.
The first thing I touched was the heavy piece of cotton cloth, the one that had been doused with chloroform to knock out the cemetery guide.
“Stop!” I said, pleading with Alger Herrick. “I can’t breathe.”
His good hand, the right one, smacked the side of my head so hard that I saw stars. “I need you with me. Just keep moving.”
“I’ll be back for you. You’ll do fine,” I heard Mike say to Minerva.
He must have gotten to his feet and retrieved his gun. He’d be coming after us.
Just then I heard a thud from the direction in which Travis Forbes had run.
“Forbes?” Herrick shouted again. “Have you found the steps, man?”
There was no answer.
Herrick seemed distracted by the silence. I thought-and maybe he did, too-that Forbes had reached the exit and dropped the lid on us after he escaped.
I pulled my arm from Herrick’s viselike grip, but he yanked me back, face-to-face. I swung my free hand up from my side, covering his nose with the chloroform-soaked cloth, using my height to my advantage.
The silver hook released its hold as Herrick tried to swat me away. I pressed the rag to him again, not knowing whether there was enough of the gas on it to overwhelm him.
He swiped at my neck with the hook, and I stepped back. He must have scored a cut. I felt a trickle of blood seeping behind my ear.
“Get down, Coop,” Mike said, rushing out of the dark.
Before Mike could reach me, Alger Herrick fell to his knees.
I didn’t know if chloroform had done its job, or if he was brought down by Shalik Samson, who cracked him on the back of his legs with a baseball bat.
FORTY-SEVEN
The night watchman at the Provenzano funeral home had opened it up for the chief of detectives while he was waiting for us to be led out of the cavernous burial ground.
Mercer brought me inside the large parlor, decorated for old-fashioned comfort-sofas and armchairs of burgundy silk, with antimacassars-meant to soothe grieving relatives. It wasn’t where I wanted to be right now, but I had no choice in the matter.
Detectives and uniformed cops, huddling in small groups to gossip about the case now that the emergency had passed, moved out of the way as I walked through the room.
I lowered myself onto one of the sofas and rested my head against the pillow.
The watchman was telling some of the officers about the old cemetery. “I bet you didn’t even know it was here, did you? We get asked about it all the time,” he said. “It was because of the terrible contagion in Manhattan back then-yellow fever, tuberculosis, scarlet fever. The city banned aboveground graves, so these rich guys decided to excavate this block and build marble vaults ten feet under. Regular plague pits, they must have been.”
I shivered, wrapping a blanket around myself as I waited for Lieutenant Peterson to clear the room.
I saw a couple of the guys who were leaving make way for Shalik Samson. Mercer brought him over to me to say good night.
“You saved us, you know,” I said to him, mustering a smile.
“You gonna say that to the judge?”
“Of course I will, if you tell me how you did it.”
“Mercer was helping that sick man, you know? He made me go wake up the chauffeur ’cause the amb’lance took so long. Carmine-that guy? He had a baseball bat in the car. Guess he thought I was gonna rob him. Mercer was like gonna shoot him if he didn’t drop the damn thing.”
“How’d you get down into the burial vault?”
“That way you went in got locked, you know,” Shalik said. It happened when Alger Herrick dropped the lid. “Me and Mercer, we just went around the whole garden, all along that crumbly stone wall, looking for another entrance. Had to be, he kept telling me. Couldn’t have just one way in or out for all those bodies.”
“And you found it,” I said.
“Back behind a tree. Mercer didn’t fit, but I did.”
I hadn’t been wrong. That sliver of light I thought I saw had been Shalik opening the lid of the second hatch.
“So you tripped the guy with the backpack?”
“Dude didn’t even see me. That dungeon’s as black as I am.”
“What do you think, Mercer? Gold shield?” I asked.
“First, we’re taking him home. I’m not ready to give Shalik any commendations yet, but we’ll get those charges thrown out.”
The kid high-fived me, and Mercer handed him off to the cops who were going to drive him home.
Mike came into the room a minute later. He had cleaned himself up, and brought some hydrogen peroxide and a bandage to cover the cut on my neck.
“You know the river Styx, Loo? Greek mythology?” Mike asked as he leaned over me, dabbing the small wound before he dressed it. “The river of hate, it was called. An old guy named Charon ferries the dead across the river to the underworld. I swear, Coop and me-we were on that ferry tonight.”
“I don’t care if the whole magilla is made of marble or papiermache,” Peterson said. “Couldn’t get me down in there for all the money in the world. Are you telling me, Alex, that Alger Herrick is the half brother of Minerva and Talbot Hunt?”
“The lab is hot on this new familial search technology. Howard Browner says he can prove it with a sample from the father.”
“Think of it, Loo,” Mike said. “Jasper the Third spent a lot of time in England, liked the ladies-young ones-as much as he liked his books. Herrick’s mother was a single girl who deposited him in an orphanage. Alex thinks Hunt’s father might even have paid to steer the infant to a good home. Placed him so well, they wound up with the same friends.”
Mercer sat down beside me and held my hand. “You want us to put this together for you?” he asked the lieutenant.
“It’s all about the map, isn’t it? The rarest map in the world?”
“Seems to be.”
