'Other people mention him from time to time. But he wasn't working in the hotel when the murders took place. So for Damrosch—probably Bandolier never crossed his mind at all.'
With the bridge directly before us, I turned left onto Water Street. Forty feet away, the Green Woman Taproom sat on its concrete slab across from the tenements. Pigeons waddled and strutted over the slashes of graffiti.
Ten feet beyond the front of the bar, a fifteen-foot section of the concrete sloped down smoothly to meet the roadbed. Pigeons ambled and flapped away from my tires. I drove slowly up past the left side of the bar. The second, raised section of the tavern ended in a flat frame wall with an inset door.
I swung around the back of the building and swerved in behind it. Tarpaper covered the back of the building. Above the back door, two windows were punched into the high blank facade. Ransom and I softly closed our doors. Now nearly at the Illinois Avenue bridge, cut from view by the curve of the river and the prisonlike walls of an abandoned factory, the army advanced. An outsize, brawling voice bellowed, '
Pigeons moved jerkily across SKUZ SUKS and KILL MEE DEATH.
A blaze of whiteness caught my eye, and I turned toward it —the harsh sunlight poured down like a beam onto a dove standing absolutely still on the concrete.
I looked at Ransom's white, shadowless face across the top of the car. 'Maybe someone took those pages out of the file.'
'Why?'
'So April wouldn't see them. So we wouldn't see them. So nobody would ever see them.'
'Suppose we try to get inside this place before the march breaks up?' Ransom said.
John pulled open the screen door and fought with the knob. Then he banged his shoulder against the door. I pulled out the revolver and came up beside him. He was fighting the knob again. I got closer and saw that he was pulling on a steel padlock. I pushed him aside and pointed the gun barrel at the lock.
'Cool it, Wyatt.' John pushed down the barrel with a forefinger. He went back to the car and opened the trunk. After an excruciating period that must have been shorter than it seemed, he pushed down the lid and came toward me carrying a jack handle. I stepped aside, and John slid the rod into the shackle of the padlock. Then he twisted the rod until the lock froze it and pulled down heavily on the top end of the rod. His face compressed, and his shoulders bulged in the linen jacket. His face turned dull red. I pulled up on the bottom of the rod. Something between us suddenly went soft and malleable, like putty, and the shackle broke.
John staggered forward, and I almost fell on my backside. He dropped the rod, yanked the broken lock away from the clip and set it on the concrete beside the jack handle. 'What are you waiting for?' he said.
I pushed the door aside and walked into the Green Woman Taproom.
We stood in a nearly empty room about ten feet square. On the far wall, a staircase with a handrail led up to the room above. A brown plastic davenport with a slashed seat cover stood against the far wall, and a desk faced out from the wall to my left. A tattered green carpet covered the floor. Another door faced us from the far wall. John closed the door, and most of the light in the old office disappeared.
'Was this where you saw Writzmann taking stuff out of his car?' John asked me.
'His car was pulled up alongside the place, and the front door was open.'
Something rustled overhead, and both of us looked up at the pockmarked ceiling tiles.
'You want to look in front, and I'll check up there?' I nodded, and Ransom moved toward the stairs. Then he stopped and turned around. I knew what was on his mind. I tugged the Colt out of my waistband and passed it to him, handle first.
He carried the pistol toward the staircase. When he set his foot on the first tread, he waved me into the next rooms, and I went across the empty office and opened the door to the intermediate section of the building.
A long wooden counter took up the middle of the room. Battered tin sinks and a ridged metal counter took up the far wall. Once, cabinets had been attached to thick wooden posts on the rough plaster walls. Broken pipes jutting up from the floor had fed gas to the ovens. A beam of buttery light pooled on the far wall. Upstairs, Ransom opened a creaking door.
An open hatch led into the barroom. Thick wads of dust separated around my feet.
I stood in the hatch and looked around at the old barroom. The tinted window across the room darkened the day to an overcast afternoon in November. Directly before me was the curved end of the long bar, With a wide opening below a hinge so the bartender could swing up a section of the wood. Tall, ornate taps ending in the heads of animals and birds stood along the bar.
Empty booths incongruously like seventeenth-century pews lined the wall to my right. A thick mat of dust covered the floor. As distinct as tracks in snow, a double set of footprints led up to and away from a three-foot- square section of the floor near the booths. I stepped through the hatch. When I looked down, I saw tiny, long-toed prints in the dust.
The sense came to me of having faced precisely this emptiness at some earlier stage of my life. I took another step forward, and the feeling intensified, as if time were breaking apart around me. Some dim music, music I had once known well but could no longer place, sounded faintly in my head.
A chill passed through my entire body. Then I saw that someone else was in the empty room, and I went stiff with terror. A child stood before me on the dusty floor, looking at me with a terrible, speaking urgency. Water rushed beneath Livermore Avenue's doomed elms and coursed over dying men screaming in the midst of dead men dismembered in a stinking green wilderness. I had seen him once before, long ago. And then it seemed to me that another boy, another child, stood behind him, and that if this child should reach out for me, I myself would instantly be one of the dismembered dead.
The Paradise Garden, the Kingdom of Heaven.
I took another step forward, and the child was gone.
Another step took me closer to the window. Two square outlines had been stamped into the cushion of felt near the window. Brown pellets like raisins lay strewn over the streaky floor.
Heavy footsteps came through the old kitchen. Ransom said, 'Something chewed a hole the size of Nebraska in the wall up there. Find the boxes?'
'They're gone,' I said. I felt light-headed. 'Shit.' He came up beside me. 'Well, that's where they were, all right.' He sighed. 'The rats went to work on those boxes—maybe that's why Writzmann moved them.'
'Maybe—' I didn't finish the sentence, and it sounded as if I were agreeing with him. I didn't want to say that the boxes might have been moved because of his wife.
'What's over here?' John followed the double trail of footprints to the place where they reversed themselves. The pistol dangled from his hand. He bent down and grunted at whatever he saw.
I came up behind him. At the end of a section of boards, a brass ring fit snugly into a disc.
'Trap door. Maybe there's something in the basement.' He bent down and tugged at the ring. The entire three-foot section of floor folded up on a concealed hinge, revealing the top of a wooden ladder that descended straight down into darkness. I smelled blood, shook my head, and smelled only must and earth.
I had already lived through this moment, too. Nothing on earth could get me to go into that basement.
'Okay, it doesn't seem likely,' John said, 'but isn't it worth a look?'
'Nothing's down there but…' I could not have said what might be down there.
My tone of voice caught his attention, and he looked at me more closely. 'Are you all right?'
