Twice

gone any farther.”

“Well, that’s not true. I know things now about those entrances that I didn’t know then,” said Jetty with a sly smile, tapping his foot rapidly on the floor. Lydia could see that some of his teeth were brown and jagged, some of them missing entirely.

“What’s that?” asked Ford.

“People live down there, man. In the tunnels. The mole people.”

“Give me a break, Jetty.”

“No, for real. There’s, like, a whole society under there… mainly psychos and junkies, but they’re under there. They make whole, like, towns… with mayors and ‘runners,’ people who go topside for stuff. I’m not making this up. You can check it out for yourself.”

“I’ll do that,” said Ford. He wasn’t about to engage in an argument with a prisoner in a mental institution. It was a story he had heard before but never quite believed. The thought of people lurking beneath the ground, living their lives out there, was just too weird to be true. A lot of cops he knew believed it, but he’d never seen any evidence of it. Anyway, anybody who was willing to go down there to investigate the possibility had a screw loose, as far as he was concerned-Jeff and Dax included.

Jetty seemed to have fixated on Lydia after he finished talking. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her and Ford couldn’t blame him. It must have been a long time since he’d seen a woman like Lydia.

“I know you,” he said suddenly, pointing a bony finger at her, his mouth widening into a jagged grin.

“I don’t think so,” said Lydia with a polite smile.

“Yeah, I do,” he said, nodding vigorously. “You’re Jed McIntyre’s girlfriend.”

The sound of Dax knocking on the metal door reverberated on the concrete around them and sounded like thunder. Silence was the answer and the two of them stood holding their breaths, waiting. Jeff was half hoping that no one would respond to the knocking so that they could get the hell out of there.

After a moment, they heard a shuffling inside and then a thin tentative voice whispered, “Who?”

“Danielle sent us. She said you could help us find someone,” Dax answered, sounding as casual as if they were selling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door.

The door opened slowly and Dax and Jeff entered a small, tidy, warm space that was lit with hurricane lamps. The ceiling must have been sixteen feet high and the floor was actually carpeted. Large cushions and beanbag chairs were scattered about the floor, and a wooden table leaned against the far wall covered with a black crocheted tablecloth and topped with silk flowers in a blue and white vase, a chair on either side. A futon mattress was covered with sheets and quilts and plenty of pillows. A small refrigerator hummed in the corner and a kettle sat on top of a hot plate.

“There’s electricity here?” said Dax, incredulous, looking around him.

“Of course, young man. Just because we’re houseless doesn’t mean we’re uncivilized,” said the woman who let them in.

“Of course,” said Dax, throwing Jeff a look.

“My name’s Violet,” she said. Her voice sounded like coins dropped on tin, her white hair stuck out like wires. Her eyes, sunken and misshapen, were an unnerving shade of violet, hence her name, Jeff imagined. And it only took a second to realize that her fixed stare meant she was blind. Short and round, with hunched shoulders and a shuffling gate, she took Jeff’s hand as he and Dax introduced themselves with a strong confident grip. She wore a gray bathrobe over a pilled, stained green sweater and navy blue sweatpants. Her feet had been shoved into too- small black Chinese slippers. Using a cane to move across the room, she seated herself stiffly on a pile of cushions.

“Have a seat and tell me, what can I do for you boys?” Violet asked affably.

Jeff and Dax seated themselves across from the old woman and told her who they were looking for. Jeff wondered if it was impolite to point out at this time that he was unsure how a blind woman could help them to find Jed McIntyre.

“Just like topside, there is good and evil under here,” the old woman said as she stared off at nothing. “The balance is the same, just some people up there hide themselves better. Down here, all pretenses have been dropped. The one you are looking for is down here. He’s a different kind of bad.”

“I don’t want to be rude,” said Dax, “but you’re blind. How could you know that?”

“If anything, I’m at an advantage,” she said. “You two stumbled through the tunnels, not used to the dark. I heard you coming ten minutes before you arrived. Darkness is my natural habitat. I’ve only got these lights on for visitors. Besides, I’ve been down here longer than most. People come to me for advice, with gossip. I know everything that goes on.”

Jeff and Dax exchanged a look. Jeff’s disbelief was palpable, but Dax shrugged. Jeff stared at the woman, who he thought looked a little bit like Yoda without the ears. He didn’t question her sanity; he could tell by the way she spoke that she was as sound as either of them, educated, intelligent.

“Well, then… where is he?”

“I’ll have to take you there myself. If you don’t mind following behind an old blind woman,” she said with a raspy noise that was somewhere between a cough and a giggle.

“And what do you want for your help?” asked Dax. In his experience, people like this never did anything for nothing. It was the way of the streets.

She cocked her head a bit. “Young man, I just want him out of the tunnels. People are afraid of him. They call him The Virus because that one’s no good for anyone. No one’s safe with him down here. People start coming after him, and we’re all gonna be in trouble. It starts with you two, next thing you know it will be the police, the FBI. This hole,” she said, waving her cane, “is the only place I have in the world. I lose this and I have nothing.”

Dax nodded. “Well, let’s go, then.”

The three of them exited her nest and continued down the tunnel that had led them to her home. Violet led the way and Dax trailed behind them. The going was slow and the darkness and stench became less and less tolerable the deeper they got. The flashlight Dax carried created a narrow beam of light, but there were so many edges and corners it didn’t illuminate that it didn’t make the blackness any less menacing. After a while, Jeff lost track of the turns and stairways they had taken and said a silent prayer that this woman could be trusted enough to lead them back.

Though she walked with a limp and a cane, Violet didn’t stumble and grope in the darkness as Dax and Jeff did, didn’t seem startled by the sounds of rats or voices in the distance. She was home and they were not; she could see and they were blind.

“How did you wind up down here, Violet?” asked Jeff, after they’d been walking awhile. She’d pushed off the offer of his arm and lumbered up ahead of him. She sighed lightly as if she’d been expecting the question but was reluctant to answer it.

“How did you not wind up down here, Jeffrey?” she asked in return. “There’s no easy answer to that question, is there? How many decisions little and big did you make every day of your life, how many factors known and unknown to you, within and out of your control, led to your life being what it is today?”

“I never thought of it that way,” he answered, chastened.

“Why would you? You don’t seem like the kind of person who has a whole lot of reason to question your decisions… and maybe not a whole lot of time, even if you had reason. Me, I find that I have plenty of both. Reasons and time, that is,” she said without bitterness, her voice little more than a whisper.

“So what did you come up with?” Jeff could sense Dax moving in closer to hear the answer.

“Short version: I was born blind, like I told you, in the late thirties. Part of a large Irish family living in a railroad flat in the East Village. I grew up, got married, was a teacher at the Helen Keller School for the Blind. My husband, Patrick, worked in the Bowery sweatshops making men’s shirts. He handled all our finances and I trusted him to do it, even though he was a drunk and a gambler. I thought that all our lives we were putting money away for our old age. I had a pension, insurance. But when he died about ten years ago, I learned that he had drunk and gambled away every penny, even going so far as to take a loan against my pension. It was only a matter of months after his funeral that I was on the street.”

“No family?” asked Dax.

“None I could turn to,” she said quietly.