‘THIS IS A buffer. They’ve saved a lot of lives.’
But not the one Guttman was interested in. He tried to look appreciative as the man named Mullen from Otis Elevators pointed to an oil barrel at the bottom of the elevator shaft.
Next to Mullen stood the building superintendent, Schuster, who was anxious and ingratiating. The police would have been here after the accident, maybe half a dozen times, and it was a wonder Schuster had kept his job. He had greeted the phoned news of Guttman’s visit as if it were a call from the dead.
They were standing in the basement of 185 Riverside, on the outer edge of Manhattan’s West Side at 91st Street. After taking the train very early that morning from D.C., Guttman had come up on the Seventh Avenue Line from Penn Station.
Now Mullen said, ‘Go on,’ as though he was teaching a reluctant kid to drive. ‘Step in and have a look for yourself.’
Guttman did so gingerly, ducking under the little door’s lintel, emerging at the bottom of the shaft where he craned his neck and stared up nervously. At the very top of the shaft there was a skylight, and tinsel trails of light drifted down on either side of the elevator car, which he could just make out many floors above. Though the professional part of Guttman overcame the apprehensive, he was still scared that at any minute the elevator might come plummeting down.
He cursed Nessheim for getting him into this. They had got nowhere looking for the mysterious man Kalvin had met at the museum, and in the absence of any other leads, Guttman had felt obliged to do something when a new name surfaced. Once Guttman learned more about Arthur Perkins, RIP, it had seemed worth a trip just to make sure his death had been the freak accident the local New York police said it was.
Guttman pointed to a bunch of thick looped wires that were dangling from the shaft above. ‘What are those?’ he asked.
‘The compensating cables,’ Mullen said confidently, stepping through the door to join him in the bottom of the shaft. ‘There are a dozen of them above the car – each one’s strong enough to support the elevator on its own in case the others break.’
‘What happens if all of them break?’
‘Slats come out from the side, hook on to the guide rails and stop the car from descending further. If for some reason that doesn’t work, we’ve got the buffer down here to cushion the impact.’ Mullen added with a touch of pride, ‘The only time that’s happened, the occupant of the elevator survived.’
Guttman stepped back through the opening, relieved to be out from beneath the elevator. The basement corridor seemed a safe if unattractive haven; the walls had been painted a dingy vanilla. What a contrast to the opulent lobby upstairs, with its marble-tiled floor, gold rococo sconces, and a pair of six-foot deco mirrors that gave a magnified sense of space. Even the elevator, which Guttman had travelled in briefly and apprehensively because of its history, was luxuriously panelled in cherry wood; the plum-sized buttons for each floor were padded in gold plush. Riverside Drive wasn’t Fifth Avenue, and the tenants here were affluent rather than rich, but these buildings had been created to attract the crème of Manhattan’s West Side, and in that they had succeeded.
‘But not this time,’ said Guttman. He pointed to the shaft.
‘How’s that?’ asked Mullen.
‘The cables didn’t work, did they?’ Guttman asked impatiently. He could visualise the elevator car falling, splintering on impact when it landed. What did people say? If you timed it right, and jumped into the air just as the elevator landed, you could survive.
He was contemplating this when Mullen said abruptly, ‘That’s not what happened here. There was nothing wrong with the elevator car.’
‘What do you mean?’ Guttman was alert now.
‘The elevator car didn’t fall. The victim did.’ And when Guttman looked puzzled, Mullen explained. Professor Arthur Perkins had left his apartment on the eleventh floor just before nine o’clock in the morning – like he always did. He pushed the elevator button on his floor. And when the doors to the elevator opened, Perkins stepped forward to get in. Only the actual elevator compartment was on the twelfth floor, which meant that he stepped into space.
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Guttman. He felt sickened. Forget timing your jump; this would be a descent filled with desperation and panic. What a horrible way to die. Guttman tried to imagine what Arthur Perkins had been thinking as he fell, imagining the feelings of terror as the man realized nothing was going to break his fall. Perkins would have fallen eleven storeys to … right where Guttman had just been standing.
Surprised to learn how Arthur Perkins had died, Guttman grew angry, partly because he was struggling with his own fear. He said, ‘How did it happen? I don’t want to hear how the Otis Elevator Company takes precautions against everything from power cuts to acts of God. Something went wrong.’ Then he turned to the super. ‘And don’t tell me you were too busy moving the Festerwalds’ refrigerator or squashing cockroaches in Mrs Du Vivier’s bathroom. I want to know why the elevator stopped on twelve, but the doors opened on eleven.’
‘I don’t know,’ the two men said, almost in unison.
Guttman turned to the super. ‘Is there an elevator man for the building?’
Schuster shook his head. ‘The doorman doubles as the elevator man.’
‘The doorman was off sick.’
How convenient, thought Guttman. ‘I’ll want to talk to him.’
Schuster said, ‘He’s called Stokes. I fired him ten days after the accident.’
‘You got his address?’
‘I have his old one. Right now he’s of “no known abode”. Your best bet would be the Bowery.’
‘A boozer?’
‘And then some. You might as well know, he’s my wife’s cousin and yes, that’s why I hired him. Do I regret it. He was off sick more than he was on.’
‘So that day, who ran the elevator for the residents?’
‘Nobody. It’s automatic anyway – the doorman runs it as a kind of courtesy. I was doorman, but still super too.’
‘And you were too busy fixing the Festerwald’s icebox to work the elevator.’
‘Actually, I was finding a cab for Mrs Monroe.’
Guttman thought for a minute, then said abruptly, ‘Okay, you can go now.’
Schuster seemed surprised. ‘Really? That’s it?’
‘Yeah. Unless you’ve got something else to say?’
‘No, no. It’s just that the cops talked to me for hours last year.’
‘I’m sure they did. So no sense duplicating the process.’
The super left and the Otis man, Mullen, started to follow him. ‘Not so fast,’ said Guttman.
‘Yeah?’ said the man warily.
Guttman softened his voice. ‘Can you give me any idea how this happened? I’m not holding you to it – I just want your best bet.’
Mullen seemed to take this as a challenge. ‘Well,’ he said, and Guttman could see he was in his element now. What followed probably lasted only a couple of minutes, but Guttman felt as though he was trapped with the club bore on a long trip in a small car. Flyweights, ratchets, sheaves, a mysterious governor, hoistway doors and car doors and of course the hoistway door interlock followed by the hoistway door keyhole. The terms were spat out without explanation until finally Mullen paused for breath.
Guttman said quietly, ‘Can you tell me what all that means?’
Mullen looked deflated. ‘It means I can’t figure out how this could have happened. It’s a mystery to me.’
‘You absolutely sure of that? I’m not asking you as the representative of your company. I’m asking you as a man who understands, talking to a man who doesn’t.’
The Otis man nodded. ‘I’m positive. The last service was only two days before the accident. The check list was complete. All A-Okay.’
‘Then I have another question for you.’
Mullen looked intrigued. ‘Yeah?’
‘If you wanted this to happen, how would you go about it?’
Mullen looked alarmed. ‘You mean cause the accident?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You’re suggesting –?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything – it’s strictly hypothetical. But try and tell me how you’d do it.’
And this time, though the vocabulary remained alien and technical, Guttman could make out the gist of what was being said. It would have required two men, and would have needed two different days. The first day was almost certainly that of the service; it was then that the controller had been rejigged so that it could interpret floor numbers differently from how it should. It wouldn’t have been before then, since according to Mullen that would have been detected during the service check. On the day of the accident itself, timing would have been critical. Someone had to gain access to the elevator controller and recalibrate it to read eleven as twelve, then nip downstairs to the eleventh floor and unlock the hoistway door – or else, regardless of the controller, it wouldn’t have opened. Though couldn’t the man doing the service have done this already? Guttman put it to Mullen.
The Otis man looked horrified. ‘Why would he do that?’
Guttman shrugged. ‘We’re talking hypothetically, remember? Who was the service guy?’
‘Bergen. Nice fellow.’
‘Still with the firm?’
‘Funny you should ask. He was too old to be drafted but he signed up anyway. Wife and kid too. Guess he can’t be wild about the wife.’
‘You know where he is?’
‘Last I heard he was at Fort Sheridan. He sent a postcard to the guys in the repair shop.’
‘Okay. But what I wonder is, if you primed the controller at the time of the service, wouldn’t that do the trick?’
‘No, otherwise you’d have elevators stopping on wrong floors or not opening at all. You’d have to do it right before you wanted the wrong door to open. Then you’d have to be sure someone pushed the button at eleven. That way, the elevator car would go to twelve but the hoist door would open on the floor below.’ He paused, seeming suddenly to appreciate the implications of this. ‘What are you driving at? Is Bergen in trouble?’
‘Of course not. I’m just working out the possibles. That’s what I get paid for.’
‘Should I be worried about this?’
‘Nah. I get paid to do the worrying too.’
It was raining as Guttman waited for the crosstown bus on 86th Street. He had on the old black raincoat Isabel had made him buy years before, and underneath a brown double-breasted suit and a striped Brooks Brothers tie. Without his wife to supervise him sartorially, he knew he was in danger of becoming entirely slovenly, but he was doing his best – and he’d shaved with special care early that morning, nicking himself only once and tending to that with a styptic pencil instead of sticking toilet paper on the cut.
From the bus stand he could see out to the Hudson, where a navy biplane flew low over the river, then turned hard left towards New Jersey. Two Negro ladies waited with him, done with their morning jobs and heading to the East Side now to work for other masters. They were complaining about the service – how late the buses were and how crowded. 86th Street was in bad shape, full of potholes from the previous winter that had still not been filled. The war was imposing new priorities, and anything without a military benefit was being put on hold.
As if to confirm this, a black Ford came barrelling by and hit a pothole full of water, soaking a passing man’s coat with a black spray of filthy gutter water. As the car kept going, Guttman saw that the pothole had left it with a warped hubcap, turning like a wobbly plate with every revolution of the wheel.
Finally the bus came. Once across Central Park, he got off at Third Avenue, and caught the L train downtown. It was virtually deserted, and half of the cars were the old sort, pressed back into service. As on the bus he found himself about the only passenger under the age of seventy, and one of the few men. New York seemed to have regressed in the war; and the city seemed dull and deadened. What was missing? Young men, away in uniform? Maybe, but that was true in Washington too, where the influx of white-collar workers was two to one women.
As the ageing cars rattled and shook, he thought about the strange death of Arthur Perkins. Guttman didn’t share Nessheim’s intuitive sense of connections: he was best at disconnections, and at sensing when something was wrong. That certainly seemed the case with Arthur Perkins; Guttman had no doubt it hadn’t been an accident. But how could you possibly prove it was a homicide after a year had passed? Even if Guttman could, who was he going to tell – and to what end? What link could there be between Perkins’s death and Nessheim’s search for a German agent in the Met Lab?
He got off at Grand Street, steeling himself for the transition as he moved back into the Lower East Side, the rough world of his childhood, where the superficial civility of uptown gave way like melting ice.