“Here’s the elevator, Mike,” Mercer said.
“I’m walking down.”
“It’s like nine hundred steps, twenty flights of stairs or more.”
“C’mon, Jimmy. Let the old dude with the football player’s knees ride to the bottom,” I said. “I’m taking the scenic route. What do you know about Fort Washington?”
“This neighborhood? Washington Heights? I hear it’s coming back.”
“The hood was lost to Dominican drug gangs in the 1980s. The Red Top Gang, the Wild Cowboys—real urban marauders,” I said, slowly starting down the staircase, which was enclosed in steel mesh, offering the same great views as the walkway above. “It’s back all right. But I’m talking about the fort itself.”
“I’m not as good on my military history as you, Mike.”
I stopped on the first landing and looked to the north, pointing out the spot to Jimmy. “Not even fifty yards from here is where the remains of the walls of the fort are, inside Bennett Park. I used to come here to play as a kid.”
“I’ve never even heard of Bennett Park.”
We wound down to the next level. I kept taking deep breaths of the morning air, happy for the brief distraction. “Well, the fort was built in 1776 so that George Washington could defend New York during the Revolution.”
I pressed against the steel caging and looked across the Hudson. “Fort Lee was built on the other side, to prevent the British from going upriver and to provide the troops with an escape route to the west—to Jersey and Pennsylvania—in case they did.”
“So Fort Lee is named for an actual fort?” Jimmy laughed. “I thought it was just a bunch of condo livers hanging off the Palisades, waiting for Governor Christie to screw up the traffic patterns in some kind of political vendetta.”
“You wouldn’t be entirely wrong,” I said, grabbing the banister for the next flight down and allowing myself to laugh at the Bridgegate memory. “Nope. Not only was Fort Lee the birthplace of the motion picture industry—”
“For real?”
“Yup. Thomas Edison’s film studio, Black Maria, was built here, and dozens of others followed. Long before there was a Hollywood. And more than a century earlier than that, General Charles Lee of the Continental army held down this escarpment for old GW himself.”
“Was there a battle here?” Jimmy asked.
“Yeah,” I said, looking down. “This point is the highest piece of land in all of Manhattan. Pure schist. Washington decided that twin forts here could stop the British warships.”
I had never brought Coop to this point. She would have loved it for the spectacle of the river view, if I kept her away from the edge and the open heights, and she would have listened to my history with her usual keen interest. I leaned on the banister for fear my own knees would go weak on me each time I envisioned her with captors.
“I guess they didn’t,” Jimmy said.
I shook my head. “Did you ever hear of chevaux-de-frise, kid?”
“Never took French.”
“I wish the same were true of Coop.”
Jimmy grabbed both my shoulders from behind me, a step above, and rocked me a bit. “She’s going to be okay, Mike. With the info going out to the entire patrol force this morning, we’re going to get lucky today. I’m sure of it.”
I was babbling to keep my mind from wandering back to visions of Coop’s condition. I was staying in my comfort zone, in the history that was my escape from death and darkness.
“Chevaux-de-frise were a medieval form of battle defense,” I said. “I clearly have a lot of educating to do with you. They were portable frames, Jimmy, usually made from logs. Anyway, Washington had them constructed to be sunk here into the river—right at the bottom of this staircase and all the way across to the Jersey side. They were loaded with boulders from the heights, where the fort was, sunk to the bottom, and chained into place with giant hooks on both sides of the river in order to paralyze ship movement on the Hudson.”
I put my hands in my pockets and kept spiraling down. “Can you see all the way to the ground?” I asked. “Washington had batteries directly beneath us—where this bridge foundation stands today. It’s called Jeffrey’s Hook, a piece of land that juts out into the water. And batteries on Spuyten Duyvil Creek, and on the King’s Bridge, crossing the Harlem River. The fort itself was shaped like a five-pointed star. Five bastions that—”
“Like Fort Jay?” Jimmy asked. “That’s a coastal star-shaped fort on Governors Island.”
He had probably been reminded of the fort by Vickee’s comments this morning—a scene that was apparently the genesis of Coop’s unhappiness with me.
“Fort Jay is four points. Fort Wood—that’s the one on Liberty Island, at the base of the statue—that one’s an eleven-point star. Fort Washington here was built like a pentagon, with five bastions.”
A sharp whistle screeched from below. It was Mercer trying to get my attention. Jimmy and I were about halfway down the tower.
“Yo!”
“Let’s move it, Mike,” Mercer yelled.
I picked up the pace and started trotting down the stairs. “You ought to read about the battle of Fort Washington,” I said. “Great story, bad ending. Three thousand troops in this very fort, with General Washington himself watching from across the river. The British had four thousand Hessian troops backing them up. Wiped this place out at the end of ’76, and Washington retreated to the west.”
“Will do,” Jimmy said. “Maybe I’ll come back with you and get the whole picture. Tour all the forts, okay?”
“You’re likely sucking up to me or you’re a good man,” I said, calling out over my shoulder. “Either way works fine for me.”
Mercer was waiting for us in the small enclosure at the foot of the giant tower.
“You got my girl?” I asked. “Or are you just whistling ’cause you’re lonely down here?”
“We got places to go, Mike,” Mercer said. “Peterson just called me. There’s some junk starting to float in from all over the city because of the alert that went out to every cop on the job when we left Scully’s office. Blondes in Brighton Beach, trench coats abandoned on the subway, an unidentified young woman who overdosed on Metro-North last night. But—”
“So he’s going to send me out on some wild-goose chase so I don’t—?”
“Suit yourself, Mike,” Mercer said, turning his back on me. “Just suit yourself.”
“What’s the ‘but’ about, man?”
“I was about to say to you that Major Case may have something to look at, is all. You’re either with me or—”
“I’m with you.”
“The cop in Central Park who saw something on his way into work?” Mercer said, reminding me of one of the items on this morning’s checklist. “Seems there’s a second piece to his encounter. Worth a shot, if you’ll come with me to see if it takes us anywhere. To see if it gives you any ideas.”
“Of course I will,” I said, tailing behind Mercer with Jimmy North. “Where to?”
“The boat basin. The 79th Street Boat Basin.”
The Upper West Side marina was in the Hudson River, about five miles in a straight shot downriver from the GW Bridge.
“A sighting?” I asked, closing my eyes to squeeze out a thought of any possible connection between Coop and a boat parked in a marina.
“Not that,” Mercer said. “But at two o’clock in the morning, in the off-season, it’s a weird time and place for a guy to be swapping out license plates on his SUV.”