Cormac Lonigan trudged along ahead of me like he was on a forced march to a death camp. I told the others to wait outside for us while he led me into the fort.
“What’s your problem, Lonigan?”
“I got no problem.”
“What is it you like about the fort?” I asked.
I knew it had been garrisoned and abandoned several times from when it was constructed until after the Civil War. At least nine of the wings of the original structure that had formed the eleven-point star had been cemented shut in the last restoration of the statue. Engineers had deemed it too dangerous—and too expensive—to try to maintain the granite and concrete that made up the once-armed and important coastal defense station.
“It’s quiet in there,” he said. “The walls are so thick it keeps the place quiet from all the banging when the men are at work. Sometimes I take my lunch break here. The granite makes it cooler inside, too.”
The only way into the fort itself, even though it was actually beneath the level of the huge pedestal, was to climb the steps of the pyramid-shaped base and then go down a staircase, where there was a small office and a gift shop. That was the part I had visited before with Coop, quite unexpectedly one night.
After we reached the pedestal plaza, Lonigan went down into the dark stairwell that was the entrance to the fort.
“Here’s what you wanted to see, Detective.”
“It’s pitch-black down here,” I said. “Where are the lights?”
“I wouldn’t know that.”
“What do you mean? Why not?”
“When I come down here the office is usually open, even when the statue is closed to visitors. There’s someone answering phones and giving information,” he said. “And I’ve usually got on a headlamp from working up inside the Lady.”
“That’s not—”
“It doesn’t take me much light to eat a sandwich and hear myself think.”
“Show me around, Cormac.” Walter had given me a flashlight in case I couldn’t find the light switches.
“Nothing to show. This is it.”
“What’s through that doorway?” I asked, pointing the flashlight. There was an archway made of bricks, opening to the next dark area.
“I don’t think anything at all.”
“Why don’t we look?” I said.
“Go right ahead,” he said, fidgeting with his backpack.
“The operative word there is we, dude.”
He slipped the backpack off his shoulders and rested it on the stone floor.
There was a room beyond the area of the office where we had first entered. It held a few wooden chairs, which looked neither comfortable nor inviting. On the walls were several old prints of nineteenth-century soldiers on guard duty at the fort, and others depicting the battery of Rodman guns, especially built for seacoast fortifications that were mounted along the bastions of the eleven stars.
“Who was your ticket to the union?” I asked.
“Why? Is that against the law?”
“No, Cormac. It’s a lucky thing. That gene pool of men who founded Local 46 is worth a lot of money, bought with a great deal of sweat.”
There was another archway and I tapped him on the shoulder to follow me through it. My flashlight revealed a long empty hallway ahead. The structure was finally beginning to resemble the interior of an enormous star. This was the side of one of its points.
“My great-grandfather was the first one in the family, on my father’s side. Then so on down the line to me.”
The deeper into the old fort we went, the cooler and darker it seemed to be. There were holes in the wall that offered a bit of fresh air, as warm as it was, but mostly the dankness of the place dominated my senses.
“Any brothers work with you?”
“I got three older sisters. Only one brother. He’s a priest, Detective. Had to happen to one of us in the family sooner or later.”
I laughed with him. Maybe he was just a nervous kid, I thought. Sullen and nervous. Maybe he’d had a bad encounter or two with the NYPD.
“I know the feeling. Would have been me,” I said, “but the nuns figured I’d sprouted an unfortunate mouth and good right hook way too young.”
At the end of the hallway—the tip of one of the star’s points—the archway was completely boarded up. A large red sign that said CAUTION was affixed to the wooden crossbars.
“Seen enough, Detective?” Cormac asked.
He leaned against the brick wall and lit up a cigarette. He blew out the match and put it in his pocket.
“Probably so,” I said.
I ran my flashlight over the two-by-fours that blocked farther access to the fort’s other starred points. At the bottom of the left corner, opposite Cormac Lonigan, were ashes. Anthill size but undisturbed, as though recently deposited. There were three or four spent matches around them.
“Is this your place, Cormac?” I asked.
“Nah. Like I said, I just come down near the office, the room behind it.”
“By yourself?”
“Usually so.”
He started to walk back in the direction from which we’d come.
I pressed my right hand against the wooden boards directly above the ashes. He heard the boards shift and turned to look at me.
“Don’t lean on that, Detective.”
“Who put this up, Cormac?”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t come back here.”
But somebody else did. Somebody who wasn’t careful enough to pick up his matches or grind the ashes into the stone floor.
I examined the boards with the flashlight. The nails on the left side of the CAUTION sign looked shiny and new. The ones to the right, where Lonigan had been standing, had already begun to rust from the dampness.
I banged on one of the long pieces of wood, about chest-high, with the heel of my hand. It cracked in dead center.
Cormac Lonigan shouted at me to stop.
I pulled at the wood and the end of it snapped out of the board behind, three shiny nails coming with it.
“Why stop?” I asked.
“Because that part of the fort’s been blocked off for years,” he said. “There’s fallen granite inside and the ceiling’s unstable. A man could get hurt in there.”
“I’m a sucker for two things, Cormac. One is exploring old forts,” I said, ripping at the other end of the board, oblivious to the splinters and nails, “and the other is getting hurt.”
I lifted the flashlight from my belt, where I had tucked it when I started to pull at the jerry-rigged wall. I shined it into the space behind the separated boards.
“Give me a hand here, kid,” I said.
I couldn’t see anything in the blackness beyond, but Cormac didn’t wait to hear that. He threw his cigarette to the ground and bolted away from me.
The flashlight dropped from my hand as I turned to give chase.
The kid was faster than I was, but the second’s hesitation when he stooped to pick up his backpack cost him the lead.
He was halfway up the thick stone steps to the pedestal base when I grabbed both ankles and brought him down.
He slid back toward me on his belly. I took a handful of hair at the nape of his neck to lift his head up a couple of inches and turn it to the side, slamming his right cheek against the solid granite slab. I expected the ringing in his ear would last for a month.