Dark Maze

PROLOGUE

    Wide gateways that once were filled by wooden chutes and screams of dumb fear, now sealed with cement and cinder block; ten stout floors in all, windows shuttered over in tin; and the big terra-cotta busts of ring-muzzled hogs and lambs and steers set high along the old, redbrick walls. And all of it coated gray from the perpetual swirl of exhaust grime that comes from the Lincoln Tunnel traffic.
    There was a steel trash bin set against the limestone base of the rear wall. I pushed past it to find the opening, a small triangular gap punched between two sections of crumbled brick. I bent, flashed light inside, and startled a rat. Then I hunched my shoulders and exhaled, and squeezed my way into the black insides.
    I stood in heavy darkness and waited for my eyes to adjust, and my ears.
    Now came fading echoes. And furtive scratchings from interior walls alive with vermin. I drew out my big piece, the .44 Charter Arms Bulldog in my shoulder holster. This I held in my right hand. With my left, I swept my surroundings with the flashlight beam.
    I had entered a wide corridor beneath an iron staircase. Down the corridor and beyond the stairs was a line of tall hollow spaces, each the size of a large door. A bank of elevators must have been there years ago.
    I directed the flashlight beam up along the staircase rails and disturbed a nest of bats clinging upside-down to an asbestos-covered pipe. The animals dropped through the dank air in frenzied loops. I covered my head and moved forward, and headed up the stairs.
    Near the top of the first flight, a rusted step gave way. My leg sank into a hole and pain filled my knee. From that point on, I tested each riser before putting down my full weight. And I walked along the edges of the steps, close against the wall, the way a good burglar will quietly stalk through an unfamiliar room.
    At the fourth floor, there was the strong odor of cats— male cats who had sprayed urine to mark their territories. Anybody living in this place was sure to have cats about to control rodents.
    Î went up one more floor where the cat odor was strongest. Then I moved toward the north side of the building, through a hallway where there once might have been offices full of people with work to do. Emptiness and stillness now, with all the doors gone but one.
    The single remaining door was closed. On it was written:

    HOME IS WHERE
    THE HATRED IS

    I knocked. There was no answer. I kicked the door, and it fell open stiffly.
    At least a dozen cats were in the big room beyond the door—backs arched, yellow-green eyes wide, fangs bared, throats hissing and growling.
    Then, something cold and hard poked at my neck.
    And a ragged whisper: “Hang onto your rosary beads and say good-bye!”

ONE

    Cop, ain’t you?”
    There was a funny edge to his voice. Funny as in tragic. Out of politeness I ignored this first impression and told myself, here is just some guy in the park curious to know if he has me rightly pegged.
    He was short and moonfaced, somewhere past sixty years and too heavy by about twenty pounds. His eyes were brown and ma g nifi ed by thick spectacles in round, wire frames. His pale pink face was arranged in a careful blank, his chin napped with a goatee that was a mix of red and gray. He wore a shapeless pair of twill pants, worn-out suede shoes, a thrift-shop sport coat over a faded denim shirt, and a navy woolen beret on top of what I guessed was a bald head.
    He perspired despite the cool April air. Two thin lines of sweat trickled down from someplace up under his beret, down over the front of his ears and then forward along the edges of his jaw until droplets vanished in his whiskers.
    Fifteen minutes ago, when I walked into the park with my Times and a buttered roll and coffee from the deli, I had casually noticed this guy and how it was just the two of us there in the little park in the middle of a weekday morning. I had my own concerns. He certainly had his.
    I had sat down on one of the only two functional benches left in the park. This was the bench in the sun. He was already settled on the other one, across a walkway filled with broken brick and glass, in the faint shade of city trees sprouting new leaves. I noted that he had one of those supermarket tabloids spread open across his knees.
    A couple of times when I turned a page or took a sip of coffee, I happened to glance over his way. And I had caught him looking at me instead of at the paper in his lap.
    And now,