Vanderbilt

The Vanderbilt doors were gone.

The stairs were there. The two wide flights of marble that came down from the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance to the floor of the concourse, with their brass rails and their balcony above, were there, under the dust, and you could climb them; but at the top, where there had been a row of tall doors with brass handles and glass in them, there was a row of tall holes, with the light of the street in them, very bright, and the glass from the doors was on the stairs, all the way down, in a layer, like ice on a step in January, and it crunched.

They brought them up those stairs.

The walking ones. That was what Teresa called them, and it was what everybody called them by the end of the morning, the walking ones and the others. The walking ones could be got up, and held onto, and walked. They came up out of the dust on the floor in twos and threes, with somebody’s hand on their arm, a constable’s or a porter’s or a stranger’s, and climbed the stairs over the glass, slowly, holding the brass rail, holding each other, and went out through the holes where the doors had been into the light.

He took them up four at a time. Then three. Then two, because the two were heavier. He would go down the stairs into the dust and find somebody on the floor who could stand and get them standing and say hold onto me and they would hold onto him, and he would bring them across the floor to the foot of the stairs, and up, and out, and hand them to somebody at the top, and go down again.

They were all the same colour. That was what he noticed, the third time up, coming out through the holes into the light with a man on one arm and a girl on the other. They were all white. The dust was on everything and everybody, to the shoulders, to the hair, so that the man on his arm, who was black, and the girl on his other arm, who was a redhead with freckles, and he himself, were the same colour, a pale chalky grey-white, like statues, like people in a photograph of a hundred years ago, and you could not tell anybody’s age or what they had been wearing or where they had been going. They were just the people who had been on the floor.

And they held on.

Nobody was carrying anybody, not yet, not the walking ones. They held on. The man on his arm held on to his arm with both hands. The girl held on to his sleeve. On the stairs below him two women he had never seen were coming up together with their arms round each other’s waists, and they did not know each other, he could see that, they had found each other on the floor. A man in a suit was coming up behind them with a child on his hip who was not his; it was a girl in a school uniform and she was holding on to his tie.

---

Vanderbilt Avenue was a ward.

He came out of the holes onto the top step with his two and the street hit him. Light. Air. Noise; there was noise now, coming up through the ringing, which had gone down, not away but down, far enough to let things in. Sirens, a lot of them, everywhere, from every direction, on top of each other, so that the whole city seemed to be one siren. Engines. Somebody shouting through a megaphone. Glass, still falling somewhere, in small pieces, tinkling. A car alarm, absurdly, going on and on in a car parked on the avenue with its windows gone.

The pavement on the station side of the avenue was covered in people.

Sitting. Lying. Standing against the wall of the station in a row, white, holding on to each other. On coats, on the bare pavement, on sheets of cardboard somebody had brought from the back of a shop. Police in shirtsleeves, the City’s police, he knew the shirts, kneeling by them. A man in a white apron from the coffee place on the corner going along the row with a tray of paper cups of water. Firemen, the company from round the corner on Forty-Third, in their coats and helmets, coming past at a run towards the holes with hoses and axes and a stretcher, and one of them stopped, a big man with a grey moustache, and looked at Tom on the top step with his two, and said something.

“What?”

“How far in?” The fireman put his face close, the way Teresa had. “How far in does it go?”

“All the way. The far side. The gates. It’s on fire at the gates and the floor’s gone through.”

The fireman looked at him for a second longer. Then he turned round and shouted something at the men behind him and they went in through the holes past Tom with their hoses and their axes and the stretcher, into the dust, at a run.

He took his two down the steps and along the pavement to where a woman in a nurse’s uniform was kneeling. He did not know where she had come from. She was not white; she had come from outside. A nurse on her way to work somewhere, in her uniform under a cardigan, who had been on the avenue when it happened and had stayed. She looked up at him and at his two and put out her hands and took them, both of them, without a word, and sat them down against the wall.

“Go on,” she said, to Tom, the way Mr Pettiford had said it. “I’ve got them. Go on.”

He went back in.

---

Costello came at five to eleven.

Tom saw him on the fourth time up. He came along Vanderbilt Avenue from the north, on foot, at a run, which Tom had not known Costello could do, short and broad and bald with his hat in his hand and his face like a fist, and two constables from the house behind him running too, and he came up the pavement past the people sitting against the wall and stopped at the foot of the steps and looked up at the holes where the doors had been, and his face did not change at all.

Then he saw Tom.

“Keane.”

“Sarge.”

“Moran?”

“Inside. She’s all right. She’s bringing them up.”

Costello looked at him. At the whole of him, white, from his hair to his shoes, the way Tom’s mother looked at a man coming into a ward. Then he took a breath.

“Right,” said Costello.

He did not raise his voice. He did not need to; Tom could hear him; Costello’s gentle voice went under the ringing the way a hand goes under a door. He stood at the foot of the steps of Grand Central with forty people sitting against the wall and sirens on every side and the dust coming out of the holes above him in a slow grey breath, and he started to give orders, quietly, one at a time, to anybody in the City’s uniform who was in reach, and they did what he said. He put two at the foot of the steps to take the walking ones from the people bringing them up. He sent two north to Forty-Fifth and two south to Forty-Second to stop the cars. He sent a man running for the coffee place to ask for every cup and every bottle of water in the building. He looked at the nurse in the cardigan and said who are you and she told him and he said you’re in charge of this pavement, then, and anybody in a uniform takes orders from you on it, and she looked at him and nodded and went back to her two.

Then he looked up the steps at Tom.

“How many more walking?”

“I don’t know. A lot. The floor’s still full.”

“Then go and get them,” said Costello, “and when you can’t find any more walking, come and tell me, and don’t go to the gates.”

Tom looked at him.

“I know,” said Costello, very quietly. “I know, son. Don’t go to the gates.”

---

The cordon was a strip of tape.

It had gone up in the first minutes, before anybody had told anybody to put it up. Brennan from the Vanderbilt post, who had been blown off his feet on the pavement outside the doors and had got up again, had gone to the car for a roll of it and tied it to a lamp post at Forty-Fifth and walked it across the avenue to a railing on the other side, and somebody had done the same at Forty-Second, and that was the cordon: two strips of blue and white tape across a street with POLICE LINE on them over and over in black, and the world on the other side of them.

The world was arriving. People came from every direction to the tape and stood at it. People from the offices on Madison and Park, in their shirtsleeves, with their telephones out, holding them up. People off the street. A man with a dog. A woman crying with a telephone at her ear saying a name over and over into it. A man with a camera, a real one, with a long lens, taking pictures over the tape. They pressed on the tape, not meaning to, the people at the back pushing to see and the people at the front pushed, and the tape bowed in towards the station like a sail, and the two constables at it put their arms out and said back, please, back, back, please, and the crowd went back a yard, and pressed again.

It had been moved twice before Costello came, a block at a time, because every time it was moved the crowd came up to it again. Costello moved it a third time. At ten past eleven he sent a man along with another roll and they put it up a block further out, at Forty-Seventh, and the crowd came up to that.

---

She was at the tape at Forty-Seventh when he came up to it.

He had come to tell Costello. He had been down the stairs eleven times, or twelve, he had lost count, and the last time he had gone down into the dust and looked, and there were no more walking ones on the floor. There were the firemen at the far side, at the gates, in the orange light, and their stretchers, going in and coming out. There were the others, on the floor, that the firemen and the porters and the station staff were going to now with stretchers and doors off their hinges and anything flat. And there was nobody left who could stand.

He had come up the stairs with nobody on his arm for the first time, and found Costello not at the foot of the steps but up at Forty-Seventh, at the tape, talking to a man in a better suit than his, and had gone up the avenue to tell him, and on the way, at the tape, a woman said:

“Officer.”

He stopped.

She was on the far side of the tape, at the front of the crowd, a woman of about thirty-five in a dark trouser suit with her hair tied back and a telephone in her hand, held down at her side, against her leg, with the screen lit. She was not crying. She was not pushing. She was standing very still at the tape with the crowd pressing behind her, and looking at him, at the whole of him, white from his hair to his shoes, with a face that was doing a great deal of work to stay exactly as it was.

“Officer,” she said. “I’m sorry. Can you tell me what happened in there?”

He looked at her.

He did not answer. He did not decide not to answer. He stood at the tape in the sun on Vanderbilt Avenue, white, with the ringing in his ears and the dust in his mouth and the floor of the concourse behind his eyes, behind the door the thing in him had shut on it, and he opened his mouth to answer her, and nothing came, because there was nothing in the world that he could have said to a woman at a tape that was what had happened in there.

She looked at him for a second longer.

Then she nodded. A small nod, quick. The nod of a woman who has asked a question and seen the answer to it in a man’s face and is not going to ask it again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Thank you.”

And she stepped back from the tape, one step, into the crowd, and lifted the telephone to her ear, and turned half away from him, and began to speak into it, low and clear and level, to somebody, he did not know who, the way people at the tape were speaking into telephones to somebody all along the avenue.

He went on to Costello.

---

“No more walking,” said Tom.

Costello looked at him.

“The floor’s clear. Of the walking. There’s the others. The firemen are at the gates.” He heard his own voice now, a little; it came to him through the ringing, flat, from a long way off, like somebody else’s voice on a radio. “Teresa’s still down there with the porters. With the doors. Carrying.”

The man in the better suit beside Costello was looking at him too. He was an inspector from somewhere, not the house, with gold on his cap, and he looked at Tom the way men in better suits looked at you, as if you were a report.

Costello did not look at the man.

“Sit down,” said Costello.

“I’m all right.”

“Sit down for one minute on that kerb,” said Costello, in his gentle voice, “and drink a cup of water from the man from the coffee place, and then you can go and carry. One minute. That’s an order. I’m counting.”

He sat down on the kerb.

The man from the coffee place came along the pavement with his tray and gave him a paper cup of water without a word, and he drank it, and it was the best thing he had ever drunk, and it tasted of dust. Across the avenue, through the holes where the doors had been, the dust was still coming out of the station in its slow grey breath into the sun. All round him the sirens. The ringing, lower now. The car alarm, still going, in the car with its windows gone.

He looked at his watch. It was white. He rubbed it with his thumb.

It was twenty past eleven.

He thought of the telephone in his jacket pocket. The photograph. The banner on the hall floor. The words under it he had not sent. He did not take it out. He sat on the kerb with the paper cup in his hand and thought that the Brooklyn column would be on the bridge now, coming over from Brooklyn behind the bricklayers and the carpenters, with the band, and the old red banner up in the sun with the stitches in the corner, and that Frank would be at the front of the ironworkers with his arm up, keeping the gaps.

He thought: he’s all right. He’s on the bridge.

He drank the rest of the water. Then he got up off the kerb, before his minute, and went back down the steps, over the glass, into the dust, to carry.