Federal Tape

They carried on doors.

That was what there was. The fire company had two stretchers and the ambulances on the avenue had more and none of it was enough, not for the floor, and so the station staff had gone to the offices along the balconies and taken the doors off their hinges, the old heavy doors with brass handles and frosted glass that said STATIONMASTER and LOST PROPERTY and PRIVATE, and brought them down, and that was what they carried on. A door each, with four people to a door, one at each corner. A porter, a constable, a man from a ticket window, a stranger.

He carried with Teresa and two porters and a man in a suit who had come in off Vanderbilt Avenue from the crowd at the tape and ducked under it and come down the stairs and said what do I do and been told take a corner.

They took a woman out on LOST PROPERTY. They took a man out on PRIVATE. They took a boy out on a door that had nothing on it, a plain door from a cupboard, and the boy was alive and his eyes were open and he looked up at the ceiling all the way across the floor and up the stairs, at the green and the gold and the stars, and at the holes in it, where the stars had come down.

The far end was open now. The firemen had got the fire at the gates down to smoke, and the smoke was thinning, and the orange was gone, and you could see it, from the middle of the floor, if you looked, and he looked once, carrying, and did not look again.

The floor at that end had gone through. It was not there. Where the gates for the upper-level tracks had been, and the ticket windows, and the place where the newsstand had stood, there was an edge, ragged, and beyond the edge nothing, a hole, going down, into the lower level, into the dark, with the girders showing at the sides of it, black, bent, and smoke coming up out of it, and men on ropes at the edge with lamps. The gate for track thirty-one was on the other side of the hole. He could see the top of the ramp, beyond it. He could see a trolley on its side on the near edge of the hole, a porter’s trolley, with its wheels in the air, one of them still very slowly going round.

It had nothing on it.

He looked at it once and carried PRIVATE up the stairs.

---

The RAC came at twenty-five past eleven.

They came in from Forty-Second Street, through the doors on that side, which were gone too, and the first he knew of it was a sound from that end of the floor that was not the firemen, a lot of men’s voices at once, in a different key, and when he came down the stairs for the next door he saw them.

There were twenty or thirty. They wore dark blue windcheaters, all the same, with three letters across the back in yellow, very large, RAC, and under the letters, smaller, ROYAL AMERICAN CONSTABULARY, and some of them had helmets and some had masks over their mouths and all of them had lanyards with cards on them round their necks, and they came across the floor from Forty-Second Street in a body, fast, not running, the way men walk who have been told exactly where to walk, and spread out, and began putting up tape.

It was not the City’s tape. The City’s was blue and white with POLICE LINE on it. This was yellow, a deep heavy yellow like a lemon, with black lettering on it, and every yard the crown and the eagle, and the letters said ROYAL AMERICAN CONSTABULARY. FEDERAL INVESTIGATION. DO NOT CROSS.

They put it up round the far end. Round the hole, and the girders, and the edge where the floor had gone, and the place where the gates had been and the place where the newsstand had been. They ran it from a pillar to the corner of the booth with the clock on it and from the booth to the foot of the east balcony and from there across to the mouth of the Lexington passage, where Tom had been standing at twenty-three minutes to eleven, and tied it there, to the brass of the old rail, round and round, very tight.

It was inside the City’s tape. It was inside the City’s station. It was a federal line round the City’s own floor, and it cut the floor in half.

---

Costello was at it inside a minute.

He came down the Vanderbilt stairs at a speed that was not a run, because Costello did not run on a floor with people on it, but was the next thing to one, and crossed to the yellow tape where it met the booth, where a man in a dark blue windcheater was standing with a clipboard and a radio and a card on a lanyard and the air of a man who had been standing there for an hour, and Tom, who was at the foot of the stairs with Teresa and the man in the suit and a door with STATIONMASTER on it, heard them.

He could hear now. Not well. The ringing had gone down to a high thin whine at the back of everything, like a mosquito in a dark room, and through it things came, flat and muffled and far off, as if through a wall; but he could hear voices if they were close and raised, and Costello’s was not raised, and he heard it anyway, because Costello’s voice went under things.

“Sergeant Costello. The City’s police. Fifty-First Street.”

“Superintendent Hale. RAC.” The man with the clipboard did not offer his hand. “This is a federal scene, Sergeant.”

“This is the Corporation’s station,” said Costello.

“It’s a federal scene,” said the superintendent. “Under the Act. A suspected explosion at a transport terminal of national significance is a federal matter from the moment it’s reported, and it was reported, and we’re here.” He looked at the clipboard. “We’ll need your people out of the area inside the tape.”

“My people,” said Costello, “are carrying the injured out of the area inside the tape.”

“The fire service and the ambulance service can carry the injured. We’ll take it from here. This is a crime scene, Sergeant, and every person who walks through it walks through the evidence.”

“There’s a man under a girder at the edge of that hole,” said Costello, very quietly, “who is breathing, and four firemen trying to get him out, and two of my constables holding the lamps for them, because the firemen haven’t got enough hands. Do you want me to take the lamps away?”

The superintendent looked at him.

“Nobody’s taking anybody’s lamps,” he said, after a moment. “The rescue goes on. Of course the rescue goes on. But anybody who isn’t rescuing comes out from inside the tape, and anybody who comes out from inside the tape comes out past us, and we note them, and anything that comes out with them comes out past us.” He made a mark on his clipboard. “That’s how it’s going to be. I’m sorry. I don’t make the Act.”

“No,” said Costello. “Neither do I.” He looked at the yellow tape, at where it was tied to the brass rail at the mouth of the Lexington passage, round and round. “That passage is my exit. My walking ones go out that way when the dust clears.”

“There aren’t any more walking ones.”

“There will be,” said Costello, “when you find them,” and turned his back on the superintendent and walked away across the floor, back to the Vanderbilt stairs, at the same speed, with his face exactly as it always was, and when he reached the foot of the stairs he looked at Tom and Teresa and the man in the suit and the door with STATIONMASTER on it, and said:

“Carry.”

---

They carried. They went in under the City’s tape and along the edge of the yellow one and took the next one off the floor on STATIONMASTER, a man of about seventy in a cardigan with his eyes shut, breathing, and brought him across to the stairs, and at the stairs a man in a dark blue windcheater stepped in front of them and held up his hand.

“Name?”

They stopped. They had to. They stood at the foot of the stairs, four of them, with a door, with a man on the door, and the man in the windcheater stood in front of them with his hand up and a notebook in the other hand.

“His name,” said the man in the windcheater. “If he’s got anything on him. A wallet. We need to note him.”

“He’s unconscious,” said Teresa.

“Then check his pockets.”

Teresa looked at him.

Tom had seen her look at a great many people in two years. He had seen her look at drunks and thieves and lost children and men with knives in the waiting room at three in the morning, and at Inspector Garvey, and at a man who had once spat on her in the Lexington passage, and he had never seen her look at anybody the way she looked now at the man in the dark blue windcheater at the foot of the Vanderbilt stairs.

“Check his pockets,” said Teresa, very quietly. “Yourself. While we stand here holding him. Go on.”

The man in the windcheater looked at the man on the door. At his face, with its eyes shut, and the grey dust on it, and the cardigan.

He lowered his hand.

“Go on,” he said. “Go. I’ll note him at the ambulance.” And he stood aside, and they went up the stairs over the glass with the door between them, and Teresa did not look back, and at the top Tom saw that her hands on the corner of the door were shaking, and that she had not let them shake until they were past him.

---

The radios were nothing.

He had stopped trying his. Everybody had. It hissed and roared on his shoulder like the sea in a shell and every so often a voice came up out of it, a fragment, Central, Central, or a number, or a street, and was gone, and nothing answered. The City’s police had one radio system and the fire service had another and the ambulances another, and somewhere above all of them there was Central, which was supposed to hear everybody, and Central could not be heard by anybody, and the RAC had radios of their own, small black ones with stubby aerials, and they talked into them constantly, and nothing they said came out of anybody else’s.

He found that out at twenty to twelve.

The superintendent came up the Vanderbilt stairs behind them as they came out with the next one, and caught Tom by the arm at the top, by the holes where the doors had been, and said:

“You. Constable. You’re City?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your sergeant. Costello. Where is he?”

“On the avenue, sir. At the steps.”

“Tell him this.” The superintendent held up his little black radio. “My people at Forty-Second Street say the City’s fire service is sending another two companies to the Forty-Second Street side and they’ll come in through my line, and I need them to come in through his, on Vanderbilt, because Forty-Second Street is evidence. Tell him to tell them.”

“Tell him on the radio, sir.”

“I can’t,” said the superintendent, and for a moment, under the clipboard and the lanyard and the card, he looked like a man who had been told something at eleven o’clock that he had not believed and was now believing. “My radio doesn’t talk to his radio. It never has. It’s a different system. They were going to fix it after the last report.” He let go of Tom’s arm. “So you’re the radio, Constable. Go and tell him.”

Tom went and told him.

Costello listened. He looked up at the holes, and at the superintendent standing in one of them with his little black radio, and then he looked at Tom.

“Tell him,” said Costello, “that I’ll tell the fire service when I see one, because my radio doesn’t talk to theirs either. And tell him that if he wants to save time he could walk down these steps and stand next to me, and then we’d be one radio.”

Tom went back up the steps and told him.

The superintendent looked at him for a long moment. Then he came down the steps and stood next to Costello.

---

On the avenue, among the people at the tape, and among the people sitting against the wall of the station on the coats and the cardboard, and among the police and the porters and the men from the coffee place, the same word was going round.

Gas.

He heard it four times between the steps and the tape. Was it the gas. It’s the gas main. It’s the old pipes, under the station, the gas company’s been at them for years. My brother-in-law works for the gas company and he says. A man at the tape with his telephone held up said it to the crowd round him as if he had been told it by somebody, and the crowd round him said it to the crowd round them, and it went down the tape like a wind down a street.

He did not believe it. He did not know why he did not believe it. He thought of the light, and of the weight, and of the shoe on the floor of the passage with nobody in it, and of the place where the newsstand had been, and he thought that gas did not do that, and then he thought that he did not know what gas did, and he did not say anything.

Teresa said it for him.

She was sitting on the top step for one minute, because Costello had made her, with a paper cup of water from the man from the coffee place, and a woman sitting against the wall below her looked up at her, white with the dust, holding on to the arm of the man beside her, and said: was it the gas?

Teresa looked down at her.

“I don’t know, love,” she said. “Nobody knows yet.”

“They’re saying it’s the gas.”

“They’re saying a lot of things,” said Teresa. “Drink your water.”

She drank her own. Then she looked at Tom, standing on the step below her, and said, too quietly for the woman to hear, so that he had to read most of it from her mouth:

“Gas doesn’t do that.”

“No.”

“Gas doesn’t do that, Keane.” She finished the water and crushed the cup in her hand, slowly, very small. “I’ve been to three gas explosions in fifteen years. One took the front off a house on Bay Street. It doesn’t do that.”

On his shoulder his radio hissed and roared like the sea. Somewhere in it, very far down, a voice said a number, and a street, and was gone.

It was a quarter to twelve.