Friday

They had opened the west half of the floor on Thursday.

Not to the public. To the families. The RAC’s yellow tape was still round the far end, round the boards where the floor had gone through to the lower level, round the scaffolding that had gone up on Wednesday night against the east balcony, round the place where the gates had been and the ticket windows and the newsstand. But the west half was swept, and the dust was gone off it, and the City had taken down the plywood door at the top of the Vanderbilt stairs and put a man on it, and let them in.

The families came down the stairs and onto the floor, in ones and twos, holding the brass rail, and stood on it, and looked. And then they had wanted to bring the flowers in.

So on Thursday afternoon the City’s police and the station staff and some of the families had carried the flowers down off the steps outside, the great bank of them in their cellophane, and the candles, and the photographs off the plywood, carefully, one at a time, and the red caps, all six, and the papers, all nineteen, and brought them down the Vanderbilt stairs and across the floor and laid them round the booth.

The round brass booth in the middle of the floor with the four-faced clock on top of it. They laid them all round it, on the floor, in a ring, a yard deep, two yards, the flowers and the candles and the photographs propped against the brass and the six red caps in a row and the nineteen papers folded in half and in half again the long way with the corners turned down; and by Friday morning the ring was four yards deep, because the families who came down the stairs on Thursday evening and Friday morning had brought more.

The clock was going. Nobody had stopped it. It said seven, in four directions, over the flowers.

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He was on the door.

The top of the Vanderbilt stairs, where the plywood door had been, where the tall doors with brass handles and glass in them had been before that. There was nothing in the doorway now; the frame was empty and open to the street, and he stood in it, with his back to the avenue and the soldiers at Forty-Seventh and his face to the stairs and the floor below, the way he had stood at the mouth of the Lexington passage every morning for two years, with his back to the wall, watching the floor go round.

It did not go round. There was nobody on it to go round. There were the families, a few, standing at the ring of flowers round the booth, or sitting on the steps of the stairs, or walking slowly along the edge of the yellow tape at the far end, looking at the boards; and the City’s police, along the walls; and the station staff, who had come in, all of them, he thought, every porter and ticket clerk and cleaner who worked in the building, and were standing in their uniforms in a line along the foot of the west balcony, not doing anything, standing. And above it, the ceiling.

He looked up at it. He still did that. He could not help it.

It was green, still, the pale old green like the inside of a shell. The stars were still on it, the gold, the crab and the bull and the twins and the fish, the wrong way round. But there were holes in it. At the east end, over the far side of the floor, over the yellow tape, the ceiling had come down in pieces on Monday morning as green and gold leaves, and there were holes there now, dark, ragged, with the iron of the roof showing through above them, and scaffolding going up to them from the floor on the far side, and nets.

Teresa was on the Forty-Second Street side. He could see her across the floor, on the far edge of the west half, by the yellow tape, on the City’s post there, very straight, with her hands behind her back.

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It was Costello who told him, at ten. He came up the Vanderbilt stairs from the floor and stood beside Tom in the empty doorway and leaned close to his left ear and said it loud and slow, and Tom heard most of it.

…THE KING. ELEVEN. FROM FORTY-SECOND STREET.

Tom looked at him.

…NO BAND. NO ANTHEM. NOTHING. Costello’s voice came through the wall and down the corridor in pieces. …THE FAMILIES. HE’S WALKING WITH THE FAMILIES. HE ASKED FOR THAT. THE FAMILIES WHO WANT TO. A pause. …YOU STAY ON THE DOOR. NOBODY COMES DOWN THESE STAIRS WHILE HE’S ON THE FLOOR EXCEPT FAMILIES. NOBODY.

Tom nodded.

Costello looked at him for a moment longer. At the dressing on his neck, and the bandages. Then he leaned in again.

…HE SAID FRIDAY, said Costello. ON MONDAY. HE SAID I’LL SEE YOU FRIDAY. Something Tom did not catch. Then: IT’S FRIDAY.

He went back down the stairs.

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At five to eleven the station staff along the foot of the west balcony stood up straighter.

He saw them do it. A ripple, along the line, from the Forty-Second Street end towards him, the porters and the clerks and the cleaners, straightening, the way the muster room had gone quiet from the front backwards. Then the families at the ring of flowers round the booth turned, and looked towards the Forty-Second Street side, and some of them who had been sitting on the stairs stood up.

He looked where they were looking.

They came in from Forty-Second Street. Through the doors on that side, which were plywood too now, with a door in the middle that opened. Not many. Twenty people, perhaps. Thirty. They came in through the plywood door slowly, in no order, the way people come into a church for a funeral when they do not know each other, a few at a time, and stood inside it for a moment, on the floor, and looked up at the ceiling with the holes in it, and then came on, across the west half, towards the booth.

The families. He could see that they were families. Women and men in dark clothes, and some old, and some young, and a boy of about ten in a jacket that was too big for him holding a woman’s hand, and a man in a wheelchair being pushed. Some of them carried flowers.

He looked for the one who was not.

He did not have to look long. He did not know how he knew, at that distance, from the top of the Vanderbilt stairs; it was the same thing that had told him, on Monday morning at twenty-eight minutes past ten, that a woman in a grey coat coming down these stairs was crossing the floor differently from everybody else on it. It was the shape on the floor. Among the families, coming across the west half towards the booth, walking at the same pace as everybody, not in front of them and not behind them, in the middle of them, there was a man who crossed it as though he had been sent to.

Tall. Grey. In a dark coat, plain, buttoned. No hat. Nearly sixty, older than the photograph in the post offices and the court buildings and the frame behind the desk at Fifty-First Street, above the clock; the face in that photograph thinking about an answer had got older, and longer, and the grey had gone all the way through the hair. He walked with his hands at his sides. He did not look at the people round him, and he did not look away from them either; he walked in among them as if they were the thing he had come to walk among.

He had a wreath. He was carrying it himself. A plain round one, white flowers, not large, in both hands, in front of him, the way you would carry a thing you did not want to drop.

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They came to the ring of flowers round the booth.

The families went round it. They stood at the edge of it, all the way round, in the ring, the way people stand round a grave. And the man in the dark coat stood at the edge of it too, on the Forty-Second Street side of the booth, among them, with the wreath in his hands, and Tom could not see the faces of the people on either side of him, and did not look; it was not his business to look at families, and the man in the coat was standing among them, and that was the point.

The man in the dark coat looked at the flowers.

He looked at them for a long time. At all of them, the whole ring, four yards deep, the cellophane and the candles and the photographs propped against the brass and the six red caps in a row and the nineteen folded papers. Tom saw his head move, slowly, from one end of the ring to the other, the way you would read a long list.

Then he bent, and put the wreath down.

He did not put it in the middle. He did not put it at the front. He knelt down on one knee on the floor of the concourse, at the edge of the ring, an old man in a dark coat, and leaned forward, and put the wreath on the floor among the other flowers, at the edge, between a bunch of daffodils from a corner shop on Lexington with the price still on and a photograph of a girl in a school uniform with HAVE YOU SEEN crossed out under it and a name and an age, and left it there, among them, the same size as everything round it.

Then he got up. It took a moment. Tom saw it take a moment.

Nobody said anything. Tom could not hear, and he did not need to; he could see. Nobody on the floor said anything at all. There was no band and no anthem and no one with a microphone and no one with a camera that he could see, and the families stood round the ring with their flowers, and the station staff stood along the foot of the west balcony, and the City’s police along the walls, and the clock on the booth over the flowers said four minutes past eleven in four directions, and the man in the dark coat stood at the edge of the ring among the families, with his hands at his sides, and did not say anything either.

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Then he walked away from them.

On his own. Across the floor. Away from the booth and the ring and the families, east, towards the far end, towards the yellow tape and the boards and the scaffolding going up to the holes in the ceiling, alone, at the same pace, with his hands at his sides.

Nobody went with him. Tom saw two men in dark suits, near the families, move, and stop; and somebody near them, whom he could not see, put out a hand, and they stayed where they were. The man in the dark coat walked across the empty floor towards the tape on his own, and his footsteps on the marble, which Tom could not hear, were the only footsteps on the floor.

He came to the yellow tape.

The RAC’s. Lemon yellow, with the black lettering and the crown and the eagle every yard, ROYAL AMERICAN CONSTABULARY. FEDERAL INVESTIGATION. DO NOT CROSS, stretched from a pillar to a stand to a pillar, at waist height, across the floor. Beyond it, the boards over the place where the floor had gone through. And beyond the boards, on the far side, the top of a ramp that went down. A ramp. With the stub of a gate beside it, black, bent, and above it, on the stone, very faint, under the black, a number that Tom could not read from the top of the Vanderbilt stairs and did not need to.

The man in the dark coat stood at the tape.

He did not cross it. He stood on the near side of it, very close, with the yellow at his waist, and looked across the boards at the top of the ramp where the gate had been.

He stood there a long time.

Tom watched him. He watched the back of the dark coat, and the grey head, very still, at the tape, and the boards, and the top of the ramp beyond them; and he did not know how long it was. He did not look at his watch. It went on. It went on the way the pause had gone on at two o’clock on Monday in the lobby of the Municipal Building, when two hundred people on a marble floor had stopped moving all at once and he had thought it was his ears. Nobody on the floor moved. The families at the ring. The staff along the balcony. The police along the walls. Teresa, at her post by the tape on the Forty-Second Street side, thirty yards from him, very straight, with her hands behind her back, not looking at him; looking at the top of the ramp.

He thought: he knows where she was standing.

He did not know how. Somebody had told him. The RAC, or the City, or the station staff, or Walter’s wife, or the Province; somebody had told the King where on this floor the Lieutenant-Governor of New York had been standing at twenty-three minutes to eleven on Monday morning, at the top of the ramp for track thirty-one, beside a Red Cap with bad knees, showing him how to bend the left one, with a paper under her arm she had bought from a woman who got down off her stool to sell it to her; and he had walked across the floor on his own to stand as close to it as the tape would let him, and he was standing there.

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Then he turned round.

He turned round at the tape and looked at the floor. At all of it. Tom saw his head go round, slowly: the ceiling first, the green and the gold and the holes in it and the nets and the scaffolding; and the clock on the booth, and the ring of flowers round it four yards deep, and the families; and the staff along the foot of the balcony; and the walls, and the police along them; once, all of it, the way you look at a room you have come a long way to see and will not see again.

His eyes came up the Vanderbilt stairs to the empty doorway at the top.

And stopped on him.

Tom stood in the doorway with his back to the street and his hands behind his back and his hat on, and the King looked at him across the whole width of the concourse from the yellow tape at the far end, an old man in a dark coat with grey all the way through his hair, and did not do anything, and Tom did not know whether he could see who it was at that distance, a constable in a doorway, or the dressing on his neck, or the bandages, or anything at all except the shape of a man on a door.

He thought: next time. I’ll nod first.

He nodded.

First. Small and quick, the way she had, across eighty yards of floor. A constable in a doorway nodding to a man at a tape.

The King nodded back.

The same nod. Small and quick. The nod of a man acknowledging somebody doing their job. Across the floor, from the tape, at the place where she had stood, with nothing at the corner of his mouth at all.

Then he turned, and walked back across the floor to the families at the ring, at the same pace, with his hands at his sides, and stood among them again; and after a while they all went, together, slowly, in no order, back across the west half to the plywood door on the Forty-Second Street side, and through it, and were gone.

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Teresa came up the Vanderbilt stairs at a quarter past twelve when the floor was clear.

She stood beside him in the empty doorway. She took out her pocketbook. She did not need to, now, quite; he could hear some of her if she shouted in his left ear. She wrote anyway, and held it up.

HE DIDN’T SAY ONE WORD.

He read it.

NOT ONE. THE WHOLE TIME. NOT TO THE FAMILIES. NOT TO THE STAFF. NOT TO ANYBODY. I WAS AT THE TAPE THIRTY YARDS FROM HIM. HE DIDN’T OPEN HIS MOUTH.

He looked at it.

He thought that he would not have known either way. He thought that if the King had stood at the tape and said a hundred words, he would not have heard one of them, and that if he had said none, as Teresa said, it was the same. He thought that he had stood on the door and watched a man walk across a floor on his own and stand at a place for a long time and look round a room and nod, and that he had understood all of it, every bit of it, without hearing a thing, the way he had understood the stewards pointing in the junction and the fireman with the flat chopping hand; and that he did not think anybody on that floor had needed to hear anything this morning, and that the man in the dark coat had known that, and had said nothing on purpose.

He took the pencil from her. He wrote under her writing.

I KNOW.

She looked at it. She looked at him. She took the pocketbook back and wrote one more line under his, and held it up close.

YOU NODDED FIRST. I SAW.

He read it. He gave it back.

Her mouth went in at the corner. Neither of them said anything else, and the clock on the booth over the flowers said twenty past twelve in four directions.