Jake stood there while Dennison inspected him. Jake was tall, pads of muscles strained against his clothes. He looked over his shoulder to where Dennison’s bodyguard waited.
“Is that Chip Lee watching the door?” Jake asked. He lowered his voice so only those around the desk could hear. “We all wanted to punch like him back where I come from.”
“That so?”
“We followed him in the papers.” Jake hunkered down to protect his midsection, he put up fists and bobbed on the balls of his feet. It was Chip’s old stance, solid and square. Jake felt his face turn red, seeing Tom smile.
“Chip was pretty good in his day. He was famous up around your parts?”
“Yeah. He was.”
“Where was that? Where you’re from?” Jake didn’t want to say, but he let on, slipped the words Jackson County out the side of his mouth. “Sure. I know the place,” Dennison said. “I lived near there, in St. John’s, when I was a boy. With the Catholics there.”
“Yeah? Is that a fact?”
“It is.”
Jake had Tom Dennison’s interest. This is why Jake was lucky.
“Did you get in a little trouble up there?” Dennison asked.
“I did. I hurt a boy in a fight.”
“Well, that’s fine. That doesn’t mean a damn thing to me. Why would I care if you clipped some guy? So long as the guy deserved it.”
Jake found the back of the Flatiron that afternoon, the long rounded butt end where the service entry was with its iron doors painted green. Trash cans lined the wall, empty produce crates, stacked milk bottles. A hotel occupied most of the building. This was on St. Mary’s Avenue, where downtown edged against the ethnic neighborhoods. Folks wandered here, passed through from north to south, or back the other way, the block specked with filling stations, printing shops, bail bondsmen. The hotel itself was newly made of tan brick and glazed terra-cotta limestone. The restaurant on its ground floor was elegant and smelled like buttered bread rolls and onion soup through the window. Jake didn’t understand why he was sent here, but the man at the service door was ready for him. “You’re Strauss,” the man said. “I’m the foreman.”
Inside, the foreman pointed to spigots dripping with water and four large washtubs near the basement office. He tossed a hunk of soap to Jake and said to wash up. Jake hadn’t washed since he left home and didn’t realize how filthy he was until grime streamed off him and settled in the bottom of the washtub. His skin burned raw when he finished, from pumice in the soap. “You ready now?” the foreman asked. He was middle-aged, short and muscular, clean shaven. A certain kind of purpose buoyed his accent. “This is hard work,” he said, “but you get clothes, three squares a day. If you can dig and push a wheelbarrow, you can handle it.”
“We’re digging?”
“Of course we’re digging. Making tunnels. It don’t matter where we’re making tunnels to, so never mind that. Do what I tell you—that’s your job.”
Speed was the first order of business in the tunnels, the foreman made this clear. Wood frames were put up every few yards to prevent cave-ins. Bare wires hung from timber to light the work. The corridor was just wide enough for two men to sneak by. There was hardly room to stand. Once Jake entered the tunnels, that day and the ones that followed, lucky Jake, he’d spend the whole shift stooped over.
There were other men Jake was introduced to, the rest of his crew. Reinhold Bock dug out the edge of the corridor with a pick or shovel or hatchet, whatever it took to expand the path. His was the dirtiest job but also the most important. The others depended on his progress to keep busy. “You won’t see him much,” the foreman said. Reinhold burrowed deep into a space only big enough for his body and his tools. Dirt flew out over his dangling legs. The next two cleared away what was picked off by Reinhold, shoveling debris into wheelbarrows, and this was where Jake came in. His job was to make sure the work kept moving. He filled in when necessary, lugged dirt and rock out the tunnel, erected frames to keep the corridor from collapsing, steadied beams with his shoulders while others clamped and hammered them into place. Jake mostly shuttled back and forth along the corridor. What the others removed, he piled outside the office. So much debris by the end of the day that they could hardly pass when it was time to clean at the washtubs. It was cramped down there anyway. Besides the foreman’s framed office there were tools lying around and washtubs stacked up and street clothes waiting on hooks, their clothes and the clothes of the dozen or more men working in other corridors. There was a telephone on the wall. Jake didn’t understand how it worked, but by the next morning the basement would be as clean as ever. Trucks had to back up to the service door overnight to remove the debris. “They load out and dump somewhere,” Reinhold said. “A farm. Or in the river.”
The shifts were ten hours long, six days a week. It was hard, but Jake liked the work, or at least the idea that he had work. He was lucky to get this job but wouldn’t have minded being in the open air. The weather outside was nice those days. It was spring. Sunny, clear, getting warm. He saw so little sun. Mostly he was bent over a wheelbarrow to go back and forth underground. A job that was easy enough to master so long as he didn’t get lost. The tunnels spindled off in an impossible web, so Jake followed the track he wore into the loose tunnel bottom, tried to line up the raised patterns left where chunks of the iron wheel broke off. He played games like this to do something besides just pushing loads.
Digging a tunnel under the city wasn’t all that strange, he learned. Tunnels spidered all over: from the bargain basement of the Brandeis department store to banks across the street, from office building to office building. Jake worried the paths might cross and they’d bust into a neighboring tunnel, a legit one, and get caught at whatever they were doing. Reinhold said not to worry. “This isn’t my first job. You dig for a while, turn where they tell you. Before long you pop up in some basement. It’s a hotel. An office that belongs to the boss. Who cares?” Reinhold wore a soft cloth cap to cover his baldness. Its ragged brim edged over his eyes. “I wasn’t the one who told you. But Mr. Dennison’s got tunnels all over town where he holds things. Here and other places. He just don’t want folks to know. It’s his prerogative, yeah. He’s the boss.”
Jake imagined that maybe Reinhold was the architect of all these tunnels. That he alone knew where to burrow and what the point of it all was.