Chip nodded slowly, then looked down and continued detailing the lower depths of the Hoboken PATH tunnel, letting his expression say it all.
"Pretty late, isn't it?"
"Tell me about it," I grunted at the doorman, willing him not to look too closely at my face. He was the same guy from that afternoon, but now I was dressed in a standard city-issue hazmat suit, a wool cap pulled down to my eyebrows. My oven-fresh Sanitation badge was flopped open in his face. In more ways than one, I was presenting a different picture than I had nine hours before.
"Yeah, I'm on till midnight myself," he said, his eyes dropping from my face as he pulled out a desk drawer. He hadn't recognized me. The clothes do make the man, as far as most people are concerned.
He yanked out a clattering ring of keys, and we headed to the elevator.
"Did you guys get a complaint from one of our tenants? I never heard nothing about rats here."
"No, just some problems nearby. Population explosion by the river."
"Yeah, the river. Always smells damp down in the basement. Kind of fishy." The elevator door opened. He leaned one shoulder against it, blocking its attempts to close while he counted through the keys until he found one marked with a green plastic ring. He slipped it into a keyhole marked B2 at the bottom of the controls and gave it a half turn.
"You ever heard of a tenant getting bitten here?" I asked. "Maybe a year ago or so?"
He looked up at me. "Didn't work here then. No one did. They hired all new staff early this year. The old guys were running some kind of payroll scam, I hear."
"Ah. I see." I made a mental note to run all those doormen's and janitors' names through Records.
He pressed the B2 button, keeping one hand on the door's rubber bumpers. "Not that hardly that many people use it down there. Only a few diehards. Like I said, smells funny. By the way, when you come back up, don't forget to mention you're leaving to whoever's on the door. It's supposed to be locked up down there this time of night."
"No problem." I lifted my duffel bag in weary half salute.
He smiled and let the door close. The elevator took me down.
It did smell funny.
There were about fifty kinds of mold growing down there, and I could smell the rot of wooden beams behind the walls, dried human sweat on the padded weight benches, assorted shoes decaying behind the slats of locker doors.
But behind the health club smells, something else was brewing. I couldn't quite figure out what. Smells are not as easy to place as sights and sounds. They're like suppressed memories: You sometimes have to let them bubble up on their own.
I let the elevator close its door and glide away, not switching on any lights. I didn't want the doorman watching me on the security cameras. I was hoping he would forget I was down here and go off his shift without mentioning me to the next guy.
Once my eyes adjusted, the red glow of the thermostats and exercise machine controls were enough to see by. For a few minutes, though, I just stood there, listening for the sounds of tiny feet.
It didn't seem a likely spot for a rat invasion; there wasn't any source of food down here, not even a candy machine. In any case, street-level garbage eaters weren't the only issue here. I was looking for big alpha rats - and, if Chip was right, unnamed other things - bubbling up from below. Things that had never heard of M&M's.
All I could hear was the refrigerator in the juice machine, the hiss of steam heat, and a distant steady rumble. I knelt and pressed one palm flat against the floor, feeling the vibration spreading into my flesh along with the chill of the cement. The rumble was cycling slowly - maybe it was those eighty-foot fan blades that gave Chip nightmares.
But I didn't hear any rats, or any of Chip's monsters, for that matter. I moved among the dark shapes of machines, the red eyes of their controls winking at me. The smell of chlorine rose from a covered Jacuzzi. That other scent, the one I couldn't identify, seemed to grow stronger as I moved toward the back wall.
Then I felt a draft, the slightest hint of cold. I swept my eyes across the baseboard behind the radiator, searching for a rat-hole letting in the autumn chill of the earth. Rats don't need much space to crawl through; they can break down their own skeletons and squeeze through holes the size of quarters. (We peeps can supposedly do that too, but it hurts like hell, I've heard.)
There weren't any openings along the floor. The fittings around the steam pipes were tight. I didn't spot any doors to slip under, no loose tiles in the ceiling. No way for anything to bubble up from the depths.
But in the farthest corner of the gym, the paneled walls themselves radiated cold.
I gave the wall a thump.
It was hollow.
Hearing the empty sound, I realized something about the darkened health club - it didn't have any stairs down. The second level promised in the blueprints didn't exist. Or it was hidden.
My duffel bag clanked against the concrete floor. From a pocket, I pulled the plans that Chip had printed for me, checking my compass. According to the blueprints, the sub-basement stairs were only a few yards away, on the other side of the wall.
The wood paneling didn't give at all when I pushed; there was something solid behind it. Of course, my duffel bag was full of drills, hacksaws, bolt cutters, and a crowbar, or I could have just put my fist through the wall. But I still had to come back in my Sanitation costume to reclaim any rats my traps caught, and the staff doesn't like it when you break their building.
I moved along the wall, pressing and thumping. The echoes were muffled, which meant that lots of crisscrossed S beams supported the paneling. The stairs were solidly sealed off as well, with no easy way in. Had they just abandoned a whole subbasement down there?
The wood paneling ended at a row of lockers - too heavy to move, even with my peep muscles. I tapped the floor with my feet, wondering what was hidden beneath. From the ceiling, the red eyes of security cameras glowed mockingly in the darkness.
Then I realized something: All of the cameras were pointed more or less at me. Were they tracking me?
I moved a few yards, back into the cold corner, but the cameras didn't follow. They all stayed pointed at the same target - the row of lockers. Whoever had set the security system up didn't care what happened in the rest of the health club, as long as they could watch that one spot.
I walked along the lockers, running my fingers against them, smelling the dirty socks and chlorinated swimsuits inside. The metal grew colder as I went.