Missing

The guards’ office was a small square room behind the security desk with no window and a coat stand and a calendar from a garage in Queens with a photograph of a lake on it, and a desk, and on the desk a grey telephone with a row of buttons along the bottom, one of them lit.

Teresa sat at the desk. Tom stood beside her.

There was a pad. A yellow lined pad, the Corporation’s, with the crest at the top, and a pen on a chain. Teresa pushed it across to him and he wrote on it, slowly, with the bandaged hand, the things she would need to say, and she read them as he wrote, upside down, the way his mother read a chart.

FRANCIS KEANE. FRANK. 22.

6 FT. THIN. DARK HAIR, SHORT. PALE BLUE EYES. BROWN FROM THE SUN ON HIS FACE.

WORK JACKET, DARK BLUE, THE IRONWORKERS’ LOCAL CREST ON THE BACK. WHITE STEWARD’S ARMBAND, LEFT ARM.

JEANS. WORK BOOTS. BROWN.

He stopped. He thought.

SCAR THROUGH LEFT EYEBROW. FELL OFF A WALL. AGE 9.

He looked at it. He had been there when Frank fell off the wall. It was the Larkins’ wall, the one with the chip in it, and Frank had been trying to walk along the top of it because Tom had walked along the top of it, and he had got halfway, and fallen, and come up off the pavement with his eyebrow open and blood all down his face, laughing, and their mother had taken him to Bellevue on the subway with a tea towel held to it, and Tom had gone too, and sat in the waiting room for four hours, and that was the first time he had been in Bellevue.

He did not write that.

Teresa read the pad. She nodded. She picked up the telephone and pressed one of the buttons along the bottom and dialled.

---

He could not hear any of it. He stood beside her and watched her face.

He watched it ring. He could see it ring, in her face: the waiting, the jaw set, her eyes on the calendar with the lake on it. It rang a long time. She put the receiver down and pressed the button and dialled again. It rang. She put it down.

She wrote on the pad, under his writing.

BELLEVUE. SWITCHBOARD. RINGS. NOBODY.

She dialled another number. Rang. Nobody.

ST VINCENT’S. NOBODY.

Another.

Her face changed. Somebody had answered. He saw her sit up, and her mouth start to move, fast, the words he had written on the pad, reading them off it, Francis Keane, twenty-two, six foot, he could see the shapes, and then she stopped, and listened, and her face did a thing, and she said something short, and listened again, for a long time, and wrote while she listened.

She put the receiver down and turned the pad round to him.

BEEKMAN. A WOMAN ON THE DESK. NO FRANCIS KEANE. NO FRANK KEANE. BUT SHE SAYS:

THEY’VE GOT 40 THEY CAN’T NAME. MEN, WOMEN. FROM THE JUNCTION AND FROM WHITEHALL. NO WALLETS, NO BAGS, NOTHING ON THEM, OR UNCONSCIOUS, OR THEY CAN’T SAY.

I GAVE HER THE DESCRIPTION. SHE SAID WHITE MALE, ABOUT 22, DARK HAIR. SHE SAID SHE HAD 6.

He read it.

SHE SAID SHE’D LOOK AT THEIR EYEBROWS. SHE SAID SHE’D RING THE HOUSE IF.

He read that too. He nodded.

Teresa turned back to the telephone and dialled again.

---

She rang for an hour. He stood beside her for all of it.

She rang every hospital on the island and three in Brooklyn and two in Queens, and she rang the Fifty-First Street house four times, and the borough twice, and a number for the Corporation’s emergency office that somebody had written on the calendar with the lake on it in pencil, which rang and rang. Some of them answered. Most did not. The ones that answered had the same thing to say, and she wrote it on the pad each time, under the last one, so that the pad filled up down the page and onto the next, in her capitals, the same words over and over in different hands, in different voices, from different desks across the city.

NO NAME LIKE THAT.

UNNAMED: 23. WHITE MALES 20-30: 5.

NO NAME LIKE THAT. UNNAMED: “TOO MANY TO SAY.”

NO NAME LIKE THAT. WILL CHECK EYEBROWS.

NO NAME LIKE THAT.

THE PRESBYTERIAN: A MAN ON THE DESK STARTED CRYING. I WAITED. HE SAID NO NAME LIKE THAT.

Bellevue did not answer at all. She rang it eleven times.

---

At twenty past four the hall on Atlantic Avenue answered again.

She wrote it down while she listened, very fast, and her face was different, and he leaned over her shoulder and read it as it came.

THE WOMAN AGAIN. THE STEWARDS AREN’T AT THE HALL, THEY’RE ON THE ISLAND. THEY CAN’T GET BACK, THE BRIDGE IS CLOSED. THEY’VE GOT A ROOM AT THE TRADES COUNCIL ON CHURCH ST. THE MARCH COMMITTEE’S ROOM. THE CHIEF STEWARD’S THERE WITH THE LIST.

SHE SAYS THE CHIEF STEWARD’S AN OLD MAN CALLED SHEA.

He put his hand on her shoulder.

She looked up at him. She saw his face. She put the telephone down.

---

Church Street was two streets west of the park.

They walked. There was nothing else to do; there were no cars, or there were and none of them could move. The streets round the park were full of people and uniforms and vehicles with their lights going and not going anywhere, and the air was full of the smell of the junction, which had got into everything, into his clothes and his hair and the bandages on his hands, a smell of burning and dust and something else that he did not let himself name.

And the soldiers had come.

They were at the edges. He saw them first at the corner of the park and Broadway, where a line of trucks had stopped, big green trucks with canvas backs, six of them, nose to tail, and men were getting down out of the backs of them in green with helmets on and rifles on their backs, not in their hands, on their backs, slung, and forming up along the pavement in a line, facing outward, with an officer walking along the line with a map. There were more at the next corner. And the next. A ring of them, going round. Round the junction, round the park, round the whole of it, at the edges, the way you would put a fence round a field.

They were very young. That was what he noticed. They were his age and younger, and their faces under the helmets were very white, and they stood along the pavement facing outward, at the people coming down the streets towards the park to look, to help, to find somebody, and they did not tell the people anything. They stood there.

At the corner of Church Street, a man had come up to the line. An ordinary man in a raincoat, fifty, with a briefcase, wanting to get through. He was talking to the soldier in front of him, a boy with freckles, and the boy was shaking his head, and the man was talking louder, and pointing, past the line, towards the park, towards the junction, and the boy kept shaking his head, and then the boy saw Tom.

He saw the uniform. The City’s. White and grey and red, with the label on its pocket. He looked at Tom with an expression of enormous relief.

He said something. Tom pointed at his ears.

The boy looked at the ears. He looked at the gauze on Tom’s neck, and the label. Then he took a notebook out of his top pocket, a small green one, and a pencil, and wrote in it, fast, and held it out.

Sir. Please can you tell him he can’t come through. I’m not allowed to tell him. We’re not police. We’re only to hold the line. If somebody won’t go back we’re to get a constable.

Tom read it. He looked at the boy, and at the man in the raincoat, who had stopped talking and was looking at Tom too.

He turned to the man. He did not know how loud he would be. He said it anyway, the way the academy had taught him, the way he had said it ten thousand times on the concourse to people who wanted to go somewhere they could not.

“Sir. You can’t go through. I’m sorry. It’s closed. Go back the way you came.”

He saw the man hear it. He saw the man’s face, and the man looked at him, at all of him, the dust and the red and the bandages and the label on his pocket, and the man’s face changed, and he stepped back from the line, and nodded, and said something that Tom did not hear, and turned, and went back up Church Street with his briefcase.

The boy with the freckles wrote in his notebook again and held it up.

Thank you, sir.

Tom nodded to him. He went on, with Teresa, past the end of the line, along Church Street.

---

The Trades Council hall was an old brick building with a carved stone door and a banner hung out of a first-floor window, and the door was open, and there were people on the steps, sitting, men from the march, in their shirtsleeves, with their jackets gone, smoking, and nobody stopped them going in.

The march committee’s room was on the first floor. A long room with tables and chairs and a tea urn and maps of the route pinned up on the walls, the five columns in five colours of felt-tip, meeting, and the times, and the speakers at the Battery, and a photograph of last year’s march coming off the bridge, the same one that had been on the front of Mrs Abelson’s paper this morning, THEY MARCH AGAIN. The room was full of stewards. Old men and young men and women with armbands on their sleeves, standing and sitting and leaning on the tables, with telephones and lists, and the room was very quiet, he could see it was very quiet, and very full.

Dinny Shea was at the end of it, at a table, with a list.

He was seventy, or more. Tom had known him all his life. He had been the chief steward of the Brooklyn column for twenty years and a steward for twenty before that, and he had been on the steel with Tom’s father in the sixties, and he had taught Tom, at nineteen, in the yard at the local, how to coil a line so it would run, and had not spoken to him since Tom went on the job. He was sitting at the table in his good jacket with his armband still on it and his white hair standing up and a list in front of him on yellow paper like the pad in the guards’ office, a long list, names, in several hands, with marks beside them, ticks and crosses and question marks, and he was looking at it.

He looked up and saw Tom.

His face did not do anything for a moment. Then it did, and Tom did not have a word for what it did, and the old man got up out of the chair, slowly, with one hand on the table, the way Tom’s father got up, and came round the end of the table and stood in front of him.

His mouth moved. Tom pointed at his ears.

Dinny Shea looked at the ears, and the gauze on the neck, and the label, and then he looked at Teresa, and at her pocketbook in her hand, and he understood. He held out his hand for it. She gave it to him. He took the pencil out of the spine and wrote, in a hand that shook, in an old man’s careful joined-up writing that he had been taught at a school in Brooklyn seventy years ago by nuns.

Tommy. He’s not on it.

Tom read it.

He went in when the line opened. At the front. With the first four. He carried a man out to the park. I saw him. Then he went back in.

The old man stopped. He looked at the page. He wrote again.

The last anybody saw him he was at the foot of the ramp taking his jacket off to put it on two poles. For a woman. Mick Larkin saw him. Mick says he put his jacket on the poles and buttoned it and they took her and he went back into the junction without it. In his shirt. That’s the last.

He gave the pocketbook back to Teresa. Then he looked at Tom.

He did not write anything else. He put his hand on Tom’s arm, on the sleeve, where Frank’s fist had been, and held it, hard, for a moment, the way Frank had held it, and Tom saw that the old man’s eyes were wet and that he was not going to let that matter, and he let go and went back round the table and sat down again with his list, and on the list, half way down, in somebody else’s writing, in pencil, Tom could read it upside down, there was F. KEANE (STEWARD), and beside it, a question mark.

---

They went back down the stairs. On the steps the men from the march were still sitting, smoking, with their jackets gone.

On the bottom step Teresa stopped.

She took her telephone out of her pocket, her own, the one she had not looked at all afternoon. He had not seen her look at it once. She looked at it now. The screen was lit. There was a message on it.

He saw her face.

She did not move for a long moment. She stood on the bottom step of the Trades Council hall on Church Street with her telephone in her hand and looked at the screen, and her face was perfectly still, the way the faces in the lobby had been still in the long pause in the King’s speech; and then her face did nothing at all, very carefully, the way Walter’s face had done nothing on Wednesday when the Lieutenant-Governor remembered his name; and then she sat down.

She sat down on the bottom step, among the men from the march, with the telephone in her lap.

He sat down beside her. He did not ask. She turned the telephone round and showed it to him.

It was from a number he did not know. It was a long message, for a text. It said:

Teresa its Mike Russo from the boat. Eddie asked me to send it his phone went in the water. Hes ok. Not a scratch. The half eleven was late. First time ever. Engine trouble out of St George we were 20 min late leaving. We were still out in the harbour at ten past twelve. We saw it. We went in and took people off the sea wall at the Battery and off the water. Eddie went in the water twice. Hes ok. Hes still at it. He says tell her Im ok and tell her to do her job. Mike.

Tom read it twice.

Teresa took the telephone back and looked at it again. She read it again. She read it, he thought, three or four times, sitting on the step, and then she put it face down on her knee and put her hand flat on top of it, the way his father had put his hand flat on top of the paper on Sunday at the kitchen table, and held it there.

She did not cry. He watched her not cry. She sat on the step of the Trades Council with her hand flat on her telephone and her shoulders went up, once, very high, almost to her ears, and stayed there, and then came down, slowly, all the way, further than he had ever seen them, as if something that had been holding them up since twelve minutes past twelve had been taken away.

She took her pocketbook out. She wrote in it, and held it up.

THE HALF ELEVEN WAS LATE. THE ONE BOAT IN THE HARBOUR THAT’S NEVER LATE.

He read it.

She wrote again under it.

HE SAYS DO MY JOB.

She looked at it. Then she looked at him, at his face, at his ears, at the label on his pocket and the gauze on his neck, and she closed the pocketbook and stood up off the step, and held out her hand to him, the way she had in the lobby, and he took it, and she pulled him up.

She mouthed it, close, so he could read it.

Bellevue.

He nodded.

It was half past five.