"This is an emergency," she said. "The Governor needs your help."
Bell flicked his cigarette into a coffee can full of water, scoring a direct hit from ten feet away, simultaneously punching the TV's off switch with a knee. Then he just stared at her and Marsha realized he was waiting for instructions.
"Is there a civil defense tunnel or something?"
By way of saying yes, Bell strode over to a big sheet of stained and lacquered plywood bolted to a wall. The plywood had dozens of cup hooks screwed into it. A key chain dangled from each cup hook. He grabbed one.
"Willy's coming down," Marsh said, she swallowed. "On the dumbwaiter."
Rufus froze solid for a long moment, then turned around and looked searchingly at Marsha.
"You need to clear a path from the dumbwaiter to the civil defense tunnel. Big enough for a stretcher."
Bell shrugged. "Shouldn't be hard," he said, exiting the room. He was a big round man with a rolling gait that looked slow, but Marsha had to hurry to keep up.
As they came into the hallway, Bell turned and held the key chain out to her, suspending it by a single one of its myriad keys, held between his thumb and forefinger. "You want me to clear that hallway, you gotta do the tunnel yourself. End of this hall, take a right, go to the very end."
Marsha had thought that she knew her way around the state house but now was beginning to feel lost and uncertain. But Bell was staring at her remorselessly, holding the key chain right up in her face, and she had to do it. She took the keys, getting a firm grip on the important one, and ran down the hallway.
"Yo!" Bell said, "you'll need this!"
She turned around to see Bell holding up a thick black rubber-coated flashlight. He clicked it on, waved it back and forth a couple of times, and underhanded it to her down thirty feet of hallway. She plucked it out of its spinning trajectory with a one-handed-grab, shattering two fingernails, and spun on her heel.
Behind her she could hear a tremendous clattering; looking back she saw Rufus beginning to shove entire file cabinets this way am that. That was all she took in before she turned down the next corridor.
It was built from several different kinds of masonry pieced together and then painted the same color, a thick glossy industrial yellow. The ceiling was obscured by bundles of heavily insulated pipes and ventilated steel conduits carrying thick black electrical cables. The corridor was narrowed by flimsy steel cabinets and racks lining the walls, stuffed with maintenance supplies, gutted Selectrics, and ancient civil defense biscuits.
The door at the end of the hall was small, heavy, and almost too dimly illuminated to see. A heavily yellowed cardboard sign was stuck to it, bearing the FALLOUT SHELTER emblem. Once it was unlocked, it took a mighty tug just to budge it. Then it opened slowly and steadily, with the momentum of a battleship, and slammed into the wall hard enough to knock off chips of the thick old yellow paint. Beyond was a circular tunnel stretching away, ruler-straight, for as far as the beam of the flashlight could penetrate It was barely high enough for her to enter without stooping. Cold air oozed out and flowed over her shins.
She aimed the beam at the floor, because her main concern at this point was to notify any vermin of her approach so that they would at least have the option of getting out of her path. Then she ducked through the low frame of the door.
Running down the tunnel, she tried to figure out which direction she must be going now. Her trip down the stairway has gotten her all spun around. She decided that she must be going north, under Monroe Street, toward the squat limestone building the former steam plant, that housed the Illinois Emergency Services and Disaster Agency.
Finally she reached the end of the tunnel. There was another massive blastproof door here, which opened using the same key; clearly Rufus Bell had been through from time to time, oiling the lock and the hinges. She threw the bolt and put her shoulder against the door, the silky filaments of her blouse snagging on the rough layers of rust and flaked paint.
But it seemed to open by itself. Brilliant light poured through. She was looking into a wide hallway in another basement somewhere. Four people were staring at her in amazement: one custodian and three emergency medical technicians, fully equipped with a gurney and several big fiberglass equipment cases.
One of the EMTs, a tiny, athletic-looking young woman with a short bristly haircut, peered down the length of the tunnel. "Does that lead somewhere?" she said. "I guess it does."
The capitol only had three passenger elevators and they all opened directly on to the Rotunda, a yawning four-story-high well where privacy was pretty much out of the question. But buried in the wings of the building were large dumbwaiters used by house, senate, and gubernatorial staff to shuffle cartons of papers back and forth. They were easily large enough for a person, even a big person like Cozzano, to sit in.
Marsha led the EMTs through the basement, and into the storage room under the east wing where the Governor stored inactive files. Along the way they picked up Mack Crane, who was loitering in a corridor intersection, keeping a sharp eye in the direction of the stairs that led up to the first floor, looking for what Mel Meyer had referred to, alternately, as "jackals" and "witnesses." Marsha could not help darting one glance up the stairs. She was expecting a phalanx of photographers and video crews, poised to capture her wide-eyed expression so that they could splash it up on the front page of the Trib tomorrow. But the top of the stairs was guarded by a sentry line of orange cones warning of a WET FLOOR. Bell must have done that; while no one was really afraid of a wet floor, anyone who knew the ways of the statehouse would try to avoid walking through the middle of one of Bell's mopping projects and earning his undying enmity and noncooperation.
The dumbwaiter was stopped in the storage room, doors open.
Governor William A. Cozzano was sprawled out on the basement floor with his head and shoulders cradled in the lap of the janitor who was talking to him softly. Bell did not look up as the gurney approached. He said something to Cozzano, something about "medevac." He slipped one arm under Cozzano's shoulders and one under his knees and picked the two-hundred-fifty-pound Governor up as if he were a six-year-old.
"Just leave him there," one of the EMTs said, but Bell stepped forward and gently laid Cozzano out full length on the gurney, ready for transport.
The EMTs worked over Cozzano for a few minutes. Then they rolled him out into the corridor and back toward the civil defense tunnel. Marsha glanced up the stairs as they went by and saw the knees and feet of a nocturnal journalist heading for the first-floor men's room.
The gubernatorial stretcher, with its motorcade - the EMTs, the secretary, the cop, and the janitor - moved quickly and silently through the basement, down the tunnel, and into the basement of the building that Marsha had glimpsed earlier. No one said any-thing except for Cozzano, who said, jovially. "Why is everyone so wallpapered?"
The janitor in the other building was holding the freight elevator for them. They all rode it up to the ground floor, along a short hallway, and out through a roll-up steel door and into a parking lot where an ambulance was waiting. The cold air of the January night came through Marsha's blouse as if she were naked. She pirouetted slowly, looking around, trying to establish her bearings.
The ambulance had backed into a three-sided nook that opened out on to an empty gravel parking lot covered with gray hard-packed snow. They were in back of a one-story building of rough-hewn limestone. This building had a notch taken out of its corner, and the back wall of that notch contained the roll-up door. The building was separated by a gap of just a few feet from a much larger seven- or eight-story building whose solid, windowless back wall formed the third side of the nook.