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sloshed through they could smell oxygen, which meant that the water was fresh. Were the Jerome Park sluices to be drawn open as Romeo Tan and Bat Charney crawled toward the silt chamber, they would die a horrible backward death, because the tunnel was too narrow for turning around. They stopped every now and then to listen, and heard nothing. Finally, Romeo Tan broke through to the silt chamber. Working in four feet of ice water, they lit the candle, pried open a crypt, threw in the sacks of E. E. Henry, slammed the door, said a two-word prayer (“Jesus Christ!”), dropped their hammer and crow, and made for the exit, hearts racing. Bat Charney made a step of his hands. As Romeo Tan’s head reached the level of the tunnel he was about to enter, he heard a strange sound. It was like wind whistling over the peaks of high mountains, or the sound of a geyser minutes before it erupts. It was the water, which had just begun to pass through the gates at Jerome Park.
    “Water!” he said to Bat Charney. At first they nearly collapsed, but soon they were snake-dancing through the tunnel, going faster than they would have thought possible. They dug so hard into the moss to pull themselves ahead that after a hundred feet they had no nails left, and their hands looked like newt paws. Still, they kept on, but it was too late. They heard the water explode into the silt chamber, and felt the displaced air rushing past them like a hurricane. Then came the torrent. Its icy mass, frothing and dark, banged into Bat Charney’s feet, knocked out his false teeth, and jolted him forward into a fetal position. He drowned that way, but he saved Romeo Tan, since Bat’s compacted body became a plug in the line shooting rapidly forward at the head of the water column. Romeo Tan lay on his back, sliding across the wet moss at the bottom of the tunnel as fast as a bullet. At the shaft, they curved upward and rose so fast that the flesh on Romeo Tans face was pulled down until he looked like a bloodhound. He wondered what would happen when they hit the top, but he didn’t wonder long, for they were shot from the mouth of the shaft (which they had left open) like cannonballs, or, rather, like a long cannonball and a trailing bunched-up wad. Romeo Tan felt his head break a splintering hole through the shingle roof over the entry. Suddenly he was flying free in the night, toward the stars and a bright moon which almost blinded him. The city on an autumn night, exciting and full of charms, was spread all around him. He could see lights, smoking chimneys, and fires at the edge of the windy parks. The Harlem River was covered with the glistening white paint of the moon. He wondered if he would fly into space. But he rose only two hundred feet above Morris Heights before he started down, and landed in an apple tree. His fall was broken as every single apple, perhaps five hundred of them, left the tree and thudded to the ground. Romeo Tan watched the apples roll down the hill and pile up against a farmer’s shack. Then, for the rest of the night, he sat in the tree, under the moon, trying to reconstruct what had happened, wondering if everyone had to experience this kind of thing sooner or later, or if in fact it was a relatively isolated occurrence.
    Pearly Soames wanted to take a hundred men down there and stay for an hour to explain his plan. As word spread throughout the city, one Short Tail after another felt his heart swim to his feet and cower like a dog. Their anxiety was infectious. Everyone in Manhattan was nervous. Even the music halls were gloomy. But at nine in the evening on Tuesday, the Short Tails assembled one hundred strong in the apple orchard around the siphon entrance, waiting to descend. There was much nervous talk and forced pleasantries about stealing, the conditions in various jails, and the state of the con. Romeo Tan, now a basket case, was allowed to be last in and first out. Pearly, as usual, was first in and would be last out.