Rose by Martin Cruz Smith

was the gale-force wind that whistled down the shaft, fresh air now tainted by the stable it passed through.
    There was the heat, the opposite of a dank cave. A stifling heat ripe with sweat, muck, carbon dust. A reminder that the earth was a living organism with a burning core.
    All these were sensory evidence that a visitor took notice of, sorted through, made order of. It took a minute for a visitor to comprehend that the pit eye was a hundred yards across. What the visitor had to simply ignore was the subtler, stronger report of his senses that a mile of earth stood over him, or that he was that far from escape. Blair checked his compass anyway.
    Just as there was a manager’s office on the surface, there was an underlooker’s office below, a square and simple room of brick. The underlooker was named Battie, a happy Vulcan in shirtsleeves, bowler and braces.
    Battie was expecting them; he had cleared his desk, spread a map and weighted the corners with lamps. On the north end of the map were the cage and furnace shafts. The south was a gridiron of large and small tunnels that ran to an irregular border.
    Battie registered with a noncommittal glance the different fashions of his visitors’ dress. “Mr. Leveret, Mr. Blair, will you please turn your pockets inside out?”
    Blair pulled out his watch, compass, handkerchief, penknife and loose change; Leveret produced a more substantial pile of watch, change purse, billfold, locket,comb, visiting cards, briar pipe, tobacco, matches. Battie locked the pipe, tobacco and matches in his desk.
    “No smoking, Mr. Leveret. I wouldn’t want you to even think about it.”
    The map was dated the day of the explosion and bore circles with numbers ranging from one to three digits. Lamp numbers, Blair realized. There were seventy-six victims in the fire and that was the total he counted. It wasn’t difficult because so many were clustered in a central tunnel, while others were evenly spaced along the coal face. One number, however, was right outside the underlooker’s office.
    “What happened here?” he asked.
    “The cage was up. The shaft itself goes farther down, you know. A boy had just come with his pony and tubs. When the smoke reached here, the pony backed over the edge. The boy tried to save it. That’s how they went— pony, tubs and then the boy.” Battie paused. He lifted the lamps and let the map roll up, and put it in a leather satchel along with a ledger. He replaced his bowler with a red bandanna tied around his forehead. In a second, he had regained his poise, as if he were about to stroll through a park. “Well, gentlemen, I have to make my rounds. If you still want to, we have a long way to go.”
    “You can wait here or go up in the cage,” Blair offered Leveret again.
    “I’m with you,” Leveret said.
    “ ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’?” Blair asked.
    “I won’t hold you back,” Leveret promised.
    Swinging his satchel, Battie led the way around the shaft and darted into the right-hand tunnel. “Tunnels we call ‘roads,’ ” he said over his shoulder. “When they’re as wide as this, it’s a ‘Main Road.’ ”
    There was nothing high about it, however, and as soon as they entered, Leveret was in trouble. The only light was the safety lamps, three flames so obscured by wire gauze that they barely lit the rails on the floor or thetimbers on the ceiling, and when Leveret tried to avoid one he stumbled into the other, and he didn’t know when to step and when to duck.
    Battie slowed but didn’t stop. “When you want to turn around, Mr. Leveret, look for a sign saying, ‘Out.’ If you don’t find one, just follow the air in your face. If the wind’s at your back, you’re going farther in. Mr. Blair, you’ve done this before.”
    Blair hadn’t even realized he’d slipped into the miner’s stride: a half-crouch with the head up, steps unconsciously measuring the ties of the track.
    “When do we reach the coal?” Leveret