City on Fire (102 page)

Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t drift further in the weeks that followed. I began phoning anyone who might remember the fireworker’s daughter. One day, a former math teacher was describing her as just another sullen girl in the back row; the next, a photo instructor at NYU was telling me how sad he’d been to see this “promising artist” drop his class. Out in Flower Hill, I made fruitless inquiries about “C,” a boy she’d written about befriending the summer before she left for college. (I’d first heard of him in August, when I’d asked Cicciaro if she was dating anyone. “God, I hope not,” he’d said. “There’s one kid picked her up a couple times in a Buick wagon, but he looked like one of those weenies from the old Charles Atlas ads, getting sand kicked on them.”) I then spent hours in the East Village, searching for her other “droogs,” likewise identified mostly by initial. Samantha hadn’t always gotten along with her friends on the scene; they had a destructive streak, if Issue 3 is accurate, that both repelled and attracted her. But as I observed their habitat, recalled what she’d written, accosted punks on St. Mark’s Place who sloughed off all questions, I came to feel my own species of exasperated affection for these characters of hers, SG and DT and NC, sometimes called “Iggy.” When people asked why I was looking for them, I finessed the truth; Samantha’s name hadn’t reached the papers, and I hated to cloud the objectivity of a source. Yet despite my scruples, or perhaps because of them, I’d begun to feel that I knew less than I had on New Year’s Day. There had been two Samantha Cicciaros. And if there were to be answers––not about who had shot her, for that was a mugging gone wrong, I believed, but about what losing her might mean––then this other life, this second self, seemed to hold them.

OF COURSE, THE SIGNATURE EFFECT OF A GOOD FANZINE IS TO make even the most out-of-touch reader feel invested in the culture depicted therein. It’s a lesson some writers take a lifetime to learn: what makes us care about things is other people caring, too. And what Samantha cared about even more than school or friends or her new punk-rock home in the city was the music. For her, Patti Smith and Joey Ramone and Lou Reed weren’t voices from her stereo speaker; they were intercessory saints. And hovering slightly above them all in the margins of the fanzine, because more accessible (or more nakedly vulnerable), was a man named Billy Three-Sticks, lead singer for the early punk band Ex Post Facto.

About the band’s history, I could find very little: the punk rock of ’74 was even three years later like a lost colony, and Billy Three-Sticks a settler vanished into the interior. I tracked down and listened to the one LP he’d recorded, but despite an odd sense of having heard it before, I found the music dissonant, and the lyrics, for all their emotion, uninterpretable. “Kunneqtiqut What the fuck Connect the dots Jumbled up On a tilt Around a bend Alone, Atlantic / Antic end.” Nor could I crack that husk of a surname, Three-Sticks. From the store where I’d bought the record, however, I did manage to obtain an address. I went to pay a visit.

The old factory building I found in Hell’s Kitchen was so far from anything described in the ’zine that I wondered what I even hoped to find there. I was weighing what approach to take when, finally, I caught a break. Or rather, two. Before I could cross the street to look for a buzzer, a small, dark man in a motorcycle jacket stepped from the vestibule. This was Billy Three-Sticks. He moved, head down, toward the Eighth Avenue IND. Maybe it was just the cold making him withdraw into himself, but he looked so secretive I couldn’t help but follow.

Then, a block shy of the subway entrance, I noticed a second man, black and in some sort of repairman’s coveralls, keeping pace with Billy Three-Sticks across the street. Intent on his quarry, he seemed not to see me. By the time I turned back to Three-Sticks, he had gone into the subway. The coveralled man was descending, too, until there was only a stocking cap slipping up in back to show a fugitive bit of green. He was not a repairman at all, but a “punk”––perhaps even a friend of Samantha’s. And if so, then these “droogs” of hers weren’t simply the loveable fuckups of Land of a Thousand Dances, but also some other thing that accounted for his presence here: lurkers, watchers, spies.

I MADE SEVERAL MORE TRIPS UP TO THE OLD FACTORY, BUT each time I found the green man from the first day there ahead of me, watching. Or a nasty-looking lunk of a skinhead in matching coveralls. Or a girl in grimy fur idling on a loading dock. Or just the glary windshield of one of the graffiti’d white vans that had lately become ubiquitous as pigeons. Three-Sticks himself was a far rarer sight, keeping to a tight, even compulsive circuit: vestibule to train to vestibule, with occasional divagations toward an off-track betting parlor or the Automat in Times Square.

As for me, I was now light-years from whatever piece I’d set out to assemble. But I knew a story when I saw one. Samantha’s idol was obviously in some kind of trouble; had she been too? I would come home at night, have a drink with a neighbor, say nothing about the drama I was watching transpire. Yet the next day, when I rose from my desk for a constitutional, my steps tended toward Hell’s Kitchen. I had fantasies of slipping into the building behind another resident and going door to door. Or, failing that––because those residents all appeared to be bikers who could have snapped me in two––I would ring every buzzer. Once I’d warned Billy Three-Sticks he was being followed, simple gratitude would persuade him to talk. He could lead me down, perhaps, to the house where Samantha had been living before the shooting, or at least recall what it had been like to be a young punk himself. But the watchers were always there, and when they did finally withdraw and let me get as far as the buzzers, one Thursday morning in March, a biker’s tattooed face popped out of an upper window seconds after I rang. I explained that I was looking for Billy Three-Sticks, and got confirmation of what I already knew (if only from the absence of an audience) must be true: I wasn’t going to find him here anymore.

“You’re saying he’s just disappeared?” I shouted. Then, emboldened by the solidity of brick and fire escape between us: “He’s your neighbor. Doesn’t it concern you?”

The man suggested, not uncheerfully, that I mind my own business. It was 7 a.m. People lived here.

IN HINDSIGHT, THIS WAS PROBABLY THE MOMENT TO INVOLVE the actual police. But what did I have that I’d trust them not to bungle? Not only did I never again see the white van in Hell’s Kitchen, but Billy Three-Sticks, whom I’d taken for my passafuoco, my passageway into Samantha, was gone, too. It was March. I’d spent a month pursuing a dead end, when I should have been going out to Long Island to keep Carmine company, or at least to finish our interviews. And now I could do neither.

What I mean is this: after Billy Three-Sticks went to ground, all the energy that had overtaken me that winter evaporated. I descended into the worst writer’s block of a career that’s had its share. I would rise around lunchtime and instead of going out to report, or sitting down to write, I would pour myself a drink. It was remarkable, I was rediscovering, how much more a person could drink if he was willing to start during daylight hours, and how the character of his intoxication changed. Once, I had felt the rightness of the slang term “buzz”: efflorescence, that bursting of the shell of the self. Now, in the bleak white late-winter light, my apartment was an Alaska. From beyond the walls came the infinitude of sound, the beep beep of trucks backing up, the rattle and whinny of a garbage masher, and, nearer in, the elevator engine’s sigh, the ghost frequencies of the super’s walkie-talkie, the noise, real or imagined, of my neighbor, my quondam drinking buddy, slamming cabinets next door. Yet within me, where my own voice would have to come from, was a silence so deep as to be pure potential. And behind that, like the backing on the mirror: death. It made even a phrase like “comatose in a hospital bed” feel sentimental.

I left the apartment only to buy as many newspapers as I could find––a habit, or vice, from my time at the World-Telegram. Now, with just three dailies left in New York, I suppose I could have taken out subscriptions, but that would have missed the point. The point was not to read, but to purchase. To feel, as you fumbled for another nickel, that something big might have happened since you last looked. In this way, you fought off the anxious emptiness at the center of your head, the sense that nothing under the sun was ever really new, and that we were all of us therefore stuck with the lives we had.

Which is how, more than a month into my bender, I discovered the photo of Sam Cicciaro on the front of the New York Post. She looked nothing like she had in real life. She wore an off-the-shoulder dress, for one thing. Her hair was elaborately plaited and shellacked, her head tilted, her smile slightly open-mouthed, as if the yearbook photographer had said something to make her laugh. I blinked and still she was there. Poured another drink. Still, she was there. Scooped, I kept thinking. I’ve been scooped.

An hour later, I was on the phone, dialing my old pal Larry Pulaski at the NYPD, who was now a deputy inspector. Behind the operator who answered, I remember, ringers trilled like slot machines. Every light on the switchboard must have been lighting up for comment.

“I wondered if I’d hear from you,” Pulaski said, once I’d made it through. “But you should have used my office line.”

“I’m looking at the Post here,” I told him. “You want the Post or the Daily News? Because her name’s in both.”

“You sound like you’ve been drinking.”

“How could you disclose it, Larry? Carmine’s still out there all alone. If I were you, I’d be worried he makes some reporter for a prowler and you end up with another shooting on your hands.”

“I’ll tell you what worries me more, Richard, if you want to know. You’re losing your objectivity.”

But how much objectivity could I get? We were talking about page one of the fucking Post. Probably it was just static in the line, but I could have sworn I heard the snip of trimmers, the punctilious deity on the other end of the wire paring his nails. “Richard, do you think I like rubberneckers mooning around my crime scenes? Do you think I like your man on the radio howling for my personal blood?” A pause here almost made it seem he was waiting for an answer.

“You swear you had nothing to do with this?”

“There was a leak, is what I’m telling you, Richard. Several links up the food chain, probably.”

“Why would anyone leak?”

“I’d love to know that myself, but bottom line, it’s a big department, this stuff happens, and right now I’ve got multiple other fires to put out. I do the job they pay me to do. I suggest you put down the bottle and do the same.”

I WOKE THE NEXT DAY WITH A VAGUE SENSE OF CRIMINALITY. I had been unfair to someone, but wasn’t sure how. The miniblinds by the couch I’d passed out on were v-shaped in the middle, like something had struck them. On my coffeetable was a meniscus of dust. But there was my dog pacing incontinently by the door, his tail thwacking it on each pass. And when I reached the street, there were the trees breaking out into leaf. Springtime. Life. It shook loose a memory. Hadn’t there been something about “no dead ends”? In any case, Pulaski was right: I had a job to do.

I’d uncovered, as near as I could tell, two avenues into the shooting. The first, though the connection remained obscure, was still Billy Three-Sticks. I’d had no luck at his place of residence, but had given up too easily. So I began looking for him at other local haunts. All I saw, from time to time, were the young men who were watching him. They were back. And when I observed the larger of them, disguised now in a preposterous sportcoat and beard, hunched up in a booth in the Automat, using a four-inch switchblade to saw a pus-soaked bandage off his hand, my search began to feel like an emergency. I widened it to other betting parlors and Automats, to Chelsea, to parts of the Upper West Side. I spent whole days walking, pausing, ducking behind newsstands, begging the city to put Billy and me into contact.

If I was home, I worked the phone. The name “Samantha Cicciaro” seemed to have leaked simultaneously to every paper and newsstation; it was impossible to say who’d had it first. But when the World-Telegram had closed, it had scattered my colleagues wide across the media firmament, and now I called them all, asking them to point me toward a source. Most refused––some vehemently––but in the end I reached one who obliged. He couldn’t name names, he told me. But he had this funny idea the story of the shooting in the park had been timed to knock something else off the front pages. And he knew his friend who’d broken it had contacts high up in the Hamilton-Sweeney Building.

That name set bells clanging. For Carmine Cicciaro’s chief competitor, I knew, was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hamilton-Sweeney Company. When he’d suggested on New Year’s Eve that these competitors were involved in the disappearance of three grams of polverone from his workshop, I hadn’t taken him seriously: his theory imputed such personal animus to what he otherwise called “the money.” (To the extent that I’d thought about it at all since, I’d decided that it was probably Samantha herself who nicked the three grams, in a moment of rebellion, or pique, or as some kind of offering for her firebug friends.) I knew, too, from paying just enough attention to the radio, that the Hamilton-Sweeney Company was in legal trouble, but I’d assumed––the dynastic merchant bank having mutated into a conglomerate in the ’60s––that Carmine’s competitor was a separate arm, and that superintending the whole would be some bureaucratic cabal too faceless to care about “sending a message” to a lone fireworker. But no, when I consulted the newspaper, there apparently was a Mr. Hamilton-Sweeney in the chairman’s seat, and now under indictment. Was it so far-fetched to imagine that he might know something about this leak? This breakin?

A few days passed. I sat on my new lead, but kept researching the Hamilton-Sweeney case. Then two nights ago when I was riding the subway back up from the Village, the miracle occurred. Through the communicating door between my car and the next, I happened to spot a battered biker jacket. Billy Three-Sticks. It was as if my ceasing to look for him had summoned him forth. But he must have seen me, too, even recognized me somehow, because when I passed through the intervening doors, he bolted onto the platform and up the stairs. I called out for him to wait, followed him down a corridor. The gate at the end had been locked for the night. Finally, we would connect; we could still save each other. I reached for his shoulder, almost fatherly, but when he turned, this skinny guy who on his record sleeve didn’t look a day over twenty, he was so pale as to seem already dead. A side gate had been left open, and he darted through it and upstairs, and before I could catch him and explain the danger I feared he was in, he was on a downtown train, the doors closing behind him.