City on Fire (109 page)

“Did you not see me jumping around with my arms waving?” he says.

“How could I see anything?”

“The problem is, we’re in the wrong part of town.”

“I don’t know where you’re getting this.”

“Think like a cop for a second, Regan. Your force has just eaten a fifteen percent budget cut, and suddenly the power’s out and you’ve got to keep the whole city from going nuts. Where are you going to concentrate your strength? Not the Upper East Side.”

“There’s valuable property up here.”

“Yeah, and people to protect it. Doormen, security guards, all these maître d’s.… It’s the dicier areas where the cops will feel they need to be.”

“Since when are you the expert, Keith? But never mind. The person we need to think like is your son. And if you stop for a second you’ll see he’s going to want to be where the people are, because that’s where he’ll feel the safest.”

“You think I’m not thinking about him? I’m telling you I’m ready to hurl myself into the combat zone. But we have to decide whether we’re looking for the kids or the cops.”

“Why don’t we split up? One for each?”

“I already told you, no can do.”

She should have put her foot down back at the apartment—he can’t just decide these things for her anymore—but the truth is, her resolve is faltering. And now a police whistle shrills in the middle of the next intersection, and before her brain can unscramble her feelings, Will’s sneakers are carrying her forward.

Only it’s not a police whistle; it’s a girl on roller skates, directing traffic. Headlights passing behind turn her filmy garment translucent. She’s wearing nothing underneath, and Regan doesn’t have to look to know Keith will be gawking. Come on, she thinks. This is a child. Of course, up in their old bedroom, changing just now, he’d looked like a child himself, yet hadn’t she still longed for him to come and put his hands on her? You can hold people accountable for what they do, but not for what they are, and Keith is this: the call, the desire, the amoral tug toward the light. But wait—those parking lights a few spots down the avenue … is that an unmarked car?

As she approaches, the driver shifts deeper down in his seat. He’s been ogling the roller girl, too, apparently: a big guy, in what her flashlight shows to be a Hawaiian shirt. But there is indeed a siren on the dash, a darkened snowglobe. She has to say “Excuse me” three times before he responds. “Ma’am, keep your light out of my car.”

“Officer—”

“Detective.”

“I need your help.”

“Can you not see I’m working?”

Again, no, but by the time he climbs out of the car, Keith has caught up. “Our kids are missing,” he blurts. “Two of them. We think they must be around here somewhere.”

The detective takes a cigarette pack from his shirt’s breast pocket, raps it on the car, extracts a cigarette. “You got a missing persons report?”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what you need, you need a missing persons report.”

“What I need is to find my fucking kids,” Keith says.

The detective lowers his lighter, not having gotten the flame to the tobacco, and sizes him up. Privately, Regan feels like cursing, too, but Keith’s belated display of emotion is just making things worse. “Honey—”

“No, really. Who am I supposed to file a report with? You’re the first cop we’ve seen in an hour, if you even are a cop. And when was I supposed to do it? They’ve only been gone a few hours.”

“Then how do you know they’re missing? They’re probably grabbing a slice of pizza.”

“In the middle of this mess?”

The world bobs queasily as three flashlights resettle.

“Please. You’ve got to have a radio. Can’t you ask your colleagues if someone’s seen them?”

The detective waves toward the intersection. “See that? See all those cars and all those drivers?” When Regan turns to look, it’s partly so she won’t have to witness Keith’s comeuppance, and partly so neither man will see the size of the fear that now grips her. She’s been operating on the assumption that this organism, her city, is essentially benevolent, but now it is revealing its deeper chaos, its drift toward unmeaning. “This is the trouble with your kind of people,” the detective is saying.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“With your pink wine and your special clothes to jog in. You think your problems are more real than anyone else’s. But right now there’s thousands of other New Yorkers needing to get home.”

“So you’re sitting in your car playing pocket-pool?”

“You looking to go downtown, buddy? Is that what you want?”

“Please, Officer. My husband doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

The detective relents. The light of a passing car makes his eyeglasses look tinted, almost blue. “Look. The best I can do for you is, your kids don’t show by morning, you go to your local precinct and ask for a form. But meantime, we’ve got our hands full. Now, if you’ll excuse me …” And he climbs back into the otherwise featureless car and pops it into drive.

“Well, that didn’t go as planned,” Keith says tightly, as the car noses into the street.

“Not after you barged in and tried to take over!”

“You didn’t tell me not to.”

“What difference does it make what I tell you, Keith? You never listen anyway.”

“That’s not fair, and you know it.”

“I said, let’s split up the work. You ignored me.”

“Out of concern for your safety,” he says, with his maddening equanimity.

And to think she’d been ready to forgive him! “Everything is always so simple for you, isn’t it? Everything that happens just happens. Who can be held to account?”

“What are we really fighting about here, Regan?”

“You can’t apologize, can you? Why is it so hard just to admit you were wrong?”

“I’ve never understood where it was supposed to get us.”

Rather than dignify this with an answer, she starts walking again, away from the intersection. She can feel Keith’s gaze all across her back, between the shoulderblades, on the back of her neck. The phrase eyes in the back of her head doesn’t do justice to the intense physicality of knowing a man like this—what he’s thinking, how he’s standing, how his heart is beating high in his chest. And of being known. She tries to tell herself this is only a trick of the shadows; he has no idea what’s inside you! But then how does she already know he’s not going to follow her here, into the darker places? And why does it hurt so much that he’s giving up this easily, letting her just walk away?

ANOTHER FATHER

IT’S TRUE, things used to get jammed up sometimes when he’d go out to check on some municipal to-do, opening night at a bush-league ballpark, Casimir Pulaski Day in the Little Poland of New Jersey. Shows that small, he trusted Rizzo to manage. Still, Carmine Cicciaro, Jr., might drive out anyway right before the first ignition, see what kinds of effects he was getting. There were parts of the hinterland so starved for amusement that traffic would lock up for miles around—folks just pulling onto the shoulder and cutting their engines to gaze up at the wildness of the lights. And when Carmine couldn’t drive anymore, he’d get out and keep going on foot, slip in among the spectators, studying faces, the only soul not looking at the sky.

This is not like that.

A scant two hours ago he was out at the shop, helping the youngest Zambelli, up from New Castle, fill a van with the two big Cicciaro boards, sign papers for the rest. He’d been locking up when everything went dark. His first reaction was relief that he’d already gotten done what needed doing. Then his mind went to Sammy. Her breathing machine. And though the phone was where it always was, in Shed 8, he couldn’t get anyone at the damn hospital to pick up. So now here he is on an elevated approach to the Queensboro Bridge, where horns began honking at exactly the moment it became obvious it was pointless to honk, because there’s nowhere for anybody to go. Other drivers lean out their windows to take in the mystery beyond the river, where the white heaps of Midtown always rose before. After ten more minutes of guilt opening back up, Carmine decides. Abandons the truck. Legs it down an exit ramp, following the blue sparks squad cars trace through the strutwork a mile off.

It’s only after he reaches street level that he spares a thought for his own protection. These days, you drive under an overpass, you keep your doors locked even in daylight. And away from the cars up on the highway, the air now is filling with the smell of smoke, the dark spreading into a wide, paved plain. No payphones, just figures hunched around intervals of fire on the sidewalk. Hurrying between them. Two people sniffing something off the back of—is that an old horse cart?—look up to watch what this old fool is doing. Or maybe he just imagines it; these last months have been like he’s back in the early days of his cuckolding, stared at wherever he goes. That’s him. The husband. The father.

But porca miseria, the things night can do to time. In place of hardwired sequence, it’s more like everything all mixed up. For now, even as he shakes his head and carries his reserve on toward the next clump of traffic, it’s coming back from even deeper how his old man used to bring him to this very stretch of boulevard, needing more corrugated tin for the sheds, or thousand-yard spools of wire. Carmine’s whole world up to that point had been the Lower East Side, three-room apartments stacked block after block and strung together with line-dried laundry. After his granddad had died, they’d taken in a boarder for the downstairs flat, hemming Carmine in, forcing him further inward. He figures his first imaginary shows, sketched in colored pencil on a secret bit of wall behind his bed, were a direct result. (And was this what Samantha had found with her magazine, the way out?) But then out of the blue his father would appear and reach down into his loneliness and drive him over to this far side of the river, and he’d hear the vendors say, Carmine Cicciaro! And this must be little Carmine.… They’ve since widened the roadway to eight lanes. Its frontage is altered not only by the blackout, but also by boxy silhouettes in places where there shouldn’t be any and gaping vacancies where there should. Here stood Rafetto’s Hardware, with its million little drawers of differential screws. And over there the by-the-hour hotel with windows full of unprepossessing girls it now occurs to him were hookers, so maybe things don’t change so much after all. Darkness just loosens the mask. Sharpens the mind’s eye. Makes the color of a remembered pencil, of a tick of waxy red on a cracked plaster wall, as vivid as that taillight a few feet away.

But it pulls the future closer, too, in the form of a bridge drawn a deeper black against the night. And as he follows its slope back up, a chasm inside returns him to what’s brought him here—the sense that he must have done something to antagonize the powers he can’t quite believe in, or let go of. This was why he’d never told the reporter about those nighttime walks along the shoulders of blue highways, communing with his art. It would have sounded like a violation. You weren’t supposed to become your own audience, any more than you were supposed to attend your own funeral, or try to outshine God. And now Richard, poor bastard, is gone, and Sammy may be leaving, and God’s never taken his calls, and here is Carmine on this bridge, stars he’s forgotten he’s forgotten falling down through the girders, making flickers on the lamped cars. His back’s starting to hurt—the work isn’t easy on it. The absence of a skyline makes him doubt he’ll ever get where he’s going, and behind him, where he’s come from might as well not be there. He can’t be sure that when he returns, if he returns, his truck won’t be just a charred and hubcapless chassis. Or that on the far shore there isn’t a line of mounted cops waiting to turn back all comers. That once every last car around him has reversed back down onto Long Island, they won’t blow the bridges and sail Manhattan out for a Viking-style burial at sea. But behind the flames, Carmine reminds himself, everything will be dead already anyway. Everything besides his daughter. So he’ll keep dragging himself up this bridge between possible worlds, this rickety ruin of light, trying to imagine it might matter if he makes it to the other side.

EAST VILLAGE—11:13 P.M.

BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT, Charlie recalls, as beyond the window a wino with a machete capers in the middle of Bowery. Over at the corner of East Third, a futon set burns down to its ribs. People huddle around, holding what look to be broken car antennas, meat spitted at the end. The inspector has to whoop his siren just to get them to move, and even then they mostly just glare over into the whirling blue light. And who can blame them? What cop cars exist for down here is to keep the masses in chains, and riding in one—even chained himself, sort of, in the backseat—marks Charlie as a class traitor. Then a fleshy something, a hot dog or possibly dildo, thunks into the glass by his head, and he feels a jolt of empathy for the cripple, with his special handle built into the steering wheel and his hand-operated brake. Blessed are the peacemakers … “What’s that?” Nothing, says Charlie. It’s nothing.

Out front of the Phalanstery, which wears its best poker face in the dark, the cuffs come off. “No hard feelings, okay?” the inspector says, pocketing the key. “Handcuffs are S.O.P., and I’m breaking a dozen regulations for you as it is. But I apologize for any discomfort.”

Charlie hates to be a feeb, but can’t help rubbing his wrists together as he trails Pulaski’s wobbly flashlight. After pressing an ear to the front door for a minute, Pulaski stumps around to a basement window. He reaches for the plywood. “You feel that? It has some give.” So does Charlie’s resolve. What every sinew in him screams, at all the important moments, is Run. And if he were to bolt again this time, there’d be nothing this bent shape banked by bonfires could do to stop him.

Instead, he tugs on the plywood. The nails sing, then groan. These splinters are going to be a bitch tomorrow. He has to borrow the butt end of Pulaski’s crutch to pry the wood the rest of the way off, making a hollow in the shadows. “Why can’t I have the flashlight, too?”

But they’ve been over this, there’s only one, and the inspector’s not about to let Charlie handle it. “You understand this is all a courtesy, right? I’m still not saying I accept a word you’ve said.” He runs his beam along the window ledge, like a jittery hand feeling for shards of glass or nails that have come out incompletely. “I assume you know your way around. You come straight up to the front door and let me in, and we’ll go through together, see what we see.”