City on Fire (110 page)

Which isn’t how it was supposed to go. The inspector was supposed to relay Charlie’s allegations to the SWAT team, and they would converge here with M16s and helicopters, and the duffelbag would be brought out, and then Nicky and Sol, if Sol was still here, while Charlie watched from some safe distance where they couldn’t see who’d finked on them, and then … And then Sam would live. He gets that the sheer implausibility of his story, coupled with the blackout, has required some divergence from plan, but he wasn’t expecting to actually be the one to go in, alone, at what must be getting on toward T-minus zero. “What if someone’s standing guard?” he asks.

“I hate to burst your bubble, but I can’t see it happening. It’s dead quiet in there.”

Charlie has seen with his own eyes that the basement into which he’s forced is bare of furniture, but as he lands on his hands, his memory seems unreliable, and that little square of moonlight awfully far away. He strains to hear voices, but the inspector’s right: this blackout is silent as death. Which doesn’t mean someone or something couldn’t be lurking. In fact, a silent lurk is maybe exactly what you’d aim for. He wishes the fucking flashlight would shine down in here, but is scared even to whisper back over his shoulder. Plus who’s to say the inspector’s still up there. Who’s to say Sol Grungy hasn’t already lurched out from his hiding place and gagged Pulaski and stuffed him into the back of the van. People turn out to be capable of just about anything, which leaves only two reasonable positions: assume the worst of them, or take stuff on trust. At this point, it seems 99 percent likely that nothing worth trusting even exists. That Charlie’s blown his one shot at belonging on some vaporous nonsense about the sanctity of life. Even these beatitudes he hums to calm himself are propaganda, like Nicky said all along. Propaganda with just enough holes to justify anything anybody wants. If there is any sin, it’s Charlie’s, too. But he can’t just sit here like bait on a hook, so he takes a hit off his inhaler and finds the stairs, the foiled walls, the front hall. When he gets the door open—thank God—the inspector’s on the far side, or his light is, swinging around to blind Charlie.

“This way, is where they’ll be.”

The back steps slow the inspector down, as does the irregular ground Charlie’s shadow scythes across, tetanus-encrusted old bike frames ambuscading in the high grass. Feral cats yowl in ardor or rage. Someone calls down from an invisible building for them to stay the hell off her property or she’ll call the City. “It’s okay, ma’am,” the inspector hisses up. “We are the City.” But now his pistol’s out all the same. It isn’t exactly a stealth approach.

From outside the little carriage house, the light picks out only the tin in the windows, the layer of dust, the darkness. A shiny new padlock lies in the dirt near the door. Something else is different, too, or missing, but Charlie can’t name it. Pulaski mates the flashlight to the gun, shoves through the door and yells “Freeze!” and the beam sweeps around to reveal … squat. The cinderblock partition’s been dismantled and removed. Even the carpet is gone. There’s just a pile of guitar strings and a kick drum with Nihilo on it.

Pulaski taps the drum. It’s empty. “This is it? This is your big conspiracy?”

It never occurred to Charlie that Nicky wouldn’t be here—that even these late epiphanies may be unreliable, he thinks, scanning frantically for anyplace you might stash a bomb. That Nicky’s too much of a narcissist to off himself. Maybe instead of going down with the ship, he’s planted his powder somewhere more secure and gotten the fuck out. Are enough minutes left on the clock to search the whole house? “No, no, just give me a little time.”

He leads the way to the back steps, and then up, floor by floor, awaiting the painfully slow climb of the inspector, who still hogs the light. The interiors it skims seem distorted, as in a body reduced to its skeleton. Sooty floorboards, crumbling brick … it’s like Charlie’s dreamed everything he lived through here. As if he’s the one stuck in bed, with the morphine drip. There’s nowhere for a bag to hide. He’d like at least to have that packet of photographs, to show the inspector he’s not crazy, there really is a PHP, but only in the attic do they find anything at all, and then it’s just crap he left yesterday, thinking to be gone only an hour, the bedroll, his piled clothes, and Sam’s filmless camera. He watches his hands reach for the strap. Loops it over his neck and shoulder, resists a gathering tightness. With the windows closed, it’s a sweat lodge in here. The chimney is bricked up. Still, it reminds him there’s a level above.

He’s halfway up the ladder to the roof when the inspector says, “Where do you think you’re going? I can’t climb that.”

“So wait here. But I’m going to need the flashlight.”

“Charlie, I’ve seen enough for one night. I was curious. I gambled. I lost.”

“Please—you said you’d give me a chance. I trusted you.”

Some more time may pass. Then, to Charlie’s surprise, Pulaski hands over the light.

Charlie’s already stepped off the ladder’s top rung when the sense of height catches up with him. He has to get down on his hands and knees, like a baby. From there, the flashlight finds nothing more solid than a wrecked pigeon coop. Through the slats and wire comes the human light of the street—cars and fires and other flashlights—and beyond that, Nicky’s wet dream: the entire financial district, blotted out. Or almost entire; red lights flash atop two ghostly towers, since even in a blackout, you’ve got to warn the planes. Scrabbling around toward Midtown, he can just make out the Empire State, a black bar against the stars, and the needle of the Chrysler. Then something glimmers between them. A gilded rhombus flaring redly into view.

“Tell me what you’re seeing up there,” calls a voice from the trapdoor behind him.

“Nothing,” he has to admit. “I’m seeing nothing.”

“There’s no such thing as nothing, kid. Tell me what you see.” Charlie levels his faint beam as if it could reach all the way uptown. It reminds him of an exhibit his dad took him to once at the Museum of Natural History. You pressed a button, a light shot from the building top; eight seconds later, it reached the moon. Around the far-off skyscraper with the gilt roof, there seems to be smoke—that’s what’s causing the glimmer, gray over gold—only it doesn’t behave the way smoke should. Instead of hanging, or rising, it sweeps back and forth like a veil. Shit. What’s missing from the garage out back, and now the roof, are Sol’s birds. And there they are, circling that tower a mile away, like the flying monkeys of Oz, or the fowls of heaven, desperate to tell him something. “I’m seeing this one building with its warning lights still on,” he says. “The one with the golden pagoda on top.”

“The Hamilton-Sweeney Building, you mean.”

And for a second, Charlie has a new sense of just what’s on the line tonight. What was the thing they used to say, back when there were no skyscrapers? The higher the building, the closer … Oh, God.

92

BETH ISRAEL HOSPITAL—CA. 11:50 P.M.

AFTER THE LAST BLACKOUT, in ’65, eight of Manhattan’s nine major medical centers invested heavily in generator modernization. Guess which one didn’t. That’s right: Beth Israel, at present, still relies on a single, ancient, diesel-powered afterthought that dwells in an annex to the boiler room. The emergency plan on file with the city includes a courtesy call from Con Ed in the event of an outage, so that the main circuit can be switched over, but tonight no call comes, and the whole towering superstructure is struck momentarily blind. Then some janitor must take it upon himself to brave the infernal circles that are the subbasements of any urban hospital and find the manual bypass—for light is returning to the upper floors, along with a rumble that wasn’t there before. Windows tremble in their frames. Personal-sized tins of syrupy fruit cocktail jig across oblique eating trays. Albeit attenuated by layers of floor and thick-soled shoes, the rumble reaches even the nurses as they squeak along the surgical pink halls.

Wednesday night is generally the week’s slowest, and right now most of the physicians are finishing up dinner in Westchester. As with the cops, many will be called back to the city in the course of the next few hours. They’ll form little agonistic clots in the waiting areas, arguing about who’s responsible for what, but it’s the nurses, really, who are the pacemakers of this short-circuited heart. Their first order of business is to visit each of the 937 inpatient beds to check that its equipment has come back online. It’s a daunting task, but these same thickset Eastern European and West Indian women who can make your life hell if you’re perceived to take a tone with them have got protocols down cold. They check vital signs and change glucose drips and “bag” patients whose respirators went haywire when the power came back on. They move down the hallways with a briskness that to anyone watching would appear majestic, like firemen at the sound of a bell.

It’s doubly hard, then, to account for the hours it takes before anyone looks in on room 817B. Or trebly hard, as the eighth-floor nurses—Magdalena and Fantine and Mary and Mary Pat—have taken a near-maternal interest in its occupant, who at 193 days has been here the longest. They’ve closed the window on cool evenings when her father’s left it open, and cranked it open mornings when there’s something she would theoretically like to see. They’ve soaped her with golden sponges, the kind husbands use on the family wagon on weekends. They’ve changed her and wiped her and in a technical sense fed her, too. Fantine and Mary Pat have sung to her; the others are not the singing type. But all have touched her hand or cheek to say Hello in there and So long for now and Get some rest, Sleeping Beauty. It was Fantine who came up with the nickname. And maybe, on second thought, this was why it took her so long: the nearer a thing is to us—the more a part of us—the easier it is to lose sight of.

It is after midnight when Fantine finally wheels the new IV stand in, and she hasn’t made it three squeaks inside the door when a knife goes into her heart. It’s hard to say which she sees first: the respirator gone dead in the corner, or the mountain of golden flesh looming over the bed. A hospital gown is coming apart at the back, revealing inky claws or wings that ascend the vertebrae to the neck and skull. This must be the man who shot her, Fantine realizes—the Kneesocks Killer, come back to finish the job. His hands continue their strangling motions as he turns to take in the source of the gasp. The tattoos extend halfway onto his face; she’s never seen anything like it. From his ear hangs a tiny dagger. Then, like some predator too powerful to take notice of a morsel like her, he returns to his labors.

Back in January, that crooked little man from the police force had gathered the nursing staff together at the shift change and told them to keep special watch on Sleeping Beauty. It was like just because her skin was white they valued her more than other patients. Though the newspapers didn’t name her, they were already turning her into a kind of story about what was wrong with the city, when in East Flatbush walking home from the train late you heard gunfire more often than not and no one cared. Some anonymous philanthropist would soon step forward to cover the girl’s hospital bills. But that was back before the girl meant anything to her personally, and now Fantine sees the size of her own failure. Someone said there was some commotion here earlier in the day; she should have known to watch closer. She tightens her grip on the IV stand as if it was a harpoon. She tries not to think of what the man’s hands could do to her. Then they move again, and there is a sound she recognizes, like the crumpling of an empty milk carton. She glimpses the blue bag of a hand-operated breathing pump. And the man says, for all the world as if they know each other, “You going to take over, or what? My arms are killing me.”

His easy manner frees her to fly across the room as she wasn’t able to a moment ago. Who on earth does he think he is? What is he doing here? This isn’t his … she reaches for a powerful word. “This isn’t your jurisdiction!”

“Well, one of us better work this thing, sister, ’cause your breathing machine there’s been on the fritz for hours.” But as he offers her the bag, a reflex makes her slap his hand away, and the blue, life-giving bellows falls to the floor. Every other care in her mind clears before the horror of the pulse monitor starting to wail. She scrabbles on her hands and knees. Then she is up again, fitting the clear-plastic mask over the girl’s nose and mouth, pumping the bag furiously. After a few breaths, she orders the intruder to put a thumb on the girl’s wrist.

“Now count, damn you,” she says, bearing down again. “Don’t stop until I say.”

Her bosom is only six inches from his huge shoulders, his arms bursting like prize hams from the sleeves of a too-small gown. Among the tattoos is a swastika she pretends not to see. After fifteen seconds, she calculates a heart rate of forty-four beats per minute, which is what the electrocardiogram says, too. It stops beeping. Air flows in, out, fogs the plastic. In the glassy jar of the breathing machine, she can see her own scowl. “Visiting hours are over, you know. O-V-er.”

“I’m not a visitor. I’m a patient.”

“That so?”

“I reckon this dashiki you people put me in means I can walk the halls if I want to. And Samantha here happens to be an old friend. You’re lucky I came up for a visit, or I wouldn’t have heard that pulse-taker there beeping blue murder when the lights came back on.”

She cannot look at his face. “You should have called a nurse.”

“You see a phone up here?”

“There’s a call button. We’ve got special training. Do you have special training?”

“Hell, it don’t take a diploma to see Sammy wasn’t breathing. I spot this thing by the sink and I’ve been sitting here ever since, pumping away at her pretty face.” Fantine looks to see what kind of sauciness is in this devil, but the black ink curled crablike around the mouth and one of the eyes makes it hard to say he’s anything but sincere.

“These tattoos, they’re bad for you, you know.”

“That’s what Ma always said, God rest her.”

“The ink gets in your blood, it can give you hepatitis.”