City on Fire (120 page)

Actual cigarettes had gone the way of red meat and anonymous sex in early ’87, just before his first major West Coast solo show. Well, he’d been more careful about the sex for several years prior, even as he’d put off getting tested; he didn’t want to spread anything, but also didn’t want confirmation that it was in him. William’s political platform, to the extent that he had one, could pretty much be called anti-Deathism, because the other available option, socialism, was hard, and required sharing, whereas death was so obviously stupid that the opposition was open to anyone. Increasingly, friends were joining up. And getting flattened. And William, between his reckless second heroin binge and the great bathhouse wallow of ’79, was due to be flattened, too, only a funny thing happened post-diagnosis. They put him on drugs, things went up and down, but he lived. He lived. It was like a waiting room where they kept not calling your name. Until this morning, when he’d looked down in the shower and seen the lesion on his chest that meant the current drugs had stopped working. Other drugs had stopped working before, but he knew already this was different. It would be another week before he went to the doctor, but more out of fecklessness than fear. Whether one placed the fin of the siècle in 1999 or 2000 or was still on the Julian calendar, William had survived it. He’d never expected to see the spring of 2001. “You happy?” the kid repeated. With what? he was about to say, when he realized that what was meant was the alignment.

“Yeah,” he said. “I can live with that.”

And time, far from running out, was crumbling into powder. Part of him was high-fiving the art handler, leading him to the elevator, offering to take him and his boyfriend to Balthazar for breakfast. Part of him was thirty thousand feet over America, flying back from the show in L.A., having told no one there what the test had finally revealed. But a significant part, he saw, was still back on Central Park West, a half-hour into the ’77 blackout, squinting at the figure rushing desperately out of the night. Seconds from now, he would discover that he knew it well, but at that moment, Keith’s face seemed like one you saw only in dreams. And say Regan had been right—say group meetings four nights a week still hadn’t drummed into him that he, William Hamilton-Sweeney III, was not the center of the universe—he might have imagined for an instant that this white scrap of Brooks Brothers cotton was a messenger meant for him alone. A terrible ghost or angel come to bring more life.

MIDTOWN—3:25 A.M.

IT IS ONLY AS THE ADRENALINE BEGINS TO WEAR OFF that Pulaski discovers that’s what it was all along: adrenaline driving his crooked body up the thirty-nine flights, adrenaline launching his last doomed sprint toward the window, and adrenaline—well, that and the elevator attendant, and the girl in the Rangers jersey—helping him back down to his car when it was all over. That this night has not miraculously healed him is clear even before the keys are in the ignition. The spasms in his legs are worsening by the second. As is an inner tension. From the attendant’s desk, he’s called his old pal from the U.S. Attorney’s office and asked him to alert the Bureau to the scene up on the fortieth floor. It seemed sanest, though against the grain of years of jurisdictional intransigence, not to bring his own Department barging in, asking the kinds of procedural questions that get you fired without benefits. And if that’s how he’s going to play this, B. has warned (none too pleased to be roused by a three a.m. phone call), it’s important to get as far away from his current location as humanly possible. Yet just scrabbling in his pocket for some aspirin takes all of Pulaski’s resources.

Luckily, he has plenty of practice with childproof lids. The half-dozen tablets that tumble into his palm are dusty, possibly expired, but he knocks them back dry and shuts his eyes and does his best to tune out the lint on his tongue. If he’s done permanent damage to his legs, Sherri will never forgive him. Heck, she may never forgive him anyway. He tries rubbing them, but can’t do it the way she used to. The pain has gone glacial, an ice-cream headache thudding deep inside each thigh.

Gradually, though, the aspirin thaws the edges a bit, and he becomes aware of a choked sound coming from the passenger’s seat. Any other night a perp could belt “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” four Cs above middle C in here and it wouldn’t faze Pulaski, but this specific sound is the kind that can really make the little hairs above your collar stand up. For one thing, he’s almost forgotten he’s got two extra bodies to figure out what to do with. For another, one of them—the boy—is crying. And here’s a secret about Larry Pulaski: a clutch situation, late innings, lives on the line, he’s Mr. October, but at the more intimate scale at which life mostly gets lived he has no idea what he’s doing. Nor does the girl in the jersey, apparently, who stays silent in the backseat. All he can think of is to offer the kid a smoke.

There’s an intake of saliva, snot, tears; “Huh?”

Pulaski focuses on the red beacon still pulsing atop the Hamilton-Sweeney Building, just beyond the upper edge of the windshield. It is not his pain. “I keep a pack in the glovebox for emergencies. This would seem to qualify, if you want to dig around in there.”

The boy mumbles something about his asthma, but what else is Pulaski supposed to do for him? Reach across the space separating them, this Naugahyde vastness reeking of Christmas-tree air fresheners, and hold his hand? He’d probably get sued. That’s if he’s not getting sued already. “Well, I’ll take one,” he says. “I’m a pipe man, ordinarily. The wife puts up with it because she likes the smell. Reminds her of her grandfather. But I come home smelling like cigarettes, I sleep on the couch. These are mostly for witnesses. You’d be amazed how people can open up.”

The pack dates to New Year’s Eve, and maybe old age has strengthened it, or maybe it’s just been too long since he’s had one, because the last time a smoke hit him this hard he was a kid himself, sneaking them out beyond the garage in Passaic. It’s doing everything the aspirin can’t. His legs are drifting away. His head is swimming like a lobster trap back up to the fortieth floor, where he sees again how at the critical moment he had failed. How his body had failed him. How the boy had thrown himself from the window. How having dragged himself to his feet again, he, Pulaski, had beaten back those birds (or had they already been clearing?) until he was staring at the flicker of far-below cars. He’d smacked his flashlight to get it working again. And—sweet Jesus—that flicker turned out to be the rickety slats of a window-washer’s platform, not a dozen feet under the sill. There was the boy on his back like a chalk outline, eyes closed. He couldn’t have known the platform would be there to catch him, could he? It had been far too dark, not to mention the birds. But in each hand was an alarm clock. And next to him, maybe a foot from where he’d made impact, was a duffelbag with loose wires poking between the zippers.

The beacon stains the upper edge of the windshield again. A texture of beseechment. “I know what this is like, Charlie, trying to keep everything inside.”

The girl in the backseat breaks in. “Does it seem like he wants to talk about it? I don’t think he wants to talk about it.”

Pulaski no longer has the touch, it seems, to cajole anything out of anyone. He has a brief image of being relieved by superiors, who have been relieved by their superiors, on up the chain. Yet something fixes him in place. And when he senses other vehicles moving in the dark, he can’t help reaching back into the side pocket for his binoculars.

Phoning B., he was expecting federal agents in cheap suits and black cars. What instead emerge from the sidestreets now are plain white vans, a half-dozen of them, no sirens, no rollers—just overdriven engines at high speed. They halt in front of the Hamilton-Sweeney Building in perfect formation, nose to curb, so that their high beams aim across the plaza. A blond fellow jumps out of the second van and seems, for a second, to look Pulaski’s way. He bends to his walkie-talkie. Then jumpsuits are crisscrossing the headlights. They pull on balaclavas—all but the one with the walkie. With baton lights, with utility belts flashing, they disappear behind glass, leaving only the vans and some orange safety cones. If you were an onlooker, you might imagine a maintenance exigency was being addressed.

“Who is that?” says the girl in the backseat.

“I don’t think we’re meant to ask.”

“It’s not like it matters anyway,” says Charlie, finally. A caul of red expands around him. Goes dark. “She didn’t make it.”

Who didn’t? Pulaski wants to ask. Then he remembers how the boy had looked as they pulled him back in. They’d looped an extension cord under his armpits to hoist him up and through the window, keeping up a pep talk all the while—don’t look down now, you’re doing fine—but the point was moot; he didn’t open his eyes until he was back inside. It was like something he’d seen out there had changed him. Something he was afraid to blink away.

Pulaski is still tracing out ramifications when there’s a knock on the roof. A white light bursts into existence on the other side of the half-open window, though he’s seen no one approach. “Can I ask what you folks are doing?”

“NYPD.” Pulaski reaches for his shield only to find he’s stowed it in the wrong pocket. Here it is. “You mind aiming that thing somewhere other than my eyeballs?”

The white orb hovers for a moment before flitting to the roadway. An athletic-looking man crouches to look through the window. He is young—too young, in the way of some people who are scarily good at their jobs—and reeks of Speed Stick. His jumpsuit, unzipped to the navel, shows a necktie, as if after this he’s going to head back to punch a clock in some second life. Even in poor light, the blond hair spilling over the shirt’s arrow collar has exceptional luster. Why this should surprise Pulaski is hard to say. “I see your badge, fine, maybe sitting in a car counts as work for you. But what’s their excuse?”

Pulaski cringes as the girl in the backseat speaks up again. “Who do you think called in the threat, pig? If it wasn’t for him, you wouldn’t be here.”

“Ah. So you’re the famous Deputy Inspector Larry Pulaski.”

“And I’m taking these two into custody,” he says. “But my name wasn’t supposed to get dragged into this.”

“Information has a way of reaching us. Like, for example, that you’d taken early retirement. I thought I’d come down here and offer congratulations while my team wraps up. But then I find you aren’t retired after all. Why is that, Larry?”

Good question.

“So retire already. It’s four in the morning. Forget this ever happened, and you never have to see my face again. Which, trust me, would be very bad for your future plans.”

Surely the jumpsuits can’t be emerging again—hasn’t Pulaski only just finished his cigarette?—but here they are, more of them than should fit in three vans, moving with the dispatch of paramedics, though maybe it’s the lump they carry between them, the size of a child, that makes him think that. The duffel. A church choir has begun to keen out there in the night, unless he is imagining that, too.

“That goes double for you two hoodlums. I’m not supposed to say this, but Uncle Sam has a little offsite deal with certain overseas governments. You know what those guys do to prisoners? Unless you aim to spend the rest of your natural lives finding out, remember: nothing happened here. Understand? You’ll make sure they understand, Detective? This is all a bad dream.” He doesn’t wait for a response. Another knock on the roof, and he is gone, this young man Pulaski is now certain operates orders of magnitude beyond his own pay-grade. Which must mean—he tries to make contact with the spectral chorus, the distant ground of his pain—which must mean that it really almost came to pass. He can still see the two identical alarm clocks, hands stopped at 2:26, where the one on the bank over there says 9:27. The hours in between he may never get his head around.

But he doesn’t need to, he sees, as the first of the vans departs. He is done with imagining there are answers. He will go away and forget any of this ever happened. It never happened.

“Like I was saying, Charlie”—he fumbles around for where he left off—“I know what this is like. What you need to do is take things one step at a time. Start with sleep. Go home and take a hot shower and just sleep.”

“You’re not going to take us in?” The girl sounds disappointed.

“Anything you have to confess, sugar, I frankly don’t want to hear. The fellow was right. It’s best no one knows you were involved.”

“Best no one knows you were involved, you mean,” Charlie mutters. “You’re the one who pulled a weapon on the elevator guy.”

“This is your get out of jail card, kid. Don’t look it in the mouth.” The choir is fading away. He is startled by the actuality of the engine when he turns the key.

“You want me to drive?” the girl asks. Then: “Your legs.”

“They’re fine.” He moves the transmission into D, grits his teeth as he gives it gas. “Just tell me where I can drop you two. Surely you’ve got homes somewhere.”

“Matter of fact—,” she is saying, when the boy interrupts: Yes, he says. As a matter of fact, there is somewhere he wants to be left.

UPPER WEST SIDE—4:27 A.M.

AT FIRST, IN THE DIM BLEAR of what could be dawn or just more humidity, the thing on the bench across from Daddy’s building looks like a bag of garbage, or a heap of schmattes, or some other of the million sorts of refuse this city specializes in. Keep walking, Regan tells herself, because helping anyone else is a story for the faint of heart. There’s only expedience, the pursuit of one’s own desires. Witness her husband, already halfway across Central Park West. But this is almost exactly where those ambulances were on New Year’s Eve. And maybe at this very moment, someone on the other side of the island is walking past two lost-looking kids, wondering whether to intervene. Anyway, it has enough of the human about it, this thing on the bench, that she’s already stepped back onto the curb.

“Regan, what the hell?” Keith says behind her, but she tells him to go ahead upstairs and check on William and Daddy. “I’ll catch up in a minute.” He pauses. “Please.” She’s been looking all night for any sign that he accepts her independence … and now, to her surprise, he gives her one. Goes. She squats by the bench. The thing is indeed human, hunched in the chin-to-chest posture of a subway drunk, but she smells only tobacco and sweat. She has an urge to touch him, but isn’t brave enough. “Hey.” And when he looks up, her heart stutters. He’s just a kid himself: rough-cut hair, fair skin, the hollows of a face. A camera-strap across his chest. “Hey,” she says, softer now. “Are you lost?”