City on Fire (13 page)

It was the old conservatory, the one room in the triplex penthouse she’d ever really been able to stand. When he’d bought the place for Felicia, Daddy had done it up as a proper library. Regan liked to think of this as Daddy’s oblique apology to her and to William for the impending remarriage. (Of course, by that point, William was off at his second or third school, and anyway, he’d always confused stoicism with not suffering at all.) Her mother’s books, with their motley spines, were easy to spot among the uniform leather sets of gesammelte Schriften Felicia had bulk-ordered from the Strand. Her first and only summer here, Regan had sequestered herself among the rolling ladders and soft couches, recovering. At sunset, the southwesterly light, unobstructed by any higher building between here and the river, poured through the jewelbox windows. It had made her feel like a passenger on the Titanic: the vessel was doomed, but the memory would be extravagant. But what good did it do anyone to recall such things now? The ladders were gone. Where one shelf of Mom’s books had been was a sort of television, which she recognized as one of the firm’s new electronic stock-price terminals. And in place of the leather couch where she’d reclined, in secret mourning for all she’d lost, was a huge desk taken up mostly by a three-dimensional architectural model. She could tell from the complicated silence that Amory was still watching, so she stiffened herself. Reined her head in. “You’ve really made yourself at home here.”

“This?” He passed around her, trailing a hand over the edge of the desk, and settled himself in the swiveling chair. “This was your father’s idea. With him working from home so much these days, he wanted a place where I’d be near at hand. His man Friday, as it were.” Sometimes Regan wondered whether her father even existed anymore, or whether he was a mere syllogistic convenience, a floating variable that could be brought in to balance accounts. “Have a seat.”

“I’ve been sitting all night,” she fibbed, but she knew the way she stood behind the armchair with her hands on its back probably read as fear.

“Suit yourself.” Amory smiled harmlessly. Then he leaned back as if the better to see the model on the desk. It was a stadium of some kind, Regan saw, rising among dozens of spikier buildings next to a flat blue river one nth of its actual size. He read her gaze, rather willfully, as a question. “Has no one shown you the plans yet for Liberty Heights?”

“Don’t tell me we’re buying a football team.”

“Of course not. Just the stadium. Building it, actually. The anchor tenant for eighty acres of redevelopment.”

“This is the South Bronx? It’s been burning up there for years. Our underwriters would revolt.”

“One man’s obstacle, Regan, is another’s opportunity. You’d be surprised at how swiftly you can have a Blight Zone declared, once a neighborhood gets sufficiently torched. And then it’s whole parcels of blocks, resold for pennies. Funds matched. Taxes abated.”

“Not exactly the textbook free market.”

But it was as if he’d unconsciously slipped into his pitch, and could no longer hear her. “We broke ground on Phase One in November, though only unofficially, once the Blight decree came through. I can’t believe this didn’t reach you. At any rate, you’ll be working on it soon enough, when we formally unveil the project.”

Since he’d joined the firm, diversification had been Amory’s watchword; Regan had been aware of it largely as a succession of debt-financed acquisitions awaiting the board’s approval. She was inclined to vote against them, as were a few others of the old guard, but during intermissions of the board meetings, this still-elegant little man, who had sat almost unnoticeable in his chair halfway down the table, would abscond to empty corners with this or that director. Later, when they reconvened to vote, Amory inevitably won. And Regan had been wrapped up in more domestic problems during those years. It was only when she came on full-time that she saw the scale of the ventures she was being asked to flack: bauxite mines and cigarettes and a major coffee concern in Central America, and now, once again, real estate, on which he’d always been oddly bullish. Why invest in others, when you can have them invest in you? He covered the model with a cloth that had been folded behind. The proselytic urge seemed to subside.

“But we’re all busy these days, Regan, who can blame us for not staying informed?”

“Informed of what?”

“Well, of the news it gives me no pleasure to break, before it reaches you some other way. A family matter. In a way, it may be a blessing that your father’s not here tonight, as it buys us some time to make decisions.”

News was a synonym for bad news, and she couldn’t keep from leaping to the worst conclusions. The test results were in; the cloud that had battened on Daddy’s mind was a brain tumor. Or his plane was in a ditch beside the O’Hare runway, in flames. Both. Still, she would not beg Amory to tell her.

“There is no way to sugarcoat this, I’m afraid,” he said, following a too-long pause. “When your father steps off the plane tomorrow he is going to be arrested.”

“What?”

“Insider trading, I’m told is the charge. It’s all rather convoluted.”

“Told by whom? I thought indictments were sealed, or classified, or something.”

“I keep an active Rolodex. You know that.”

“You’re making this up.”

Having gotten this out of her, Amory was free to lean forward, to show his eagerness. He was weirdly tan for December, she thought. He must have gone down to the isthmus again to meet with the Café El Bandito people, or his cronies in the junta. “Now why, dear niece, would I want to do that?”

Why indeed, she thought, when upon Daddy’s return she would just have found out he was lying? “Fine,” she said, “maybe it’s true. But we face lawsuits all the time. That’s why we have a legal department.”

“This is different. There’s a mole inside the firm. Your father is the named defendant. There is jail time involved, not to mention the scandal.”

“Well, what do you propose we do?”

After swallowing her revulsion, she worked out with him that Daddy would remain in Chicago until Monday, when he’d surrender in person before a judge. This way, they could keep it out of the papers, or at least confined to the business section. Amory was of course confident, he said, having tortured her sufficiently, that there had been no actual wrongdoing. That this would blow over.

BUT WOULD IT? When Regan reached street level a half-hour later, the sirens she’d been hearing in the distance were imminent. Red and blue lights lapped at the elevator gate. The block beyond the front windows was now a horror show of police cars and ambulances and people falling off the sidewalks: people from the party, people from other parties, snowy-haired women from surrounding buildings who had come out in slippers, putatively to walk their tiny dogs one last time before dawn, but really just to gawk. And shame on you, Regan, for pretending you’re any purer of heart. Her first instinct, despite the jostle of endorphins and cannabinoids in her bloodstream, was to go ask: Had the police arrived already? Then Miguel had explained, in a chastened voice, that someone had got shot in the park. She wished she could travel back in time and erase the part of herself that had assumed this must be about her father, her problems. “A damn shame,” the doorman said. “A kid.” And there instantly were her own kids, uncarapaced in their beds, with only three locks and Mrs. Santos the sitter to protect them, and all she wanted was to be in motion toward them.

She teetered over to Amsterdam in her heels and caught a cab. She asked the driver to take the Transverse, to avoid the quagmire around Daddy’s. Only after a minute did it occur to her that she’d given the cabbie the address of the old place, out of habit. She leaned forward to request that he take a right when they hit Fifth—they were actually going to Brooklyn. She still thought of it that way, as a request, rather than an instruction. He could just as easily have adopted some alternate route to run the meter up, or left her for dead in a field near one of the airports, having taken her wallet. She used to have a gift for trusting people who claimed to know the way, but wherever you turned now, these nightmare scenarios seemed to fly at you, like tabloid sheets gusting up from the gutters. Thieves posing as cabbies. Killers posing as cops. And now Kid Shot in Park.

Fighting nausea, she pressed her forehead to the window. Through the cold glass and the snow, she could see up to the top of the wall that hemmed in the transverse road. Branches tattooed the sky. A man with a gun moved from tree to tree, tracking her, but not really. When had she become such a fraidy-cat? She had contrived by certain arcane strategies to keep the answer hidden, even from herself. These always involved a man, analysis had helped her to see. There had been Daddy, and then William, and then Keith, each taking over at the point where his predecessor had failed. But now there was no one left to look after her, or to whom anyone who hurt her would have to answer. She herself was the protector, the final line of defense between Will and Cate and the world, and what frightened her she would just have to face down.

The potholes of Fifth Avenue and the cab’s jellied suspension sent her stomach floating again. The snow was tapering off beyond the breath-fogged glass. Down the length of a sidestreet, the lights of Times Square were cold and inhuman. Surprising, how quickly it emptied out once the cameras were off. She had a sudden vision of the city surrendering to wilderness. The snow would blow off to reveal vines climbing townhouses, cougars prowling the subway entrance. Not a natural order of things, but chaos: children turning against parents, cars falling through holes in the street. Commercial districts empty, neighborhoods overrun. Indigents hunkered in alleys, looking up raccoonlike into the sweep of light from passing cars, paws pressed together, faces smeared with blood. And underneath it all, an echoing pop—the sound she now realized she’d heard, too, up there on the balcony, of a gunshot. In a just world, she thought, whoever the kid was would still be ambulatory, and Amory would be the one in that ambulance, screaming off downtown.

She couldn’t get his voice out of her head. This will all blow over. A Blight Zone. Nor could she forget that shot. Bile rose hot in her throat. She made it as far as the expressway, but then had to ask the cabbie to pull over. She hunkered, hands on knees, over a Jersey barrier. She hadn’t closed the door behind her, and from it spilled the dome light and the sound of the radio, which the cabbie must have turned up to cover her retching. It was that one call-in host, the primal screamer, Dr. Whosit, with a Z, not actually a doctor. But was it possible his show was already on, at whatever a.m. on a Saturday? And again: could she really be hearing him rant about crooked financiers, so soon after settling with Amory to keep the indictment under wraps? She could feel the telltale spike of her temperature. The alcohol would not let go of her. She would not, would not put her finger down her throat; it had been half a year since she’d last made herself throw up, and what if her kids could see their mother now? Cars whizzed by behind her, a belt of broken lights printing woozy shadows on the concrete. And then it came, and her streak was ended, so that arguably Regan’s first official act of 1977 was to puke her guts out on the shoulder of the FDR.

11

FOIL-EMBOSSED FRONTALS uncoupling from diadems, confetti dull with soot, business ends of noisemakers trampled under boots, cracked bottoms of disposable champagne flutes, butts of khaki Luckies and pale Pall Malls, nickelbags like punctured lungs, plus bottles: half-full, empty, broken off at the neck for the commission of crimes or smashed into green and brown explosions the red flash of a peepshow sign makes look romantic, in a sleazoid kind of way. Here is the stuff you don’t get on TV. Extraneous footage, B-roll of the aftermath. Broadcast personalities let their Fruit of Islam bundle them into the plush rear cabins of towncars. A union technician in a satin jacket winds cable around his forearm like a hawser; its loose end scrimshaws the snow. By the time the ball, that descended monorchid, goes dark above Times Square, the last masses have drained underground. For a second, the city seems to lean forward and make contact with a future self: ruined, de-peopled, and nearly still. In a sealed hangar, forensic economists move around numbered lots with scales and calipers. Believing themselves to have evolved beyond delusion and loneliness, beyond illness and longing and sex, they hum distractedly and wonder what it all meant. To the extent that they’re right about themselves, they’ll have no way of knowing.

And let us not forget the pigeons, who shouldn’t be active this late, but are. They scrabble over hamburger papers that gust up the building fronts, carry their spoils back to the Public Library lions a few long blocks away. Normally they wouldn’t range this far, but they are agitated tonight by sirens that sing of time out of joint, of things gone terribly awry. Which may explain why a little band of them has taken refuge in the busted skylight of a precinct-house in the quiescent blocks south of Lincoln Center. They choir around a sag of see-through plastic. Their claws make little ticking sounds when they move.

It will take Mercer Goodman some time to identify the egg-like shadows up there, but then, sitting almost directly below the sloppy hole cut into the drop-ceiling of Interrogation Room 2, what does he have if not time? The acoustic tiles around the hole terminate in discolored edges that look less sawed-off than gnawed. Some water has collected in the sagging underbelly of the plastic sheeting stapled there. Every time the wind kicks up, the seams wheeze asthmatically, letting in the bone-cold air, and then in the silence that follows comes the ticking. Mercer shivers. Just behind his eyes is a stippling pressure like the popping of a thousand champagne corks. Or, more accurately, blood vessels. Mashing his hands to his orbitals brings some relief, but for reasons he’s trying not to think about, he doesn’t want to close his eyes. He’s started to wonder, not quite abstractly, whether the hole in the ceiling is some kind of invitation—whether, by standing on the table in front of him, he might reach it and escape—when it occurs to him that the shadows are not eggs, but birds. Which accounts for the smell in here, like sawdust and the unmucked coops of his childhood. It’s as if they’ve been following him.