City on Fire (36 page)

“You and me, we’re a different generation,” he hazarded.

“You can say that again. I can remember when there were still horse apples on Mulberry Street. But this isn’t what you came here to ask me about.”

“Wait a minute. You grew up on Mulberry Street? I used to live on Mott, when I first got to the city.”

“We were at 270 Mott, my granddad’s old place. We had the apartment above.”

“Right across from the church there, the old St. Patrick’s,” Richard said. He had prepared for this.

“That’s the one.”

At some point during this beer or the next, Cicciaro would explain how his grandfather had come through Ellis Island in 1907 or ’08. “The family legend is that Granddad got chased out of Sicily because some villagers thought he’d made a deal with the devil. Fireworks were in his blood, you know? He knew how to make the powder do what he wanted to do. That’s old-time magic, from back to Marco Polo. Came up with the formula we use to this day, six, seven times as potent as in your average grenade. They probably would have let him stay if he didn’t use it anymore, but the thing about this job is, you don’t choose it, it chooses you.” Behind the stoic front, he was obviously as hungry to tell his story as every other person on earth, but Richard didn’t want to spook him by getting out too early the folded A4 he habitually kept in his pocket for notes. In America, Cicciaro continued, the grandfather started shooting off rockets even before he found a place to sleep at night. For years, on feast days, the neighbors down on the Lower East Side would gather on stoops and in windows while he rolled up his sleeves and made the fire dance. “Then this guy, this Tammany fixer, spots my granddad one day, looking like he’s setting off bombs in the street. People didn’t trust Italians then. Sacco and Vanzetti and all that, not to mention the Black Hand in everybody’s pocket. So he has him hauled before the ward boss, and my granddad’s standing there—or this is how they told it to me—and inside he’s falling apart, because those old folks, always in the back of their mind was the threat of being shipped back to Palermo, where people still kept time with sundials. But from the outside, he looks like he’s made of stone, which is a Sicilian thing, too. Authority? Vaffancul’. Anyway, they weren’t going to throw him out of America,” Cicciaro said. No, it turned out they wanted him to shoot off bombs for Independence Day, courtesy of the Democratic machine. “Like I said, it chooses you.”

Richard saw his opening. “You know, Benny had mentioned some of this to me, but listening to you talk here, I’m wondering if your grandfather’s story, and your family’s, might become a bigger part of this article than I had imagined. It’s a great story, and it might help City Hall see what they’re missing when they go with these computers.”

“Five years from now, everybody’s going to go with computers. But I guess that would be all right, if you wanted to say some things about my granddad.”

And here came the part that was always so delicate. “It would mean sitting down for a talk or two, at your convenience. I’d take notes. Things would go on record.”

“Oh.” There was a pause. The bug zapper zapped a bug. “I don’t know, Mr. Groskoph. I’d really have to think about it.”

IT WAS HIS DAUGHTER, Carmine would say later, who convinced him to agree to Richard’s proposal. He never admitted that he himself did anything other than tolerate the interviews; he would spend the first ten minutes after Richard’s arrival puttering among the kitchen cabinets, amassing two baloney sandwiches on crustless Wonder Bread and a warty dill pickle and a can of Schlitz, all to preserve the conceit that this was merely lunchtime, he’d been planning to take a break anyway. But by the time he stopped talking, it would be late, the sandwiches a distant memory. And even then, when whatever gust of self-disclosure had passed, they’d keep sitting out on the slack plastic deckchairs, drinking beer from the mossy cooler, or soda if Richard was feeling virtuous.

Afterward, he would pilot his old Schwinn back through the conurbations of Nassau County and Queens to the number 7 subway terminal in Flushing. Bringing the bike took about an hour extra each way, but it saved cab fare, and what was better than this? The route was bucolic, mostly, through neighborhoods of ersatz-Tudor rowhouses and detached homes, little parks with shade trees that might have dated back to the Dutch. The sun shimmered through the thinning elms and poplars, the air was cider-crisp, the chain hummed, the back wheel ticked. He felt then, and really that entire fall before the shooting, as if he’d managed to convey back across the Atlantic the equilibrium he’d worked so hard on the far side of it to achieve. And sometimes he would stand in his pedals, six-three, forty-six years old, and steer a long, loose arc toward a knot of scrabbling birds at the curbside, just to see them detonate into the air, to freeze one mid-flap with the camera of his mind. For he had made his peace, finally, he thought, with the fact that this was who Richard Groskoph was: a camera attached to a tape recorder. A disappearer into all that was not him. A receiver, a connector, a machine made exactly for this.

25

ON SECOND THOUGHT, maybe Keith had understood more about Regan than he’d admitted to himself back in ’61, their last semester before adulthood. At the very least he’d known better than to tell her about his second run-in with the Demon Brother. It had followed hard upon his final exam in organic chemistry, which had revealed, inarguably and somewhat majestically, the depth of his inaptitude for the medical profession. The afternoon the grades were posted, he’d found himself at a payphone in the back of the campus rathskeller. Was it possible he was drunk, though it wasn’t yet dark out? Sure, but he felt no more responsible for the former than for the latter. Things happened, he imagined himself explaining to Regan. And now this was happening: his hand was reaching for the receiver. His mouth was asking for Amory Gould.

His datebook would record a meeting the following week at a café on Seventy-Ninth Street near Madison. At the time, Keith couldn’t figure out why they didn’t just meet at the Hamilton-Sweeney Building, but maybe this was how high finance worked. The greater the altitude attained, the fewer the hours spent behind a desk. And then there was the matter of properties—accoutrements. In his office, Amory would have had only the separate phone-lines Regan had mentioned and maybe a pen and some paperclips with which to fiddle and beguile, but here there were coffee cups, sugarcubes, napkin rings, steak knives, long spoons designed to reach the bottom of milkshake glasses … all of which he handled restlessly while leading Keith through a half-hour of Welcome to the Family chitchat. You would have thought Amory had requested the meeting himself, for the purpose of mending, with these arcane instruments, whatever had been breached between himself and Regan. When he slid the laminated menu across the table and told Keith to order anything he wanted, they still had not come within shouting distance of the question of Keith’s future.

Yet as Keith ate, Amory’s gestures grew somehow quantitative, like the gestures of a man trying to purchase fabric in a language he doesn’t speak. The Quanto costa gesture, the No, I couldn’t possibly, the Lachesis gesture of measuring something out to have it cut off. And when the leatherette envelope enclosing the check had been returned to the waiter, he drew his hands into his lap. “Now then. To business.”

The effect of the abrupt cessation of movement was to make his head suddenly vivid, as though it had come zooming across the table. Previously, Keith felt, he had glimpsed the man through a fog of unknowing. Now he was seeing the tiny blemishes at the tip of the nose, every capillary in the white of the weak blue eyes. “You have come to me, I gather, in the aftermath of some setback in your education. And because you want solid ground under you before proceeding with my niece-to-be. You want to be sure you can support her in the style to which she is accustomed. You are thinking, in short, of a shift in field.”

Keith nodded, like a bird following a bit of waved seed.

“Now as I’ve said these are exciting times, expansionary times, for the Hamilton-Sweeneys. I’d love nothing more than to make a place for you at the firm.”

“Is there a reason you can’t?”

“Think, Keith.” It was practically a whisper. “You want Regan to see you’re landing on your own two feet. She’s very particular, as I’m sure you know, about being in anyone’s debt. No, what I’ve taken the liberty of doing instead is arranging for you to meet with my old friend Jules Renard at the firm of Renard Frères. I had only to tell him about you, and he is eager to talk. Provided all goes well, you save up for a couple of years …”

It was the same line of argument Keith would use with Regan after graduation, after the Renards had offered to bring him on in the bonds division in the fall. He even adopted elements of Amory’s crabwise approach, inviting her first to the finest French restaurant in Poughkeepsie. But as he broke the news, he could see he’d bumped up against something in her that caused pain. “I thought you’d be happy,” he said. “I was never smart enough to be a doctor, we both know that, and this way we could really stand on our own feet. I mean, if that was something we ended up wanting to do.”

“Why are you trying to make this my decision, Keith?”

But he was off and running, as he’d so often been since that night in the hotel, with their future tucked like a football under his arm. “We could rent a place in the fall wherever you wanted, and in a few years, I’d have enough saved up to buy. You could keep acting. And you’d be close to your brother, which I know is a concern. Are you crying? Why are you crying?” And why in a restaurant this expensive was the table so damn big? He ended up having to scootch his chair around the side to hold her hand, though to other diners it must have looked impulsive; Regan’s distress had again become nearly undetectable, except for that little stone or lozenge stuck in her throat. “I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too.”

“And I trust you, honey.”

“You make it sound like a warning.”

“It’s not, but—”

“So trust us, then,” he said, and stroked her ring-finger with his thumb. By the time of her father’s wedding, which is to say her brother’s disappearance, he’d have placed a diamond of her own there, bought on installments that, on a bond trader’s salary, he figured he ought to be able to pay off by the end of the year.

RATHER THAN SUBJECT NEW HIRES to any real training process, the Renard frères threw them in among the veterans and saw who had the will to survive. Keith assumed he would be one of that select group. He had a wife, after all, who’d thought she’d be marrying a doctor, and to whom he felt he owed a reasonably quick, reasonably large success. But the Demon Brother’s influence had its limits. That first week after passing his Series 7, Keith sat eight hours a day in the semi-privacy of his cubicle, watching the black leather oblong of his trading book atrophy like cooling lava on his desk. Beyond the pebble-glass partitions, the ringing of phones formed a vivid, angelic continuum, but his own phone stayed mute in its cradle, until, Friday morning, the head of the guy at the next desk rose like a balding half-moon above the glass. Tadelis, was his name. Every name here was a last name, or ended in a vowel—Mikey, Matty, Bobby—or both. “Wake up, Lamplighter. You’re making us look like geniuses out here.”

“I can’t seem to get anything going.”

The noise Tadelis made was not what was traditionally thought of as laughter; it was more in the way of a spasm ground out between tectonic plates of anxiety. “What, do you think you just wait for the phone to ring and then you pick it up and money flies out? Look around you. Is that what you see? No, seriously, stand up and look.”

Renard Frères had adopted an Action Office floorplan, with only these low walls to separate the junior traders. The goal was the free exchange of ideas—a kind of happy medium between the organization man and godless socialism. But all around, in the shallow prisms of the cubicles, were guys like Tadelis, jackets off, hunched over phones in extreme, almost defecatory postures. Hands jiggled pens. Raked thinning hair dark with sweat.

“No, what you see is a bunch of guys nobody ever handed nothing. You see Jimmy O over there? Made the firm a million bucks last year. I’m not sure he even went to high school.” Tadelis’s voice was somehow both bumptious and conspiratorial, his mouth a pink cloud behind the glass. “Now you come nancying in here like dead weight, and we’re all trying to figure out, what’s the underlying value of this asset?”

“Pure nepotism,” Keith confessed. “A favor to a friend.”

“Bullshit. To a big swinging pair like the Renards, there’s no such thing as a favor.” He narrowed his eyes. “No, I see it now. You may not have an idea in that pretty head of yours, Lamplighter, but people want to do things for you. Look at me, I’m barely clinging to the lower rungs, I should be sandbagging the hell out of you, and here I am offering a hand. You’re a salesman. You can sell.”

“Not if nobody calls, I can’t.”

Again, the laugh. “You think those are incoming calls you’re hearing? Those are callbacks, my friend. Now the way this usually works is, you go through that book you’ve got there, Jimmy Schnurbart’s old book, Fat Jimmy, we called him, God rest his fat ass, and any entity you see on the other end of a trade, you dial.” Fair enough, Keith thought, but Tadelis wasn’t finished. “Except frankly, it’s all dead wood at this point.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Me and Jimmy O already picked off anything of value for ourselves. Think of it as a gentle nudge. A guy like you should be upstairs as a stockbroker, chasing rich old WASPs who are waiting for you to call up and say, Let me make you a hundred grand.”

“And how would I make them a hundred grand?”

“Jesus, Lamplighter. You take a percentage coming and going. What do you care if they make a hundred grand?”

Keith wasn’t sure how literally he was to take Tadelis’s analysis, but testing it couldn’t be any less productive than sitting around playing with himself all day, as he now realized he appeared to have been doing. He opened the book. He dialed. And dialed. But what he discovered over the next month was that his interest wasn’t in entities, it was in people. The last call he’d make from that phone was to Jules Renard, to ask about a transfer over to equities.