City on Fire (41 page)

I hadn’t asked him about New Year’s, but now, as if overhearing my thoughts, he spoke up from the pilot’s compartment. “You know there’s a better show up in New York tonight. Same folks they got to do the Fourth. I never could figure out why you aren’t talking to them.”

I told him I’d much rather be here, with someone who knew the traditions, than with some schmuck feeding cards into a computer.

“I don’t mean to throw cold water, but pretty soon you won’t be able to tell the difference.” The first flare lifted off like a rocket, reddening the clouds. Even for this lowly job, he’d come up with something special: a shell that scattered across the snowy sky a dozen fizzing orbs of gold. They hung there as if on strings.

“I doubt that very much, Carmine,” I said.

“You work and work to make something of value, and then the money moves in.” He seemed to be weighing something. “I wasn’t going to tell you this, but that day we missed each other, at Thanksgiving, my little workshop out back had just been broken into. Three grams of my polverone was missing. Now why go to all that trouble? I can’t prove anything, but I think someone wanted to let me know they can reach me.”

Three grams was nothing, I knew by now. A rounding error, or at worst, a prank by some kids like the ones I’d seen back on the shore. “I’ve got friends who are cops,” I began.

“You don’t go to the cops, where I’m from. And that’s not––”

But Len Rizzo, the technician, must have gotten impatient up in the bow, or hit the wrong button, because just then a dozen more lights streaked up from the boat, a great volley of pops. They were more of Carmine’s latest shells, and, hard as it may be to credit, the two things that happened next would conspire to knock the story of the theft into some far corner of my consciousness for months. The first thing, slower to unfold, began with the stroke of a churchbell on shore. It was midnight, New Year’s, 1977. Which meant that, fewer than 100 miles away, Carmine’s daughter already lay in Central Park, two bullets from an unknown assailant or assailants in her head, the snow going pink from her blood. Yet this was still remote from our awareness, and the sudden thing, the thing that struck me dumb at the time, was that, instead of just hanging there, or lilting slowly earthward, as a lifetime of gravity had trained me to expect, the gold orbs before me began to rise.

LIBERTY HEIGHTS

[ JANUARY–JULY 1977 ]

Marcus Garvey was inside of Spanish Town District Prison,

and when they were about to take him out,

he prophesied and said:

“As I have passed through this gate,

no other prisoner shall enter and get through,”

and so it is until now;

the gate has been locked—so what?

Wat a liiv an bambaie

when the Two Sevens clash.

—CULTURE

“Two Sevens Clash”

26

ALMOST A DECADE HAD PASSED SINCE RICHARD GROSKOPH’S last trip to the Bronx—it had been the late ’60s, he’d been wrapping up a piece on the klezmer kings of the Grand Concourse—and now, as the 4 train went elevated beyond the river and the lights cut out, he had an image of himself as an astronaut hurtling toward some inhospitable planet that was really a future version of his own. Stark brick monoliths, blue in the moonlight, thrust up from a landscape nearly treeless. Cranes stood here and there, fossils with wrecking-ball heads. Above loomed columns of smoke too thick to blame on incinerators. Then the lights were back on, and none of his fellow passengers seemed to realize they’d ever been off, or that anything out there was burning. They stared instead at newspapers or at the letters and numbers scratched into the windows. Stash, Taki 8, Moonman 157, incantations to keep the passing world at bay. Not unlike, come to think of it, those ads overhead, peddling podiatry, plastic surgery, orthodontia. The doctors were all white, the patients brown. Richard was the only gringo in his section of the train. And no one else was rising to get off at the next station.

Down below was a stretch of asphalt where paper cups and plastic products collected around girders, their colors obliterated by winter. There were Rent-to-Own circulars. There were syringes. Graffiti suppurating on the metal shields of storefronts. When he stopped to peer through a grating, he could make out tipped-up chair-legs. Mott Haven had once been a promised land for working folks tired of slums. Now the sole signs of life were a trashcan fire in a lot down the street and the takeout joint on the corner, the counterman ghostly behind bulletproof glass. Of course, one possible definition of the word city might be a site of concentrated change, and these transformations had been under way long before Richard had left. But he’d somehow imagined that his leaving might affect the rate of decay. Wasn’t this what Heisenberg said? Apparently not. Nor—he thought again of Samantha Cicciaro in her hospital bed—did it pay to turn your back on these streets. He flipped up the collar of his sportcoat, shoved hands into pockets, and pushed deeper into the ghetto.

In a concrete plaza between two housing-project towers, emergency vehicles idled, screamers off. Firemen with small bare heads sat smoking on bumpers. Red lights raked the crowd gathered behind catenaries of police tape. Richard again felt acutely Caucasian, but no one appeared to notice him. For maybe ten minutes, they all watched cops move in and out of the nearest building. Then, through the vestibule’s smeary glass, Richard spotted a plainclothesman lurching toward him on crutches. He would have recognized him anywhere, despite the hair gone largely gray. The Little Polack. Larry Pulaski.

Back when they first met, there had been no crutches. Richard had been twenty-two or twenty-three, beating the bushes for copy. One strategy was to hang around a certain tavern on Jane Street, which, if you could tolerate potatoes like wet newsprint and the occasional chit of bone in your beef, had the advantage of proximity to the Sixth Precinct. Off-duty patrolmen swarmed the bar. A round of drinks might dilute their natural antipathy to the point where they’d cough up something useful, a name, a number to call. These were physically large men, most of them. Pulaski stood out for being so small, and for always sitting down to drink. There was this hunch only Richard seemed to see; when he rose from his table, his shoulderblades pressed like tentpoles against his starched blue uniform. Later, having discovered their mutual love for Patsy Cline, Richard was moved to ask him if he ever played cards.

Now he watched Pulaski, in a child-sized wool topcoat, address the cab of an ambulance. Its aspirated idle grew louder. The crowd parted to let it pass, even as the rollers went dark; it was in no hurry. A woman started muttering. Boys in ski jackets and stocking caps—he wasn’t supposed to think boy but that’s what they were, young men with the wispiest of facial hair—jived with an edge of hostility. How long since Richard had covered a crime scene? He wanted to flee back to Chelsea, a dozen stops away, to forget again the intimate terms on which people live with death. But if Carmine didn’t have that luxury, neither should he. When the last fire truck had rumbled away, he ducked under the tape. I tried to pull that shit … crack my head open, the muttering woman muttered. Pulaski looked up from where he’d braced himself against an unmarked car to peel off latex gloves. Extending a hand was probably not the move here, but Pulaski rebalanced himself to take it. His expression was benevolent. Even grandfatherly. “Richard Groskoph, for Pete’s sake. Where you been all my life?”

“It’s been a while,” Richard agreed. Time had worsened Pulaski’s spinal condition, cramped his torso into the shape of a comma. His legs made contact at the knee, but splayed below like a tripod’s to support the uncentered weight up top. Obviously Richard, getting older himself, wasn’t allowed to mention this. He tilted his head toward the apartment tower. “Can I ask?”

“My guys call this the Mitchell-Lama Fire Drill,” said Pulaski. “Jam the elevator, pull an alarm on a high floor, set up with a gun in the stairwell near the lobby and jack people up as they come down. Except sometimes the gun goes off. Two bodies here.”

“That’s awful.”

“It surprises me, though, to see a reporter this far uptown. You can firebomb whole blocks these days and not attract a single tape recorder.” His gaze was a tailor’s, eyeballing measurements.

“To be honest, Larry, I’m not really up here in my professional capacity. You got a minute to talk?”

Pulaski turned toward the building lobby, where subordinates did their best to look busy. “Doesn’t look like we’ll be making an arrest tonight. Let me tell the primary, and then we can go somewhere quieter.”

He was surprisingly swift on his crutches; he looked almost batlike, gliding through the slatted shadows of what lights survived above the El tracks. Back at the takeout place, an orange formica counter facing the street offered enough room to eat standing up. Richard, suddenly ravenous, ordered a cheesesteak. Pulaski settled for coffee. The counter came up to the middle of his chest, but he said nothing about being uncomfortable, so Richard tried not to disguise his own height, or to feel uncomfortable on Pulaski’s behalf. And it would have been easy to dwell in the safety of small-talk. No one had asked Richard to come up here; no one had made the dying girl his personal affair. But how else was he supposed to bridge the distance between the body hooked up to a breathing tube and the one that had sat before him two months ago, strumming an apple-green guitar? “Truth is,” he said, crumpling his napkin into the cardboard basket the demolished cheesesteak had arrived in, “I wanted to talk about a case of yours. Cicciaro, is the victim’s name.”

Pulaski glanced behind him as if someone might be listening, though the only other person in here besides the counterman was the elderly Chinese who manned the grill. “Remind me … ?”

“New Year’s Eve. Central Park. Seventeen-year-old white girl. Comatose. It’s been in the papers.”

“I’m sure it has been, in that ZIP code. But where’d you get her name? We’re not releasing it.”

“I happen to be what you might call a friend of the family.”

“Who, the father? This is a friend of yours?”

“Or associate. Subject. I’ve been working on a profile.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Fireworks and all that. It’s been five months, you get to know people.”

“Odd, though, that this would be the first I heard of it,” Pulaski said. “I’d remember if he’d mentioned you.”

“Probably didn’t seem important at the time.” This circling put Richard in mind of the courtship dance of crabs: each looking to grab without getting grabbed.

“And I don’t suppose in those five months, Richard, you’ve learned anything I need to know?”

“Like what?”

An eyebrow rose almost imperceptibly. “Friends of mine, friends of ours, guys who know guys …”

Richard had the same disoriented feeling he’d had on New Year’s Day, answering the phone. Which hospital? Are you there right now? Carmine’s voice had had the tough flat affect of a kid talking himself into something. For three minutes in the OR, he’d said, Samantha’s heart had stopped. Then Richard understood. “Come on, this is because they’re Italian? The guy’s the furthest thing from mobbed up, Larry. He’d go live on Mars, if he could.”

“I have to ask, you know that. This is all off the record, by the way.”

“Which is exactly the thing. I came up here to ask if there’s a way to keep him and his daughter out of the news. I counted eleven follow-up articles the week after New Year’s, and that was just off the pro forma you guys put out. I’d hate to have a gaggle of reporters descend on the Cicciaros’ lawn. Or whatever the collective is, a herd, a murder.”

“For them, you’d hate this?” Then, when Richard refused to be drawn in: “Believe me, I need the press in this like I need a hole in my head. Pardon the expression. But what’s left to cover? It’s an anonymous victim and a random shooter. We’ve got no leads, no case, and right now, you’re the only one who knows who she was. Even the people I talked to at the college assumed she just dropped out. Give it another week, and everyone moves on to the next story.”

“Have you looked at the file, Larry? She turns eighteen tomorrow. As of”—he checked the clock on the wall behind the inch-thick glass—“as of a couple hours from now, Samantha Cicciaro is no longer a minor. Everything about her becomes public record. Starting with the name.”

For a minute, Pulaski was completely still. His reflection was a shade on the window. “Her date of birth. Cripes. Someone should have caught that.”

“I caught it. And I’m telling you now. Do you really want her life story all over the six o’clock news, and then another month of coverage?”

Pulaski took a swig of coffee, tamped away the drops that clung to his moustache. “But what’s your angle? You planning to crack this on your own?”

“I’m just trying to wrap up my profile. Probably won’t even publish, now that all this has happened.” He wanted to believe this was as much thought as he’d given it. But was there, briefly, a skeptical look from his old friend?

“All right, Richard. Let me see what I can figure out. Meantime, though, not a word of this. And no more surprise visits.” Pulaski put his cup down, a hollow sound, and handed across a card with his new title, Deputy Inspector. “Anything occurs to you, that’s my direct line.” Clipping crutches to forearms, he seemed suddenly vulnerable, like a mollusk climbing back into its shell. “You know, for a minute there, I thought you’d left us for good.”

“What can I say? It’s obvious I don’t know what’s good for me.”

“Well, selfishly, I’m pleased. Wednesday nights haven’t been the same without you and ‘Dr.’ Zig. I miss having an easy mark around.”

“Wait—what happened to Zig?”

“Tune in to the radio sometime, you’ll see. It’s like 1962 all over again. That’s the year you two fell out, isn’t it?” It was odd: Richard had believed that his break with Zig Zigler, like its cause, was a secret. And then what else might Pulaski know? “But drive safe, Richard.”

“I took the train.”

“In that case, God help you, I guess.” As the men shook hands, each took care not to squeeze too hard, or to let the other know this care was being taken. Still, something lingered between them that Richard would only later come to realize wasn’t quite an understanding.