City on Fire (43 page)

“My dear—” Amory turned to his colleagues. “What you’re proposing isn’t practicable. The sheer volume of … An office of, what is it, two people? Ahem. Impracticable.”

From the corner, the Guy with the Hair spoke up. “Well, actually, as far as influencing public opinion, she’s right. Just taking out full-page ads and tossing ducats to orphans, New Yorkers are too jaded not to see through that stuff. You ever listen to that show, Gestalt Therapy?”

Amory had teleported to a spot behind the chairman’s chair. His hands rested on its back.

Artie Trumbull looked up at him. “I agree, Amory. What Regan’s saying makes sense. Leverage the good we’re already doing, we might have more of a fighting chance at the voir dire. Or convince the U.S. Attorney we do, should we choose to pursue a plea.”

As the senior person in the room, he still had influence; his motion to broaden Regan’s mandate passed so quickly that it surprised even her, and the best Amory could do was pretend it was his idea. Unless it was only her first point he really cared about. “Evangelizing for our work, indeed, will be essential. But as far as Bill’s day-to-day schedule, I have to say, I’m not sure this sabbatical isn’t for his own good.” He looked around the table. “Until Bill is cleared of all charges, as he no doubt will be, best to keep him out of harm’s way, no? Absent any objections, it will be proposed at this afternoon’s Board meeting that an interim chair be named.” There was quiet now, even from Artie Trumbull. Even from Hair Guy.

And thus there would be no point in lingering to work the room, Regan was to decide as the meeting broke up. The day’s inevitable outcome would be an assumption of power by Uncle Amory—or a formalizing of the power he’d already, over many years, assumed. She tried to calculate whether she could make it uptown to look in on Daddy and still be back for the start of the official Board meeting at five. Maybe, just barely, if she hurried.

The Rothko canvas near the elevator bank flashed past her, a red wound to match the blue bruise back at the penthouse. The elevator was empty, but then, at the last second, someone stopped the doors from closing: Hair Guy. They stood in mannered silence and watched the numbers count down. The building was a dinosaur, a neoclassical monstrosity from the days before elevators broke the sound barrier. Only when the door opened onto the lobby did she permit herself a look at the man’s face. “I just wanted to say thank you.”

For what? he said.

“For what? For being there, I guess.”

He had a name, he said. It was Andrew. Andrew West. “Well, thanks a bunch, Andrew West.” Then she tapped out into the cold, not daring to look back. Thanks a bunch? She sounded like a third grader. And still there was this stupid gauze on her hand, from when she’d nearly sliced her thumb off. Jesus, Regan, when did everything go so badly off the rails?

29

THE FIRST CHRISTIAN BIBLE Charlie had ever seen was in a motel room when he was six or seven. Usually, to save money, Dad liked to make the trip up to Grandpa’s place in Montreal in a single daylong sprint. The wide new traffic-lightless interstate made it easy. That particular December, though, the stretch that ran through the Adirondacks was subject to fog and ice and closures, and when the darkness caught them north of Albany, they were forced to stop for the night. Dad showed Mom the little dresser-drawer Bible with a look of mild irony, like a man handling someone else’s underthings. He must have thought Charlie, trying to tune in Petticoat Junction on the rabbit ears, didn’t see.

But a decade later, the shooting of his best friend and the subsequent appearance of the Lord Jesus Christ to him personally would send Charlie scrounging for a Bible of his own. He found a copy—several, actually—at the back of the storefront Salvation Army in downtown Flower Hill, where the books smelled like mildew but were only a quarter apiece. He picked a pocket-sized edition stamped inside with the words GIDEONS INTERNATIONAL. Its green-and-gold fake-leather cover wouldn’t have been out of place on a T. Rex record, but that probably wasn’t what made him choose it. Probably it was the memory of that motel room upstate, which he hadn’t thought about once in the intervening years.

Over the next week, cocooned in blankets in his cold basement, he had begun to read. Or re-read; the first few books he’d covered in Hebrew school. Now they worked their way deeper into memory. But it was the Gospel of Mark, mysterious and unJewish, he kept returning to. It said: Forgive yourself, Charlie. It said: Onward. It said: Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

The problem was, each new day was just like the previous one. He awoke to the fact of his friend lying in a hospital twenty miles away, comatose (or so Newsday had indicated in a blind item on the shooting). What would Jesus do? Jesus would be on the first train to the City, to be at her side. Charlie, for his part, couldn’t make it past the LIRR. Afternoons after school, he’d stand shivering on the platform, gazing down the empty tracks to the east, as westbound riders always did. As he had with Sam on New Year’s Eve. But what if he got to the hospital to find her eyes open, staring at him like, Why weren’t you there, Charlie? Or what if they stayed closed? What if, while he stood there, her heart stopped? So he ended up back in his room, trying to fathom the workings of the goyish God. (E.g.: If there was no sin so bad as to be unforgivable, why had He withdrawn again into deistic silence after that night in the church? Or, supposing the voice was simply something Charlie had made up to comfort himself, why couldn’t he make it come back?)

Then one afternoon, after weeks of trying, he made it all the way to the City. Rising above the little park that ran between some churches and Second Avenue, Beth Israel Hospital looked like the tower of Barad-dûr, a blinking red eye at its summit. There was so much of it up there, and so little of him down here, where everything was gray: gray paving stones, gray treetrunks, black wrought-iron fencing sooted down to gray. The only spots of color were the knit hats and mittens of the homeless scattered nearby. And copper-topped Charlie, tremendously exposed.

But this wasn’t what stopped him. What stopped him was, he still didn’t know what he’d find inside. What if the bandages made her look like a mummy? What if one eye was missing, its soft pink socket gaping like the eye of a painting that follows you around a room? As long as he stayed out here, everything remained potential, including the possibility that Sam might leap up any minute now to light up a smoke. And then it wouldn’t be that big a deal that he hadn’t come to visit. He felt the weight of the Bible in his pocket. He waited once more for God to speak to him, but all he heard was the wind clacking the bare trees and a bus whooshing past and, closer in, the apocalyptic grumble of an old guy on a bench.

Then, as he tracked the bus down the avenue, it hit him that he couldn’t be more than a dozen blocks from the crash-pad where he and Sam had ended up the night of the Bicentennial. He wondered if her other friends, her City friends, still lived there. He wondered whether they’d been to see her. Whether, indeed, they were still her friends; she’d seemed so keyed up, going to see them play on New Year’s. It was as if something had happened to her that autumn, while Charlie had been grounded out on Long Island. If he could find out what it was, he might, belatedly, reach her. Of course this was mostly an excuse for not having the balls to march this instant through the doors of that hospital. Still, he let himself be tugged south, into the East Village.

Though the blocks were ruler-straight, the way they all looked so similar made the house hard to locate, especially if you’d forgotten the number of the street. Another thing he couldn’t quite remember, once he finally found it, was whether its front door had been this banged up last summer. He seemed to recall instead a big graffiti piece like a Burger King crown spreading across the steel. They’d both been high on mushrooms; he’d probably been seeing things. But he did know that it was kept unlocked. (What do you think this is, a country club?) When no one answered his knock, he stepped inside. The ramshackle parlor to his left had been full of black light and kegs of beer and music and punker types he’d done his best to avoid, drag-walking his semiconscious friend to the safety of the basement. In January, it was empty. There wasn’t even plaster on the walls.

He climbed one flight of stairs. Then another. Still no sign of habitation.

Which made him no less nervous than that party had.

Finally, on the top floor, he heard voices. The windows were too dirty to admit much light, but a bit of gray sun fell in from a trapdoor in the ceiling. This must also have been why it was so cold in here—why Charlie could see his breath. As he approached the ladder that led to the roof, his heart went John Bonham on him. He hadn’t been lying when he’d told Dr. Altschul he was acrophobic. But to chicken out now would be to admit that he’d chickened out back at Beth Israel; that these investigations weren’t serious at all.

He emerged behind a chimney. Or half a chimney, rather. The rest had collapsed on the swaybacked roof. Around the broken bricks came voices, one male and one female. The girl he’d danced with at the Ex Nihilo show was passing a joint to the black guitarist who’d plied Charlie with beer. He was saying, “I don’t understand why we can’t get rid of them …”

“That’s why they’re called homing pigeons, D.T.”

The guitarist scratched his lymon-colored hair. “Fair enough, but why have they all decided to call that shed home? There weren’t more than ten of them a week ago.”

They were staring down at an outbuilding in the back garden, whose roof, Charlie saw, was covered not with snow, but with roosting birds. There must have been a hundred. The chickenwire coop the guitarist leaned against stood empty. “We could just shoot them …,” he said, thoughtfully.

“And bring the cops? Plus Sol would kick your ass. It’s his coop to begin with. Or anyway, he stole it fair and square. Hey, Sol—,” she called.

All of a sudden, Charlie was being hauled aloft by the collar of his jacket. The winter sky wheeled around until he was face to safety-pinned face with Sam’s so-called friend, Solomon Grungy. Fee-fi-fo-fum. “Look what I found.”

“It’s that kid from the show,” said the girl. “What’s he doing here?”

“Get off me!” Charlie sputtered. And when he’d been set down again: “I’m buddies with Sam Cicciaro, remember?”

“Yeah, but like what the fuck are you doing here, kid?” said the black guitarist.

Charlie was terrified, so close to the edge. Someone seemed to have stolen the saliva from his mouth. “We were here last summer. He invited us.” Nodding toward the hulking Grungy. “I don’t know if you know, but Sam got hurt real bad over New Year’s.”

“Of course we know. What are you trying to say here—that we wouldn’t know?”

Charlie didn’t know what he was trying to say.

“Nicky should hear about this,” the guitarist decided. “Anyway, let’s get him downstairs, before Sol’s pigeons come shit all over us.”

“I already told you, motherfucker. Those are not my fucking pigeons.”

They forced Charlie onto the ladder and then back down the stairs. On the second floor, in a room whose walls were papered entirely with record sleeves—dozens of copies of Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream & Other Delights—they found someone sitting lotus-style on the bare floor. Nicky Chaos. How had Charlie missed him on the way up? The other three seemed proud of themselves, or expectant, as if waiting for Nicky Chaos to recognize the value of the human sacrifice they’d brought him. But he was wearing steel-rimmed spectacles now that made him look surprisingly civilized. He put down the book he’d been holding. Scratched his chin-beard. Rubbed a tattoo on his arm. “No, no, it’s coming back to me. Backstage Charlie, right?”

A funny thing about charisma: the same people who can make you feel an inch tall can also make you feel huge, fortified, sometimes almost simultaneously. Charlie was all of a sudden eager to explain. “I just followed my feet here. I was at the hospital.”

“They let you in? We figured that place would be crawling with pigs.”

Charlie hadn’t meant to imply he’d actually made it to Sam’s room. “She’s in a coma.”

There was another bristly silence, and then Solomon snorted behind him. “So what, you want a shoulder to cry on?” The green-haired guy, D.T., started laughing, coughing, cough-laughing. But Nicky Chaos’s speaking voice, a resonant baritone from which only a lunatic would have extrapolated his musical stylings, quieted them down.

“Sol’s right, people want things, what did you come down here for, Charlie?”

“I don’t know, you’re machers, right? People who … who do stuff. That’s what Sam said.”

“And what does that mean to you? You want to paint some posters? Call the call-in shows, march around singing protest songs, that’s going to make you feel better?”

Charlie took a step forward. Solomon started after him, but Nicky, still sitting, waved him off with a tattooed hand. Charlie’s own hands clenched. He towered over Nicky Chaos. And vice versa, it seemed, weirdly. “I want judgment. I want to find whoever did this and bring vengeance down on their heads.”

How naked his voice sounded, here in this cold house, in the gloom. But Nicky’s came just as soft, like the two of them were alone. “Is that what you’re about, kid? Avenging angel? Harbinger of doom?” When Charlie didn’t answer, Nicky nodded, and hands from behind began patting at his sides, at his pockets, little nuzzling animals. By the time Charlie realized he was being searched, the hands were holding his shoulders. He’s clean. Nicky rose and made the sign of the cross. “Te absolvo.” Then: “Jesus Christ, man, I had no idea you were one of us.” His laugh reeked of reefer. “But let’s get you fixed up. Sewer Girl, I need to powwow with your old man here for a minute, but why don’t you go and see if we’ve got some medicine downstairs for the Prophet Charlie.”

The girl led Charlie down to the kitchen, where all the doors had been taken off the cupboards. Inside were mostly mouse droppings—he could smell, he thought, the chemical tang of the poison—but she managed to come up with a teacup. After rinsing it and putting on some water to boil, she plopped down across from him at a crippled cardtable. By daylight, her vibe was maternalish. And at the same time still sexy. She probably outweighed Charlie, but it was all kind of pushed to the right places. A belly you could lie against. The big, warm thighs he’d felt against his own, dancing at the Vault. She didn’t seem to mind him staring at the shadowy place her tits made when she leaned forward, either. Having shed her coat, she was wearing only the thigh-length Rangers jersey and scuffed white go-go boots; with her sleepy eyes, she looked kind of like that one sexy Muppet who played in the band. “Are you cold?” When he nodded, she reached for his hands and rubbed them between her own. Then she took out another joint, lit it, shook out the match. “You want?”