City on Fire (46 page)

But when he’d reached the street, he’d had only the one visitor: a storklike man with longish hair and a salt-and-pepper beard. He had a good two or three inches on Keith, and his corduroy sportcoat was more a humanities professor’s than a G-man’s. When he said the name of the magazine he wrote for, everything clicked into place. For a single lapse in professional judgment, Keith Lamplighter was going to be dragged before not only a court of law, but also the court of public opinion. And what would he tell his kids?

“Please, Mr. Groskoph, I can’t talk to you here,” Keith had said. He moved briskly toward the corner, the local public-school schoolyard. They’d be less exposed there. The man followed without a word. Which was good, it meant Keith could still be persuasive, though inside he was a quivering ephebe. When he reached the basketball court, he drew himself up to full gridiron size and rounded on his visitor. “Let’s get something straight. I don’t appreciate you coming to my home, invading my privacy.”

The reporter looked genuinely unprepared for this. “If you could spare only a couple minutes of your time, Mr. Lamplighter—”

“Am I to assume you got Amory’s side of the story first, then?”

“Beg pardon?”

They reassessed each other uneasily. How did Keith keep getting so far out ahead of himself? “I’m sorry. What are we talking about?”

“You haven’t let me get to that: the shooting in Central Park last month. I was hoping you might remember something about the victim.”

“Huh?” Pugnacity gave way to confusion. Relieved confusion. He tried to recover. “You must have me mixed up with someone else. I don’t know the first thing about it.”

“But I was under the impression you’d corresponded with her? The girl. She left this.” The man held out a small sheaf of pages. On the back cover was Keith’s name. The front resembled the one he’d seen once in Samantha’s dormroom. . And he almost had to sit down right there, on the icy blacktop. The victim, New Year’s.…

He turned toward the school building. Instead of meeting Samantha that night, as they’d agreed, he’d been watching underwear fly on Third Avenue. And now some junkie in the park had been careless with the trigger, and Samantha was—was she … “Is she … ?”

“She’s alive, Mr. Lamplighter, but she’s not been conscious since. I apologize, it didn’t occur to me her subscribers wouldn’t have heard. I’m just having trouble tracking down any of the people mentioned between the covers here. But you weren’t in contact, then?”

Keith wondered if he was visibly shaking. “Not personally. I mean, obviously, I was a, um, subscriber. Trying to keep up with the new music. But this is insane. I need a cigarette.”

After he’d tried a couple times with his matches, the guy had offered him a Zippo. The schoolyard disappeared behind the lighter’s flutter. The smoke scraped like fiberglass.

“I guess the name Sol doesn’t mean anything to you, then? Iggy? Or the initials D.T.? PHP?”

Keith shook his head. “Where did you get that thing, anyway?”

“The other mystery is, this is a long shot, but I’m wondering if you’ve heard about a house in the East Village where she might have had some friends. I can’t seem to run down any kind of address.”

Keith saw again the sealed mailers that had filled his in-basket that summer and fall. But what did they have to do with anything? “Sorry,” he said.

The man moved around to study his face. Whatever kind of reporter he was, it obviously wasn’t an investigative one. In fact, his mood seemed strangely buoyant, as if Keith’s answers were an afterthought to the questions themselves. “She never mentioned it?”

“Like I said, I never really knew her, personally.” Was that it? Was he free? He’d pulled his coat tight against the winter wind, which sobbed around the playground equipment. “The cops know about her little magazine?”

“They’ve got copies, I’m sure. Though I can’t see how it’s going to help crack a mugging gone wrong. If it’s a concern …” The reporter removed a card from his pocket. “That’s a direct line you can use, should anything come back to you that might be useful.”

But it wasn’t even Groskoph’s card, Keith had seen, once he was back inside the apartment. He’d bolted the door behind him and gone to the pile of newspapers next to the kitchen trash. There it was, in the Times: the Central Park victim had ended up at Beth Israel. He was afraid to breathe as he looked up the hospital in the phone book. He’d forgotten his niece’s room number, he told the woman who answered, and gave her Samantha’s last name; he wanted to send flowers. He waited to be told there was no such person. Instead, the woman said that gifts weren’t allowed in surgical recovery, but that his niece was scheduled to be moved back to intensive care on Monday. Visiting hours were seven to seven. Hello? Was he there?

And now that he was there, or here, the thing he couldn’t stop thinking was that it was true: he’d barely known her. There were only eighteen candles on the cake. He’d counted twice, to make sure. And she looked even younger than that—ten years younger, at least, than when he’d first met her, on the stoop of that goddamned brownstone. Far younger than she’d pretended to be, standing over him, looking straight into his eyes and smiling with one side of her mouth at the roles they found themselves playing. And he’d let this deceive him. In a by-the-hour room with rain lashing the windows, with the ripe berry of her nipple in his mouth and her long legs clinched around his back in a sweet misery of barely moving, he’d wanted to be deceived. Those legs were lost beneath the medical-green blanket. Her skull, shaved for surgery, reminded him of the soft skulls of infants, and he wanted badly, for a second, to bend down and smell her there where the bone had fused, to feel the roughness of hair coming back, to close his eyes and press his nose to this lineless pale scalp that hadn’t seen the sun in not twenty-two but eighteen years—as if she were his daughter, rather than his mistress. Or not even that. He’d taken all the inadequacies of his marriage and his life and shaped them into a fantasy. Consciousness stripped away, she was a stranger. He was carrying flowers from the gift shop downstairs, in case the nurses got suspicious. Now he placed them on the tray by the cake. Neutral white irises. “Happy birthday, Samantha.” He kissed his fingers and touched them lightly to an unbruised patch of arm. And then, Keith knew, it was time to leave, before someone—her father, the law, or just a less credulous journalist—got wind of the fact that her old lover, a fraud and a married man, was still out here roaming free.

33

REGAN WOULD RATHER DIE than admit it, but the Demon Brother was right; she’d had very little sense of what it would mean to check every pie in which the Hamilton-Sweeney octopus now had a tentacle. She hadn’t considered the sheer number of these pies, or the volume of paper that went along with each: earnings reports, public utterances, letters of interest, memoranda of understanding. This was in addition to divorce papers, analyst bills, summer camp applications for the kids, and her duties as the juniormost member of the Board. Every morning when she unlocked her office, a ziggurat of paper two feet high awaited her, as if it had rebuilt itself overnight. Her job had become, in essence, to vanquish the ziggurat, and with her only employee out on maternity leave, she was more or less an army of one. Though sometimes, looking up from some document she didn’t understand, she would see a head of golden hair floating above the tops of the cubicles outside, or its owner, tall and broad-shouldered, flushed out briefly into a transverse corridor. She would pretend their eyes had met. She would make silent contracts with herself: if I sit and work for the next half-hour, then I will let myself go to the water fountain. Andrew West, the Hair Guy, was never there, of course, and she would have to punish herself by tacking the minutes she’d wasted onto the end of her workday. It was an old pattern, rules to rebel against, rebellion leading to further rules, but she kept this insight below the level of conscious recognition, for if she were to allow herself to see it fully—to admit to Dr. Altschul, for instance, that she’d become infatuated with a man who wasn’t her husband, or ex-, or whatever Keith was to her now—it would be just one more reason to punish herself.

Then one morning, she pulled out her chair to find under the desk a plain brown tube she’d requested from Archives several days back, along with supporting documentation. She moved the ziggurat to the floor and unrolled what was in the tube. On top was an elevation of a treeless waterfront, your typical urban minefield, but overlaid with a transparent dreamcity: green meadows studded with retail kiosks, mansarded condos with hanging gardens, two beaming office towers, and that stadium she’d seen a model for at New Year’s. Artists’ renderings of pink-skinned people hoisted stemware in open-air cafés, a few darker faces for contrast. said the legend at the top, renewal being the current term of art for slum clearance. Since losing the bid for Lincoln Center at the turn of the 1960s, the Hamilton-Sweeney Company’s investment arm had diverted most of its energy to international concerns, Exigente cigarettes, El Bandito coffee (whose mustachioed spokesperson, Pepe Rodríguez, she was in a position to know, was actually an Armenian from South Jersey). Meanwhile, the real-estate slump had all but halted construction in the five boroughs; you couldn’t get a project a tenth of this size built anymore, even with City Hall behind you. And hadn’t the city’s new overlords in Albany, even before the indictment, scrambled to distance themselves from the old machinery of power that had led to the fiscal crisis—and thus from the Hamilton-Sweeneys? Yet this, Liberty Heights, was the hundred-million-dollar initiative toward which Amory had driven the company. And it turned out he’d been right! A simple Blight Zone decree had changed everything, turned breakdowns to fast-tracks. It was as if he’d known even back in ’75, the year on the blueprint, that such a decree was inevitable, and now here she was, raising and lowering the transparency: reality, fantasy; fantasy, reality. A knock at the door interrupted her. An immaculate head of hair angled into her airspace, like a retriever nuzzling the slipstream. “Ms. Lamplighter? You asked to see these?”

The Guy with the Hair approached to place an accordion file on her desk. He was younger even than she’d thought: he moved with that carelessness that gets knocked out of you by about twenty-seven. “Thanks,” she said. “This is awful, but I don’t remember what you do, exactly, Andrew. Are you in Real Estate, or Legal?”

“Global Operations, actually.”

“But these are accounts, right?”

“The accounting department of Global Ops.” He gleamed at her like a diamond with a single facet.

“We have two accounting departments?”

“And now Global Ops has swallowed Real Estate. It’s complicated.”

Fighting down doubt, she fed the blueprint back into its tube. “Do you think you could stay for a minute and translate these?” His voice was lovely, and as he walked her through various charts and tables that first day, she sat with lapped hands and let her brain go slack, until his words, receivables, carrying charges, standard depreciation, became avant-garde poetry.

By the third such session, though, some genetic disposition for figures kicked in, and she could hear the skepticism Andrew was doing his best to conceal. Even for him, the Global Ops books were a maze, credits and debits darting across columns and around corners, and then at every third turn you ran into a matryoshka doll of shell companies. Most seemed to be registered in the same Central American republic the cigarettes and coffee came from, but Andrew having returned to his desk, it wasn’t clear whether the net capital-flows were toward or away. What was clear, from his departure if nothing else, was that this haziness couldn’t be accidental. And cui bono? Well, here and here again was her father’s school-ruled signature. Not to say that complexity was in itself criminal, but did she really want to have to turn this stuff over to the government in discovery? Especially when the media, led each day by the four a.m. transmission of that motormouth on WLRC, was more hostile than she’d imagined? At this rate, they were going to have to get the trial relocated to Albuquerque.

Still, she couldn’t bring herself to press her father on any of this when she swung uptown on her lunch-hour to check on him. Behind the desk in the library where he still spent his days (though he couldn’t make heads or tails of the new data terminal), he was too much the Daddy of old: towering, proper, vaguely imperial in his dark blue suit. And his rectitude was heroic, Regan felt, given the arc of his cognitive decline, and even before. She’d learned long ago that what read as reserve was really just a way to protect the things that mattered.

THEN ONE DAY his new neurologist scheduled a house-call. It was only a preliminary visit, questionnaires and bloodwork, but Regan had taken the afternoon off to run interference—Felicia found other people’s medical appointments draining—and when she arrived, a table like a masseuse’s had been unfolded in the fitness room. The patient sat in a gown the blue of a Mylanta bottle. His feet swung back and forth, a kid’s splashing in water. His shins, hairless from a half-century of socks, filled her with unreasonable dread. But any minute now the neurologist would reappear. “Daddy?” He seemed to return from whatever childhood dock he’d been visiting. That he could still do this was a good sign, she thought. “We need to talk. About your case.”

“Yes. Okay.” He’d never been verbose, exactly, but lately he’d pared his word-hoard even further, to these clipped affirmatives that obscured how much of what you said was getting through. Which may have been their purpose. The doctors at Mayo hadn’t been able to arrive at a definite diagnosis, any more than the other specialists, but the more she thought about these dodges of Daddy’s, the more she wondered if he’d been deteriorating for much longer than she’d thought: ten years, or even fifteen.

“Remember how we talked last month about fighting this thing in court? Amory wanted to look at a plea, and I said, No, Daddy, you should stand up and fight. Do you remember?”

And then sometimes there would be this: the flash of lucidity, even when it was least welcome. “Of course I remember. Why wouldn’t I remember?”