City on Fire (50 page)

D.T. was also the one who handled the binoculars once they reached their destination. He trained them on a door a half-block away, as if something big was about to happen … but on this street, it soon emerged, “big” was a relative term: a bag person pushing a shopping cart past Charlie’s window; a schizophrenic shouting about a “box of nightmares”; a lady of the night limping by on a broken heel. True, there was the one time D.T. ducked and hissed, “Don’t let him see you,” and when Charlie looked across the street he spotted the huge tattooed mulatto who worked the door of the Vault, now climbing onto a motorcycle. A suspect! “He’s getting away!” Charlie hissed back, caught up in the spirit of the thing. But D.T. shook his head. “He’s not the target, Einstein.” And the only further developments were a couple of lights going on here and there in the buildings above. There was a target, fine, but knowing what that meant was apparently for D.T. alone.

Indeed, Charlie came to believe he’d been brought along simply to keep his partner from losing his mind with boredom. Which wasn’t easy, with a partner who was already too bored to talk. When Charlie tried to play deejay with the radio, D.T. said to leave it where it was. And when Charlie offered to run over to the bodega a block back for snacks, the reply was a groan. “Christ, bro, I’m not your sensei, you’re not my apprentice. You want to go, go.” This meant, of course, that Charlie couldn’t go. So they listened to the radio and watched the sky get dark, and at a certain point, some secret meridian was crossed, or (what amounted to the same thing) D.T. had seen enough, and they took the van back downtown.

Subsequent shifts monitoring this spot, though, would change Charlie’s assessment. The problem wasn’t so much that D.T. couldn’t be bothered to talk as that when he did now, it was like a negation of the whole purpose of talking. His favorite words were no, shit, and really? followed closely by nothing, fuck, whatever, and man. They came together in a surprising variety of utterances, but the underlying message was always the same: D. Tremens really did not give a fuck, dig? It almost made you wonder about his role in the Phalanstery. Nicky Chaos had a negative streak, too, but he was a prodigious maker of connections. D.T. denied them. When Charlie asked how he’d ended up with the PHP, for example, he insisted, “I’m not with anyone, okay? I’m my own thing.” Maybe it had to do with people always thinking they had you figured because you were black. Charlie knew a little bit about people thinking they had you figured. Though not about being black. Then he realized he was doing it, too, and felt guilty, and so basically gave up on conversation himself.

But there was a more labile side of D.T. that still came out when he was drunk, and by the second week of their stakeout, this was a fair portion of the time. His sauce of choice was beer, the cheaper the better, and as the hours piled up, so did the empties. Charlie liked beer as much as the next guy, but the heap of crumpled cans outside the driver’s-side door seemed to puncture the plausibility of their disguises. Well, sure, there were alcoholic window-washers, just as there were alcoholic lead guitarists, but maybe, Charlie suggested, he should go scout around for a trashcan? “Not the Mary Poppins bit again,” D.T. said. “You have to have figured out this deep-cover bullshit’s just to keep Nicky happy, anyway. Or did he not tell you about his old man?”

“I know his dad was a Marine, if that’s what you mean. And half-Guatemalan.”

For the first time in a long while: a laugh. “And I’m fucking Chinese. You’ve heard Nicky try to speak Spanish, right? They spent a year or two in the tropics when he was a kid, but I’m pretty sure that’s only ’cause Papa was in military intelligence. Which is obviously where Nicky got all this. The disguises, the code words, the stupid fucking foil, like there really are listening devices …”

“But I thought Nicky hated his dad.”

D.T. rolled down the window and sent a can clattering to the curb. “Fucking exactly, Prophet.” Then, between gulps of his next beer, he told Charlie a story. Back in ’74, he said, before the Post-Humanists were Post-Humanists, Nicky started having them keep tabs on the members of his favorite band, Ex Post Facto. It was the first principle of tradecraft: he was going to figure out what his future bandmates needed, Nicky said, and then offer it to them. Sol had been working as a window-washer for dough. “So we already had these uniforms,” D.T. said, plucking at his collar. “And the van.” To which Nicky added a crash-course in how to avoid getting noticed, unless of course you wanted to get noticed. Dress like a square. Fake whiskers, if necessary. But D. Tremens didn’t like being told what to do, see? “Hell, I first started dyeing my hair partly hoping it would be too conspicuous for Nicky to send me out spying. Like, I assume if this shit was so important, he’d go out and do it himself.”

“Couldn’t you just point that out to Nicky?”

D.T. shrugged. “In a perfect world, maybe. In this one, you need a roof over your head.”

His surveillance portfolio had included Venus de Nylon. There was a sister, too, whom he’d been sent to check out once or twice. “But mainly he had me watching Billy, who he was obsessed with even then. Nicky never gives up on anything. It’s what makes him effective.”

“Wait—are you telling me it’s Billy Three-Sticks we’re watching for here?”

“Shit, kid, they really keep you in the dark, don’t they?” When no answer came, he sighed. “You see that cinderblock up on the fire escape? That’s Billy’s window right there.”

Charlie’s first urge was to go throw rocks at it, to shout up what was going on below. It didn’t seem fair, somehow, to repay Brass Tactics with an invasion of privacy. “But what possible purpose—”

“That’s what I’m saying, Prophet. You do enough drugs, you start to get these persecution fantasies.” He played a funky little kalimba rhythm on the pulltab of his beer. Charlie couldn’t figure out whether it was unconscious or to make a point; by now, D.T. might as well have been talking to himself. “But maybe it’s catching. I mean, the way Billy came around on New Year’s Eve rapping about a blaze of glory … That could have just been loose talk about the flashpots we were planning to use, but Sol swears he was acting suspicious even back as far as Christmas, and whatever you want to say about Sol, he’s pretty hard to rattle. And then that record, the one about the world coming to an end this year—”

This, Charlie knew, described a surprising array of records. “You mean the Clash, ‘1977’?”

“I mean the one Billy brought backstage that night. ‘Two Sevens Clash,’ right? A message, he called it. Or a peace offering. And I agree he’s been looking haunted. No, Billy definitely knows at least as much as I do.” Fair enough, Charlie thought, but about what? Reggae? Numerology? Even if he’d felt like revealing the depths of his bewilderment, though, Charlie wouldn’t get a chance to ask, because just then D.T. told him to shut up and make like wallpaper. “Here he comes.” Charlie expected to see the unkempt figure in the motorcycle jacket. Instead, it was another black guy, well-dressed. “That’s Billy’s boyfriend.”

Hang on a sec, Charlie thought. Billy Three-Sticks—the man who’d penned the deathless lyric Wasted, tripping,
basted in the drippings
of your love—was gay? But then, hadn’t Charlie been taught not to look down on his fellow underdogs? D.T.’s indifference seemed, in this light, nearly Sam-like: what people did with their genitals was their business. “Now watch. I’ve seen this before. A half-hour or so after the boyfriend leaves, Billy comes out all sneaky. He’ll go down to the Meatpacking District, then up to the Bronx. Or just to the Bronx. He goes straight uptown, I don’t even bother to follow anymore.”

In fact, what happened was that fifteen minutes later the boyfriend pulled up to the vestibule in a late-model white hatchback. Then Billy Three-Sticks, unshaven and looking even thinner than at New Year’s, hurried out with a suitcase and got into the shotgun side. D.T. sat up. “What the fuck?” But as the car pulled away, he was too drunk to give chase himself. He made Charlie switch seats and ordered him to wait until the car was a block away before they tailed it onto a highway by the river.

For miles, their quarry would stay at exactly the speed limit, a hundred yards ahead. Only way up near the George Washington Bridge, after they lost the white hatchback in Jersey-bound traffic, was Charlie allowed to turn back. And thank God: he was due home anyway. Still, as they picked their way through traffic on Broadway, he asked if they should have done something to stop Billy Three-Sticks.

“Orders are, not unless it looks like he’s going to meet with his uncle, or the fuzz. Force was never supposed to be our first option. Like, if we saw him entering the Hamilton-Sweeney Building, we’d know for sure he’d sold us out, and that would be a whole ’nother kettle of shit. But hey—Nicky doesn’t need to know we let him off our radar just now, okay? Nothing to report. Another dumb day.”

And like that, Charlie was the one with power. Did it make him automatically immoral? He thought back over the various kinds of instruction he’d been absorbing. “Fine,” he said. “But only if you level with me about what the hell this all really is. Nicky’s working on something major, isn’t he?”

They were stuck behind a bus somewhere north of Times Square. Horns rose around them in peevish disputation. D.T. seemed to hold his breath for a minute before reaching for another beer. “Look—you know Billy’s uncle’s one of the biggest wheels in New York, right? An old crony of the Dulleses, may they rot in hell.”

“No, I didn’t know that. I’m in the dark, remember?”

“Consider yourself enlightened. This guy, the uncle, he’s plugged into every network you can think of, public and private. Like a gauge that registers every flicker. And over the years, he’s done us some favors, so you might say he’s plugged into the PHP, too. Of course, we kept that from his nephew. But when Billy shows up on New Year’s dropping hints—when he just happens to be hanging around Grand Central at Christmas as Sol’s coming back from some top-secret mission in Queens—what’s the logical inference, if you’re Nicky? Like, what if the uncle’s using Billy as an agent to see if we’ve turned against him? There’s no manipulation he isn’t capable of. Nicky claims Billy used to call him the Demon Brother.”

Charlie felt a twinge, like he’d heard the phrase before—the title of a lost Ex Post Facto song, or an Ex Nihilo one yet to be recorded. He reminded himself to focus. “Nope. I still don’t get it. ‘If we’ve turned against him?’ Why would the PHP have anything to do with a big wheel like that in the first place?” (Or frankly, given what he’d seen of this operation so far, vice versa?)

A burp brought D.T. back to the present—a present in which he was compromised. “Suffice it to say, before you wager with the devil, you’d better see his trump card. Nicky didn’t, until November. The city made that Blight Zone in the Bronx, opening a hundred acres to development. And then the thing with Sam … there’s just no way Nicky’s going to roll over and accept he’s beaten. The latest thinking is that we need a Demon Brother of our own.”

Not so fast, Charlie wanted to say. Go back to that. To Sam. It had been a month since he’d heard anyone, even himself, speak her name. But they’d reached the Phalanstery, and D.T. had his door open to get out. Charlie reached for his arm. “What do you mean a Demon Brother of our own?”

“You may be Nicky’s chosen one, Prophet, but if I’m not ready to be read in on the details, you sure as hell aren’t. Listen, you asked me last week what I believe. Someone comes at you, comes at something that matters to you, you blow up in their face—that’s what I believe. Which reminds me,” he said. He pulled from the glovebox a small suede sheath with a switchblade handle protruding. “Nicky thought you might want some protection.” But that just went to show that they were right about things, that Charlie really wasn’t ready, because he’d never imagined Nicky was this serious. He couldn’t use a knife on someone, no matter how bad his need. He tucked the switchblade, still folded, into his uniform’s pocket. D.T., for his part, was sobering up. Which meant souring. “I mean it about keeping your trap shut, okay? I figure Nicky wouldn’t send us out together if he didn’t want you to know we had Billy under watch. But if he heard I’d let on about the Demon Brother,” D.T. said, nodding at the pocket, “he’d probably use one of those on me.”

39

BRUNO’S HIDEAWAY, as Mercer couldn’t help thinking of it, sat at the end of a deep lot forested with hemlock, so that it was invisible from the road. But though William had been talking it up all week, the accommodations were one-star at best: a few bedrooms, a bearskin rug before the fireplace, a shelf of discontinued board games. Everything smelled like mothballs; it had been shut up since the previous summer, Mercer surmised, or maybe the one before that. And they could have been on the beach right now! He kept his disappointment to himself, but couldn’t help going around to open windows. William took this as just another opportunity to expound upon the freshness of the twenty-degree air.

For dinner, they unearthed from a cupboard a box of pasta, a decade old if it was a day, which Mercer whipped together with olive oil and some canned Parmesan of equally dubious provenance. Then they sat up side-by-side on the wicker couch playing Risk. They had this game at home, but hadn’t touched it, he didn’t think, since the night he’d told William he loved him. The Summer Olympics had been on then. William had moved his feet to Mercer’s lap, and something about the gesture had led him to blurt out the sentence he’d been turning over in his mind for weeks. William’s response was to look just this way: preoccupied with his next move. Now Mercer wondered if he’d been jonesing for a fix, or whatever the slang was. William pushed his armies into Kamchatka. “I know what you’re thinking, Merce.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think I’m cracking up. Going crazy.” That last word—a significant one, in the context of their relationship—seemed to twist in the wind for a minute.

“I think you’re reckless, maybe. Asia’s always hard to defend.”

“Come on, Mercer. Be honest with me a little.”

“What do you want me to say? Good artists are always crazy, one way or another.”