City on Fire (54 page)

The little dog tried to follow him out into the hall, and he had to use his foot to keep it inside, compromising somewhat the majesty of his exit. But by the time the door closed, Regan had turned back to the window. Her hands, nearly lost in her sleeves, were balled tight; it was impossible to tell whether she was crying again. Mercer leaned against the counter, feeling punched in the gut. At last, Venus reached down for her dog. She had preserved a certain dignity in the midst of all this, and intended to leave with it intact. The dog, oblivious, plunged into the purse and situated itself there. Venus hoisted the strap to her shoulder and looked back at them just before leaving. “Well, that went well, don’t you think?”

43

WILL WAS A NOTORIOUSLY LIGHT SLEEPER, and his bedroom was right next to the kitchen, so the noisy percolator was to be avoided. Instead, up before dawn that Saturday, Keith heated the coffee in a pot on the burner, the way they used to in college. It came to a boil faster than expected; he found himself rushing around in stocking feet, looking for something to strain it through, a colander or sieve or any other porous vessel his wife might not have thought to deprive him of. As the airshaft beyond the kitchen window brightened, he grew almost frantic, like one of those coyotes that occasionally wandered onto the Upper East Side. There was already a note on the fridge in case the kids woke up— —but he’d been hoping to get back quick enough that they’d still be in bed, and he wouldn’t have to lie. Something with holes … The best he could do was a slotted spoon. He wrapped a paper towel around it and made a mess filtering the molten mixture into his cup. The coffee tasted like water colored brown with a crayon. Grounds stuck to his lips. His heart, he felt, was a porous vessel. He was in the front hall zipping his windbreaker when Will appeared behind him, rumpled with sleep, the note in his hand. “Running where?”

“Just around the Reservoir,” Keith said. “Supposed to be like spring today.”

“In those, you run?”

He looked down at his loafers. “Shit, I forgot. This is what happens when you get old, champ. Your brain starts to go.” Then, recalling his father-in-law, he felt like a jerk.

Under Will’s watchful eye, he switched into sneakers. He would have to remember to get some mud on the treads on the way back. His son was becoming the kind of kid who would check. He seemed not only to bristle with secrets lately, but to suspect everyone else of keeping them, too—though maybe this was what Regan had meant when, citing her shrink, she’d accused Keith of projection. Anyway, the sneakers came in handy; after waiting fifteen minutes for the poky Sunday morning local, he actually did end up jogging down to Bryant Park, where, provided the forecast held, he’d arranged to meet Tadelis at seven.

“Look, Lamplighter,” Tadelis said, even before Keith took a seat. “You have to go talk to them. As your friend, I advise this. If I was your lawyer, I’d drive you there myself.” He’d brought bagels, and already had a poppyseed lodged between his upper incisors. Keith was in no position to tell him, though. For several weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the terms of the separation were being worked out, Tadelis had put him up on his couch. And now, for free, he’d agreed to look over the target letter that had come from the U.S. Attorney’s office two days ago, precipitating Keith’s panic. Tadelis was the only guy he knew personally who’d ever been through an insider-trading investigation. Since losing his securities license, he’d been scraping by teaching business communications at City College. Notwithstanding which, he still pronounced “attorney” so that it rhymed with “horny.”

Keith handed him the letter, which shook slightly. “I’m sure you’ve heard it’s Regan’s dad who’s under indictment. I just feel like I can’t say anything to these guys.”

“What could it hurt if you did? You’re innocent, remember?”

Tadelis wasn’t really capable of keeping his voice down, but the old ladies taking in the morning from some benches nearby had their own lives to worry about. Somehow Keith kept forgetting this about other people, as they no doubt did about him. On the surface, he was healthy, prosperous, talented, good-looking. Inside, though, he was suffocating. He couldn’t let Regan’s divorce lawyer get wind of his potential exposure in U.S. v. Hamilton-Sweeney. Nor could he let the U.S. Attorney get wind of his involvement with a shooting victim. And about the Demon Brother, whose silence he took as a warning, he didn’t dare say a word even to Tadelis. If the spheres of his life that—just barely—contained one mess or the other came into contact, it would all explode. “They don’t seem to think I’m so innocent.”

Tadelis, who’d been intent on the letter, looked up. “Think like a prosecutor for a second. You’re a little fish. Your father-in-law’s the big kahuna. We already know there’s a confidential informant somewhere in the firm, no? So they must have granted whoever it is immunity, thinking they were going to get an airtight case. But my read is, either the immunity freed the person not to talk, or the evidence is shaky. Now they’ve got to build leverage to push for the toughest possible settlement for Regan’s old man, so they put the screws to anyone they can think of to corroborate what they’ve got. This much publicity, they’ll want him to plead to at least a few felony counts, plus some jail time, a hefty fine.”

“You’re saying if I don’t talk, there’s a chance Old Bill gets a better deal?”

“I’m saying you’ve got to look out for number one, Keith. Unless there’s something you’re not telling me, I don’t see where’s the breach of fiduciary—but at any rate, go in, meet with them, and if necessary, you’ll be protected.”

“But that would be a kind of betrayal, you know?”

“A bigger betrayal than getting indicted yourself? These are your peak earning years, my friend. You’ve got kids to think about. And soon enough, alimony. Here, have one of mine.”

From his own battered soft-pack, Keith had been able to fish only two ends of a broken Exigente. Which amounted to yet another thing Regan didn’t know about him: last fall, he’d taken up smoking, a reminder of the license, the chaos that persisted beneath the superficial order of his life. Sometimes, late afternoons, he used to take the elevator down to the street. The day’s last cigarette was all it took to separate those who had a reason to be idling there, at 3:55, at 4:10, from the loiterers, the drifters, the scarecrow homeless. There was a kind of fellow-feeling, never expressed with eye contact, exactly, but a glancing, sidelong sense of something larger than the self. Of course, it struck him now, he was already part of such a something, called a marriage. Samantha may have been the white rabbit leading him down to Underland, but all the while, it was Regan he’d been chasing. For it was only with her that he’d ever felt that powerful powerlessness he knew was love. And it was Regan he needed here in the open air, really. Her beautiful good sense. Her hand holding his, reminding him of exactly where his apparent gift for subterfuge had gotten him. If this were about anyone else but her dad (and maybe even then), she too would have pushed him to talk. “Just remember,” Tadelis said, around a finger mining food from his gum line. “My advice is worth every penny you paid for it.” But he was right, Keith decided at last … as was this Regan who remained inside him. What could it hurt to set up a meeting?

44

THAT HIS OLD FRIEND AND RIVAL should land such a large chunk of early-morning radio had always seemed miraculous. “Dr.” Zig’s mouth alone should have disqualified him; it was one of the filthiest Richard had encountered (and the competition, among newspapermen, was stiff). Now, more than ever, you could feel him running right up to the edge of the Seven Dirties, longing to jump:

—so far we’ve got Ed from Far Rockaway on public fornication, the lady from Brooklyn with the hobo on her stoop, and then, working our way up, muggings, rapes, the merchant princes fallen into disgrace. The Yackline’s still open at KL5-YACK—that’s 555-9225 for all you illiterates out there in the gritty city. But before I take another call, New York, can I speak freely? I feel like you’re only getting half the picture …

Richard had first tuned in three weeks ago just to see if Pulaski was right. But now he found himself waking earlier and earlier, leaving his police scanner’s AM radio function set to WLRC. “Dr.” Zig was drinking again, it seemed. And he got too close to the material, saw everything as personal, including what he made up wholecloth; that had been his problem at the newspaper, too. But in ways Richard found hard to account for, it made Gestalt Therapy even better, as radio. He was not alone in feeling this. According to the Arbitron ratings he’d last checked in ’73, Zig’s audience had lately more than doubled. Every morning, tens of thousands of masochistic tri-staters were tuning in to hear him rant about the shooting of the unnamed minor in Central Park. Or this other thing, some insider-trading case. Or their symbolic link to entropy, to decay. For paranoia was Zig’s late style: How else but through networks and conspiracies could he fashion a target big enough for his outrage? Richard usually found paranoia uninteresting, insofar as it swept away the incidental, which was the real grist of history. But maybe this was precisely why he couldn’t stop listening to “Dr.” Zig now: it reminded him that he was comparatively sane.

What he’d been chasing these same weeks, he kept telling himself, was not any particular set of connections, but simply background, the last incidentals of the story that had flashed before him forever ago in a bar in the north of Scotland. Sure, he’d made the rounds of the classrooms and dorms Samantha had abandoned, but the purity of intent was there; police had already exhausted any leads. And sure, the terse employees sweeping last night’s cigarette butts out of the rock clubs on the Bowery seemed to look on him with suspicion, but all he was asking for was someone who’d admit to remembering her. In the evenings now there was his neighbor, Jenny Nguyen. He sat with her making little birdbath stabs at the one glass of Scotch he allowed himself and pretending that this was his life: another item or two of due diligence crossed off the list, someone warm and funny and human to come home to.

But then why every couple days did he find himself back in Hell’s Kitchen, at that bodega where he always got coffee—the one whose owner claimed there was no such person as Billy Three-Sticks? The man didn’t like him loitering, so Richard had started walking Claggart all the way up there as a cover. He’d drink the coffee down a bit and unleash the dog from the lamppost outside, and together, they’d start toward the old mint factory. He kept telling himself that today would be the day he at last reached the buzzer. If nothing else, he could tip off Samantha’s idol about the oddballs in coveralls who were staking him out. But then Claggart would stiffen, and Richard would spot a shadow in a doorway down the street, or in a white van, watching. He’d had to resort to surveillance a few times himself in the ’50s, and knew the little tricks: these were no more window-washers than that lamppost was a time machine. Yet whatever of the cub reporter remained in Richard kept coming back for more.

What he’d established, after nearly a month, was that Billy Three-Sticks rarely came out before late afternoon; he seemed almost to shun the light. And if he did walk over to the Times Square Automat, say, for food, his pursuers would trail along unseen a half-block behind. If he then ducked into the OTB to place a bet, they would linger outside. More often, he left his apartment only to scurry to the subway, where they would or wouldn’t follow him, depending on which entrance he used. Even in the latter case, Richard didn’t feel he could follow Billy down into the tunnels; someone was always watching.

Except he hadn’t yet tried the crack of dawn, had he? So now, as Gestalt Therapy rolled into its third hour, he ran Claggart out for an expedited walk and wrapped an egg sandwich in wax paper, in case he got hungry—the bodega wouldn’t have opened yet—and headed uptown alone.

This early, the street was devoid of vans, or any life at all. As he approached the old factory, Richard felt again the humming inside, as if he were about to get lucky. And perhaps he was, though not in the way he thought, for a dozen yards shy of the door, he heard an echo from a loading dock farther down the street. Ignore it, he told himself, but he’d never been a match for his own curiosity. And what he found on the dock, a few feet off the ground, was a tableau: a young woman rooting among some shipping pallets. With her go-go boots, she might have been one of the neighborhood’s many prostitutes, but the grimy athletic jersey beneath her unbuttoned fur wasn’t the sort of plumage that lured tricks. “Hey,” he said. “Did you lose a contact lens or something?”

“Keep walking.”

“No, really. It’s cold out. If you’re looking for something, let me give you a hand.” He had already hopped up onto the dock; he intuited a connection with the window-washers, even before she told him it wasn’t a contact she’d misplaced, but some binoculars. “I come here to bird-watch,” she explained, a bit tightly. “This is the best time of day.” For a few minutes, they searched together in silence. The most he found was a featureless white outline, not quite a stick figure, spraypainted onto a side wall. She kept edging toward the dock’s lip, but he made sure to stay between her and the street, lest she try to bolt. Then he saw, near some steps, a sleeping bag. A leather strap poked from the top of the roll. When he pulled at it, out came the binoculars. Heavy. Military surplus. “If these were a snake they would have bit you.”

She shrugged. “Must have rolled them up inside.”

“They’re not really for watching birds, though, are they?” he said. “You know you shouldn’t sleep on the street.”

“Why? You reckon some perv is going to try to chat me up?” As he handed her back the binoculars, though, the wrapped egg sandwich fell from his pocket to the ground, and her expression shifted from sarcasm to interest. “Hey, are you going to eat that?”

“I’m afraid it’s not hot anymore,” he said, but it seemed the offer of real food was too good to pass up; she looked like she’d been getting by entirely on Twinkies.