City on Fire (66 page)

Sherri was asleep when he got home, but he stayed up, looting beers from the rec-room fridge, wearing an uneven path in the carpet with his crutchless pacing. Assume it’s accurate, he thought. Assume the Cicciaro girl had these connections to some lefty agitators, fine. But the guy who’d found her body had been a guest of one of the city’s richest families, the very model of the Establishment. Pulaski had never been one for the overwrought plot; any entanglement he could imagine between these two lines of evidence was willful to the point of insanity. Still, his work had taught him better than to believe in coincidence, either. That a hundred yards from the Hamilton-Sweeney New Year’s gala (as “Dr.” Zig Zigler never tired of pointing out) she’d crossed paths with a random mugger—he’d stopped buying it a while ago. And it was manifestly not a serial killer, per the Post. Streaks of reflected light on the sliding door blotted out whatever was outside, but he could hear the wind-chimes rattling. The creak of stairs behind him. “Honey? How was the game?”

“Oh, fine. You know how I feel about the Yankees.”

“Overdogs,” Sherri said. “But what are you going to do?” Then she stood there in her nightgown. He couldn’t figure out why until she said, “We’ve got a big day tomorrow. Are you coming to bed?”

AT A.M. MASS, he would struggle to be interested in the homily, as he would struggle on the way home after to be interested in the property descriptions Sherri was reading aloud from the classifieds. He could hear his own distracted monosyllables, yet felt no more able to improve upon them than if he were watching himself on closed-circuit TV. Sherri waited until they were passing through downtown Port Richmond, in sight of the New York skyline, to say, “I’m guessing you want me to drop you at the ferry?” Her smile might have been wry, triumphant, had he not known her well enough to see she was furious.

“I just need to go in for an hour or two, hon. I should have mentioned it, I know, but I’ll be back by lunchtime, we can hit the road. Promise.” At the ferry terminal, he leaned in to kiss her, but she turned so that his lips glanced off her hair.

THE ADDRESS ON THE CRUMPLED TICKET-STUB took him east of Bowery, to a neighborhood of old tenements and townhouses. It had been a rough enough area even back when Pulaski had only been a beat cop, but at least there’d been life on these streets. Now, for blocks, the only greenery was spindly ailanthus sprouting through the stoops. From broken upper windows, pigeons came and went on inscrutable errands. Other windows were boarded over. The summer sky was a blue beyond blue. The rowhouse itself looked uninhabited (though it had become hard to tell which, if any, of these houses were occupied; did a padlock mean someone lived there, or someone didn’t?). He made a halting circuit of the block, but any glimpse of the back of the building in question was blocked by others. He returned and knocked on the big windowless door, which to his surprise was steel, rather than wood. A few patches of green paint clung like graveyard moss. His hand, flattened against it, didn’t look much better: splotches the color of coffee rings. He thought he smelled marijuana, but then, the whole Lower East Side smelled like marijuana.

Breaking in was an option. He tried to picture his misshapen shanks shimmying through a basement window. On one hand, he had no warrant, and if the Feds really had this place on their radar, he could get in big trouble for tipping off the occupants. On the other hand, what surer guarantee of an exit from the department than official misconduct? But perhaps Sherri was right. Perhaps he had no intention of making an exit.

He took up a vigil from the far side of the street, in the shadow of a lone tree. Bending to copy license-plate numbers into his notebook, he had an intuition he was being watched, but when he looked down toward the corner of the avenue, there was no one. And then, for a long time, no movement; the heat, merciless as a specimen jar, was making it seem there might never be movement again. Not to mention immersing him in sweat. The vague sense of crisis that had begun on the ferry last night, or at the ballpark, had never really subsided. He told himself he needed to cool down.

He followed the old streets west and north, to where there was likely a bodega. And there was still some life down here, it was true. Sleek golden kids who could have been anything from Puerto Rican to Egyptian prowled the sidewalks of Third Avenue, fighting and flirting, at ease in their bodies. A boy spritzed a girl’s shirt with a can of seltzer. Hand-lettered signs crowded the window of the Gristedes: HALF CHICKEN 89 CENT LIMIT FOUR PER OFFER CREAMSICLE 12 PK 2-4-1! He thumbed a dime into the cup of the junkie out front, reflecting that for a dollar he could have bought the guy half a chicken, and also that the guy probably didn’t want half a chicken. No doubt his sense of being under observation was not the FBI, but his conscience, which now no longer wore the face of God, but that of Sherri.

At Astor Place, the grid opened up to admit prospects to the north and southwest. Here, too, were kids, but older and less innocent, mohawked and safety-pinned, with the stringy look of stray dogs. Some had actual stray dogs. It was as if, Pulaski sometimes thought, the ’60s had tipped the entire country on end and shaken it like a box of cereal until all the flakes ended up in the East Village. He wanted to ask them, Why do you keep coming here? Can’t you see this city is dying?—but maybe underneath he was jealous of their freedom. And of course Samantha Cicciaro had been one of them, he’d seen from the photographs now filed neatly away at 1 Police Plaza. Around him men in African prints sold incense and sunglasses from long bingo tables. Drugs and money changed hands openly. He might as well have been invisible. He found a deli and bought a cold beer, keeping it in a paper bag. He was somewhat surprised at himself, but why not? This was what liberty was. There was no real law down here anymore.

He could no longer sit on a curb or a Siamese connection—his spine wouldn’t permit it—but out front of St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery were benches and some old big shade trees that had withstood the centuries. It had a tiny graveyard, too, one of a handful on the island, and he’d always found graveyards comforting, somehow. A city where we’d all dwell. He sat for a while imbibing tepid foam. With each sip, the world turned a degree, or a second. He’d really believed, apparently, that on this day, in his hour of need, God Almighty was going to swoop down and reveal what had happened back there to the Cicciaro kid, but maybe this was all he was going to get: a memory of his senior year in high school, when his father had driven him in from Passaic to see the V-J Day parade. Afterward, in a cool yeasty bar with sawdust on the floor, Dad had treated him to his first-ever foamer and said, “Don’t tell your mother.” Then they’d walked back to retrieve the car. Passing directly behind the spot where he now sat, not thirty feet away, his eighteen-year-old self had felt about as good as he’d ever felt in his life. Summer in New York City, with the clouds above going copper-colored and a Negro with a trumpet playing for pennies by the subway station, the shimmy of buses echoing up the fronts of high buildings, as if God were on a person-to-person call, saying, This is where you belong. He’d always assumed that it was this feeling that had led him here. But what if time worked the other way around? What if what his adolescent self had felt then was the ghost of his present one, sitting here on a sagging bench, beckoning him into his future? He wove his hands together and touched his forehead to them. He could almost feel his father’s eyes on him, swimming with liquor. But when he turned to where the eyes were, it wasn’t ghosts he saw. It was a carrot-topped teenager with a terrible haircut, staring in through the wrought-iron bars.

It was the purposeful way the kid looked away and drifted down the street that let Pulaski know he’d been watching. He reached for his crutches, but the boy was already half a block away. As Pulaski limped after him, the kid glanced back and began to run. Pulaski, too out-of-shape for pursuit, pursued anyway. The red head floated nearer, and despite the fact that the kid was at a near-sprint now, a design was visible. Pulaski crossed against the signal, looking no doubt like just another of the crazy people who haunted this place. If his hands had not been occupied with rubber grips, he could have reached out, could have grabbed …

Then the sky was swinging behind him and he was pried off his feet, undone by a crutch-tip in a sewer grate. Asphalt exploded against the side of his face. Tires screeched. Horns. A circle of faces appeared above him, peering down in concern. “Gracious, mister.” “Are you all right?” Someone offered to get him water.

“I’m … all right,” he said. But getting up seemed beyond him, and he could tell that stitches were in his future, and that he’d have to call Sherri to drive him home in his work car. He could feel himself already in the passenger’s seat of the Fury, with a bruise that was going to hurt like hell, being borne away from this mysterious kid, and this moment when the world and the case—which by now were practically the same thing—had seemed so close to breaking open.

58

AS SPEED APPROACHES INFINITY, time and space begin to skew, and what once seemed knowable divulges a deeper strangeness. Which helps explain why the awnings and building fronts Charlie is racing past now look so unfamiliar, and why the blocks are so much longer than he’s used to. Where could he be? East Fifth? East Sixth? The street signs have all been painted over or stolen. Even the instinct behind his flight—that the neighborhood will enfold him, that he’ll disappear here among the natives—reveals itself as a misconception. Old women in housedresses gawk at the crazed white boy streaking past their stoops, but at least they don’t call the cops.

Then again, maybe they don’t need to call the cops. The little cripple back there in the crosswalk obviously was one; Charlie had seen it, looking down into the guy’s coplike face, just before he’d bolted again. And should he feel remorse for this, for not reaching out a hand? Other people had stopped to help. But that was liberal accommodationism, right? And who was to say the guy’s crutches weren’t a prop? Curiosity had been part of why he’d followed. Plus maybe if he could show that he’d actually picked up a few tricks on his surveillance runs, the PHP would see that their trust in Charlie was well-placed. That he was fully PostHuman after all.

Not that stealth was easy. The cripple’s course had been fit-and-startful—a long pause at Cooper Square, while Charlie crouched behind a parked car pretending to tie his shoe—and then into a deli for a brown paper bag. Then they were backtracking, it seemed, to that church on Second Ave., the one where Sam claimed to have seen Patti Smith read “Piss Factory.” There was no way for Charlie to follow him into the fenced churchyard without giving himself away. The man’s posture on the bench among the graves was slumped, defeated, almost like David Weisbarger’s after a rough day at work. Charlie tried to dismiss this as a trick designed to lull him into lowering his guard, but it must have worked, for in the second after the guy turned and their eyes met through the bars, the only thing Charlie could think of was to flee.

Now, the sirens he’s braced for having failed to eventuate, he slows to a walk. A blister has formed on his sockless left heel. This block is a mystery, but at the end of it, pigeons circle, flashing, blind or indifferent to his lostness. Their order is the order of leaves whipped by a helical breeze. Of kids determined to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl until their money runs out. Or of something else Charlie’s whacked-out brain can’t remember. He tells himself they have no message for him, he’s just happened to look up at their moment of peak agitation, but they keep going round and round in urgent epilepsis, until he recognizes the trees beneath them as Tompkins Square Park. Somehow he’s run clear around it and is approaching from the river side. He checks back to make sure no one’s following and then uses the park to orient himself toward … well, what? You couldn’t quite call it a home.

The little garage out back is unlocked, and he intrudes as far as he dares if he doesn’t want to get yelled at. A fan whirs on the other side of the cinderblock divider, and when he clears his throat, loudly, two figures appear from behind it with goggles on. They stare at him through the safety glass, astronauts at an alien life-form. Then Sol uses his good hand to push his mask up above what would have been his eyebrows. His eyes are high, wild. The burnt hand’s driving glove, soaked in disinfectant nightly, gleams like a futuristic fashion statement. Otherwise he looks quite ill. “You scared the shit out of us.”

“It was unlocked,” says Charlie, lamely.

“We thought you were COINTELPRO or some shit.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” Charlie says. “But listen, I saw someone out front, watching. I tailed him.” At this, Nicky’s own goggles go up. Charlie puts his hands on his knees to help him catch his breath. That smell. Like a dentist’s drill. “It was maybe an hour ago, I had just gone out to … uh, get a muffin, and I saw this little crippled guy with a moustache watching the house from across the street, like casing it, honest, I swear. So I followed him.”

“And?” Nicky’s face is covered in sweat and missing its chipped smile. This is the moment when Charlie realizes he’s not going to tell them how it really turned out.

“He was pretty slick. He lost me.”

“It could have been the reporter guy,” Solomon says to Nicky, who momentarily blanches.

“Obviously it couldn’t have been the reporter, Sol. Don’t you read the paper?”

Another thing Charlie’s not going to do: he’s not going to beg them anymore to explain themselves. “I thought if I saw something I was supposed to …”

“You did right,” Nicky says, “to bring us these concerns, and I’m going to think on this real hard, I promise. But it’s kind of the critical juncture here, Prophet. Would you mind?”

Sol has already pulled his goggles back down to return to his work, and after shooting Charlie a meaningful look, Nicky joins him behind the concrete shield or barrier. The fan, wedged into a window, stutters the light like a nickelodeon. Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can’t see.