City on Fire (89 page)

It wasn’t an accurate account, entirely, but Mercer didn’t see how he could explain. Nor could he protest that he hadn’t been warned.

“What you do on your own time is one thing, Mercer, but I don’t think you grasp how serious the element of collusion is. The faculty code of conduct ties my hands. This is in your contract. I can’t ask the Board to renew it for the fall unless there’s some extenuating circumstance you care to share with me.”

“I’m not going to try to pin everything on a couple of high-schoolers, if that’s what you’re saying.”

Dr. Runcible sighed. “I appreciate that you’ve got your own code, Mercer. So did Ahab, but would you trust him with your daughter? I can try to arrange to keep you paid through exam week, provided you pull yourself together and keep your mouth shut. Now on a personal note—” But Mercer had decided not to hear the personal note, for the damage had already been done. He was not only single again, but also no longer employed. He had $247 left in his bank account. The Selectric sat unplugged in the loft, the paper inside it blank. However you wanted to measure it—materially, emotionally, aesthetically—his time in New York had amounted to nothing, and as soon as his savings hit zero, it would be Greater Ogeechee, here I come.

SINCE THE END OF CLASSES, THEN, the only thing he really had to look forward to was his daily climb to the roof of his building. Evenings were best. Hunker down in a folding chair, read the same two pages of Leaves of Grass over and over, get high, wait. And as dark fell, the summer fires would start to flicker infernally on the horizon, distracting him from the pathetic smallness of his life. Around the start of July, though, Bullet had begun throwing these wild parties downstairs, and on the night of the twelfth, for no other reason than that it was a Tuesday, the Angels had spilled onto the roof. Mercer had decided to postpone his ascent until the morning, when he could have the place to his lonesome.

As now he did. Not even noon and it was Götterdämmerung up here, the chairs too hot to sit in, the giant steel O of the Knickerbocker sign more or less molten above. He put down his book. Took a toke. Watched some pigeons nip at pop-tops baked into the tarpaper. One waddled over to him, blinking Morse code, jerking its head forward and back like a tiny Egyptian before smashing it into the roof. Of course, he could only pity its mindlessness for so long, because he had problems of his own, equally intractable, to ram his head against.

A siren’s bloop somewhere in the infinite grid drew him toward the roof’s edge. The vista was dizzying: ashcans like bullseyes six stories down, a lamppost with the colored spaghetti of wiring spilling from its base, an electrician clambering out of a van, heading into the building opposite … and, yes, the day’s first patch of smoke, up past the park. Last summer, with William, it had been easier to imagine these black smudges as so many painterly flourishes on the sky. But now that even Harlem was succumbing to the fires, it was harder to forget that there were actual people involved, and that underneath the spectacle of the city’s burning lay someone’s shelf of LPs, or the cushions of someone’s sofa, or, God forbid, someone’s child. Maybe the siren was a fire truck? Mercer couldn’t see one anywhere, but like some bounding St. Bernard of the metaphysical, he couldn’t quite let go of the belief that there must be an objective reality out there, beyond his own head.

He took a step closer to the edge and sucked down a real lung-buster and tossed the doob and spread his arms like the Jesus of Rio de Janeiro. What one wanted was a gramophone with a trumpet the size of a churchbell, diva Leontyne Price doing the big Act 3 aria from Madama Butterfly. No, what one wanted, really, was the city or anyone in it to see how one suffered. Of course, this being New York, they’d likely just tell him Get over it. Was this what that bird had been trying to communicate? Was it possible that the last month had been a kind of judgment on him for ever daring to pretend that anything meant anything at all? And just what the hell, by the way, were electricians doing in this neighborhood, where the streetlights hadn’t worked since the Nixon administration?

It was a scissoring of wings that sliced his musings to ribbons. At some signal he’d missed, the pigeons were on the move. There were hundreds now, it seemed, a whole confusion of them rising and flapping around Mercer’s head. He tried to bat them away, but ended up yawing out over empty space, trying to cough and shout at the same time. In the feathery maelstrom he couldn’t tell whether he’d turned 180 degrees or 360, and his body, panicking, must have decided that the only way to prevent a hundred-foot drop was to bellyflop onto the tarpaper, because that’s where he ended up, face-down on the roof.

It took the world several breaths to become solid again. There was pain in the heel of his hand where a bottlecap had cut it. A few feet away, his glasses lay anchored to oblongs of light. When he put them back on, he could make out Eartha K. perched atop a doorway, her tail twitching in disdain. And underneath, the figure that had startled the birds: that standoffish Vietnamese girl from the Bicentennial.

“Jenny Nguyen? Do you realize you nearly just got me killed?”

“I knocked and knocked on your door. When I tried the handle, the cat escaped.”

“Well, would you help me get her back downstairs, at least? I don’t want her going over the edge.”

Jenny seemed to define “help” as looking on skeptically while Mercer pretended to have something delicious in his bleeding hand. Eartha narrowed her own eyes at his approach—they both knew the cat was the superior creature—but allowed herself to be carried down to the sanctuary of the loft. There Mercer dampened a towel and cleaned the grit from his hands, dabbed at his sweaty face. In the mirror above the sink, he looked darker than he had that day in the faculty washroom, though maybe it was all the sun he’d been getting. Between the whiskers scraggling down his neck and the now-crooked glasses, he could have been the Black Allen Ginsberg. Jenny cleared her throat behind him. “Mercer, I have to talk to your boyfriend. Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“Didn’t Bruno tell you?”

“Bruno doesn’t tell me anything. It’s not how the relationship works.”

“William and I are kaput. He moved out four months ago.”

“You mean he still hasn’t come back? Shit.” When he turned to her, she was studying William’s self-portrait. “He must be somewhere, though.”

“Common sense would seem to dictate. But your guess is as good as mine.”

“You don’t have any idea where he is?”

As she moved toward the futon, lost in some private worry, her eyes no longer saw him. And because she seemed to be taking the news of the breakup so hard, he found he didn’t dislike her quite as much as he’d thought. “It’s fine, go ahead and sit.” He’d somehow not noticed until now the folder she was carrying. “Is this about a painting?”

She looked up. “No, but it’s absolutely critical I find him.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me why?”

“You’d think I was crazy.”

“Who says I don’t already think you’re crazy?” he said.

She rose to go to the window, but something stopped her halfway there. And now she was speaking rapidly, facing the glass. “Mercer, listen to me. William’s got himself into trouble. I’m still missing some pieces, but someone’s been watching him.”

“Says who? And what do you mean, watching?” he asked, even as he thought back to Christmas Day, William’s unexplained bruises.

“I mean spying. Stalking. I came here to warn him he might be in danger. I thought maybe he’d know from whom. Probably the same fuckers who broke into my apartment yesterday, trying to get this manuscript. By the end of it, you see them carrying around switchblades—”

“Let me see that.”

She clutched the folder to her chest. “Now’s not the time, Mercer. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“You know what? Never mind. I do think you’re crazy.”

“Well, somebody should tell your friend out there.” She motioned Mercer over. On the rooftop across the street was a black guy in coveralls, the electrician he’d seen earlier. He might have been looking around for a junction box, but his hair was all wrong, a vibrant lime-green. And what was that glinting in his hand? “No, stay back,” Jenny was saying, but as she pulled him to the side, the man seemed to pivot toward this window.

“I think he saw me,” Mercer hissed.

“Now ask yourself why you’re whispering.”

Well, because there was something unmistakably malevolent about that electrician. His small dark blank of a face. Though this could have been a side-effect of marijuana. Please, Final Cause, Mercer thought. Get me through this day and I’ll give it up, I swear. Then he was briefly in a cemetery, with Regan staring through tinted windows at the person who’d sat here waffling while William was out there in need. “Maybe it’s drug people,” he said.

“Drug people?”

“Dealers who haven’t been paid. Or collection agents? You know he’s a junkie, right?”

“Like I said, I don’t know much about William, or whatever he calls himself these days, beyond the fact that he had a double life as Billy Three-Sticks—and what’s in this folder. Now is there a way out of your building other than the front entrance?”

“Why?”

“Mercer, if he moved out four months ago, and they’re still watching, then you’re obviously mixed up in it, too.”

He could keep fighting this dream-logic, Mercer felt, but what would be the point? Jenny Nguyen would just go to some other part of the loft and produce some other artifact he didn’t want to know had been here all along: a dollop of plastique, a rat’s nest, a decomposing head. So he led her out toward the freight elevator.

The basement was cooler, darker, faintly minty under scattered bulbs. The few remaining cartons from the Knickerbocker days alternated with the possessions of tenants who’d fled or been kicked out, all of it forming a maze in which a distant radio babbled. Mercer found that the thought of another electrician alarmed him, but more likely it was one of the Angels out cold on a shipping pallet. The metal doors up to the street were hot to the touch, and for a second, there was resistance, but then whatever had been holding them shut came loose, and the razor-edge of daylight widened into a wedge of world. Here on the northern side of the building, the street was empty, its warehouses sealed like tombs.

“We’ll head east,” she said, decisively. Though, with no commercial properties to duck into, no alleyways, they were defenseless against anyone who might have meant them harm. When Mercer hesitated, just past the corner of Tenth, Jenny told him not to look back. “Keep walking. One more block and we’ll start seeing cabs.” Then a blur shot past on the avenue behind them. She froze. “Shit. Was that their van?”

“How could it be their van?” he asked. “The guy’s still up on the roof.” But ten minutes ago, I wouldn’t have believed they could be on the roof, either, he was thinking, as tires screeched, and the white van he’d observed from above sped back by in reverse. Was he imagining the flash of sun on metal in the window as it turned onto this very street? “Come on,” he said, and grabbed her arm.

They scrambled to the next intersection, her short legs struggling to keep up with him. Though he didn’t look back, he could hear the engine getting louder. But then the signal was releasing the perpendicular traffic on Ninth Avenue, and she was grabbing the doorhandle of a taxi, and he was piling in beside her, telling the cabbie just to drive. He prayed for the van to stay stuck at the red, which it did long enough for them to sail south, and there was no sign of pursuit, no bullet smashing through the back window. If Jenny, in the seat beside him, hadn’t seen the van, too, he would have thought he’d dreamed the whole thing. After a dozen or so blocks, they hit a light. The cabbie’s expression in the rearview was deadpan. Another odd couple. “We going anywhere in particular, folks?”

“The nearest police station’s, what, Thirty-Fourth Street?” he asked Jenny, but she tightened her grip on her folder.

“Uh-uh, no way. No more cops. Besides, those aren’t what you’re calling drug people. Drug people don’t have vans and disguises.”

“So who was it, then?” Mercer said.

Jenny checked back out the window. For a second, she looked as wrecked as he felt. “I don’t want to jump to conclusions, Mercer, but I’m starting to think if I knew the answer, we’d have even bigger problems.”

74

TO DISCUSS A FORMER CLIENT was not only a breach of nondisclosure, Keith felt, but also a breach of loyalty, yet here he was, in a climate-controlled room on a high floor of the Trade Center’s north tower, trying not to stare at the upside-down document poised on the table between the hands of the government lawyer, or at the hands themselves, pale, mushroomy things untouched by the light of honest work. The document would grant him immunity from prosecution, but for Keith, the notion of loyalty still meant something. And were he to look down at his own hands, hands that had gripped footballs, hammers, steering wheels, and to discover that they, too, had gone pale from disuse, he might not be able to go through with this.

Luckily, there was little on this side of the table for hands to do. There was a glass of water, now warmed to room temperature. There was a ballpoint pen. He’d had to surrender his briefcase at the front desk in the morning, as though he were the one under indictment, which he supposed he’d have to get used to. No one trusted a turncoat. But this was merely another trade, he reminded himself: information for security. He was securing Will’s future, and Cate’s, as surely their grandfather would have wanted (against whom Keith had been told the case was a slam dunk, “even without your testimony”), and still he felt unsteady. They’d seated him facing the big picture window, as if to say, All this could be yours, just sign already, but what Keith saw out there, beyond buildings arranged like crudités on a platter, were guys like himself, guys he’d gone to high school with, with welding torches in hand, with scalpels, with the black billiard knobs of the gearshifts of cranes, testing the strength of the city against their demolition balls. The Irish in him was telling him to ball up the document, take his chances, be a man. Trader, he thought. Traitor. Surely there was some other way.