City on Fire (91 page)

The smell got harder to ignore the higher you climbed: rotten food, animal fat souring in the heat. Behind and below, doors parted to the length of chains and snapped shut. Little paper envelopes crinkled underfoot. She could feel Mercer’s ambivalence returning even before he knocked on the garret apartment’s door. There was no answer. “I guess William’s not here, either,” he said.

“Shall we look inside and see?” She’d noticed a bent bobbypin hanging out of the lock. When she pushed, the door flew open, harder than she intended.

Mercer caught it on the rebound. “This is so wrong,” he said, peering in. It was a single room, surprisingly big, crammed with old mirrors and broken furniture, newspaper twists clotted with paint. Nothing to suggest someone might be living here, though, unless you counted a half-empty pack of Necco wafers. No sleeping bag. No toiletries. And no visible drug paraphernalia.

Then Mercer flicked on a light, and she almost forgot what she was looking for. The walls, ten or twelve feet high, were covered in signs, the kind you saw on subway platforms, or taped to the bulletproof glass of bodegas. Something was slightly off about them, but it took Jenny a second to figure out what: the scale. A parking ordinance was a foot too wide. A stop-sign was skewed, its angles foreshortened. An Uncle Sam recruiting poster was taller than she was and missing an eye. A teenager might have ripped off a piece of poster to reveal the subway tile underneath, but this was trompe l’oeil; the whole thing, once you got up close, was oil paint. It was as if William Hamilton-Sweeney, despite to her knowledge never having sold so much as a painting, had been trying to re-create the face of the entire city, right here in this attic. She couldn’t tell if it was good, exactly, but no one could say it wasn’t ambitious.

“Help me lift this one.” She indicated a canvas lying face-down under some mannequin limbs. It was a work in progress, an almost monolithic slab of blue, but when the dust was blown off, she could see other colors, blacks and oranges and greens rising like sparks from within. The paint wasn’t quite dry to the touch. She was about to mention this when a voice from the doorway said, “I told y’all not to come back.”

The elderly woman who stood there in her nightgown was as dark and squat as a fire hydrant, if a fire hydrant could carry a baseball bat.

“I done called the police, you better leave that poor boy’s things alone.”

Jenny, hands in the air, tried to reason with her—they were the poor boy’s friends—but Mercer interrupted. “You’re right. We shouldn’t be here.”

“All right, then.” The old lady retreated behind her door.

Jenny could feel the whole building listening as they trudged back downstairs, and Mercer must have, too, because it wasn’t until the vestibule that he let himself groan. Hadn’t she heard? Someone else had already been here, probably the electricians. “So that’s it,” he concluded. “All’s lost. The end.”

Over the frantic course of the afternoon, she’d almost grown to like him, but this defeatism just annoyed her. And the annoyance was probably mutual, she thought, as she took from her pocket what she’d plucked from under the edge of that canvas. “This was on the floor.” A prescription slip, edged in tacky blue. Stamped across the top was the dispensary logo. it said.

76

THE SIGN-IN SHEET was a grid clipped to a binder on the counter of the nurse’s station, with slots for your name, the time in, and all those Establishment hoops a real punk would sooner die than jump through. But the nurse on duty was looking at him funny, so Charlie stooped to leave a squiggle where his name should have been, and again in the space where you were supposed to say who you were here to see. Once the nurse was out of sight, Charlie hung a left onto the hall where he thought Sam was. He yanked out charts holstered next to doorframes to check the names. The door by Cicciaro was open an inch or two. Like the others, it was wide enough to fit a stretcher through, he thought. Or a coffin, before telling his brain to shut its face, because how many months had his brain just cost him?

The bed by the door was empty, so she must have been in the one closer to the window. He stood for maybe a minute, fingering the privacy curtain that had been drawn between them. Finally, he swept it back, but what he saw made him wish he hadn’t. The fluorescent light bouncing off all the toothpasty green furnishings seemed to pool and deepen in the hollows of Sam’s skin. Her neck, sticking out of the hospital gown, was just skin stretched over tendons, like paper over the wooden sticks of a Japanese lantern. Her hair had grown back to what it had been at New Year’s, but there was this bald patch where they’d taken out the bullets. The saddest thing was the vase of cheap flowers, because they must have come from her dad. No, actually the saddest thing was the band-aid covering the place where the needle went into the back of her hand. The modesty of that. The hand, with all its nerve-endings, pierced. Oh, Sam. How could you have been naked in his bed?

Charlie thought he’d come here, finally, to ask. But the flesh-and-blood hurt of her made the answers meaningless. It no longer mattered.

He turned off the lights and climbed carefully onto the margin of bed her body left available. He’d ditched the smoke-smelling coveralls in a trashcan outside. With his tee-shirt rolled up to his chest, he could feel how warm she still was under her gown and press his belly against her hip and remember how she’d lain once with her head on his lap. It wasn’t dirty to do this, he felt, to show her how close he wanted to be. After a while, though, it got physically uncomfortable, so he retreated to the other bed, from which, if she’d been conscious, he could have held her hand. Her face, in profile against the bright window, was peaceful. But that was something you said about dead people, too.

A great weariness overtook him. He’d spent last night hunkered on some church steps with only a plywood awning to shield him from anyone on the street. Every time headlights rolled past, he’d found his grip tightening on the handle of the switchblade he’d remembered was in a pocket of his coveralls. And in between, he’d had the same argument with himself he was having now. On one hand, Nicky had been right; Charlie’s faith in the cause was imperfect, there were spots on his raiment, or why was he so freaked out? On the other, these things happened. Ready to leave the house, you discovered last winter’s snot on the sleeve of your sweater, and you couldn’t be sure you hadn’t worn it since then. Plus he recalled from the Bible that no prophet was perfect. Jeremiah was a notorious dawdler. Jonah basically turned tail and ran. And PostHumanism turned out to be embarrassingly human. Look where he’d found himself: in a strange apartment, eyes burning, slopping water from the sink onto the bonfire Nicky’d made on the floor. Soiled, worldly, the whole stinking business. At least he’d managed to save the dog.

Trees sighed outside and hazy clouds scudded past and the shadow of a flower vase swung from west to east on the plastic tray table. No one came in to feed Sam lunch, because she couldn’t eat. Sometimes he imagined he was talking to her and she was talking back. Sometimes, without realizing it, he hummed. Sometimes he closed his eyes, but he didn’t pray. Maybe he even drifted off for a little while, because when a man’s voice spoke up in the hall, it took a second to really hear. Just look in on her for a minute, it said …

Oh, shit. How was he going to explain his being here? Charlie was an excellent sneak but a crappy liar. The voice, and another voice, that nurse or a lady doctor, were just outside the door. He had a few moments left to yank the privacy curtain closed around the bed he was on. Out of childish habit, he pulled the blanket over his head. Then came the footsteps. Then the complaint of metal on floor as a chair was dragged next to Sam’s bed. Then the chair, mere feet away, creaking under someone’s weight. Then nothing.

This couldn’t be Mr. Cicciaro; he knew that voice from the phone, and the muttering that came now sounded more educated. No, Charlie understood suddenly—for understanding was given in visions and in dreams—that the person he was trapped here with had to be the one who had shot her. Returned to the scene of the crime. Or the body that amounted to the same thing. Beyond the closed door, machines beeped, wheels rattled, clocks were punched. Should he bolt for the nurse’s station to raise the alarm? God, he was suffocating here. The light through the blanket’s thin places was malevolent, green. He tried not to think of the afflictions of all the bed’s previous occupants, snowing down on him in this underworld. He tried not to imagine this was how Sam had been feeling for the 192 days since this man had put her here, but he couldn’t help it: it was like being buried alive. He groped in his pocket for his inhaler, but found the switchblade instead. Some coins slipped out and clattered against the bed and then the floor, and for good measure rolled around and around before rattling to a halt. The silence that followed was the kind where you can actually feel the weight of the listening: his listening, your own, the wispiness of the fabric that separates you. And the last conscious thought of the Prophet Charlie Weisbarger, before the killer swept back the curtain, was to hell with the inhaler. It was going to have to be the blade.

77

REACHING CONEY ISLAND took several more centuries. The Triboro at rush hour was a catastrophe of millennial proportions, as was the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, any time of day or night. (And didn’t time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?) Somewhere around the Verrazano Bridge, the Gremlin’s two-stroke engine began to whimper. From the passenger’s seat, Mercer watched the gas needle flirt with E. Then a string of kitelike pennants in primary colors was snapping outside a line of dead storefronts, beyond which stretched seagulls and the sea.

They pulled into a near-empty parking lot. He heard the engine die. Across the street was the place they’d come looking for, a derelict pile of cinderblock with an impenetrable steel door and heavy mesh over the windows. A big-bellied man in camouflage pants dozed on the steps. In the heat beside him lay the spine of a dog with fur hanging off it. The clinic’s sign was barely legible. Methadone, Mercer thought. A drug you take to stop using other drugs. William, who couldn’t be bothered to give up heroin for him, had done it for Bruno. But why all the way out here?

He got out to sit on the hood of the car. It was a million degrees, but fuck it. He felt like a discarded marionette, or a building collapsing in on itself, floor by floor. Jenny plopped down next to him, too light to register with the car’s suspension. “What now?”

“What do you mean, what now? The place is obviously closed.”

“We could check if there’s an open window.”

“I’m sure we could, but what would be the point? He’s not going to be in there. All we can do is wait for him to come get his dose.”

“Do you really think there’s time for that?”

Up until now, Mercer had been having trouble holding her gaze when he met it. “I read the article, too, Jenny. I saw the guy on the roof. But William’s not at his studio, he’s not in SoHo, he’s not here. Anyway, what are you going to do if we get to him first? Lock him up safe in a tower somewhere?”

She thumbed the edge of the folder in her lap. “I just feel like we have to warn him.”

“You’re virtual strangers, Jenny, you said it yourself. No one’s that altruistic.”

“I’m trying to take responsibility. It’s a choice I’ve made.”

But this was ducking the question. “Sometimes you don’t get to make a choice,” he said.

“When have you ever not had a choice, Mercer? Okay, the man you love is an addict. Don’t you still have to choose?”

Well, so much for subtext, Mercer thought. He laid his arms across his knees and lowered his head to them. There was a pause here, a silence, in which he could feel Jenny wrestling with something. “Mercer, it’s not just that these people broke into my apartment. Do you understand how rare it is to get a real chance to save someone? You can’t just blow it off—trust me. This might be our chance to redeem ourselves, but you have to stop second-guessing. You have to let yourself think.”

What Mercer thought was that in the distorting chrome of the bumper, with his stupid beard, he looked like someone who’d been turned inside out—superficially soft, but with a hard shell where his tissues should be, holding the emptiness in. He could hear the pop of balls jumping off bats in cages and a bored voice through a megaphone, They’re here, they’re weird, real live girls, and a spectral organ recalling something from his youth, though he couldn’t remember what. “You aren’t a bad person,” Jenny added gently, as if she could hear him.

“You know, people keep telling me that.” When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close. He wouldn’t be surprised if up there behind the yellow haze there were two or three moons, and mutually exclusive evening stars. But even in this strange new cosmos, was there not still something of the old one left? “I suppose there is one other thing we could try,” he said at last. “I’m just guessing you’re not going to like it.”

78

PULASKI HAD SUSTAINED NO SERIOUS INJURIES in last week’s fall. Or tumble, as he’d put it in the car on the long homeward loop from a downtown ER. Just a deep-tissue bruise in his thigh and, he joked, some surface abrasions to his pride. Sherri was unamused. Back in Port Richmond, with the engine ticking down, she’d twisted her hands on the customized steering wheel and stared through the windshield at the garage’s pegboard wall. Did he know what it felt like, to get that call? Did he have any idea what had gone through her mind, in the gap before the nurses put him on the line? She didn’t have to tell him, of course. Nor did she have to remind him that, with his condition, he could have filed for disability years ago. That his overlords at 1PP had set him up to fail; that he had no probable cause to search the house on East Third, or even to assume the Feds weren’t backward on this. There was no way they knew his city better than he did, and the carrot-topped kid he’d chased up Second Ave. could easily have been the lone member, or a product of Pulaski’s own need to believe.… When a minute had passed without Sherri saying anything, he realized it was his turn to speak. He suggested they call and see if the New Paltz place was still on the market. Then she was crying. “For Pete’s sake, Larry. I don’t want you to do this because I want you to. I want you to want to do it.”