City on Fire (92 page)

He peeled her hands off the wheel, cradled them between his awful claws. “I do want to do it,” he said.

Now that he’d submitted the paperwork, he even found that it was true. Pulaski hadn’t realized how twenty-five years of work could tax a body, or how restorative it could be to start boxing up an office. At the bottom went anything from the mounds of files he’d be taking with him. Next came the velveteen cases to which his special pens returned, disassembled, and his hardwood pipe. Then the pictures. Other people kept photos of their kids; Pulaski had Sherri and Pope Paul VI and his late mother. The last dozen boxes were for books. He’d amassed a substantial library over the years, through a mail-order service he kept forgetting to cancel. The Time-Life History series. It had been the uniform and color-coded spines that had first caught his eye when he’d seen the special trial offer in the back of the TV Guide. He’d been meaning to repopulate the built-in bookcases he’d inherited from the previous Deputy Inspector. You needed books, if only to remind the subordinates who would be the only people to see the inside of your office that you knew more than they did. Over the years, though, he’d discovered that he liked to read them, too. To be a cop at this late date in history was to be, by definition, a nostalgist; beyond the big window at his back, the streets were humming, anarchic, yet still every morning he’d taken up badge and revolver, pledged to defend laws laid down mostly before he was born. And even as he should have been bundling them into boxes, he found himself wanting to linger over the books one last time, as if saying goodbye to the friends of his youth. The Mughal Empire. Pagans of the British Isles. Probably he was just tired.

But now the hum from the open window started to seem more like chanting. He used the edge of his desk to swivel himself in his chair. The view was unchanged—water towers and the strutwork of the bridge—but when he craned to the right, a column of tiny people was flowing into the pedestrian plaza below. Heads seemed to lift toward Pulaski’s window. Distance blurred their chants, so he couldn’t quite hear their demands. For weeks now, he knew, “Dr.” Zig Zigler had been hectoring his listeners to reclaim their city, but to no effect—until today. And reclaim it from what, from chaos? Pulaski wanted to laugh. The protest itself was chaos, and anyway, it couldn’t reach him now. Or was all this just, as he’d once imagined, the mask worn by some deeper order? Because just at the moment when Larry Pulaski was about to shut the window and finish packing, the phone began to ring.

79

SHE WAS OLDER BY THREE YEARS, but around the time when William’s patchy memories had fused into the single, continuous individual now before him—which is to say, in the afterburn of their mother’s death—he’d decided that Regan was in need of his protection. In the Park, where Doonie took them afternoons, he’d fought the other boys off no matter the game: Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, Peter Pan. A shrink might have had interesting things to say about this. There was, e.g., the possibility that the woman up there at the front of the fortieth-floor press room, lit up for the cameras, had in fact been his protector. But William believed that psychoanalysis was at best a collection of insights you could figure out on your own, and at worst hippie-dippie bullshit. It had been one of the reasons he’d felt so threatened by Mercer’s attempt to get him help there at the end, he was remembering, when a flashbulb in the vicinity of his elbow saved him from having to remember any more. They’d reached the Q&A portion of the press conference, and though Regan’s prepared statement had been perfectly straightforward, etiquette demanded that the reporters pretend they’d just been made privy to some shocking new development. A blond Ken doll with shoulder-length hair (had Daddy’s standards slipped?) pointed into the crowd and then the clamor died and one of the reporters repeated his question. Cameras turned. Turned back. William knew of pawnshops where a news camera could have fetched several hundred bucks. But no, what interested him, psychologically speaking, was the sense of continuity itself, the mind’s insistence that this was the same Regan he’d known when he was eight; had anything befallen her, the Regan he lost would have been the one who’d perched on the black rocks of the park back then, with all her futures inside.

His arm had started to tingle from being held aloft so long, or maybe it was just the last spasm of withdrawal, when the guy finally called on him. “Yeah. Freddy Engels. Daily Worker,” William said. He made no effort to consult an imaginary steno pad. Just crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “My readers want to know, how much money has the parent company already wasted on the defense, and will it lead to sail-trimming at the various subsidiaries?”

Regan squinted against the light. He was sure she recognized his voice, despite the fact that it was scratchy from vomiting. Siblings knew these things. There had been months in the past when he’d felt her fretting about him from afar. Years when he’d known she was dying inside. She covered the mic with her hand and whispered something to the man, like a mobster at a RICO hearing. The man leaned forward. “I think that will be all for the question and answer period.” There was another perfunctory clamor, and the bursting of flashbulbs, and under cover of brightness, William ducked out into the hallway to wait.

The Hamilton-Sweeney Building, despite its height, dated to the dark ages before air-conditioning, and updates to this part of the floor looked unfinished. His great-grandfather had evidently subscribed to the idea that marble had cooling properties, but on days like this one, the dog-slaying, hydrant-bursting, power-sucking July days, marble seemed instead to trap the heat, and all the fans could do was blow it around. On a window-washer’s platform outside an open window, a pair of birds did their best to avoid unnecessary motion, but when William went over to see what kind they were, they took wing, as if they knew better than he did what was in his heart. Swooping out over the parks and streets, Madison, Park, Lex, they achieved an improbable beauty. But around them rose high-rises that hadn’t been here when he was a kid, thousands more people crammed into boxes, and off beyond that two towers wavering in the haze. It seemed impossible that mortals had built all this. Men would be the size of fruit flies up there, battering themselves against the locked heavens. More likely, thought William, the towers had been quarried whole out of granite, and somewhere in Vermont twin holes plunged a thousand feet into the bedrock.

Then his sister said behind him, “You’ve got some nerve. And you can’t smoke in here.” She tried to snatch the cigarette from him but he fended her off. Reporters spilled from the press room, breached the quiet. She waited for them to pass. “Honestly, William, it’s like you just learned to walk around on your hind legs,” she continued, when they were gone. “And you look like death warmed over. But you know what?” She put up her hands. “I’m not getting sucked into this again, after your whole tantrum of renunciation. I’m a busy person.”

“I embarrass you.”

“Don’t pretend that’s not exactly what you were trying to do just now.”

You love it, he wanted to remind her. You love me. But she was already halfway to the elevator, and he wondered again if there was something wrong with his memory. He looked at her and still saw Princess Tiger Lily grateful for her rescuer, but apparently his refusal to grow up was no longer an asset. “I’m sorry,” he said now.

“Like hell you are. You’ve never been sorry. That’s the whole problem.”

“About everything.”

She turned to scrutinize his face, wondering what “everything” might mean. He wondered himself. Sometimes things just came out. “What is it you want, William? You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want something.”

Touché, he thought, as the elevator doors rolled back to reveal a plump woman in plaid who held a rubber plant. William would just as soon have waited for the next car, but Regan was already squeezing in on one side of her, so he took the other. Scratched steel gave back his reflection. Regan was right, he was no Valentino. He’d lost weight, and there were little red slits where his lips were cracking. He needed a shave. He didn’t smell fantastic, either.

The plaza at the foot of the building bulged with humanity, women one-handing food from vendors while packs of jacketless young men checked them out. “You grabbing a late lunch?” he said. “Because this is perfect. You can take me, we can talk.”

“If you wanted to talk, William, the time was four months ago. Things have gotten a little hectic since then. Or did you not hear the press conference?”

“It doesn’t have to be lunch.” He scanned again to make sure he wasn’t being followed. “We could get coffee instead. Your treat.”

“I don’t have time for this. I have a life, you know. I’m meeting someone for dinner.”

“Good for you. I always had my doubts about what’s-his-name.” He knew Keith’s name, of course; it was only that he couldn’t help himself. But as she turned away, a belated shame broke over him. This was where he’d been supposed to be by thirty, one of these janissaries of the corporate state. Instead, he’d spent much of the spring on the nod in his studio, surrounded by what most people would have called trash. Even now, three and a half weeks clean, he kept collecting whatever municipal signage might fit under his cot at the halfway house, and then smuggling it up to the Bronx. To persist in a project you know seems crazy: Did this mean you were crazy, or the opposite?

Just then, the woman from the elevator trundled over to a trashcan already overtopped with junk and deposited her rubber plant at the center. “Hey!” William bounded across the plaza, jostling his way past secretaries and bankers. “Hey! What are you doing?”

“It’s dying,” she said.

“Well, that’s no reason to throw it away.”

The woman shot him a look of purest contempt. He was formulating something nasty to say to her when his sister caught up with him. “Have you lost your mind?”

It had been Mercer’s question, too, but Regan had a way of making him second-guess himself. He might even have apologized to the fat lady, had she not already melted into the glassy heat. “It’s money, isn’t it?” Regan said. “If it’s money, just ask for money. Don’t put me through this.” You assumed whatever was vivid to yourself was vivid to others, and vice versa, but she was going to make him spell it out, for the first time in either of their lives.

“If you must know, Regan, what I came for is your help.” Then he plucked the rubber plant from the trash and, with a great and beleaguered dignity, headed west. He didn’t stop to see if she’d followed. Didn’t stop, in fact, until he reached a bench under the dried-out sycamores behind the Forty-Second Street library.

“Fifteen minutes,” she said, taking off her watch and setting it between him and the rubber plant. “That’s all you get.”

“I don’t understand why you’re so angry.”

“What do you want me to say? Oh, thank God, my brother’s finally decided he’s ready to receive me? Life doesn’t work like that, William. You don’t get to just disappear for however many years and then come click your ruby slippers and make it all go away.”

“Now you know how I felt when you showed up at my place that night.”

“I wasn’t the one who ran away!”

She was being obtuse on purpose, he thought. She’d known every time he’d come to a family dinner drunk or stoned, and had known almost before he’d known it himself that he was queer. So how could she not now see the hell he was going through? “Listen. I didn’t mean that about Keith. I’m sorry you’re having problems.” He worked the edge of a scab of paint under a fingernail and tugged at it, thinking of needles probing his toes. “Maybe we’re just fundamentally destined for unhappiness.”

“I don’t see the point in looking at things that way, William. It’s adolescent.”

He could feel his tongue swelling in his mouth, his knucklebones aching for that sweet relief he would never feel again. “I’m saying, when you look at this family, you’re getting divorced, I’m thirty-three and my life is basically defunct … Sort of makes you wonder, is all.”

“If this is what we deserve?”

“That’s not what I mean, Jesus. If anything, the reverse. I mean no matter what you deserve, how far you run, your fate stays stuck to your heels.” Her eyes were glistening, but for some reason he couldn’t reach out and touch her. It was like some gestures were so simple they were beyond him. “Hey, stop feeling sorry for me for a second, okay?”

“It’s not you I feel sorry for, jerk. Have you ever thought about what it would do to Daddy if something happened to you? What it would do to me?”

Everybody had to die sooner or later, he said. And Daddy would be relieved.

Apparently William didn’t understand anything. Anything.

“Well, I’m glad to hear you say that,” he said. “Because, as it happens, this thing I need your help with is that somebody’s trying to kill me.”

She sniffed. Smiled a little despite herself. “You always did have that effect on people.”

“No, I’m serious.” And he proceeded to tell her as much as he knew.

AFTER THOSE LATE-NIGHT PSYCH-OUTS on the streets of deepest Brooklyn and the one verifiable run-in in Times Square, William’s stalker had taken up position somewhere near the border between waking life and dreams, which, given the amount of dope William was into at the time, were hard enough to tell apart anyway. All it took was someone unusually tall in his peripheral vision, a sense of moving shadow, and he’d feel sure the Specter—he’d taken the name from a comic he used to read—had tracked him down again. He’d spin around to find only a rustling tree, or a splash of shade in the shape of a face on a parked car’s windshield. But then some friend or neighbor (to the extent that he still had any) would mention that a guy flashing a press credential had come around, asking about him by name. Or rather, by his handle.

One evening at the end of April, after a week or two of this, he was riding a near-empty train back uptown from Union Square when he spotted the Specter peering through the doors between cars. Or possibly another Specter, dressed similarly in a sportcoat and hat. In any case, this time, he was real. How had William known? The height, for one thing: that head rising to block the light. And the messy salt-and-pepper beard hiding the mouth. Most frightening, through the smeary glass, were the eyes. They were somehow too intelligent for this Specter to be a narc, as William had thought. Yet somehow swimmy, damaged. Remote. As if they’d already bored through to the obverse side of the canvas. And then he understood that this man had come to send him there. To kill him. A bell dinged. The subway doors slid back, or one of them did, its twin being stuck in place. The junk he’d sampled downtown had turned to lead in his veins. He could have sat there, let it consume him, and was even in some ways so inclined, but there must have been beneath all the dead weight something still alive in him, and when it spoke, it was in Mercer’s voice: Run. As the communicating door racketed back he lurched through the narrow gap that placed him on the platform. He knew better than to look back.