City on Fire (93 page)

Along the soot-dark tracks, up some stairs, and then left, down a corridor lined with movie posters. It was one of those weird hours in the transit system when the normal crowds disappeared, leaving behind only black pocks of gum and passageways that seemed to stretch out forever. Impossible to say whether it was his echoing footfalls that sent rats up ahead scurrying to their holes, or the sight of his Specter like a bad moon behind. Turning to check would only slow him down. Then his fingers were closing on the metal of the exit gate, which groaned into motion … and stopped. Thick loops of chain held the gate shut. His steps echoed all around.

He turned to defend himself. The Specter, halfway back along the flickering tunnel, held out his long hands, as one might to a badger backed into its hole. Particularly if one intended to soothe the badger just long enough to throttle it to death. William saw off to the side another exit gate, this one blessedly unchained. A downtown train was gathering force in a nearby tunnel, preparing to platform. He tried like hell to recall the layout of this station, but his brain was a block of cheese the rats had gnawed holes in. Or the junk that had promised to fill the holes had. He bolted, pushed through the turning gate and took the steps three at a time. At street level, he didn’t check for traffic before crossing; a car skidded, horns blared, someone called him an asshole, and then he reached the far side of Eighth Avenue. Down the downtown stairs, grasping in his pocket, please, let there be a token. And then he heard the gasp of an incoming train that had stopped one level down. He shot down the passageway, a cramp knifing between his ribs. He almost lost his footing on the steps, but made it onto the very last car of the train, where two black-hatted Satmars eyed him skeptically. He willed the doors to work. Oh please oh please oh please. And with a bing, they closed. Opened. Closed.

The Specter had made the platform, thinner now than in memory—William could see his shapeless fedora through the train’s rear window—but he was shrinking even further, until the blackness of the tunnel swallowed him.

THAT HAD BEEN AN EXPRESS TRAIN, William said, and he’d ridden it to the end of the line, too terrified to get off. He’d spent the night in a diner in Ozone Park, Queens, drinking refill after refill of coffee, watching the sun come up over the old textile factories. Mercer had been right. He didn’t know how to live. But how had he ever convinced himself that it was anything else he wanted? That he wasn’t terrified to die?

He hadn’t planned to go into such detail about all this with Regan, or about how hard it turned out to be to get into rehab—it would have felt too much like he was trying to impress her—but once he got going, he couldn’t stop. “It’s true. Demand exceeds supply. You need four straight positive piss tests to get into the methadone program on Fourteenth Street, like to prove you’ve got a problem or something. But by the third or fourth day, I wouldn’t have wanted to quit anymore. So I ended up going all the way out to Coney Island. I handed over my wallet and keys, they locked me in a rubber room for a week while they tried to get my dosage right. I know I should have been glad afterward, but what I felt was absolute grief. The first time they let me out unsupervised, I walked out to the beach and just lay down in the sand and cried. I don’t know if I ever really stopped.”

When he looked up, the color had drained from Regan’s face. She was twenty years old again. “But what about these people you say want to kill you, William?”

“That’s the thing, though,” he said. “I got off the methadone in June, and I’ve been staying at this halfway house in Sheepshead Bay. But I still go up to my studio in the Bronx sometimes to drop off stuff I might want to use, if I ever start painting again. Then last night, I find this demolition notice on the door there. And it smacks me that the whole time I was strung out, feeling hunted, the entire neighborhood was being razed around me. As a Blight Zone.” Regan crinkled her brow, like a judge hearing an argument. “Can’t you see it’s connected? The Liberty Heights development, that big fire in April, Daddy getting indicted, the hitman. And I think I know how to make it all stop. But this is where I need your help.”

Then her voice was doing the thing it always did: “William, I don’t see how I can help.”

“Sure you do,” he said. “You can get me in to see Daddy.”

80

SINCE THAT FIRST TIME IN JANUARY, unbeknownst to anyone, or even almost to himself, Keith Lamplighter had been returning at least once a month to the plastic chair next to the hospital bed. He’d slip in first thing in the morning, before work, anxious to avoid being spotted; his habit of signing in under a fake name indicated what a terrible idea this was. Not coming, though, was not an option. It wasn’t that he still expected Samantha to wake up, or that he even felt close to her anymore, but she was his responsibility, somehow, and these lonely vigils reached something in him that church wasn’t able to: the very thing the old kook with the shopping cart had pressed on with an ectoplasmic finger.

Now he hunched forward and clasped his hands together and tried to locate the transformation he’d felt dawning in himself after that encounter—like a back door opening in a dream. Déjala ir: Go to her? Go from her? Was he supposed to say goodbye to Samantha before he could get Regan back? Just tell me what to do, he thought. No, wait. Maybe that was the problem, right there. For as long as he could remember, his first thought had been only for himself. He would try putting someone else first and see what happened. He scrunched his eyes and bore down on the still-inchoate thing inside him. Show me how to help, he was thinking, or murmuring—Make me an instrument of your will—when he heard the rattle of loose change behind the privacy curtain, where the bed, every previous visit, had been empty.

He feared Samantha’s new roommate was having some kind of episode back there, but the emergency that greeted him when he pulled aside the curtain was a zitty kid in street-clothes, kicking off the sheets with his combat boots, some kind of implement in hand.

“Hey,” Keith said.

The kid didn’t have a bad face; beneath those pimples and the home-cut hair were features that posted feelings like a billboard. In this case, panic. He rolled off the bed, waved the thing in his hand around as if fending off demons, and darted toward the door. Keith, whose blocking reflexes had never really faded, moved to cut him off. Somewhat less pronounced were his skills as a wrestler, and so when he caught hold of an arm, sending the implement skittering across the floor, it was all he could do to keep the kid from going for it. “Hey! Calm down! Where’s the fire?”

“What fire?” The kid wouldn’t look at him.

“I’m saying, what’s the big rush?”

“If you don’t let go of me, I’ll scream for security.”

The kid squirmed free, but Keith reached the thing on the floor first. It was a switchblade handle, not even out of its sheath, black with a silver button. “Why should I worry about security? I’m not the one with a knife.”

The kid went a shade paler. “It’s for self-defense. I’m a friend of the patient’s.”

“Yeah? Me, too.”

“So how come I never heard of you?”

“Or acquaintance, is maybe the better word.” Now it was Keith’s turn to squirm a little. “You know what? I was just going to get food, so why don’t you stay here and visit? I insist.”

Hanging on to the kid’s weapon made this an easier sell than it might otherwise have been. He barricaded the door with his body until the kid had slunk back to the plastic visitor’s chair by Samantha’s bed. But something wasn’t right here—not least what happened when he tested the button on the blade. Keeping one eye on the room to make sure the kid didn’t leave, Keith stole over to the nurse’s station, temporarily vacant, and picked up the phone. There was no reason, really, for him to be carrying around the battered business card the reporter had pressed on him in February—to use it would be to acknowledge the role he’d played in Samantha’s life. But maybe he’d just been waiting for the right moment to give himself up. For now he dialed the printed number and prayed someone would answer, so that he could inform whoever he was, that there was someone here he might be awfully interested to meet …

81

THE FELLOW ON THE PHONE insisted on giving his name, but it wasn’t easy to hear, what with the cowbells and whistles, the tattoo of war drums outside. And though Pulaski could always have closed the window, the sound seemed to forbid it. He swiveled his chair into the slab of hot sun. Applied a thumb to one eyelid, an index finger to the other. Lamplighter. Lamplighter? “Do I know who that is?” Probably not, the caller admitted. But he was standing right now on the intensive care ward at Beth Israel Hospital, where he’d apprehended someone who might be of interest. And boom, there it was, Beth Israel. This wasn’t going to be one of your catch-and-release-type herrings, the palm-reader’s revelation, the suspicious van seen miles from any crime. Moreover: “Apprehended, did you say?”

Well, not exactly, the caller conceded, but he was standing right outside the Cicciaro girl’s room, which is where he’d stumbled upon a youth in hiding.

There was an electric squeal below, like metal on slate. Pulaski recognized it (with some satisfaction at how this would sit with the Deputy Commish) as a megaphone. The marchers had brought a megaphone. Next they’d be issuing demands. The whole seething mass seemed to hold its breath. “A youth?”

“Like a teenager. A boy.”

Pulaski squeezed again. “You want to describe him for me, please?”

The man on the phone saw like a man, with no real eye for detail, but each nudge—height? weight? complexion?—yielded more specifics, until the ellipses of unnamable color behind Pulaski’s eyelids became a greasy face framed by wrought iron. A head of red hair he’d seen last week on Second Avenue. “There’s really something fishy about this kid,” the caller concluded. “He had what looks like a knife.”

There’s something fishy about you having my direct dial, Pulaski thought, but this was coming at him too fast to stand on a protocol that in a week or two would no longer apply anyway. “All right. I’ll send someone over to bring the kid in for questioning. Meantime, try to make sure he stays put, would you? Buy him a Coke, call the guards, whatever. But Mr. Lamplighter—Lamplighter? Don’t get yourself hurt.”

Waves of percussion were swelling once more in the plaza below, and in the second before opening his eyes, Pulaski felt the strange serenity a fisherman must feel, sucked out to sea. He picked up the receiver again and ordered the girl on the switchboard to patch him through to the Thirteenth Precinct. From there, he scrambled a squad car to the hospital to bring in not only the boy, ASAP, but also the man who’d called. Then he lowered his face to the desk. What are you doing? Sherri would have asked. Letting himself slide back into some sort of mirror image, was what. Identical to his real life in every respect, only reversed, and minus a crucial dimension. Or maybe two, for hardly had his forehead touched the blotter when the intercom erupted at his ear. “Sir? You have visitors.”

“You can send them on back.”

Rallying, he watched the door for the first sign of the boy from the churchyard. What appeared instead was a Negro it took him a second to recognize. And, back in the shadows where the light had burned out, a small Oriental girl. Young woman, he was supposed to say. “It’s madness out there,” said Mercer Goodman. “I hope this isn’t a bad time. But you said on New Year’s, if anything should come to me …”

As at other moments of stupefaction, Pulaski’s instincts were what saved him. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, motioning them in. “Or about the mess.” It seemed unlike the Goodman kid to charge in first, but then, it had been months. The girl looked less sure of herself, picking her way through the maze of open-topped boxes. Attractive, though, in the casually androgynous way of women of her generation. Pageboy, bluejeans, a man’s white Oxford shirt buttoned to the wrist, a folder under one arm—she was what had come to Goodman, it seemed. Once upon a time Pulaski would have welcomed any new leads. The question now was whether, already one deviation away from his plan for the day, he could afford them. “Please, sit.” He’d have stood to help them move chairs but felt an urge to keep the girl from seeing his infirmity. “I’m in the middle of a few things, as you can see, but who’s your friend here?”

“This is Jenny Nguyen. You have a mutual connection, we think.” He waited. “Richard Groskoph?”

But that was the last name Pulaski wanted to hear! Give him Cicciaro, give him more on the boy … No, steady; keep control. “You were colleagues?” A guess, from her clothes.

“Neighbors,” she said quietly. “I inherited his dog, and some papers.”

Awful close for neighbors, then. Pulaski pulled an ancient cancer-stick from his center drawer and tapped the filter against the desk. He’d switched to the pipe long ago, but found cigarettes handy for staying in character, or building rapport. Or pausing to strategize. “I first knew Richard back when he was a beat reporter, and even then it was plain he was going places. One minute, you’d be picking out songs on the juke, the next you’d be telling him about some goldfish that died on you when you were thirteen. He was a past master at opening people up.” He addressed all this to Goodman mostly for the purpose of getting a better read on the girl. Once she’d softened a little, he turned to her. “I can’t tell you how sorry I was to hear what happened.”

Too soon, though; she was instantly back on guard. “This isn’t a condolence call.”

“We’re here because we need your help,” said Goodman. “He was writing something about the girl from the park New Year’s Eve—”

Of course, Pulaski thought. They needed his help. “—and ended up collaborating with the aspiring novelist who found her there, I suppose? After swearing he’d leave the shooting alone?” What galled him most was the presumption of these writer types, as if there weren’t actual people in the world, with jobs to do, appointments to keep, wives to appease, but only so much material. “I hope you’re bringing me the name of the shooter, because if all you two are doing is carrying on the Groskoph torch, I’m afraid we’re wasting each other’s time. An open case isn’t something I’m free to discuss. As Richard well knew.”