City on Fire (95 page)

Pulaski, quizzical, was flipping through the folder on his desk, but the black guy interrupted him. “No, no, you’ve got to start after the pictures. The stuff about Billy Three-Sticks doesn’t come until the end.”

Pulaski flipped again, eyes racing ahead, and then, on one of the last pages, stopped. “Okay, at this point I’m really lost.” As was Charlie—lost, sleep-deprived, angry, and ashamed. But Pulaski seemed to be referring to the passage beneath his index finger. “The initials ‘NC’ could certainly point in a lot of directions, Nervous Charlie comes to mind, Not Credible, but what about this Demon Brother character? He’s a Hamilton-Sweeney?”

“William is a Hamilton-Sweeney,” the black guy said.

The lights dimmed briefly, but no one noticed. Not even Charlie, tripping over all the crossing wires. He was thinking now of pictures. Of missing eyebrows and maimed fingertips, stolen clocks. Smelling a chemical smell that had been there all along. Holy shit, was he slow. “No,” he heard himself say. “The Demon Brother is Nicky’s weapon. The Demon Brother is a bomb.”

There was a pause. Another flicker. From the black guy, a groan. Then Pulaski said, “Nice try, kid, but I’m buying exactly none of this. If you were out to kill Mr. Goodman’s friend, you’d shoot him. Or stab him, as Miss Nguyen would have it.”

It was unclear if the lady heard, or cared. “You’re making yourself so hard to believe, Charlie, you have to see that. Captain Chaos has a bomb?”

He did his best. “The, uh, detonation must have been planned for 7/7, I think, except for some reason it got pushed back a week.”

“Well, that’s just peachy. A week like ‘I’ll call you next week,’ or a week like seven days?”

“How should I know?”

“You see what I’m saying?” Pulaski said. “A murder plot, a bomb threat, and he can’t even improvise a date.”

The lady ignored him. “Because seven days from 7/7 would be 7/14. Which is tomorrow.”

“Or a few hours from now,” the black guy said.

“Okay, fine, midnight,” said Jenny Nguyen. “We can still alert the cavalry, Charlie, if you just say where they’re going to put it.”

He looked from face to face. To Pulaski’s doubtful face. And wondered at that moment if even his own face looked convinced. It was a curse, being stuck in here like this. Because honestly, he had no clue.

83

REGAN HAD PASSED THE HUGE COLOR-FIELD PAINTINGS here and in the Hamilton-Sweeney Building so many times they’d become simply a part of her mental furniture. But it said something about her brother (or about her understanding of him) that of all the things he’d had to renounce years ago, in that act of pride disguised as loyalty, the matched set of Rothkos had probably been the hardest for him to leave behind. She was halfway across the foyer when she saw he’d lagged behind to gape. “Are you coming?” she asked.

“Just give me a second.”

She stopped by a small window with a western view. The sun was low and huge, as if it had come to engulf New Jersey. No wonder it was so hot. “William!”

“Right behind you.”

As she turned to verify this, their voices dislodged a nut-brown woman from an adjacent hallway. Regan didn’t recognize her, nor did she seem to recognize Regan. But this was nothing new; Felicia had trouble hanging on to help. Asked about Daddy, the woman looked puzzled. “Daddy?”

“My father.”

“Mr. Ham?”

After some further negotiations, the woman led the way to the second floor and down a long corridor. It, too, seemed lifeless, but from the doorway at the far end leaked a trickle of voices. Regan was surprised to discover that one of them was her own. A large wooden television set had been dragged to the center of the defoliated library and connected to the wall by means of an extension cord. It was currently rebroadcasting the press conference from earlier today. Beyond it, in an armchair someone had pulled to the visitor’s side of the desk, her father sat in Bermuda shorts. Violet varicosities chased one another down his bluewhite legs. On one foot was a canvas deck shoe. The other was bare. The smell was aftershave bordering on gin. But what time was it? Surely the news would be over by now. “Daddy, what is this?”

“Regan? I was just watching you.” He patted the arm of his chair, as if she were still small enough to climb onto it. “You certainly know what you’re about, dear. Kept those bastards on their heels.”

She knelt on the rug in front of him and reached for his hands and tried to recall the last time she’d heard him curse. “Where is everybody? Where is your wife? You shouldn’t be drinking on top of your medicine, you know that.” Somewhere behind these concerns was an awareness that William hadn’t caught up to her, and that there was still time to prep Daddy for his reappearance. Unless it was William who needed prepping. How much a person could change, even in a couple months.… “You understand what we did today, right?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Amory was just explaining everything.” His eyes hadn’t left the television. Had he started hallucinating, on top of everything else?

“Amory isn’t here, Daddy.”

He blinked once or twice, as if roused from a dream, and turned and looked at the desk, the chair behind it, empty except for a videotape machine Regan thought she’d seen once at the production office where Café El Bandito commercials were edited. There was a momentary stutter in the picture. “Perhaps he’s gone to fetch my luggage. Felicia went down to open the summer place yesterday, after the latest envelope arrived from our lawyers. It’s a good idea that I be there these next few weeks while the state comes up with a better offer, don’t you think?”

“Where?”

“Block Island.”

“Is that what they told you? That there would be a better offer?”

“But Regan, you could come, too! You and Cate and …”

“Will,” she said, but he was lost again in TV. The French doors had been left open to let air in from outside. She moved toward the balcony half-expecting to see the tiny imago of her brother seventeen stories down, falling back to Columbus Avenue, having at the last minute changed his mind. Away and to the north, a few late planes or early stars glimmered inches off the horizon. The view would have been much the same from her living room in Brooklyn, where she should even now have been setting out the cheese plate, watching Andrew West peel the foil from a bottle of wine. A phone somewhere rang. Stopped. If this dragged on much longer, she’d have to call him to cancel. Then she listened, a deep listening that stretched to the farthest corners of the apartment, and down into the chasms of herself, where all was still. “Daddy?” How to break this to him. How to let a thing be broken. “I’m not here alone.”

“You brought Keith? Now there’s a young man I’d like to have a word with.”

She wished the gin she smelled were actually at hand. “Daddy, please—”

But there was a commotion from the interior of the apartment, loud enough to be heard over the television. “You stay here,” she said. “I’m going to see what it is.” She stepped through the eastern doors and onto the interior balcony that ran three sides of the reception hall. Without the several hundred people the room was meant to hold, it looked barren. One of the wet bars from New Year’s remained, however, and Amory Gould was standing behind it in an open-collared shirt. Or circling it, actually, highball glass in hand. Opposite him, also circling, was an unkempt figure brandishing a fireplace tool. Amory looked up at her. “My dear! Perfect timing! We were just about to have a drink!”

If he meant to create a diversion, it hadn’t worked. “You are the motherfucking devil,” the figure said, distinctly. But whatever came next was lost, because Daddy had appeared at her elbow to ask who that man was down there.

“It’s Amory,” she said, blushing. “You were right.”

“No, the hobo,” he said.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” she said. “That’s William, Daddy. That down there is your son.”

84

FIRST THE BOY WAS BLURTING THAT THERE WAS A BOMB; next he was claiming not to know where it was. But how, Jenny thought, could he not know, when her entire life had been leading toward this moment? Was it even possible to make this stuff up on the fly? Then the detective, who must have seen the look on her face, spoke up Solomonically. While it would have been nice to get a location for this suspect device, he said—easier that way to show the whole thing was a sham—Charlie had screwed up; the moment you mentioned a bomb, you obliged police to run down every last lead you’d given them. And the kid had already given a lot. With the protest breaking up downstairs, there’d be plenty of extra manpower to redeploy to the East Village, where Charlie had been observed last week. “If there’s something to turn up, we’ll turn it up. I’ll send a whole phalanx over to serve a warrant on his crash-pad, bring in anyone else we find.”

“What makes you think they’d talk to you?” the boy said.

Pulaski seemed well-meaning, as cops went, but she thought she sensed some minute adjustment of persona. “Charlie, not all of my colleagues are as patient as I’ve been with you today.”

“I’ll drink to that,” mumbled Mercer, dejected.

Well, if the poor guy wasn’t going to keep pushing, Jenny would; her own patience was long since shot. “I’m glad you’re taking some part of this seriously,” she told the detective. “But what about William Hamilton-Sweeney?”

“Who’s William Hamilton-Sweeney?” the boy asked.

“William Hamilton-Sweeney is Billy Three-Sticks.”

“Oy.” His head hit his hands.

“Well, that explains your being at the gala,” the detective said to Mercer. “But your friend’s a separate issue. The kid’s confabulating.”

“I am not. There’s a bomb out there. Why won’t you listen?”

I’m trying, Jenny thought. You’re giving me nothing. Yet around the boy remained a nebulous urgency only she seemed to feel. Out loud, she said: “Can we not walk and chew gum here? William’s still at large.”

“I’ll put in a word with Missing Persons”—Pulaski pointedly continued to address Mercer—“but I can’t say they’re known for speed. It’s a big city. That’s if this William of yours isn’t just on vacation. The bright side is, in the unlikely event someone did have it in for him, they wouldn’t be able to find him either. Did you try the family, on Central Park West? I’m sure our switchboard could run down a number.”

“William loathed his family,” Mercer said. “With cause.” The lights crapped out for a second.

“Reminds me of an old line they drummed into us at the academy, though. When you’re investigating a woman, look for whoever loved her; when it’s a man, hatred works just as well. And who’d be more worried if William Hamilton-Sweeney went missing? All drama aside, experience suggests anyone who was watching his old apartment would be working for the family. They may at least have some more recent whereabouts.”

“So why don’t you call the Hamilton-Sweeneys?” Jenny said. “You’re the detective.”

“Was the detective. My retirement comes through in the next couple weeks. Burning up resources on this other thing makes me look bad enough. I get tangled in the politics of the ultra-rich, they’ll probably keep me here forever, as punishment. Here, I’ve got a phone.” After a back-and-forth with the switchboard, he handed Mercer the receiver. Charlie had devolved into whimpers of frustration. Mercer waited to be connected.

“No one’s picking up.”

“Maybe you can try again later. But right now I’ve got to start in on my due diligence with Charlie here, so you folks are going to have to get out of my hair.”

“We do have the car,” Jenny found herself telling Mercer. “I guess I could drive you up there to talk to the Hamilton-Sweeneys.”

“Perfect,” Pulaski said, but it sounded to her ears like whatever. And as Mercer passed into the hall, she realized the folder was still on the desk.

“Don’t you want us to stick around?”

“If I have questions after a more thorough read, I know where Mercer lives. But I must have been crazy in the first place to have you two in the same room with the kid. So unless there’s something else on your mind …”

Jenny lingered in the doorway. The lonely boy looked up at her, then sank down even deeper into himself.

“Miss Nguyen?” the cop said.

“Oh, forget it,” Jenny said, because as long as Pulaski was responding with the full force of his office, who cared whether he was convinced of the threat?

The reasoning held while she followed Mercer out to the elevator bank, and (on second thought) down the stairs, and really right up to the moment she and Mercer stepped out of the building. But then her misgivings returned, redoubled, coalesced: the demonstration. Far from breaking up, it had spread to fill all available space. It was like a Kafka thing she’d read in college, a lone courtier entrusted with a dying king’s message, an empire too crowded to move through. The leading edge of the mass, pushing toward the line of cops at the doors, swept her forward and away. She thought guiltily about her own message, abandoned in that office, and the little seam between the two halves of the article—fuck, she should have remembered this earlier—but she was halfway across the plaza now, and it was getting harder and harder to go back. And that wasn’t even really the problem. The problem was that without a receiver, no message existed. Pulaski wasn’t stupid, he would see the overlaps with the boy’s story even if she didn’t point them out, but he would fit them to a reality that still came in discrete packages. Hell, who knew but that five stories up, those boxes still held. There had been a theft and then a shooting, that was clear. But what she’d seen in the folder, what had scared her so much in the first place, was what it couldn’t quite contain: a disturbance to the universe so vast as to connect Samantha Cicciaro and William Hamilton-Sweeney. A rupture so large it had already swallowed three lives. And which of these pictures fit the reality surrounding her now, the awakening, the human mess, the sea of flesh that would still be keeping Pulaski’s extra manpower busy at eleven p.m., or later? It had churned to a halt with half the plaza still before her, plus, beyond an archway through a building, the streets. These seemed to be the facts: out there somewhere was however much stolen gunpowder, ready to blow a hole commensurate with this madness. And she would be stuck here waiting. She could see people near the arch hoisting speakers onto stands, but what was left to want anymore? Then, as if in response, came a squeal, and an echo, and a voice she’d almost forgotten, looping obsessively back: