Our Lady Of Greenwich Village (2 page)

“I think,” said O'Rourke. “And I thank God I got out of this country with my life.” He went into the rear looking for Flaherty's ghost, but everything was quiet. The back room was as handsome as the front of the bar. It was all brick and dark wood. Three rows of dining tables ran from the twin front windows to the back, their shellacked surfaces gleaming as the sun struck them at sharp angles.

The room was indeed filled with ghosts. As he looked at the big, empty round table in the back he thought he could faintly hear the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem belting out “Brennan on the Moor.”

Then it materialized to him, clear as the day. All the regulars were gathered around Liam Clancy and his guitar like a bunch of boozy Dutch Masters:

There was Pinto and Flaherty, the hunchback was Hy Harris, the one with the loudest voice was ace journalist Dennis Duggan, the quiet one Frank McCourt, and the most earnest, off-key ones were actor Val Avery and barman Al Koblin. Was that young Bobby Zimmerman, Liam's acolyte, in the corner? Harris and Koblin, the two Jews in the bunch, actually knew the words. O'Rourke laughed. It always seemed that the non-Irish, especially the Jews, knew all the words to Irish rebel songs best. Then he could hear Koblin's tough Boston accent emanating from under that thick, droopy, Vonnegutian mustache: “The Moat,” he said with a crane of the neck, “is the only bar in New York where the Irish think like Jews and the Jews drink like Irish.” Once, thought O'Rourke, it was true.

The memories of those happy winter nights faded as he thought of Bobby Kennedy. O'Rourke had been the youngest Moat regular when he rang the bar and told them that Senator Kennedy was on the way down. The kitchen help immediately descended en masse on the men's room wall, scrubbing the salacious graffiti away, as if to protect the emotionally wounded senator. When O'Rourke heard the story days later he could only muse what a middle-class Irish respectable gesture it was. “Didn't have time to procure some lace curtains?” he inquired.

His mood darkened further as he looked to table number one, up front by the window. That's where the filthy deed was consummated. For it was there one early March night in 1968, that as a punk kid, he had sat at a table with Kennedy and pleaded with him to run for president.

“The hottest places in hell,” O'Rourke told Kennedy, as he threw one of the senator's favorite quotes in his face, “are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” O'Rourke's words—spoken with the rotten arrogance of the pure-ofheart—had clearly hurt the senator.

“You're right,” Kennedy said. “I'll have to run.” There was no joy in his voice, only dread at what he knew was coming.

O'Rourke should have just kept his fucking trap shut. But back then, he thought he had saved the world. Little did he know he had set in motion the first major hemorrhage of his soul. There were ghosts here, all right, but they were not talking to O'Rourke right now. They were letting him stew.

“Too bad about Hogan,” he said, coming back to the bar.

“The lung cancer,” said Shipman, lighting up another unfiltered Camel in defiance of the city's anti-smoking law, “actually metastasized into his testicles.”

“Jesus,” said O'Rourke.

“They had to snip them off.”

“What happened to Barney?”

“You won't believe this,” said Shipman. “The dog got cancer of the balls, too.”

“Sounds like sympathy balls.”

Shipman looked at O'Rourke for a second, then began to laugh. “You still have that vicious sense of humor, I see.”

“Did they snip Barney?”

“No,” said Shipman, “they put him to sleep. But they buried them together in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, within a stone's throw of mobster Albert Anastasia. The mayor himself cut through the red tape to get the dog in.”

“You're shitting me.”

“It's the truth,” said Shipman, pointing to the framed Cyclops Reilly article on the wall. O'Rourke got up to take a closer look at Reilly's “Eye on New York”
Daily News
column: DRUG BUSTING DUO REUNITED IN DEATH. There was a photo of a big coffin and a little coffin about to be lowered into the ground. A priest stood to the side, sprinkling the boxes with holy water. Reilly's piece started out, “I don't care if it rains or freezes, Hogan and Barney will be safe in the arms of Jesus.” O'Rourke started to laugh. “Cyclops doing okay?”

“He's the best,” said Shipman. “You made him a star. He won that Pulitzer covering your campaign, and now he's on TV all the time. Yeah,” he said, laughing at the thought, “you made him a pundit.”

O'Rourke laughed, too. “Who would have thought it?” he said. “The pervasive and invasive power of television. The instrument that turns American minds to dust.”

They both looked up at the TV, which was muted. Stock prices ran on a grid on the bottom; above it a generic blond news jockey was yakking away.

“Where do they find them?” said O'Rourke, gesturing toward the TV anchorman. “If he was any blonder, he'd be transparent.”

“They miss you,” said Shipman. O'Rourke shook his head. “The cable networks.”

O'Rourke laughed, thinking about the summer of his infamy eight years ago. It wasn't that long ago, but it seemed a century or more to O'Rourke. “You know, the cable networks still call me in Wexford.”

“What do you do?” asked Shipman.

“I hang up.”

There was silence broken only by the ship's clock striking the hour. Finally, Shipman asked the hard question. “Was it worth it?”

O'Rourke reflected back to the late winter of 2000 and thought about what he had gotten out of it. “Yes, Saul,” he said slowly, “I think it was.”

A
t 1:15 a.m. the telephone rang at the City Desk of the
New York Daily News
. “Henry Fogarty?” the voice asked.

“Yeah,” said Fogarty, “this is he.”

“Fogarty, this is Officer Tessa of the Sixth Precinct. I'm in St. Vincent's Hospital in the Village.”

Fogarty began scribbling the information. “Yeah?”

“I was told by Cyclops Reilly that if I ever got a hot tip, I should call you.”

“Cyclops told you that?”

“Yeah.”

“So?”

There was silence on the wire. Tessa was getting impatient. He didn't realize that Fogarty was already negotiating. “You want to listen to me, or do I call the
Post
?” asked Tessa. More silence.

“What you got?”

“I just got bribed three hundred dollars by Georgie Drumgoole, Congressman Swift's press secretary, and—”

Fogarty interrupted: “You don't have to tell me that. You are protected by the Fifth Amendment.”

“Don't be such a smart ass, Fogarty. I might have a bit of a scoop for you,” retorted Tessa.

“You mentioned Jackie Swift, I believe.”

“Yes, he's here,” said Tessa.

“Why?”

“Heart attack.”

“What the big deal? Lots of folks, including congressmen, have heart attacks.”

“Apparently he had it while ballin' his chief of staff. There's a cover-up going on here. Could be another Bill and Monica.”

Cover-up, thought Fogarty. Since Watergate, everything was a fucking cover-up. It had gotten to the point that the media was making up stories so some dumb politician could try to cover them up. The gotcha mentality, Fogarty called it.

“Bill and Monica are ancient history as far as I'm concerned,” said Fogarty. “Anyway, thanks.”

“Whatdaya mean, thanks? Cyclops told me you would pay.”

“Well, Reilly was wrong.”

“You want I should go to the
Post
?” Tessa asked. “Remember HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR?” Fogarty winced at the memory of the headline. “This story is right up Rupert Murdoch's alley,” continued Tessa. “Fucking
Post
will have a photographer up here in three minutes. Ya wanna let that rag scoop you?”

Fogarty's problem was his personality—or, more specifically, the lack of one. No one, it seems, ever called him Hank. He was not one to joke or have a beer with the boys after the paper went to bed. He had worked for the
News
since Eisenhower was president, yet no one had ever remembered seeing him in the late, lamented Costello's Bar on East 44th Street.

Though he was an emotional cold fish, Fogarty was also a talented and insightful reporter. His personality, talent, and a drunken city editor by the name of Shitty Collins had conspired in 1957 to give him his sobriquet, Peccadillo. Shitty Collins cared about two things: newspapers and drink—and not necessarily in that order. Collins knew talent, and Fogarty had it. Collins also knew how to hang onto his job. In a strange way, the two had taken to each other. Collins gave Fogarty the choicest assignments, and Fogarty's work made Collins look good in the eyes of his superiors. Fogarty was becoming a star, with his byline frequently—too frequently, the gang at Costello's thought—appearing on page three. When one of the rewrite men got into a fight with Collins and mentioned the alleged favoritism between Collins and Fogarty, Collins had condemned the reporter and praised Fogarty in a gin-soaked voice loud enough for the whole city room to hear: “Your sins are mortal compared to Fogarty's peccadilloes.” Unfortunately, a just reprimand and a statement in support of Fogarty's skill had created a nickname that at first had been reduced to Pecker and then Peck. Fogarty had suffered silently, if not saturninely—which was his natural state—and had just about survived all his contemporaries, including Collins, who was killed one evening soon after when he had emerged from the old News Building on East 42nd Street under the influence and fell into an open subway grate. A loner in his personal life also—he was another one of those eternal Irish bachelors—Fogarty, his legs shot, had pulled his green eyeshade over his forehead, and retired to the City Desk and the telephone. Even with all the newspaper strikes and labor strifes, the
News
could not get rid of him. “Never met a buyout he liked,” they said about Peccadillo Fogarty. He was known to be judicious, circumspect, and cheap. Nothing got by Fogarty. He wasn't about to let a congressman whom he didn't particularly like get by him either.

“No, I'm not going to let that rag scoop me, Tessa. How much?”

“If Swift'll offer three hundred to shut me up, another three hundred from you sounds fair.”

“One hundred sounds fairer,” replied Fogarty.

“Two,” shot back Tessa.

“One-fifty. Take it or leave,” snapped Fogarty. He loved it. If there was one thing he hated more than shady congressmen, it was crooked cops.

“One-fifty. You're all heart, Fogarty,” said Tessa.

“That's me,” replied Fogarty. There was silence on the line.

“I'll take it,” Tessa finally replied.

“I thought you would,” said Fogarty. Tessa didn't know it, but Fogarty always gave his tipsters $150. It was in his petty-cash budget. “Just don't go away. I'll find Cyclops and send him over. I got forty minutes before the four-star final closes. I'll try to find him.”

Fogarty knew exactly where Reilly was. He dialed Hogan's Moat.

“Cyclops Reilly. Telephone!” Zeus, the ursine Moat barman, called out over the crowded Friday night bar. Reilly was in great shape. He was sure that he was about to get laid and he didn't particularly want to be disturbed.“Yeah?”

“Cyclops, it's Fogarty. You got to help me.”

“What you want?”

“Jackie Swift was just brought into St. Vincent's with a heart attack.”

“Big deal,” said Reilly, who looked like a pissed-off Richard Widmark. As he cradled the phone on his shoulder, he pushed his slicked-back blond hair into place and played with one of his out-ofstyle Elvis sideburns.

“He was fucking his chief of staff when it happened.”

“The chief of staff a boy?”

“No. Of course not,” said Fogarty, although the thought hadn't crossed his mind. Reilly was good—if you could keep him away from the booze and the broads. “Cyclops,” said Fogarty in desperation, “we live in the Age of Clintonian Fellatio. This could be big.”

“The Age of Clintonian Fellatio,” said Reilly, laughing. “You're beginning to sound like Eric Fucking Sevareid. I like that, but I bet Clinton's getting more pussy than JFK ever got.”

“You think?” said the skeptical Fogarty.

“What's the big deal?” stammered Reilly. “Is there a story here?”

“There is,” said Fogarty, “if New York City's most reactionary Republican congressman is having sex with someone other than his wife or his hand.”

“Good point,” conceded Reilly.

“Look, we got the scoop on this one. They bribed your cop friend Tessa three hundred dollars, and he called and filled me in. Get up there, please, Cyclops, and get me a statement from Drumgoole for our last orgasm, which closes in thirty-five minutes.”

“Well ...” said Reilly who almost smiled at the term “orgasm,” which only an old-timer like Fogarty would use instead of “edition” to show his love of the newspaper business.

“I wouldn't like to be scooped on this one by the
Times
,” said Fogarty, who knew how to push Reilly's buttons.

“The
New York Cocksucking Times
!” yelled Reilly into the phone. Reilly hated the
Times
—or the
Cocksucking Times
, as he always referred to them. He had worked for them for six months and he considered them to be not only trite, but anti-labor and anti-New Yorker. “The only strike they ever supported,” Reilly would tell one-and-all, “was in fucking
Poland
!” By now Reilly was shouting into the phone. “I will not be preempted by the
New York Cocksucking Times
,” he told Peccadillo Fogarty as bar patrons backed away from him in fear.

“I'll owe you one,” said Fogarty.

“Okay. I'll get back to you.”

With that he went back to the bar to see the lady whom he was seriously chatting-up when Fogarty had called. She was a blonde from Akron, Ohio, and her name was Paige. She had a wholesome Midwestern face, which radiated innocence as she listened to Cyclops. Reilly knew that she was a “professional virgin,” the type that would coo “no, no, no”—then after four drinks demanded that you fuck her to exhaustion. Reilly had met her about an hour before and they had hit it off immediately. He kept buying her drinks and dazzling her with his newspaper exploits which lately, because of his great affinity with Declan Cardinal Sweeney and the management at the
News
—he had been one of the union point men during the strike—had been reduced to reporting which restaurants in Manhattan and Brooklyn had rat shit in their kitchens. She could play the expert innocent, but Reilly had noticed that she had certain callipygian talents. In fact, she had an ass on her like a wombat. Reilly relished a good sexual challenge.

When he returned from the telephone Reilly explained to her how important he was to the
News
and how he had to run out on this hot tip. Would she wait for him another hour? “Sure,” said Paige as she pulled him close and shot her tongue into his ear. “Why do they call you Cyclops?”

Reilly laughed. In one motion he popped his glass eye out and covered the open white eye-pit with a black patch. He deftly dropped the glass eye into his vodka on the rocks. “Keep an eye on my drink, will ya?” he called over his shoulder as he left the bar. He exited onto Christopher Street and started on the quick walk to St. Vincent's. Five minutes later he was conferring with Officer Tessa.

“What's the scoop, Gino?”

“I'm here with a hit-and-run victim, and I see Swift. Drumgoole—who seems to have half a bag on—sees me, turns white, and sticks three big ones in my pocket, saying, ‘You ain't seen a thing, Officer.' Ambulance attendant tells me Swift's had a heart attack while balling his cute little chief of staff.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Girl, of course. Ambulance guy,” Tessa continued, “says they were having a hell of a party.”

Reilly's ears shot up like a trained hunting dog's. “Party? What kind of party?”

“Don't know. Just a party,” returned Tessa.

“Where is he?” Reilly asked.

“Off duty. Gone for the night,” said Tessa. “What do you think?”

Reilly didn't know what to think. “Ah,” he said, “our Family Values candidate succumbs. Hypocrite. I'll say this for Peck Fogarty, the old fart's got a nose for news. How much you get from him?”

“Son of a bitch Jewed me down to one-fifty. He drives a hard bargain.”

“Four-fifty—still not a bad night, Gino. Where the fuck is Drumgoole?”

“In the emergency ward.”

As Reilly walked down the long hall he knew there must be something to this story, especially if that cheapskate Fogarty had promised some cop $150 over the phone. He was stopped by a hospital security guard, flashed his press card, and forged ahead. He was beginning to feel that Joseph Pulitzer had nothing on him.

Reilly headed straight for the ER, which he knew from when he was shot up in a bank heist in Chelsea in 1986. The robbers had tried to break out by having a running gunfight with the NYPD Tactical Force and had ended up winging Reilly in the shoulder. He was lucky he didn't bleed to death right there on 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue. Reilly hated hospitals, from the one in Saigon where they had removed what was left of his eye to the VA hospitals in New York where he had been an out-patient. But if he ever had to be in a hospital, he hoped it would be St. Vincent's. He would never admit it, ever, but that crucifix on the wall still meant something to him, and he got a kick when one of the old Sisters of Charity had come to visit the famous newspaper man who had ended up on page one of the
Daily News
.