Woman Who Loved the Moon (20 page)

In the eighth month his breasts began to grow and ache and his cock to shrink. He understood: his body was making a pathway for the baby. His depression vanished. He went back to the bookstore and bought books on natural childbirth. Sara and Tony helped him do the exercises and learn the breathing techniques. His sisters had a fight over whether or not he should go to the hospital. Nancy stopped speaking to him or to Ruth. But one day she called him, crying, to tell him she loved him and that he should do whatever he wanted to do, that he would always be her baby brother.

He went into labor one night at home. Sara called a woman she knew from a midwife collective to help. Tony counted and rubbed his back and yelled at him to breathe. The labor went on for a long time; he fell asleep in the middle of it (not a real sleep, just a drowse) until the contractions woke him up. The baby was born in the afternoon, in the sun, and named Kris. It was his mother’s name. Sara pointed out it was short for Krishna. He could not remember when Ruth and Nancy had arrived, but they were there. The midwife praised them all for their spirit, and gave them the name of a pediatrician. It did not seem to him that it could be over. He rubbed his nipple against the baby’s tiny lips.

When the doctors finally came around to check on him, he pretended to be his own (nonexistent) brother. He told them that he had moved away. They seemed relieved to hear that. They shook his hand. The woman doctor smiled at Kris.

After that nobody came to ask questions. He lost all the weight that he had gained during the pregnancy. His cock regained its normal size. Except for the stretch marks and the darkened wide aureoles of his breasts there was nothing to show that he had been pregnant. Under Jorma’s tutelage, Kris began to call him Da and not Ma.

The orange caftan hung shapeless and unused in the closet. He took it out one day, meaning to give it to Ruth to make into a shirt. The smell of it was familiar and interesting. He put it on, and wore it like regalia around the studio, till one of his sisters commented unmaliciously that it made him look swish. The word offended. He took it off again, and when he went to look for it some months later it had disappeared.

Obsessions

I have a bad habit of straddling categories. (Or, in some cases, of abandoning them altogether.) This story, however, appeared in an anthology which itself straddled categories:
Dark Sins, Dark Dreams,
a science fiction/crime anthology, the creation of Bill Pronzini and Barry Malzberg. At the time I wrote it there had been a lot of arson in San Francisco. Much of it was (much of it
is
) professionally devised, arranged by the owners of the decaying property for the insurance money. Often the buildings are still being lived in.

Barry and Bill, with my permission, changed the title of the story to “The Fire Man.” I have changed it back. The story troubles me; I’ve reworked it over and over, and can’t help feeling that there’s something missing in it. It’s the only one of my stories with which I am strongly dissatisfied.

* * *

Tony Dellara knew that he was being watched.

In the middle of a torching, nothing disturbed him. He went about his work with a specialist’s precision. Firemen in their asbestos rigs, sweating in the sun, were a familiar annoyance; the presence of a stranger in civvies an ignorable one—but sharper. He distrusted observers in suits.

He poured a gasoline trail down the Victorian hallway, and sight-checked the windows. No glass. Once they had stopped him halfway through because some marshal had missed a stained-glass window. This was the last house—the trigger house. Soon the block would erupt, a small nova, to flare inward and burn to ash. Up on Parnassus Heights, the poured-concrete buildings of the hospital leered at him. We’re safe, they said. We’re not wood. Lording it over a valley of wreckage. Devastation Row.

One of us will get you, he thought. Wind, water, fire, or the earthquake. You won’t stand.

He tucked an end of soft rope into a crack of the wooden oil-soaked floor, and began to back up, unrolling it. His arms and legs were aching with tension, and the gasoline smell was making his throat catch. With painful self-discipline Dellara forced himself to slow down, to pace the yards out. If they would only let him work at night—the sight, the sound of flames against the night sky!

Far enough. He took a box of kitchen matches from his pocket, and fumbled one out. The sizzle and flare as it caught calmed him rock-steady. He touched the flame to the end of the cord, and watched it travel across the bare earth up to the door of the house. Kneeling, he laid his head on his knees, cloth rough on his face, and rocked, back, forth, back, forth...

It caught. Air bellowed as it rushed into the house, drawn through window and door frames by the sucking fire. The firemen moved back a little. The visitor went with them. Tony Dellara knelt, watching the conflagration.

When he was sure that no power short of the hand of God could put the fire out, he stood up. Home now, to an old rooming house on Buena Vista, a firebug’s gingerbread dream. From its windows he could see the rubbish that was downtown San Francisco. The quake had ripped the city like rotten cloth, toppling its towers: Coit Tower, Transamerica, the Hilton, and leaving the wreck of the Bay Bridge scattered over Treasure Island like the bones of a beached whale. The Golden Gate still stood; the city’s symbol. No one used it now. Its approaches were down.

It gleamed orange in the sunlight, like his fire.

Now there was time to check out the stranger. The man’s head was cocked back; he was watching the fire. Tony strolled over to Lee Harris, the chief marshal. Mostly the firemen ignored him: some of them, Tony guessed, feared or despised or envied him. Lee Harris, for reasons he never needed to voice, hated the arsonist’s guts. “Nice day,” he said. “No wind.” Lee nodded. “Department being investigated?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“The dude in a suit. He’s been watching pretty close.”

Lee grinned tightly. “He’s watching
you,
Dellara. He’s some big shot from Recon, name of Susman. Think they’re going to take you off the job?”

“Maybe,” Tony said softly. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, you bastard. He repeated to himself, as he walked away: “Susman. From Recon.”

* * *

Jake Susman walked into Marta Riordan’s office.

“Claudia, is she in?” he demanded.

The secretary looked at him coldly. She did not like him. She knew he wanted Marta’s job. “She’s in, Mr. Susman. She wanted an hour free to get some work done, and she’s getting it.”

Jake sighed. “Please call me when the hour’s up.” He went back to his desk. He shuffled papers, emptied the overflowing ash tray, put a file away. He read the top paper on the pile on his desk, buried it under six reports, and then fished it out again. He could take it to Marta. “We, the undersigned, respectfully petition the Department of Urban Reconstruction to exempt from its program blah-blah, blah-blah.” A house on Duboce, near Noe, built in 1886, still standing. He knew what she would say. No.

When Claudia called him, he walked in holding the petition before him like a shield. “What d’ya think?”

Marta took it, looked at it, and laid it down on the desk. “Why waste my time with this crap?” she said.

“I know the area—I live there. It’s right near Franklin Hospital. That block’s in pretty good shape.”

“You want me to approve it? Okay, Jake. Now—what do you really want to talk about?”

She had short black hair and classic Irish skin, like cream. The jade pendant the office staff had given her for her thirtieth birthday matched the green of her eyes.

“Come to dinner with me tonight?”

“No, Jake.”

“You’ll have to say yes sometime.”

She shrugged. He gave it up, slapped his pockets for his cigarettes, and then ostentatiously folded his hands on his lap. “It’s about your pyrotechnics experiment—Tony Dellara.” She raised her eyebrows. “I watched him Friday morning.” He wished Marta allowed smoking in her office. He suddenly needed something to do with his hands.

“Odd occupation for a day off.”

“He burned a block of the old Haight. Just like that—gone.”

“That’s his job.”

“I thought we were hired to build the city up, not bum it down,” he said.

Marta tapped a pencil on the desk. “Burning takes less time than the bulldozers, cranes, and trucks, and uses less gasoline than they do. Those old blocks are mostly deathtraps. You know that. We can build over them after we clear them out.”

“Burning’s dangerous.”

“So far there hasn’t been an accident.”

“It doesn’t employ as many people as the bulldozers.”

“It frees them to work on the building projects.”

“It pollutes the air.”

“True.”

She did not want to fight with him. “And Dellara?” he said. “What made you pick him for the job?”

“He applied for it. And I knew him casually, ten years ago in New York. He was a fire insurance investigator for twelve years. He knows his work.”

“You ought to see his face, when he lights that fuse,” Jake said. “It’s just not normal, Marta. Have you thought—he’s got to be obsessive?”

“You’re not a psychiatrist. Have you talked with him, Jake? He’s a sensitive man.”

“I looked up his file. I was curious. Did you know he was twice questioned in cases of suspected arson?”

“Along with every volunteer fireman in the Bronx!” she said. “He told me about it when I interviewed him.”

Jake’s fingers itched for a cigarette. “What he does is essentially destructive.”

“At the moment it’s helping us rebuild San Francisco. What’s eating you, Jake? Show me something wrong. Show me where Dellara’s made a mistake—I’ll drop the experiment like that!” Her palm cracked the desk. “But till the experiment proves valueless, your suspicions sound as irrational to me as those of a businessman who won’t hire kikes.”

Jake flushed. “Okay,” he capitulated. “Let’s drop it.” He grinned. “It isn’t that important. Are you sure you can’t make dinner tonight?”

“Goodby, Jake,” she said.

He went back to his cubicle, and reached for his smokes, savoring the harsh taste. What the hell does she care about Tony Dellara? he wondered. He saw in his mind the figure kneeling—like a goddamn sun-worshiper—in the dust. I’ll go again. Today’s Tuesday. Friday—I’ll go again.

Friday Jake followed Tony Dellara home.

I don’t understand what makes a man like that tick. He doesn’t look crazy—but neither do men who molest little girls... Nice place he lives. I wonder what we’re paying him. I think Marta liked him. Cool, so cool, green eyes, jade eyes—she doesn’t go out at all. Executive women... Do his neighbors know? Hello Mr. Jones, I’m your next door neighbor, I’m a pyromaniac... Slander, that’s slander, I’m only guessing— maybe I’m wrong and Marta’s right...

He stopped by the mailbox to light a cigarette, careful to keep his face turned away from the windows of the house.

* * *

Tony Dellara watched Susman strike the match.

Did he think I wouldn’t notice someone following me home? Shucks his suit for a denim jacket and he thinks it’s a disguise. He wanted to go down and grab Susman by his clean, pressed collar, shake him, scream at him. Why are you following me? Recklessly he went down the street. Susman was still there, smoking. Tony tapped him on the shoulder. “Got a spare?” he said. Susman slapped his pocket for his pack, and shook out a cigarette. “Thanks.” Tony pulled out his matches and lit it. The flame burned between them. “You live around here?”

“Uh—no,” Susman said. “See you around.”

Dellara waited until he turned the comer of Roosevelt, heading down. Then, slowly, he started to walk in the same direction.

From the pay phone at the comer of Henry Street, he made his call, grinning at the thought of Susman. Wouldn’t you like to know...”May I tell her who’s calling?” the secretary said.

“Tell her it’s Tony Dellara.”

In a moment he heard her voice. “Tony? You
swore
you wouldn’t call me here.”

“It’s important. About a guy who works for you. Name of Susman.”

“Jake? What—”

“He watched me last Friday. And this morning. He even followed me home. It’s getting me nervous. Pull him off, Marta. You’re his boss.”

“Friday’s his day off, Tony; he can go where he likes.”

“I don’t like being watched.”

“Yes,” she said, “I remember.” He saw her for a moment as he had first seen her, back in the Bronx, ten years ago: thin white face, black curls, green eyes, trembling against the brick wall in the light of the flames. He recalled his own unholy burst of fear and rage.

“He doesn’t know, does he?”

“No. Nobody knows.”

But me. “Tell him to lay off,” he said again, trying to be gentle. “Suggest it to him, Marta. It’s bad luck to rattle a torch.”

“Tony!”