City of Dreams (60 page)

And Kathy snapped her fingers. “I remember now. You were the FBI man who went to arrest Jennifer Wilson and her boys in the World Trade Center.”

“To interview, not to arrest,” said Joey. “Me and my partner, Jimmy Johnson. When the first plane hit, Jimmy knew right away that it was Al Qaeda. He says, ‘Joey, if they hit one tower, they’ll try to hit the other, so we shouldn’t go up.’ He was right, but I was a hard-ass in those days.”

“You had all kinds of troubles after that. Right?”

Joey looked off toward the water. “Divorce, drink, a discharge from the bureau. That’s trouble. But the shrinks called it post-traumatic stress disorder, because up inside that building, up on seventy-eight, that was a fuckin’ battlefield, a goddamn massacre.”

The three of them were silent for a time . . . imagining . . . or remembering.

Then Kathy said, “You disappeared, didn’t you?”

“Into a straw-covered Chianti bottle.” Joey stood. “But now I have a purpose. Jennifer Wilson says that you should go to the meeting of the Paul Revere Foundation tomorrow. It’s going to be a very big story.”

“I won’t believe her until I see her,” said Kathy.

“I’ve convinced her to stay hidden a while longer.” Joey looked down at Peter. “Till we know we can trust you guys.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all this from the beginning?” said Peter.

Joey looked around, as if to check that no one was watching. “I like the secrecy thing. And me and Jennifer, we’re after this for more than money . . . not like you.”

Peter stood. He was a head taller than Joey. He stepped close to him, and said, “You got me very wrong, Joey B.”

“If you aren’t in it for the money, then what?”

Kathy stood. “Peter is an idealist, Mr. Berra. Haven’t you noticed?”

So Joey said, “Well, Mr. Boston idealist, let’s join forces.”

“And if I do?” said Peter.

“We share what we know. You tell us where you are, and I’ll bring you an exact replica of what it is we’re lookin’ for. Tonight. Where are you stayin’?”

“Can’t tell you,” said Peter. “It’s our safe house.”

“Wrong answer.” Joey turned and started to walk away. “You’re safe with
me
. I already proved that on the Bowling Green and in Central Park and in the middle of Fourth Avenue.”

Joey was right, thought Peter. “Wait a minute.”

Joey waved his hand bye-bye. He had one more quality of the New York street. He could be way too volatile when he had been insulted.

“Hey, Joey Berra”—Kathy followed him along the path—“don’t go yet.”

Joey stopped and turned.

Kathy said, “Jennifer knows where I live. If she has proof of how far you’ve come, bring it to my apartment. Tonight.”

“We’ll see what Jennifer says.” Joey took another look around, then headed for the subway. “And no cell phones. They can track the cells.”

“The Russians can’t track your cell phone calls, Joey,” said Peter.

“No,” said Joey. “But the FBI can.”

They watched him go, then Kathy said to Peter. “I guess I have plenty to write about now. Share a cab back uptown? I’ll drop you off wherever you’re going.”

He did not want to get into a cab with her again. She was way too enticing when the excitement of the chase colored her cheeks and lit her eyes. He said, “I’ll take the subway.”

“Don’t want to reveal your safe house?”

“That’s it.”

She reached forward and took his hand. “You can tell me where it is.”

“Then it wouldn’t be a safe house.”

“Peter, we’re on the same side in this. And I may need a safe house, too.”

“You can call if you get into trouble.”

“What if it’s too dangerous to call?”

She was right. There was a team coalescing here, a group of like-minded people gathering around the idea of finding the truth as well as the bonds, and Kathy was part of it. So her safety was important, too. So he told her. Then he added, “Just don’t abuse the privilege.”

And she stood a bit closer and kissed him on the lips.

Peter Fallon did not move a muscle.

She pulled away and said, “We would have made a great power couple.”

“If you need safety, Evangeline and I are there.”

She gave him a little pat on the chest and strode off, long legs swinging.

He did not look at her ass.

E
VANGELINE AND
H
ENRY
had ridden back to Hell’s Kitchen in a cab. Now they were walking south along Ninth Avenue.

“I can’t believe it, Henry. We’re trying
not
to attract attention, and you steal their goddamn car? What were you thinking?”

“I was thinkin’ we might get somethin’ out of the little dude in the front seat. I didn’t think he’d start cryin’. Can’t stand a dude cryin’.”

“Now he’ll describe you to the Russians, and they’ll figure out where you live.”

“Him? He’s scared shitless. He’ll say he saw a big black guy with a big gun. How many big black guys with big guns you figure we got in this town? And unlike myself, most of them have rap sheets. We fine.”

“But I thought you said these Russians were—”

“Nastier than athlete’s foot?”

“Nastier than nuclear fucking weapons!” she said.

“Now, E Ticket, watch your language. This here is no longer Hell’s Kitchen. Folks call it Clinton, and it’s gettin’ to be a very uppity place.”

She wasn’t exactly sure why he was leading her down Forty-eighth Street, between Ninth and Tenth. Both sides of the street were lined with brownstones and tenement buildings. As on almost every cross street in Hell’s Kitchen, they formed a wall on both sides, broken here and there by an alley or a driveway. But he slowed as they approached a breach.

“This is where the Rileys lived,” said Henry. “I just wanted you to see it.”

Evangeline read the sign:
THE CLINTON COMMUNITY GARDEN
.

“Four or five buildings, all came down in the late forties or early fifties. The rubble pile was still there in the seventies. Just a lot of bricks and shit, so the neighborhood turned it into a beautiful garden.”

Where once there had been six-story buildings overflowing with people, fruit trees flowered. Where the tenement yards and outhouses had festered a hundred years before, neighborhood people were working garden plots, tending roses, taking the May sun.

“Maybe the box is buried under somebody’s pansies,” she said.

“Well, they might be old foundations down there under the topsoil. Maybe we could come back with a shovel.”

Evangeline imagined the Riley brothers sitting on the stoop on a spring day before their father was beaten to death and their lives changed. Then she looked up higher. Most of the buildings did not rise above six stories, but out on Tenth there was a twelve-story building, and on top of it stood one of those famous New York water tanks.

“I wonder if Tim Riley’s father helped to build that,” she said.

“Hard to say, but I bet his son helped finance it.”

P
ETER STRODE ALONG
Fifty-first with his head down. He had come home—and it felt like home—via foot, taxi, foot, subway, taxi, taxi, foot. If someone had been following him, they would have thought he was drunk . . . or lost.

He had also bought a throwaway cell phone. He made a call, just to warn them he was coming up. And he walked right into a young black man heading in the other direction.

“Hey, watch where you’re goin’, man.” He was wearing a New York Giants hoodie, jeans, and sneakers.

“Sorry.”

“You goin’ up to see Big Mama’s Baby?”

Peter stopped.
Damn it
. He’d been made. Now what?

He turned slowly, right into a big smile. “Antoine? I thought I told you to stay in Boston.”

“I had to see you guys in action with Uncle Henry. So I drove down. Parked in a lot on Eleventh Avenue, right across from Midtown Hardware.”

“You scared the hell out of me.” Peter patted him on the back. “But I’m glad to see you.”

“I hear Uncle Henry already gave you nicknames.”

“Don’t ask.”

Antoine said, “Aunt Sonia sent me out to get a few things at the groceria. I’ll be right back.”

“Do you have anything new?”

“The Morgan Library has three bonds. The E Ticket has good notes.”

Peter let himself in with the key that Henry had given him.

Evangeline was waiting, and as he stepped into the flat, he flashed on another life, one that might have been lived there a hundred years before: He had just come from Deegan’s Saloon, and his long-suffering wife was waiting with a rolling pin. That was how Evangeline looked at him when he walked in.

“What?” he said.

“Two hours. We said
two
hours. Then we’d meet back here. You’ve been with her all afternoon. It’s six o’clock now.”

He shrugged. “Time flies.”

She gave him a long look, then she stalked over and sat at Henry’s computer.

“What did you find?” he asked.

“‘Rainwater. O’Day. X marks the spiffle.’”

“What?”

“I don’t know what it means, but—”

She leaned back in the chair and threw up her hands. “This is pointless, Peter. I’m combing through old notebooks, and you’re running around with a girl I decided not to trust a long time ago, and—”

He just said, “The bag lady is after the bonds, too.” And he told her what he had learned with the help of Kathy Flynn, about Arsenault, Wedge, Joey Berra, and the woman whose real name was Jennifer Wilson.

When he finished, Evangeline chewed her cheek, drummed her fingers, and decided not to be mad after all. “That’s good stuff.”

Then they went over the notes she had taken from Tim Riley’s narrative.

They liked the father’s description of the smoke that must have hung over the city—and still did—day and night: “the great cloud of commerce that rains money like water on the city of New York.”

Evangeline said that the father had once built water tanks and was known as “the best tank-bottom man in New York.” Then he started his own demolition business, selling wood and other materials to a guy named O’Day, who made the tanks.

Then she read Tim’s explanation to his son of why he had become a banker: “My father used to tell me that the clouds bring water that rains on the good and the bad alike. And water makes things grow. It washes away dirt and sins, too, in baptism. And he told me that money was like water, except it didn’t wash sins away. It made it easier to live on the right path, since you don’t always have to be scheming.”

Peter looked out at the church. “Good Catholics. Plenty of cleansing water imagery.”

“Yeah, but money doesn’t cleanse original sin. It
is
original sin.”

“Only if you don’t have it,” said Peter.”

Evangeline said, “Tim’s father would have agreed.”

She flipped a page. “I love this part: ‘Without water, there’s no life. Without money, there’s no America . . . or no New York anyway.’ Tim Riley tells his son that he decided right then that he would handle money.”

“A Catholic and a capitalist,” said Peter, “even though Christ was a socialist.”

A
REAL FAMILY
dinner. That’s what Henry called supper that night.

His wife Sonia, a tiny little Filipina woman with a big voice and a mountain of energy, cooked two roast chickens, and they all sat at the dining table, said a grace in which Henry thanked the Lord for his smart nephew, Antoine, and for the Boston Fallons, “who helped my little brother when he moved north to that strange land.”

Just as they began to eat, the buzzer sounded.

Henry looked at Sonia. “You expectin’ anybody?”

She shook her head.

Henry gestured for Antoine to go over and look down into the street.

“I don’t see anything, but the trees are in the way—”

The buzzer snapped again.

Henry went over to the intercom and put on his nastiest voice: “Who is it?”

“It’s Joey Berra.”

Henry looked at Peter. “Joey Berra?”

“Let me in,” said Joey on the speaker. “I got something for you.”

Henry said to Peter, “You good with a shotgun?”

“I am,” said Evangeline.

Sonia blessed herself.

Henry pointed to the closet.

Peter pulled out the gun and flipped it to Evangeline. It was a pump action. She chambered a round.

“
Madre de Dios
,” said Sonia.

“Don’t worry, Aunt Sonia,” said Antoine. “It’ll be all right.”

Sonia said, “I’m not worried. My chicken get cold.”

Henry pulled his .44 and stepped into the hallway.

Footfalls down. Footfalls up.

A moment later, Joey Berra stepped into the apartment, looked around, and took off his Yankees hat. His hairline was receding and he had a bald spot on the back of his head. He was clutching a paper bag.

Henry came in right behind him, closed the door, locked it, bolted it, chained it. Then he put the Magnum to Joey’s head. “How did you find us?”

“The address was in Kathy Flynn’s purse.”

Evangeline looked at Peter. “You told her where we were? Are you crazy?”

But before Peter could stumble through an answer, Joey B. said, “She’s dead.”

“Jesus,” said Peter. “Dead? How?”

“Killed in her apartment.”

“Russkies?” said Henry.

“Whoever didn’t want her writing a big piece about Avid Investment Strategies,” said Peter.

“What was you doin’ in her apartment?” said Henry.

“Jennifer and me, we went to show her the other box, like she asked us to. But Jennifer got spooked when we found Kathy. So I took her home.”

Then Joey opened his paper bag and took out a mahogany box and put in on the table next to the roast chicken. “This is what you’re looking for. Another one, just like this. Erica stole this for us, right out of the New-York Historical Society.”

EIGHTEEN

September 2008

S
ALLY AND
E
RICA HAD LIVED
so long in the same skin that they really thought they were two people, very different people who supported each other like sisters.