City on Fire (104 page)

Somebody else says no, they’ve got to hold in what little AC is left.

¿A quién le importa? This always happens, we’ll be moving soon anyway.

Where are the conductors? Why aren’t they fixing it?

Sheeyit. Motherfuckers couldn’t fix a ham sandwich.

Time has its own way of moving down here. Still, it’s got to be close to ten. In order to be up at the crack of three—one of the perquisites of pre-drive-time radio—Zigler should have been in bed hours ago, but he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep since May, since the news about Richard. Anyone who’s spent so much as ten minutes listening to Gestalt Therapy (and even its producer, Nordlinger, who usually pops in earplugs after the opening theme and spends the remainder perusing porn) has to have figured out that “Dr.” Zig’s planning to punch his own ticket one of these days, to make a final point. And then the one-time National Magazine Award Nominee goes and one-ups him again. Diet pills have always been Zigler’s secret for getting through four hours on air, but these days he lets them blast him right out of the broadcast booth at the end of the show and into the shift bars south of Times Square where you can be drunk before noon. Sometimes, early evenings, there comes a point where the speed wears off and he feels his meter running, but his sleep deficit is already so far beyond anything he’ll ever be able to earn back that he figures he might as well pop another pill, have another drink, because what’s another hour at the bar in the face of a million hours? What’s a little hangover in the face of the infinite grave?

Someone lights a match, coaxing faces from the dark, and dimly, at the deserted end of the car, feathers. When the blackness is restored, Zigler smells tobacco. He should have checked his watch when he had a chance. There has to be a natural limit to how long anyone can spend like this, in a black aluminum suppository lodged in the asshole of the earth. Like: How much does body heat have to build before people start keeling over? And how long before someone starts to really freak?

He unbuttons a button, luffs shirt from chest. The air refuses to move. Then, through the window of the communicating door, he sees one of those deep, eyeless fish with the hypodermic teeth, a brighter light approaching. Zigler steps aside just as the door opens and a flashlight floats in, followed by a cool dank gust of tunnel air. Shapes play weirdly on walls and windows. One cuts around in front of the light. It’s the Chinese man who came through earlier selling batteries from a trashbag. There were apparently cigarette lighters in there as well, or maybe this is a different bag he’s offering side to side. Anyway, as soon as a lighter’s been taken, he passes on to the next person. When Zigler reaches for his wallet, the Chinaman shakes his head. Meanwhile, from behind the flashlight, a booming, island-tinged voice announces that they can’t be more than (kyant be more dan) a couple blocks from 110th Street. The stress falls oddly. “If we’re careFUL, we can exit through the front car, walk up the track to the sta-SHUN.” The flashlight swings around to touch the door to the next car, the bodies in motion beyond. “Women first, unless there’s babies.” I’m a baby, Zigler wants to say—Me first!—but were anyone to recognize his voice, it would inevitably lead to blows over some bullshit he’s said on air. Which is why every time he rides this train home now, he’s afraid to speak a word. The shock jock’s vow of silence. What if the power comes back on? someone says. “What if it doesn’t?” booms the Jamaican. “You been down here forty minutes already.” This seems to settle things. People flick their Bics, move toward the forward door. But “Dr.” Zig Zigler, for reasons even he would have a hard time articulating, is fighting his way back to the cranes at the rear of the car. Maybe they’ll attack him, tackle him, peck out his ravaged liver, but so what? It would at least be an exit Rich Groskoph couldn’t steal. He supposes he means to prop open the aft door, in case what the birds want is to escape. But when he gets there and gets the new lighter working, they appear to have vanished completely.

1 POLICE PLAZA—9:27 P.M.

“SEE?”

“See what, Charlie? I can’t see a blessed thing. Let me see if I’ve got some matches.”

“This is like the oldest trick in the book. You put out the lights at the fuse box, or you unscrew all the lightbulbs before the person gets home—”

“This is Con Ed, kid. This is eight million people running air conditioners off an eighty-year-old grid.”

“—and when they come in, wham! Or did you not see Godfather II?”

“Look around you, Charlie. Or I guess these don’t put out enough light, but you’re sitting in one of the most secure rooms in New York City. It’s exactly where you’d want to be if someone was trying to bump you off. Which no one is. And if you would just cooperate with me a little about Samantha’s shooting, I might be able to look out for you on some kind of longer-term basis. Ouch!”

“You don’t give up, do you? It’s like a fixation.”

“Well, the lights are going to come back on sooner or later. Real life will resume.”

“How many times do I have to tell you it wasn’t me who shot her?”

“Okay. Have it your way. Let’s say for the sake of argument your invisible friend, Mr. Chaos—”

“It wasn’t Nicky either. He wouldn’t. With anyone else, I know, a bomb points to that, but not with Sam.”

“Again with the bomb, though, Charlie! You should know, the only thing I’ve seen that makes any sense with your story is a throwaway line in Richard’s article, some gunpowder missing from Flower Hill.” Another flame dies. The air is thick with sulfur. “I suppose if she knew about the theft, that could have put the girl at risk.”

“Well, there you go.”

“But only from your phantom perpetrator, kid, who you just ruled out. Anyway, three grams is barely a thimbleful. Certainly not enough to reliably kill this William fellow, even granting you the larger plot.”

Nor was Billy Three-Sticks in danger so long as he steered clear of his uncle, D.T. had said. And inside Charlie now, a thimble begins to empty: a little anthill of black dust, a tiny, ineffectual anticlimax. But then why would Nicky spend months puzzling over circuits and timers? Something breaks from him. A sob-slash-manic-cough. “I’m not insane, okay?”

“No one said you were.”

“And I’m not a criminal. I’m a loyal person. Be nice to me, and I’m loyal.”

“Charlie, I’m trying to be nice. Do you not see me sitting here burning my blessed fingers so you can see no one’s coming to get you?”

“But no, that’s not true, I’m the worst thing. A rat. You hear that? It’s footsteps—they’re coming to give me what I deserve.”

“That’s just bodies in the other cells getting restless, and honestly, kid, better they beat on the cinderblock than each other. Here, can you see this?”

“No.”

“I’m on my last match, so look close. That’s St. Jude. He’s been around my neck since long before you were born. In other words, I’ve had years to think about this. Justice doesn’t mean stomping out a person just because he’s done something wrong. Sometimes it means giving him a chance to set it right. I’m trying to give you—oh, for the love of …”

“Wait, say that again.”

“I’m going to need a salve.”

“No, the other. About justice. Oh, shit. Holy shit. I can see it now.” Because forget D.T.; what Nicky had said last week, in that house cleared of even its meager valuables, was that everybody had it coming. Charlie had thought it must be another figure of speech—Nobody escapes in the end—but if it wasn’t, that solved the timing problem right there: while the other Post-Humanists fled toward their fates, Nicky would remain in light. “That’s why you’d use a bomb and not a knife. That’s why you’d steal gunpowder … multiple victims, all at once.”

“Boy. One of us is sure fixated, I’ll give you that, Charlie. But all this pedaling is taking you farther away. Grams, is what the article says. It wouldn’t blow up a kewpie doll.”

Only Charlie’s hardly here anymore; he’s pushing down deeper in the darkness, thinking again of Mrs. Kotzwinkle on the importance of units. Hearing voices through the floor. “So how much powder would you need to kill three people at once, and maybe take out a house? Would kilograms do it?”

“Charlie, that’s not funny. With a kilo of the stuff, you could take out a city block.”

“But is that much enough to fill a duffelbag?”

For the first time, Pulaski sounds anxious. “Now you’re talking a whole neighborhood.”

“I saw the Rangers bag myself, going into the little house out back. Shit. I even helped prepare the way, dried out the floor, cleared the way for the fans. And when I left Nicky yesterday, he was on his way to deliver an invitation to Billy’s uncle. For tomorrow. Or tonight. Operation Demon Brother. The duffel’s full of black powder, kilograms of it.”

“Motive again, though, Charlie. Give me a motive for any of this.”

“Because he was in love with Sam. You said yourself that’s the best motive. They were in love, and she got shot, and Nicky thinks it’s the Hamilton-Sweeneys’ fault somehow, but also his own for getting mixed up with them. He was fucking her, okay?”

“That’s not the same thing.”

Yet Charlie knows blowing himself up is what he would have done, too, if he’d really loved her enough, or ever been serious about atonement. “Maybe not, fuck if I know. But I’m telling you, that’s his idea of justice now—to hell with everything. This Demon Brother guy’s going to come to East Third Street, and he’ll find a way to draw Billy Three-Sticks down there, too. As soon as all three of them are in the house, Nicky’s going to blow them all to kingdom come. And you still haven’t sent those cops.”

“I don’t have cops to send, Charlie. Not now that we’re in a blackout. Not for a story like that, without a shred of evidence.”

“I’m your shred. Why can’t you listen to me? You’ve got to listen.”

Again, there is the pounding noise. Like a giant at a fortress door. Then: “Geez, kid. I really wish you could have put all that together before the lights went out.”

DOWNTOWN & POINTS NORTH—CA. 8:00 P.M.

THE FIRST THING KEITH DOES after leaving the cop shop is find a payphone. He knows no one at the day camp’s going to pick up; the aftercare program’s start and end times, heretofore so hard to remember, are now emblazoned in neon across his frontal lobe. But after getting no answer, he takes a cab up to the school anyway, in case the kids are still waiting on the front steps … which they aren’t, because when has anything ever been as simple as Keith needs it to be? He does manage, however, via persistent pounding, to get someone to unlock the door. The streetlamps have come on, and a glinty whistle dangles in the dusk. Attached to it is a manchild in gym shorts whose every sentence ends up a question. Maybe there’s a simple explanation? Maybe Will and Cate decided just to walk home? Seeing Dad was two hours late? Or went over to their granddad’s, like last time? The even temper Keith prides himself on is evaporating. Anger comes pouring out, as yet uncut by fear. There are intimations of liability. He may even use the phrase “educational malpractice.” When it is proposed, though, that the manchild lead him back to the Assistant Head Counselor’s office so they can try getting in touch with the mother, Keith sees he’s in checkmate. No, yes, he is overreacting; they are indeed probably back home. Where he agrees now to betake himself, and no need to drag Regan into it again.

But that home—apartment, really—is as lifeless as a crypt. His message service has no messages. An impulsive call to her place goes unanswered, too. He has a sudden vision of an entire city of unused phones, receivers dangling from cords like hanged men in vacant houses. Of course, if the kids have tried to call here at any point in the last twelve hours, they will have gotten no answer, either. Where would he go, were he Will? What goes on behind that watchful face has always been a mystery. But Will is his mother’s child, rational above all else, and since no one’s at Regan’s, the rational thing, Keith sees, would indeed be for them to go wait at their grandfather’s, where there are sure at least to be servants to let them in, and which is infinitely closer, not a mile from the day camp if you cut across the Park. Yes, they’ll be there waiting at Bill and Felicia’s, or they’ll be en route, in which case maybe he can overtake them before any of this gets back to his soon-to-be-ex-wife.

And so nightfall finds him on the Center Drive, moving at a decent clip considering he’s in loafers, scanning for the kids. Baubles of electricity burn amid shadows. The sycamores have that green-gold quality where the leaves swallow the light. Other leaves, already dry at midsummer, explode underfoot. Joggers slide past in a gloom of sweat, smirking at the man clumsily run-walking in business attire. He’s jogged around the Reservoir plenty of times himself over the years, but always for the sake of being the sort of person who jogs around the Reservoir. Not a few things about his life, come to think of it, have operated on this principle. Maybe it’s why people think of him as shallow. Or if that’s too strong, as somehow less … dimensional than themselves. Regan included. Will very much included. As if he hasn’t fully developed whatever the third thing is besides ego and id, and so basically needs to be managed a little to keep from getting into trouble. And mightn’t this sense of being treated like a teenager account for his history of acting like one? There was a time before the separation when he’d swum down to a place so deep inside himself it almost wasn’t in contact with the adult world.

Then, as if to suggest he never came back up, the lit-up apartment towers he’s been aiming for, the Dakota and San Remo, go dark, as does the roadway, and all those golden sycamores. Perfect. A power outage. He can’t see a damn thing. Afraid that if he keeps going he’ll break an ankle in a pothole, he stops and laces hands over head and breathes great, raggedy breaths, waiting for the lights to come back on.

Which they don’t.

And don’t.

And as the seconds pile up he feels a hole opening inside him, a black bulb searing through the bright film of life. His children are out there. Even say they are just ahead of him, crossing the Park. A person can get seriously hurt here in the dark. Has he warned them about this? Probably he hasn’t, probably it’s a subject he’s been avoiding altogether. Probably he lost track of Will and Cate long ago, exchanging them for son-and daughter-sized symbols, like the pillows kids pile in their beds before they sneak out at night.