City on Fire (35 page)

Bruno’s fingers steepled in front of him as he watched. You are an adult, Mercer reminded himself. But then why did adulthood, the part of your life when you were theoretically freest to pursue what you wanted, always seem to require these compromises? “Nothing,” he said. “You didn’t miss anything.”

“So who’s got room for dessert? Anyone?”

Even though Bruno made a show of trying to fight for it, William did end up picking up the check, pulling a roll of twenties from the breast pocket of his dinner jacket. “No, I’ve got this.” Mercer pretended not to see Bruno’s knowing look.

Outside, after the foursome had dissolved, William said he would pay for a taxi home. “We can’t afford it,” Mercer told him. “I don’t mind taking the train. Or even walking, it’s a nice night”—which it wasn’t, it was a sweltering, tropical, miserable night, with the gunpowder stink of the fireworks just ended, and already, out of the humid desertion of post-celebratory streets, a cab had materialized, a big yellow answer to a question Mercer didn’t know how to formulate. He let his burning forehead rest against the inside of the window and watched the empty streets scroll by, sparkler sticks, downtrodden little flags, the metal gates of loading docks graffiti’d with the hundred secret names of God.

“How did that go?” William asked.

“You make it sound like an audition. But I feel like the fact of my being black or whatever settled any questions Bruno might have had.”

“It’s true that Austrians aren’t known for their sense of transracial brotherhood.”

“You can joke all you want, but I don’t like you showing me off like that.” The Papaya King on Sixth Avenue was still open. A hunched shadow out front appeared to be vomiting into a gutter, but when Mercer blinked it was only a postal box. “He tried to warn me about you, you know.”

“What, that I tried to sleep with him?”

“You tried to sleep with Bruno?”

“I was a kid, Mercer, it was the ’60s. Anyway, as I recall, he wasn’t having it.”

“I mean he tried to warn me about who you are. Where you come from.”

“Ah.” William’s hand, on the back of the seat, brushed Mercer’s shoulder gingerly. “But I sort of assumed you’d figured that out already.”

“Well, I didn’t. I was trying to respect your privacy.”

“Don’t you see, Mercer, that this is something I love about you?” It was too loud; the driver’s eyes swung to the rearview mirror, but William glared fiercely back, and the guy turned up the radio and kept driving. “You’re the first person I’ve ever met who, if I left a diary lying around open, would close it without reading.”

“Only because I’d feel guilty. It doesn’t mean I want us to have secrets, William.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me you were writing a novel?”

“You weren’t supposed to hear that. It’s embarrassing, that’s why.”

As William touched his cheek, Mercer felt himself, against his will, leaning into the soft, white palm. “So let’s give each other some room, some mystery. Make our own utopia. Let Bruno be jealous; he doesn’t have what we do.” The driver’s eyes flitted back to the mirror, and William dropped his hand. But when they passed into a black patch, a sidestreet where all the lights had been knocked out, their fingers found each other on the seat again.

IF ONLY MERCER COULD HAVE LEFT THINGS THERE. But the next day, while his lover slept off what he didn’t yet realize was probably cocaine, he headed across town to the library. He trudged up the marble steps between Patience and Fortitude, two leonine friends he hadn’t seen since those uncomplicated days when he was just another reading-room arriviste.

The periodicals division was a grotto off the first floor, redolent of burnt coffee and aged paper. That afternoon, and for several that followed, he hunkered down at one of the macrocephalic machines, pages of microfilm spooling past too fast, really, to read. It was like his life, somehow—a thing you watched go by much too quickly, and the only real decision in your hands was to stop or keep going. It was hard to know how far back to look—’69? ’65? Finally, from 1961, he found a society page article on the impending marriage of Felicia Marie Gould of Buffalo, New York, to William Stuart Althorp Hamilton-Sweeney II, Chairman and CEO of the Hamilton-Sweeney Company. In a photograph, the couple stood shoulder-to-elbow, attended by family. The groom was dignified, the bride-to-be resplendent. When Mercer attempted to adjust the size of the image, the machine whinged nervously. Not pictured: the bride’s brother. To one side, though, stood a woman identified as the daughter of the groom, flanked by her own fiancé … and then the son, a late-adolescent William. Mercer had never seen a picture of him from this era before, and a great tenderness or forgiveness welled up in him. William was even skinnier than he was now, his body slumped like a question mark in its too-big suit. And something was wrong: he looked as if it were consuming him whole, from the inside. No wonder he didn’t want to talk about it.

Outside, the big old plane trees heaved in amber light, as though signaling to the rush-hour buses on the avenue. A door spun behind him—it was closing time, shouts of guards were echoing under the vaulted ceilings, telling all the pale, sedulous scholars it was time to go—but it was as if the air dissolved them on contact, or as if the broad spaces of the raised plaza diluted them, because the only people left out here seemed to be mendicants and the mentally ill. A woman with fingerless gloves approached, and Mercer had foisted a handful of pocket-change on her before he recognized her as his erstwhile colleague, the one with the giant handwriting. Watching her walk away, he felt guilty for not letting her finish whatever she was asking him; why was he in such a hurry? Was it mere forgetfulness, or something graver? He would wonder again a week later, when, wandering toward the foot of Madison, he turned and saw the inscription chiseled like a bad joke into the limestone pediment of the tallest structure there, the one with the golden finial. The Hamilton-Sweeney Building, it said.

24

WHEN HE’D LEFT AMERICA IN 1974—its dirty wars, race riots, drug culture, Watergate—the whole country had seemed to Richard Groskoph to be in flames. What he was looking for was a place without news, and on a small island in the north of Scotland, he’d more or less found it. Why Scotland? It was the country of his mother’s grandparents, for one thing. For another, he wouldn’t have to learn a new language. There were Park Avenue high-rises with more residents than the village where he found a farmhouse for rent. The money would have to be paid back eventually—he’d abandoned his hypothetical book, that search for a last story—but eventually was so far off, and in the meantime, his advance remained surprisingly fungible. For companionship, he bought a terrier from a neighbor. He called it Claggart because he’d always thought Melville had been too hard on Claggart in Billy Budd, and because the name seemed to fit the squat furry body, the officious muzzle butting at his shin, demanding food or a walk.

By day, Richard gardened and read and carpentered to the accompaniment of bad pop radio. By night, he ambled down the shoulderless road to the village for the one drink he still allowed himself. And were it not for television, things could probably have gone on this way. He didn’t keep a TV set in his hermitage, as a matter of policy—easier just to saw a hole in the roof, or in the roof of his skull, and call back down the demons—but on a high shelf in the pub sat a small color model, years out of date, used mostly for football matches. One night he came in to find it on. From her stool near the door, the widow Nan McKiernan tipped her sherry his way, in obscure congratulation. He followed her gaze to the TV. The smoggy pink sky pictured there was unmistakably not Scotland’s. And now here came the greening copper of Lady Liberty turning slowly past the helicopter window, and great white flocks of boats and the airy towers of Manhattan heaving into view behind. How could he have forgotten? It was the Fourth of July, the American Bicentennial. Which meant he’d been at large now for two solid years.

As he splurged on a second drink, and then a third—calling it Scotch, like a tourist—the sky onscreen faded to the color of the one outside. Sparks burst across it, lapidary handfuls of blue and red and gold, like memories of his earliest summers in Manhattan. Only not really, the BBC was saying: in the wake of the fiscal crisis, the City had switched contractors, and for the first time ever, these fireworks were being directed by computer. Did it matter, Richard wondered, that it was robots instead of men in the boats, lighting the fuses? But then, wouldn’t some nuance, some human thing, be lost? And would the computer remember to mail a special program of music to the radio stations, keyed to the detonations? Surely they still did that. Surely “Rhapsody in Blue” was even now ringing from every car on that other island, to which he’d once belonged. And suddenly his whole journalistic apparatus was up again and humming, for here, he saw, was the vehicle he’d been waiting for, the missing story. History, scenery, fate, impermanence, disaster, politics, the city, all packed into a single shell, awaiting combustion. Music made visible: fireworks.

The display went on and on. Rehearsing the million ways one might narrate it, Richard barely noticed the dog’s plaintive whimper at his feet, or the ring of the till discharging its drawer, or the chairs being turned upside down on the tables. He didn’t even want to blink. Then, just at the start of the grand finale, the light onscreen dwindled to a point and died. The barman had pulled the plug. Down by the window, the widow Nan McKiernan had vanished like an apparition, leaving only empty stemware. Richard dropped too many pound notes on the bar and made to follow. Claggart hesitated, looking fretful.

“What?”

But somehow Claggart must have known, even before Richard did: a week later, he’d be back in New York with the dog under an arm, unlocking the apartment, steeling himself for the dust and the mouse droppings that had doubtless accumulated there in his absence, and all the other imperfections that never showed up in memory.

THE LONG ISLAND ADDRESS HE GOT FROM A SOURCE didn’t look like the third-largest pyrotechnics outfit on the East Coast, or really the third-largest anything. It was just a gravel drive at the end of a cul-de-sac, leading back past a modest, ranch-style house. God, these houses! He stuck a twenty in his cabbie’s hand and told him to keep the meter running. Batik curtains gave the windows a closed, impassive look. Richard pushed the front doorbell, pressed his ear to the storm door’s glass. Nothing. Or not nothing; there was another, deeper sound—a kind of low thunder gathering not within the house, but behind it. Hoping his old fedora and necktie made clear he wasn’t an intruder, he walked around to the neglected backyard. In a tree near the patio, a treehouse was collapsing. And then tucked into a copse at the bottom of a slope was a corrugated metal hangar the size of a small bungalow. Its sides rumbled. A panel truck was parked alongside: Cicciaro & Sons Am seme ts. For ten or fifteen feet in every direction, the grass grew high, an inordinate, overfertilized green.

His knock on the hangar’s door brought no answer, but a smell of sulfur seemed to issue from behind it. He knocked again, louder this time, and the rumble deepened, as though downshifting. A voice yelled something he couldn’t make out. He called back, “Hello?”

A beefy man in flannel appeared in the doorway before him, lowering his ear protectors to his neck. He had hair the color of iron. A workingman’s blunt features, like the face of an Orkney plowman, only darker, more stubbled, streaked on one cheek with grease.

“Carmine Cicciaro?”

The man didn’t respond.

Richard introduced himself, showed a credential from the magazine that hadn’t published a piece of his writing in almost four years.

“I don’t read magazines,” the man said. He was missing part of the ring-finger on his left hand, Richard noticed. Behind him were the sources of the shuddering: big, industrial fans attached to ventilation ducts. And was that, just visible on a table, a twelve-gauge shotgun?

Richard explained that he was just looking for a comment or two about the Bicentennial fireworks. (This was an old ruse—give them a chance to set the record straight.) “A friend of mine in the Mayor’s office said the City decided to go with another contractor this year, and I wanted to make sure I understood the reasoning.” It felt good to be reporting again, to feel eye and mouth and memory sync together like parts of a machine. But Carmine Cicciaro had already returned the ear guards to his ears. “I’ll give you fifteen seconds to get off my property.”

Had Richard’s touch deserted him? “Mr. Cicciaro, Benny Blum gave me your name personally, said you were the man to see if I wanted to know anything about anything about fireworks. For what it’s worth, he also said he thought it was a mistake for the city to bid the job out to a conglomerate. ‘Injustice,’ was the word he used.”

Cicciaro gave him a look as if, during this whole speech, there had been a piece of spinach in his teeth. “How do you know Benny Blum?”

“We were in Korea together,” Richard said. Which was true, technically, though they’d not met until years later, at the poker table.

“You really rode all the way out here from the city?” Then Cicciaro sighed. “Give me a minute.” He retreated into the hangar, where the drone of the fans died. When he emerged, he put a padlock on the door. “Can’t be too careful nowadays. Anyway, I need a beer.”

They ended up in grimy deckchairs, drinking cans of lukewarm Schlitz from a cooler whose ice had long since turned to water. “I keep ’em out here, my daughter won’t be tempted,” Cicciaro said. “You got kids?” Richard shook his head, no, because “kids” made him think of presences, personalities. Though at this point, his own progeny with the stewardess, boy or girl, would be what? Almost three.

“Can’t say that I do.”

“Well, it keeps you up nights.”

“That’s what they say.”

“I’d compare it to a constant, low-grade hangover. Luckily, I have extensive training. That’s a joke.” Cicciaro looked off toward the hangar. “Sammy’s got basically a good head on her shoulders, but with a reckless streak she didn’t get from me. In the old days, she used to climb up in my lap and talk. They hit thirteen, though, they’re women, with all that goes along with that. Hardly ever here these days. And when she is, I can’t even describe the noise from the stereo. I have to put up with exhaust fans, but I get paid for it, you know? Or used to. She’ll be in college in the fall.” He took a long drink of his beer. At this temperature, Richard thought, you could really taste the aluminum.