City on Fire (57 page)

The phone number came to him quickly. When he’d paid to have it established—or when a subagent of the tobacco company had—he hadn’t quite known its purpose. He’d learned by that point simply to give himself options and use whatever came of them. When the Presidente was in power, one worked with the Presidente. When the Subcomandante, the Subcomandante. But he could not deny a little sizzle, as of a closing circuit, when he discovered the reason a thing was as it was. Why this number? So he could dial it now. And on the fourth ring, someone answered. Female, a bit slow. “Huh? Speak up.”

There was a low mechanical noise in the background. Calibrating rapidly, Amory decided it was better she not get the sense he’d noticed. Was young Nicholas there? Seconds passed. “Nicky’s, uh … he’s not disposed at the moment.”

“Not disposed, or not at home, my dear? I’m more than happy to stay on the line.”

There was the sound of a mouthpiece being covered, of life at the other end being extinguished. Returning after two minutes, minus the noise. She seemed agitated about something. “I’m not your dear, though, bub. You got a message?”

He had the impression Nicholas might in fact be as close as her shoulder, listening, and he made his voice resonant again, that it might be overhead. “Tell him his benefactor is in the neighborhood.” He checked his watch. “I have installed myself at Don Jaime’s Cantina. By five thirty p.m., I will be gone.” He hung up, walked to his booth, and, ignoring the coughing woman, returned to his pocket the nickel he’d got back.

He could be confident they knew the place; it was hardly a block from the house he’d just called. And this had been calibrated, too (as had this morning’s paper). The idea was that mediation take place in light of the utter ease with which, at any hour of any day, Amory Gould could reach Nicholas, relative to the difficulty of someone like Nicholas reaching him. It might indeed have made a nice show of fearlessness to march right up East Third Street, whistling if that wasn’t too much, and to knock on the door. This way, he could note any evidence of change. That noise, for example. But he’d been intrigued to find himself apprehensive about entering the house again. It was this same apprehension that had read Nicholas’s silence since mid-November as a sign the boy was more dangerous than he seemed. (Though as with any game, two could play at silence.) In the end, Amory had simply made sure to pass the house en route to the bar. The door had been repainted; the gray at the center was a shade darker than the gray around it. To further the air of abandonment, they’d done something to draw birds to the roofline and windows, sprinkled seed possibly, so that guano whitewashed the stoop below. And good for them. What he did not understand was the tinfoil in the windows. Why not butcher paper, something less flash? Perhaps he would suggest it, a show of magnanimity.

In any case, a bar was a worthy Plan B. Its darkened interior limited the number of observers. Yet it was public enough to convey a sense of up-and-upness, of having nothing to hide. And if one’s interlocutor had things to hide and still agreed to the venue, then it also conveyed a sense of power. Besides, he felt at home among Spanish-speakers. These people knew where they stood. El hombre invisible, they called him on his junkets south, though with his current tan, he was nearly one of them. He raised a hand to signal the waitress. Far from rendering the prompt service to which he’d grown accustomed, she chattered on with the bartender. But fine. It only went to show Amory had been forgotten.

That is, until Nicholas entered and approached the booth with a girl in tow—likely the one who’d answered the phone. Amory had long known women to be unreliable (even his fool sister); how could he possibly be construed to have invited one here? Nor had either of them bothered to change into civilian garb, or otherwise play down their difference from the cheaply but neatly dressed Latins. If anything, it was played up. The boy’s short-sleeved sweatshirt, too light for the chill, showed off his million tattoos. His beard was Amish-ish. The girl wore some kind of insalubrious sports uniform and carried a bag with a broken zipper. All of which was interesting, as data. They wanted it known (thought Amory) that they didn’t care who was watching. That they too had nothing to lose. Well, we would see.

“I’m thrilled you could fit me in on such short notice.” He held out a hand.

Nicholas just grunted and slid into the booth. Jerked his head. “S.G.”

“The pleasure is mine,” Amory said. “Shall I order something for the table?”

Nicholas started to decline, but here the girl spoke up. “They’ve got food?” He associated her dull-eyed look with factory workers, but, now that the waitress was paying attention, handed off his untouched gin and asked for three mezcals and a bag of potato chips. He’d noticed some clipped to a stand by the door. The waitress went again. He waited for Nicholas to say something, but Nicholas had discovered the first rule of negotiation. Well then, small-talk it was. “You’ve been to Don Jaime’s before? I thought because it’s so conveniently located, vis-à-vis the house … and once you get used to it, the atmosphere is almost convivial. One could imagine making a habit—”

“But we’re not here to swap notes on watering holes, are we?” The boy was really too easy to needle into speech. “I mean, unless you’re planning to buy the place.”

“Any plans, on either side, I would hope could be discussed privately.”

“We can talk in front of S.G. What there is to know, she knows.”

“I’m sure.” Now the waitress slid Amory’s newspaper to the edge of the table to make room for drinks. The girl was struggling with the mylar bag of chips when the boy reached over to open it for her. He wanted her attention freed for whatever passed between him and Amory Gould. In all probability, then, she knew next to nothing, but was along as an insurance policy, a witness that on thus-and-such a date, at thus-and-such a time, this meeting had transpired. There was an implied threat, but this was part of why the PHP had appealed to him all along: Who would ever believe anything any of them said?

Nicholas downed his mezcal. Made no sign of noticing the burn. “To be honest, I’m impressed you’d show your face down here.”

“I’ve always suspected this neighborhood’s reputation for criminality was at least one part hysteria. Look around you. Salt of the earth.”

“It would show more nerve if you’d stay after dark.”

“I’ll make a note to avoid it. That means our time is limited, though.”

“Why don’t you just say why you came? I assumed we’d served our purpose,” the boy said.

“Ah. But this was exactly the thing I hoped to hear.”

“Hear what?”

“Did I ever conceal that I had a purpose in coming to you?”

Nicholas reached for a chip. “No, no. I wouldn’t say concealing was what you did.”

It should have set Amory at ease. But as the woman kept coughing and a car slid by, scattering the rainy light, he thought back to the time when he himself had been closest to feeling his plans had come to nothing—the spring of 1975. He’d spent the previous dozen years swelling his firm’s coffers with Central American lucre. Through two successive coups and a guerra civil, he’d kept the Bandito beans harvested and the Exigentes rolled and a black market in American-made munitions profitable. Yet the fiscal crisis in New York, for all the little opportunities it opened, threatened to foreclose bigger ones. Again, though, what Amory’s dealings with Bill’s children years ago had taught him was not to try to create from nothing. Instead, he shaped such conditions as could be shaped; as for the rest, he waited.

Then one day, in the course of checking up on his nephew’s activities, he’d learned of this house on East Third Street, and of the intriguing alias of its occupant. To wrest further information from the city bureaucracy was easy enough, but slow. By the time the files reached him, Ex Post Facto was no more. The carbon-copied rap sheet of “a.k.a. Nicky Chaos” should therefore have held little interest. Vandalism, disobedience, possession. But just as he was about to shred the document, an item stayed his hand: an arrest for attempted arson in Bushwick that June. There’d been a string of more successful fires in the same area, Amory recalled, but in this case no pecuniary motive could be discerned; the building spared from flame had already been condemned. Two accomplices had fled on foot, but the accused had evidently made no attempt. High on narcotics, no doubt. For though Nicholas would later be freed via long-distance bond, in the police file was a most fascinating set of notes from the night of the arrest. Suspect made no attempt to deny ownership of the kerosene and the matchbook. Suspect instead claimed solidarity with the oppressed. Suspect argued that fire dramatized the material conditions, the collusiveness, the need for change … the awful banality of the ideas, in flatfoot prose, hurt Amory’s eyes to read, and yet, and yet. Something about these ambitions, the scale perhaps, had reminded him of nothing so much as a young Amory Gould.

It was how he’d introduced himself a week later on East Third Street: as a man of ambition. When it came to ends, they were on opposite sides, naturally. Still, it had been remarkable to discover in Nicholas’s own words a potential congruence of means.

The boy had edged backward through the front hall, baffled but already, Amory saw, inflamed. “I don’t understand. I never signed the confession. How did you get a copy of that?”

One could have said anything here, so long as one kept beaming and spoke quickly and in hushed tones and did not appear to be steering one’s audience toward the parlor. Amplify the plumminess. Establish a debt. “Success in this life depends on connections. I’m fortunate to represent, in my business dealings, a family rich in them. For example, I believe you have a history with my nephew. William Hamilton-Sweeney. Billy.”

“But we’re at total loggerheads, Billy and me.”

“I trust, then, I can count on your confidence about this visit. And I should add that on my side, I’m acting as a free agent. Not a soul knows I’m here.”

The windows in those days had been blocked only by dust and pollen. An even, golden light filled the room they sat down in, saturated the boy’s strong chin, his rawboned features, and underneath, his air of quick intelligence. An ape of God, was the phrase that occurred. As a child smarter than the rest he must like Amory have been subject to schoolyard taunts, but with the total stillness of the house, and the heat—the casements were open an inch or two—it felt as if they were beyond all that. Beyond time. Something shifted in the boy’s expression. Hands on knees, he leaned forward. “Holy shit. Billy’s uncle. You’re the fucking Demon Brother, aren’t you?”

Amory had found the nickname distasteful when it first reached him. But then he’d seen the beauty of it. It was a giant puppet, a white screen he could hold over his head. The fear, the desire, others would supply.

What he proposed to Nicholas was a kind of wager. Charges dropped, records sealed, the boy could resume his arson campaign, though this time in the already smoldering Bronx. And provided he kept within boundaries Amory defined, he could be sure the police would not stop him. Budget cuts had left holes in their deployments. Indeed, Amory had access to the triage plan, and would pass along certain sites and times where the game could be pursued with immunity, he said. “Or I understand you studied social science? Think of it as a test of competing theories.” When the last claimants to the torched acreage had been driven out for urban renewal, per Amory—or when the spectacle of the system’s neglect finally galvanized the underclass, per Nicholas—it would be clear whose vision of human nature had won. Whatever the case, Nicholas would get to stay on in the house. Amory had taken the liberty of having a corporate investor from south of the border secure the deed.

“And if I don’t go along with this, you’re going to kick me out? Make sure I go to jail?”

“I don’t work by coercion, young man. When people enter into a bargain, they must do so of their own free will.”

“But how do I know you’ll hold your end up, once my fires do their thing and you see the people start rising up?”

“The same way I know you won’t mention my visit here today to our mutual irritant, William Hamilton-Sweeney the Third. We proceed on faith.”

In the event, of course, it was the reverse he needed to see now: that Nicholas, five months after the Blight decree, had accepted defeat. For what Amory had neglected to mention was that he need not assume control over the South Bronx property by property: that, once the arson had passed a certain threshold, his plans could be accomplished by fiat. Toward the girl, who’d made short work of her chips, he now nudged a glass. “Please. Drink.”

“No,” Nicky repeated. “I guess you told me how it was going to be, and I guess that’s how it is. You didn’t need to come all this way for a victory lap.”

“I’m afraid your friend has me all wrong.” He had turned to see what the girl would do. What she did was finish her mezcal and then shoot a look of despair at the empty glass in her hands. She would rather, in other words, be anywhere else. Amory wondered what Nicholas had over her. “I’m here to ensure there are no hard feelings.”

“Do you think that’s what it was about for me?” Nicky said. “Feelings?”

“We can agree then that we’ve reached the end of our walk together.”

“That’s a little poetic for me, but yeah. What do you have, if not your word?”

“You don’t know how immensely pleased I am to hear it. And just as a gesture,” and that there should be no lingering tie between them, “I’ve had my compadre the investor burn the deed on East Third Street. The house is yours to do with as you wish. Your property.”

“I guess there’s no getting outside that, is there?” Just then a horn honked. A beaten-down van had pulled alongside a hydrant. Its driver was lost in shadow, but it wasn’t impossible, given the light and the angles, that whoever it was could see Amory Gould. “That’s you, S.G.,” said the boy, and after shaking the last drops of mezcal onto her tongue, the girl rose and slung her satchel onto her shoulder. From under the flap peeked weathered volumes. She caught him looking, and he was surprised to find, before her mask went up, that her despair was hatred, and meant for him alone.