City on Fire (65 page)

YET, AS WITH HIS OLD FAMILY, his new one kept him on the margins. There a basement, here an attic, but still: no one who adopted him ever seemed quite able to forget the fact of his adoption. And so, two months into his stay, there remained these deeper recesses, things Charlie felt he wasn’t being allowed to know. There was, for example, the fact that Sewer Girl was also fucking Nicky. More than once, while Sol busied himself in the little house out back, Charlie had jerked himself off listening to his own comrades go at it, not particularly subtly, on the far side of the floorboards. (“I love you,” he heard her say over and over, as if in a trance, while Nicky, usually voluble, just grunted.)

Then there was what he’d found in Sol’s clothes drawer one day. He’d been foraging there for pills, because he was tired of being rationed, or having to filch them one or two at a time from the pockets of Sewer Girl or D. Tremens. And Sol had indeed been sitting on the motherlode, blue codeine and sky-white ’ludes, each in its own jar. The pills glowed like jewels in the light of unshaded bulbs, the artificial day that now reigned throughout the house. But when Charlie reached back in to see if there was any Percodan, he bumped up against something hard and metallic. The gun, was his first thought, but in fact what he discovered, tucked carefully, almost tenderly, inside an athletic sock, was a black Nikkormat camera. What was Solomon Grungy, of all people, doing with Sam’s camera? Charlie wrapped it back up, but not before winding and removing the film.

THAT WAS THE NIGHT HE BEGAN ACTIVELY TO EAVESDROP. Well past midnight, after brushing teeth and stripping down to skivvies (not having any pajamas), he would kneel on the dusty floor he’d been sleeping on, and rather than saying his prayers, he’d find himself pressing an ear to the wood. Maybe he was hoping to catch again the distant sound of sex (and it was funny, come to think of it, that he never heard Sol and Sewer Girl fucking). Mostly, though, it wasn’t a planned-out thing, this listening. Or so he told himself. One minute, he was clasping his hands in front of his chest; the next he was bending down, in animal attunement, the draft from the trapdoor to the roof raising gooseflesh on his thighs.

Down, down went his attention. Past the pale hairs that edged his eustachian tubes, past the trapped volume of air between ear and wood, the scuffed surface of the floor and its tough intractable heart, the narrow-gauge pipes, frayed wire, rat-runs along the joists. With his eyes closed, the Prophet Charlie could see all this, as well as strabismic whorls and irregularities on the undersides of his eyelids, from the pills. (His pre-bed routine usually included a couple painkillers, to bring him down off whatever he’d been on that day.) Down through flaking tin ceilings, through plaster and lath; unimpeded, he should have reached all the way down to the cathected utility lines and subway tunnels. Instead, he stopped ten feet down, in the room where Nicky slept, surrounded by Whipped Cream & Other Delights. If it was late enough, he might hear murmuring there, halting, as Nicky and Sol forgot the ends of their sentences, sparked a joint whose peppery essence seeped up to where Charlie was trying with all his might to ward off an asthma attack.

Nicky’s voice was low and insinuating. D. Tremens, when he finally showed up, cracked wise. But Sol, for whom a whisper was an alien concept, spoke in a hiss, a concentrated version of his usual basso, which meant it squeezed more easily through the intervening layers of wood, paint, and air. “Do you have any idea how tricky it is to circuit all the parts together with any precision?” Charlie heard. And, “Well, you damn well better think about it, D.T.” And, “It’s the scale that’s the whole problem.” Charlie thought he heard Nicky say something here about geometry, like that, plus three zeroes, which was simple enough, but a thousand what? Inches? Seconds? He suddenly understood why Mrs. Kotzwinkle had been so adamant about units back in eighth-grade math. But no—he couldn’t follow shit, and now he’d gone and drooled on himself. He really needed to lay off the codeine.

Then, some time past the Fourth of July, he came down to the parlor to find the front door wide open, and Sewer Girl and D. Tremens humping furniture out to the back of the PHP van. When Charlie wanted to know what they were doing, D.T., straining under the weight of his own mattress, gave him a look. “Are you going to ask questions, or are you going to help?” So Charlie grabbed a couple of folding chairs. Each according to his means, he thought.

The Phalanstery aesthetic had always been Spartan, but now the parlor was totally bare, save for the stereo and the single lamp D.T. had told him to leave behind. They moved on to the kitchen. Nicky, sitting Buddha-like on the one small countertop, smiled approvingly as Sewer Girl carried out the cardtable where Charlie had once been served tea. Where, just last week, ten identical travel clocks had appeared and then, just as quickly, disappeared. “Nicky, what’s going on?” he asked. “Where are they taking that stuff?”

“Whatever doesn’t fit we’ll dump at Fresh Kills. You know it? A trash-mound out on Staten Island, so big it’s got its own ecosystem.” He drained his beer, threw the can in the sink. “The vanished remainder, made manifest. For the rest, who can say? Amarillo. Winnipeg. Whoever needs a wake-up call, or call-up, or wake.” He’d laid hold of more coke, you could tell when he started in like this with the puns. “You look distressed.”

“I just don’t get what’s changed?”

“Everything’s always changing, Charlie. We become who we are. The mask melts into the face.”

“But if you get rid of all the chairs, the novices won’t have any place to sit.”

“There won’t be any more novices, not here. You Post-Humanists have labored long enough in darkness. It’s time for you to think bigger than New York, go launch other Phalansteries in other places.”

“Leave New York? But what about you?”

“Like you said, Charlie: I’ll remain in the light.” It was true, it sounded like something he would say, but then, he’d said a lot of things. Nicky reached under himself and produced the dog-eared Bible Charlie couldn’t remember the last time he’d consulted. Flipped to a page. “ ‘We will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.’ You were right, there is good shit in here. Nobody escapes in the end. And now it’s almost time to pull the golden image down.”

“I thought that’s what we were doing at Liberty Heights.”

“Do you see chaos in the streets? Phase One was just a dry run. Next to Operation Demon Brother, it’ll look like a cherry bomb.”

Charlie waited for Nicky to look away, as if he’d inadvertently let slip a clue, but instead he seemed to be staring straight into Charlie. And it was Charlie who turned to go, unable to bear the maniacal steadiness of that gaze. “Hey.” Nicky stopped him and held out the book. “You don’t want to leave this lying around where just anyone can find it.”

AND SO THERE WAS THIS, finally, jamming him up: doubt. There’d been a brief once-upon-a-time when, no matter how he’d drawn the line between insider and outcast, pure and impure, oppressed and oppressor, his little Bible had reassured him he was on the side of the righteous. Its insistent second person had seemed to address him specifically, just as that voice in the church had—just as Nicky’s did now. It was a seductive proposition: You, Charlie, are the subject. The hero. Yet when the pills wore off, another voice, his own, still let loose a stream of what Dr. Altschul would have called insecurities. For all the theoretical sexiness of election, of innercity revolution, Charlie was beginning to suspect that Long Island had ruined him for it, somehow. That there was something irredeemably common about him.

For here he was the next day—having just received an object lesson in the vanity of material attachments—sneaking off to the laundrette around the corner to wash all his worldly possessions with a box of vending-machine soap because Western culture had trained him to hate his own, natural smell. He supposed he’d have to get used to taking care of himself, if the Phalanstery was truly, as Nicky suggested, winding down. The denim jacket he’d sliced the sleeves off and painted with the PHP icon was green from grime. His tube socks were crispy and brown on the bottoms, like cookies left too long in the oven. As he loaded the pair of jeans he wasn’t currently wearing into the machine, he went through the pockets, as his mom had taught him. In addition to some linty pocket-change, he found the roll of color film he’d shoved in there a week ago and then forgotten. And when he passed a camera shop a few doors down, he went in on impulse and, before he could change his mind, dropped off the film to be developed.

He was feeling awfully low now, slinking back to East Third Street, though he couldn’t be sure why. Secretive, maybe. But how many times had Nicky told him that excess attention to these interior states was another symptom of the humanist disease? What mattered, he wanted to believe as he turned the corner, was the world beyond the self, the world of action—and that’s when he spotted the cripple.

It was clear in an instant that he was out of place. There was the shirt, for starters, a short-sleeved madras model like the idea of leisurewear held by someone who’d never known leisure, and the creased blue trousers redolent of golf courses. There was the old-fashioned straw hat, and the brushy gray moustache below, in a region of blinding sun. It was true that impressive whiskers flourished all over the Loisaida, but they were either curly, as with the Hasidim, or in the case of the Spanish-speaking men in their folding chairs, a sumptuous beetle-black. This guy looked, in other words, like a tourist, in a neighborhood tourists ran from, screaming. Or with his crutches, maybe a refugee from one of the nearby medico-psychiatric clinics. But as Charlie looked on, he seemed to be hiding behind the trunk of the struggling sapling opposite the Phalanstery, and—yes—making notes in a flip-top pad.

57

AFTER THE NIXON SCANDALS, the various law-enforcement agencies had been sealed off from one another to prevent abuses of power, but there were still nodes of contact where favors could shuttle back and forth. Larry Pulaski and an old friend of his from the Police Academy constituted one such node. The friend—let’s call him “B.”—now worked for the U.S. Attorney’s office, and so they made sure only to talk in informal settings. That first Tuesday in July, for example, Pulaski had gone up to meet him at Yankee Stadium. It was B.’s choice; last time it had been Pulaski who, having come into some information about a Bonanno family capo, called up and said, “Let’s go see the Jets.” B. had put on a few pounds since then, but as they began the slow limp up the endlessness of ramp, Pulaski told him he looked like a million bucks.

From the nosebleeds, the inner face of the stadium was wall-to-wall carpet, little nubs of pink and brown stretching in either direction amid filaments of red (for the visiting Indians), but chiefly of Yankee blue. Innings, hot dogs, and remarks were passed. Games always moved slower in person than on the radio, particularly when an eight-run bottom of the third put the outcome beyond doubt. Or when you were waiting for a companion to get down to brass tacks. But it wasn’t until the seventh-inning stretch—another reminder of Pulaski’s physical limitations—that B. asked, out of the side of his mouth, how the case was going. Pulaski, reflexively, played dumb: Which case? The one that was all over the papers, wiseguy. In that case, “going” wasn’t quite the right word, Pulaski said.

“Come on,” said B. “You’ve got it easy. All you have to do is make an arrest. The prosecutors are the ones who have to convict on your weak mess.” The calliope tootled drunkenly behind ten thousand other conversations. B. bent to scribble an address on the back of a ticket-stub. He handed it to Pulaski. “You heard of these guys, the PHP? One of the fringe groups, like the SLA, the PLO.”

“I’m guessing P stands for People? Or is it Power?”

“So far as I can tell, just some dropout with delusions of grandeur and a couple friends. Though who can say what folks are capable of. Anyway … the office has been busy with something bigger, but in the course of due diligence, someone ran across the acronym, did a little poking around. Nothing came of it that we could use. But word is, your vic spent time with them.” When Pulaski gave him a look, B. wiped mustard from his mouth and held up his hands in the gesture for I swear, Your Honor, I never touched her. “You think the lead’s a piece of shit, you’re probably right. Throw it away, burn it, my lips are sealed.”

“Exactly what kind of poking around are we talking about? And who’s this ‘someone’?”

“My salary line is GS-9, Pulaski. I just get whatever trickles down.” It took Pulaski about a second to know when something wasn’t being said, and B. knew he knew. A few drops of mustard trembled on the underbristles of his moustache. “Fine. What about FBI? Those initials mean anything to you?”

“But what’s their jurisdiction on this?” Pulaski asked.

“Like I said, they’re working on something unrelated, which isn’t what I came here to talk about. I just thought maybe you’d seen this.” B. took back the ticket-stub. His pencil began to sketch two eyes and a spiky head of hair. Or a number. A tattoo. . “PHP, get it?” The sound around them seemed to go hollow, as though receding into cans. Pulaski felt exposed. See-through. Even here in the shade behind home plate, they were visible to thirty thousand people. There were cameras everywhere. The people behind them suddenly seemed too plausible, with their spanking new caps and giant foam fingers. Then B. ripped off the little stub of stub he’d been doodling on and crumpled it and dropped it among the peanut fragments. “Don’t say I never did you any favors, asshole.”

BUT WAS IT EVEN A FAVOR, really? At this point, with the retirement plan in dry-dock and the Deputy Commish breathing down his neck, Pulaski was about ready to listen to Sherri, to go to the doctor who fudged his annual bill of health and say: Let’s get me on disability, already. It was he, not Sherri, who had arranged to drive up to the Catskills to look at acreage the very next day.

On the ferry home from the game, he stood at the back rail watching the lights of Manhattan recede into dusk. The city, from this angle, was so small. Uptown buildings hid behind the towers of the Battery and dwindled until he could blot them all out with his thumb. His native Jersey was terraced housing projects and trees gone umber from summer heat and smog. He’d spent the last couple months trying not to think about Richard Groskoph, but he couldn’t help himself now. The scuffed shoes. The water churning below. He’d worked his share of suicides. He could never grasp, though, how anyone lucky enough to be born in this country, in this century, could want anything other than as much life as he could possibly lay claim to. And Richard had been survived by a child! A three-year-old living somewhere in Florida, the Times had said, which just went to show you never really did know anybody. Of course, Richard had only spoken to him twice in the last half-decade, and had been so hacked off that last time, after the Cicciaro girl’s name leaked out. But surely this was a symptom, rather than a cause. Surely he, Larry Pulaski, had been the farthest thing from Richard’s mind … A few violent-looking clouds edged in from the west to menace the trade towers. The breeze was thickening. But rain did not come, and the end of the thought sat cooling within him, plated on some nerve ending just beneath his tongue.