City on Fire (90 page)

The Assistant U.S. Attorney who had wooed him these last weeks had disappeared, leaving him alone with this balding, nearly eyebrowless juris doctor who spoke in a murmur, as if his every utterance weren’t already confidential. Each time he scuttled up close to one of the big questions, the immunity agreement inched closer on the table; each time Keith failed to give a satisfactory response, the document slid farther away. Over repeated objections, Keith had insisted on coming to sign without his own lawyer, both because he couldn’t afford counsel other than Tadelis until he was formally deposed and because he couldn’t stand the idea of looking guilty. Now, asked again about his dealings with Hamilton-Sweeney père—“just to review what we’re getting here”—he tried to stall for time. He recalled the first time he’d met the man, the high-backed dining room chairs, the oil-painted ancestors. “It was the first time I’d ever seen consommé. I kept looking for meat hidden at the bottom. But Old Bill never made me feel unfit to sit at his table. He’s a decent old guy once you thaw him out a little. Misunderstood, maybe. I guess decency often is.”

But whose idea had it been to put “Old Bill” in such a large position in muni bonds?

Wasn’t this covered in someone else’s testimony? Keith said.

The lawyer’s fingers bridged themselves above the document, a gesture curiously puppetlike. Keith had liked the boss better. “You’ll notice we keep returning to this question of the bonds.”

“Maybe you can explain to me again what you think Bill did wrong. It’s a pretty loosely regulated market.” They couldn’t incriminate Keith without his lawyer present, right?

“The principle is exchange value, Mr. Lamplighter. The sense that information is convertible into value. Information not available to everyone in the marketplace.”

Interesting, how these government types avoided the word money. “This is something I know it’s hard to get your head around, but buying bonds isn’t like playing the ponies. In ’72, ’73, city paper looks like a rock-solid investment.”

“But by the winter of ’75, I don’t have to tell you, the city was effectively bankrupt. The debt—on your own trading book at that point, we’ve established—was approaching worthless. And yet you manage to unload it to your father-in-law at eighty-nine cents on the dollar, write the difference off as a loss, and three months later when the bailout comes through, they’re cashed out at face value plus accrued interest.”

“With a position that big, it was still a huge haircut.”

“If it weren’t, Mr. Lamplighter, you’d be the one preparing for trial. That could still be arranged, by the way. But we’re talking about the twelve percent the trade netted the Hamilton-Sweeneys. That’s nine hundred thousand dollars. And, according to our source, your father-in-law had information the bailout was on its way.”

Or, more likely, Amory Gould did, for whom information was nearly an end in itself—but the information Amory had on Keith (all those envelopes, full of God knew what) made it impossible to say this without risking further exposure. And that did appear to be Bill’s signature, however shaky, on the carbon copy of the memo they’d showed him. Memories of holiday cards he’d seen it on led to memories of Regan, who on the phone yesterday had been hinting pretty unsubtly that she had a date … and then to the kids, whom he was taking to tonight’s Mets game. Pain-wise, it was one long associative slide, only this time it ended in inspiration. “Hey. Are you hungry?”

The lawyer blinked, uncomprehending. It was as if there were an invisible wall, Keith thought, to go beyond which you were expected to turn your back on all animal life, all desires of the flesh. In the orderly future being prepared by the federal bureaucrats, the Amory Goulds, the Rohatyns and the Trilateral Commission, people would be as bodiless as numbers, receding into the blue. But hadn’t it been precisely the animal business, the getting and spending, that had sent the numbers skyward in the first place?

“Hungry. Peckish. In need of food. It’s got to be past lunchtime. If you want to stay on the clock while I duck out to eat, I won’t tell a soul.” He rose and turned to go. Perhaps the lawyer was too surprised by Keith’s impertinence to notice he’d made off with the government’s pen. Keith couldn’t even have said why; it was a piece of junk, and by the time he reached street level, he’d discarded it.

Down here, the mercury had spiked another fifteen degrees. A hot-dog vendor sat on his trailer-hitch just beyond the north tower’s shadow, pouring sweat. Pigeons, with a gull or two and some other species Keith didn’t quite recognize, gabbled after the scraps of bun the hot-dog man threw. Keith was no Franciscan, and it seemed to him an act of narcissism to feed pigeons, who would if anything outlast us. But was it really worth interrupting this for a hot dog? He would make the long walk up to that sandwich place in the Village instead. If nothing else, it would buy more time.

He headed north through Chinatown, whose stink was summer, was the city itself, growth and its own decay. Women with wheeled carts and lean men with cigarettes hurried past. People thrust objects into his sightline, umbrellas, luggage, whole duck, a frenzied commercial semaphore he didn’t need to speak the language to understand. Then, outside one of those stores that sold all the above plus jewelry and electronics, the sidewalk slowed. People had gathered to watch a TV in the window. He stepped off the curb and walked along the gutter, but the cataract had spread there, too. By Canal, he couldn’t move at all.

The next cross-street had been cleared of cars, and hundreds of people were processing through the intersection, or maybe thousands. Some kind of funeral, he told himself, a New Orleans–style thing, or one of those marches in honor of a waxy saint the Italians undertook every other weekend. But this crowd was too casual to be religious. The men wore jeans and muscle-tees or work shirts with union insignia. Women were profoundly tanned, their hair piled high. The fabled white ethnics, the return of the repressed, but what did people like this have to protest against? An obscure shame crept over him even as he strained to read the scattered posters.

At which point an extraordinary thing happened. Out of the crowd emerged that old man from New Year’s Eve, Isidor, the shopping-trolley pusher. He was moving now at a normal pace. Or rather, everything around him had decelerated. Less than a dozen yards away, without breaking stride, he turned and with a strange underwater languor aimed a finger right at Keith’s chest.

Even after the man had passed, Keith could feel it there, burning. (Day allah here. Was that what he’d said?) Everything stood out crisply in blaze and shadow, the solid geometries of soot-faced buildings and subway grates, discrete flocks of what kinds of birds were those sweeping downtown and then changing their minds, flapping bright to dark like the departure board at Grand Central. Traffic, free to move again, streamed toward the tunnel end of Canal. And how simple it would be just to follow. Swing a leg over the metal fence along the gangway. Descend into pitchy cool. Brakelight smearing the grimed tiles. By the time he reached the mainland, the sun would be slipping down the sky, beckoning him past four-in-hand interchanges and the numberless gas stations of Jersey to where the earth broadened and softened and it was okay to eat when you were hungry, fuck when you were horny, rest when your loafers started to pinch. Forty hours and one bus ticket later, he would step from the blackness of a motel room west of Oklahoma City into sweet prairie air, having slipped his own life.

But that was assuming man was a rational creature, and Keith wasn’t so sure anymore which part of him, the rational or the animal, was calling the shots. Maybe the idea of parts was itself a rationalization. He’d started to feel instead like he was ruled by a congress of entirely dissimilar people—Keith at seventeen, Keith at twenty-five—all of them screaming for some last, authentic Keith to show up at the final second to save them.

Which was now, possibly.

Which was him.

Déjala ir? Why wasn’t his Spanish better?

From the nearest working payphone, he dialed the U.S. Attorney’s office. He left a message with the receptionist. (The under-assistant was indeed at lunch.) He was happy to face whatever music there was, he said, but they shouldn’t expect him back today. The briefcase they could keep, there was nothing in it anyway. Otherwise, the deal was off. They’d be hearing from his lawyer just as soon as he got one. Then he hung up the phone and hurried up the street the march had turned onto, a man called onward by spirits.

75

SOME KIND OF DOWNTOWN TRAFFIC NIGHTMARE snarling streets all through SoHo, Jenny and Mercer eventually had to leave the cab and make their way forward on foot. Still, she was unwilling to scuttle her mission, Richard’s mission. Mercer had surprised her by pointing out that if anyone knew where William was, it was probably her employer. But now, outside the Galerie Bruno Augenblick, they were at odds again, this time over who would have to enter. Bruno hated him, Mercer insisted. Jenny’s suggestion that he was being paranoid didn’t go over well. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but when a fucking—sorry, but basically fucking perfect stranger sweeps into your building and all of a sudden you’re in The French Connection, it does tend to make you a little paranoid.” On the other hand, Jenny had called in sick this morning, and was supposed to be in bed right now with stomach flu, so she ended up waiting down the block while Mercer went in to find out what he could.

She’d been imagining this as the work of two or three minutes, but it seemed to take longer. How much was he telling Bruno? She’d gone to see if there was a way to peer in when the door swung open, sending her back behind the blind of a dumpster. It was Mercer, looking sucker-punched. Bruno followed, extending a set of keys. “Mercer, a cab would cost a fortune, the subway nearest there is a trek, and the car has to be moved for street sweeping anyhow. It’s the orange one, right down at the corner. Just see that it’s returned when you’re done.”

Jenny waited until Bruno had left to emerge from hiding. Mercer was looking around frantically. “Would you stop just materializing like that? I thought those people in the van had come and kidnapped you.”

“I can’t have Bruno thinking I’m a liar. Plus I was right, see? There’s no way he hates you, Mercer, if he gave you his keys.”

“That’s not affection, it’s pity.” Mercer explained what he’d been told: that for a while after the breakup, William had been living with Bruno. “It’s so obvious, in retrospect. Of course he’d go running back there. But Bruno apparently refuses to be a party to suicide, however gradual, so I guess he kicked William out.” And now Jenny actually did feel a little queasy. So this was what her boss had been going home to every night.

“Did he say where William went after that?”

“He keeps a studio in the Bronx. I’ve never been up there, but Bruno gave me an address on 161st Street.”

“Better hand those over, then,” she said, reaching for the keys.

“I can drive,” he said.

“Are you kidding? This thing is Bruno’s baby. You so much as scratch a fender, he’ll never recover. Anyway”—she handed him the folder with Richard’s manuscript—“this will give you time to do the reading.”

The car was not some marvel of German engineering, but a neon-orange AMC Gremlin; Bruno’s love for it, like his love for most things, had probably started out tempered with irony. But as she jockeyed it free of the gridlock on Houston and onto the West Side Highway, she could see how irony and sincerity might coexist. Out on the mottled brown Hudson, boats lay becalmed and innocent. Or as if becalmed. As if innocent.

It took them almost an hour to get out of Manhattan, and by that time the pages were back in their folder. Mercer ran a hand down his face. “This is unbelievable. You know I was the one who found her, right?” And, seeing Jenny’s look: “The Cicciaro girl, the daughter. In the snow that night. I was leaving the Hamilton-Sweeneys’ party.”

“How would I know that, Mercer?”

“What if they think I’m the shooter?”

“The article makes it pretty clear it’s Billy Three-Sticks they’re after.”

“I still don’t see how you got ahold of this story, though.”

“Richard, the reporter who wrote it—he lives next door. Or did. He died in April,” she heard herself say pointlessly. “What’s driving me nuts is how he doesn’t put together Billy Three-Sticks and William Hamilton-Sweeney.”

Mercer picked it up. “It’s not as rare an oversight as you might think. I mean, it wasn’t until that dinner last summer … but hey, wait a second. That whole time he and Bruno were jawing about corporatocracy and bla bla bla, I could see you biting your tongue, like a self-hating capitalist was the worst kind. You’re one of those power-to-the-people people, aren’t you? And suddenly you’re sticking out your neck for William Hamilton-Sweeney the Third?”

She sighed. They were now farther uptown than she’d been since her stint as a canvasser, having made their way off off-ramps and round roundabouts and back down in zigzag fashion among the crackerbox apartment towers of the Bronx. Containment units, was what they were, really. Warehouses. Prisons, with trapped air shimmering between. Horns and shouts and portable radios assailed the pavements. Then came blocks burned nearly to the ground. Yet still there were people, people with shopping bags, people with strollers, brown and black people, mostly, waiting for the buses that trundled up the long V of the street. And what if Jenny’s longing was only a kind of homesickness for the place she couldn’t see she was? What if that other world was already in this one, somehow?

Except a single, transcendent world wouldn’t have three distinct East 161st Streets. The particular one they were looking for was impossible to locate. Every street ran one-way, going the wrong way. Half the signs were missing, and those that remained made no sense. At what point had 163rd Street turned into 162nd? How could 169th Street cross itself?

It took almost an hour to locate the freestanding tenement with B.T. Sticks, Artist under a piece of moldy laminate by the door. A demolition notice had been freshly wheat-pasted above. For a moment, Mercer seemed paralyzed, but when she reached out to mash the relevant buzzer, he stopped her and mashed the ones around it instead. The door buzzed, and they pushed through into the urinal light of a stairwell.