City on Fire (96 page)

—but when are you going to get over yourself, New York? How can I make you see? I know I shouldn’t be yelling in a crowded theater, but really, where’s the fire? The hour’s late, the odds are long, the patient’s on life support … and if anyone’s going to pull us through, it’s going to have to be you. You longtime listeners, you first-time callers, you pussies—you need to come out by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, and go right to the source of the disease. You need to say, “This is my city. My city, goddammit.” And you’re going to have to act to take it back.

85

FIVE FLOORS UP, Pulaski steered the kid down a hall and across an open-plan bullpen. This proved tricky with the crutches, and with the file-folder rolled in his pocket, but the handcuffs cinched at the kid’s back helped. His colleagues per usual seemed not to notice. They sat at cubicles, typing in shirtsleeves, or clumped at windows trying to dig the action in the plaza through the gathering dark. Well, that was fine. He’d be needing them shortly, when six or eight got sent over to East Third Street, laughing their keisters off at Pulaski’s swan song, his last Overtime Special. They’d never understood you can’t be too careful. But right now, he and Charlie were going to have a little heart-to-heart, and he needed to apply the kind of pressure no one, not even Pulaski himself, believed him capable of anymore. His instinct remained that this patter about villains and explosions was just an attempt to distract him. About the part that concerned Pulaski—about Samantha Cicciaro—he still felt jerked around. “Aren’t you going to say something?” the kid asked, as the elevator doors closed. “Or I get it. You’re giving me the silent treatment.”

“I’m not giving the silent treatment,” Pulaski said. “I’m thinking what to do with you.”

“With me? I’m telling you, my friends have a bomb. Somebody could get hurt.”

“There’s nothing to be done right now that can’t be done more efficiently when that crowd in front thins out.” The doors peeled back to reveal the concrete basement called Temporary Holding. He frog-marched the kid past the phone another cop would ordinarily have been manning, and then the open-air pens where arrestees palavered. A couple of them obliged Pulaski by making smooching noises in the kid’s direction. “You ever see the inside of a cell, Charlie?” Pulaski propelled him into an empty pen a ways off from the others and onto a concrete bench and went to shut the door. You could feel the pulse of the crowd up in the plaza, but only through cinderblock and who knew how many feet of schist. Pulaski had always found it comforting down here. Even the lights were in cages. “Now sit and soak in the ambiance, while I give this thing another look.” The kid tried with his cuffed hands to work something free from a pocket, but it landed out of reach. An albuterol inhaler. Pulaski, ignoring it, lowered himself to another bench and took out the manuscript, opened to the page the pictures had been clipped to like a bookmark, halfway through. Okay, he could see here the bit that might have Miss Nguyen a little on edge, inclined at first to fall for the kid’s shenanigans. Someone up there clearly didn’t want him to finish, though, because the lights kept cutting out, so that reading was an instant headache. This whole day was an instant headache. And now he was late for dinner. But forget it. He knew what he was after. He stooped painfully to pick up the inhaler and then held it inches from the kid, like a carrot before a horse. “Charlie, who shot Samantha?”

“You asked me that already. You don’t listen when I say there’s a bomb, but when it comes to Sam I’m all-knowing?”

“You’re the missing link. East Third Street, the girl—” He enumerated on cramped fingers. “If I could put you at the crime scene, I’d say you shot her yourself.”

The boy’s face was hot. “You take that back!”

“You ever hear of William of Occam, Charlie? He had only one tool in his kit, but it’s a doozy. And I’m going to tell you what it says. It says you’ve been living in that house all by yourself. It says there’s no such person as Captain Chaos. Or else you’re Captain Chaos. You keep turning up, kid. You and you alone.”

“Maybe someone wants me to keep turning up, did you ever think about that?”

And the lights in their cages began to flicker faster. On off on. Off for several seconds—on again. It was the darnedest thing.

“You really believe in this stuff, don’t you, Charlie?”

“Hell, that’s probably one of them now, coming to take me out.”

86

TO BE HONEST, William had forgotten about the Rothkos. And even if he hadn’t, he would have imagined (hoped?) their painful associations would have driven Daddy to sell them, or bury them under a dropcloth somewhere in the bowels of the Hamilton-Sweeney Building. Instead, the blue one was the first thing he saw when he stepped off the elevator. It alone might have been enough to send him running back downtown, had he not also forgotten another thing: how standing before this painting was like learning to see for the first time. Blue fields resolving into overlapping squares, identical in weight, distinct in hue. Stasis and motion, the purity of the thing simply seen—exactly what he’d been seeking, pressing his own wet brush to canvas, so long ago. He could have been back there still. Or further back, the day before Daddy’s wedding, when the whole field of time lay open before him.

His mind continued reeling through these perceptual spaces as his body followed his sister’s upstairs and down a long hall. Doors on the left were pools of inert gray, while those on the right let through rhomboids of light. In the bedroom where he’d slept one summer, the guest-beds were made tight as corsets. He stepped back into the hallway to find Regan had lost him again. He never had learned to navigate this place. He felt no alarm, though; he tried one door and then another and then descended a staircase, certain he’d find some other staircase back up to the other wing. And it was there, crossing an empty reception hall gone lunar with the fading light, that he spotted the suitcases, three of them, lined up by the bar. A child rummaged in the cabinet underneath, its back to him.

Except it was not a child. It was the Demon Brother. He hadn’t changed in fifteen years, William saw, when he rose and turned. Not his clothes, not his face, not his prematurely white hair, which, William having sprouted a few grays himself lately, had the perverse effect of making Amory seem to be getting younger. “What are you doing here?” William said. There was a glint in the eye, but no larger sign of recognition.

“Why, I live here. What are you doing here?”

It was the solicitude of a person talking to a toddler: What are oo doing here? And William could feel his miraculous clarity collapsing. This had been a mistake. “Do you really not remember me?”

“William?” Amory took glasses from a breast pocket, put them on, leaned forward. “But you should always call ahead! Sadly, I’m about to depart for Block Island with your father. I’m already skipping a scheduled meeting, though I suppose the two of us might just have time to refresh ourselves. It really is thoughtful of you to drop by, after all these years.” He retreated to the far side of the bar, stooped again, and suddenly bottles were appearing on the counter. “What’s your pleasure? There’s Scotch, gin of course, Haitian rum—”

The strangling muscles in William’s arms had gone rigid. “I don’t drink anymore. And I’m not here to see you.”

“No, of course not. Though as regards your father, a few months ago a visit might have meant a great deal, but we’re a bit concerned about agitating him just now.” Amory paused, as if something were occurring to him. “But I don’t suppose Regan will have told you about his condition? I assume she’s here, too.” He uncapped one of the whiskys. Was the bottle shaking? It was this slight tell, or counterfeit thereof, that led William to overplay his hand.

“What about the Specters, Amory? Did you fill Dad in on them?”

The other man looked up from his pour with genuine surprise. “The Specters?”

“Those spooks you sent to make sure I stayed out of the family business for good.”

“Really, William. What kind of creature do you take me for?” Having returned the glasses to his pocket, Amory now reached with his free hand for the fireplace poker that had somehow replaced the rubber plant in William’s. William could feel it slipping from his grip. For a second, the face before him began to change. Then the poker came free, and a noise made him look toward the balcony. William turned to find Regan standing one story up, and beside her, their father, lit by the last red lozenge of sun. Somehow, in the flood of projects, grievances, and delusions sweeping him forward, William had lost sight of the question of how it was going to feel to see Daddy again. But what did you expect to feel, damn it, besides this mingled fury and helplessness, your childhood all over again? Everything irrecoverable laid bare in a flash, as Amory Gould, the motherfucking devil himself, flew up the staircase to the balcony without spilling even a drop of his drink.

William could only follow, trailing the fireplace poker. Maybe he, too, looked more fearsome than he felt, because when he reached the top of the stairs, Regan asked what he was doing, and his father was saying, “Tell your brother this has to stop.”

Amory was at Daddy’s elbow, turning him toward the fading windows. “We really should make haste, Bill, if we want to catch the last ferry.”

But Regan, turning him back, said, “No, Daddy. William needs to speak to you.” So she was on his side again. Still.

Daddy must have felt it, too, because he hung, suspended. Amory changed tack. “Why don’t we all step into the library, then, and talk things over like gentlemen?”

“I think William means one-on-one.”

William nodded, giving himself over to her guidance, but Daddy was already following Amory through the French doors and toward the desk. “Anything your brother has to say to me, he can say in front of his uncle.”

“Will you stop saying that?” William said. “He’s not my uncle. Don’t you see what this little fucker’s done to our family?”

The tide of personality seemed to withdraw as Daddy’s lined face floated above the desk, though maybe this was the condition Regan had alluded to in the car. Anyway, if Daddy wasn’t going to sit, neither was William. But then, almost effortfully, the tide came surging back. “This is nonsense, darling,” Daddy said to Regan. “Amory has done nothing but good. It was your brother who abandoned us.”

“I got cleared out, Dad. It’s what the Goulds do. First Regan got put in her place—”

“He made his choice, Regan, and I have respected it.” Daddy’s voice had risen. People were always raising their voices at William. Though possibly his father’s breathing, his almost panting, was something to be worried about. Meanwhile, Amory remained by the window, looking out at the twilit city.

“—and now they’re going to clear you out, Daddy. I was at that press conference today. You’re going to be found guilty, and then you’ll have to cede control of the company. Do you think this is accidental? Ask yourself, who’s left to take the reins?”

“Your brother could have taken them, Regan. And his son, and his son’s son.”

Son. William was pretty sure Regan had mentioned her own son. Was this him, in the photo on the desk? A little boy and a littler girl, and himself an uncle—but momentum pulled him onward. “Daddy, did you ever stop to ask yourself if you’ve actually done anything wrong?” That he was certain his father hadn’t was the difference between him and his sister. “Regan, have you asked? Well, did you, Daddy? Did you break the law?”

The great head shook slowly, fading again. Or pretending to fade. “I don’t … I don’t remember.”

“But someone did, right? If you do any halfway competent investigation, it’s going to lead back to a certain person, even you’ve got to see that. The same person who will have been working hardest to make sure an internal investigation like that never happens. I’m saying this just as a spectator who knows the players.”

Amory, who had seemed to be contemplating nothing more serious than the moonlight in his drink, now turned. “Yes, a spectator. I couldn’t have put it better myself. Now, if you’re quite done with this childishness, William—except you never will be done, will you? You remain a perpetual seventeen. It sounds so pretty in pop songs, but is in the flesh merely embarrassing. Bill, I really can’t abide these innuendoes any longer. I’m headed downstairs. Your car is waiting. But you know, I may just head to this prior appointment after all and catch up with you in the morning.”

Daddy looked uncertain.

“No, listen, Dad. There are men out there trying to kill me. They’re like six and a half feet tall. And right as a Hamilton-Sweeney project gets rolling in the Bronx and you’re under indictment, one almost clips me. This can’t be a coincidence, do you see what I’m saying? That man over there, your brother-in-law, he needs the once-and-future heir gone if he’s to pull off his coup.”

Amory snorted. “Piffle. No doubt drug-related. And hasn’t he staged this scene once before? William, you’ve wasted enough of your father’s time.”

“A coup,” Daddy said. He squinted, trying to recover his bearings. “These are serious charges.”

“Fantastic, I’d say, Bill. Opium dreams.”

“I’m not on drugs now, Daddy. I’m trying to understand my life as best I can.” He heard his voice catching, hated himself for it; blew through it. “If I abandoned you to the Goulds, okay, I take responsibility for that. And maybe there’s a reason I still can’t get all the pieces to line up. But you shouldn’t need me to tell you you’re in danger. You’ve seen it yourself. I’m telling you I am, too. Your son. Send me away, and you’re never going to see me again.”

“Oh, come now,” Amory said, though he seemed in a hurry to leave. “You can’t really think me so monstrous as that.”

“Or you can make him stop.”

Daddy was all at once an old, old man, blinking against the lamplight. His blue eyes shifting like that painting, now muzzy, now crisp. As if anybody had a choice. They were William’s eyes, too. How long had it been since the two of them had looked at each other like this? And William recalled, or his father did, or it arose somewhere between them, an Impressionist sky, blue, jostling with the perambulator, and in it the smell of Burma-Shave and a peach-colored smear with the same blue ellipses meeting him, as a rich, clear baritone intoned,