City on Fire (64 page)

On a Friday afternoon in the heart of June, she was supposed to meet with Daddy’s lawyers to vet the terms of a revised proffer. She decided to take Andrew with her to the offices of Probst & Chervil, down in the Financial District. She’d been in the conference room once before, and it should have been spacious enough, though no one had told her Amory Gould would be in attendance, already occupying the extra chair. It struck her again how physically small he was, for as large as he’d managed to make himself in her mind.

“Regan, how goes it on 29?” Only someone who’d known him for a long time would catch the note of challenge. She acted unfazed. Things were fine. Surely he remembered Andrew? “I gather Mr. West has been lending a hand,” said the Demon Brother. “But I wonder if he’d allow us a tête-à-tête. There’s been a development that might affect your work.”

“Andrew’s been deep in the books, Amory. Whatever it is, he can hear it, too.”

One of the lawyers offered to get a chair. “I don’t mind standing,” Andrew said.

If this registered as a blow, Amory didn’t show it. And it occurred to her that he, too, had been acting—that this was all to be disseminated as office gossip. “Well, I wanted it to come from family first.” He paused. “Your father has once again changed his mind.”

“Excuse me?”

“About the plea,” another lawyer blurted. “Your uncle means we’re moving to trial.”

“I know what he means,” she said, her knuckles whitening on the arms of her chair. “But this is not what has been discussed.”

“As we both know,” Amory resumed, “Bill has a way of forgetting. He now seems quite insistent that he admit no wrongdoing. Understandably. The risk of exposing assets … And he still hopes to return to run the company. Which as you know is a sticking point for the government.”

“But if he wins, people will just say he got away with it. And what if he doesn’t win?”

“You don’t think he’ll lose, do you? Nothing’s been proven, you yourself have said. And if he’s to run the company, surely he’s competent to make his own decisions? The trial would likely start in mid-July. Our counsel here just filed the relevant motions.”

The lawyers were obviously meant to be his amen chorus, for each one she tried to look at looked away. “I can’t believe this.”

Amory gestured to a telephone on the conference table between them, and only now did she see that it had been turned to face her, even before she’d come in. “Call him, if you like.” And here again was the gate rising before her. On one side was the old Regan. The new Regan, though she had no idea how she could fight back, wasn’t about to plead with Amory or his Gouldettes for mercy.

As they all made their courtesies and departed for the weekend, she and Andrew were urged to linger as long as they wanted, to talk over next steps. But she felt, in the room with its door left open, as if everyone out there could see every last thing about her. Andrew took the chair next to her, and they sat for a long time in silence. When his hand reached for hers, she brought it to her cheek. There was an emptiness that ran the length of her, a sweet oblivion now on fire after so many months. She wanted to move the hand to her mouth, to kiss it, but when he tried to scoot his chair closer, she drew back. “Geez, I’m sorry,” he said. His flushed cheeks nearly melted her again.

“Please don’t say that. It’s my fault. Or not my fault.… It’s just the timing, Andrew. Can you just be patient with me a little longer?”

55

THE CLOCK-RADIO WAS HOW SHE KNEW, the day the noises came, that they started pretty much exactly at 6:30 a.m.: sharp barks out in the hallway and beyond the construction scaffolding out front, the heavy thud of bodies against an interior wall. They’d likely been instigated by the super, but Jenny found herself unable to reach for the phone to call him. Instead, she played dead on her hide-a-bed, letting the bar beneath the mattress subtly reconfigure her lumbar region. She was too old for resistance, she’d decided. Easier to say nothing than to say something.

Gradually, though, the voices outside grew more insistent. They were foreign, of course, Eastern Europe being Mr. Feratovic’s preferred labor pool. Hopes of getting back to sleep began to seem ahistorical. She carried her other radio into the bathroom so that she could catch the tail end of “Dr.” Zig in the shower. But her focus was shot. Even when the slamming in the hallway stopped, she was primed for it to continue, and after rinsing the conditioner from her hair, she killed the water and the radio and pressed an ear to the shower wall. All she heard was a kind of low rumble, punctuated by distant clunks and clanks. She stepped back; the sound was gone. When she listened again, there it was, the neutral gear of a great submarine, the sound of the apartment house itself. It should have alarmed her—to think that this sound had been here all along, without her knowing!—but somehow she found it comforting, as if indifferent gods were puttering nearby. Then behind the dripping shower and the building’s murmur came the squeak of wheels, echoing in the emptiness of the apartment next door. What had they done with all of Richard’s stuff?

She threw on an old tee-shirt over her panties and looked for her missing huaraches and then, failing to find them, galumphed barefoot out into the hall. Two white guys who couldn’t have been any older than she was lounged there in weightlifting belts, their cigarette hands draped over the handles of dollies. Richard’s coffeetable stood on end between them. She demanded to know what they were doing. One said something to the other in what sounded like Russian and smirked in the direction of her breasts. She recrossed her arms to make sure she wasn’t poking through the fabric and rummaged for useful phrases from her Red Brigade days, but all she could remember was Na zdorovie and Komsomol, and anyway, who’s to say these guys weren’t Polish? Finally, she just pushed past them into the dead man’s apartment. It pained her to see it so bare in the too-bright light. To smell the turpentine a gangly kid was applying to the baseboards, and the dust on the carpet, embossing where things had stood in paler blue.

She went to put on a bathrobe. Down in the vestibule, Mr. Feratovic was roosterish, his walkie inert. The V-neck of his tee-shirt made a topiary of his chest hair. As he leaned toward the glass to look out at the curbside traffic jam of Richard’s furniture and boxes, a tiny cross glinted in the sun. “I hope you’re not planning to throw all that away,” she said.

He turned as if only just noticing her and then, with an ostentatious lack of comment, turned back to the glare. When it came to the question of who was using whom, the super-tenant relationship was the strangest this side of politician-constituent. Or reporter-subject. His cigar twitched. “Two months, Miss Nguyen.” His habit of addressing her formally was obsequious to whatever degree it wasn’t patronizing. She also hated the way he made her last name sound like unguent. “Nobody steps forward to claim this crap. Anyway, your friend does not need, where he is now.”

Maybe he meant in an urn in Oklahoma, she thought, as a hired man crabwalked past them and crashed the coffeetable like a great blimp onto the curb. But it sounded like he meant in hell. “This stuff doesn’t belong to you. You can’t just throw it away.”

“Is not throwing away. Is what-do-you-call.… The good furniture is in someone else’s flat by nighttime.”

“That jukebox should be in a museum.”

He shrugged. “Call a museum.” A rumpled-looking girl in a bikini top, some kind of voluptuous transient, had stopped to pick through a box of records. Jenny couldn’t just stand there, it was like watching a buzzard pick at carrion—indeed, actual birds seemed to be eyeing the loot from the fire escape—so she blew down the steps in her bathrobe and lifted the first box she saw. It was heavier than it looked, but, no longer caring who gawked at her bare legs, she carried it to the elevator. She couldn’t afford to renew her lease come September, anyway.

By midday, the clutter of Richard’s larger apartment had been reconstituted in her own. There were towers of books on the hide-a-bed and LPs in the bottom of the closet. Boxes swamped the kitchenette counters. She would have made room for the Wurlitzer, but it turned out Mr. Feratovic had already sold it—to cover the last three months’ rent, he said. From the doorway, sweating through her gallery clothes and three hours late for work, she watched Claggart scamper to and fro among the piles, as if searching for something. It looked like a crazy person’s apartment, she thought, the home of a lost Collyer brother. Then again, the junk formed a body of evidence: Richard had existed. And who, in this city at the tail end of this century, wasn’t crazy a little?

THAT EVENING, she began to go through the boxes. They were legal-style cartons, sealed at the ends with bits of string wrapped around plastic buttons. In the first, she found sealed envelopes with crinkly glassine windows, an ashtray in the shape of Richard Nixon, a plastic backscratcher, and a hunk of gray rock with a hole you could fit your pinky through. Did this last even count as a possession? Mr. Feratovic’s goons had just taken heaps of whatever was at hand and stuffed it in, like leaves into a bag. The next four boxes she merely took the lids off and dug around in with her arm.

At some point, she realized she’d forgotten to eat dinner. The dissembling sun had dropped halfway down the sky without seeming to traverse any of the space in between. Dust hung in the shafts of light the window scaffolding admitted, and it was strange to think that at least some of this dust was Richard, dislocations of skin, of bitten fingernail. She was sitting on the floor with the final box before her. She unwound the string, only half-remembering what she was even looking for. Inside, a mess of twisted hair and flesh confronted her. Only after she looked away, gorge rising, did she realize there would have been a smell, had it ever been alive. It was a Halloween mask, a Wolfman, turned inside out. A girl in grade school had been able to do this with her eyelids, turning them a glossy, whitened pink. Jenny had to kind of steel herself to get the mask out, but underneath was a stack of magazines. She lifted them from the box and rolled off a rubber band dry with age, which snapped before she could work it free. A manila folder that had been bound in with the magazines fell to the floor. She tucked it gingerly back into place, between the issues of August 1965 and April 1966. She had been fourteen then. She had been fifteen.

These were Richard’s archives, and she was to spend much of the weekend perusing them. The obits were right. Colorful characters—bartenders, minor-league ballplayers, owners of Russian baths—emerged from his sentences without apparent effort, as if he’d become each of them in turn. By the night of Monday, July 11, all that was left was the folder—a typescript she already knew was not a last will and testament, but what he’d been working on when he died: The Fireworkers. She’d saved it for last because reading it would be weird. And was. The surface was drier, cooler than some of his efforts from the ’60s. But beneath that she could feel a greater passion struggling to break through. After fifteen or sixteen pages, she decided she needed to ration herself. She marked her place with some pictures he’d clipped in and balanced the folder on the arm of the hide-a-bed and doused the light and lay for a while in the darkness, more baffled than ever about what might have compelled this man to destroy himself. An actual artist, living right under her nose.

Still, it was as if through his art she’d finally started to heal. She would sleep through the night that night for the first time in months. And when she left the next morning for work, she would remember to lock the door. She was absolutely sure of this, she would tell the cops later. When she left, the lights had been off, the door locked, and the windows that looked out on the scaffolding closed.

56

NICKY WAS RIGHT: you couldn’t really understand PostHumanism until you’d seen those bottles of fire whooshing end-over-end through the air. Even now, Charlie wasn’t sure what to feel about it. Or rather: he could imagine what he should feel, but didn’t quite know what he did. Order and rules and property were things he’d been brought up to respect. This being America, some rebellion was to be anticipated—even welcomed—but there had been no question of him not finishing high school, for instance, any more than there would have been of ripping up the Constitution and starting from scratch; he would someday be an accountant or a podiatrist, with kids and a mortgage. Instead here he was, living out of a single bag of sweat-stiffened laundry in the attic of a revolutionary cell in the East Village. And things around the Phalanstery had changed in the weeks since their raid on the Bronx. The graduate students and punk-rock groupies who used to drift over to smoke the Post-Humanists’ dope and engage Nicky on the finer points of Ecce Homo had disappeared. There was now a police lock on the front door, and two padlocks on the little garage out back; one on the inside, for when Solomon Grungy was holed up in there—which was most of the time—and one on the outside, for when he was out.

What was constant was the birds. By the start of summer, the roof out there held so many that it threatened to cave in, and Sol was constantly at war with them. He’d tried poison; he’d tried installing a row of spikes along the dented gutters, he’d tried electrifying them; once—this was before the rear windows of the Phalanstery, too, got covered with foil—Charlie had been arrested by the sight of Sol pacing around back there with a heavy pistol, muttering to himself. Later, when Nicky had taken Sol aside and reminded him that they couldn’t afford to attract attention, he’d heard Sol say something about how even the birds were out to fuck him up.

At the time, Charlie put this down to increased drug consumption. In the morning, Sol would toss back whole handfuls of amphetamines, and in the evenings, when he came in from whatever he was doing out there, he collapsed in a chair shaped like a satellite dish and smoked massive amounts of weed. It helped, he said, with his hand. He’d injured his left thumb and forefinger not long after Liberty Heights—had burned the tip of one, apparently, and damn near lost the other—but refused to see a doctor. Now he would peel off the white leather driving glove he’d taken to wearing, and Sewer Girl would bend over him in her bikini top, her tits almost touching his chest, and massage cactus oil around his wounds and then, while he waited for it to soak in, pack him bong-loads and hold the mouthpiece to his lips. “What?” he’d say, when he saw Charlie watching. But the sneer had become a sort of comfort. If Sol’s paranoia meant locked doors and covered windows and banished outsiders, and if Charlie remained here, in the front parlor, with him and his old lady, did it not then stand to reason that Charlie was part of the family?