City on Fire (106 page)

“I’m not dragging anyone. I’ll drop you wherever you like. But I’ve had plenty of time to think about this. I know where to find Captain Chaos, I remember where I sent the check for that painting Bruno sold. And you heard what the boy said.”

To be honest, Mercer’s been trying to let the blackout blot it from his mind. He should have realized, though, that she wouldn’t make this easy. “By that point Charlie would have said anything,” he says. “He’s in trouble with the cops, and he’s clearly got some kind of problem with the truth.” A blockage at Foley Square—a skirmish between two guys in white undershirts—is sending them left anyway, he’s relieved to see.

“Did we not read the same article? ‘NC’? The gunpowder?”

“The men in my family are all Army, Jenny. I can tell you, three grams of loose gunpowder is pretty useless, unless you’ve got an old blunderbuss lying around.”

Though it comes out sounding more hypothetical than dismissive, she appears to relent. Really, she’s just gathering force.

“You’ve never made a typo? Or had something misrepresented to you? We know the girl’s dad makes fireworks, we know he’s had security problems, and now we hear there’s a bomb. Is it so hard to believe Nicky Chaos has whatever amount of explosive he’d need to hurt your boyfriend, excuse me, roommate?”

He brushes wrinkles from his shirt, strains for dignity. “Why don’t you just pull over here at the corner. I’ll see if the buses are running.”

“I’m saying, why fumble around uptown in the dark, Mercer, when you can go straight to the source of the threat?”

“That’s what cops are for,” he says, as he opens the door and swings his feet to the curb. But the moment he stands, he sees that his reasoning has been off. For where earlier it was the protest clogging traffic around them, now it’s the blue lights of the Furies shoving everything else aside. The whole police building back there is emptying itself into Lower Manhattan, fanning out to do God knows what. Defend the banks, stop murder in the tunnels, look busy enough to create plausible deniability. He’s starting to sound like Jenny Nguyen. Still, it seems far-fetched that whatever the inspector said, a phalanx, is on its way right now to check out the boy’s story. Which, if he really thinks about “The Fireworkers,” is less improbable than he’s hoped. “What are you doing?” he asks, hearing a beep behind him.

“It’s a timer. Setting my watch for midnight.”

“Jenny, they’re not going to forget about this bomb stuff just because there’s a blackout on. Pulaski will do the right thing. He’ll be on the scene long before midnight.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“You have to know him,” he says, because the real reason, the kindness Pulaski showed him on New Year’s Eve, is even shakier. Yet it feels like the person he’s trying to convince is himself.

“Assuming you’re right,” Jenny says, “and the cops are there, we can park down the block and enjoy the perp-walk. Maybe they’re not there, though. And if there’s a bomb—”

“A bomb is why I’m telling you, please, this is a bad idea.” Nicky Chaos can blow himself up, for all Mercer cares, and Jenny can probably still be talked out of going to stop him. Any other victim at this late juncture may simply be outside Mercer’s brief. But what do you call someone who has second thoughts about even his second thoughts? Because, before he can get the words out, Mercer is pulling himself back into the car and shutting the door again. William is the one “NC” has pursued, which means that somehow William will have to end up there, too. And if that’s the case, then what choice does Mercer have? If he loves William enough, he has to stop this from happening. Has to go.

Now, though, random groups of marchers, leftover traffic from rush hour, police cars, erratic pedestrians, and the blackout itself are forcing them west, west, until half the city lies between them and their destination. On the principle of steering into the skid, Jenny goes speeding toward the riverfront, where cars still zoom along. The traffic signals are gone. Darkened streetlamps whip past the window. The water is flashes of moonlight. She’ll cut across at Fourteenth and back down, she’s telling him, as the cobbled streets of the old Meatpacking District start pummeling the Gremlin’s suspension. They must be doing sixty in a twenty-five. Bent forward in silhouette, peering into the darkness, she herself is a little gremlin.

“Let me ask you something,” he says. “Have you ever met Nicky Chaos?”

“Only on the phone. But I know the type.”

“And we’re going to charge in there with our awesome powers of persuasion and hope he has a change of heart? If things go wrong, do you even have a way to defend yourself?”

“Inspiration comes to prepared spirits,” she says. And he is in the middle of voicing his warning that she’s going to have to be the enforcer, he only cares about William, when he spots a huge puddle spread over the paving stones. It makes no sense, he’s thinking, that someone should have opened a hydrant here in this forsaken part of town—and all at once he’s aware of a curtain of water shearing up over the windshield and of a sort of floaty feeling, a loud blam halting his progress while something else comes and whumps him on the back of the head. His mind, still flying forward, just has time to emit a kind of clumsy lover’s prayer. And then the blackout, for Mercer Goodman, turns an even deeper black.

UPPER WEST SIDE—10:10 P.M.

HE SPOTS THE STUNNED SHAPE behind the flares just before he’d otherwise flatten it: William Hamilton-Sweeney. In the years since Keith’s seen him, he’s gotten even thinner, but still with those noble features. His arm, when Keith grabs it, feels tacky. Hardening wax. Of all people. “Hey—you’re coming from upstairs? Are my kids there?”

William is slow to respond, as if shaking off a vision. He seems even sweatier than Keith. Nearby, the doorman continues to lay out a line of safety flares along the sidewalk. Smoke billows like blood in a syringe. Shadows stand at hedged distances, everyone, it seems, obeying the same summons to come out into the night. But in the space beyond his shoulder at which William stares (Where the hell did he go?) there are only birds.

“Come on, it’s Keith, your brother-in-law. Are they up there? Did you see them?”

Then William comes back to himself. “No kids, but Regan is.” It’s the worst of all possible answers. “But you weren’t supposed to be here, Keith. She said you two split up.”

Keith’s running is catching up with him. A cramp stabs at his side, his breath coming in little gulps; still, he tries to keep his voice steady. All this time, Regan’s longed for her brother’s return. If he scares William off again, she’ll never take him back. “It’s a long story. I’d better tell her myself.”

William leans in to look at him. It’s hard to see much in the pink penumbra of the flares, but Keith feels uncomfortable. The last time their eyes met was in the middle of William’s self-immolating best-man speech, when for a second Keith had sensed some attraction on the boy’s side. On his own had been the force of Regan’s feelings for the kid; everything she loved, Keith was helpless not to love. It was for her that he’d chased William back along a corridor after he’d fled the banquet hall. He’d almost managed to grab the shoulder of his dinner jacket. Then, with a juke move sideways, William had disappeared out a fire door and into the next two decades. Half a life ago, but only what, fifteen hundred feet away? As if even then they were racing toward this moment. Okay, William says at last; phones still work in a blackout, he’ll go in and call up for her.

In the dim lobby, Keith collapses into one of those quasi-thrones probably no one’s ever sat in, while William leans over the doorman’s desk and dials. He seems to meet with some resistance on the other end of the line. “Tell her it’s about the kids,” Keith says. Then William hangs up and sits to wait, too, as the doorman, Miguel’s his name, returns inside. The small-talk about baseball Keith used to make with him would be frivolous now. All anyone can do is watch the shadows beyond the big plate-glass windows. It’s like being at the court of Louis XVI, waiting for the palace walls to collapse and someone to come drag them to the tumbrel. There is still time to reverse course, Keith reminds himself, but there isn’t; a door has swung open. Regan’s flashlight slides from William’s face to his own. Just get it over with, he thinks, and finds himself explaining that the kids are missing.

Everything’s silent for a second as the flashlight hits a wall-sized mirror, doubling the light. “You lost them, Keith?”

She makes it sound like he did it on purpose, when really he was only a little late to pick them up. A glance at William yields a sympathetic shrug.

“In this. You lost them.” She turns to Miguel. “Is the towncar still waiting outside?”

“It’s already gone, miss. Your uncle, he comes to take it while I’m looking for flares.”

“That little fucker!” William explodes. “What did I tell you?”

But Regan has already collected herself. She orders her brother to go upstairs while she goes to hail a taxi. “This is important, William. One of us has to stay. Daddy’s in no shape to be left alone.”

The old William would have told her to go to hell, and in fact, there is a pause here, during which she screws the head of the flashlight tighter and clicks it off and on and extends it to him. “It’s my kids. Your niece and nephew. Please.” She has this total gravity, this total clarity of purpose calling her out of herself, and something must have changed in William, because he actually obeys, taking the flashlight and disappearing. She is halfway out the door when Keith realizes he’s going to be left behind if he doesn’t say something. The best he can come up with is, “How’ll you find a taxi?” She doesn’t answer, but also doesn’t forbid him from following her out.

Sure enough, traffic is still bumper-to-bumper, not a single cab vacant. Then a roar is gathering blocks away, loud enough to shake buildings apart. It’s hard to discern a direction; it seems to come from all sides. He tries to follow it, though, and after some seconds of pretending not to notice, she comes up behind him. Seeing dark shapes beetle by ahead, he hurries to the corner. It is motorcycles, rumbling down Columbus like an invading army. There must be hundreds. They’ve squeezed all other traffic over into one lane. Way up the darkened avenue he can see the lit signs of those taxis that have been swooft enough to fall in behind, the way they sometimes will with an ambulance. Illegal, of course, but the rules everyone’s been living by seem to have been suspended. Which, despite everything, gives Keith a kind of hope. He steps right out into the gap between the dwindling bikers and the oncoming cabs, more or less daring the latter to hit him. The first one that stops he jumps into, and before Regan has a chance to say anything he tells the driver he’s got two fifties in his pocket, and to take them wherever the lady wants to go—and step on it.

HELL’S KITCHEN—10:27 P.M.

THE WEST SIDE ANGELS don’t need the shadow of a Vincent Black Shadow flashing high against the clouds to summon them, or any Justice League junk like that. They just sort of figure when the lights go out some action’s about to go down, and so, from all over Manhattan, they make for the pad of their Maximum Leader. Headlights like hard objects swerve around stalled cars, bear down on bottlenecks at speed, as in some colossal game of chicken. (Part of being in the Club is never letting on that you think about things like collision insurance. Helmets are an affectation. You sit your hog as if death doesn’t exist.) And at the Maximum Leader’s, as foretold, last night’s party might as well have never ended. Bikes roost in rows outside, where riders pass bottles of Rheingold. To judge by the sound of things, two or more people are already getting it on on a loading dock. A bent spoon jams the lock of the downstairs door. The cage inside is, per usual, tied open with a chain, which you can see only by dint of the headlamp of the Harley somebody’s driven straight through the entryway and idled at the foot of the stairs, facing out, as if, when the moment is right, the Leader will descend like the Last Mahdi to claim it. Its motor sends exhaust to every corner of the decrepit old breathmint factory, but who’s complaining? It isn’t even clear who besides the Leader lives here—and again it isn’t the Angels’ way to think about this stuff.

The apartment on the sixth floor is wide open, a box of moonlight, but if the Maximum Leader is in here, in the dark, no one can find him. He’s always been, despite that menacing jollity of his, sort of a cipher. For example: Is he white or is he black? (Or possibly half-Maori, with the face tattoos?) And: How has he managed to live for so long with no furniture, with no telephone, with (someone recalls, from back when the lights were on) a refrigerator missing its door? Under the giant shadows that lumber in and out crunches jetsam from last night. Bottles roll into the stairwell, go silent, and after a two-second delay, burst five stories down, where some chick keeps shouting, Motherfucker!

The real action, though, is up on the roof. Here, after the black slog of the stairwell, is enough light to party by—fat moon, improbable stars, a bonfire built in a wheelbarrow, and little bits of headlight swimming along the beaten tin gutterpipe—though poor visibility plus booze plus roof is an equation crying out for balance. Angels in various degrees of drunkenness play Spin the Knife, cradle lit cigarettes between knuckles in tests of endurance, argue about the blackout’s origins, then cluster along the northern roofline to watch a warehouse burn ten blocks uptown. Two blond Rhinemaidens have stripped off their shirts to dance white-titted in the moonlight to a radio that plays this new band Chic on a continuous loop. Faggot music, someone mutters, but no one pays him any mind.

Atop an upturned trashcan near the bonfire, supplies of booze are soon depleted. A wobbly deputation gets sent down to ground level to scrounge for more. They make it no farther than the next corner, the desultory bodega whose plywood shelves always seem to contain exactly three of everything. Three rolls of one-ply toilet paper; three dusty cans of expired black beans; three vacuum-sealed bricks of Café El Bandito; three boxes of roach powder. These are pretty much a beard; for years, the store’s real business has been to keep the Leader and his crew in beer. But now it sits silent behind the metal security gate the Angels slam their fists against. That’s until somebody gets a brainwave.