In This Rain (7 page)

That had never bothered him. “One rat’s as good as another,” he’d said the day Ann had stormed in fuming about being assigned to a small time union kick back scheme when she’d asked to be let loose on a nest of double-dipping concrete inspectors in Queens. “Calm down,” Joe had uselessly told her. “It’s not like there’s not enough lying, cheating, and stealing to go around.” He felt permitted to speak this way to Ann; he was six years her senior in this business, though only three in age.

She’d thrown him a glare, told him he was a cheery bastard, and stalked out. And done both investigations, juggling the one she was assigned and the one she’d assigned herself. And gotten, simultaneously, a rap on the knuckles from their boss and a commendation from the grateful Queens Borough Superintendent.

What she had not done was calm down.

Now Ann, though exiled to the outer boroughs, continued in defiant, ceaseless motion, and Joe was shipwrecked.

And so each visit grew more difficult, she dropping anchor from time to time at his dry and featureless island. With no trees or grasses, hills or streams, no change in light or weather, what was it they could comment on? What did they have to say?

City Hall

The mayor walked to his window. City Hall Park was in lush bloom. Charlie Barr, a Red Hook kid, could only pick out the maples, oaks, and lindens, but he knew he was looking at a dozen other varieties, too, some of them important specimen trees dear to the hearts of the Parks Department. On the paths, between banks of pink and purple flowers, tourists consulted maps and teenagers flirted and families with strollers ambled along.

Charlie was gratified by the whole thing. He might not know one tree from another but he knew a city with well-kept parks looked prosperous and confident. Two years ago, after hearing the Hamptons crowd lament how they missed their gardens once they’d closed their beach houses for the season, he’d started a program for citizens to plant and maintain certain areas in certain parks, and turn into parks what were once weedy traffic islands and roadway shoulders. At the start this meant turf battles— ha, he thought, turf battles: he should remember to use that— between Parks and Transportation. Twice he had to bring both Commissioners in and bang their heads together. But finally they saw reason, or maybe, as Don had said, predestination, and Charlie got his program. A program that gave citizens a way to participate, added amenities, and cut costs: who could ask for more?

He watched the wind push the fountain’s water around. At the height of last summer’s drought, Environmental Conservation had ordered all the fountains off. Charlie had personally thrown the switch on the City Hall one at a press conference where he’d talked about public-spirited sacrifice, praised DEC’s Commissioner for making tough decisions, and expressed the hope that the drought would be short. He’d looked into the suddenly still bowl and said, “Boy, I’ll miss that fountain.”

“You just said all citizens have to make sacrifices, Mayor,” some press wiseass had cracked.

“Yeah,” he’d snapped back, “but they don’t have to enjoy them!”

Then he’d stalked off. It was one of the things the polls said New Yorkers liked about Charlie Barr, that he wasn’t goddamn cheerful all the time.

The drought hadn’t been short; summer stretched into fall and the fountains stayed dry. But this year New York could have its fountains, its grass, its gardens. Parks could stop fretting about their specimen trees (which they’d watered anyway last summer, legally but, by Charlie’s order, in the middle of the night). This year there was plenty of rain.

The doorknob clicked. Charlie turned from the window. Lena was holding the door wide to admit Mark Shapiro and Greg Lowry.

“Thanks, Lena. What about Don?”

“Here.” Don Zalensky, probably fresh off a Camel break, eased around Lena. She smiled at him. Don and Lena, so different in all ways, had always gotten along, seeming to share some private source of amusement. Charlie suspected it was him, but what the hell.

“You need me?” Lena stood in the doorway.

“No, go on home,” Charlie told her. This meant, This meeting’s private and off the record, but these days no one winked at a secretary and said, Sweetheart, get lost. “Thanks for coming in,” he added.

“Anytime, Charlie,” she said drily, and pulled the door shut as she left.

Don sat in the wooden straight-backed chair he favored, shifting it to face the leather armchairs Shapiro and Lowry were settling into. Don’s gray suit, fresh from the cleaner (Charlie had had to suggest, after the limo picked Don up, that he pull the tag off the sleeve), was already looking rumpled. Greg Lowry had on a white shirt, brown jacket, maroon tie, gray slacks. Even if Charlie didn’t know Lowry wasn’t married, he’d know he wasn’t married. No woman would let a man out of the house looking like that. Mark Shapiro, of course, was in full dark-suit-and-tie regalia, down to spit-shined shoes and NYPD twenty-year pin.

Charlie’s own jacket was hanging in the closet where it wouldn’t wrinkle, and his shirt was blue, for the TV cameras. He perched on the edge of his desk and folded his arms. “Well?”

Lowry and Shapiro exchanged glances. Shapiro cleared his throat. “Well, of course you can’t guarantee anything based only on observation.”

“Fine, disclaimer accepted. But?”

Shapiro shrugged. “But I can’t say anything suggests either of them knows something they’re not saying.”

“Greg?”

“No, me either. Nothing raised a red flag for me about those two.”

Charlie breathed out a long breath. “Thank God for that.”

“Those two” were Virginia McFee and Les Farrell.

The stated agenda for the first Sunday morning meeting, just ended, was a briefing on the investigation into the fatal construction site accident late Friday night: falling bricks that had left Harriet Winston, single mother of three small children, dead on an inner-city sidewalk.

The agenda for the second meeting, just starting, was a discussion of the other reason for the first meeting.

“And nothing else, either?” Charlie asked. “New cars? Vacations? Either of them suddenly pay off a mortgage?”

“No,” said Lowry. “Matches what we found at the lower levels at Buildings, over the last week or so. If anything’s going on there, they’re doing it for free.”

In the chair beside Charlie, Don recrossed his legs for the fourth time. “Don, for chrissake, light up if you want to!”

Don, after a moment’s hesitation, slipped a Camel from the pack. As he lit it, Shapiro frowned and shifted his chair away. Don went to the window, holding the cigarette outside between puffs. Shapiro didn’t look any happier, but too bad.

“And it goes without saying,” Charlie said, because it didn’t, “that you’ve been absolutely quiet about it?” Looking at Shapiro’s starched face, he couldn’t help adding, “Like little church mice?”

Shapiro, probably never before compared to anything less ponderous than a bull moose, frowned again and looked to Lowry.

“I did it myself, Mayor,” Lowry said. “On tiptoe.”

“But they’ve got to know,” said Shapiro. “McFee and Farrell. Everyone expects to be investigated in a situation like this.”

“I don’t care if they know. But I don’t want to read in the Post that the city’s investigating the mayor’s appointees, unless and until one of them’s arrested. And if that happens I want to announce the arrest myself.”

Silence from the DOI men, which the mayor decided to interpret as accord.

“Okay. So— ”

“Mayor?” That was Shapiro. “What would you have done if we’d found something?”

“Burn ’em,” Charlie shot back. “Anyone I trust who fucks me up, they’re on their own.”

“No matter how it makes you look?”

“Makes me look a lot worse to slap their wrist and send them on their way. Why? Who’re you thinking about?”

“I’m not. Just wanted to know how far you really wanted us to take this, if we did find something.”

“All the way. If I end up eating crow, it won’t be the first time and it won’t kill me. Looking like I’m covering up for a friend, that’s what’ll kill me.”

Shapiro nodded thoughtfully, the worry folds between his eyebrows minutely easing.

“Look at that, Don,” the mayor said. “I made Mark happy.”

Heart’s Content

“The pressure’s gotten so high in Manhattan”— Ann’s brisk voice, Joe’s back porch: she was talking about real estate; he wondered how much he’d missed— “developers are taking to the boroughs. These guys, Three Star Partners— you can tell what they think of themselves by the name, huh?” Interrupting herself, she turned to him. He continued to stare over the rail to the far bright corner of the garden. In the lee of a granite boulder, white peonies were unfurling from tight, waxy buds.

“Three Star,” Ann continued. “They assembled a site in Mott Haven and got it cheap. Who wouldn’t sell, up there? Near the subway, police station a block north, school two blocks south. Three Star says they can make it go.”

He shook his head. He meant, That area can’t have changed that much in two and a half years. And he meant, Three Star Partners, whoever they are, are up to something. And he meant, I live in a different world now and none of this matters to me anymore.

He shoved his chair back, strode across the grass to where the yellow irises glowed hard against the pines. From here you could hear the stream. He listened to the water racing south as though it had a place it had to be.

Ann crossed the yard and came to stand beside him.

She might have remarked, at that moment, on the beauty of his garden, the rush of the water, the sun’s warmth. That was an interrogator’s trick Ann knew well: say something that will suggest to the subject the connection of common ground. But this was not an interrogation and Joe was not a subject and the connection— even now, even after all this, even to his dismay— did not have to be suggested. Ann said nothing about the landscape or the weather.

She said, “It’s why I need you.”

“Go home, Ann.”

She paused; when she spoke her voice held a new tone, part triumph, part wonder. “Oh! Wait. You think— Joe? You think I’m trying to do you a favor? That that’s what this is about? I tracked you down and drove three hours to East Jesus on a Sunday to, what, save you from yourself?”

He didn’t speak. The breeze shifted and he could smell her perfume. Hanae Mori, a fresh, green scent, the only perfume she ever wore. He didn’t turn to her.

“For God’s sake, Joe. Someone died.”

Harlem: Frederick Douglass Boulevard

Ford brewed more tea and brought it back to the armchair as Ray flipped through a spiral-bound booklet.

“Looks good,” Ray told him. “Lot of work here already. Lot of time.”

“Sixteen years,” said Ford. “One way or another.”

Pages dense with print alternated with tables, pie charts, and sheet after sheet of architect’s renderings: gleaming glass and steel buildings, high and low, from a distance and in close-up detail, inside and out. Sunlight streamed. Store windows beckoned. A basketball player lifted off for a dunk. Dogs sniffed, cats stretched. People shopped, strolled, sat. Plants and kids were everywhere.

“All right, then,” said Ray. “Take me through it.”

“Start with the rendering on the fourth page.”

Ray flicked the pages. His forehead creased. “Doesn’t look like the same place, does it?”

“That’s what was in the paper eight, nine months ago, remember? It’s what got me going. It’s what the city’s proposing.”

The page faced Ray; from where Ford sat the image was upside down but he knew it too well for that to matter. Reproduced from an architect’s drawing in the real estate section of the Sunday Times, this bird’s eye view pictured the same site as the other renderings: a city-owned half-block in the center of Harlem. Ford walked by that site every day now; he’d deliberately changed his route from home to pass it. Most of it was a rubble-strewn empty lot, littered with rusting bedsprings, leaking batteries, ripe bags of garbage. Four buildings still stood, two half-full of squatters, two concrete-blocked and empty. The city had put up a chain-link fence well over a year ago; the neighborhood had torn holes in it within a week.

It was known as Block A, this neglected plot of land. It was the last large city-owned site in Harlem. The city had plans for it and Ray was looking at them now.

No sparkling glass, no shining steel. No streaming sunlight. No: nighttime brownstones with bow fronts, and back alleys for service and parking. Jazz clubs with neon signs. Not many kids, no jumbled foliage. Carefully trimmed, well-spaced trees alternated with cast-iron streetlights in a promenade up the avenue. A hip, multiethnic crowd with a subtle Roaring Twenties air lounged in sidewalk cafés, emerged from yellow taxis, and passed energetically in and out of the bars and restaurants.

“Remember seeing it?” Ford asked Ray again.

“Sure do.”

“Harlemland.”

Ray looked up. “That’s what they’re calling it?”

“No, of course not. The Times used fifty-cent phrases like ‘contextual design’ and ‘harmonizing with the surrounding architectural fabric.’ It said, ‘The city’s proposal recalls the glory days of the Harlem Renaissance.’ ”

“Did it make mention that those particular glory days were eighty years ago?”

“Look at it! Single-family townhouses. Private parking. Nightclubs, speakeasies— ”

“Speakeasies?”

“You know what it is? It’s a theme park!” Ford jumped up, calling like a carnival barker. “C’mon up to Harlem, see them black folks swing! Get your collard greens and hooch, your hams, your yams! Go to church on Sunday, hear that ole time gospel sound. Then turn and leave while the sermon’s being preached.”

At that, Ray laughed.

“Like it uptown?” Ford plowed on. “You can live here too! Like Disney World? You can live in Celebration. Like South Street Seaport? Battery Park City. And if you like slumming, here’s: Harlemland!”

Ray smiled and nodded. “Tell it.”

“Step right up! Meet a gangbanger! See a junkie nodding out! View the exotic colored folk from the safety of your Beemer. Drive right to the door of your own brownstone— period-detailed, with all the amenities, and so much more affordable than downtown! Park securely in your own garage. Harlem, USA! It’s clean, it’s new, it’s sanitized. Dope dealers and welfare moms, the homeless and the jobless been swept clear out to the Bronx. Harlem, the final frontier! To boldly go where no white man has gone before. Harlemland! Sho’ nuff.”