Man of the Hour (51 page)
David saw no sign of Elizabeth, but he sensed her presence nearby. A kind of springish radiance in the air. He stumbled through the crowd, slowly feeling himself becoming part of a surging life force again. He was determined to find her. It was a matter of honor not to give up looking, since he’d come this far. He had to connect with her just one last time and let her know everything was all right.
After twenty minutes of searching, he finally spotted a girl who looked like her waiting in line for the Wonder Wheel. But she was thirty yards away, and with his blurry vision he couldn’t be sure. She was wearing a dark sack-like skirt and a white
hijab
. And she was in a separate line for girls. David called out to her, but she didn’t hear him through the milling crowd and ride noises. He was feeling dizzy and weak from the warmth of the day and the crowd closing in on him. He tried to maneuver through with his cane, but his progress was slow and painful. He hoped he wouldn’t collapse.
He made his way past a souvenir stand and saw the girl smooth down the back of her
hijab
, leaving a little handprint. Was it Elizabeth or wasn’t it? He stopped and called out to her, and then suddenly realized that if it was her she might have changed radically these past few months. The
hijab
and the sack of a skirt. The separate line for girls. It dawned on him that she might be doing penance for everything that had gone wrong.
He wanted to tell her it was all right, that she shouldn’t blame herself. But maybe he couldn’t reach her anymore. Religion had come into her life. Something else was pushing her forward. The Wonder Wheel stopped and the line of girls waiting to get on it moved.
And then without warning, she turned and looked right at him. As if she’d known he was there all along. Slowly, a smile spread across her face and he knew he didn’t have to come any closer. She was seeing him from across the river and it was okay. This was something more than penance. The hand over her heart had lifted. And now he knew he could go home too.
He started to wave to her, but she had already turned back and started to climb into one of the gondolas for the Wonder Wheel.
And so he just stood there by the ticket booth and watched her go up on the turning wheel, a smudged white dove rising above the hot dog stands, mattress stores, and housing projects, into the fierce brightness of a Coney Island afternoon.
Although Peter Blauner (b. 1959) grew up on Manhattan’s East Side and attended the prestigious Collegiate School for Boys, he has always been drawn to the dark side of city life. “Being a kid during the fiscal-crisis seventies, I saw how things could change and you could go from the high to the low very quickly. Which is a very good lesson in humility and an even better one for writing crime fiction.”
Influenced equally by the films of Sidney Lumet and Martin Scorsese, the burgeoning punk rock scene, and the split-lip school of American pulp fiction, Blauner began writing short stories in high school and while still in college got a summer job assisting legendary newspaper columnist and author Pete Hamill. “He gave me a master class on what it means to be an urban writer. He taught me to always get your notes on paper right away, always ask the hardest question you can think of, and always listen carefully to the last thing somebody says to you.”
After graduating from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1982, Blauner returned to the city and began working at
New York
magazine, where he apprenticed with Nicholas Pileggi, author of
Wise Guy
and screenwriter of the film
Goodfellas
. Over the next few years, Blauner developed his byline for the magazine, writing about crime, politics, and other forms of antisocial behavior. But, he says, “My real goal was to train myself to become an urban novelist. I wanted to write stories that were suspenseful and compelling, but that also tried to capture what’s funny, surrealistic, and occasionally beautiful about city life.”
He decided on an approach of full-immersion research, which he has continued throughout his writing career. In 1988, he took a leave from the magazine and became a volunteer at the New York Department of Probation, so he could write about the criminal culture of the era from the front lines. The result was his debut novel,
Slow Motion Riot
, which was published in 1991. It went on to win the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best first novel and was named one of the “International Books of the Year” in the
Times Literary Supplement
by Patricia Highsmith, who called it “unforgettable.”
Soon after, Blauner turned his attention to fiction writing fulltime, and his next novel,
Casino Moon
,
was a kind of update of the classic noir pulp genre, set in the Atlantic City boxing world and published in 1994. After his time in Atlantic City researching
Casino Moon
, he returned to New York and spent a year working at a homeless shelter to research
The Intruder
, which was published in 1996 and became a
New York Times
bestseller. For his next novel,
Man of the Hour
, published in 1999, he anticipated the reality of 9/11 by writing about misguided notions of heroism and Middle Eastern terrorism in America. Four years later, he shifted gears and wrote
The Last Good Day
, about a murder in a quiet Hudson River town and the resulting social fissures among the people who live there.
Blauner’s most recent novel,
Slipping Into Darkness
(2006), found him back on the city streets creating a modern urban mystery. It tells the story of Julian Vega, a bright young immigrant’s son, locked up in the early eighties for killing a female doctor on New York’s Upper East Side. Twenty years later, Julian is released from prison and another female doctor is killed under strikingly similar circumstances. Only this time, the evidence doesn’t point to Julian at all—it points to the woman he allegedly murdered two decades before. And the detective who arrested him in the first place, Francis X. Loughlin, is left to wrestle with the possibility that he ruined the life of an innocent man. The book earned the strongest reviews of Blauner’s career, with everyone from Stephen King to the
New York Times
ringing in, and introduced him to a new audience.
More recently, Blauner has branched out into television work, writing scripts for the
Law & Order
franchise, and also into short fiction. His short stories have been anthologized in the
Best American Mystery
collection and on NPR’s
Selected Shorts from Symphony Space
. He continues to live in Brooklyn with his wife, Peg Tyre, author of the bestselling nonfiction book
The Trouble With Boys
, and their two sons, Mac and Mose.
Blauner grew up in the New York City of the 1970s and started writing fiction while a student at the Collegiate School for Boys. “I became a writer right before Mother’s Day when I was fifteen: I saw a little girl at Gimbel’s Department Store trying to pull her dress down, and heard her nanny say, ‘Stop that, you’re as bad as your mother.’”
For his first novel,
Slow Motion Riot
, Blauner immersed himself in research, spending six months as a volunteer at the New York Department of Probation.
For his fourth novel,
Man of the Hour
, Blauner traveled Jerusalem and the West Bank to get a sense of his characters’ background stories. This photograph was taken by a shepherd at the sheep market outside of Bethlehem.
Since 1989, Blauner has been married to bestselling author Peg Tyre (
The Trouble with Boys
,
The Good School
). They have two sons.
In recent years, Blauner has been working in television, as a writer and producer for the
Law & Order
franchise.
THIS IS A WORK
of fiction. As most New Yorkers know, there is no Coney Island High School.
I would like to acknowledge the following books as invaluable research sources: Thomas W. Lippman’s
Understanding Islam
, second revised edition (Meridian, New York, 1995);
Two Seconds Under the World
by Jim Dwyer, David Kocieniewski, Diedre Murphy, and Peg Tyre (Crown, New York, 1994);
Cry Palestine: Inside the West Bank
by Said K. Aburish (Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1993). I’m also deeply indebted to Izzat al-Ghazzawi, head of the Palestinian Writers Union, who generously gave of his time and insights during my stay in the Middle East; Jennifer Goldberg from Edward R. Murrow High School; and of course, my uncle Arthur. Any errors in fact or interpretation are the author’s original creations.
In addition, I’d like to thank the following people: Marcie Ruderman, Sandra Abrams, Don Roth, Jim Murphy, June Feder, Midge Herz Kosner, Ken Wasserman, Hubert Selby, Jr., Lenore Braverman, Nasser Ahmed, Jeffrey Goldberg, Alyson Lurie, Kim Bonheim, Gail Reisin, Jarek Ali, David Ignatius, Dan Ingram, Dr. Charles Stone, Bart Gellman, Dr. Bernard Sabella, Carol Storey, Daniel Max, Doug Pooley, Eric Pooley, Sonny Mehta, Alice Farkouh, Larry Joseph, Allen Leibowitz, Joe Gallagher, Fatima Shama, Guy Renzi, Donald Sadowy, J. J. Goldberg, Jim Yardley, Joyce London, Sarah Piel, Lori Andiman, Mel Glenn, Ari Mientkovich, Chiara Coletti, Michael Siegel, Larry Schoenbach, Naomi Shore, Caroline Upcher, Joanne Gruber, Claire Zion, Susanna Einstein.