The Finder

by Colin Harrison

  She shrugged. "Everyone is different."

  "Yeah, but in general. Burns, falls, accidents, cave-ins… a lot of guys?"

  The lady shrink nodded. "Couple of hundred, anyway."

  He didn't know how to respond.

  "Listen to me. Being a fireman is a macho thing. Sacrifice, heroism, the whole deal. Very male. But it doesn't allow for emotional nuance, for ambiguity. You got hit hard. Maybe you should accept that, not resist it. Let the hit carry you somewhere. Ever consider that?"

  "My dad always told me I should be a cop."

  "He was wrong, in my opinion."

  "Why?"

  "You interested in power?"

  "Not really."

  "Justice?"

  "That's tougher."

  "Something more basic. More elemental?"

  "Life and death, yeah."

  "Then go find it, Ray. You found some death, go find life."

  She stood then. They were done. She gave him a direct look, like a mother to a son, woman to a man. Firm. With a profound human authority. He remembered it. She'd been right. Go find some life.

  Within a week, he was on the other side of the world, everything he needed in a rucksack. In a little town in Indonesia. Unplugging. No cell phone, no Internet, no newspapers, no CNN. He met a skinny German girl, and they traveled for a few weeks. She was pretty but she had an intravenous drug habit. He wouldn't have sex with her. He'd seen two advanced AIDS patients coming out of a burning Harlem walk-up once, living skeletons. Besides, he hadn't survived the WTC just to get whacked a stupid way. His refusal to fuck had the effect of making the girl do more drugs. But he knew that if he stayed with her, he might eventually have sex with her, maybe shoot some of the heroin she kept in her knapsack. He told her he was going to leave and she tearfully admitted this was a good idea. He paid a man with a truck to take him to the next town. A few days later he was in the Philippines. In an outdoor restaurant, he saw some big blond guys who looked like sunburned surfers from California. They weren't. Aussies. Relief workers. Lounging around in their boots and sunglasses. He sat down and shared a beer with them. They asked where he was from. New York, eh? Long way from home? They'd just flown in, they'd said, were waiting. A typhoon was hitting the eastern islands. They would be dropped in by a C-5 military transport as soon as the trailing edge cleared the coast. Advance team with sat-phones, tents, water. He asked if he could join them, help out. No, they said, we don't take tourists. The tone of the conversation changed, became awkward. He didn't push it. When the bottles were almost empty, one of the guys asked him why he was in the Philippines. Drifting, said Ray. What do you do there in New York, mate? Ray took a last pull from his beer. Used to be a fireman, he said.

  "Fire department, New York City?" said the Aussie, his voice more energetic. "Whereabouts?"

  "Company Ten, 124 Liberty Street, lower Manhattan."

  "Certified first aid?"

  "Yes."

  "Rope trained, rappelling, the whole bit?"

  "Sure. Smoke-plunge and failing-structure rescue. Roof collapse, floor collapse, wall collapse."

  "Construction analysis? Post-and-beam, masonry?"

  "I can tell if it's going to fall down," said Ray.

  "You can drive a lorry?"

  "Lorry?"

  "Truck?"

  "I've driven a pumper and the hook and ladder."

  The Australian nodded. "Gimme a minute, mate." He rose and found the others. They turned and looked at Ray.

  Two days later he was in the top of a mangrove tree, trying to rescue a terrified eight-year-old girl clinging to a branch. She'd been in the stripped branches for thirty hours, after the waters had gone down. Her mother stood waiting. When he reached the girl, she clung to him so tightly he could feel her heart hammering against his chest. Her arms squeezing his neck for all she was worth. The best feeling ever, in his life. Ever. The best moment of his life. I'm going to remember this until I die. He struggled not to cry when the mother raced to her daughter. The crew spent three days digging out corpses from the mud. They directed airdrops of bottled water and foodstuffs and distributed them to thousands of hungry hands. They saw hundreds of people dying from dysentery. Three weeks later the crew was rotated out and given medical exams. His parasites were not unusual, but he'd lost twenty pounds. The scar on his stomach sank inward. They offered him a job. From there on it was six months in the field, off two weeks. All over the world. He didn't read many newspapers, he just lived-in the place, in the time, and with the people.

  Was he finding life? Not exactly. Or yes, in the midst of a great deal of death. From time to time he saved someone again. Not that others would not have saved the same person, but it was Ray who happened to be there, with the rope, the oxygen bottle, the hand. He remembered these moments, tried to understand them but could not. Understood less and less, in fact. No continuity. He lived in a stream of moments. Smoked opium a few times, mostly drank beer to relax. He read the Bible, then the Koran. Then some of the Hindu texts. Most of the cities had a bookstore where you could buy books in English. He followed the news about the war in Iraq, the war in Somalia, the little wars everywhere. He saw UN workers selling pallets of tires to local middlemen. He saw a man holding a pair of pliers walking through a field of bodies, each thick with flies; the man searched for the bodies whose mouths were open wide enough to pull out teeth with gold fillings in them. In Somalia, after having his truck emptied, he was handed an AK-47 and told to keep watch for raiders seeking to steal more relief supplies. The gun felt strange in his hands, so light. Inevitably the crew's work intersected with war zones. They were held up at gunpoint a few times, their money taken. Sometimes local gangs needed to be paid off, warlords placated with gifts of medicine. It came to him that there was a certain futility to what he did. The more relief work you did, the more you saw how much there was to be done. Some of the aid workers got sick, or outright collapsed. Others just flaked, didn't make the flight, called in their resignations. But most of them kept going, not really knowing what else to do. No one in the rest of the world much cared.

  I had some good times here, Ray thought, looking up at Jin Li's apartment, a walk-up in the East Nineties. He had with him a set of fireman's skeleton keys, which contained the master forms provided by the major key manufacturers as well as a variety of trial-and-error sets created by the fire department's research department. Using the keys was sometimes faster than breaking a door down, especially if it was metal and dead-bolted. You were supposed to turn them in if you left the FD, but no one ever did.

  He put on his old fire department suspenders and boots, carried his bag of tools plus a water pressure gauge, and clipped his old ID to his shirt and figured this might help him. His father owned an old police radio that didn't work very well but crackled and popped convincingly, and he carried this in one hand, too.

  At the front door he encountered a little old woman who had dyed her hair but forgotten to do the eyebrows.

  "Ma'am, I'm going to follow you in."

  She turned in alarm. "You are?"

  "Yes."

  "Who are you?"

  "Fire department."

  "Where's the fire?"

  "No fire. Just checking something."

  "What is it?" she demanded to know. "Why isn't the super letting you in?"

  "Between you and me?" He leaned close. "I'm an inspector. We have a confidential tip regarding the building's automated sprinklers, and letting the super know I am coming would be potentially disadvantageous to the safety of the residents."

  The woman nodded in keen understanding of such a stratagem and her eyes narrowed in conspirational pleasure. "I see. Just give me one detail so I can understand."

  "Yes, ma'am. We require sprinkler systems to be on their own piping system so that a regulatory constant pounds-per-square-inch pressure may be maintained and so also that shut-down repairs to dwelling plumbing systems do not impair the readiness of the fire sprinklers. However, maintaining two water
piping systems is more expensive, and-"

  "Yes!" the woman exclaimed. "This building is so cheap you can't believe it!" She opened the door and pushed at him to go in, right past the mailboxes he was supposed to break into to find a telephone bill. "Come on, get in quietly," the woman insisted. "I won't tell anyone until it all comes out. We'll expect a full report to the tenants' association. What floor will you be on?"

  Jin Li lived on the top floor, as he remembered. "The structure has five floors and we are required to start at the top to check the pressure there first."

  "Yes, yes, hurry, please. I live on the third floor. I'll be waiting for you."

  He followed her up the stairs, carrying a bag of groceries for her along the way. "How long will you be before you get to our floor?" she asked.

  He showed her the water pressure gauge, as if that explained everything. She nodded eagerly. "Perhaps an hour, okay?"

  "Yes, thank you."

  He continued on to the fifth floor, the hallway of which corresponded to the L-shaped building, and followed it around to Jin Li's apartment, which lay at the end of the hall. He tried his fancy skeleton keys one by one. He found three that went in but none that worked. Which was why he was glad he'd brought the stubby and heavy gas-powered Saws-All. He would be making a lot of noise for fifteen seconds. Couldn't be helped. He started the saw, gouged the reciprocating blade into the door crack, and guided it downward, cutting two brass dead-bolt locks in about ten seconds. A hell of a skreeling racket, too, metal on metal, bright brass sawdust spewing onto the carpet. Wake the dead, for God's sake. He waited for a door to open along the hallway, a head to pop out, but nothing happened. People were at work, maybe that was it.

  He turned the handle and pushed open the door. The apartment was dark, and he shut the door behind him before turning on the light.

  "Let's remember a few things," his father had briefed him earlier. "People live different ways. Young people are often quite messy but have places where there is order. Their music collections, their spices, that kind of thing. A bed with the sheets on the floor means nothing. Women are not necessarily neater than men, although what will be neat and messy will usually be different. People say gay men are the neatest but not in my experience. Blind people living alone are. They have to be. Anyway, you are looking for three things, the way I see it. You are figuring out if she left in a hurry, you are seeing if the place has been tossed by someone else, and you are looking for information about what kind of trouble she's in. The faster she left, the more information is available."

  He first checked the refrigerator, which was running. He opened the door. No mold on anything. Some Chinese vegetables in there. He sniffed the quart of skim milk-not sour. But that didn't tell him much. He needed a date stamp. She'd been gone at least five days. In the trash was a bill from the local supermarket, which included a quart of milk. The bill was marked the day before the murder of the Mexican girls.

  He inspected the bedroom. The bed was unmade. What was missing? He saw no computer, no wallet, no cash. He checked the bathroom; her toothbrush and toothpaste were gone. He opened the cabinet; her birth control pills were there; this, as much as anything, suggested a hasty exit. She'd said she never missed a pill, ever. In the closet he saw her dresses hanging neatly, many with the dry cleaner's cellophane still on them. He recognized some of them, had run his hand over and inside them, too.

  Had the place been tossed by someone else? Hard to say. The apartment was neither messy nor particularly orderly, just as he remembered. He checked the kitchen drawers, the living room table drawer, the dresser. He stared at the phone and then hit Play Messages. Nothing. That was in her nature. He tried scrolling through the numbers for incoming and outgoing calls; all had been erased. Come on, come on, Ray muttered. I'm not getting what I want. He went back to her dresser and opened up the underwear drawer. In a small silk box he found some jade earrings and a matching jade bracelet. He'd priced jade in Malaysia, and even to his unpracticed eye, this jewelry looked expensive.

  Not getting much, he thought. He paced around the apartment a second time, peeking into the hall closet and under the bed, but found nothing. He crept out the door and pulled it shut, feeling defeated.

  "I hope you have a good fucking reason for being in there," a voice said.

  Ray turned around. A man of about fifty with a red cane stood watching him. He was holding his portable phone.

  "Hi," said Ray.

  "You hear me?" He pointed the cane at Ray.

  "I did."

  "So what's going on? I hit the number one here, this dials 911, and the cops will come."

  Ray put down his bag of tools. "I just broke into her apartment," he admitted.

  "I got that. What did you steal?"

  "Nothing."

  "Right."

  Ray pulled out his pockets, one by one. He opened his tool bag and showed it to the man, who poked his cane inside.

  "I'm her old boyfriend. She's in trouble. I'm trying to find her."

  The man smiled. "Very romantic."

  "It's true. I'm surprised I didn't run into you before."

  "You've been here?"

  "Lots. Nights."

  The man nodded in disgust. "I work nights. I'm the light man on the Empire State Building."

  Appeal to the man's pride, Ray thought. "All the colored lights, the reds and greens?"

  "You got it. What's your name?"

  "Ray Grant."

  The man nodded suspiciously, as if this was an obvious lie. "You look like a fake fireman or something."

  "I was a real fireman."

  "Was? Can you prove it?"

  "I got my old ID right here."

  "Oh, fuck you," the man snarled. "That's bullshit. Probably can buy them on the Internet, eBay or something." He held up his phone menacingly. "Okay, asshole, unless you convince me otherwise, I'm calling the-"

  "The Empire State Building is sheathed in eight inches of Indiana limestone," Ray announced. "It is unlikely to ever collapse in a fire because of the high ratio of its poured concrete to its structural steel, and because every floor has its own ventilation system, meaning fire cannot easily travel from floor to floor… and the building's steel columns and girders are enclosed in two inches of brick terra-cotta and concrete, not spray-on mineral fiber as is common and increasingly controversial today. Also, as I remember, the elevators and utility shafts are masonry-enclosed. The building has a smokeproof stairway with independent vent shafts, a safety feature eliminated in the 1968 revisions of the city's building code, due to weight issues and cost considerations. Old-timers in the Fire Department say that if the 9/11 airliners had hit it instead, it never would have collapsed."

  The man nodded, even allowed a smile. "That's correct." He put the phone in his pocket and leaned on his red cane. "Okay, Ray whoever you are. You got me."

  "You have any idea where Jin Li might be?"

  "Nope."

  "She moved out. Really fast."

  "Scared?"

  "I think so."

  "Why don't you call her?"

  "I did. No answer."

  "No answer at work?"

  Ray shook his head. The first place Chen had checked.

  "That girl works hard. Long, long hours."

  "You know about the office-cleaning company?"

  The man hesitated, unsure whether to answer. "Well, she tells me sometimes, like how she works in midtown in the evenings at various locations but has to get out to Red Hook every day in the morning, to manage everything."

  "Red Hook?" An industrial area in Brooklyn, on the water.

  "Sure, where the company keeps its trucks. Tough to park a lot of big mobile shredding trucks in Manhattan. You need parking space, Red Hook is pretty good."

  Ray had never considered this; it made sense. He picked up his bag. "You got that address?"

  "Nope. But Christ, drive around. Can't miss those trucks."

  19

  Yes, there are a million great places
to eat in New York City, the steakhouses, the celebrity chef halls of worship, the places to see and be seen (at Michael's: "There's Henry Kissinger! There's Penelope Cruz!"), the stuffy theater district joints with timed seatings, Italian-Chinese-French-Vietnamese-Indian-nouvelle-fusion-whatever trend is next, the taverns and bars and clubs and eateries and saloons and bistros and cafes and sushi places frequented by skinny women and coffee shops and bookstore cafes filled with geniuses and depressives and bodegas and snack bars and pizza joints and espresso bars and fast-food places and emporiums of fish and tearooms and Thai noodle shops, absolutely every possible taste catered to, not to mention the Oyster Bar, where businessmen have been knocking them back for decades before taking the train home-and be sure you try their New England clam chowder. Yet not to be forgotten and in fact to be specifically remembered is the Primeburger, on the north side of Fifty-first Street off Fifth Avenue. Not a high-class joint, but not a low-class joint, either, rather a real old-time Manhattan luncheonette. Hamburgers have been served there since 1938. Last remodeled in 1965. You enter to a long counter on the right, single seats with once-futuristic swing-trays on the left, a few crowded tables in the back. Tuna melt, Boston cream pie. Jell-O with whipped cream. Prune juice, if you want it, heh. All the waiters are older guys in white jackets and neckties, with their names embroidered on the jacket. The menu is not expensive. Your basic burger is $4.50. You heard right: $4.50 in midtown Manhattan. Gray-haired businessmen like the place, some of them rich guys who the world forgot twenty or thirty years ago. But they stayed on, oblivious to being disremembered, getting to their little offices by eight a.m. each day, making a few phone calls, watching the price of something on a screen: pork bellies, spot oil, the Brazilian crop report. Not retired, just working an easy schedule. Don't run anything anymore, no titles, no pressure. Take the early train home, money made. Men of habit, not only do they eat at the same time each day but generally eat the same thing, and thus the Primeburger waiters grunt intimately at them as they arrive, mouthing again the order that never changes. "Ham chee, Swiss'n'rye, Co-no-ice."