Tabloid City

by Pete Hamill

  12:36 a.m. Glorious Burress. The Lots, Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

  She shifts, turns in the twisted sheets of the queen-sized bed, always on her back, never finding a position that brings sleep. Her belly is bursting with the child. She wants to rise, to bang on the locked door that holds her as a prisoner. She wants to find Malik in the rainy night, Malik who put the baby in her. To find a hospital with dry sheets and nurses and doctors. Or even a police station. Anyplace where the walls don’t drip. Where water is hot. She wants to find her mother.

  Glorious Burress can’t look at this room, its pale bare walls, its flaking paint, the holes ripped away near the splintery floorboards to make gates for rats. With eyes shut, she thinks: Malik got the key. Malik, that locked me in. Malik and his Muslim shit. No surprise, she thinks. He wanted me to change my name, the name that my mother gave me. Wanted me to take some fucking Arab name. He even wanted me to wear a burqa. Imagine: in fucking Brooklyn! Malik wanted me to be a masked marvel, for fuck’s sake! I shoulda run. Shoulda slipped away. Gone to my cousin’s house in Paterson. Instead, I’m here. Hurting bad. On the top floor. No fire escape. Hurting. Oooooooooh…

  She feels as if a cannonball is trying to burst out of her belly, ripping everything in its way. She grabs the filthy pillow, bare, no pillowcase, pulls it tight into her face, and screams again in pain. Ooooooooooaaaahhhhhhh! The pain ebbs. She throws the pillow into the darkness. Then reaches down with one hand. The floor is cold. She hears a scratching sound. She shouts: Stop! The rats stop.

  The floor is cold as Malik’s black-ass Muslim heart, she thinks. Him and his Allah. Him and his holy Quran. If you exist, Allah, get me the fuck out of here. Unlock the door, Allah. Send me a fucking car service, Allah. Right downstairs, here in the Lots. Get me in the car, Allah, and take me to a fucking hospital.

  And tell Malik to come back. He tells me he’s got some stuff to do, and will bring back milk and bread and maybe pizza. Come on, Allah. Find the fucker. Try the mosque. Maybe he’s there praying to you. Telling you how great you are. Maybe he’s with some Muslim wife, putting a baby in her too. Find him, Allah. Maybe he’s in that Gitmo. Down in fucking Cuba. Nice and warm.

  Oh, she says out loud. Ooh, that hurt!

  Her voice sounds thin and frantic in the darkness.

  She feels the cannonball is trying to kill her now. Trying to rip her, to stretch her pussy as wide as her shoulders, to slam out free into the bed. In a river of blood.

  Momma, she says out loud, where you at? I’m fifteen, Momma. I’m fifteen and you’re not here. I need you, Momma.

  She stares at the place in the dark where the door is. She stares at the glassy window. She hears the scratching of the rats. She listens to the rain on the window glass. She puts one naked foot on the icy floor.

  Oooooouh! OoooooUH!

  12:40 a.m. Myles Compton. Madison Avenue and 59th Street, Manhattan.

  He sits alone in the back of the limousine, gazing idly at the dark windows of the shops they pass. His face looks older than forty-one, his lean body wedged against the door. Under the dark Borsalino fedora, his face is rigid with tension. His overcoat collar is pulled high on his neck, a tweed scarf crossed upon his shoulders. The limo is warm. Compton is cold.

  One final stop on the farewell tour, he thinks, and then I’m gone.

  Everything is ready. He’s sure of that. Everything except the weather. This goddamned freezing rain. Weather report says no snow until tomorrow night. He has the EU passport and three untraceable credit cards in his new name. He has ten grand in euros and dollars. All the big money has been moved without a trace. The Learjet is waiting near Newburgh, the second in Toledo. Maybe the rain will delay them, but so far they’re flying. Myles Compton feels bad about his guys, his friends, his associates, but now at least they can blame everything on him. For sure, the Bulgarian will blame me. If any Bulgarian can ever admit to being a sucker. His lawyers might tell him to say nothing. No matter. By the time they all meet in the grand jury room at Foley Square at ten o’clock tomorrow—shit, ten o’clock today—I’ll be a citizen of the wind.

  –It’s the next corner, he says to the Asian driver.

  –Sure thing, sir.

  –I’ll be about twenty minutes.

  –Yes, sir. I’ll be waiting right here.

  –Don’t smoke in the car, okay? I’m allergic.

  –Yes, sir, the driver says.

  He’s from an outfit called Eagle Limo, which caters to Japanese and Korean businessmen, and it’s the first time Compton has used the service. He has no account with them. He will pay cash. And when he called, for the first time he used his new name. Martin Canfield, he thinks. Martin Canfield. Say it again. Say it a lot. Martin Canfield. The Eagle car was waiting when he came out of the Oriental Garden downtown, after changing his tuxedo for a business suit in the men’s-room stall. That was itself a relief. The jacket and trousers were bad enough, but he hated the bow tie, suspenders, cummerbund, and patent leather shoes. Now they were in the old Gap shopping bag on the floor of the limo, along with the bunched tuxedo. He sat in this costume through the dinner and speeches at Cynthia Harding’s, the tux already stripped of its labels. Trying to look normal. Poking at the food, forcing himself to eat and look interested. Hearing nothing that was said about the library or the noble life of Brooke Astor. Thanking Cynthia as he left. Brushing her warm cheek. Thinking, for one stupid beat: I don’t know how old she is, but I’d like to boff her. While she reads a book.

  The driver pulls over at the corner. Compton steps out and hurries through the light rain to the first apartment awning. The night doorman nods in recognition and waves him toward the elevators. He glances back and the doorman has picked up a phone. Even a mistress must be warned. He steps out of the elevator on 17 and Sandra Gordon is standing at the open door. She is wearing the white nightgown he bought her in London, the one that heightens the rich blackness of her skin. She smiles in a tentative way.

  –Come in, she says, in a husky voice. He moves past her in silence, and she locks the door behind him.

  He slips off the scarf, removes coat and jacket without separating them. He lays them on a chair like an actor playing casual. Sandra stares at him in a pensive way, her arms loosely folded, a thumb tucked under her chin.

  –You look terrible, she says, and touches his face.

  –I don’t feel great.

  –What’s this all about?

  He loves the British abruptness of her Jamaican accent, the rhythm softened by the tropics. And the aroma of her ebony body as he steps forward and hugs her. Her muscles are tense. She knows. He figures she must have known from the tone of his voice when he called from the Chinese restaurant.

  –I have to leave right away, he says. For Miami, then maybe another stop.

  –The Times website says the grand jury reports in the morning.

  –My lawyer will handle that.

  She stares at him.

  –You’re going on the lam, aren’t you? she says, chuckling in a dry way. It better be to Saturn, Myles. ’Cause they’ll find you.

  –The lawyers can get a delay. We’re preparing new evidence. That’s what they say.

  He inhales, then breathes out slowly, thinking: The lies are coming very easily now, aren’t they? I never even told the lawyers. And Sandra doesn’t believe a word.

  Sandra turns her back and pads on bare feet to the narrow oaken table that serves as a bar. Compton knows every inch of this small apartment, which is hers and hers alone. Sandra isn’t rich, but she isn’t poor either. She takes down a big salary, plus bonuses, at that advertising agency in the Lipstick Building on Third Avenue. She was a vice president there for four years before he ever met her. She owns this apartment too, and pays the mortgage and the maintenance herself. A year ago, when he offered to come up with the maintenance for her, and maybe pay off the mortgage, her eyes went cold, with a hint of insulted anger, and she said, in an icy way: “No, thanks.”

  Her anger that n
ight made him feel like an asshole, but filled him with respect for her. Now Compton sits down and she brings him a scotch and soda. He holds it, then ventures a sip. That’s all, he thinks. A sip. No more.

  –How was the party? she says.

  –Fine, fine, he says. You were right. Cynthia Harding is a fine woman.

  –You didn’t mention me, I hope.

  –My lips were sealed.

  He glances at the bedroom where, so many times, she has taken him out of himself. The door is open. The bedding is rumpled. His right leg begins drumming hard, until he wills it into stillness. She surely must have been asleep when he called from that pay phone in the restaurant. He wants to take her to the bed, to make love one final time. And thinks, no: It’s time to go.

  –I won’t see you again, will I? she says, still standing, looking down on him.

  He slides the glass under the chair, then stands. And embraces her again.

  –Of course you will.

  And kisses her neck. His hands grip her small breasts. He presses against her. Feels himself getting hard.

  –You’d better go, she whispers.

  When he returns to the wet street, the driver is standing in a doorway facing the car, smoking in the cold. On the sidewalk, some loose pages of the Daily News are soggy with rain. Compton sees a woman across the avenue, wearing a thick down coat and a fur hat, walking a small dog to a fire hydrant. The dog lifts its leg. There are many parked cars, but no passengers are visible in their shadowy interiors. The driver stomps his cigarette twice and opens the door. Compton slides in. The engine starts, and they move up Madison Avenue, the windshield wipers moving slowly. He leans back, feeling empty. The tale is almost over, he thinks, the final act in the long sad story of big money. Or my own life in the Big Casino. Hedging all bets. Bundling shit and proclaiming it platinum. Bringing in all sorts of private players and handing them the dice. I never should have handed them to the Bulgarian. He placed his bets. And lost. Big.

  The lawyer said, Never ever do business with a Bulgarian.

  –Why not?

  –Google “Bulgaria,” the lawyer said. More crimes per capita than any nation on the planet, Myles. They got guys there make the old Mob look like Quakers!

  But he went to see the Bulgarian anyway, in a plush two-room suite at the Stanhope, across Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum. Expected a thick-necked muscle guy, with shaved head, oozing menace. Instead found a sparrowy little man with rimless glasses, squinting at the paperwork like someone from the IRS. About sixty years old. Asking a few questions in accented English. And the return is what? The main bank is where? Myles heard a toilet flush beyond the door to the second room, but no goons appeared. The Bulgarian’s face was all lines. Finally, he looked up from the papers, removed the glasses. He smiled in a thin way, said “Deal.”

  The Bulgarian’s eyes were a pale blue, like hotel mouthwash. The eyes were not smiling. Myles knows now that he should have fled. Instead, he shook the Bulgarian’s hand. “Deal.”

  In the limousine now, Myles thinks: Fuck it.

  I’m through with it all.

  Except I’ve got enough dough to last me the rest of my life.

  At 81st Street, across from the Frank E. Campbell funeral parlor, Compton sees a small shadowy man hurrying along in a space between parked cars, heading downtown, as if being pursued. He’s in a wheelchair. Covered with a poncho. In the streetlight, his face is chalk white. The light changes. The limousine moves north. The rain falls harder, mixed with grainy pebbles of ice. The driver shifts to the faster swish-swish, swish-swish of the windshield wipers.

  1:05 a.m. Freddie Wheeler. North 8th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

  Wheeler hunches over the keyboard, a small gnarled man in a denim shirt and pale blue briefs, black socks, no shoes or slippers. His screen is framed with small Post-its that seem like leaves of a designer’s tree. The computer faces a wall covered with larger scraps of paper, a collage of more Post-its, invitations, index cards covered with scrawled notes, jammed into rain-damp plaster with pushpins or tacked up with Scotch tape. The only thing on the wall that’s not paper is the clock. Wheeler glances at it. Another hour. Hickory dickory cock…

  Wheeler is alone in this one-bedroom in Williamsburg. He can afford larger but he loves the sense of a cell in a monastery. The radiator is knocking, dwarfed by gray metal file cabinets, disorderly shelves of books on movies and music and theater, hundreds of them, and CDs and DVDs and some old LPs: they are Wheeler’s true monastic walls. He has two land lines, and his cell phone lies open. So do two laptops. Waiting for bulletins. From the competition… Gawker. Jossip. Jim Romenesko… None of them have what I have… Wheeler’s thick glasses are clamped on the bridge of his nose. Time to work. He lays out Post-its and index cards beside one computer. He types in the name of the column and the website: CelineWire.com. And the date.

  He is always tense when he begins the column. But he is relieved that he no longer has to write about Lindsay Lohan Paris Hilton Britney Spears. Well, maybe Lindsay if she kills herself, becoming another celebrity martyr. All three as dead as hip-hop… Politics the thing now, and Media, full of the new Names, waiting for verbs…

  But tonight, folks…

  Tonight Freddie Wheeler is ecstatically happy. Tonight the subject is Briscoe… The old hack… Shitcanned me, when?… Two years ago now?… I got more hits on the site yesterday than he sold papers… Told me that night he needed the space, and the money, for news, like I don’t write news… Said the old three-dot stuff is long over, deader than Walter Winchell… Take a look at me now, Briscoe… Take a look at the website tomorrow… Like most people will… And you’ll be the lead item… I promise… Take a fucking look.

  Wheeler remains still before the keyboard. He flexes his fingers.

  Thinking: I looked at him that morning and said, Okay, Briscoe, go fuck yourself… He laughed in that way he has… The laugh of a half a Hebe… That’s what he is, Jewish father, Irish mother… Clear out your desk, he told me… And go see Fay, for your check… I slammed his door so hard the glass fell out of the window that let Briscoe watch everybody in the city room… They all stopped moving… Briscoe’s zombies… Stopped typing, stopped talking on phones. Some stood up… Some old bitch screamed in anger and that Jew kid from sports, Spiegel or something, came over, and stood in front of me… You got a problem, man? he said… I said, Yeah, I got a problem: you and all the other losers in this shithouse… I started to go past Spiegel and heard Briscoe’s voice shouting Hey, Mark!… But Spiegel grabbed my wrist and shouted past me into the city room: Call security!… And now everybody was crowded around and a guy from downstairs… the big black dude from the front door in the lobby, he was there… and Briscoe came out, and said: Just put him in the street, Harry… Calming everybody down… Smiling… Shaking his head… Spiegel said, You better go while you can walk…

  Wheeler laughed all the way to the elevators, thinking: It wasn’t Walter Winchell I learned from, you assholes.

  My master was Céline.

  Céline… King of all the three-dotters… There, his photo right in front of me now on the wall, here in Williamsburg, plus those lines from Rigadoon I typed years ago on that yellowing index card… “Gossip is right at home! Nothing fazes it! Peremptory! On the nakedest summits, Everest or Nevada…. Gossip is at home all over, wherever you go, it creeps in somehow”—Louis-Ferdinand Céline… He knew everybody was shit… presidents, generals, archbishops… Show me a hero and I’ll show you a shit… My slogan too… They’re all shit… And fifty years later, Americans finally know it… I confirm it for them every fucking day… Famous in September, forgotten by New Year’s… Joining the mountain of enrubbled American shit…

  Yeah… Welcome to the shitocracy, America! Meet all the fashionistas… the priests and the pols… the boys in the band… Editors go, I’m shocked, I’m shocked… and leave their offices for the Days Inn to fuck little summer interns with big tits… Everybody at every mag
azine, every book publisher, all editors, all fact-checkers, all citizens of the Republic of Shit… My beat!

  Comfort me, Louis-Ferdinand… I know, I know, you were a collaborator with the Nazis… I know you hated everybody who was not like you, starting with my fellow Jews… But you didn’t lie… Comfort me… I continue your work.

  Wheeler starts typing. We’ve learned that the end is near for the Daily Loser, ancient Sam Briscoe, editor… Not days… Hours.

  He smiles, glances at the clock, thinks: I had to blow a guy in the Elwood website room to get this… tonight I get laid as a plain old reward. Tonight, of all nights. Tonight, when Briscoe falls, and I win.

  And resumes typing.

  1:15 a.m. Sandra Gordon. 120 East 70th Street, Manhattan.

  All lights are out. The bedroom door is closed, the heavy drapes drawn, sealing out the sounds of the city. Except for her breathing. The white gown is folded on a trunk at the foot of the bed. She thinks: I’ll drop it at Goodwill on the weekend. No, I have to get it cleaned first. She is curled on her side in pajamas under the heavy blanket, legs drawn up, hugging the thick pillow. She does not sleep.

  Just like that, she thinks. He’s on the lam.

  And laughs at herself.

  Gone. And she knows he’s not coming back. Not in a few days. Not ever.

  The worst of it is, she thinks, I always knew this could happen.

  What do they say back home? He’s an ’at steppa. Myles tells her Miami, it must be Siberia. Always wrapped in secrets. Turning his back to her when he took a call on the cell. Texting close to his chest on his BlackBerry like she was interested in the messages he was sending, which she wasn’t. Now the fall is under way, for him, for thousands like him. Maybe more. It’s all they talk about at the agency. Or the client meetings. The Great Fall.

  My man Myles is falling too.

  Who knows where.

  The funny thing was, she didn’t really know him. Didn’t know his mother’s name or if she was even alive. Or the name of his father. Or if he was ever married. Or had kids. Once, early on, she Googled him, and found the name of his firm but no bio, no list of degrees, no experience in other places. She knew his hair was his own but was never sure about his teeth. He said he was her age, which would have made him forty-one. But who knows? Not Sandra Gordon.