Tabloid City

by Pete Hamill

  He turns his eyes away from the rising ovals of the Lipstick Building, with its arrogant red-brown and pink bands, gazes downtown, sees a thirty-ish hatless man in a dark blue overcoat, staring at the page 1 wrap of the World. His jaw is slack. And Briscoe wonders if Cynthia Harding had ever arrived on this corner. To cross into the Lipstick Building and ride up the silent elevator to meet Madoff. To create wealth for the library. To create wealth for herself. And Briscoe thinks: Never.

  Cynthia was a reader, one who could read human faces too, including mine, read the practiced smiles of others, the rehearsed patter, the movements of eyes, the posture of hands. She knew that books in neat or disordered shelves revealed the character of their owners too, and as a guest in any luxurious apartment always found her way to the library, and was filled with a kind of joy to discover those leathery older volumes whose pages had never been cut. Briscoe was beside her on two such investigations, moving around the edges of crowded parties. She didn’t say much, showing him a volume that was only a piece of interior decoration. She never needed to italicize a word. She just moved her brows in an amused way. “Henry James would love these people,” she whispered on one such patrol. “His own books have never been opened.”

  An imaginary flash of her astonished face slices into his mind.

  Oh.

  Her beautiful mind drained of life. And irony. And art. And love. With a knife, on a rain-soaked night.

  You fucker.

  And realizes that he is thinking now about Cynthia in the past tense.

  For the first time. And for the rest of his life.

  He inhales hard, turns to watch the thickening morning crowds rising from the subway stairs or stepping out of the few limousines, or finishing the last lap from Grand Central. Hundreds of them. And sees past them, or through them, or under them, into a world they don’t know ever existed, right here. Where the Lipstick Building rises like a triumphant sneering monument. Briscoe sees the corner when he lived in this neighborhood as a boy, in another century, another world. He sees the great black steel girders of the Third Avenue El rising above the summer street during the war. He climbs the worn stairs at 53rd Street with his mother and goes through the turnstile. He rides all the way to the last stop in the Bronx, East 149th Street, peering from the front car at the tracks ahead of him, the steel rails stretching to a vanishing point, or making abrupt turns, while Briscoe looks into the windows where other people lived, sipping tea, drinking beer from tin pails, eating or laughing or locked in morose solitude, smoking cigarettes. He sees their heads and shoulders beyond the rooftop canopies, tending flocks of pigeons, or hanging wash.

  On another day, he takes the El downtown to Chatham Square and he and his mother have chop suey in Chinatown and walk over to the entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge, his mother gripping his hand, and they are walking across to Brooklyn, just the two of them, high above the crowded river, then walking back that summer afternoon and seeing the skyline for the first time outside of a movie. On the way home, they get off early and stop in St. Agnes to pray for Briscoe’s father, who is off at the war.

  And then Briscoe sees V-E Day, when he was seven, and the war is over at last in Europe and everyone who lived on these side streets came surging out to Third Avenue, and out of the saloons, out of P. J. Clarke’s and the World’s Fair and others whose names he can’t remember. Retired cops and old bootleggers, butchers and bakers, shipyard guys. longshoremen, shoemakers, plumbers, ice men, thieves, black marketeers, cabdrivers, all of them roaring, singing, drinking. There were even more women than men, most of them crying for sons and boyfriends and husbands who would now be on the troopships steaming back into the harbor. And his mother said, “Now, Sam, now your father will come home, Sam. He and his friends, they beat that old Hitler.” Nobody said anything about the war in the Pacific that was not over. They took what they could get here, Briscoe thinks. Right where my feet are planted.

  And though his father was a New York cop, and could have stayed home, he had to go to the war, his mother explained, because he was a Jew, and Hitler was killing Jews, and so his father had to kill some Nazis back. That’s what his mother told him. On the crowded street now, in the rushing Friday crowds, he can still hear her voice, the Irish curl, the Belfast rhythm.

  He sees his father too, months later, coming up the tenement stairs where they lived on East 49th Street, wearing his army uniform, a big lumpy duffel bag on his shoulder. Sam was sitting on the third-floor-hallway steps with his friends, all of them eight years old, waiting and waiting. Until Jimmy Hartigan from the first floor started yelling up at them, He’s here, Sam! He’s here! And Briscoe remembers clomping down the flights of stairs, two steps at a time, leaping to each landing, and on the first flight he saw his father, who saw him, and dropped his duffel bag, and the boy leaped to his father’s arms, and the two of them froze there, bawling and bawling, man and boy. No words said. The father’s body heaving. The boy trembling. The fucking war was over.

  Nobody on this Third Avenue morning knows that such a world ever existed. Cynthia Harding knew. She knew because I walked these streets with her and told her all about it. More than once. Blathering away. Hoping I was not coating her with the treacherous paste of sentimentality. We went together often to the only surviving remnant: P. J. Clarke’s, another block uptown. Introduced her one night to Sinatra. And Danny Lavezzo, the owner. When we got back to her house, she said to me, with a hint of envy, You’re such a lucky man, Sam. You didn’t get that world secondhand. You didn’t take a course in it. You lived it. He thinks: I didn’t take a course in Cynthia Harding either. I lived it. We lived it.

  Standing now, facing the Lipstick Building, Briscoe checks his watch. Ten minutes more before the meeting. And he remembers walking here with Cynthia one summer afternoon, telling her about walking the same street with his father, who was a cop again. After the war. They passed pawnshops and saloons, full of workers from the slaughterhouses down where the UN now stands. Some of the workers wore aprons covered with bloodstains, drying into darker colors, swatting at horseflies. In summer, the saloon doors were always open, for there was no air-conditioning then, and the joints all smelled of sour beer.

  Briscoe described for Cynthia the brick facades of buildings permanently shadowed by the El, the boxy shadows on the cobblestones at high noon, hears the sound of screeching steel, almost painful when trains stopped at 53rd Street. Right there where the Lipstick Building is, his aunt Mary lived in one of the flats, his mother’s sister, her sailor husband dead in the Pacific war, his body never found, and when they went visiting Aunt Mary on Sunday afternoons, for dinner and song and company, Briscoe loved peering at the trains from the front windows of the flat, the faces of the people within, who never looked at him, or even at each other. He wanted to know who they were, and would spend a tabloid lifetime finding out.

  Briscoe remembers the day the nickel fare ended in 1948 and how everyone complained bitterly about the increase when he and his father stopped to chat on Saturday mornings. He remembers listening to the radio every day, no television then. Music and serials and news. And baseball. He remembers Giant games playing from open windows, and how everyone hated the Yankees and the Dodgers. He remembers too the day the Briscoes packed up to leave, all they owned put in cartons, or wrapped in sheets of newspaper, then stacked in a truck that was leaving for Brooklyn, where his father had bought the house in Sunset Park. A house with a backyard and a tree and eventually a dog. Bought with a V.A. loan. A different world.

  Enough. It’s all gone now.

  He crosses Third Avenue, walking quickly. Part of his past is under his feet and the future is right in front of him. He moves into the Lipstick Building, taking his press card from his jacket pocket. Thinking: Now Cynthia is part of the past too.

  8:20 a.m. Josh Thompson. The High Line, Manhattan.

  He is in the street but he can’t see the sky. There is a man standing off to the side, with a wild gray beard, a heavy plaid shirt.<
br />
  –Mornin’, soldier, he says.

  –Morning, Josh Thompson says, his throat cloggy with phlegm. He grips the MAC-10 under the blanket and poncho.

  –Go ahead and hawk up the lunger, soldier.

  Josh calls up a wad from his throat, makes a pulpy ball on his tongue, spits it three feet to the side.

  –Where is this? he asks, looking around him.

  –The High Line. Used to be a railroad spur. Then it was dead for fifty years. Now they planted it with stuff and made a park out of it. Right up above your head.

  –A park?

  –Yeah, a park in the sky. The High Line, they call it. There’s an elevator down there, you wanna see it. Hey, you must need to piss.

  –Yeah.

  –Let the brake out and I’ll walk you.

  He rolls Josh into a shadowed area, filled with packing crates.

  From the darkness, he wonders where the Aladdin is from here. As he does every time he has to piss, he thinks of payback.

  –You need a paper to read, soldier?

  –Sure.

  He takes the newspaper. Two women on the front page. One blonde. One black. The headline says:

  THE LAST DINNER PARTY

  Who are these people? Josh thinks. Why isn’t Iraq on the front page? Or Afghanistan? They just don’t give a rat’s ass, do they?

  The bearded guy leaves him alone. Josh starts unzipping his jeans, unfastening his diaper.

  8:35 a.m. Sandra Gordon. Lobby of Lipstick Building.

  She walks across the crowded plaza, following others through the revolving doors. She is wearing high boots, a heavy coat, a warm wool hat. The New York Times is under her left arm, home-delivered but unread, and she grips a Mark Cross briefcase. She will open the paper when she reaches her desk. Not an electronic reader for the Times. The Times itself. To see if there is news about Myles Compton. And his co-conspirators. She wonders if Myles made his plane, if that’s what he was taking to wherever he will hide for the rest of his miserable life. The poor son of a bitch.

  Then she glances at the newsstand, the newspapers blocked by two men buying nuts or gum or even newspapers. One of the men moves and heads to the elevator banks. Sandra’s eyes fall to the low shelf of newspapers.

  She makes a sharp sound of pain, and falls to the polished stone floor.

  8:40 a.m. Ali Watson. Office of Joint Terrorism Task Force, Manhattan.

  He is still filled with the night, lying on a cot in the small dark back office. Nobody has tried to rouse him with knocks on the door. He knows they are out there in the office, absorbing information, thinking about chatter from many places. For now, they will get along without him. He’s better off here than alone at home. They will let him grieve.

  His mind is jagged, alive with crude scribbles he saw from his Mazda, which Malachy parked in front of his house. His brain jangles with the graffiti on the wet walls of empty Brooklyn streets, marks without verbs, just names, the narcissism of vandals. I am, they snarl. I exist, they brag. All the names invented, pseudonyms without warnings or declarations of love. When Ali was young, and he saw the words “Bird Lives” on a subway wall, he knew the message was about Charlie Parker, and the words were saying that his music would live forever. And so it has. This is not like Bird. I want to buy a spray can and write Mary Lou Lives on all the unwashed walls of the city. State it. Shout it. Make the verb clear. Make it about her, not me. Refuse to join the legions of I. All those young fools declaring that they exist. Shouting: I am alone, as lonesome as God, and here is my mark. I exist, and fuck you.

  Mary Lou lives, you assholes.

  He sits up on the edge of the narrow bed, and remembers the drive at dawn to the mosque, where he spoke to the imam. He woke the man up, and was allowed inside. He said to the imam that if he heard from Malik, please tell him that his mother was dead. That he should call his father. The imam was gentle, trying to console Ali, but shrugged and said he had not seen Malik in a long time. Maybe years now. Ali said: What about Jamal? Yes, sometimes he comes, the imam said. Jamal is still a Muslim. He even made the haj. He has nothing to do now with jihad. Ali knew that, knew Jamal’s address too. He said nothing more to the imam about Malik, but did give him a card.

  –Call me, if you hear from my son.

  –Yes, sir.

  –I’m sorry for waking you up.

  –I wasn’t sleeping, the imam says. I was praying.

  –Pray for me.

  –I will.

  –And above all, for my wife.

  Ali walks blindly now to the wall of the tiny room in the JTTF, feels for the light switch. Flicks it on. He blinks in the hard blue light of the fluorescent ceiling bulbs. The pale green walls are blank. Then he steps to the sink, turns on the tap. Thinking: This is like a cell in a very good prison. I am sentenced to solitary.

  Never thought I’d survive Mary Lou. Not because I’m older, because of this job. You race to a domestic dispute and a man and a woman stop beating the shit out of each other and turn on you. Both of them. A knife or a gun, that’s part of the deal. Or there’s a robbery of a jewelry store in Chinatown, and you see the guy running through the screaming crowd, and a truck blocks his way, and he turns and fires. Over and over again. Day by day, year by year. Life in this job is a goddamned lottery, with odds against. Ali Watson always thought she would bury him. Why you, Mary Lou? Why not me?

  He dries his face, runs a comb through thinning hair. He sees that his eyes are rimmed with red. And turns away from the mirror. Now I have to do the clerical stuff. There’s nobody else. Just me. Arrange a funeral. In Brooklyn. Pick the cemetery too. Dodge the press. Plead national security or some goddamned thing. Ask Ray Kelly to help. Call the lawyer about insurance.

  First I gotta find someone else.

  8:50 a.m. Sam Briscoe. Publisher’s office, Lipstick Building, Manhattan.

  He is sitting on a leather couch in the reception area, casually scanning the New York Times. His hat and coat are in the closet. He is warm in his suit jacket. Behind him on the wall are raised letters in Caslon bold, spelling out the name chosen long ago by Elizabeth Elwood: “World Enterprises, Inc.” Simple and modest. There is a large portrait of her by Everett Raymond Kinstler on the right side of the lettering, placed there after her death. The portrait perfectly captures her intelligent, sympathetic eyes. It was commissioned by her husband long ago, and hung over the fireplace in the living room on Sutton Place until he died. Then she moved it into the library. Her son Richard moved it here, after the apartment was sold. He donated most of her books to the public library, but Briscoe is certain that he chose none of them for himself.

  He has been waiting now for twenty minutes, and the receptionist has explained with chilly vagueness that the publisher knows he is here. The door into his office remains shut and Briscoe knows why. He glances at Forbes, New York magazine, and the lone copy of the Friday edition of the World, with its wraparound and the faces of the two women. He wishes he could stretch out and sleep.

  The door opens. And a man and a woman emerge, holding coats before them in laced fingers. They are obviously from Homicide, but too young for Briscoe to know them. Richard Elwood is behind them, his white shirt open, tieless, looking solemn.

  –Thanks again, Sergeant, he says. It’s a horrible, horrible tragedy, and I hope you catch whoever did it very soon.

  –We will, the male cop says, while the woman nods. They shake hands with Elwood, glance at Briscoe, and go to the outer door leading to the elevators. Elwood gestures to Briscoe to come in. They shake hands briskly and Elwood closes the door behind them.

  –Hello, Sam, Elwood says. Great paper today. You were right to do the wrap.

  –Thanks, Richard.

  –I just wish it had never happened.

  –Me too.

  The office has more square feet than the old apartment on East 49th Street. Briscoe glances around and sees that everything remains as it was a few months earlier, when he last came for a visit. The bar. A
cork wall behind Elwood’s desk, busy with a collage of index cards, newspaper clippings, Post-its, business cards. A wall with framed photographs of his mother with Ted Kennedy, Bill and Hillary, Mike Bloomberg, Bush the Father, and young Elwood himself. One of him as a little boy. Through a wide window Briscoe can see Queens. Elwood leads the way to the sitting area, with a couch, two wing chairs, and a low table. A Mark Rothko rises above the couch, all reds and yellows. The table is bare except for a single copy of the World. Elwood sits in a corner of the couch, and gestures for Briscoe to take the near chair.

  –Cynthia Harding was a wonderful woman, Elwood says.

  –She was. Did the cops tell you anything new?

  Elwood stares at his hands.

  –Not much, he says. They have two theories. One, a guy saw guests leaving the party, waited, took a chance on the door being open, and got lucky. He finds the Watson woman in the kitchen. She runs up the stairs, yelling. He stabs her. Then Cynthia comes out of the bedroom, and he stabs her too. Then starts a fire and runs.

  Briscoe waits. Then:

  –What’s the other theory?

  –It was somebody one of them knew. Maybe both of them knew.