Tabloid City

by Pete Hamill

  She tamps out the cigarette on the rail, flicks the butt into the current. What the hell: Al Gore is nowhere in sight. She sees a helicopter rising out of the tumbling grayness over Brooklyn, sees it before she hears it, watches it cross high over the empty harbor, then descend into New Jersey. The ongoing search for terrorists. She turns with her back to the river and gazes at the tops of the buildings on Wall Street. They must be happy up there, she thinks. Then she sees a man slip out a door from the mall. White hair pokes out the sides of his hat, one of those Irish jobs that Sam always brought home from Dublin. The guy is wearing a long tweed coat, a dark scarf, polished shoes. He looks up at the Brooklyn Bridge, the cables like part of an immense harp. Then he peels off his gloves, takes out a pack of cigarettes, and lights up.

  Helen looks south at the harbor and the distant Verrazano. She remembers a chilly night with her husband on the deck of the Staten Island Ferry, the two of them holding each other for warmth, and she spoke some of the words of Edna St. Vincent Millay. “We were very tired, we were very merry—/ We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry…” That night they tried again to make a baby, and once again it didn’t happen. She wanted just that, just a tiny boy in a crib playing with his toes. They kept trying until a week before her husband died, and she never tried again. Not with anyone. Across more than thirty years. The little boy still plays with his toes in her dreams.

  She turns away and the white-haired man is walking toward her. She hopes he veers away. He doesn’t look like he wants a spare cigarette, or some change. For sure. But he doesn’t veer away.

  –Helen, he says. Helen Loomis?

  Suddenly she knows him.

  –Eddie Gaffney? she says. Is that you?

  –I’ll be goddamned, Gaffney says.

  –What are you doing here?

  He exhales, making a fluttering sound with his lips.

  –My wife, she’s in St. Vincent’s, the downtown one, you know: a couple of blocks from here.

  –Oh, Eddie. I’m so sorry.

  –Yeah, well…

  He shakes his head, takes a drag on the filtered Camel.

  –And you, Helen? I heard the news about the paper on the TV at the hospital. You all right?

  –Not really.

  –Want some coffee?

  –Sure.

  He flips his butt into the river and they turn toward the mall. How long had it been since Eddie Gaffney walked away from newspapers? To become a flack, and then a lobbyist up in Albany? Thirty years, at least. How long since she’d seen him? Twelve years? Some funeral… He opens the door and she steps into the mall. Somewhere, Beatles music is playing. “Hey, Jude.” Maybe the floor below.

  –There’s a place over in the corner, Gaffney says.

  –Right.

  She knows he will start talking about the days when the fish market was still here and they all filled the big table at Sloppy Louie’s in the mornings. He won’t tell Helen about his wife unless she pries. She won’t. Over coffee, they can talk about the years when they each had the best of everything. Without much money. She thinks: The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else’s nostalgia.

  1:45 p.m. Josh Thompson. Fourteenth Street, Manhattan.

  More steps and he can’t climb them. These lead into still another church. Dark faces, men and women, probably Mexicans. The sign says something in Spanish, ending with that word he can’t say. Goo-add-a-luppy? Same as back home. All these Mexicans, it must be Catholic. Figures. But if you look at their faces long enough, they look like Arabs.

  He moves the wheelchair closer to the iron spears of the fence, and locks the wheels. People move along the street in both directions, but none of them look at him. Across the street, past the buses and the taxis and the SUVs, he sees the King Food Chinese restaurant. Every kind of people here. Chinese too. This side of the street, they even got an Istanbul Café. Not just Jews and Catholics and blacks and Mexicans. Muslims too.

  Then he sees an older woman looking at him. A Mexican. Or Arab. Short and dumpy, hair a little gray, the tan skin a little red from the cold. She has kind eyes. She comes over.

  –Señor? Necesita ayuda? You need help?

  –No, no, I’m all right.

  –You wan’ to go to chutch?

  He smiles, shrugs. Then taps the arms of the wheelchair.

  –No, no, lady. I can’t. Not with this.

  He waves at the high steps.

  The woman leans forward.

  –Wait a minute.

  She turns and hurries to a side entrance, and moves down the steps into a place Josh Thompson can’t see. He thinks he should leave. Go away. Disappear. But he thinks of her eyes. There was no anger in her eyes. In Baghdad, all eyes were angry, even when people smiled.

  Now she comes back, with two Mexican men, rough, dark, smiling.

  –Mister, this is Joaquín, the woman says. He was in the war too.

  The man smiles, salutes.

  –You wan’ to go to church, soldier? he says.

  Josh hesitates, then shrugs his okay. He wants to be warm.

  –Thanks, man.

  The two men lift the wheelchair, and the woman goes forward, waving people out of the way. They go up the stairs, and gently place the chair on stone blocks, facing large doors. The woman is on point, the officer of the patrol, followed by Josh and the two Mexican men. The grunts. She speaks to them in a low, soft voice. They pause, while the woman opens one of the two large doors. Josh is wheeled into a long, high-ceilinged church, with rows of wooden pews, a Mass under way on a distant altar. The rear pews are mostly empty. Josh thinks: That figures, these people work in the day. The space is warm, with an aroma of food and incense and the sound of a hymn being sung by a chorus. He doesn’t see a chorus. Must be a CD. Nice, though…

  –Make yourself comfortable, soldier, the older man says, and both men walk away.

  Josh sits on the aisle beside a pew. The woman touches his hand with her own warm bare fingers.

  –Goo’bye, she says. You be okay here, okay? Warm. Safe. I go to work now. The guys, they’ll check when you want to leave.

  And she hurries away too, leaving Josh Thompson alone.

  2:35 p.m. Sandra Gordon. Her apartment.

  She comes around the corner, after leaving the office and grabbing a fast lunch. And sees two men in overcoats waiting at the door of her apartment house. Aw, shit. One in a trench coat, the other in tweed. Each is hatless, with neatly trimmed hair. She has never met an FBI man in her life but has seen plenty of movies. She wonders what took them so long.

  –Miss Gordon? says the one in the trench coat.

  –Yes?

  –I’m Special Agent Roberts from the FBI and—

  –Can we step inside? she says.

  –Of course.

  The agent in the tweed coat opens the door, Sandra follows him, and Roberts steps in behind her. The day doorman looks up from behind the desk, his eyes wary. Sandra goes directly to him.

  –Anything for me, Andy?

  –Yes, ma’am.

  He places a package of magazines, junk mail, letters, on the counter before her. He smiles thinly, even protectively, and glances at the FBI men. Sandra lifts her mail, turns to the two men.

  –Can we talk down here?

  –We’d prefer your apartment, ma’am.

  –Why not?

  They go up in the elevator. No words are spoken. She knows the men are her own age, even younger, and must have seen the same movies she did. They follow her out of the elevator, all of them pausing as she unlocks her door. They follow her into the apartment and she flicks on a light switch. She puts the mail on a chair, then shrugs off her coat and places it over the mail.

  –Well? she says. What do you want to know?

  –We’re looking for Myles Compton. Your friend. He was due in court this morning—a federal grand jury—and didn’t show.

  She shakes her head slowly, gestures for the men to sit on the couch. She eases into
a chair facing them. Before them on a low table is a large volume of photographs by Annie Leibovitz. Sandra tells the FBI men about Myles’s visit the night before, and how he said he had to go away, to Miami. And how he left. And how she hasn’t heard from him since then. No, he didn’t stay here for the night. No, she didn’t know where in Miami, or any connection to another flight. He was always vague.

  –Did you know about the grand jury?

  –Of course. It was in the papers. He said it was all about people connecting dots that don’t connect. I guess he meant you. Or the Justice Department.

  –I see. Did he mention a certain Bulgarian?

  –Not really, but it was in the papers. Yes. He said he was one of the investors. When I asked him about the newspaper story.

  –Nothing else?

  –We had a deal, Sandra says. He didn’t talk about his business, I didn’t talk about mine.

  The silent man in the tweed coat makes notes, holding a small tape recorder against his pad with his thumb. Roberts says:

  –Did you have a business relationship with him?

  –Absolutely not. But look, if you think I’m involved somehow, I’d better get a lawyer, right?

  She stands up, folds her arms as if she has nothing more to say. Sandra thinks: This is as spontaneous as one of those goddamned reality shows.

  –I understand, says Roberts, standing, then taking a wallet from under his coat, and sliding out a card. Just like all the movies. She takes it, lays it on a small table, leads the two men to the door, and closes it after them.

  For a long moment, she leans her back against the door. Her arm aches from the fall. She has a headache. She will lie down, and read a book about strangers, and take another Aleve, and hope the pain goes away. Then she’ll call Sam Briscoe to find out about the funeral of Cynthia Harding. Thinking: Oh, Myles, wherever you are, don’t drag me after you. And sees the face of the Bulgarian in the newspaper, his eyes full of ice.

  3:15 p.m. Malik Shahid. Orpheum 7 Movie House, East 86th Street and Third Avenue, Manhattan.

  He squirms in his aisle seat in an orchestra row halfway from the entrance. The backpack is under his seat. His back and shoulders are sore from walking with the pack all the way from 104th Street. Damned ticket cost twelve-fifty. Paid with money for Glorious. Wanted just to borrow the money. Took it instead. Oh. There are old people scattered around in the darkness, most of them white, but the theater is mainly empty. Malik is jellied with exhaustion. He sees glimpses on the screen of a white infidel whore unbuttoning her blouse, and closes his eyes. The music is loud. He sees Glorious in the darkness of the house in the Lots. Her breasts fat with pregnancy. Her skin. Always in the dark, because they could not use lights or some fucking cop might notice.

  Glorious.

  Dead.

  Waiting for me.

  He remembers in high school at Tech, reading about Lee Harvey Oswald, and how after shooting JFK he got away but then shot some cop and ran into a movie theater. What happened then? Can’t remember. Malik’s fingers touch the pistol in his belt. The tire iron down a sewer. The .38 is better. If I gotta use it, I use it.

  Now he has to rest, and then go to visit Aladdin. To rub the magic lamp. To summon the djinni. To turn the lamp into that place in the Bronx he saw on television when he was three or four, sitting beside his mother on the family couch. First thing he can remember. Seeing all the fire engines and the hoses and hearing talk about ninety people dead, or something, and they were watching because his father was there. One of the cops. They even saw him once on TV, in his overcoat, a badge pinned to his chest. Badge of dishonor. They were still his mother and father then. “This is mass murder,” his mother said. “Mass murder!” And Malik didn’t know what she meant by that, not then, didn’t know the word “murder.” Or, truth be told, the word “dead.” Except that a lot of people were dead and nothing else, no weather, no sports, nothing was on TV except that. Dead. What were the words they kept saying? Over and over?

  Happy Land.

  Yeah, that was it:

  Happy Land.

  Tonight he will create some happiness in this land. For Allah.

  He opens his eyes. The infidel white whore on the screen is weeping into a pillow. The guy is smoking. Never read a word of al-Quran. But he and the whore hate the Prophet, and Allah too. They never learn anything. Not in Iraq. Not at Fort Hood. They don’t know that they will all die, unless they submit to Allah. They will die one at a time. Then fifty at a time. For now. Then more and more and more. Malik imagines a great white blinding light, a rumble that gets deeper and deeper, then the howl of a ferocious cleansing wind: and then nothing. Allahu akbar!

  On-screen, the white guy is now driving alone through a place with palm trees. L.A.? No, no. Miami. Is that Don Johnson? No. Too fat. The sun bright. The sea blue. Miami. A town he’s never seen except in the movies or TV. And will never see now.

  3:45 p.m. Sam Briscoe. His loft, Manhattan.

  A siren wakes him. An ambulance, for sure. The soprano sax of emergency. The sound fades but he does not return to sleep. He glances at the clock. Three forty-five. Day, not night. He is in bed in the dark bedroom, but doesn’t remember getting there. He was on the couch. Now he is here, in a sweat suit under the covers. He turns, groping for the cool part of the sheets. As if he can find another half hour of warm darkness.

  Why, oh why, do I…

  He sees Cynthia Harding for the first time, when she was young and he was too. She is on the stage at the Village Gate on Bleecker Street, and Art D’Lugoff is alive, the guy who ran that wonderful joint, and Charlie Mingus too, and the place is packed. Telling himself now: Write all that. Write her on the stage to make the case for books. Speaking for just a few minutes, too quickly, because she is not an actress. Speaking for the library, not herself. For all kids and all old people and everybody in between. For those who need books in order to live. She quotes Robert Louis Stevenson about how young writers must read like predators. And she says that all of us, not just writers, must read like predators too. For books are food, she says, for every single one of us.

  Write how the rich crowd stood and cheered her words in a reserved uptown way, while the jazz crowd maintained its permanent cool, and she seemed embarrassed and made a small nervous steeple of her fingers, and bowed, and then smiled, and Mingus fingered his bass, and the group bounced into “If they asked me, I could write a book…” and Briscoe wanted to meet her. And then D’Lugoff waved him over.

  He sits up now, wanting to write for the first time in years. Remembering more clearly that first meeting. When he was still married to Joyce. And Cynthia was married to her first husband, a professor at Columbia. When there was not yet a New York World. When his daughter was not yet born. Cynthia at once shy and strong. A lifetime ago. He stares at his hands. He wants to take a yellow pad and a good fountain pen in his right hand and sit with a board in his lap and write. He knows that his hands have memory. But his hands now are blotched with age spots. They carried no spots when he met Cynthia Harding. Nor did hers. Time does the spattering. Later, she seldom complained about the way they lived in the world. She would sometimes erupt in exasperation, and go away, for as long as a year. She even married a guy she didn’t love, and that was another two years. Briscoe would rush to the safety of covering a war. Or the troubles of others. When they were together again, there was never an accounting. Not from her. Not from him. She didn’t speak about him to anyone else. He lived by the same rule. Once, when she mentioned marriage to him, he told her he didn’t think he had the talent for it.

  –Maybe I don’t either, she said.

  –Maybe nobody does, he said, and they both laughed.

  –What’s the line from Chekhov? she said. If you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.

  And they laughed again. She tried marriage anyway, that second time, and retained Briscoe as an option to ward off the loneliness. Briscoe—and books too. “With a book in my hands, and a soft light,” she sa
id, “I’m never alone.” And she lived that way, with Briscoe, or without him. She had her year of living dangerously, he knew, but never went into details. He didn’t describe to her his own long series of episodes with women after Joyce died, most of them enclosed in parentheses as part of a longer story. The story that was hers too… At first Briscoe thought she saw him as a book she took down from the shelf, savored, and then returned to a higher shelf. But it lasted too long, like a serial by Dickens that had great gaps and greater and greater richness as it went on. He loved her more last week than he ever had, the richness of her, the plenitude of her that was part of his own consciousness, even when he slept alone. Now, some son of a bitch has torn away the last phase of that long narrative. We’ll never live those final chapters.

  He must write it all, Briscoe thinks, good times and bad, cataloging his sins of cowardice and evasion and, yes, cruelty. And all the amazing good times, the laughter, the surprises, the intelligence with which she dissected the world. Write it all, to get it out of his fucking head.

  He leaves the bedroom in a heavy robe and walks slowly past the books, wondering how many of them were gifts from Cynthia Harding. Hundreds? Maybe more. She made him promise a few years earlier that in his will he would put her in charge of his collection, and absolutely not allow them to end up on eBay or the shelves of the Strand. He told her that was a deal. He didn’t ask about her collection and where it would go if she died first.

  He leans against the bookcase. Fingering the bindings with his spotted hands. He knows that for as long as Cynthia was alive, he was never alone. She’s gone. And now he no longer has the much less intimate comfort of the newspaper. The clock no longer moves without pity to the deadline. No more deadlines. But surely another chapter is beginning in this story without a last act. His story.

  4:10 p.m. Bobby Fonseca. Victoria’s apartment.

  He wakes alone. The blue door is open, the toilet empty. Nobody sits at the round table, or the narrow desk holding the laptop and printer. Maybe she’s playing games. From under the bed. He speaks her name. No answer. He pads to a chair, finds his cell phone, checks messages. Six of them. One matters. Big meeting in the city room at five o’clock. No guests. Staff only. Maybe that CelineWire prick is right. Maybe…