The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  “No bullshit now. What have you two been up to in the last five minutes?”

  I looked him in the eye and told him how we had just left Dani’s party. I was respectful but not too jittery or suck-uppy. I told him how we’d heard a weird hissing from a few floors above us in the back stairwell, like a burst steam pipe maybe, and how it freaked us out, and how we’d hightailed it out of there as quickly as we could.

  “What was it, officer?” I asked. “Is everyone okay? I hope no one got scalded with steam or anything.”

  He looked at me a long moment, and just when his posture started to soften, something seemed to occur to him and he got all puffed up and suspicious again.

  “But the doorman ID’d you!” he said. “He says he saw the two of you standing in the lobby staring at the door to the back stairway, like you knew water was about to flood out. You’re gonna have to explain that.”

  Kyle looked at me. His expression was completely blank, but I knew him well enough to recognize that blankness as terror. I looked at the cop. He was staring down at me, waiting.

  “Well, it wasn’t the door, actually,” I said.

  “What wasn’t?”

  “The thing we were staring at, it wasn’t the door.”

  “What was it, then?”

  “It was the molding above the door, along the ceiling.”

  The cop cocked his ear. “What about it?”

  “Well, its gilding isn’t real gold, for one thing,” I said. “It’s a poor restoration job done with gold radiator paint. Back when they invented it, restorers thought of it as ‘gold in a can.’ They didn’t know the paint would bronze over time and start to look crummy.”

  The cop was eyeing me closely. “And that’s why you were staring at it?”

  “Well, not that exactly,” I said. “What I was mostly doing was pointing out to Kyle here what a cool example of egg and dart that molding is.”

  “Egg and what?”

  “Egg and dart. It’s one of the most common decorative moldings in Western architecture. And the really special thing about that lobby’s ornament, and why I wanted to show it to Kyle in the first place, is that just below the egg and dart there’s also a really nice Dentyne molding.”

  Kyle was nodding.

  “They call it that because it looks like teeth,” I explained quickly. “It’s a classic design. There’s Dentyne moldings all over New York, not just inside buildings but outside, too: carved in stone on windows, porticos—you name it.”

  The cop stared at me a long time without talking. I kept quiet, too, deferring to his authority. Finally, with a grudging nod, he said, “All right, you two, get out of here.”

  We did, and this time we didn’t say a word to each other until we’d turned the corner on Riverside.

  Kyle’s face was ghostly pale. I gave his shoulder a playful little shove and said, “Oh, don’t be such a sourpuss. If you ask me, that really might’ve been my finest—”

  “Griffin?” Kyle interrupted, stopping to make sure I was looking him in the eye. His voice was shaking, and he looked like he might throw up.

  “Yeah?”

  “Fuck you.”

  11

  MY WINDOW WAS GOOD AS NEW when I got back to my room. The fresh pane my father had put in was better than the old one, too, because aside from a few smudgy Dad fingerprints along the edges, it let you see things clearly; the original one had had that wavy antique glass that made you a bit seasick to look through.

  I got out one of the cigar boxes I’d cadged from the Te Amo head shop on Lex and gingerly began filling it with the shards of glass Dad had left all over my floor. I think I would’ve almost enjoyed the challenge of not cutting myself had Quigley not been tap-dancing above my head like a crazy person. Her room was right above mine, and although I’d gotten pretty used to her practicing her tap routine up there for the school talent show, this was an entirely new level of mania. This was a staccato, skull-jabbing racket that sounded like Woody Woodpecker with a gizzard full of amphetamines. Or a small army of hypercaffeinated, cane-wielding blind men conducting a Morse code competition.

  I had to bang on Quig’s door a good long time before the mad tapping stopped and she opened up.

  “What the hell is going on up here?” I asked her. “Are you okay?”

  Quigley was wild-eyed, her freckled cheeks flushed. Her orange hair was slick with sweat along her forehead.

  “They kissed!” she said breathlessly. “At least I think they did—my breath kept fogging up the window!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Mom and Dad, they kissed! I got them to kiss and I was trapped outside totally barefoot and it was freezing cold but everything was going really great—better than great!—until it wasn’t. There are just too many people around here, Griffin, too many—it’s impossible!—I can’t do it any better than this, I can’t, I did my best, I really did!”

  I got her to sit on her bed and tell it to me slowly. Quig, it turned out, had left Dani’s party early to see how her latest matchmaking scheme was working out at home.

  My father had let himself in as usual without calling ahead, but my mother didn’t let it bother her this time; she even went up to my room to thank him as he was smoothing down the last of the window glazing with his index finger. Quig was spying on them from the hall the whole time. Dad slid down my storm window to protect the regular window from any future wayward baseballs, and when my parents headed upstairs to close the fourth-floor storm window, too, Quig slipped up toward the fifth floor to avoid them. This turned out to be a tactical error, because when Mom asked Dad to take a look at a strange bulge up on the fifth-floor wall, Quigley found herself trapped. As our parents climbed the steps, she had to slip out the fifth-floor door to the roof to avoid being caught.

  The fifth floor of the brownstone wasn’t technically part of the brownstone at all. Our house, in its original form, was only four stories tall, but a little after I was born, Dad had built Mom an art studio atop it. Invisible from the street, this new fifth floor was basically a little suburban cottage plopped down on the tar roof amid the chimney pots and vents and pipes. Its own roof was pitched, and it had white clapboard siding and window boxes and a glass-louvered front door that opened onto a tar-paper lawn. In better times, Mom had painted trompe l’oeil green shutters on its façade and Dad had planted old spackle buckets with tomatoes. This fifth-floor cottage was where my parents sometimes used to sneak off to smooch in private, back when my father was still living with us.

  Before Dad moved out, he moved upstairs. He emptied his closet and his dresser and brought everything up to the cottage, where for several months he slept on the floor on an old mattress, with a hot plate and a rotund electric coffee percolator for company.

  I really had no clue at the time where things were headed. To me, Dad’s new upstairs digs were more special than worrisome; he just seemed to be taking a sort of extended camping trip I could drop in on whenever I liked. I could see that he was in a foul mood most of the time and that it cheered him up when I visited him in the mornings, and that made me feel important. I’d put on my powder-blue robe with the white piping—the one I’d worn to the emergency room the time Quig smashed my head into the metal trundle bed—and I’d play the part of his happy little manservant, aglow with my usefulness as I brought him milk for his coffee.

  I especially liked putting together the percolator, whose peculiar assortment of archaic-looking parts—the perforated disc! the gray metal tube! the sproingy spring!—reminded me of one of those ingenious inventions in the Leonardo exhibit Dad once took me to. Leonardo wrote everything into his notebooks mirror-image with his left hand, immediately encoding his answers to the very problems his inventions were meant to be solving. The percolator was its own problem, an intricate puzzle that, when properly assembled, reshaped Dad’s whisker-grim face into a smile and made the coffee burble up into the little glass knob on top.

  Quig peered through the gla
ss door as Mom showed Dad the place on the far wall where some of the cottage’s Sheetrock was swollen and stained. He didn’t look impressed, and seemed to tease her a little about being alarmed by something so trivial as a roof leak. She gave him a playful little shove and he shoved her back, gently, his hand on her collarbone. They were laughing a little, discovering an unexpected intimacy in their months of shared conflict. Not far away on that same wall, Mom’s latest piece was under construction on a slanted architect’s table. It was a new subject for her: a huge mosaic portrait of a brownstone that was probably ours, the curlicue cursive words Ceçi n’est pas un oeuf spelled out in eggshell fragments and hidden like a Hirschfeld Nina in the looping decorative ironwork of our front-stoop railings.

  Mom went to the mosaic to pick at a loose piece with a long maroon fingernail, and Dad joined her to have a look and said something to her and she considered his words and replied and in a moment they were doing something I guess they hadn’t done in a very long time, which was listen to each other. Dad moved in to inspect the work more closely and Mom leaned in, too, dropping from Quig’s view behind his body, and then it seemed their mouths must have met, because Dad’s head and back were curving urgently forward, with all of Mom’s form swallowed up in his, all but her wine-red fingernails clutching the back of his neck.

  Quig’s toes were growing numb out on the cold roof, but she was euphoric. She kept looking away and back, away and back, unsure of the proper protocol for a girl spy under the circumstances. And then Dad’s head whipped around: there was Mr. Price, rumpled and embarrassed at the head of the stairs, a ratty wicker basket of damp laundry in his arms. Realizing his blunder, he began to blurt apologies and backtrack, but Dad was already surging across the room at him.

  “Jesus Christ! Ever hear of knocking?”

  Mr. Price’s neck and face flushed deep red all the way up to his ears as he muttered muddled explanations about how he sometimes dried his laundry up there by clipping it to the lines Mom had strung up for her woodcut prints. Mom hurried over to insist that Mr. Price was telling the truth, that it was an honest mistake—and just like that, the fleeting tenderness between our parents vanished as quickly as it had come.

  12

  EVERYTHING ABOUT THE CITY FOLLOWED hidden rules, if only you could uncover them. The subways had cryptic subterranean signals and unpublished schedules and phantom stations that rushed past you in the darkness according to some overarching logic of momentum. The water system had aqueducts and gatehouses and six thousand miles of concealed mains through which a million gallons of water sluiced each day, all following an arcane plan I imagined to be the handiwork of mustachioed engineers in belted trench coats. Even the weather could be understood, if you possessed the secret knowledge that allowed you, with an authoritative swoop of your Magic Marker, to sketch a scowling storm cloud over the Battery or Hell Gate, the way weatherman-cartoonist Tex Antoine did on Eyewitness News.

  My father’s anger, like all the bewildering infrastructure governing my world, must follow some unseen pattern as well, I felt sure, its eruptions issuing from obscure yet knowable fault lines beneath the asphalt. But unlike the secrets of the transit and water systems, some of which I’d puzzled out over the years by squinting at the yellowed maps and documents that had flowed through our house en route to eventual resale, the rules behind my father’s mood swings had always defied discovery. Only by dumb luck, in fact, did I finally stumble on a system for decoding and, at least for a while, containing his temper.

  The solution was hiding in plain sight. The day after my father’s blowup with my mother and Mr. Price, I crept up the stone spiral staircase that led from our school’s cinder-block basement classrooms to the church upstairs, from which the school rented space.

  The Church of the Heavenly Rest was an impressively gloomy structure, a vast vaulted world of soaring stone arches and bloodred stained glass and humorless whiskered personages carved in the wall behind the altar. Since our school had no auditorium of its own, we performed all our plays and musicals up there. By sneaking up to the church after school on this afternoon, I hoped to catch a glimpse of Dani rehearsing her swordplay performance for the talent show. But I’d picked the wrong day. This was the afternoon they were setting up the stage, and before I had a chance to slip away, Mr. Krakauer, the drama teacher, spotted me.

  “Watts!” he called. “Stop skulking around in the shadows and give us a hand here!”

  During a little self-granted break after an hour of hauling sets, I found my eyes drawn to the group of three-digit numbers posted on the broad stone surface behind the pulpit. I’d surely seen them dozens of times over the years, but never before had it occurred to me to wonder why those numbers were there, or what their specific sequence might signify.

  Prominently displayed on a massive wall of stone blocks, the numbers seemed to speak of permanence. But they were ephemeral, too, each digit printed on an eggshell-yellow card of its own and slid into a small track like the ones you sometimes saw at coffee shops announcing the special of the day.

  The numerals put me in mind of the carved naked ladies on the altar down at Dad’s studio, the upper arms of which, I now recalled with a kind of tingling recognition, were also marked with three-digit numbers, in yellow chalk. I grabbed a stubby little pencil and a Join Our Parish card from the wooden shelf beneath the pew and scribbled down all five three-digit numbers from the wall. I felt certain I was on the cusp of understanding something here, something crucial.

  While Mr. Krakauer was squinting at his stage diagram, I slipped to the darkened edge of the church and then out to the street.

  The explosion of sunlight on Fifth Avenue was blinding after all that time in the lugubrious belly of the church. But I was too excited to mind the way it hurt my eyes. I blinked until the numbers I’d written on the card became unblurred: 592 was the first one.

  592. It looked familiar.

  Before I even had time to contemplate why, my feet were carrying me uptown, past the ornately textured brick-and-limestone mansion of the Cooper Hewitt Museum.

  Two blocks up from school, I saw them: a pair of lushly maned lion heads, carved from rich red stone and roaring down, full-throated, from atop two columns flanking the door of a townhouse. I’d never noticed them before. The expression on the lions’ faces was so epically peevish, and the details of their open mouths so finely wrought, that you could practically smell the caribou on their breath and diagnose which pointy teeth in their jaws might be afflicted with a touch of gingivitis.

  I looked up at the two yellow street signs jutting, perpendicular to each other, from the lamppost on the corner: E 92 ST and 5 AV.

  92 & 5: 925.

  Or flip the signs around: 5 AV and E 92 ST.

  5 & 92: 592! Just like on the church wall. I’d done it! I’d cracked the code.

  —

  It took me more than a week, because the five three-digit church numbers referred to blocks all over town, but I scoped out all the relevant intersections, and at all but one there was a building façade with a gargoyle or some other architectural ornament that looked precious enough for Dad to want to own and sell. Here at last was the hidden system that ordered and nourished my father’s obsession with possessing the city. Here, if I knew how to use it, was a blueprint for keeping his nettling dissatisfaction at bay.

  —

  The next time I went to watch Dani rehearse her swordplay act—and I have to say, she looked way better in her cutoff jeans and red bandanna headband than the ordinary pretty ballet girls in their pink Danskins—the numerals above the pulpit had changed. This time, though, I was properly equipped. I carefully recorded them in a moleskine notebook I’d gotten at Blacker & Kooby: 237, 348, 590, 256.

  I didn’t tell anyone about those church numbers. Not Kyle, not Quig, not Mom. I wasn’t sure what to do with the information, whether I should reveal to Dad that I knew how he decided which gargoyles to target, or if learning that his secret was out would cause
him to turn his rage on me. It was important to play it right.

  The matter was further complicated by the disturbing certified letter from Chase Manhattan Bank I signed for and tore open one of the many afternoons Mom wasn’t around to answer the doorbell. It was a NOTICE OF ARREARS informing my father that he was several months behind on the brownstone mortgage. I’d never seen or heard the word arrears before. It sounded like being mooned by a financial institution.

  —

  With Dad short of cash, I needed to take matters into my own hands. By the time it got dark, I had swiped Quigley’s old violin case and filled it with the few things I thought I might need for my mission. Mom didn’t come home all evening—she never seemed to be around much anymore—but Quig was still bustling about in the dining room and kitchen. She couldn’t stand the chaos of the house, how the boarders never cleaned up after themselves. In an effort to restore some of the order that had eroded along with our parents’ marriage, she always crept downstairs after the boarders had retired and emptied the ashtrays, pushed in the chairs, did the dishes. She couldn’t bear to start a new day with things in such disarray.

  At 11:17, when Quig finally went upstairs to listen to her show tunes, I snuck out to the street. I’d had hours to choose my first target from the list of numbers in my moleskine notebook: 590.

  Ninetieth and Fifth was easily the closest of the city intersections indicated by that week’s three-digit church numerals, and happened to be the location of the Church of the Heavenly Rest itself. I hoofed it over there with my tools rattling around in the violin case. There were doormen in long coats behind the glass doors of the two apartment houses facing each other across Ninetieth Street on the west side of Madison, and a broken checkerboard of lit and unlit windows above each lobby. But as I headed toward Fifth, everything residential slipped away behind me and the only light came from the jaundiced glow of the tall silver streetlamps curving their necks to peer down at my slinking progress. On Fifth Avenue and Ninetieth, only two of the four corner streetlamps were even functioning properly. A third, on the southeast corner where the hulking stone church loomed, flickered a jittery light down onto me. Nothing much worked in the city these days.