“You must know something I don’t.”
“Supposing I did. Would sharing it be to my advantage? Wouldn’t you do better to assume I was obfuscating?” Amory narrowed his eyes against the drift of his own cigarette. Keith had never realized he smoked; he did so like a man in a hurry, or one who had grown up in an extremely cold climate. As in fact, Keith remembered, he had. “I always liked you, you know, Keith.”
“I guess I do. I guess I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.”
“Oh, I don’t mean to imply that. No, what you’ve got you grabbed for yourself, and for that I salute you. But it doesn’t alter the fact that I’ve always felt you and I could do great things together, given world enough and time.”
Keith, a little flummoxed, suggested that Amory seemed to be getting along just fine without him. Weren’t new markets still falling open across the globe for the Hamilton-Sweeneys? Hadn’t last quarter’s year-over-year earnings, miraculously, almost doubled?
“You haven’t taken my meaning exactly. I mean I’ve taken a liking to you, Keith, you’re practically my nephew. And those I like I take an interest in. And those I take an interest in I have ways of looking out for. And now once again you need some looking out for, don’t you? Yes, there’s something you need your Uncle Amory’s help with.”
The tone struck Keith as off, but he was now beyond the place where he might have showed it. At that moment, he thought he understood why Regan didn’t like Amory. “Now how would you find out a thing like that?”
“You assume I’d need to go looking. But your face has always been an open book.”
Armies of pigeons, rustling, plummeted down a building face across the street. Then, just when it seemed they were about to hit the pavement, they surged back upward to roost again in high windows. They repeated their performance several times, rendering it inexplicable. Why these windows? Why leave them? It was as if the birds were caught in the repetition of some primal trauma, stuck between what they had and what they wanted. There was no point trying to hide things from Amory. Keith found himself explaining about the bonds on his books, now far below junk, the losses that were about to become insolvency. The nicotine must have gone to his head. Still, it was a relief just to tell someone. Even this someone. “I’ve turned out to be quite a disappointment.”
“Not at all.” Amory lit another cigarette. Reflected. “Let me tell you something, Keith. When I was a younger man, people dressed up to go on airplanes. The seats on the subway were made of wicker, and a gentleman always yielded his seat to a lady. Everything had place and proportion, and a man like you … well, you would have simply thrived. Now things are different, naturally. It is harder to find people you can trust. But what once was true remains so. There is still money lying all over the streets.” His voice sounded as if it were coming from much farther away than it really was, crossing tundras and seas, rather than merely the square of sidewalk between them, on which Keith, when he looked down, half-expected to see loose currency. “Not everyone is bold enough to collect it. People are waiting for someone else to go bring down the buffalo, are you following me? Now I’ve watched you from afar all these years, you’ve been a comer. You have earned. There is a vulgar term for this, I remember. You have shown yourself, Keith, to be capable. It is a fact of this world that a capable earner can fall on hard times. But then who will feed the tribe? Where will that leave them? We can’t let that happen—not for our own sake, but for theirs.” He paused. Leaned forward. “Eighty-nine cents on the dollar. Would that be enough? Because that’s what your father-in-law would be prepared to offer.”
Keith, stunned, found it hard—or harder—to calculate. With that kind of money, he would be able to pay back the bank and get his clients back to neutral, though he’d still be somewhat in the red personally, after patching the holes in the kids’ trust funds.
“You’d take a commission, of course,” Amory continued. “Let’s call it thirty-five.”
“Thirty-five thousand?”
“Everything aboveboard. Which doesn’t mean we couldn’t keep this to ourselves.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Say nothing. Go forth and sin no more.”
“Jesus,” he said. “Thank you. You have no idea what a favor you’re doing me.” And took Amory’s hand in his own, before Amory could take back these too-generous terms.
“We are no longer in the world of favors, Keith. Think of it as a trade.”
“Then what do I owe you?”
Amory tamped out his cigarette decorously on the bottom of his shoe and then smiled a placid smile. “Oh, I’ll be sure to let you know, when the time comes.”
THE HOLE PLUGGED, his balance sheet rebalanced, and summer stretching out before him like a shoreline, Keith should have felt like a new man. He wanted to reach home on time, or even a little early, to take them all out for pizza to celebrate. But when he did reach home, he found a note saying they were already out for pizza. And even if they hadn’t been, what if they should ask, Why this munificence all of a sudden? It was then that Keith understood that his mistake wouldn’t be escaped so easily—that he was living in a post-mistake world. The parasite may have gone, but it had left him hollowed out, a man apart.
Though maybe that was just the knowledge that the Demon Brother was not through with him. For long after the sale had been executed, transferring the bonds from his accounts to Regan’s father’s—after Felix Rohatyn had stepped in and arranged for the rescue of the city budget, netting the Hamilton-Sweeney Company a neat $900,000 on a strategy that had been Keith’s; after Regan had taken a job of her own (albeit at her family’s company)—Amory would reach him at the office. His voice, normally so distant-sounding, receded even further, as if the connection was bad. He had an errand, he said, that he wondered if Keith might run?
IN GENERAL, IT WENT LIKE THIS: On a Thursday or Friday, late in the day but not yet at close of business, Keith would pick up his briefcase. Inside would be a manila envelope, which would have arrived by courier in a larger envelope in the morning. Making some excuse for leaving early, he’d pass Veronica and the secretarial pool and board the elevator to the street below. His destination was a derelict townhouse east of the Bowery, the kind of place that sent a little bit of itself with you whenever you left it, in the form of dust on your shoes, on your cuffs, fine gray film on the pads of your fingers where you had rung the dusty buzzer. Keith never rang the buzzer, though; Amory had said nothing about hand delivery. Easier, instead, to use the mailslot.
What was in these envelopes? Subpoenas? Payments to a secret mistress? To an illegitimate child? He knew better than to ask. Amory maintained a far-flung network of contacts, not only in the intelligence circles he’d moved in as a young man, but also with the tremendous data machine that was taking over finance; he saw information as his business. Not Keith Lamplighter. He just stooped and pushed the envelopes through. The arrangement was a little uncomfortable, sure. Grandees of old New York had once lived in these brownstones, but now it was territory openly hostile to his social class. And what if someone he knew should see him down here? But of course, not even the natives saw him. People were too busy getting high, or too scared to come out on the streets. The closest he would come to human contact was the bark of a dog or the muffled noise of a stereo.
Then, after the fourth or fifth time, he was walking back over to the safer blocks to find a cab when a sick feeling overtook him. He balanced his briefcase on the rounded top of a postal box and flicked open the clasps, and there inside lay the long, unmarked envelope he’d been supposed to deliver. This might not have troubled him so much except that its fraternal twin, a sealed stock warrant awaiting the signature of an important client, was missing. He tried to recall the moment when he’d slid the envelope through the mailslot, but couldn’t. His mind had been already back uptown, already home. He returned to the townhouse. The noise coming through the walls of the basement and the battered steel door with its gia
nt hieroglyphic graffito now had the deep, amphibious thud of live music, but it couldn’t quite be called music. It was more as if someone was shooting up a music store. He knocked until his hands hurt and waited for some lull in the noise, but there was none. August of 1976, with the air thick, the sun beating down.
At some point since he’d last noticed it, the buzzer had been ripped out like an eye from its socket; a single, twisted ganglion of wire corkscrewed from the doorframe. He squatted and lifted the squeaky flap of the mailslot, to see if he could see his envelope lying on the floor inside. Sweat trickled from hairline to eye. He could feel watchful presences behind drawn curtains across the way. Did people ever call the cops down here? And if they did, did the cops dare to come? Maybe if he fashioned the buzzer-wire into some sort of hook.… He was about to shout through the slot, to ask if someone could let him in, when a shadow fell over him. He looked up. There, suspended against the humid sky, were two very long legs in denim. The young woman they belonged to was cradling a stack of records against her hip. Her black tee-shirt was cropped short to reveal a pale strip of belly. Her brown hair went gold where the sun hit it. She squinted down at him fiercely, but her voice, when it came, was curious, rich, throaty—almost amused, he might have said, long after he’d forgotten the exact words she spoke.
Which were, for the record: “Hey—is there something you’re looking for?”
[click here to view a facsimile from the print edition]
The Runaway
In My Father’s House, There Are Many Mansions
What a Kingdom It Was
monkeys invade the heavenly palace and chase out the dragon
Year of the Snake
No One Goes There Anymore
The Fireworkers
THE HOUSE WAS A WHITE, ALUMINUM-SIDED RANCH SET BACK off a cul-de-sac amid the ramifying suburbs of Nassau County, Long Island. Save for its relative isolation there, it might have been any of ten thousand others. The plumbing was temperamental. The walls bled sound. But when Carmine Cicciaro, Jr., drove his young wife out from Queens to look at it in the spring of 1963, he saw that it would serve: out back was just enough flat land to fit a patio, a cottage-sized outbuilding, and a stand of pine and elm to screen the traffic on the Long Island Expressway, toward which the rest of the lawn ungently sloped. I was living in Manhattan then myself, and, in the years after the Cicciaros moved to Flower Hill, I must have passed the place a dozen times on summer treks out to Montauk without giving it a second look. Certainly, I never imagined that one of America’s greatest indigenous artists made his home there. Then again, until the Bicentennial summer of 1976 and the events that followed from it, I probably wouldn’t have thought to call what Cicciaro does for a living “art.”
What Cicciaro does for a living––or did, until very recently––is shoot off fireworks. To his colleagues, the show he put on over New York Harbor on July 4, 1971, remains the greatest achievement in his field in a generation. So neglected is this field in the outside world, however, that no one can even agree on a name for it. Its seminal texts are all hundreds of years old. Casimir Simienowicz’s Artis Magnae Artilleriae, from 1650, uses whatever is Latin for “firemaster,” while other period works refer, somewhat cryptically, to “Wild Men” or “Green Men.” More recent sources speak of “pyrotechnicians,” but I have found that the men themselves (and they are all men) prefer “fireworker.”
They are of Italian descent, largely––the Rozzis of Cleveland, the Zambellis of Pennsylvania, the Ruggieris of France––and they are clannish and recessive and tight–lipped and gruff. Indeed, when I first found my way to that house on the hill, Carmine Cicciaro, Jr., was reluctant to talk about himself at all. Asked about his accomplishments, he fell back on platitudes. “You don’t choose it so much as it chooses you,” he must have said three times in as many minutes, as we stood in the doorway of his workshop. When I pressed him to elaborate, he said only that firework was in the blood. Growing up, he’d watched his older brothers, Frankie and Julius, load shells onto the family barge. He’d watched his father pilot it out into New York Harbor. Later, he’d watched from the deck as the sky lit up and thousands of heads along the waterfront tilted back, mouths widened into “o”s. My suggestion that this was rather an extraordinary way to spend one’s youth yielded only a shrug and another truism: “No one goes into this job for the glory.”
As if to underscore the point, Cicciaro carried himself less like an American master than like a pirate exiled to the mainland. He had eight o’ clock shadow and a belly like a catcher’s pad and a checked wool shirt several sizes too big, as if his own big frame might disappear inside. His left hand was missing half its ring-finger (most fireworkers are missing some appendage or other), but he never made reference to this, or to the silver band he wore below the remaining knuckle, except to turn it around and around while I made my pitch for an interview. On a table in the workshop was a shotgun. He might have turned me away entirely, but when my military service in Korea came up, it seemed I had passed some test. We were soon seated on his back patio, drinking cans of Schlitz from a cooler.
Beer, I found, relaxed him. Provided the subject was remote enough, he could be positively digressive. When I told him my research into fireworks had gotten little further than a 16th-century Sienese named Vannoccio Biringuccio, he said, “You’ve just got to know where to look.” He must have spent hundreds of hours when he was a teenager digging around at the library. “Chinese history, technical manuals in chemistry and metallurgy, military history around the Hundred Years’ War … Did you run across Francois de Malthus? Back then, the guy firing your shows in peacetime would also be the one mixing your gunpowder in battle. I could probably come up with call numbers, but my memory’s not what it used to be.”
This was another feint, I thought. Cicciaro was only 48 years old; his memory was manifestly good. Moreover, he wanted to talk. That summer and fall, we would spend many hours on his patio, where I coaxed out of him the story of his profession, a Spenglerish tale of triumph and decline. We got comfortable enough with each other that he seemed not to care if I went inside to freshen the sodapop I switched to, rather than try to match him Schlitz for Schlitz. But when I confessed that I hadn’t expected him to allow me back after that initial meeting, he said I’d gotten lucky. His daughter could talk him into just about anything.
Her name was Samantha, she was 17, and she was the first truly personal subject he’d been willing to broach. This was back in August. In a month, when the dorms opened, she would enter NYU’s School of the Arts. Cicciaro didn’t seem to connect the word “arts” to his own work. “Music, movies, poems … she’s crazy about all of it,” he said, though he hoped, given what he was paying, that college would steer her toward something “more practical.” He lifted the beercan perched on his knee and gestured to me. “Maybe even journalism. She’s been making this whole magazine by herself, with pictures and everything. Not that she’d let me read it.”
Later, he would have reason to speak of Samantha and her secrets with anger and with sorrow. But that first time, his mouth contracted as if he’d snuck in a lemon drop. Then we sat in pleasant ignorance and talked some more and watched the wind-tossed trees at the end of the yard, whose leaves were going gold at the edges. It was three o’clock, and then three thirty, and the traffic was thickening on the L.I.E. and the sun was going down.
WHEN WE TALK ABOUT FIREWORKS, WE’RE ACTUALLY TALKING about three distinct things. Roughly half of the 653 members of the Confederated Pyrotechnics Guild work in military ordnance, and wouldn’t know a Roman candle from a hole in the ground. The rest are in “amusements,” which further subdivides into stationary “set pieces” and “aerials.” Any self-respecting fireworker knows how to fashion a set piece. At the holiday shows I saw growing up in Tulsa, a burning frame spelling out “God Bless America” was a ubiquitous coda. A scant few decades earlier, the grand finale itself would have been a life-sized palace or Catherine wheel spewing
sparks onto earth or water. Improvements in technology, however, have left the aerial branch ascendant. The staple of a professional show today is the mortar-fired shell, which you’ll rarely hear referred to in the trade as anything other than a bomb.
The basic science behind both set pieces and bombs Cicciaro traced back to the nameless Chinese villages where gunpowder first appeared some 2,000 years ago. “Of course it wasn’t gunpowder then,” he told me, “because there weren’t any guns.” Still, to judge by their efforts at monopoly, the emperors of the Tang dynasty must have recognized the powder’s martial implications. By the seventh century, fireworks were a fixture of court occasions, and fireworker an official position, like magician or Lord High Executioner. Then, around 1300, Marco Polo succeeded in smuggling a few unfired shells back to Venice. “Or anyway, that’s the story.” But the alchemists working for the doges would prove no better than the Tang emperors at containing the supply; over several centuries, fireworks spread down the boot of Italy.
By the 1850s, when they reached the ancestral home of the Cicciaros, the village of Pozzallo in Sicily, the Italians had made modifications. One was to replace the closed spheres the Chinese favored with open-ended cylinders that tumbled in the air, spraying sparks even before they burst. Another was “polverone,” a black powder alloyed with various dampening agents to slow the burn. And in the early 19th century, fireworkers discovered dozens of other alloys that broadened their palette beyond the traditional off-white. There were strontiums for red, sodiums for yellow, bariums for green. As a general rule, Cicciaro said, colors become less and less stable as one moves up the visible spectrum. Blue is generally thought to be the most volatile, and the hardest to produce, but Pozzallan lore holds that while still in short pants, Cicciaro’s grandfather, Gian’ Battista, found a way to go beyond it, to a purple that verged on ultraviolet.
City on Fire Page 31