“You’re saying he’s just disappeared?” I shouted. Then, emboldened by the solidity of brick and fire escape between us: “He’s your neighbor. Doesn’t it concern you?”
The man suggested, not uncheerfully, that I mind my own business. It was 7 a.m. People lived here.
IN HINDSIGHT, THIS WAS PROBABLY THE MOMENT TO INVOLVE the actual police. But what did I have that I’d trust them not to bungle? Not only did I never again see the white van in Hell’s Kitchen, but Billy Three-Sticks, whom I’d taken for my passafuoco, my passageway into Samantha, was gone, too. It was March. I’d spent a month pursuing a dead end, when I should have been going out to Long Island to keep Carmine company, or at least to finish our interviews. And now I could do neither.
What I mean is this: after Billy Three-Sticks went to ground, all the energy that had overtaken me that winter evaporated. I descended into the worst writer’s block of a career that’s had its share. I would rise around lunchtime and instead of going out to report, or sitting down to write, I would pour myself a drink. It was remarkable, I was rediscovering, how much more a person could drink if he was willing to start during daylight hours, and how the character of his intoxication changed. Once, I had felt the rightness of the slang term “buzz”: efflorescence, that bursting of the shell of the self. Now, in the bleak white late-winter light, my apartment was an Alaska. From beyond the walls came the infinitude of sound, the beep beep of trucks backing up, the rattle and whinny of a garbage masher, and, nearer in, the elevator engine’s sigh, the ghost frequencies of the super’s walkie-talkie, the noise, real or imagined, of my neighbor, my quondam drinking buddy, slamming cabinets next door. Yet within me, where my own voice would have to come from, was a silence so deep as to be pure potential. And behind that, like the backing on the mirror: death. It made even a phrase like “comatose in a hospital bed” feel sentimental.
I left the apartment only to buy as many newspapers as I could find––a habit, or vice, from my time at the World-Telegram. Now, with just three dailies left in New York, I suppose I could have taken out subscriptions, but that would have missed the point. The point was not to read, but to purchase. To feel, as you fumbled for another nickel, that something big might have happened since you last looked. In this way, you fought off the anxious emptiness at the center of your head, the sense that nothing under the sun was ever really new, and that we were all of us therefore stuck with the lives we had.
Which is how, more than a month into my bender, I discovered the photo of Sam Cicciaro on the front of the New York Post. She looked nothing like she had in real life. She wore an off-the-shoulder dress, for one thing. Her hair was elaborately plaited and shellacked, her head tilted, her smile slightly open-mouthed, as if the yearbook photographer had said something to make her laugh. I blinked and still she was there. Poured another drink. Still, she was there. Scooped, I kept thinking. I’ve been scooped.
An hour later, I was on the phone, dialing my old pal Larry Pulaski at the NYPD, who was now a deputy inspector. Behind the operator who answered, I remember, ringers trilled like slot machines. Every light on the switchboard must have been lighting up for comment.
“I wondered if I’d hear from you,” Pulaski said, once I’d made it through. “But you should have used my office line.”
“I’m looking at the Post here,” I told him. “You want the Post or the Daily News? Because her name’s in both.”
“You sound like you’ve been drinking.”
“How could you disclose it, Larry? Carmine’s still out there all alone. If I were you, I’d be worried he makes some reporter for a prowler and you end up with another shooting on your hands.”
“I’ll tell you what worries me more, Richard, if you want to know. You’re losing your objectivity.”
But how much objectivity could I get? We were talking about page one of the fucking Post. Probably it was just static in the line, but I could have sworn I heard the snip of trimmers, the punctilious deity on the other end of the wire paring his nails. “Richard, do you think I like rubberneckers mooning around my crime scenes? Do you think I like your man on the radio howling for my personal blood?” A pause here almost made it seem he was waiting for an answer.
“You swear you had nothing to do with this?”
“There was a leak, is what I’m telling you, Richard. Several links up the food chain, probably.”
“Why would anyone leak?”
“I’d love to know that myself, but bottom line, it’s a big department, this stuff happens, and right now I’ve got multiple other fires to put out. I do the job they pay me to do. I suggest you put down the bottle and do the same.”
I WOKE THE NEXT DAY WITH A VAGUE SENSE OF CRIMINALITY. I had been unfair to someone, but wasn’t sure how. The miniblinds by the couch I’d passed out on were v-shaped in the middle, like something had struck them. On my coffeetable was a meniscus of dust. But there was my dog pacing incontinently by the door, his tail thwacking it on each pass. And when I reached the street, there were the trees breaking out into leaf. Springtime. Life. It shook loose a memory. Hadn’t there been something about “no dead ends”? In any case, Pulaski was right: I had a job to do.
I’d uncovered, as near as I could tell, two avenues into the shooting. The first, though the connection remained obscure, was still Billy Three-Sticks. I’d had no luck at his place of residence, but had given up too easily. So I began looking for him at other local haunts. All I saw, from time to time, were the young men who were watching him. They were back. And when I observed the larger of them, disguised now in a preposterous sportcoat and beard, hunched up in a booth in the Automat, using a four-inch switchblade to saw a pus-soaked bandage off his hand, my search began to feel like an emergency. I widened it to other betting parlors and Automats, to Chelsea, to parts of the Upper West Side. I spent whole days walking, pausing, ducking behind newsstands, begging the city to put Billy and me into contact.
If I was home, I worked the phone. The name “Samantha Cicciaro” seemed to have leaked simultaneously to every paper and newsstation; it was impossible to say who’d had it first. But when the World-Telegram had closed, it had scattered my colleagues wide across the media firmament, and now I called them all, asking them to point me toward a source. Most refused––some vehemently––but in the end I reached one who obliged. He couldn’t name names, he told me. But he had this funny idea the story of the shooting in the park had been timed to knock something else off the front pages. And he knew his friend who’d broken it had contacts high up in the Hamilton-Sweeney Building.
That name set bells clanging. For Carmine Cicciaro’s chief competitor, I knew, was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hamilton-Sweeney Company. When he’d suggested on New Year’s Eve that these competitors were involved in the disappearance of three grams of polverone from his workshop, I hadn’t taken him seriously: his theory imputed such personal animus to what he otherwise called “the money.” (To the extent that I’d thought about it at all since, I’d decided that it was probably Samantha herself who nicked the three grams, in a moment of rebellion, or pique, or as some kind of offering for her firebug friends.) I knew, too, from paying just enough attention to the radio, that the Hamilton-Sweeney Company was in legal trouble, but I’d assumed––the dynastic merchant bank having mutated into a conglomerate in the ’60s––that Carmine’s competitor was a separate arm, and that superintending the whole would be some bureaucratic cabal too faceless to care about “sending a message” to a lone fireworker. But no, when I consulted the newspaper, there apparently was a Mr. Hamilton-Sweeney in the chairman’s seat, and now under indictment. Was it so far-fetched to imagine that he might know something about this leak? This break-in?
A few days passed. I sat on my new lead, but kept researching the Hamilton-Sweeney case. Then two nights ago when I was riding the subway back up from the Village, the miracle occurred. Through the communicating door between my car and the next, I happened to spot a battered biker jack
et. Billy Three-Sticks. It was as if my ceasing to look for him had summoned him forth. But he must have seen me, too, even recognized me somehow, because when I passed through the intervening doors, he bolted onto the platform and up the stairs. I called out for him to wait, followed him down a corridor. The gate at the end had been locked for the night. Finally, we would connect; we could still save each other. I reached for his shoulder, almost fatherly, but when he turned, this skinny guy who on his record sleeve didn’t look a day over twenty, he was so pale as to seem already dead. A side gate had been left open, and he darted through it and upstairs, and before I could catch him and explain the danger I feared he was in, he was on a downtown train, the doors closing behind him.
THERE WAS NO CHOICE LEFT BUT TO PURSUE THE HAMILTON-Sweeney angle. The next morning, then, I gave the picture in the paper a twice-over. Took a shower. Grabbed a nearly clean shirt, figuring a few wrinkles here and there would make me seem less of a threat. Put on a tie. Folded a sheet of A4 into eighths, tucked it into my breast pocket, took from its hook my old fedora, and headed across town to the Hamilton-Sweeney Building, where I would try to get a meeting with William Hamilton-Sweeney II on the spot. It was better, sometimes, not to give a potential subject too much time to think. The first impulse of even the loftiest chieftain, offered the bullhorn of mass media, is to grab it.
Rather than waving me up to the 30th floor, however, the tubby elevator attendant at whom I flashed an old credential told me to have a seat, his supervisor would have to call up to the press office. A few minutes later, an elevator expelled a small man who did not at all resemble any press officer I’d ever seen, much less the CEO depicted in the Times. His perfectly white hair gave a false first impression; as he drew closer, I saw that he couldn’t have been older than early middle age. At any rate, there were no wrinkles or superfluities. The man himself was bespoke. “Mr. Groskoph, I presume.”
Then a hand was at my back, steering me toward a busy outdoor plaza. I had a few questions, I told him, once we’d reached it. But he proposed to ask me one instead: “Mr. Groskoph, what do you suppose you’re worth?”
“Beg pardon?” I said, or words to that effect.
“I am asking you to imagine yourself forced to liquidate everything you own, today. How much capital might you come up with? What do you think you are worth?”
He never turned from the street to look at me, but I felt put back on my heels. Best, I decided, to be direct––to admit I had no idea.
“Understand, I’ve had my eye on you for some time. You’ve made inquiries concerning certain of our contracts.” There seemed to be around him a layer of cold, but maybe I was just hung over. “The Company has a pronounced interest in privacy. Time was, all Americans did. Now I can pick up a magazine and see the former Mrs. Kennedy in a bathing suit. Her affair, of course, but the Hamilton-Sweeneys do not intend to join her there.”
“In the bathing suit?” I said. “And would you mind if I got your name?”
“I see you haven’t finished inquiring. But I have. Since you called City Hall last summer, I’ve made it my business to read most every word you’ve written, Mr. Groskoph. Or rather, published. And may I tell you I’m impressed? The piece about the Apollo program, in particular. I said to myself, this is a man of considerable intelligence, at some point he will discover which end of the stick he’s got. Frankly, I am surprised it has come to this, but I am here to tell you, face to face: this is that point.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Which point?”
“The point at which you cease and desist.”
“It’s a free country.”
“Indeed. One whose civil code protects the legal person against harassment, libel, and other incursions against liberty. These matters are very hard to adjudicate, of course, very costly. Like paternity suits. Like calculations of palimony, child support.”
He had somehow found out, he was saying, about the child I’d fathered in Florida earlier in the ’70s, with an airline waitress whom I’d left on bad terms. She must have been three years old. The child, I mean. I still may not have believed this man would stoop to breaking into Carmine’s workshop for three measly grams of powder, even to send a message; it was beneath him. But there wasn’t anything at that moment I would have put beyond him.
“Financially, this family has long been prepared for such eventualities. What I’ve been trying to ascertain is whether you are, too.”
“I’m afraid there’s been some misunderstanding.”
“On the contrary; things couldn’t be clearer. Whatever story has brought you to our doorstep, as it were, ends this morning. Ends here. And now more pressing business calls.” He began to leave.
“But to whom should I attribute all this, for the record?” I called out, loud enough that it caused other people on the plaza to look over. But he didn’t turn around, and already the glare off the lobby’s glass was devouring him, a metal box arriving to whisk him back into the sky. The attendant, sweating through his uniform, must have seen something in my face as I pushed back inside, approached the velvet rope by the elevator bank, for he stopped me with a kind of demoralized shrug. “It’s not for nothing they call him the Demon Brother.” Then, when I pressed for an actual name, he told me he was sure a good reporter could figure it out. Besides, it was time I was on my way.
TO THE INNER LEAF OF THE THIRD AND FINAL ISSUE OF HER fanzine, or at least my copy of it, Samantha Cicciaro clipped a photograph of herself as a freshman, a new arrival to the city. The issue itself has vanished inconveniently among my papers, but the photograph must have fallen out beforehand, for I found it in February on the floor––and tonight, having sat for too long in one place, grasping after a language not compromised by time, I have it propped on the desk before me. There on the median of Houston Street, the sun is so intense that it’s hard to make out details of her upturned face. It will be even harder, I know from experience, if I turn off the lights in my apartment. Then, in the shifting glow of the jukebox across the room, she’ll become my colleague, co-conspirator, lost daughter, best friend. But say I really could know her. Say I could find the perfect wording for what flashes now on my mind’s eye: the rusted-out deckchair where she sat on the last day of 1976, preparing herself for whatever the new year would bring. The swallows blown off-course over the yard where her mother used to hang the clothesline. The secret cigarette stubbed out on the bricks of the patio. The girl herself, hunkering down deeper into her formless winter coat. Then where would it stop? How many column-inches would it take to get her from there to the little municipal train station, the train, Central Park? I could fill a whole book with that one day––I could find out who shot her––and it wouldn’t do justice to the quiddities of human life, much less reveal what they mean. A miracle, a universe, I heard a rabbi say once. Any of us, plucked out of the eight million. The several billion.
No, that man, whoever he was, was right. I’ll never reach the end of her story. Never find out who wanted to hurt her, or Billy Three-Sticks. Never be allowed to get that close to either again, or to find that second house, or the other, smaller house behind it, or the awful truth or truths I now feel sure Samantha or her phantom twin stumbled upon. There are too many of everything. Too many of me, even. I set out here to write a profile that would mirror the enigma it sought to unravel: how, from canisters of inert material the size of coffee urns, patterns of blazing color come to fill the sky. I imagined myself engineering out of discrete pieces a singular explosion. Instead, I find now I’ve been trying to work backward from one, to reconstruct from a random dispersal of elements a single shell. An impossible shell, in fact, insofar as there is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and insofar as time only runs the one way.
I’LL ADD ONLY THAT I DID MAKE IT OUT TO THAT HOUSE IN Nassau County to see Carmine Cicciaro once more. This was at the beginning of April, weeks into my slump. How often in the previous months had I imagined returning in triumph, with a typescript that
would instantly expunge my distraction and my disregard. Yes, yes, I neglected you, but look what I found! Instead, I’d brought only a pair of confessions: first, that I’d stolen the fanzines from his daughter’s bedroom back in January; and second, that in my fog of this morning, I’d forgotten to take from their place of safekeeping the two remaining issues––that I’d noticed my own empty-handedness only halfway out to Flower Hill.
I found Carmine Cicciaro sitting out on the back patio, almost as if it were still August. He was no longer the immovable object, though, who back then had nearly forced me off his property. On the bricks between his shoes was a beercan, and without a word for my long absence, he reached into the cooler and fished me out one. We clinked cans reflexively and then sat silent on our matchingly grimed deck furniture, gazing down toward the expressway, lost in our respective thoughts. Out of nowhere, he said, “I ever tell you how the Chinese name their shells?”
I shook my head, no.
“They look at the sky and just make up a story about what they see when the bomb goes off. Pure bullshit, but you get these beautiful names. Flower Scattering Child, Golden Frog Bangs a Gong––I always loved that one.”
What would they have called us? I wondered. I didn’t know what to say.
When he spoke again, it was to tell me he was closing up shop, putting the house on the market. The mortgage was nearly paid off, and he was looking to sublet a place in the city where he could be closer to the hospital. And I decided then, if I hadn’t already. What good would it do to confess I had broken his trust? To add a breach of faith to his sorrows?
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