Tabloid City

  He pauses and turns to Logan.

  –In Matt Logan, you have one of the greatest editors I ever worked with, and he’ll make sure that happens.

  They applaud some more.

  –Wherever the hell I am, I’ll be reading you. And remember to kick ass, and take names. Thank you—every single one of you.

  Logan nods to the left, where Fonseca is paused before the CD player. Briscoe thinks: Good, the kid made it. Then, from out of the past, from the vanished beery walls of the Lion’s Head, from other saloons now gone, from many snowy nights when nobody went home, come the Clancy Brothers. A ballad. A lament.

  Of all the money that e’er I had

  I spent it in good company

  And all the harm I’ve ever done

  Alas ’twas done to none but me…

  Logan is singing hard, and so is Briscoe, and so are others who were formed by those nights on Sheridan Square when all of the Clancys were still alive. Fonseca is not singing. Too young to know the words. Briscoe sees Sheila McKibbon from the dayside copy desk off near the windows, singing, her face dark with melancholy. Another graduate of the Lion’s Head. And there, taller than some of the men, wearing a down coat that is wet on the shoulders, newly arrived, is Helen Loomis. She is smoking. And singing.

  And all I’ve done for want of wit

  To memory now I can’t recall

  So fill to me the parting glass

  Good night and joy be with you all…

  Briscoe starts moving through the crowd, hugging every one of them, whispering his thanks. The singing goes on. He makes his way to Helen. Her eyes are mildly glassy, from cold, or sadness, or whiskey. It doesn’t matter to Briscoe. Or to her.

  –Thank you for coming, Helen, he whispers.

  –Thanks for everything, Sam.

  –You okay?

  –No.

  –Neither am I.

  –Yeah. I can see.

  –We’ll have lunch next week.

  –That would be great, Sam.

  –Sloppy Louie’s, okay?

  –We’ll have to settle for dim sum, Sam.

  Briscoe hugs her again, and feels her loneliness pushing into his own lonesome heart. He kisses her cheek, and then starts walking to his office to retrieve his jacket and coat. Still singing. The wake still building.

  But since it falls unto my lot

  That I should go and you should not

  I’ll gently rise and softly call

  Good night and joy be with you all…

  Logan is outside the office as Briscoe leaves. Briscoe hugs him.

  –Sam, see ya, man, he says. May the wind be always at your back.

  5:20 p.m. Bobby Fonseca. City room.

  Leaning on the edge of a desk in the city room, music playing, everyone milling around, he wants to cry, but knows he won’t. Reporters don’t cry. Someone told him that the song at the end, “The Parting Glass,” was out of the Lion’s Head and he wishes he had known such a place. He wasn’t even born when they had all those nights of song and argument. Neither was Victoria Collins. She wanted so much to come here today, but the message said no outsiders, and even with her credit line, she was an outsider. He’ll see her tonight. Maybe take her to his place in Brooklyn. Where will Mr. Briscoe go? He wonders what kind of sickness leads someone to slash a woman’s flesh. Any woman’s flesh. Cynthia Harding’s flesh. Mary Lou Watson’s flesh. Or Victoria’s flesh. So that all the passion and desire and laughter flow to the floor.

  –Don’t be glum, Bobby.

  Matt Logan. A consoling hand on Fonseca’s shoulder.

  –I need you, kid. I need you to kick ass. I need you to help make this a great, professional website.

  –Thanks, Matt.

  –Call the desk Sunday at nine. I’ll be here. I want you to do a follow on the Patchin Place murders. Unless something else is breaking.

  –Will do. And Matt? I’ll try hard to kick some ass.

  A fist bump on the shoulder, and Matt Logan moves to a knot of the others. Fonseca thinking: We’re not orphans yet. So why do I want to cry?

  And here comes Barney Weiss, Nikon hanging from a strap.

  –Hey, kid, we’re going drinking and you’re invited.

  –Where?

  –We’re tryin’ to figure that out. There’s some kind of benefit someplace near the High Line… Remember what Bernie Bard once said: If it ain’t catered, it ain’t journalism.

  Fonseca chuckles. He doesn’t know who Bernie Bard was, but he loves the tabloid attitude. He moves across the city room, in search of a Coke.

  5:50 p.m. Lew Forrest. Chelsea Hotel, Manhattan.

  He signed the papers without being able to see them clearly. Jerry from the front desk guided his hand to the place where he must sign. Jerry, my personal banker. The lawyer said, Yes, that’s it, Lew, and Forrest scribbled the name. He did this on three more copies. Then Jerry stamped each copy with his notary machine, signed his own name, and it was done.

  He had called the lawyer around one o’clock, told him he wanted to change his will, fast, because who knew at his age? He dictated the changes, and the lawyer came to the Chelsea around five. He took the elevator with Jerry. They sat at the big table. The lawyer filled in the names and addresses of the people, and the phone numbers. Lew Forrest signed. They left. As simple as that.

  And now, sitting in the room, longing for the aroma of oil and turpentine in a time of acrylics, he is filled with a sense of relief. Everything is now settled. There are clear instructions to the gallery that handles his work. The lawyer knows his role, which is to defend Forrest’s intentions. Even Lucy from ARTnews and Jerry from the front desk will have their shares. Of what’s in the bank. Of what might come into the bank from future sales. Forrest knows there’s always a bump in sales when an artist dies. He has nobody else on the planet to take care of. And most important, Consuelo Mendoza will be safe for the rest of her life.

  The growing silence tells him that snow is falling. He hears an iron shutter banging gently somewhere, so there must be wind. For me, he thinks, snow is the most treacherous condition, even with Camus taking me for my walk. Maybe Lucy can take him, and I can wait in the lobby. I wish I could see the snow.

  Then in his mind he sees Consuelo’s kids heading for Sunset Park, lugging a sled. And he knows she will call. She has to explain the money to her husband. He might think there was something shameful that brought this windfall. He thinks: I will have to come up with a consoling lie. That I failed to pay her when I left Mexico. Something like that. Like a book that’s overdue at the library for fifteen years. And tell Consuelo to bring her husband and the kids to visit me. Once the husband sees me, his jealousy will die. I’m a fucking wreck. Maybe the kids could take home some of the books. Maybe, if I die first, and they have a yard, they can take Camus home too. Like all Labs, he loves kids.

  Then thinks: If she comes here with her husband, I’ll have to take the painting of Consuelo off the wall. Hide Consuelo when she was young and in my bed, with her golden skin, her hard dark nipples, her silky pubic hair, the hair beneath her arms, the hair on the back of her neck, the delicate calligraphy of hair. Her heat seeping into me. Warming me. Heating my heart and my blood.

  Hide all that, he thinks. Save it here in my head, in the cave of memory, like a secret pulse. To die when I die.

  6:15 p.m. Consuelo Mendoza. Sunset Park.

  The lock clicks. Raymundo is home. The girl starts shouting, Papi, Papi, Papi, and the two boys leave the television set to greet him. Raymundo is smiling, and hugs each kid, then turns to Consuelo, and hugs her too.

  –Ah, mi amor, cómo estamos? he says.

  She whispers in his ear: Good news, mi amor.

  She pulls away, while the kids race around, and Raymundo removes his coat and looks at her. He makes a move with his head, raising it an inch to say, What’s wrong?

  She takes his coat and says, Ven.

  They go to the bedroom together. She hangs the coat, then opens the
top drawer of the bureau, her drawer, and removes the envelope.

  –There’s a story here, she says, holding the envelope.

  He looks puzzled. And she tells the story of the old gringo she worked for in Cuernavaca, a sweet man, old then, older now, blind, a painter. Señor Lewis. She does not say what they did in bed. She never will. But she tells Raymundo that she reached out to the gringo viejo today. For help, finding a new job. The first time she had seen him in fifteen years. Then she hands him the envelope.

  –Open it, she says in Spanish. He takes it, a wary look on his face. Then opens it.

  –Hijole, he says, holding the thick wad of hundred-dollar bills in thumb and forefinger. Then he falls back on the bed. He looks up at her.

  –This is true? he says in a soft doubting voice. Not a lie?

  –You know me better than anyone in the world, Raymundo.

  –I just, I mean, who does such a thing?

  –A good man. Old now. With no children. We can go over to see him tomorrow. Bring the kids. You can meet him. We can bring him flowers. Help him clean up. Make him eat.

  She sits beside Raymundo on the bed. There are tears in his eyes.

  –How much money is it? he whispers.

  –Five thousand dollars.

  He grabs a pillow and sobs into its soft thickness.

  Then Marcela pushes into the bedroom.

  –Papi, let’s go to the snow!

  He pulls the pillow away.

  –Sí, mi querida, pero primero la comida, he says. Yes! But food first!

  He starts to laugh then, and sits up, and hands the envelope back to Consuelo, and hugs the little girl, and says in English, Food first! And then the snow.

  Consuelo thinks, Yes, the snow. All of them. And thinks: Then we can return exhausted to sleep in our own beds.

  6:20 p.m. Bobby Fonseca. The A train.

  He holds the pole in his gloved right hand, the other World guys close around him. They are packed together in the rush-hour train, maybe eight of them, including Helen Loomis. Murmuring jokes. Chuckling. Fonseca is silent. Thinking: I get a double wood and the paper folds. Fuck. He flashes on the faces of the night: Harding, Watson, the woman whose son had been killed. Remembers a professor at NYU, an old reporter, telling him: Ya gotta learn to forget. Ya gotta leave all the pain in the city room. Report it, write it, and go home.

  Not that easy. Maybe if I had Victoria Collins with me every night. Maybe then it would be a home, instead of a place to sleep. Now it’s a fixed-up Brooklyn tenement full of college kids, with a view of a red-brick factory turned into condos. Growing up in New Jersey, Fonseca imagined Brooklyn before he saw it. From movies. From photographs. Saw its light. Its beautiful brownstones. He found his pad in his last year at NYU, paid $350 a month for a chopped-off slice of a railroad flat. Too much, for a place the size of a small attic in Montclair. Still, it’s bigger than Victoria’s place. The bathroom has a sink, for fuck’s sake.

  His father and mother came once to visit and his father said, “For this, I spent all that money?” And never came again. But it was Brooklyn, in a neighborhood renamed the South Slope by the real estate guys, with the subway three blocks away and places to eat on all the corners. It just never became a home, even after I got hired at the World. Where I wanted to work fifteen hours a day. For the rest of my fucking life.

  He hears Barney Weiss mention CelineWire and that nasty shit Wheeler who writes it. That asshole probably even thinks he brought us down. Not the recession and the loss of ads. Not the delivery system. Him. Well, at least I had it for a while. He remembers what Mr. Briscoe told him when he handed Fonseca his first working press card. When I got mine, Briscoe said, I wore it to bed for a month, like it was a dog tag. Fonseca did the same thing. And that first week his father called, after seeing Fonseca’s byline in the paper, and said, “Damn, Bobby, I am so goddamned proud of you.” He could hear a tremor in his father’s voice, and then heard him say, “Maybe now you can get a decent place to live.” And Bobby Fonseca laughed.

  The train slows. The World crowd faces the doors as the 14th Street station appears. Fonseca sees the sign: IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. Nah, if I see something, I write something. I’m a reporter, man.

  NIGHT

  6:45 p.m. Sam Briscoe. Patchin Place.

  AS THE SNOW FALLS SOFTLY, he stands with his back to the Jefferson Market Branch of the public library. There are still lights burning in the tall former courthouse, rising still out of the nineteenth century. How Cynthia loved having a house a block from a library! On his head is a woven wool cap he found in the office, made years ago by Kevin & Howlin in Dublin. He was in Dublin with Cynthia on a day of sun, showing her the sights. Where Yeats lived on Merrion Square and Shaw not far away and the monument in St. Patrick’s to Jonathan Swift. The bookstores on Dawson Street. The National Library. She said: Sam, I could live here. And he laughed. So could he. “Of all the money that e’er I had…”

  He is facing Patchin Place, where two bundled uniformed cops remain on guard and the gates are draped with yellow crime-scene tape. A patrol car is parked on the Sixth Avenue side of the entrance, its windows opaque with steam.

  He is not much of a believer but he tries to pray. No words come. Except “sorry.” Cynthia was not much of a believer either, but told him once that she tried to read a poem each night as if it were a prayer. Maybe, Briscoe thinks, memory is a prayer. And he remembers fragments of snowy nights when he walked with her from the Lion’s Head, one long block away, and came here with her and she made tea and they snuggled before a movie on the couch in the den. The snow is now general all over New York. Softly falling into the dark mutinous Atlantic waves. He thinks: No, not Atlantic. It has to be Shannon, two syllables. Joyce was right.

  He has entered from the Sixth Avenue end of West 10th Street. He notices that a woman is now standing in the snow-flecked shadows at the Greenwich Avenue end. A heavy fur hat on her head. Long down coat. Heavy boots. Very still. Alone. She is staring into Patchin Place too, where the snow is now gathering on Cynthia Harding’s stoop, tamped down in the center by the feet of cops.

  Briscoe moves slightly to the left, stamping his feet as the uniformed cops did. The lights are still burning on every floor. He can see shadowy figures moving in the windows. Technicians. Crime-scene guys. Examining every hair. Down the block the light from street lamps seems spectral. Trucks moan up Greenwich. Buses on Sixth Avenue. The woman is still there. He can’t see her face.

  Then a door of the police car opens. A detective steps out. In civilian clothes. With a hat over his black face. He stares at Briscoe. And walks over. The snow pelting him. Briscoe knows him.

  –You waitin’ on something, man?

  –I’m not, Lieutenant Watson.

  Ali Watson brushes snow off his eyelashes and squints. Then smiles thinly in recognition.

  –Hello, Sam.

  –Ali. I’m so sorry about what happened. Mary Lou was a wonderful human being.

  Ali sighs.

  –The same with Cynthia. I know, uh, that you and her…

  –Yeah. A lot of years.

  –What are you doing here, Sam?

  –Trying to pray.

  A pause.

  –That’s not easy, is it?

  –Not anymore.

  They are both silent for a long moment. The snow is blowing east.

  –I heard about you and the newspaper, Sam. It was on the radio.

  –What the hell. I had a long run.

  –So did me and Mary Lou.

  They stand in silence.

  –You got a suspect?

  –Yeah. But I can’t talk about it. Not yet.

  –Of course.

  Briscoe removes a glove, takes a card from his wallet, writes his home number on the back and hands it to Ali.

  –When this is over, Ali, you want to talk, we’ll have dinner somewhere.

  –That’s a deal.

  Ali walks slowly back to the police car. He did not pr
oduce a card and Briscoe knows why. Briscoe turns. The woman who was waiting down the block is gone.

  He moves to Greenwich, passes the small garden, and turns left onto Sixth Avenue. She’s on the corner, trying to flag a taxi. And then he sees her face. He hurries to her side.

  –Sandra Gordon…

  She looks startled. Then relaxes.

  –Oh, Sam. I thought that was you, but—

  –Were you praying too?

  – Sort of… Really just telling her how, as long as I’m alive, she’s alive.

  She has the same vocal rhythm she had when she came to New York, at once clipped and melodic. The sound of the islands. He remembers her going with Cynthia to buy clothes for interviews at colleges, and later for job interviews. He remembers her at Cynthia’s old place uptown, and then in Patchin Place. For lunches. For parties. Never for fund-raisers, even after Sandra started making good money. Polite, but never servile. Able to speak when asked questions, but not a performer. A listener.

  –Want some dinner? he says.

  –Of course, she says.

  They cross Sixth Avenue and walk east on 8th Street. She hooks a gloved hand to his arm. The snow falls heavier. Driven by a wind off the North River. Coming from Jersey. The Great Lakes. Canada. They pass shops for rent, and a pair of middle-aged women, their heads lowered as the snow blows in their faces, and three drunk college boys, one of whom looks at Sandra, shouts a sentence as he passes that ends with “Obama.”

  –It’s comforting, Briscoe says, to know that young guys are still assholes.

  Sandra Gordon laughs.

  –They get worse, Sandra says, as they get older.

  They cross Fifth Avenue. To the right through the snow, the lights make the Washington Square Arch lovelier than ever. A man stands at the corner, staring into the whitening park, holding skis. They move on to the east, passing more empty shops, and others that are closing early because of the storm. A scrawny man in a camouflage jacket and worn jeans stands huddled in a doorway, holding a cardboard cup. He says nothing. His eyes are dead. Briscoe has no change. They move on. Briscoe thinks: How many times have I walked this street? Five thousand? Ten? More? How many times with Cynthia Harding?