“When did this happen?”
“I couldn’t say when it happened. It was midmorning he was found, and early this evening by the time I learned of it.” He picked up his glass and drank it down like water. “Did I know this friend of yours?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You never brought him here, then?”
“He stopped going to bars awhile ago.”
“Ah, one of that lot. Not the one you were talking about the other night, was he? That went on retreat with the Buddhists?”
“That was him, as a matter of fact.”
“Ah, Jesus. It’s a curious thing. I’ve had that conversation in mind, do you know, and I was thinking that’s a man I’d like to know. And now I’ll never have the chance. Tell me his name again.”
“Jim Faber.”
“Jim Faber. I’d raise a glass to his memory, but perhaps he wouldn’t care for that.”
“I don’t think he’d mind.”
He poured a short drink. “Jim Faber,” he said, and drank.
I took a sip of coffee and wondered what the two of them would have made of each other. I wouldn’t have expected them to hit it off, but who’s to say? Maybe they’d have found some common ground, maybe Jim had sought the same thing sitting in the zendo that Mick looked for at the Butchers’ Mass.
Well, we’d never know.
He said, “They’ll try for you again, you know.”
“I know.”
“By dawn they’ll know their mistake, if they don’t know it now. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. All I’ve done so far is lie to the cops.”
“Do you recall the time I went to Ireland? I was avoiding a subpoena, but ‘twould be as good a place to dodge a bullet. You could fly out tomorrow and come back when they sound the all-clear.”
“I suppose I could.”
“You and herself. I know you’ve never been there, but has she?”
“No.”
“Ah, you’d love it, the two of you.”
“You could come along,” I said. “Show us around, give us the grand tour.”
“Just walk away and let them take what they want,” he mused. “Do you know, I’ve thought of it. It’s not my way, but is it my way to fight something I can’t see? Let them take it, let them have it all.”
“Why not?”
He fell silent, considering the question. Over his big shoulder I saw Andy Buckley lean forward to waft a dart. He lost his balance, and Tom Heaney reached out to set him right. Tom, another Belfast native, worked the bar days, and hardly said a word. He came along when Mick and I had that business in Maspeth. Tom took a bullet that night, and the four of us rode clear out to Mick’s farm with Andy at the wheel. Mick got a doctor to patch him up, and Tom hardly said a word throughout the ordeal, and was just as closemouthed afterward.
Someone at the bar was laughing—not, surely, the ever-silent Mr. Dougherty—and at the table near us the man was telling the woman that it was no easier for him than it was for her.
“Maybe it’s not supposed to be easy,” she said.
I looked across at Mick, wondering if he’d heard what she said. He was forming a response to my question, and then his face changed as he caught sight of something behind me. Before I could turn to see what he was looking at, he was in motion, swatting the little table and sending it flying, cup and saucer and bottle and all, then heaving himself at me across the space where the table had been.
There was a ragged burst of gunfire. Mick hurtled into me and I flew over backward, my chair breaking up into kindling beneath me. I landed on it and he landed on top of me. He had a gun in his fist and he was firing it, snapping off spaced single shots in answer to the bursts of automatic-weapon fire from the doorway.
I caught sight of something sailing overhead. Then there was a loud noise, with shock waves rolling, rolling like the sea. And then there was nothing at all.
I couldn’t have been out for very long. I don’t remember coming to, but the next thing I knew I was on my feet, with Mick urging me on. He had one big arm around my waist, the hand clutching a battered leather satchel. He’d gone and fetched it from his office, so I must have been unconscious for at least as long as it had taken him to do that. But not much longer than that.
He had a pistol in his other hand, an army-issue .45 with the front sight filed down. I managed a look around but couldn’t take in what I was seeing. Chairs and tables were overturned, some of them smashed to splinters. Barstools lay on the tile floor like corpses. The backbar mirror had disappeared, all but a few stray shards still left in the frame. The air was thick with the residue of battle, and my eyes stung from smoke and the fumes of gunpowder and spilled whiskey.
There were bodies scattered around, looking like dolls tossed aside by a thoughtless child. The man and woman who’d been discussing their relationship were together in death, sprawled alongside their overturned table. He was flat on his back with most of his face gone. She lay curled on her side, bent like a fishhook, with the top of her head open and her brains spilling from her shattered skull.
“Come on, man!”
I suppose he was shouting, but his voice didn’t sound very loud to me. I guess the bomb blast had left me partially deaf. Everything was slightly muffled, the way it is in an airport when you’re fresh off a plane and your ears haven’t popped yet.
I heard him and the words registered, but I stayed where I was, rooted to the spot, unable to draw my eyes from them. This is no easier for me than it is for you, he’d told her.
Famous last words . . .
“They’re fucking dead,” Mick said, his tone at once brutal and gentle.
“I knew her,” I said.
“Ah,” he said. “Well, there’s fuck-all you can do for her now, and no time to waste trying.”
I swallowed, trying to clear my ears. It was like getting off a plane m the middle of a war zone, I thought. Smelling the cordite and the death, and stepping over bodies on the way to the baggage claim.
One such body lay in the doorway, a small man with delicate Asian features. He was wearing black pants and a lime green shirt, and at first I took it for one of those Hawaiian shirts with tropical flowers on it. But it was a solid-color shirt and the flowers were three bullet holes and his blood supplied the petals.
Resting in the crook of his arm was the automatic rifle with which he’d sprayed the room.
Mick stopped long enough to snatch up the gun, then gave the dead man a solid boot in the side of the head. “Go straight to hell, you fucker,” he said.
A car stood at the curb, a big old Chevy Caprice, the body badly pitted with rust. Andy Buckley was behind the wheel and Tom Heaney was standing alongside the open door, a gun in his hand, covering our exit.
We dashed across the sidewalk. Mick shoved me into the back seat, piled in after me. Tom got in front next to Andy. The car was moving before the doors were shut.
I could hear sirens. Imperfectly, as I heard everything, but I could hear them. Sirens, coming our way.
“You’re all right, Andy?”
“I’m fine, Mick.”
“Tom?”
“No harm, sir.”
“Good job you were both in the back. What hell they made of Grogan’s, eh? The fuckers.”
We’d headed north on the West Side Drive, then cut over to the Deegan at some point. Andy offered more than once to drop me and Mick wherever we wanted to go, but that wasn’t what Mick wanted. He said he wasn’t sure yet where he’d be staying, and wanted a car.
“Well, this here’s a step down from the Caddy,” Andy said. “But it was just down the block, and a lot quicker than getting yours out of the garage.”
“It’ll do me fine,” Mick said. “And I’ll take good care of it.”
“This piece of shit? You treat it nice, it’ll die of shock.” He slapped the steering wheel. “She runs good, though. And the body damage is a plus, far as I’m concerned. You can park it on the
street and know it’s gonna be there when you come back for it.”
We drove through the Bronx, a part of town I know hardly at all. I lived there briefly as a child, upstairs of the little shoe store my father opened—and closed, whereupon we moved to Brooklyn. The building where we lived is gone, the whole block bulldozed for an addition to the Cross-Bronx Expressway, and my recollection of the neighborhood is gone with it.
So I couldn’t really keep track of where we were, and I might have been equally lost in more familiar terrain, my hearing still imperfect and my whole inner self numb and befogged. There wasn’t much conversation, but I missed a portion of what there was, tuning in and out.
Tom said he’d walk from Andy’s house, there was no need to take him to his door, and Andy said it was easy enough to run him home, that it wasn’t far at all. Mick said near or far we’d drop Tom at his home, for God’s sake.
Andy said, “You’re in the same place, Tom? Perry Avenue?” and Tom nodded. We drove there through unfamiliar streets and Tom got out in front of a little box of a house clad in asphalt siding. Mick said he’d be in touch, and Tom nodded and trotted to the door and stuck his key in the lock, and Andy turned the car around.
At a red light he said, “Mick, are you sure I can’t run you back to the city? You can keep this car and I’ll get a subway home.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Or you can pick up the Caddy. Or I’ll get the Caddy, whatever you say.”
“Drive yourself home, Andy.”
Andy lived on Bainbridge Avenue, on the other side of the Mosholu Parkway from Tom. He pulled up in front of his house and got out of the car. Mick leaned out the window and motioned him over, and Andy walked around the car and leaned against it with his hand on the roof. “My best to your mother,” Mick said.
“She’ll be sleeping now, Mick.”
“By Jesus, I should hope so.”
“But I’ll tell her when she wakes up. She asks about you all the time.”
“Ah, she’s a good woman,” Mick said. “You’ll be all right now? You’ll have no trouble getting your hands on a car?”
“My cousin Denny’ll let me take his. Or somebody else will. Or I’ll grab one off the street.”
“Be careful, Andy.”
“Always, Mick.”
“They’re hunting us down like rats in a sewer, the bastards. And who are they? Niggers and Chinamen.”
“Looked more like Vietnamese, Mick. Or Thai, could be.”
“They’re all one to me,” he said, “and what am I to them? What’s their quarrel with me? Or poor Burke, for Jesus’ sake, or any of the boys?”
“They just wanted to kill everybody.”
“Everybody. Even the customers. Old men drinking their pints. Decent people from the neighborhood having a last jar before bed. Ah, ‘twas a last jar for some of them, right enough.”
Andy stepped back and Mick got out of the car himself and looked around, then shook himself like a dog shaking off water. He walked around the car and got behind the wheel, and I got out myself and got in front next to him. Andy stood on the sidewalk and watched us drive off.
Neither of us said anything on the way back, and I guess I must have faded out. By the time I checked in again we were back in Manhattan, somewhere down in Chelsea. I could tell because I recognized a Cuban-Chinese restaurant and got a sudden sense memory of their coffee, thick and dark and strong, and remembered the waiter who’d brought it to the table, a slow-moving old fellow who walked as though his feet had been bothering him for years.
Funny what you remember, funny what you don’t.
On Twenty-fourth Street off Sixth Avenue, at the edge of the Flower District, Mick braked to a stop in front of a narrow brick building eight stories tall. There was a steel roll-up door like the kind at E-Z Storage, but narrower, only a little wider than a car, with a pair of windowless doors on either side of it. The door on the right had a column of buzzers at its side, suggesting that it led to the offices or apartments above. The door on the left showed two rows of stenciled lettering, black edged in silver on the red door. MCGINLEY & CALDECOTT, it proclaimed. ARCHITECTURAL SALVAGE.
Mick unlocked and rolled up the metal door, revealing a small street-level garage. Once he’d kicked a couple of cartons out of the way there was just enough room to park a full-size car or a small van. He motioned, and I slid behind the wheel and maneuvered the Chevy into the space.
I got out and joined him on the sidewalk, and he lowered the door and locked it, then unlocked the red door with the lettering on it. We stepped inside and he drew the door shut, leaving us in darkness until he found a light switch. We were at the head of a flight of stairs, and he led me down them to the basement.
We wound up in a huge room, with narrow aisles threaded among dense rows packed with bureaus and tables and chests of drawers and boxes stacked to shoulder height. It was, as promised, an architectural salvage firm, and the full basement constituted the showroom and stockroom all in one.
Ever since the Dutch bought the place, Manhattan’s been a town where they throw buildings up only to knock them down again. Demolition is an industry in itself, construction’s twin, and, if its main goal is an empty lot, I was looking at its by-products. Drawers and boxes spilled over with every sort of hardware you could strip from a structure before you took a wrecking ball to it. There were cartons full of nothing but doorknobs, brass ones and glass ones and nickel-plated ones. There were boxes of escutcheon plates and hinges and locks and things I recognized but didn’t know the names of, and there were other things I couldn’t identify at all.
Carved wooden columns stood here and there, looking for a ceiling to hold up. One section was crammed with ornamental stone and cement work from the outsides of buildings—gargoyles with their tongues protruding, real and imaginary animals, some sharply detailed, others as hard to make out as the inscriptions on old gravestones, weathered by time and acid rain.
A year or two ago Elaine and I spent a weekend in Washington, and in the course of it we dragged ourselves through the Holocaust Museum. It was wrenching, of course—it’s supposed to be—but what hit us the hardest was a room full of shoes. Just shoes, an endless heap of shoes. Neither of us could quite explain the room’s ghastly impact, but I gather our response was not atypical.
I can’t say the plastic milk crates overflowing with doorknobs elicited a similar emotional reaction. My gut didn’t churn at the thought of what had happened to all the doors to which those knobs had once been fitted, or the long-vanished rooms behind those doors. But somehow the endless array of hardware, sifted and sorted with Teutonic thoroughness, did call to mind that room full of shoes.
“Where buildings go to die,” Mick said.
“Just what I was thinking.”
“It’s a good old business. Who could guess what you can strip off an old building before you knock her down? You pull the plumbing, of course, and the boiler, and sell all that for scrap, but there are people who find a use for all the old hardware and ornamentation. If you were restoring an old brownstone, say, you’d want all the details authentic. You’d come here and go home with replacement crystals for the chandelier, or a better chandelier entirely. And door hinges, and a marble mantel for the fireplace. It’s all here, whatever you might want and much you wouldn’t.”
“So I see.”
“And did you know there are those that collect bits of ornamentation? Caldecott has one customer with a passion for gargoyles. There was one he bought too heavy to carry, and your man delivered it and saw his collection. Two small rooms in Christopher Street was all he had, and there’s shelves all round stuffed with dozens of fucking gargoyles of all sizes, all of them making horrible faces, and one uglier than the next. From the description it must have been as cluttered as this place, but that’s how it is when you’re a collector. You must be forever getting more of whatever it is you fancy.”
“Do you own this place, Mick?”
“I’ve an
interest in it. You might say I’m a silent partner.” He picked up a tarnished brass hinge, turned it in his hand, put it back where he’d found it. “’Tis a good business for a man. You sell for cash, and you’ve no purchase records because you don’t purchase your stock, you salvage it. So you’ve cash coming in and cash going out, and that’s a useful sort of business in this day and age.”
“I imagine it is.”
“And I’m a useful partner for the lads. I’ve connections in the construction and demolition trade, labor and management both, and that’s a help in securing salvage rights to a building. Oh, it works out well for all concerned.”
“And I don’t suppose your name’s on the paperwork.”
“You know my thoughts on the subject. What you don’t own can’t be taken from you. I’ve a set of keys, and the use of the office when I want it, and a place to park a car where it can’t be seen. They keep their van there, they use that bay for loading and unloading, but Brian McGinley takes the van home at the day’s end. And that reminds me.”
He dug the cell phone out of his pocket, then changed his mind and put it back. We walked the length of one aisle to an office in the back, where he sat at the gray metal desk and looked up a number and made a call. The phone had a rotary dial, and might have been salvage itself.
He said, “Mr. McGinley, please. . . . I know it is, and I’d not call at this hour but out of necessity. . . . I’m afraid you’ll have to wake him. Just tell him it’s the big fellow.”
He covered the mouthpiece and rolled his eyes. “Ah, Brian,” he said. “Good man. Do you know, I think you and Caldecott are closed for the week. No one’s to come in until you hear from me. . . . That’s the idea. And my apologies to your wife from the lateness of the hour. Why don’t you make it up to her and take her to Puerto Rico for a few days? . . . Well, Cancún then, if she likes it better. . . . And you’ll phone Caldecott? And anyone else that ought to be told? Good man.”