Absent Friends

LAURA'S STORY

Chapter 13

Breathing Smoke

November 1, 2001

In the office, Laura typed up notes, checked her e-mail, made a list. She waited for the morning meeting to start so it could end so she could get to work. She was close, very close, she could feel it. And the story in this morning's edition, already tucked into briefcases and open on breakfast tables all over New York, should, if things went right, bring her much closer, work like a depth charge, blasting to the surface all the ugly bottom-feeders that scuttled through the dark.

The newsroom was a deadline-driven place; clocks studded its walls, columns, desks. Laura glanced at them, at her own wristwatch, at the numbers in the corner of her computer screen. All were identical, and none had progressed more than a minute since the last time her eyes had made this sweep. That made it nine minutes until the meeting started, twenty-nine until it was over—no, now twenty-eight, hooray. When four more endless minutes had dissolved, she began to gather her things. That way she could take off as soon as Leo waved them all away. She had just picked up her cell phone from her desk when it started to ring.

Well, if that don't beat all, she heard Harry drawl.

Harry! Laura's heart drummed wildly. Oh, Harry, don't! I can't work, she explained earnestly, I can't stay focused if you keep doing this. Don't you want me to work? Don't you want me to find out the truth?

I already know it, my little flounder, Harry said.

But I don't. The world doesn't.

Are you sure you want to? You and the world?

Of course! Why wouldn't I?

A lot of reasons.

Reasons not to know the truth? You know I don't believe that.

Well, then, said Harry (and Laura could have sworn she saw him shrug, though she couldn't see him at all), well, then, he said, answer that damn phone.

Laura snapped her eyes to the phone in her hand. It was still ringing.

Flip, press. “Laura Stone.”

“You that reporter? The Tribune?” A familiar, impatient voice.

“Yes, I am. Who—?”

“Eddie Spano. What the hell is this crap in your paper?”

Laura's heart, pounding from her encounter with the unruly ghost of Harry, stilled in expectation. “Mr. Spano. I'm glad you called.”

“Sure you are. I read one more word of this crap, Miss Stone, you'll find out I have some damn nasty lawyers.”

“Would you like a chance to tell your story?”

“I don't have a story. None of this McCaffery shit has anything to do with me.”

“I'd like to tell my readers that.”

“What's stopping you?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“I'd like your explanation—”

“I have nothing to explain!”

“Your theory, then. I'd like to talk about what's going on, from your perspective.”

“From my—”

“May I come talk to you?”

“Shit,” Spano breathed. “Yeah. Yeah, you better come out here. Come out, and I'll set you straight.”

He spat out an address. Then a thud, and silence: he'd slammed down his phone.

Laura thumbed hers off.

Harry? See? I'm getting close.

She waited. Nothing. In the vast, empty silence, Leo plowed out of his office, leading the morning swarm toward the conference room.

Midmorning, Laura standing at the ferry's front rail, watching the hills on Staten Island become larger and clearer. A beautiful day. Another beautiful day.

Laura was headed out to one of Eddie Spano's construction sites, the address he'd given her. According to Jesselson, Spano was connected to more than a dozen Staten Island businesses, all of them dirty or, if clean, fronts for dirty ones. “Spano? Hands-on. A headquarters-in-the-saddle type,” Jesselson had told her.

“This place,” Laura asked, “where he told me to come. Harry went there. What's it like?”

“His project du jour. Luxury development. Chapel Pointe.”

What chapel? Laura wondered. And when her cab left her at the gate in a chain-link fence around acres of mud in the center of Staten Island, as far from the water in every direction as you could get, she also wondered, What pointe?

Laura had not met Eddie Spano. Her one conversation with him had been by phone. Harry, though, had been to Chapel Pointe and—just a week ago? in her last lifetime?—had described the place to her.

“Very biblical,” Harry had said, raising his gin bottle high above his glass to make a dramatic waterfall. “‘Every valley shall be exalted and every hill made low.' Also every tree chopped down and every blade of grass bulldozed into eternity. Thus shall the dwellings of men be created. They may be luxurious, but I promise you, when our Mr. Spano's Townhomes at Chapel Pointe are finished, they will be ugly.” He took a drink. “And his coffee's bad.”

“So's the Tribune's.”

“The Tribune”—Harry had wagged his finger at her severely—“is not Italian. It has no cultural responsibility to serve drinkable coffee.”

“You're in a good mood.” Laura had sidled over to him, kissed him, gin and all.

He had kissed her back but then said, “To the contrary. I have work to do.”

“Can't it wait?”

“The man who loves you would be only too happy to let it wait. However, the man you love had better get back to work.”

“They're the same man.”

“No,” Harry said softly. “I think not.”

And Harry, glass in one hand, bottle in the other, had taken himself to his desk to work on his story, the work Laura had been so sure was the right thing for him to do.

The construction trailers belligerently displayed World Trade Center posters, American flags, patriotic bumper stickers. God Bless America. United We Stand. These Colors Don't Run.

Laura clomped across plywood sheets laid over the mud, followed by the appraising territorial stares of dirt-streaked men in hard hats.

In Lower Manhattan men just like these were heroes now. They were given thumbs-up signs and bottles of water, flowers and applause as they rode in pickup trucks or wearily walked away from Ground Zero, after a day or a night—the work on the site was around the clock—spent burning through twisted steel columns and clawing with backhoes at chunks of concrete, moving the gigantic bulk of the rubble aside so the inch by inch search for the lost could go on.

The Tribune had run stories, and would run more, about these men. The nobility of manual labor. The courage and dedication of the workers who climbed the tangled, smoking wreckage. The drained and driven men who slept on church pews and ate at the tent they called the Taj Mahal, who asked for extra shifts and objected, refused, when ordered to take a day off, ordered to go home. Rescue workers, they were still called, though there was no one to rescue anymore, there was no one to save.

Laura stopped in the sunlight to study Chapel Pointe. She watched the rumbling earth movers, gazed at the wooden homes-to-be rising against the hard blue sky. She smelled sawdust and mud, heard the percussion of hammers, the whine of drills; and was caught off guard by an emotion she hardly dared look at straight-on. In front of her were things being built. Built. Not dismantled, bucket of dust by chunk of concrete, not untangled, uncompounded, lifted and removed, not disassembled but created. Yes, they were ugly. That didn't matter. What mattered was that the way they were was the way they were intended to be.

Hope. Laura, whose religion had always been truth, whose prayers were always words, named what she was feeling and then caught her breath. She waited for horror and fear, despair and loneliness and anger, to flood her heart and drown this once-familiar, lately unknown sensation. It didn't happen. Hope shrank and retreated, but remained: glowing, she thought, in an eerie, hypnotic way, like a light underwater. Laura, amazed, walked tentatively forward, seeing something she'd thought she'd never see again: possibility.

She squinted in the sun, eager to move. Eager to finish this work. She scanned the trailers for the one that belonged to the Chapel Pointe Development Corp. She climbed its stairs and knocked on its door. Her headache had started, but that was good. Now she'd speak to Eddie Spano.

Now she'd find the truth.