Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

On the Slide BY RICHARD BOWES

Richard Bowes has published five novels, two collections of short fiction, and fifty stories. He has won two World Fantasy Awards and the Lambda, International Horror Guild, and Million Writers Awards. Recent and forthcoming stories appear in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the anthologies Digital Domains, The Beastly Bride, Wilde Stories 2010: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, Haunted Legends, Best Gay Stories 2010, Nebula Awards Showcase 2011, Supernatural Noir, and Blood and Other Cravings. Several of these stories are chapters in his novel in progress, Dust Devil: My Life in Speculative Fiction.

The author’s home page is www.rickbowes.com.

Sean Quinlan caught the 6:30 wake-up call almost before his cell phone began its first ring. He murmured, “Thanks,” glanced at Adrianne La Farice, who wore only a soft, lovely smile and barely stirred in her sleep, thrust the phone aside, slipped from the bed in the pearly morning light, and padded quietly out of the room.

He wasn’t awake so much as in a place where the line between work and dreams had been erased. In the ample living room he flicked on the DVD player, keeping the sound way down. In the kitchen he started the coffee. Back in the living room he sat in his shorts on the arm of the couch and watched the opening scene in an episode of the old Naked City TV show.

Grainy black-and-white detectives in suits and hats chased a gunman over the roofs of early 1960s New York. Sun through the apartment windows made the gray figures look like ghosts, and Quinlan liked that effect.

The gunman turned to fire, and the detectives ducked behind a chimney. An actor playing a uniformed cop fell, shot. The fugitive fled down a fire escape with the two detectives firing after him.

Quinlan turned up the sound half a notch to catch the voice of the old character actor who played the hard-bitten police lieutenant in the series. “Wounded in the hunt, with the law on his trail, the fugitive returns to his final lair, his first home, the old neighborhood.” The trumpets played the city-at-dawn theme music, which mixed nicely with early rush-hour street noise from downtown Manhattan fifty years later.

The episode was set in a neighborhood of five-story tenements that Quinlan didn’t quite recognize. It had probably been torn down and turned into high-rises. When coffee smells spread, he stood and discovered Adrianne in a floor-length robe, with her eyes barely open, leaning in the doorway and watching him. Her smile was gone.

“More detectives,” she mumbled. “You never stop working, do you, Sean?”

“My granddad and his friends used to make fun of what they called ‘twenty-four-hour-a-day cops’—guys who were always on duty,” he said. “Now it’s like I’ve become one. Can I offer you some of your own coffee?”

“Yes, please.” She made her way to the bathroom saying, “When we were kids, I remember guys backing off from confronting you because they just knew you were the law.”

Adrianne La Farice had been Adie Jacobson when they were in their early twenties and she waited tables while he took care of the door at Club Red Light over in the Meatpacking District back in the now-legendary early nineties.

She returned saying, “I don’t need to be up this early. I don’t need to be up at all. With business the way it is, I could spend the day in bed, and I think I will.” She uttered some variation on that every morning and never followed through.

His divorce had left him broke. Adie’s divorce from Henry La Farice, the designer, was much more successful, leaving her with this renovated condo and a partnership in a prosperous real estate business. Sadly, like everything else in New York, that was now in the tank.

Over the last several years they’d made it their pleasant habit to get together like this each time he’d been in New York on a job. And it was in Quinlan’s mind to see if they could turn this into something more permanent.

When he brought Adie the coffee and half a bialy, she was sitting up in bed reading e-mail on her laptop. “No apartment in Manhattan’s going to be sold today. Everybody who owns one remembers when it was worth two million dollars. Anyone who wants one will offer a quarter of that and then either can’t get financing or can’t explain where they got the cash.”

Quinlan took a jacket and slacks out of the corner of the closet that he’d been assigned, and got socks and underwear from the rolling suitcase in which he’d brought them.

In the bathroom he stared through the steam at the serviceable face he was shaving, the short hair with almost no gray. “The family face, anonymous and perfect for stakeout work,” his grandfather “Black Jack” Quinlan had said. Jack Quinlan had made detective lieutenant on the job. He’d died almost thirty years back, when Sean was barely thirteen. He thought about the old man almost every day.

Sean looked in the mirror and smiled just a bit. Lately he’d had occasion to notice that the Quinlan face was also perfect for a man on the run. He put on a jacket and shirt but no tie because suddenly there wasn’t time. On the way to the bedroom he picked up the brown snap-brim that he’d been wearing for practice and put it on his head with just enough tilt.

When he kissed her Adie said, “Brazil! I’ve got a Brazilian with money interested in a penthouse, and with that trade agreement he doesn’t even have to explain where he got the cash.”

Then she looked up and said, “You are beyond retro, mister. You disappear and I’ll start believing in Sliders.”

“People talk about Sliders. Have you ever known one?”

“It’s escapism, not reality. I think they took the name from some old TV show nobody watched. I know a woman who described her teenage son as a perfect 1969 hippie. He had the clothes and the hair; his room was papered with old posters, and he hardly ever left it. One morning he disappeared, and she thinks he slid back there, claims she found notes from him written on old yellow paper and telling her he was OK. Of course, she’s also delusional enough to think the Dow will hit sixteen thousand some fine day.”

Turning to go he said, “Remember the Peggy McHugh party tonight.”

Adie nodded and pointed to a set of handcuffs attached to one of the brass rods on the headboard. “Can you hide those before you go? The cleaning lady’s coming today.”

Outside on Rivington Street, it was still early enough that Quinlan got a cab with no problem. This Lower East Side drug pit of his youth had gotten gentrified and hip beyond measure. But times like this, on mornings with bright, merciless sun shining on empty shop windows, it had started to look a bit shabby again.

As the cab rolled across Houston Street into the East Village, he noticed people setting up folding tables on the widened sidewalks, opening for business in the big informal flea market that had grown up there.

Portable dressing rooms lined Avenue B. On Tenth Street police barricades blocked traffic onto that side street. Miss Rheingold posters and ads for Pall Malls covered over the Mexican restaurant and reflexology parlor signs. Extras were ready to stand on the corner in greaser haircuts or lean out of first-floor windows in housecoats and hairnets. Down the block, lights brighter than the sun illuminated a tenement.

Getting out of the cab Quinlan was spotted by a couple of the film crew. “Morning, officer,” one said, and they all laughed.

For their amusement and his own he did an imitation of the old cop he’d heard on TV. “This is my once and future city. My life consists of long periods of waiting and brief flashes of action and violence. My name’s Sean Quinlan. And when I can get the work, I’m an actor.”

Big parts of Quinlan’s life were in a condition he didn’t want to think about. But he had a good part in a medium-sized film. Nothing else would matter for the next few hours.

At 9:22 one day in the spring of 1960 New York Police Detective Pete McDevitt climbs out of an unmarked Buick, flicks his half-smoked cigarette away, and steps into East Tenth Street. His suit is gray and his shirt is blue to match his eyes. His tie is bloodred and his hat is tilted back a tad to give full value to his face. Detective Pat Roark exits from the driver’s side wearing brown with a white shirt and blue tie, as befits a steady backup man and faithful partner.

McDevitt was played by Zach Terry, star of Like ’60, a Hollywood production currently shooting exteriors on the streets of NYC. Detective Roark was Sean Quinlan’s role. As a featured player it was his duty to exit on the far side of the car and step smoothly into his proper place one pace behind and two feet to the left of the star.

Pete McDevitt keeps his eyes fastened on an upper floor of the tenement opposite. But Pat Roark gives a quick scan over his shoulder, to see if anyone is watching them.

Quinlan planted that gesture in rehearsal and put it in each of the takes, wanting it there to emphasize that his character was the competent by-the-book cop. No one has commented one way or the other.

What he kept in his mind was a street full of guys and women setting out dressed for work, kids going to school on a spring day more than fifty years before. He blocked out what he actually saw—the trucks, the crew, the commissary table, the lights, and the crowd of gawkers.

Sean Quinlan felt a bit dizzy, like he was about to fall or maybe fly and wondered if this was how the start of a Slide felt. He had created a background for his character. Roark and McDevitt were supposed to pick up Jimmy Nails, a two-bit thug suspected of having ambitions above his station, for questioning. Roark was a ten-year veteran of the force, a guy with a wife and two kids who was talking about moving to the suburbs. He would not be bouncing on his toes on an ordinary morning on a routine assignment.

A sound crew moved with them just out of camera range as the two cops continued a conversation that the audience would just have heard them have in the car. That scene got filmed in California a couple of weeks back.

“Definitely it’s spring, Pat, my boy,” says McDevitt and comes to a halt. Roark’s expression is mildly amused, a bit bored until he follows the other’s gaze.

Without looking, Quinlan knew Terry was wearing the trademark same half-bemused, half-aroused little grin he had used at least once in every episode of Angel House.

Then Roark sees what McDevitt sees, and his jaw drops just a bit. They hold the pose.

“Cut!” said Mitchell Graham, the director. “I think we may have it.” Crew members moved; traffic began to flow. Zach Terry looked Sean Quinlan up and down for a moment before the two of them stepped apart.

The actors had worked together once a couple of years before, when Quinlan appeared in an episode of Angel House. That’s the HBO series featuring a law office whose partners are angels but not necessarily good ones—an amusing show, Quinlan thought, once you accepted the premise. Terry was one of the stars.

Quinlan had played a quirky hit man who didn’t happen to be guilty of the killing with which he’d been charged. Their two scenes together had gone well, and Quinlan hoped the look just then didn’t mean some kind of tension.

On the way back to his dressing room he passed a girl, maybe twenty, in pedal pushers, teased hair, and pumps. She smiled and he turned to watch her walk away.

A production assistant saw him look and said, “That kid has all the moves. This location is a magnet for Sliders. They think if they dress in period and hang around sites like this they’ll wake up in 1960. One told me that the trick was not to think about Sliding back while you did all that.”

The kid had a nice ass but not enough to make his head spin like it did. In his dressing room Quinlan did relaxation exercises, sipped iced tea, sat silently for a few minutes, and finally listened to his calls. Arroyo, the lawyer, was first.

“Sean. I assume everything you wanted to keep is already out of the condo. As of today it’s repossessed. Second, my colleague who’s handling your case up in San Bernardino says there’s no word from the DA’s office. We don’t know if an indictment is coming down. But as we discussed, an indictment is just their way of getting you to testify. I’m wondering if you got my bill.”

Quinlan had gotten the bill. The condo was one more casualty of his divorce and bankruptcy. When he could have sold, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. When he had to sell, there were no buyers.

Everyone had consoled him about the divorce, like he’d suffered a death in the family or been laid off from work. Monica Celeste had the better career, was a major presence on daytime TV. Quinlan told himself that if the situation had been reversed he wouldn’t have dumped her. But all that was in the past.

The San Bernardino matter was current. A runaway grand jury led by a self-righteous young DA was investigating collection-agency practices. Some debtors apparently testified that a few years before, Quinlan had led them to believe he was a cop. So far nothing had gotten out to the media.

That time just after the divorce was still a jumble in his mind. One thing he was sure of was that testifying meant implicating his former employers, which would be very unwise. Another thing about which he was positive was that lawyers had eaten up his Like ’60 pay.

Adie was at the office and in full business mode when she left a message. “For the Peggy McHugh thing, we can meet at Ormolu at eight. I mentioned that to a prospective client and he knew all about it. So we may meet him there.”

The last call was a voice from deep in a disreputable past. Rollins said, “You asked around about me. Here I am. I know where to find you.” Quinlan was a bit amused.

When they knocked on his door to say he had ten minutes, Quinlan thought about his character for a few moments. Roark had the usual problems trying to raise a family on a cop’s salary. His wife and he had disagreements. But she was a cop’s wife and understood what that meant. A steady guy was Roark, a good partner.

Detectives McDevitt and Roark hold the same poses as at the end of the previous scene. The audience has just watched a sequence shot two weeks before on a sound stage in California. It shows what the two cops are watching—a nude woman standing behind gauze curtains.

The viewers see a reverse strip, as she hooks her bra, pulls up her panties, draws on nylons, wriggles into a slip, a blouse, and a skirt. She bends slowly to put on her shoes.

Suddenly McDevitt shakes himself awake. “Decoy!” he says. “She’s letting him get away.” The pair of them run for the front door of the building.

Locations had found an untouched and ungentrified tenement. Props had filled the dented cans in front with in-period trash—a partly crushed Wheaties box, a broken Coke bottle, a striped pillow leaking feathers.

A little old lady with a wheeled shopping cart gets in their way. The stoop is worn and paint is peeling on the railing. As they run up the steps the front door opens.

And there stands Laura Chante, the first time the audience gets a good look at her. Laura is the girlfriend of a very wrong guy, hard but soft, bad but good. She wears high heels, a black sheath skirt, and a jacket open to reveal a pale, shimmering blouse. A scarf with a streak of scarlet covers most of her blond hair. “You boys looking for someone?” she asks with an innocent expression.

Laura was played by the young London actress Moira Tell. Her posture, her accent, her attitude were impeccable.

Peggy McHugh still had a sassy smile. Back in the 1950s and 60s she had made a career playing bright young girlfriends and wisecracking best pals of too-sweet heroines. She was the young detective’s fiancée in the Naked City TV series.

At eighty she played tough old broads with a regular role on As the World Turns and a girlfriend thirty years her junior. In a nod to nostalgia she’d been cast as Detective Pete McDevitt’s hip, utterly unsentimental grandmother in this movie.

It was her birthday, and Mitchell Graham, the director, along with the movie’s producers threw a little party for her at Ormolu’s on Union Square and invited the press.

Ms. McHugh had already knocked back a Jameson on the rocks and was swirling champagne in her glass when Quinlan came up and hugged her.

“How are you doing, you old witch?” he asked.

“Sean! Thought I’d see more of you on this shoot. How’s your mother? Still living in New Mexico with what’s-his-name?”

Peggy McHugh and Quinlan’s mother, the former Julie Morris, had been pals back when his mother was acting, back when she married his father, Detective Jim Quinlan.

“Arizona. Lou Hagan is the current husband. Nice guy—retired broker. She’s fine. Sends her love.”

“Your mother was gorgeous. She and your father, when they met, were more like a movie than any movie I’ve been in.” And having taken the conversation to a place where Quinlan didn’t want to go, Peggy caught sight of someone else and said, “Bella! So wonderful of you to come!”

Quinlan stepped away, went to the bar, sipped a Scotch, and looked around the room. Ormolu’s tin ceiling had been polished to a fine shine; the wood paneling looked rich as chocolate. The place had been a dump twenty years before when it was a rock club called Ladders. Long before that it had been an Italian wedding hall.

Sean’s parents were quite a story—the young actress and the young cop who got himself quite dirty trying to keep her in style. Jim Quinlan shot himself when the shit came down. Sean had been three when that happened and found it out in bits and pieces.

Once when he was small his grandfather had explained how it was growing up in the Irish New York of the twenties and thirties. “Kids who got in trouble, which was most of us, got let off with a warning if we had cops in the family. Those without a relative on the force got a criminal record. Simple justice and nothing less.”

Out of nowhere Quinlan had asked about the father whom he barely remembered and knew almost nothing. “Did my dad get into trouble?”

He never forgot the grief on the old man’s face as he said, “Your father got more than a couple of warnings.”

Adie was across the room talking intently to a thin man wearing thousands of dollars’ worth of suit and a long, dark ponytail.

Where Quinlan was standing he could hear Mitchell Graham say, “Sometimes acting is beside the point and it’s the physical presence you want. Someone walks on camera unannounced and the audience knows he’s a killer.”

Quinlan shifted slightly and saw that the director was talking to Moira Tell and a reporter. “In America, real Mafiosi go to jail, get involved in the prison drama group, get out, and go into business playing Mafiosi on stage and screen. When Friedkin shot Sorcerer down in Latin America he hired a couple of Sing Sing School of Drama graduates to play the thugs. The two stopped off on the way down there and helped pull a robbery. This delayed them and held up the shooting. When they showed up, Roy Scheider, the star, said, ‘I was told we were waiting for actors—these are just gangsters.’ Supposedly, the two were deeply hurt that their artistic bona fides were being questioned.”

Moira Tell laughed and moved toward the bar. On her way she noticed Quinlan. “You are very good,” she told him.

“Sing Sing School of Drama.”

“Oh, he was not talking about you. Graham admires what you’re doing, the presence you bring. He believes all that nonsense about inner-emotion-American versus exterior-detail-English acting.”

“You were great this afternoon.”

“It’s wonderful to visit a past that has nothing to do with me at all.”

From across the room they heard Peggy McHugh in full voice speaking to a cable interviewer: “Back when the economy was first going down the toilet, someone asked me if I’d like to go back sixty years. I thought they meant would I like to be young again. Instead they just meant me going just as I was. ‘Before heart bypasses, before air conditioning?’ I asked them. ‘You’re out of your mind,’ I said. Sweetheart, we lived like dogs back then.”

Adie said as they were leaving a bit later, “The one I was talking to is the Brazilian from this morning. He wants to buy a penthouse. He’s loaded.” Somehow money had not really come up in all the years they’d known each other.

The ferry boat called the Queen of Union City disembarks passengers onto a Hudson River pier in the West Twenties. A woman wearing a veiled hat leads a small boy in an Eton cap and a girl in a straw boater by their hands. A tall man in a three-piece suit and a topcoat follows them. An old slat-sided truck piled with crates of live chickens rolls onto the pier past a large sign reading ERIE LACKAWANNA FERRY COMPANY.

Under that in smaller letters is “Departures from Manhattan on the hour and the half hour, 4 A.M. to 8 P.M.”

Detectives Pete McDevitt and Pat Roark stand under a clock that says 2:25, poised, alert and ready to step out from behind the makeshift ferry shed. Then McDevitt says, “Now,” and moves to his right. Roark at the same moment moves to his left.

Roark served a year in Korea. Firemen are navy; cops are army. Quinlan knows this. The next line is his:

“Okay Nails, freeze.”

“Cut!”

The truck with the chickens went into reverse and parked next to a mint-condition 1955 Oldsmobile and an old-fashioned ambulance the size and shape of a station wagon.

Before the first take Mitchell Graham had said, “Sean, you’re so perfectly in period that I feel like I should film you in black-and-white.”

As McDevitt that day, Zach Terry wore his hat at the same great angle as Quinlan did. Graham noticed that. After the first take he told Quinlan, “It’s distracting to have both of you with your hats alike. Could you straighten yours?”

The game was called protecting the star. Sean knew that game. McDevitt’s hat was an important prop today. He shifted his own fedora.

“Perfect,” said the director.

A featured player yields gracefully in the hope that a director will remember when casting in the future. Quinlan wondered how many movies Graham would direct after this one. He wondered what his own career would look like if an indictment came down in California.

Crews were setting up for the next scene, which would be shot in front of an old three-story building just across from the piers. For the movie a sign had been erected on the front that read MURPHY’S FINE FOOD AND DRINK. ROOMS BY THE DAY OR WEEK.

Once this had actually been a waterfront tavern with rooms rented to sailors on the upper floors. For a while after the waterfront shut down it had been a notorious gay bar called the Wrong Box.

Carter Boyce, the actor playing Jimmy Nails, was in costume and taking a practice walk toward the ferry shed. Carter Boyce was a nice guy who happened to have a mug two feet wide with bad news written all over it.

In the next scene, Jimmy Nails was supposed to have just come down the wooden exterior stairs that led from the second floor of Murphy’s. He had an overcoat on his arm and carried a satchel.

The scene of Nails on those stairs had been completed the day before through the miracle of second-unit work.

Detectives McDevitt and Roark stand exactly where they were at the end of the last shot. In the background as they start to move toward Murphy’s, the Oldsmobile and the chicken truck roll off the dock in one direction, a red Studebaker station wagon goes by in the other.

Twenty feet away from them Jimmy Nails drops his luggage and overcoat and swings a double-barrel shotgun their way. McDevitt, acting instinctively, whips off his fedora and flings it at Nails’s face in one gesture. Jimmy, his eyes rolling like a trapped beast, is a creature of instinct and empties a barrel at the hat. Roark’s gun jumps into his hand and he fires three times. Jimmy Nails goes down firing the second barrel into the ground.

The hat flying through the air and getting blasted into felt confetti was being shot that same week by a special-effects outfit in California.

“Thanks,” Roark says.

“That hat cost me seven bucks at Rothman’s,” says his partner, his buddy.

“Cut. Let’s put Zach and Sean about a foot farther apart,” said Graham. “And Sean, slower on the reaction. Let the hat surprise you as much as it does Carter. Sean, are you with us?”

Quinlan nodded. For a moment he’d felt like the back draft of the vintage vehicles was pulling him away from this time and place.

Over several takes the vintage Studebaker blew a tire and the wind and the sun played hell with Mr. Terry’s hair. Half a dozen people surrounded him, spraying his chestnut locks.

“Exposure to the elements…”

“It’s not, of course, but the light makes it look thin.”

“… lighting adjustment…”

This Quinlan knew was also about protecting the star, as was the scene they kept enacting. McDevitt needed to save Roark’s life to mitigate, for the audience, the fact that his misjudgment was going to cost Roark his life.

As they prepared for what turned out to be the last take, Quinlan couldn’t stop thinking, each time he looked at Zach Terry, that this was the bastard who was going to get him killed.

At some point during the last couple of takes, Sean Quinlan became aware of a figure from his disreputable past. Rollins stood across the street dark and sharp in a navy blue suede jacket and soft leather shoes and watched everything that went on.

When they were finished with Like ’60 for the day, he and Rollins went down the avenue to what had been a nouveau-chic diner and now seemed to be slipping into just being a diner with a liquor license.

“We had some rare adventures, you and I,” Rollins remarked, when they settled into a back booth, “a pair of theater students out looking for adventure.”

“And not caring where they found it.”

“Always on the right side of the law, though.”

“Not as I remember. There was the time we unloaded the Quaaludes those crazy guys from NYU manufactured in their chemistry lab.”

“We weren’t caught. That’s being on the right side of the law, as far as I’m concerned. Glad you got in touch. I’ve been following your career. Sorry about the divorce. Monica Celeste must be loaded.”

Quinlan shrugged. “I see you’re still the Well-Dressed Passerby,” he said. “That routine keeps working for you?”

“In any large city there are always the lost, the confused, and the lonely that need an assist from a passing stranger.” Rollins gave a charming smile. “Actually, though, I’ve gone legit. I’m in the tourist business—tours of various old New Yorks. You heard about that?

“We have people taking daytrips to 1890s New York. Out in Brooklyn in a couple of spots you can walk down a street and almost think it’s a hundred and twenty-five years ago. Any decade you can think of, people want to see the remains.”

Rollins smiled. “It’s an amazing confluence, you being back in town and making this movie. Like ’60 is on the cusp of the hottest boom in this dying town. Your movie is going to be porno for the ones who go for fifties New York. That ferryboat sliding up to the dock and that truckload of chickens and you and your pal in those hats and padded-shoulder suits will make them cum in their Dacron/rayon pants.”

Sean gave a grin. “In tough times people want to go elsewhere,” Rollins said. “With every corner of the planet going down the drain, the places they favor are in the past. Some lunatics even want to go back to the Great Depression. Like this one isn’t bad enough for them. But I don’t ask questions; I just set up the tours. Who would have guessed that a master’s degree in history from Columbia would stand me in such good stead?”

“Especially since you never went there.”

Rollins shrugged. “What makes it all weird and twisted and thus makes it my kind of enterprise is that some of the clients believe that if they can find a place with enough artifacts that evoke a certain time, they’ll get a jolt and wind up there.

“Most of them want to go back to the seventies, the sixties, the fifties. They figure things would be comfortable enough. ID requirements were still loose back then. Sliders know enough about those times that they could make a nice living betting on the World Series and buying Xerox stock. One said that if he could get back to 1950 he’d have almost sixty years before stuff got really screwy.”

“You’ve heard them talk all this out? Ever help any of them do it?”

“None of my clients and no one else I’ve ever known has actually managed the Slide. They’ve all heard about someone going back in time. They know someone who found a message from someone who disappeared saying he’s living like a king in 1946. Psychiatrists say it’s delusional. People can’t deal with bad times.”

“You believe the shrinks know what they’re talking about?”

“They diagnosed me as a sociopath back when I was in high school. It sounded good and I went with it. If you’re looking for a guide to the Slide you’re out of luck. If you want a job leading 1950s nostalgia tours, I’d be happy to hire you.”

“Thanks, but I have other plans.” Quinlan rose and put a ten down on the table. “Nice talking to you, Rollo.”

For a moment Rollins looked hurt. Then he said, “Sorry to break your heart, Quinlan. It’s nice that you figured if anyone in New York knew how to Slide it would be me. You’ve been in and out of the city over the years without ever trying to get in contact, so I wondered what you wanted. Somehow I didn’t think of this. Either you got stupid out in California or you got very desperate.”

In the early morning light, stepping carefully along a tenement fire escape just off Tenth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, Detective Roark edges forward, revolver in hand. Up ahead is Figs Figueroa’s window. In another moment his partner will knock on the door of the apartment and Figueroa will be on the move. Roark curses the stupidity that led him into this. Backup is on its way and they could have waited. But the lieutenant is not happy with the way they’d bobbled Jimmy Nails’s arrest the other morning or the way they’d then made him too dead to talk. McDevitt thinks the two of them need some redemption.

As Roark inches forward, the window right behind him opens. He drops to a crouch, revolver at the ready, turns, and sees the terrified face of an old woman about to hang a basket of wet laundry on her wash line. When Roark turns back, Figueroa stands on the fire escape with an automatic leveled on him.

“Cut.”

On the roof just above Quinlan were an assistant director, the script girl, the cameraman, and the director himself. “We need this one more time,” said Graham. “Just do what you’ve done before.” He looked closely at Quinlan and said, “Get this man some coffee.”

It was late in the morning and Quinlan had already gone up this fire escape six times. He guessed this particular building got cast for the part because of this fire escape, which was as black and labyrinthine as the stairways of a Piranesi prison. People fussed with his clothes and his makeup. He’d lain awake all night next to Adie, who slept soundly. Somebody brought him coffee.

This scene was his best moment in Like ’60. By coincidence, it and the one they’d shoot immediately afterward were his last ones in the film. His work in New York was over.

If someone asked him what Like ’60 was about, Quinlan would have said it was the story of a cop who was an ordinary guy wanting the ordinary things and living in a simpler and not very enlightened time. This man is pulled by circumstance and human weakness into a situation where his life is on the line.

Again he climbs the stairs and inches forward. Again the window opens and, revolver at the ready, he stares into the terrified face and looks up too late to see his killer.

This morning, it seemed as if Rollins was right about the Slide being a delusion. Quinlan felt no distant hum of past times. His stomach was tight, his shoulders tense.

In his dressing room he looked at his messages. Adie had called from her office to say she had a meeting with a client and would have to miss the wrap party. This morning she had asked him—gently, indirectly, not like he was being evicted yet—if everything was OK for him back in LA. She hadn’t mentioned the Brazilian, but he was an invisible presence.

As Quinlan sat absorbing this, Arroyo, the lawyer, called. “My associate in San Bernardino says the grand jury will hand down indictments in an intimidation/extortion scheme this afternoon at around six P.M. New York time. You’re accused of impersonating a law officer. One alleged victim says you showed him a badge, threatened to run him in on false charges if he didn’t come up with his payment.”

“That’s a lie.” Sean said that automatically, but the only memory the accusation evoked was an appearance he’d made as a rogue cop on NYPD Blue many years before, in which he’d flashed a shield.

“Sean, they’re not interested in you. They want the ones who hired you.”

“Speaking those names means I’ll be dead or in witness protection,” he said. “I’ll get back to you.”

Quinlan remembered when he turned thirteen and decided that instead of becoming a cop, which was all he’d wanted up until then, he was going to be an actor. His grandfather had said, “Tough luck, kid; you drew your father’s face and your mother’s brains.”

He jumped when a woman from props knocked on the door and came in to put him into a bloody shirt.

Pat Roark lies sprawled face up in the alley with the gun still clasped in his lifeless hand, his hat beside his head, his dead eyes staring at the sky.

The scene is shot from above. The camera looks down as a dozen extras—kids carrying schoolbooks, women in curlers and housedresses, guys in work clothes, idlers, and honest citizens—suddenly converge from all directions to see the dead man who has fallen from the sky.

The computer imaging of Roark falling backward off the fire escape and slamming into the asphalt had been completed before he left Los Angeles.

“What was he doing up there?” a woman with a Spanish accent wanted to know.

“He’s a cop,” said a wise-ass kid. “See that police special.”

As the sirens wail and echo off the alley walls, Pete McDevitt runs down the fire escape, yelling, “Pat! Jesus, no!” His voice breaks into a sob.

Quinlan couldn’t tell if he used the dippy smile. The shot of Pat Roark dead in the alley would be used repeatedly in the film as a motive for Zach Terry’s Peter McDevitt in his quest for the killer and the ones behind the killer, who, it turned out, reached all the way to the commissioner’s office.

The old stage actor Denny Wallace, whose father was a Polish Jew and whose mother was a French ballet dancer, played Lieutenant O’Grady.

Standing over the corpse, he delivers Roark’s epitaph. “He was worth twenty of you. I’ll have your badge and your gun for this, boyo.”

Quinlan heard applause on the set, which meant this was probably the last take. There was comfort in lying dead in an alleyway, killed in the line of duty in a time when that meant something. This was the part of his life that actually made sense.

The applause faded and died. Smell was the first thing he noticed, tobacco smoke and garbage and exhaust. Sirens sounded on the avenue. Quinlan focused his eyes on a kid with bat-wing ears, a crew cut, and jeans so stiff they could stand up by themselves. A bunch of scruffy street rats stared down at him.

“It’s a cop!”

“How’d he get here?” The city accents were thick enough to cut.

He closed his hand on his prop gun, and they all stepped back. “You been shot, mister. You need a doctor?” Quinlan remembered the prop blood on his shirt front. No one, he noticed, talked about calling the cops.

“He’s a fuckin’ actor. Look at the makeup,” said an old lady with way too much lipstick, peering into the alley.

All Sean wondered as he got up was how long it would take Graham and the rest to notice he was gone. He dusted himself off, buttoned his jacket to hide the dye on his shirt front, and wiped his face clean with a pocket handkerchief.

It was a five-story city, and the sun shone directly from across the Hudson. Everyone got out of his way as he walked down the alley. He stuffed the gun in his pocket.

“Anyone follows me…” He gestured to it. He doubted that anyone in Hell’s Kitchen was going to call the police. But he moved quickly, got on Tenth Avenue, and started walking.

Cars and clothes gave only a hint of the year. A corner newsstand had a big display of papers dated May 19, 1957.

His father would be about half his age and still in the army in Germany. His mother would not have moved here from Buffalo. His grandfather and grandmother lived up on Fordham Road in the Bronx. The avenue was lined with pawnshops. The gun was a prop, but he figured it would be worth a buck or two.

“Black Jack” Quinlan and he would be about the same age. If he was here. He had to be here. Once he explained things, once he showed this face, Sean Quinlan couldn’t imagine them denying this fugitive a welcome.