The man who had registered at the Hotel Clinton as G. T. Strong, the man who had left his Tuborg untouched on the bar at the Kettle of Fish, the man who had lost his entire family in or after the 9/11 attack, stood in the shadowed doorway of an apartment house on East Twenty-eighth Street and watched the building directly across the street.
He was dressed differently, in clothes he’d retrieved from his storage locker. He was wearing a dark suit and a white shirt and a necktie, and he’d replaced his sneakers with lace-up black oxfords. He’d shaved that morning, as he did two or three times a week.
During the afternoon he’d found a leather briefcase in good shape at a thrift shop. A hardware store supplied a hammer, an ice pick, a large screwdriver, and a cold chisel.
It had taken him a while to get to this point, and there’d been some changes in the external circumstances of his life. He lived in a different hotel, and was registered under another name. He’d finished that volume of George Templeton Strong’s diary and had exchanged it for another book, Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York. He liked Strong, but the man had been deeply interested in music, he’d taught it at Columbia, and the diary entries were full of music. He’d had enough music for the time being, and he always enjoyed Asbury, had read the book many times over the years. Picking it up was like taking up an old friendship.
Now he was three-fourths of the way through it.
For a week or more he’d been uncertain what to do, and so he’d followed his routine, walking, reading, taking his meals, waiting for the next action to reveal itself to him. Until early one morning, walking on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea, he’d seen a familiar face. It was the young man who’d discovered the body on Charles Street. Pancake, his name was. No, that was wrong, but he would wait and it would come to him.
He spent the whole day following the young man, and of course the name came to him as he had known it would. He’d seen it in the newspapers. Pankow, that was the name. He followed him to his home and returned the next morning to follow him on his rounds again.
Pattern, that was what he was looking for. Not the pattern of Gerald Pankow’s days, that was evident enough, but the pattern that he himself was creating, had been creating since his wife and son and daughter and son-in-law had sacrificed themselves for the city.
Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart...
The line came to him and he knew he’d read it somewhere once but didn’t know where or when. Did he have a heart of stone? He put the tips of his fingers to his chest, as if to palpate the heart within, to determine by touch if it had calcified.
The three bars Pankow swept out each morning were possibilities, but, once he’d managed to determine the nature of the premises on Twenty-eighth Street, it was clear to him where he ought to direct his efforts. He stopped following Pankow and began spending his waking hours on Twenty-eighth Street.
The building was five stories tall, with a Korean nail shop on the parlor floor and a locksmith a floor below, several steps down from street level. The top three floors were residential, but the third floor was the one Pankow cleaned every morning. He’d known that from the first; the lights went on moments after the young man entered the building, and went off shortly before he left.
Watching the traffic in and out of the building, watching lights go on and off, he learned the nature of the business conducted on the third floor and the schedule on which they operated. After Pankow left, there was no activity for a couple of hours. Then, somewhere between ten-thirty and eleven, a middle-aged woman appeared and let herself in with a key. Over the next hour, five or six considerably younger women came and buzzed to be admitted.
Starting at noon, men came to the door, buzzed, went inside, and reappeared anywhere between twenty minutes and an hour later. Around ten in the evening, two or three of the girls would leave. At midnight or a few minutes after the hour, the lights would go out, and shortly thereafter the remaining girls and the older woman would leave the building and go their separate ways.
Three days ago he’d got the suit out of storage, shaved, put it on. He’d found out the telephone number — it wasn’t difficult when you knew the address and knew how to use a computer at an Internet café — and he called it. He made an appointment, saying a friend had recommended the establishment. He was going to give his friend’s name as George Strong, and his own as Herbert Asbury, but the woman who answered hadn’t asked for names.
Instead she’d supplied one. When he rang the bell, he was to say his name was Mr. Flood.
He’d said he would come at ten that evening, and from nine o’clock he waited across the street, and at ten he rang downstairs, gave his name as Mr. Flood, and was admitted. There were two girls in abbreviated costumes in what he guessed you’d call the parlor, and the older woman who brought him there told him they were both available. To pick one was to reject the other, which bothered him until he realized how unlikely it was that it bothered them. One girl reminded him faintly of his wife as a young girl, and so he chose the other.
He hadn’t had sex since well before the bombing. He and his wife had still had relations, but it had become an infrequent event. Sometime in July or August, he supposed, and it was July now, so it might have been a year since he’d had sex, or wanted to.
He still didn’t want to, but when he and the girl were both undressed he found he was able to perform. He became detached during the act, and observed, disembodied, as his body did what it was supposed to do. She had put the condom on for him and she removed it and disposed of it, returning with a washcloth to sponge him clean.
He paid the madam a hundred dollars, tipped the girl twenty. He went straight to his hotel, and when the hall shower was empty he stood under the spray for a long time, washing her scent from his body.
Now, three days later, he’d shaved again and put on the suit again, and he’d called and made an appointment for eleven-thirty. “Don’t be late,” the madam told him. “On account of we close up at midnight.”
At ten minutes past ten the door opened, and three of the girls came out and walked off together toward Third Avenue. He felt a stab of sorrow when he noted that the girl he’d been with on his previous visit was not among them. Of course she might not have come in at all that day, that was entirely possible, but he had a feeling he’d find her in the parlor when he went upstairs.
And he was right. “I know you had a good time with Clara the other night,” the madam said, “so you could see her again, or Debra here’s a very sweet girl herself, if you’re a man who likes a change.”
He was a man who liked things to remain the same. That, at least, was the sort of man he had always been. But things didn’t remain the same, they changed irrespective of the sort of man you were. And nowadays he didn’t know what he liked, or what sort of man he was.
He chose Clara. If he’d been told her name the first time he’d forgotten it as soon as he heard it, but he knew it now, and wished he didn’t.
“You musta worked late,” she said, when they were in the bedroom together. She nodded at the briefcase. “Came straight from the office, didn’t you?”
He nodded.
“What you need now,” she said, “is you need to relax.”
He undressed, and she slipped out of her wrapper. Her body was familiar to him, and that made him wish he’d chosen the other girl, whose name he’d already forgotten.
He wished he could forget Clara’s.
While she was hanging up his suit jacket, he opened the briefcase and drew out the heavy claw hammer, chromed steel with a black rubber grip. The price sticker was still on it. Her back was to him when he brought the hammer up and swung it as hard as he possibly could at the back of her head. It made an awful sound, but that was the only sound; she fell without crying out, and he caught her as she fell and eased her down.
Was she dead? Had the single blow been sufficient?
It was hard to tell. She lay face up, and she might have been sleeping but for the blood that welled from the back of her head. He took hold of her wrist but couldn’t tell whether it was her pulse that he felt or the throbbing of his own heart. He had to be sure, and he didn’t want to hit her again, wasn’t sure that he could, so he got the cold chisel and stuck it into the left side of her chest.
He felt an awful aching in his own chest, as if he himself had been stabbed. He looked down at her and felt tears coursing down his cheeks and realized that he was weeping. He got a tissue from the box at the bedside, wiped the tears away.
Sacrifice — hers now, along with so many others — had not made a stone of his heart, not yet, not entirely. He could still feel. He could still weep.
After the deaths, the four that were his, the three thousand that were his city’s, all he could seem to do was read, and all he could read was the city’s history. He took down his copy of the New York City encyclopedia, the huge volume that had been a surprise bestseller for Yale University Press, and sat down with it, reading it through like a novel. He’d browsed extensively in the book since it had come into his possession, but now he started at the first page and read through to the last.
Not everything registered. There were times when he would sit up, realizing he’d read his way through several articles, scanning the columns, turning the pages, and he had no idea what he’d just read. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t studying for a test. He went on reading, and turning pages.
From time to time he would pause and look off into the middle distance, and his mind would go all over the place.
When it was time to sleep, he slept. When he thought of it, he ate. When he was awake, he sat in his chair and read.
He had been reading about the Draft Riots in New York during the Civil War, when the city was essentially lawless for days, and when mobs lynched black men and beat policemen to death. The Draft Riots were a puzzle, an anomaly, and all the arguments trotted out to explain them — the animosity, born of competition for work, of Irish immigrants for freed African slaves, the resentment of white workingmen at being drafted to fight a war for black freedom, and others, so many others — all were valid, and all seemed beside the point.
But he’d looked at them in the context of the Civil War, or in the context of the city’s ethnic and political realities, and he could see that he’d been completely wrong. The Draft Riots happened because they had to happen.
They were a sacrifice.
They were the city, New York, sacrificing itself for its own greater glory. They were a ritual bloodletting by means of which the city’s soul was redeemed and renewed, rising from its own psychic ashes to be reborn greater than it had been before.
And the Draft Riots were not an isolated example. No, not at all. The city had been shocked over the centuries by no end of tragedies, great pointless disasters that were no longer pointless when viewed through the lens of his new perspective.
The General Slocum tragedy, for example, when a ship loaded to capacity with German immigrants and their children, bound for a holiday excursion, caught fire and burned and sank in the East River. Hundreds of men and women and children perished, so many that the Lower East Side neighborhood known as Little Germany ceased overnight to exist. So many residents had been lost that the survivors couldn’t bear to stay where they were. They moved en masse, most to the Yorkville section of the Upper East Side.
Or the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, when 150 seamstresses, most of them young Jewish women, died when the sweatshop they worked in went up in flames. They couldn’t get out, the fire doors were locked, so they either jumped to their death or died in the fire.
Sacrificed, all of them. And each time the city, reeling in shock, bleeding from its wounds, had rebounded to become greater than ever. Each time the souls of the sacrificed had become part of the greater soul of the city, enriching it, enlarging it.
When this great insight came, this revelation, he stopped his front-to-back reading of the encyclopedia and began skipping around, looking for further examples to support his thesis. They were there in abundance, tragedies great and small, from the city’s earliest days to the eleventh of September.
The history of the city was the history of violent death.
The gang wars, from the pitched battles between the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits to the endless Mafia palace coups and clan wars. Albert Anastasia, shot dead in the barber chair at the Park Sheraton hotel. Joey Gallo, gunned down in Umberto’s Clam House. Throughout the five boroughs, blood seeped into the pavement. The rain couldn’t wash it away. It only made it invisible.
And fires, so many fires. You thought of the city as nonflammable, a city of glass and steel and asphalt and concrete, but hadn’t the world watched as buildings of glass and steel burned like torches until they melted and collapsed of their own weight? Oh, yes, forests could burn, and wooden houses could burn, but so could cities of concrete and steel.
Energized by what had emerged from his reading, he found it impossible to read. He would pick up a book only to put it down and pace the floor, consumed by the thoughts that came at him in battalions. He began to leave the apartment, walking for hours through the city’s streets. His feet took him to Little Germany, where no Germans had lived for years, and past the one-time site of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, and, more than once, to the barriers that still ringed Ground Zero.
And, walking, he had a further insight.
He was thinking of the fire in the unlicensed social club that had taken the lives of seventy or eighty Hondurans a few years earlier. It had been a great tragedy, certainly, but it had not come upon the poor people as an act of God. An embittered Honduran immigrant, furious over some real or fancied insult, had returned to the club with a container of gasoline and set the place on fire. He’d been caught and tried and convicted, and was serving a life sentence somewhere.
The people he’d killed had been sacrificed to the city of New York, he could see that clearly enough. They’d come to New York and died here so that others of their countrymen could follow them here and live and thrive and prosper. And the man who hurled the gasoline, the man who tossed the match, had surely been the architect of their sacrifice, and hadn’t he sacrificed himself in the bargain? He was alive (unless he’d been killed in prison, for he did seem the type to get killed in prison) but what kind of a life did he have?
Perhaps...
Well, take the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. A horrible fire, certainly, bad enough to consume the entire building, but the great loss of life occurred because the doors were locked from the outside. Otherwise there would have been fatalities, certainly, but some, even most of the young women would have been able to get out alive.
Was it pure happenstance that the doors were locked? Was it, as some claimed, that the bosses locked the doors to keep the women at their sewing machines?
Or...
Or could the same hand have locked the doors and set the fire?
That’s what had happened. He was sure of it. Someone had made the great tragedy happen, someone intent upon causing as much loss of life as possible. Maybe it was sheer villainy, as inexplicable as all evil is inexplicable, or maybe, maybe...
Maybe it was someone with a vision. Maybe it was someone willing to sacrifice those lives, and to give up his own morality in the process, his morality and his hope of eternal reward (for what fate but Hell could await a man who’d do such a thing?), to give up everything, to sacrifice everything, for the sake of the greater good?
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
The Latin phrase came to him from somewhere in the past. Sweet and decorous it is to die for one’s country. Or for one’s city, and how would you say that in Latin? He’d forgotten everything he ever knew of the language, except for a few odd words and phrases. Still, the things you’d forgotten tended to come back to you.
Dulce et decorum est...
And the General Slocum disaster? There were all sorts of explanations advanced for the tragedy, several of them plausible enough, but were any as apt as that someone had sabotaged the ship, someone had set the fire, someone had deliberately made the whole thing happen?
And the Draft Riots. Spontaneous combustion, erupting naturally and inevitably out of social and political and economic realities? Or did circumstances merely provide a framework of logs and sticks and kindling, waiting for a knowing hand to strike the spark and fan the blaze? The history books spoke of neighborhood agitators who’d urged on the mob, only to lose control of it. But what if they’d never intended to control it? What if their sole purpose had been to unleash the whirlwind?
He saw them now, a long chain of men (and women, too, for who was to say it was an exclusively male calling?), not selling their souls but giving them up, sentencing them to perdition, committing unpardonable sins for the good of generations yet unborn.
Did many of them see the greater purpose? Probably not, but surely some did. Surely he was not the first to be consciously aware of what he had to do, no matter how great the cost to himself.
Walking home, he picked up a discarded newspaper. A man in a stolen car had gone berserk at the wheel, driving down Seventh Avenue at top speed, running red lights, caroming off other cars, and taking deliberate aim at pedestrians, trying to run down as many of them as he possibly could. He eluded police pursuit, then repeated the stunt on Eighth Avenue, hitting a few more pedestrians before he was finally taken into custody. He was perfectly calm, and told police he was angry, though he seemed unable to say what it was he’d been angry about.
He remembered how he’d taken the sleeping pills and lain down beside his wife. He had been ready to join her sacrifice, and his disappointment at surviving had been softened slightly by the thought that there must be something for him to do.
And now he knew what it was.
Dulce et decorum est... pro urbe mori.
See? It had come back to him.
In late March, a little more than six months after he’d scattered his wife’s ashes to the winds of Lower Manhattan, he took the number 3 subway to the Bronx. He got off at the East 160th Street stop and walked north and west to an abandoned building on Cauldwell Avenue. He’d discovered it a week ago, and had visited it daily for the past several days. The windows were boarded up, but the piece of sheet metal nailed over the doorway had been pried up at the lower left corner to give access to the squatters — drug addicts, homeless people — who found the place an acceptable alternative to sleeping in the street.
He’d purchased half a dozen quart cans of charcoal lighter fluid, buying them one at a time in different shops in Manhattan to avoid arousing suspicion, and he carried them with him in a canvas tote bag that had belonged to his wife. It had been a gift from one of the children, a cloth sack with GOOCHEE stenciled on the sides, and the giver — it was his son, he remembered now, and he couldn’t have been more than twelve at the time — had told her that he knew what she really wanted was a Gucci bag.
How they’d laughed, and how she’d loved that bag. She’d used it for years.
He fully expected someone, a cop or a local resident, to challenge him, to demand to know what he was doing where he so clearly did not belong. He was oddly calm, quite unconcerned about what might happen to him, but in fact nothing happened, and no one seemed to notice him.
Maybe he was dead, he thought. Maybe he was a ghost, and that was why people paid no attention to him. They couldn’t see him.
But no, he’d bought the charcoal lighter fluid. He’d handed over his money, been given his purchases and his change.
He raised the sheet metal, crawled under it, and went into every ground-floor room he came to, squirting the lighter fluid where he thought it would be most effective. He emptied all six cans, lit a match, set a fire, and walked away from the building.
Steps away from it, he remembered the GOOCHEE bag. He’d put it down and neglected to pick it up. Well, the fire would consume it, and it would be untraceable anyway. He kept walking.
In movies there would be a great whoosh, an explosion, flames shooting into the night sky, shock waves knocking him to the ground as he ran off down the street. But there was nothing of the sort. He walked a block, looked back, and saw a building that looked no different from the way it had looked when he approached it. His attempt at sacrifice-by-arson would seem to have been a failure.
He turned at the corner, walked a block, turned again. He kept walking until he came to a small storefront restaurant with signs in Spanish. There were no tables, just a worn Formica counter with eight backless stools.
He took a stool. The menu hung on the wall, chalk on slate, with several of the dishes rubbed out. Even if he read Spanish, it would have been hard to make out. The woman behind the counter, assuming he didn’t speak Spanish, addressed him in strongly accented English, asking him what he wanted. He pointed to the plate of the man two stools away on his right.
“Arroz con pollo,” the woman said. “Tha’s cheecken an’ rice. Tha’s what you wan’?”
He nodded. The food, when she brought it, was a little spicy for his taste, but it wasn’t bad. He wasn’t hungry, he was rarely hungry, but realized he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. And thirsty. Water was aqua in Latin, and was it agua in Spanish? Or if he just made the gesture, raising an invisible glass to his lips...
While he was considering the matter, she brought him a glass of water.
He had eaten half his meal when he heard sirens. And this wasn’t a single ambulance, this was more than one siren. He tucked ten dollars under his plate and didn’t wait for change. He’d lost his bearings, wasn’t sure which way he’d come from, but all he had to do was walk toward the sirens.
The building was burning after all. He didn’t see flames shooting, but there was a lot of smoke, and a lot of activity on the part of the firefighters. A crowd had gathered to watch, and he joined them, but felt dangerously conspicuous. He managed to find his way to the subway and went home.
It made the papers, because there were two fatalities — a young man who’d evidently been sleeping, or comatose from drugs, and a firefighter, thirty-two years old, the father of three, a resident of Sunnyside, Queens. Both had died of smoke inhalation.
He mourned them, and honored their sacrifice.
A day after the Bronx fire, he set about reorganizing his life. He liquidated his stocks and mutual funds and put everything into a money-market account at his bank. The apartment was his most substantial asset, but it seemed an impossible chore to list it for sale and wait for the co-op board to approve a prospective purchaser. And how much money did he need, anyway? A few dollars for rent, a few dollars for food.
In the end, he’d walked away from the apartment. Rented a storage locker, ferried some possessions there a carton at a time, then packed a small suitcase and left. Sooner or later, he supposed, his failure to pay maintenance charges would lead someone to take some sort of legal action, and he’d eventually lose the apartment, but he’d never even know when it happened, and wouldn’t care if he did.
Since then, he had set a fire in a two-family house in Middle Village, Queens (minimal damage, no loss of life) and sacrificed three people in their homes, most recently Marilyn Fairchild, of Charles Street. Sometimes his actions seemed pointless to him. How could individual sacrifices revitalize the wounded city? As well, he thought, to try easing the water shortage by spilling a bucket of water into the reservoir.
Then he’d spotted Gerald Pankow, and recognized him, and saw a way to establish a pattern.
And now he rose from the body of the girl. He opened the door a few inches and stuck his head out. He said, “Could one of you come here for a moment? Something seems to be wrong with” — what was her name? — “with Clara.”
The older woman came, the madam, and she saw Clara lying on her back, then registered the chisel planted in her chest, and looked up at him, naked, advancing on her, and opened her mouth to scream, to cry out, but before she could make a sound he hit her with the hammer. It was a glancing blow and it drove her to her knees. She held up hands curled into claws, she blinked at the blood flowing down her forehead and into her eyes, and he swung the hammer full force and smashed her skull.
Without checking if she was dead he bolted from the room. Debra was racing for the phone. She tripped over a footstool, righted herself, and had the phone in her hand when he reached her. He wielded the hammer and hit her on the shoulder and she dropped the phone and cried out, and he swung backhand and hit her just above the bridge of the nose. She went sprawling and he rained blows upon her, hammering at her face until her features were unrecognizable.
His own heart was pounding. He steadied himself, got to his feet, and had trouble keeping his balance because the room was spinning. His knees buckled, and the black curtain came down.
Later, when he got around to noting the time, he calculated that he had been out for the better part of a half hour. He had fallen beside Debra, and he had blood all over himself, and he must have left fingerprints all over the place, and she’d cried out between the first and second blows, and someone a floor above could have heard her, could have heard the noise the hammer made, could have heard him when he fell.
He might have awakened to bright lights and sirens. Instead he came to in the midst of silence and death.
He found the bathroom. He showered, used the liquid soap, used the Herbal Essence shampoo. He retrieved the hammer from where it lay beside Debra’s body, the chisel from Clara’s chest, and washed them both in the sink before returning them to the briefcase. He dressed, tied his tie until he got the knot right.
He put his hand into the pocket of his suit jacket and drew out the little turquoise rabbit. He’d been carrying it ever since he took it from Marilyn Fairchild’s apartment, and now he walked over to Clara’s body, got down onto one knee, and placed the rabbit so that it covered the hole the chisel had left in her chest.
What would they make of that?
He went around the apartment, using a hand towel to wipe surfaces he remembered touching and others he might have touched. But he’d touched the rabbit, hadn’t he? He picked it up and wiped it off and decided he wasn’t ready to leave it behind after all. He put it in his pocket and left Clara’s wound uncovered.
The poor girl...
He had the towel over his hand when he turned the doorknob to let himself out, dropped it behind him before he drew the door shut.
He walked crosstown to his hotel. On the way he stopped several times to discard the tools from his briefcase, dropping them into three well-separated storm drains. He hadn’t used the big screwdriver, had never even removed it from the briefcase, but he got rid of it just the same, and left the briefcase propped against a trash can. Perhaps someone would get some use out of it.