Small Town

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.

A F T E R T H E D E A T H S , T H E 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 trot-ted 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 pave-ment. The rain couldn’t wash it away. It only made it invisible.