by Mark Helprin
“I’m a mechanic, and I work by the universal ratios and indestructible laws. But strange things have happened lately, and I suspect now that, although the laws remain the same and cannot be abridged, we may have little idea as yet of the variety of their applications. In other words, I’m speaking of abilities that, by all logic . . .”
“Say it plain!” Hardesty urged.
“All right. Why don’t we choose a nice dead-end alley into which we’ll draw these devils and test out this new stuff that I think I can do?”
“Why not,” Hardesty answered.
“If I can’t do it, they’ll kill us, the little snub-nosed bastards.”
“Let’s try your magic in Verplanck Mews,” Hardesty said. “It’s wide, and it’s a dead end.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with magic,” Peter Lake stated as they turned into the closed alley. “What I’m talking about is, shall we say, concentrated and unexpected redistribution.”
“Whatever it is,” Hardesty said, his voice cracking with excitement, “you’ve got your chance right now.”
The Short Tails appeared at the end of the mews like a flock of sheep arriving at the open end of a canyon: they formed a line that slowly lengthened until it blocked the entrance completely. Then they advanced in the same slow and methodical fashion. At the far end of the Mews, Hardesty and Peter Lake heard what sounded like the operations of a huge casino spinning its wheels and paying out, with metal dashing against metal, as the Short Tails cocked their weapons, opened their spring-loaded knives, and limbered up garrotes and razor-studded chains.
“Okay,” Peter Lake said, beginning what promised to be a calm exposition. “This is what I thought of when I was up behind the sky . . .”
“Just do it!” Hardesty screamed. “Don’t get professorial! They’re right here!”
“Don’t worry about them,” Peter Lake reprimanded. “Watch.”
He rolled up his right sleeve, shut his left eye, and held out his hand, sighting into the Short Tails as if his arm were a rifle. Then he closed his fist slowly around the air.
One of the Short Tails suddenly dropped his weapons and seemed to compress upon himself. He looked like a man undergoing a rare and untreatable fit. His arms were plastered against his body, and he turned purple from lack of air. The Short Tails were impressed.
Stiff-armed, Peter Lake raised his fist in front of him. The constricted little Short Tail rose into the air. “Ah!” exclaimed Hardesty, nearly fainting in delight.
“Okay,” said Peter Lake, with the same detached air he had had before, rather like a high-school science teacher, “let’s see if it works.”
“Of course it works!” Hardesty shouted.
“No,” Peter Lake said. “This.” He dropped his fist, smashing the Short Tail against the ground, and then threw it up as fast as he could, opening his hand at the apogee.
The Short Tail was launched like a rocket. Even from a distance, one could see his bulbous cheeks and fleshy nose as the G-force padded them down into Buddhaesque folds. Off he went in a white streak, whining like a bullet into the thickening smoke above the city.
“It does work,” Peter Lake affirmed. “Now I want to try a lariat trick that I figured out.”
“Please do,” said Hardesty. “I’d be very interested to see it.”
By the same technique, Peter Lake seized a Short Tail and elevated him above the rooftops. Swinging his closed fist around his head, he made the Short Tail circle at phenomenal speed, ten feet above the gables and chimneys of the mews. The Short Tail went faster and faster, and his colleagues spun their heads like a group of dogs following an energetic bee, until he began to leave a trail of smoke, and suddenly burst into flame. A shower of cool sparks, all that was left of him, rained down upon the alley. Because the Short Tails did not have Pearly to mold their courage for them, they turned and ran.
Peter Lake grabbed one from afar, turned him upside down, and shook him until the coins and weapons fell from his pockets and jangled onto the ground. Then he turned him right side up again and let him go.
“The way I remember it,” Peter Lake offered as they walked peaceably and undisturbed through the Village, “these black-coated ones, who are called Short Tails, chased me once before, and the same sort of thing happened. I always get better and better at fighting them, but they increase in number.”
Two blocks from St. Vincent’s Hospital, as Hardesty and Peter Lake were walking through the thick miasma that had gradually taken hold of the city, a lone Short Tail came running at them from a side street, as fast as his little legs could carry him. They braced for an attack, but just before he reached them he threw himself on the snow, belly-flopping like a seal and sliding on his stomach to Peter Lake’s feet, which he then proceeded to flood with kisses.
“I beg you! I beg you!” he implored, accidentally taking in a mouthful of snow, and choking. “Master! Spare me!”
“I’m not chasing you,” Peter Lake said, pulling the Short Tail up. “I won’t harm you, if you’ll be civil.”
The Short Tail brushed the snow from his coat and hounds-tooth-check pants. His derby was a repulsive, fly-colored, liver-green. “P-P-Pittsburgh!” he shouted, still spitting out snow. “P-Pittsburgh!”
“What about it?” Peter Lake asked.
“What about what?” the Short Tail, whose nose curved like an English saddle, replied with apparent sincerity.
“Pittsburgh.”
“Oh, Pittsburgh,” he answered, rather mechanically, suddenly afraid. “I was born in Pittsburgh. They kidnapped me and killed my parents. Or, rather, they killed my parents and kidnapped me. They made me go to their school—ape school, all kinds of flying things, horrible insects, death. They made me go to their school, and, uh, learn terrible things, and, uh, I don’t want to be with them no more. I want to be on your side.”
“I don’t have a side,” Peter Lake told him.
The Short Tail looked at him blankly. “You mean there’s just you and him?”
“You might say so.”
“What about the horse?”
Peter Lake was catapulted into melancholy thought. He looked as if he were on the verge of something, indeed, as if the dawn were coming up in his eyes.
“You mean you don’t got the horse?”
“No . . . no . . . I . . . I think I. . . .”
“We’re not afraid of you,” the Short Tail said, almost in triumph, “if you don’t got that fuckin’ horse!”
With a single swift motion that reminded Hardesty of a magician retrieving something from behind his cape, the Short Tail pulled a knife from his coat and stuck it into Peter Lake’s abdomen.
Peter Lake’s silence was compounded and his breath was stopped by this blow. He reached for the knife, and pulled it out. Blood flowed in a streaming bright red arc. Staggering slightly, he stepped forward, and covered the wound with his left hand.
The Short Tail seethed with self-satisfied laughter, but was too terrified to move.
“You laugh,” said Peter Lake, with great difficulty, “in spite of what I’m going to do to you.”
“You’re a dope! You’re a dope!” the Short Tail yelled, in growing terror. “I’m not from Pittsburgh. I’m one of them from way back. You trusted me!” Peter Lake grabbed the air, and crushed the little man’s arms to his side. “My own grandmother, if I hada had one, woun’ta trusted me!” the Short Tail screamed. He grimaced as he was lifted into the air.
Clutching his wound, Peter Lake moved his arm back like a javelin thrower, and pitched the Short Tail forward as hard as he could, hurling him up Sixth Avenue in a blurr that whizzed away with a high-pitched sound, caught fire, flew above the sleighs and taxis like a blazing comet, and then disappeared in a puff of sour gray smoke.
PRAEGER DE PINTO was studying a huge leather-bound book of reckonings and accounts, trying to discover in the history of the previous century a metaphysical solution to the city’s tragic and intractable financial problems. T
he clock had struck nine. He had noticed that he could not see the stars through the window of his office in City Hall, but assumed that this was attributable to thick clouds that soon would bring snow.
Suddenly, one of his newly appointed aides burst into the room without knocking. Tears were running down his face.
“What is it?” Praeger asked. The hysterical young man tried to talk, but an atonal sob burst from his lungs, and more tears came.
“What is this!” Praeger screamed, more frightened than he was angry.
Then the fire commissioner, Eustis P. Galloway, an enormous man of great authority and dignity, appeared behind the young aide. He put an arm around the boy’s shoulders, and made an electrifying statement.
“The city is burning,” he said.
“Where?”
“Everywhere.”
“What do you mean, ‘everywhere’?” Praeger asked, looking out the window. Though the nearby buildings were intact, the sky behind them was a fiery orange color as in the apocalyptic paintings that had always hung unheeded in the basements of historical societies. Even from a great distance, it was a superb and extraordinary sight. Galloway, huge strong Galloway, the Rock of Gibraltar, had had a slight quivering in his voice.
Now Praeger the man vanished, and Praeger de Pinto the holder of office appeared. This immediate and magical separation and elevation was something appropriate to ancient chieftains and leaders of empires and clans. The office enfolded him in its powerful shroud, investing him with a hardness and a coolness of nerve that would have made it easy for him to give his own life or, for that matter, the lives of his family, because he was no longer himself. He had become the mayor, and the responsibility of office threw him into a selfless trance that heightened his powers, deepened his judgment, and banished fear from him forever.
The mayor turned to his commissioner. “What have you done so far?”
“Each company is covering its own section as best it can, with an eye to shoring up natural firebreaks. But the fire is spreading faster than if it were traveling on its own. It’s as if there are ten thousand arsonists out there. That’s because there are ten thousand arsonists out there.”
“What about reserves, and other cities?”
“We’ve just put out a general call to every city within three hundred miles. We no longer have any reserves. They’re all on the street.”
“Good,” Praeger said. By this time, his office was filling up with aides and commissioners. He organized them, and dictated instructions.
“First: get a truck, and move the radio-telephone and radio-teletype equipment to the observation floor of the Fifth Grand Tower. Get everybody out of there and set up a command post.
“Second: tell the police commissioner to join me up there, with emergency links to all his precincts.
“Then call the governor. Tell him that I’ll be speaking to him as soon as possible, but that meanwhile I’m requesting that he mobilize the entire militia. Tell him to get as many troops from whatever source he can and send them toward the city. I’ll designate marshaling areas before they arrive. If he balks, tell him that we’ve got general insurrection, and that the whole city is burning.
“Send all the commissioners up there.
“And get a supply operation going to send cots, blankets, food, chairs, and desks to the tower.”
A dozen sheets of paper were ripped off a dozen pads as his subordinates started to move.
Praeger and the fire commissioner left for the observation deck. The fire commissioner spoke into his radio as they walked hurriedly across the little park in front of City Hall, which, because it was surrounded by tall towers in an unbroken ring, had always reminded Praeger of the bottom of a deep well.
The Fifth Grand Tower was the highest building in the city. It took five minutes by express elevator to reach the top, and when they got there the last tourists were being herded into glass cabins for the windy trip down. An observatory guard handed Praeger and Eustis Galloway each a pair of high-powered binoculars, and told them that he had opened all the coin telescopes.
When Eustis Galloway and the mayor strode onto the wide glass-enclosed deck, they looked first to the north. Praeger had intended to berate his commissioner for letting things get so far out of hand, but when he saw how fast the fire was spreading he realized that he couldn’t. Arsonists were surely at work, for the dark areas were the scene of sudden sparks which quickly became fires that then combined into cyclical tornadoes and firestorms. It was as if the world had begun the self-consumption that myth had always promised with the turning of the millennia, but in which, long before, most everyone had ceased to believe.
The city was trapped within a dome of orange smoke that seemed as solid and smooth as alabaster. Not a star was to be seen: not even directly on high, where an upside-down maelstrom that was twisted into a cowlick rotated upward at great speed. Across the horizon, clouds of different densities, some glaring flame off their bellies, some broken into flak, circled clockwise, speeding up as they climbed toward the tumultuous vent where they were then braided out.
“Look,” Praeger said, as a glass tower on the Palisades suddenly erupted. In less than a minute, flames shot from it in flaring wings and stable coronas that made the seasoned fireman draw in his breath. Before the building collapsed, they saw that its steel skeleton was darker and redder than the sheets of white and gold flame which, for a moment, signified its rooms.
As tank farms exploded, spewing gasoline and oil, streams of fire ran onto the rivers and bays, cutting canyons of flame into ice several hundred feet thick. The fires that burned in these trenches sent aloft clouds of white steam and black oil smoke, and branched out laterally into hollow caverns. A section of the harbor half a mile in diameter had become a delicate crystal roof over a cave hewn from the ice underneath it. As the fire raged inside, the ice lit up and glowed like a titanic lamp. Water and steam surged through the crust, making geysers that were a thousand feet high.
After the communications net was in place, a technician told Praeger that the governor was on the line, and that he need only speak: everything would be amplified, including his own voice.
“What are you going to do with all those troops down there,” the governor boomed out from nowhere, his words echoing through the observation deck.
“To begin with,” Praeger said, “we’ve got ten thousand arsonists running around.”
“Troops are not trained for that kind of police work,” said the governor’s voice.
“What police work?” Praeger bellowed in return, looking about to see from which part of the air the voices came. “They’re not going to do police work, they’re going to shoot arsonists and looters.”
“To what end?” the governor asked.
“The whole goddamned city is burning,” Praeger asserted. “The more arsonists and looters we shoot, the less arson and looting there will be. Isn’t that self-evident?”
“But at what price?”
“Price? There’s not going to be anything left!”
“Then why bother?” the governor asked, in such a way as to confirm his long-standing hostility toward a city in which he seldom dared to set foot.
“I’ll tell you why, Governor,” Praeger returned, his words rising all over the place. “The city’s not going to burn forever. We’re going to rebuild it. By summer, you’ll see, it will have become something that you’ve never dreamed of. Do you know what else? If this fire stops at night, we’ll begin to rebuild on the next morning. If it stops in the morning, we’ll begin to rebuild in the afternoon. When that happens, I want all the arsonists to be dead, and I want anyone who even entertains the idea of lighting a match to be able to remember what happened to the people who started this fire.”
“I’ll believe what you say about rebuilding,” the governor said, “when I see it.”
“You’ll see it. We’re the quickest rebuilders in the world—we don’t talk as fast as we do for nothing. As much as the fire
takes from us, we’ll take from it. We’ll pretend it’s a tourist.”
The governor relented. The militia would soon begin to move toward the city.
“Eustis,” Praeger said, still amplified, “pull all your trucks in. I want to create safe islands where, if necessary, we’ll protect each and every building individually.”
The fire commissioner shook his head, as if to say what Praeger wanted was hopeless.
“Do it now,” Praeger said. “Choose the islands, and protect them. Fire anyone who doesn’t move fast. I’m sorry,” he added. “I suppose that wasn’t the proper word.” Then he turned to look over the city.
“As yet there are no fires in all of Manhattan,” an aide reported. “Shall we try to hold the whole borough?”
“No,” Praeger answered. “It’s too big. It would never work. Make islands. Make islands, and keep them safe.”
ON ABBY’S floor at St. Vincent’s, a row of tall windows gave out upon a northward view. “Look,” Peter Lake said, when he saw the color of the sky.
“What is that?” Hardesty asked, stepping close to the window. The entire sky was red. But unlike a sunset or a dawn, it pulsed and flickered. Outsized snowflakes that had formed around particles of ash fell leadenly and straight.
“It must be a fire,” Peter Lake said, “which explains the pall in the air. The flames are probably a thousand feet high.”
When she heard someone at the door, Virginia thought that the mortuary attendants had arrived. Anything but eager to receive them, she recoiled, and stared blankly ahead. But then she got up and slowly walked across the room. When she opened the door, she was crying.
Upon seeing Hardesty, she bowed her head. He didn’t want to believe that the sheet was drawn up over Abby.
