Faces of the Gone

by Brad Parks

  “Hey, Captain,” I said.

  “This can’t possibly be the most interesting thing going on in Newark today,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be off trying to figure out who the city council is stealing from?”

  “I was just driving into the office, saw the smoke, and wanted to see Newark’s bravest in action,” I said, trying to keep my tone nonchalant. “So what’s this one? Crack addicts get sloppy with their lighters again?”

  “Nope, someone wanted themselves a bonfire,” he said. “You’ll have to get it officially from the chief’s office, but off the record, this sucker was set intentionally.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “Whoever did it was quick and sloppy about it. You could still smell the gasoline when we arrived.”

  “No kidding. When did you guys get here?”

  “Call came in at seven thirty-six, I think. Chief will have that, too. We were here in four minutes—I don’t want to hear any more of that crap about slow response times. We were able to contain it pretty quickly. Only the upper two floors on that one end got it. But they got it good. There was definitely an accelerant involved.”

  I looked down at my feet, sorting things out. The call in Nutley had come in at 7:29, right after the man in the white van tossed his little present through my living room window. At that time of the morning, it was at least fifteen minutes from my place in Nutley to 18th Street, even if you drove like it was Indy qualifying. There was just no way Van Man could have gotten here, doused the place with gasoline, and gotten a good fire roaring so quickly. Obviously, Van Man had friends. This was a coordinated attack.

  “Everyone get out okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, looks that way. Except for this one woman on the fourth floor. She wasn’t breathing too well when she got carted out of here.”

  “Her name Brenda Bass, by any chance?”

  “You know her?”

  “I interviewed her once,” I said, skipping the details.

  “Yeah, that’s her,” the captain said. “Brave lady. We’re pretty sure the fire got started in the apartment below hers—the super said it was empty. She must have smelled it pretty quickly, because she threw her four kids in the bathroom, stuffed some wet towels under the door, and got the shower going. Then she started looking for the fire to put it out. We found her in the living room with an empty fire extinguisher. The smoke got her.”

  “Why didn’t she just take her kids and run out of the building like all the others?”

  The captain looked over his shoulder at the TV crews then back at the building, then at me.

  “I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he said. “And you didn’t get it from me. But someone barricaded her in that apartment.”

  “Barricaded?”

  “You didn’t get this from me, right?” he said.

  “Right. Of course. We didn’t talk.”

  “Good,” he said, speaking quickly in a low voice. “Some of my guys told me there was a board over her door.”

  “Oh, dear God.”

  “Yeah. You know how a landlord who is kicking out tenants will put plywood over the doors of the empty apartments to stop vagrants from breaking in?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s what someone did to this place, except the apartment wasn’t empty. That lady and her kids were trapped in there. Someone wanted to burn them alive.”

  The captain’s radio squawked something unintelligible, but it was enough to get him moving.

  “Interview over,” he said, as he walked away. “Call the chief’s office.”

  As I watched water drip down from Miss B’s building, I wondered if this was how bugs who lived near the highway felt. They knew there was danger all around but they told themselves if they just kept flying, everything would be fine. And then all of a sudden, splat, there comes the one fast-moving windshield they couldn’t avoid.

  I was nearly lost in that thought when I suddenly became aware of someone approaching behind me. With a surge of adrenaline, I whirled around in a crouched position, ready to be staring at a six-foot-five, white-van-driving brute.

  Instead, it was just Tommy.

  “Relax, I come in peace,” he said, holding his hands up.

  “You scared the crap out of me,” I said, putting my hand over my fast-beating heart.

  “Tina told me what happened to your place. She’s right. You are a mess.”

  “I’m just a little edgy is all.”

  “A little? I’ve never seen a white man jump so high.”

  I could still feel the pounding in my chest.

  “You shouldn’t have turned off your cell phone,” he said. “Tina is really freaked out.”

  “Excuse me if I’m not awash in pity for her.”

  “Well, she sent me out here to fetch you. She wants you to come into the office immediately. She said to tell you Szanto and Brodie said the same thing.”

  “Then I’m going to ask you to pretend you didn’t see me.”

  “Carter, I don’t know. This is pretty serious. I mean, this guy is a wacko. And Szanto and Brodie . . .” Tommy said, looking stricken. He was a twenty-two-year-old kid. He had yet to learn the finer art of ignoring the higher-ups.

  “There is no way I can figure out who is doing this while cowering in the office,” I said. “At least if I’m cowering out here, I can keep my mind off it a little.”

  Tommy said nothing, turning his attention toward the sodden, blackened building.

  “What a mess,” he said. “Everyone get out okay?”

  I related what my fire captain had told me about the plywood on Brenda Bass’s door.

  “Oh, my God, that’s terrible,” Tommy said. “This is real, isn’t it? This guy is really going after you, her, everyone.”

  “Yeah, and don’t forget your name was at the bottom of that story as a contributor,” I said. “You better watch yourself, too.”

  He nodded silently, looking down at a broken spot in the sidewalk, nervously shifting his weight from side to side.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” I said. “There’s no need for you to panic. There are a lot of guys named Tommy Hernandez in the world. There’s no way these psychos are going to be able to find you.”

  “I guess they would have done it already,” Tommy said. “I don’t know whether to find that comforting or terrifying.”

  We hadn’t really been looking at each other, but suddenly he was staring me straight in the eye.

  “Carter, please come into the office,” he pleaded. “Tina is right. You shouldn’t be running around the city right now.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, trying to convince myself more than him. “If it makes you feel better, I’ll call Tina myself. That way, you’ll be off the hook.”

  “It’s not about being on or off the hook. It’s about you being dead or not.”

  “Tommy, I just feel like my best chance to stay alive is to keep moving and get to the bottom of all this. And I need to have you on my side. Please help me.”

  Tommy held my glance for another ten or fifteen seconds, which feels like an awful long time when you’re looking straight at another human being.

  “Okay,” he said, finally.

  “Thank you. I promise I’ll be careful.”

  “You better be,” he said. He looked down at his shoes, then added: “I’m not supposed to tell you this part, but there’s been another explosion this morning.”

  “Let me guess: Booker T.”

  Tommy nodded.

  “Initial reports are that Building Five is a big pile of rubble,” he said.

  “When did it happen?”

  “It’s tough to say because we think it wasn’t called in right away—there’s no one up there with a phone. Maybe an hour after your house blew its top.”

  I shook my head, thinking about Queen Mary and Red, hoping they weren’t inside. And who knows how many other vagrants might be sleeping there? How high would the body count get?

  “I�
��m scared,” I said.

  “Me, too,” he replied.

  We stared at the building for a while, a couple of guys feeling the weight of the bull’s-eyes on their backs. I put my arm around Tommy. It felt nice to have a little human contact.

  Actually, I was starting to feel a lot better in general, like I was coming out of the shock that had gripped me since my phone call from the Nutley police. If anything, the shock was being replaced by euphoria. I was alive. And it felt damn good.

  I turned and gave Tommy a hug, patting him on the back.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “No problem.”

  “Well,” I said, breaking the embrace. “If we wait here much longer, Tina is going to come out here with handcuffs for both of us. I’m heading to the Stop-In Go-Go. You mind checking out the scene at Booker T?”

  “Okay,” Tommy said.

  “Do me a favor and ask around for Red Coles and Queen Mary,” I said. “And, for God’s sake, watch out for tall men in white vans.”

  My trip to the Stop-In Go-Go slowed to a trudge shortly after I turned onto Springfield Avenue, which was doing its best impersonation of a mall parking lot at Christmastime. I remained calm at first, using the time to call Tina. She didn’t pick up her phone—which was perfect—so I left a message telling her that although my cell phone had been turned off, I had not been.

  Once I hung up, I reminded myself I shouldn’t let something as trifling and pedestrian as a traffic jam bother me. I’d just had a near-death experience. My thoughts should be more transcendental. I should be glad for the gift that was sitting in traffic.

  Instead, all I could think was, why, in the name of all that is most holy, was any road gridlocked at ten-thirty in the morning? It’s a lot harder to be grateful for one’s continued existence when those precious extra moments are being spent stuck behind a Nissan Pulsar with a noisy muffler and an I STOP FOR SALSA bumper sticker.

  I finally just parked and hoofed it, and thirteen blocks later figured out the problem: the Stop-In Go-Go had become the command center for the entire metropolitan New York mass media market.

  Now it was clear why such scant attention had been paid to the other two catastrophes. Everyone who was anyone in the local infotainment world had set up shop outside the charred remains of this dubiously venerable Irvington institution. The TV trucks outnumbered the fire trucks, ten to two, which was troubling: just think of the flammable potential of all the petroleum-based cosmetics concentrated in such a small area. I could only hope there weren’t any burning embers still floating on the breeze.

  As I drew closer, I noticed none of the cameras were pointed at the building. Every last one of them had focused on the five women holding an impromptu press conference on the sidewalk outside—five exotic dancers in varying states of dress and undress.

  Channels 6 and 12 were tag-teaming the husky, fake-blond Russian I recognized from my earlier visit to the Stop-In Go-Go. She was dressed in a leopard-print unitard that was being pushed to the theoretical limits of spandex’s tensile strength. Her interview seemed to have ended, but her attempts to spell her name—Svetlana Kachintsova—for the two Hairspray Heads in front of her was something straight out of an English as a Second Language class. And it wasn’t the Russian who was struggling.

  Channel 7 was interviewing a woman who had saved not only herself from the fire, but also managed to wrest from the peril her knee-high spike-heeled boots. She would have been five eleven barefooted, but the boots boosted her to six three. She was being interviewed by a Smurf-sized guy who was struggling to maintain eye contact, what with his face being at the same level as her massive, silicone-aided bosom.

  Channels 11 and 32, the Spanish-speaking station, were sharing two apparently close friends who had escaped the conflagration in matching kimonos. They insisted on doing their interviews with their arms wrapped around each other—as if the male viewers needed their imaginations prodded any further—and you got the sense they were waiting for Girls Gone Wild to show up so they could start chewing on each other’s tongues.

  But the biggest star was Tynesha, who was captivating Channels 2, 4, 9, 22, and 47 with her rendition of the morning’s harrowing events. Wearing her amber contact lenses, furry slippers, and a brief robe, she was telling her story in animated fashion, waving her arms about in a manner the robe wasn’t built to contain. She kept tugging it closed, but every once in a while, when she got too excited, it resulted in a shot that would not have been appreciated by the FCC.

  In short, everyone was making great hay out of the scene at the Stop-In Go-Go, which combined the necessary local-TV elements of human tragedy, an easy-to-tell story, and great visuals—with the added bonus of involving strippers.

  From a brief bit of eavesdropping on the interviews, I was amused to find the dancers’ stories contradicted each other in nearly every detail—who first became aware of the fire, who had alerted whom to the danger, who had been the most selfless heroine putting herself in harm’s way to save others, and so on.

  But they seemed to agree on one basic fact: that sometime after eight that morning, when the five inhabitants of the upstairs apartments were still snoozing in their beds and dreaming of aging sugar daddies, all hell broke loose.

  I sidestepped the cameras and looked for someone who resembled a spokesman for the Irvington Fire Department to get the official word, but the only firemen remaining were just as mesmerized by the dancers as everyone else.

  With their attention thus occupied, I was able to slink close to the seared building and examine the damage for myself, letting my nostrils tell me the story of what happened. Gasoline. It wasn’t as fresh as if someone had just soaked the rags. It was more like a little-used Exxon station, with the faint remains of an eighty-seven-octane fill-up still lingering in the air.

  Or maybe ninety-three. Whatever it was, it had done the job. The tar-paper roof was more or less gone, reduced to a few scant islands of singed material remaining atop the blackened joists. The yellow aluminum siding had gone brown in spots, warped and buckled from the heat. The signature Stop-In Go-Go sign, with its curvaceously outlined dancer, was hanging askew, half melted so the dancer appeared to be some freakish doppelgänger of her former lovely self.

  It was sad. That sign, that bar, had been a fixture for at least half a century in Irvington. It had seen the city through every economic and social shift, offered dancers good money and patrons a chance to blow off steam (and perhaps a little more) in a relatively safe, structured environment. I suppose you could say it had been a place of comfort for workingmen and a place of work for comfort women.

  And now it was no more. I doubted it would be rebuilt. The owner, who had probably been looking for a way out, would take the insurance money and run, selling the land to someone who would open an auto parts franchise or a chain drugstore.

  I know it’s a little strange to get sentimental about go-go bars. I certainly wouldn’t recommend running for city council on a progo-go platform.

  But to me, go-go bars get a bad rap from outsiders who don’t understand the culture, people who want to see them as dens of vice and smut and nothing else. They are dens of vice and smut, but they’re also communities of people who, in their own bizarre way, really care about each other. They’re wholesome places, albeit in an unwholesome way, and each time one of them gets bumped out for an auto parts store, some important bit of a town’s character is lost.

  The circus behind me was still playing in all four rings as I started mentally assembling a timeline of the morning’s events.

  My house had been blown up at the same time Miss B’s place had been doused and lit ablaze. That seemed to be the first wave of attack, and it hit around seven-thirty. The second wave, which came during the eight o’clock hour, was the go-go bar being torched and Booker T detonating.

  So, obviously, my two pyromaniacs preferred different methodologies: one knew what to do with a stick of dynamite; the other was a gas man—slosh it around, th
row the match, run like hell. Each had effectively destroyed whatever evidence might have been left in their respective locations. I thought about distance between the sites and the time it might take to make the necessary arrangements. The timing fit nicely.

  I had just worked it out when I heard the scuffling of Tynesha’s furry slippers behind me.

  “You!” she thundered. “This is all your fault!”

  Her voice had been loud enough to attract the attention of all ten cameras—not to mention the firemen, the sidewalk loiterers, and the traffic stopped on Springfield Avenue—and I suddenly found all those eyes and lenses focused on me.

  “That’s right,” she hollered, even louder. “Put his picture on TV. It’s all his fault. Put his picture on TV under a thingie that says ‘bastard.’ ”

  Tynesha was staring at me with her arms crossed. The cameramen quickly arranged themselves to form a wall on one side of her, standing at enough distance to be able to catch a wide-angle shot of the dancer and the recipient of her ire. They clearly didn’t have a clue what Tynesha was talking about, but they recognized potentially great footage when they saw it.

  “Uh-huh!” she kept railing, her head bobbing from side to side as she spoke. “Bastard. Oh, he act like he’s a nice white boy who takes a girl to the Outback Steak house and plays all friendly. And then the next thing you know you wake up and all your stuff’s on fire.”

  Tynesha glared some more, challenging me to answer. But I wasn’t saying a word, not with all those cameras rolling. I know how that stuff gets cut. If I said, “It’s not like I’m guilty as sin,” what would go on TV is me saying, “I’m guilty as sin.” Plus, making the six o’clock news for arguing with an exotic dancer in front of a go-go bar was not a career-enhancing move.

  The Smurf from Channel 7, undaunted by his ignorance, pointed his microphone at me.