Absent Friends

by S. J. Rozan

  Phil pushed out of Grainger's into stillness. The streets were almost empty of people, no cars at all; down here the perimeter still held. The rumble of heavy equipment faded as he moved south, away from the site. Behind him the sky glowed with an icy gleam from the enormous lights lent by filmmakers to the rescue effort. No, not rescue now; now, just recovery.

  A faint breeze brought him the smell of burning. At Battery Park he walked past the wary eyes of two young men wearing military camouflage, holding rifles, serving their country on the tip of Manhattan. Kids with guns, Phil thought. Once that would have meant either a threat or a client. Now, God help us, they were here to protect him.

  He leaned on the railing near the ferry terminal. He knew this place so well, he was sometimes surprised his shoes hadn't made grooves in the pavement, his hands hadn't worn down the rail. He'd stood here so many times in the beginning years, staring across the water, letting the ferries go, telling himself he'd take the next one. And in the end turning, walking home.

  Telling himself it didn't matter. Telling himself it was better. Going for coffee in the morning with the blond photographer in the top-floor loft whose boyfriend had just walked out on her. Buying drinks for a girl from some southern college while she marveled at how everything was just so different here. Phil thinking, My God, they'll eat you alive, taking her home, leaving her, perplexed and a little hurt, at her apartment door.

  And waiting. Until—collapsing under the weight of a need as great as his? or just simple loneliness? he was never sure—the walls Sally built to keep him out would crumble. Then for months he'd cross the harbor nearly every evening to her world, that alien place of quiet houses on shaded streets, Sunday morning church bells, and neighbors who lived in the homes they'd grown up in. He'd stay until morning, then sneak away, sailing back through the breaking mist to the sparkling towers of his own world like a prince from some idiotic fairy tale. Trying to avoid being transformed by the sun's first rays into what, exactly? What could getting caught with Sally Keegan in the hard light of day turn him into that he hadn't already become?

  Phil stared across the harbor, watched the ferry, but tonight he couldn't go.

  Now, when the death of Jimmy McCaffery was only one of many deaths that Sally's Staten Island neighborhood was trying to stand up under—McCaffery, gone from the place for over twenty years but still a hero there, how well Phil knew—Phil was staying away. Not because he gave a damn how the people of Pleasant Hills looked at him, the silent stares as he walked down their streets. Truth was, it wasn't so different now from the way it had always been. He'd always felt eyes on him, known things were said beyond his hearing that he wouldn't want to hear. The idea that the people of Pleasant Hills thought less of him than before Harry Randall's muckraking was almost laughable.

  But Sally. She'd read the articles, too. She had never cared any more than he what her neighbors thought, and she didn't care now: but Sally wanted to know the truth. Demanded explanations he didn't have. Refused the ones he gave her.

  Sally didn't believe what Randall had written about Jimmy McCaffery. Kevin didn't, either. In Pleasant Hills, no one did.

  It might, though, be true.

  But it appeared they were all willing to believe what he'd written about Phil.

  And Phil?

  Phil had to admit (but so far, only to himself) that what Randall had written about him might also be true.

  He turned, to look not across the harbor but anywhere else. Up the Hudson, at buildings and ships and, above them, tiny pale stars just opening into a perfect cobalt sky. Harry Randall. That bastard Harry Randall had killed himself. And why the hell, Phil thought, gripping the rail as though to choke the truth out of it, why the hell, if the old bastard was going to do this, couldn't he have done it weeks ago and spared everyone all this shit?

  The river went on and the stars didn't blink. Phil's fury faded, unsustainable. The answer, of course, was that without the McCaffery story and the shitstorm that followed it, the old bastard would never have done this at all.

  Staring north through the haze of the filmmakers' lights, Phil considered the crushing weight of guilt Randall must have carried these past weeks. The truth about McCaffery might have mattered once. But not now. New Yorkers didn't need truth now. Now New Yorkers needed what Sally and Kevin had always needed: for the sainted Jimmy McCaffery to have actually been the hero they thought he was.

  Randall's article had come too late to do anything but harm. And Randall must have finally come—too late—to see that.

  And so Phil accepted the facts of Randall's death as they had been spread before him. Oh, he had questions, when was he without questions? But not among them, not yet, was the question of whether Harry Randall's death had actually been suicide.

  BOYS' OWN BOOK

  Chapter 3

  Tree, Falling

  September 11, 1978: The Boys (Jimmy)

  Now it's later, though not by much, and changes have come, but not so many. Not the important ones; or if they have begun, you cannot see them.

  Jimmy's a fireman. Aces the Academy and has a choice of houses; and though he could have had Manhattan, where the television cameras always come, or Bed-Stuy, where the trucks go screaming out two, three times a night, Jimmy asks for and gets Engine 168, around the corner. Wants to be close, so he can trot down to the house on days off, to drink coffee, listen to the old-timers. He loves the stories, Jimmy does: lunatic bravery, elaborate pranks, offhand memories of laughing just out of Death's reach.

  Four years old: Jimmy across the street, wearing the red plastic fireman's helmet he got for Christmas, so excited he can't stand still as the bell clangs and the door flies up so 168 can go tearing out. Firefighters yank their coats on, swing up on the truck as it starts to roll. One of them grins, waves to Jimmy. Jimmy's father grabs him: The kid was gonna run right up onto it, he tells Jimmy's mother later, shaking his head. He was going to the fire, weren't you, Jim? I wanted to go, Jimmy says, I wanted to go to the fire. His mother asks, You wanted to help the firemen? Jimmy nods hard. But Daddy said, Daddy said they don't let kids, kids aren't big enough. I can help when I'm bigger. When I'm bigger, I'll go to the fire and help. Jimmy's dad musses Jimmy's hair and smiles. His mother smiles, too, but then she looks at him without saying anything, just looks and looks at him.

  Now, when the smoke is whipping and the flames are roaring, someone still has to hold Jimmy back, someone senior screaming, No! some soot-streaked face in his, yelling, Don't play Superman, kid, just do your job, that way you make it out and all your brothers, too. What Jimmy wants, what he wants, is to go howling in, come out carrying everyone in his arms.

  But Brother: they're calling him that already.

  So he nods through the smoke, follows his orders, shrugs when his captain shouts to him, What the hell's so funny? Jimmy's seen the same grin, the one he can't keep back, flash across his captain's face, and some of the other guys', too, as they're piling off the truck, eager, one more time, to cheat the dragon.

  Jimmy's happy.

  LAURA'S STORY

  Chapter 2

  First In, Last Out

  October 30, 2001

  Laura was on the street, blundering through the scattering of midtown pedestrians. End-of-the-day rush hour, but no crowds; mostly office workers, residents, people who had to be here. Finally, on a corner, a cluster of defiant tourists, pointing cameras at the Empire State Building because it was still standing.

  Laura barely noticed any of these people, or the sun, or the softness of the air. She was thinking about other afternoons, and nights, mornings, too, about the dry rough feel of Harry's hands and the taste of gin when he kissed her.

  Leo had been too smart to try to send her home, to try to give Laura Stone some time off. But a dazed, hollow-eyed reporter isn't much use around a newsroom, in fact gets in the way. Too many others feeling like they have to say something, too much swampy thickness in the atmosphere. What Leo had done instead was rear
range the week's Metro sections, pulling someone's piece on the teachers' union from Friday to tomorrow, pushing Laura's SoHo merchant story to later in the week, maybe even Monday or Tuesday. Because the teachers' union piece was more timely, he'd growled as she stood in his doorway, and she should goddamn know better than to even ask.

  So when Laura left soon afterward, she could have been assumed to be working: seeking out more sources, interviewing Prince Street businessmen she'd skipped in her rush to deadline, taking the extra days to dig deeper. No one really did assume this, but Laura's dry-eyed fierceness and the rigid lock of her shoulders set up enough of a barricade that the sympathetic glances and kind comments were mercifully few. As Laura jabbed and jabbed again at the elevator button—slowest frigging elevator in New York, Harry always said, especially when thirsty reporters needed their beer—Georgie appeared and stood sadly, but Laura, her focus inward, living again an afternoon not so very long ago, did not turn his way.

  Harry Randall's explosive piece on the real James McCaffery—the third story, following by two weeks the one Leo had assigned as a soft feature on the Fallen Hero, a heartstring-tugger (and assigning it to Harry, the newsroom knew, was further proof of how far Harry himself had fallen)—had been brilliant, and Laura had told him so.

  But Harry had not been so easily bought.

  It was the trailing edge of an afternoon in late October. Harry had discreetly absented himself as she sifted through his copy. She ran through it once, then again, was on it for a third time when he brought his worry and his gin back with him into the bedroom.

  “Terrific,” Laura told him, scooting over to make room. “Jesus, Harry, this'll light the fuse. It's fabulous.”

  Neither of them was on that day, and they had not left Harry's apartment. While Harry hunched over his desk, the clicking of keys stopping only when he was rifling through papers, flipping notebooks open and shut, or shifting folders from pile to pile, Laura kept herself mostly to the bedroom. Once or twice, pulling her robe around her, she slipped into the kitchen to make coffee. Each time she left him his without a word and carried hers back to bed, where she was working her way through a stack of yesterday's newspapers.

  This was Laura's habit from journalism school days, to scan rags from all over, every week. Harry had groused when she'd first brought her habit to bed on a Sunday afternoon: “Hey, Stone, you're smearing ink all over my sheets.” Laura reminded him he was supposed to be an ink-stained wretch and went on reading. She needed to know: Someone might have thought of an angle she hadn't. Someone's prose might be making readers sit up and take notice. And some young reporter—younger even than she—someone still in the sticks, might be breaking out, a star rising. She needed to know.

  Though, if truth be told, the bedroom was a little chilly, the view from its windows dull, a neighbor's brick wall. Laura might have been happier out where Harry was, in the living room, wrapped in a blanket in Harry's reading chair, where she could glance up from an op-ed piece to see the river roll by and to watch Harry work. She would have preferred some conversation, maybe even a kiss and a cuddle, between the Sacramento Bee and the Chicago Sun-Times.

  But the muttering Harry Randall in the other room, tossing papers, dropping folders, banging the keys nonstop as the sun slid in orange squares across the wall—this was the Harry Randall of legend. The man the newsroom, with Laura the sole exception, said was gone for good, drowned in gin and futility.

  He was not gone; he was right here; and it was thrilling. Once or twice, as the afternoon lengthened, Laura slipped out of bed and stood silent in the doorway. She watched as, with a hunter's taut smile, Harry searched his notes for this quote, that date, letting out a sharp “Ha!” when he found what he'd wanted; and Laura's heart sped, and she had to wipe her eyes because they'd suddenly gone misty.

  So Laura made Harry coffee, and sipped her own, and stayed out of his way. And if she did not precisely smear ink on her own shoulder patting herself on the back, still she was certain that if an exiled afternoon was the price of getting that Harry Randall back, it was a hell of a terrific deal.

  And when he'd stopped, hit the keys for the printer, brought her the pages, and wandered off to find his gin, she shoved to the floor all the newspapers floating around her, read his copy through, and told him it was brilliant, because it was.

  “Ummm.” Standing the gin bottle on the side table, holding on to the glass, he flapped the sheet up and slipped into bed. With his empty hand he tugged the covers up again.

  Laura rolled onto her hip to look at him. “You're still not sure?”

  “That it's great? No, that brilliant young reporter, the up-and-coming Laura Stone, says it's great. It must be true.”

  Harry nestled closer to her. She giggled. “I'm not the only thing around here that's up-and-coming, am I?”

  “Behave yourself, Stone. I'm an old man.”

  “I know.” Laura traced a slow finger on the rim of Harry's ear, continued down the side of his neck. “And the one and only thing that interests you at this point—in the twilight of your life—is the pitiful and corrupted state of American journalism.”

  “You're right.”

  “You're lying.”

  He had been, and it was some time before they returned to story, coffee, and gin.

  By then the sun had gone, striping the sky across the river with the colors of fire. Harry picked up his drink, Laura the pages he'd given her. It was too dark to read, but she did not reach for the light. She offered the pages to Harry, almost as though for the first time, almost as though they weren't his. “This is great, Harry.”

  He shrugged: yes, okay, maybe.

  She said, “But you don't think it should run.”

  Harry, looking at the pages in Laura's hand but not touching them, said, “What's the point?”

  “That's not really what you mean.” He didn't answer, just sipped at his gin, so she went on. “You mean, ‘What good will it do New York's suffering citizens?' You mean, ‘Does a shell-shocked city really need more pain?' You mean, ‘Does a grieving country, trying to heal, to reach closure, to find some answers in these troubled times—'” That was all there was of that; Harry was stuffing a pillow over her face.

  “Finished?”

  The pillow nodded. Harry removed it, and Laura charged on. “You mean, ‘It's time to get back to normal'—wait, normalcy—‘and move on. To take back our lives or the terrorists win! In this city so damaged by Recent Events—'”

  “I thought you were finished,” Harry complained, settling his pillow weapon behind his head.

  “You mean”—the anchorman tone dropped from Laura's voice, she was Laura again—“for everyone's good, some truths are better off buried. Come on, Harry. You're not serious.”

  “I'm beyond serious, Stone. I'm maudlin.”

  “This is a great piece. This is tremendous. This is dynamite, Harry.”

  “There were firemen from forty-six states at his funeral.”

  “So?”

  “And the Mayor, the Fire Commissioner—”

  “Since when does Harry Randall give a damn?”

  “You have it backwards.” He inspected his gin as though for something missing. “Harry Randall used to give a damn, but he wised up.”

  Laura looked at Harry as he had at his gin. The skin around his eyes was loose and lined, old and dry, but the pale gray eyes were clear.

  “You've been working on this for two weeks,” she reminded him. “Night and day. You don't eat. You don't sleep. You don't screw.”

  “Wait—what was that just now?” Harry said, with mild surprise.

  “You're lucky I recognized it, it's been so long.” She squiggled around, settling with her cheek on his shoulder, the hand holding his copy draped across him. “If you weren't going to run it, then why write it?”

  He shrugged. “I thought,” he said, stopping as though surprised to hear his own voice, then going on, “I thought it might be important to find the truth.”
<
br />   “Of course it is.” Impatience crept into her tone, and she could have kicked herself for it.

  She said nothing else, just moved closer, held Harry tighter. His glass was empty; as he groped for the bottle, he said, “Maybe people need their illusions.” He was talking to her, she thought, about the story; and to himself, about something else, too.

  She was quiet for a moment, then said, “People need the truth.”

  He had hold of the bottle by the neck. “Why?”

  “‘Wherever you're lost, land or sea, you can navigate by the north star. It's real; the sounds in the night around you aren't.'”

  His eyebrows lifted. He poured gin, chortled, drank. “You're quoting that old charlatan Harry Randall.”

  “When Harry Randall said that at my graduation, it was—Jesus, Harry, it was inspiring.”

  “Stop. You're about to tell me I've been your hero since you were a child.” He sighed. “On the other hand, that was only the day before yesterday.”

  “This story,” Laura offered gently, “this is a real Harry Randall story. The kind you—the kind everyone expects from you.”

  “Expected.” Harry nuzzled his chin into her tumbled hair.

  “Expects. Harry? Tell me the truth: it was fun, wasn't it?”

  “Fun?” Harry pulled back, putting on a tone of shocked disapproval. “It most certainly was not fun. Exposing the perfidy of trusted members of society, following the trail of duplicity and deception as it leads ever higher and deeper—”

  “At the same time?”

  “Of course! That's the thing about duplicity, it can do two things at once. Sshh. Where was I?”

  “Following the trail.”

  “Right. Following, et cetera. This is a sacred trust, to be shouldered only with the most grave respect for its importance, to be undertaken with only the most solemn purpose and dedication. It is—”