Absent Friends

by S. J. Rozan

  What is it? shouts Markie, and he drops his pole, too, and scrambles, slippy-sliding on the slick rocks, toward Jack. Everyone else squints in their direction. Jimmy looks at Tom. Tom's mouth is a thin line, and he starts clambering over there. So does Jimmy, and then everyone else. Jack disappears down between the rocks. Marian shouts, Jack, be careful!

  Markie, always fastest, gets there first. Just as he does, a big wave comes, fills up the place between the rocks with a crash of white foam. The foam backs off, and they hear Jack say, Whoa!

  You okay? Markie shouts.

  Jack coughs. Yeah, but shit, this shit is slippery! Markie, man, I gotta get out, help me get out of here.

  The kids are all there now, looking down where Jack is, between the rocks. He's trying to climb out, but his hands and feet keep sliding on the slimy moss. Jack's face is white, he looks back over his shoulder like another wave's chasing him.

  Markie flops down on his belly, sticks out his skinny arm. Jack grabs his hand. A wave comes. For a few seconds Jack disappears, comes back up sputtering, his eyes wild. Markie still has Jack's hand, but Jack's a lot bigger than Markie, Markie's just small and skinny and he can't pull Jack up, no way, but he keeps trying. Markie starts to slide across the rock, Jack pulling him down instead of him pulling Jack up, but Markie won't let go. Tom drops next to Markie, grips Jack's other arm with both hands. Jimmy plants his feet against a rock and grabs Markie's legs, keeps Markie from falling in. He pulls Markie and Tom pulls Jack, and finally Tom hauls Jack up.

  Everyone ends up with skinned elbows or knees, bruises and bumps and cuts. Everyone's dripping wet. Jesus, Jack, says Tom.

  Yeah, coughs Jack. Oh, shit, man, I can't breathe.

  You can, says Jimmy, kneeling down so he can look right into Jack's eyes, Just in and out slowly, like always.

  Jack's wild eyes skitter toward Jimmy, and he does what Jimmy says, he coughs and chokes, but he breathes in and out, in and out.

  And then suddenly Jack grins. Anyway, he says, his voice raspy but tough again, almost Jack's normal voice. Anyway, look.

  He sits, pulls something from the back pocket of his soaked jeans. The kids all lean around to look.

  Jack coughs again, says, Some asshole lost his wallet.

  He thumbs it open. Credit cards, a driver's license, pictures. From the billfold part Jack pulls out a fan of limp and soggy bills. He peels them off each other and he counts them. It's eighty-two dollars, more money than any of the kids have ever seen. They pass it around, so everyone can see how it feels.

  After everyone's had a turn, Marian says, We have to give it back.

  Jack yells, Are you crazy? Asshole was dumb enough to lose it, I almost got drowned going after it, Markie too. Screw him, let's go get ice cream. He waves the bills, which have come back to him.

  But his license, Marian says. And his kids' pictures.

  He's an asshole, Jack says.

  Vicky looks at Tom. Everyone else does, too, even Jack; he scowls, but he waits for Tom to speak.

  Tom says: Jack can keep the money. He says: It's not like the guy would ever get it back if Jack didn't climb down there.

  Jack flashes Marian a grin and a big wink.

  But we can give the wallet back, says Tom.

  Hey, Jack says.

  Tom says, What? You need pictures of his kids? You gonna take his Esso card and gas up the car or something?

  Tom grins, and most of the other kids, and finally Jack does, too; it's a pretty funny idea, Jack pulling Mike the Bear's big Impala into the Esso station, sticking his head out the window, and hollering, Fill 'er up! Marian's the only one not smiling. She's looking at Jimmy, like this is a bad thing that happened and he's supposed to do something. But Jimmy's not so sure it's bad. What Tom says seems right to him, the whole thing seems fair. And for sure it's not bad enough to start a fight with Jack, who's pretending he doesn't care that all the kids saw how scared he was when he couldn't breathe. Right now, Jack's all lit up and promising everyone Eskimo Pies.

  So Jimmy doesn't say anything. Marian, after a minute, looks away. She doesn't say anything, either. Vicky, she's smiling at Tom, and at Jack. Not just a regular smile, Jimmy thinks. Jimmy thinks Vicky looks the way his dad looks when they're watching a Mets game on TV, the Mets not doing so well, and Jimmy says, How come they don't take the pitcher out, put in a pinch hitter? And his dad says, Don't worry, Jim, Casey Stengel, he knows what he's doing. And Jimmy's not sure, but he waits and watches, and the pitcher singles, and the Mets score. And then Jimmy sees the same smile on his dad that he sees on Vicky now, looking at Tom.

  Why doesn't Jack just leave? It's a big world out there, why doesn't he go see some of it?

  Because Big Mike's saying, Soon. If Jack waits, Big Mike will set him up, get him his own operation, make him part of the machine. Guys, major guys, will have a beer with him, tell him what's what, in Atlanta, in Portland, wherever this happens.

  And if he doesn't wait, if he leaves on his own, he's on his own.

  It may come to that. It may have to. And it might be okay if it did, thinks Jack, except this: his mom. If Jack walks out on Big Mike, he doesn't come back, that would be the deal and he knows it. And his mom, this is what she's always been afraid of, Jack knows that, too. Jack did some weird, wild things when he was a kid, does some now, and he'd probably have done even more, played with fire, stuck his head in a lion's mouth, except for the way his mom always looked at him. Not mad, the way Big Mike gets, red and furious. His mom's eyes, when Jack does something loony and gets in trouble (this is how it was when he came back from New Haven), they're happy and sad at the same time. Like she knows something bad is coming for Jack, and she's glad, so glad, it wasn't this time.

  Jack would have gone long ago, if his mom's eyes didn't look like that.

  So Jack stays. He goes to the office, he runs his crew and hangs out. And waits.

  Is he happy? Yeah, sure. Jack's happy.

  PHIL'S STORY

  Chapter 3

  Secrets No One Knew

  October 31, 2001

  Game over. Phil's team, 48–40. A fast-moving game today, a passing game, the ball getting four, five, six touches before anyone put up a shot: this on both teams. Under the shower in the echoing locker room, Phil thought about that, rifling through the game in his mind as through a card deck, picking out moments to look at again. He did this also with jury summations, with phone conversations: any situation could teach you something, lessons were everywhere if you looked for them. Most people didn't look. The reason behind that (because there was a reason behind everything)? Phil assumed it was this: most people didn't want to know they had choices. People loved the idea of doing what they had to do—God, his clients said that all the time. That was how they told him why they'd shot their sister's husband, why they'd snatched a woman's purse, why the whole damn crowd was cooking meth, wrapping it and dealing it from the nice frame house in Queens.

  Had to.

  No choice.

  And by the time they came to Phil, the damn thing was, by that time, for a lot of them, it was finally true.

  Toweling off, looking through the cards in his mind, Phil compared today's game to last week's, to the other games since September 11 and the games in August, in July, in days before.

  Right after the attacks, in those first days, the Y was closed like so many places, and no one played games.

  When the Y reopened early the next week, Phil and his teammates reassembled. They began again, as everyone tried to do.

  Those first games were wild, lawless. People passed too hard or too far, fired up insane shots. No one set things up, no one was making plays. Then a strange thing: in the third game after, Terry the Ball-Hog (even Terry called himself that) made three great passes, two to Brian, who could really shoot, and the third to little Jane, who was cutting in for a layup. It was the right play, a play by the book, though Jane had no layup anyone had ever seen; and Terry, who never before in memory had given up a ball
once he had his hands on it, passed for the third time that morning, and Jane took the shot. And missed it. But the next ball that came to her she sent to Brian, who swung it to Terry, and suddenly the passing game was under way, and they had never given it up.

  Oh, they still ran the fast break when the chance came, they still posted up and cleared out for the big centers (on those mornings the big centers showed up), but this new thing, this was a team game. These last few weeks, Phil had seen this: the thrill of setting a teammate up in a smooth and beautiful play trumped the thrill of sinking a basket. Almost, it trumped winning.

  No one spoke about it; it was possible, it occurred to Phil as he shaved, that he was the only one who thought about it.

  What caused the change?

  The same thing that made the players who came early to the first game after the attacks hold off starting for nearly half an hour, in case other people were coming but were late, delayed by the erratic subways or by having to show their ID to the National Guardsmen on the corner.

  The same thing that made all fourteen players show up that day, something that almost never happened. (Even Arnie had come, though his brother was still missing, later declared dead with no body found; Phil went to the service.)

  The fresh breeze of relief that had swept the gym every time a player pushed through the swinging doors that day had flashed Phil back to his childhood, to his Bronx neighborhood, to after-school detours to the newsstand for comic books and Cokes.

  In the shadow of the El women with their wheeled wire carts stopped for gossip. Old men shuffled by, dangling loaves of bread and quarts of milk in plastic bags. Eleven-year-old Phil Constantine (Konnenstein in the old country, four generations back; Phil had cousins called Conner) was on a mission for the new Spider-Man, hoping maybe for the Fantastic Four, though that was probably not out until tomorrow. He headed up this way a couple of times a month: he'd worked out the Marvel schedule, and DC, too, he knew just when to expect his books.

  He knew this, too: Sometimes when you got to the newsstand, the Irish kids from St. Margaret's would be hanging out on the corner. Sometimes if they were, all they did was look at you with stony eyes; but sometimes they wanted more. If they did, you had to fight them. Had to. Because if you didn't take it up there, in public, on the sidewalk, they'd wait for you on the ballfield at dusk, or on the corner where the construction site was: somewhere lonely, where no one would see and no adults were near to break it up.

  Phil understood early that that was the point: on the sidewalk, where adults could see and stop you, no one won and no one lost. The St. Margaret's boys could throw down the challenge, could stand proud that they'd defended their territory, could claim they'd have murdered you, pulverized you, little kike bastard, if only old man Murray hadn't come out swinging his baseball bat, hadn't threatened to call the cops. They could do this safe in the knowledge that old man Murray would come out, or Mrs. Harper, or that old crock Lefkowitz with his bloodied butcher's apron. That someone would stop them before they had to find out how far they were really willing to go.

  Phil understood that. And this: old man Murray's newsstand wasn't the only place to buy comic books. You could walk way up Broadway, twenty minutes out of the neighborhood, where the St. Margaret's boys didn't care if you went or not. You could jump on the El, ride downtown a few stops, pick up your books in the subway newsstand at 168th, and come back on the same token. You had choices. Going to Murray's, Phil was making his.

  So when he had to, Phil fought those boys.

  And as great as the relief was that enveloped him anytime he rounded the corner and saw the sidewalk empty, he never once considered not heading to old man Murray's newsstand the day the new Spider-Man came out.

  Now, knotting his tie in the locker room mirror, he thought that same enveloping relief was where the team game came from at the Y a mile from Ground Zero, the first weeks after.

  They were all relieved that this one morning ritual could continue. That among so many things so totally changed, this one hour was still what it had been. That it required no coping, no dealing-with, no brave adjustments or support groups or halting, painful phone calls.

  The passing and the play-making were expressions of gratitude.

  Gratitude for what?

  They were grateful to one another, Phil thought, for being alive.

  Two blocks east of the Y, Phil sat down at a diner counter to drink black coffee, wait for eggs and bacon, thumb through the morning papers. All five, every day: the dailies and the Wall Street Journal. Just to know.

  The war on the other side of the world was shown in grainy photos of blossoming explosions. A story on a Pentagon briefing quoted a spokesman telling reporters that the situation was too security-sensitive for him to tell reporters anything. At home, in the twisted, smoking ruins of Ground Zero, eight firefighters were pictured saluting a flag-draped stretcher that carried the remains of one of the three bodies recovered yesterday. No one knew where the anthrax was coming from, no one knew whether the air downtown was safe to breathe, and no one knew what they would find as they pulled the rubble pile apart shovel by shovel and ton by ton. No one knew.

  In the Times the Harry Randall story was inside, in the Nation Challenged section with all the other September 11–related news. Reporter Dies in Suicide Plunge from Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Wrote Series of Articles About Hero Firefighter. Phil shook his head. Son of a bitch. He hadn't liked Randall, hadn't liked him at all, but, shit, couldn't a guy even die without the glow of Jimmy McCaffery's halo throwing him into shadow?

  He scanned the Times story. He didn't know why he was reading it, and he didn't learn anything from it. The Post and the Daily News were pretty much the same, fewer words, more pictures.

  The Tribune was different. They carried the story, with Randall's photo, on the front page, just below the fold. The headline was different, too, a clear shot across someone's bow. Whose? Good question. Phil propped the paper against the ketchup bottle and read every word.

  From the New York Tribune, October 31, 2001

  REPORTER DIES IN FALL FROM

  VERRAZANO BRIDGE WROTE SERIES OF

  ARTICLES ABOUT HERO FIREFIGHTER

  Connection Suspected Between Death of Tribune's

  Harry Randall and Organized Crime

  Firefighter May Be Link

  by Hugh Jesselson

  Sources tell the New York Tribune that the October 30 death of Tribune reporter Harry Randall, previously listed as a suicide, may be related to organized crime elements based on Staten Island.

  Harold Randall, a widely respected investigative journalist and three-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, fell to his death from the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Randall's death is now being investigated for possible connection to a series of articles he was working on for the Tribune. Revolving around the life of FDNY Captain James McCaffery, who led Ladder Co. 62 and died in the September 11 collapse of the World Trade Center's north tower, this unfinished series, according to sources, might have traced a relationship between Capt. McCaffery and reputed organized crime figure Edward Spano. If this relationship exists, police sources say, “There would be some justification for reexamining the evidence in the death of Harry Randall.”

  The first two articles in Randall's series focused on the heroism and legacy of Capt. McCaffery. In the third article, which appeared in the Tribune the day before his death, Randall began to probe the source of payments made over the past two decades to Sally Keegan, widow of Capt. McCaffery's childhood friend Mark Keegan. These payments were not, as claimed by both Capt. McCaffery and prominent New York defense attorney Phillip Constantine from the State of New York. Their true source has yet to be disclosed.

  Keegan died at the age of 24 in prison, where he had been sentenced in connection with the shooting death of Jonathan “Jack” Molloy, 25. Phillip Constantine has admitted being the conduit through which the mysterious payments were made to the Keegan family, and has also admitted being ac
quainted with James McCaffery. He has refused further comment on the matter. The Tribune has learned that the State Ethics Commission has opened an investigation into Constantine's activities. Constantine has been investigated by the Ethics Commission on three previous occasions; none of these investigations resulted in disciplinary action.

  Attention is focusing on Edward Spano, a Staten Island developer and reputed organized crime figure. Spano denies any connection between himself and Constantine, the late Mark Keegan, or McCaffery. However, Keegan, McCaffery, and Spano grew up together in Pleasant Hills on Staten Island, along with two other major figures in the case: Jack Molloy, the victim, and Marian Gallagher, who heads the More Art, New York! Foundation. In addition to being McCaffery's former fiancée, Gallagher is a member of the Downtown Redevelopment Advisory Council and is also executive director of the recently formed McCaffery Memorial Fund, a nonprofit organization created in the wake of September 11.

  The Fund, which has reportedly reached a half-million dollars in pledges and contributions, has as its mission support of FDNY outreach and recruiting efforts. As reported in Randall's October 29 article, Gallagher, under pressure from FDNY leadership, has temporarily suspended accepting contributions until the questions surrounding McCaffery are answered. Gallagher, who told the Tribune she has no doubt that the allegations about McCaffery would be quickly cleared up, is reported to have broken off her engagement to him soon after Mark Keegan's death in prison. She claims to know nothing about the payments to Sally Keegan.

  Thomas Molloy, asked about a possible relationship between his brother and Edward Spano, said, “Back then, my father ran some shady businesses. Jack and I both thought that kind of life was exciting. But after Jack died, I saw things differently. I've spent my life trying to live down some of the things they did, Dad and Jack. Trying to prove a Molloy can be respectable.”

  Police sources who study organized crime on Staten Island tell the Tribune that the criminal enterprises directed by Jack Molloy “faded away” after his death, and that those of his father, Michael Molloy—known as “Big Mike” or “Mike the Bear”—were disbanded. Thomas Molloy has no criminal record. For the past twenty years he has been involved in a variety of successful Staten Island business ventures, and he is a contributor to many charitable causes. “I'm just doing what I have to do,” he said. “My family and I live in this community. Like I said, it sort of makes up for Dad and Jack.”