The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  Dad couldn’t take his eyes off her. He seemed so consumed with mastering her every detail, her every nuance of movement, that he never put the binoculars down.

  Dad was a peeping Tom! The realization coursed through me with a thrilling shame. I’d never understood, even before he moved out, what exactly Dad did downtown when he wasn’t home. He was an antiques dealer with a big old restoration studio on the margins of the city (by appointment only). That much everyone agreed on. He had a woodshop there, and a metalworking shop, too. He was good with his hands. But Mom always intimated that there was more to it than that. “Oh, that’s where Nick stashes all his women,” I’d once heard her say scornfully to her friend Nadine.

  I watched Dad watch the woman. There was an animal refinement about his fixation as he tracked her, an intensity somehow both reverent and predatory, as if he felt that the act of unbroken observation, of appreciating a thing of beauty more fully than the next fellow, could somehow bring it under your control, make it yours.

  And then his gaze, his need, did seem to command her. Dad glanced at his watch, nodded, and looked up expectantly at the woman’s window with his arms crossed, binoculars dangling from his neck. Within seconds, as though heeding his unspoken directive, she disappeared from the window and her room went dark. Dad seemed to know what would happen next. Taking his time, he crouched behind a car and watched as the woman emerged a minute later, a zippered bag over her shoulder, from the building’s battered metal front door. She had wavy, dirty-blond hair. He made no move to follow her, just watched as she clicked down the block away from us in her knee-high Naugahyde boots, hugging a denim minidress tightly around her body. Turns out I’d been right about those knockers.

  5

  DAD’S BUILDING WAS A FORTRESS with its eyes closed. A run-down redbrick warehouse built in the style of a medieval castle, it had a notched roofline like a battlement and four rows of tall arched windows, each one sealed shut with a pair of massive iron shutters. You kind of got the feeling that if you hung around out front too long, a couple of workmen in flannel shirts and chain-mail overalls would peer out from the roof and pour boiling oil on you.

  The warehouse, flanked by grubby loft buildings, sat midblock on an asphalt-patched cobblestone street with no sign of human activity other than the parked hearse up the block. I’d followed Dad here from his little curbside reconnaissance mission, watching from a safe distance while he let himself in. Though I wasn’t in any hurry to get into an enclosed space with his unpredictable temper, I was certainly curious about what lay behind his building’s imposing street wall. I’d never been inside, and had glimpsed the outside just once before, the day three years earlier when Dad dragged me down to this area to watch the metal face of a decrepit antique building get peeled away, piece by piece. I’d never seen such meticulous destruction before that morning. Straddling a beam three stories above the street, two men in wool caps were shooting flame at the old building’s seams, twin clouds of steam rising lazily from their blowtorches in the February chill. When I’d looked over at Dad, he was wincing, almost as if the building’s skin were his own.

  Shaking off the memory, I locked my bike wheel to a bent iron railing out front of a butter-and-egg wholesaler and gingerly approached Dad’s warehouse. Its entrance had a speakeasy anonymity. A dented metal door, no street number, a hodgepodge of unmarked, improvised buzzers, some with wires running right up the outside of the building and into the shuttered windows. I pressed the buttons one at a time, with no results, until the only one left untried was a broken round one I hadn’t wanted to touch. It hung loose by a green wire and made me think of a girl’s nipple, a robot nipple maybe.

  A second exposed wire was sticking out of the wall behind it, and when I touched its frayed copper tip to the loose screw inside the robot nipple, a flaming torrent of pain surged into my hand and shot up my arm. I dropped to the ground and rolled away on the pavement, desperately trying to catch my breath, a crushing weight of buzzing weariness pushing down on my chest. I don’t know how long I lay there panting, but as the electrical shock faded to an intense, achy tingling in my fingers, I heard a strange squeak from above. I looked up to see one of the heavy iron shutters swinging slowly open on the third floor, and Dad’s big handsome head popping out the window.

  “You’re late,” he said, looking down at me on the ground a long moment before hauling the shutter closed again with a clang. The front door buzzed.

  It was like the opening sequence of Get Smart in there. Just inside the metal street door was a second metal door, behind which ran a long, dingy hallway, at the end of which stood an elevator door with a rectangular window grate set into it. The elevator smelled of sweat and Chinese takeout. Wheezing and clicking, it took me upstairs in slow motion, giving me plenty of time to admire the key-scratch graffiti (YO MAMA YO MAMA YO MAMA!) on its sloppily painted gray walls.

  No one was waiting for me on the third floor. But a trickle of classical music was escaping through the crack in a big metal door on my left. I followed the sound inside, then left and right through a dusty warren of hallways, until I reached its source: my father’s army surplus transistor radio. It was sitting on a chewed-up worktable in the middle of a cavernous room stuffed to the ceiling with antique bric-a-brac: lion’s-foot bathtubs, buckets of tarnished brass doorknobs, a moose-antler chandelier, upside-down four-poster beds, a candy-striped barber pole leaning against a crumbly brick wall.

  Piled together at the front of the room was a great jumble of churchy-looking wooden panels and pews and doors and things. They appeared even more disordered than all the other antiques, as if God, perturbed by the way His house had been allowed to get as tumbledown and shabby as the rest of the city, had plucked up a cathedral and shaken loose its contents through the windows of my father’s restoration studio.

  I started toward the middle of the pile, where a fancy wooden birdbath, the kind you saw at the front of churches, was lying on its side.

  “Going right for the good stuff, are we?” I heard Dad’s voice say. “I guess excellent taste runs in the family.”

  He had been watching me, and he now stepped out from behind a dark carved-wood staircase that corkscrewed ornately up to a grand but grungy pulpit. He was glittering a little, his sandy hair and one of his eyebrows speckled with gold leaf from some object he’d been gilding.

  “This is actually the very stuff I thought I’d start you on,” he said. “Beautiful pieces—came out of a sweet little church in Hell’s Kitchen—but the dopey priests have been slapping varnish and lacquer and God knows what-all on them for about a hundred years. The archdiocese hired me to clean up the whole mess and reinstall everything.”

  He motioned me over to a worktable scarred with cuts and pimpled with paint.

  “I suppose this isn’t the kind of stripper most fathers would teach sons your age about,” he told me with a half chuckle, hefting a big red-and-white can onto the table. “But I guess I’m not most fathers.”

  He poured some silvery goo from the can into a Greek coffee cup printed with a blue picture of what looked like a naked muscleman hurling a Frisbee.

  “This is methylene chloride,” Dad said. “It’ll eat through just about any oil-based material. Just don’t get it in your eyes or it’ll blind you.”

  Dad mounted the spiral staircase, which was supported by cinder blocks, and appeared a moment later in the raised pulpit. He looked even bigger than usual up there.

  “This poor pulpit has really suffered,” he said, preaching down to a congregation of one. “You can see how dark and gooey the oak has gotten, and you see these gaudy orangey-gold highlights on the raised parts of the ornament?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s radiator paint. Back when they invented it, everyone thought of it as gold in a can. They didn’t know it would bronze over time and look phony, so they just slathered it on wherever the real gold got dulled.”

  Dad leaned over the top of the pulpit, loaded up his p
aintbrush with stripper from the cup, and gooped it onto a horizontal strip of carved ornament that looked like alternating gumballs and arrowheads. The paint on it had the cheap bronzy look he was talking about.

  “What I’m going to need you to do is strip off the last century of goo and paint and get to the original ‘parcel gilding’ underneath,” he said, looking down at me. “Well? Come up already. Come up, you fearful Jesuit!”

  The twisting steps complained as I tiptoed up them. When I leaned over the pulpit next to Dad, the stripper fumes immediately stung my eyeballs, and I snapped my head back involuntarily.

  “What’re you doing?” Dad asked irritably. “We’ve got work to do here.”

  Squinting hard to protect my eyes, I leaned over the pulpit’s edge again. It was all about timing. Dad showed me how to wait until the gold paint started to bubble up beneath the stripper, then to poke at it with the bristle tips, shoving the gooey gold bisque to the side. But when I gave it some elbow grease to try to get down to the layer of real gold on one of the gumballs, Dad’s hand shot out and grabbed my wrist.

  “Easy there, kiddo,” he said. “First, do no harm.”

  I looked at him.

  “That’s the conservator’s credo.” He took the brush from me and nudged the liquefied gold paint, with exquisite tenderness, to the edge of the gumball. It was hard to believe that so gentle a touch could reside within such a heavy hand. “You want to take the object back in time, to get down to the original surface,” Dad told me. “But you need to make sure that in the process of trying to save it, you don’t fuck it up instead by scraping off the original gold.”

  Dad headed back down to the studio floor, the spiral staircase groaning under his weight. With his arms crossed and his head cocked in silent appraisal, he stood down there and watched me—an eighth-grader with exactly zero restoration experience—try to save the richly carved pulpit of some New York congregation’s precious nineteenth-century church.

  Eyeball-stinging fumes aside, it felt like a pretty cool thing to be doing, until a drop of stripper fell from the brush onto the back of my hand. The pain was searing, a flaming drill bit boring straight into my flesh. I frantically wiped it off with my shirtsleeve.

  “What?” Dad asked.

  “This stripper stuff, it kills.”

  “Please. Every restorer knows it hurts like a bastard to get stripper on your skin—but it’s worth it, okay? Most people go their whole lives without handling an object of beauty in any meaningful way. Most people don’t even think to want to.”

  The stripper on my sleeve was now scalding my wrist. I rubbed at it with the other sleeve. Dad paid no attention.

  “What I’m teaching you to do right now,” he said, “is really the only way to learn about architectural sculpture: with your hands first, and then with your eyes.”

  I couldn’t focus on what he was saying. In trying to rub the stripper off my wrist, I’d gotten some on my fingers. It felt like someone was jabbing lit matches into my cuticles.

  “That’s why I chose to have you work on this pulpit first,” Dad went on. “It’s Renaissance Revival, which means it’s like a greatest hits of classical ornament: you got your Ionic capitals, your fluted pilasters, your scrollwork—and running along the top there you’ve got that golden oldie we’ve just been struggling to clean: egg and dart.”

  “Egg and dart?”

  “Yeah, it’s one of the most common decorative moldings in Western architecture. It’s everywhere around the city.”

  “I call it gumball and arrow.”

  “That’s great!” Dad said, his voice rising with something like excitement. “The name doesn’t matter. People who study academic lingo learn facts about ornament, but the only way you can really come to know the ornament is by feeling its contours for yourself.” He fixed me with those green eyes of his. “If you do that, Griffin, the whole city will open up to you. You’ll find that you’re suddenly seeing ornamental sculpture, really wonderful stuff you never noticed before, on buildings all over town. You’ll learn to look up.”

  He handed me up a blue can of alcohol and a roll of cotton, told me to use them to clean off the surface when the stripper and melted paint got too gloppy.

  “So I’ll leave you to it,” he announced. “I’ve got an important Stanford White grille frame I’ve got to finish regilding. You just keep hitting that egg and dart, and when you’re done, move down to the dentil molding below it—the one that looks like teeth.”

  I nodded and bent to my work. When I glanced up for his approval, he was gone.

  —

  The warehouse was a busy place. Men came and went in the hallway, shouldering loads, muttering at one another with joshing aggression. Now and then the grinding shriek of a power saw echoed down the corridor from some distant room.

  It was a relief to have Dad out of my face, but I sure wished I could keep the stripper fumes out of it, too, because that methylene chloride was now stinging my throat as much as my eyes.

  I’d never seen a real stripper, the Times Square kind. But I was pretty sure that women’s bodies coursed with danger. One Christmas Eve when our family was coming back uptown from Sky Rink, our Checker cab stopped at a red light on a side street near Broadway, a few blocks up from the colossal Gordon’s Gin bottle and the giant man on the Winston billboard blowing real smoke rings out over the theater marquees and electronics shops. I was sitting on the right jump seat in front of Dad, who was reaming Mom out for getting him wobbly rental skates that made him look foolish on the ice. One side of his face kept flashing an unnatural purple, and when I looked out at the sidewalk I saw that the color was coming from a neon stripper, topless and life-size, blinking rhythmically in the window of a sex shop.

  She was made entirely out of twitching electricity, which seemed to flow into her fragile outline from the pole she was straddling. Every time her body blinked, she would ride lewdly up or down that pole. I wondered, if you shattered the thin glass tube that held her, whether she would spurt out and scald you, or just leak out into nothingness.

  As I snapped a pair of rubber gloves onto my hands, two men with red faces struggled past the studio door, pushing a sort of gurney weighed down with something long, thin, and awkward. It was wrapped in a filthy green bedspread.

  “Stop! Stop twisting her!” one guy whisper-yelled at the other. “He said not to hurt her any more!”

  “It’s not me!” the other hissed. “It’s this damn wheel!”

  When they came hurrying back a couple minutes later, the gurney was empty. I gave the men time to get back to the elevator, then slipped down the hall in the other direction, following the cart’s wheel tracks in the floor dust to where they ended at an industrial-looking sliding metal door. The door had a big padlock on it, and just behind the lock, on the dingy off-white paint, a smear of fresh blood. It was moist and thick, like finger paint.

  For a second, the greasy ick of my egg-roll lunch washed up into my mouth from my insides, mixed with sour stomach acid. I swallowed it all back down and sprinted back to the studio.

  I yanked off the rubber gloves and tossed them on a DECARLO FUNERAL HOME cooler, then crept to the elevator and saw the brass arrow above it pointing to 1. Right there on the landing, opposite the elevator, was a big clouded window with wire pentagons inside its glass. On a hunch, I yanked the window open and poked my head out into the dusk. Below me, parked a few feet down the cobblestoned alley behind Dad’s building, was a boxy vehicle I instantly recognized, even in the waning daylight, as a Good Humor truck. It had the big doors in back for loading in cases of ice cream, and on its side, faintly visible through a layer of what looked like white house paint, hovered an enormous phantom Popsicle.

  The vehicle was giving out an unnerving rumble. What could Dad possibly need a refrigerated truck for?

  One of the men from the hall, a twitchy hippie with a gray-streaked ponytail down to the small of his back, was at the end of the alley, peering furtively out onto
the street. His head was darting around with so much nervous energy that his swinging ponytail appeared prehensile, as if he could use it to pull a Marlboro from his vest pocket. When he was satisfied that the coast was clear, he sprinted back to the side of the truck, slid open the big side window a crack, and called to someone inside, “All right, all right, we’re good!”

  The rest of the maneuver was carefully orchestrated. The ponytail guy dashed inside the warehouse and came back out pushing the gurney. As he shoved it up against the tailgate, the truck’s rear doors were thrown open from the inside, and out slid an old door on which lay a quilt-shrouded figure about the same height as the one from the hall. This one was roped flat to the door. With help from old Ponytail, the guy inside the truck slid the door onto the cart, where it landed with a heavy slam that echoed off the alley’s darkened windows.

  As the two men muscled the wheeled cart over the bumpy cobbled street, the quilt concealing the bound figure’s head slipped to one side, revealing the startled eyes, tangled hair, and protruding collarbone of a woman. She was staring straight up, and our eyes met, but before she could cry out, the ponytail guy frantically smothered her face with the quilt again. I wondered if she would expect me to do anything for her.

  After the two men had hustled the woman into the building, I sat there a long moment on the sill of the open window, watching my hurried breath float out into the alley and vanish. Not a single window was illuminated in the loft building across the way. It was all up to me.

  Unable to think straight, I slammed the window shut and fled back to the studio to try to figure out what to do next. This time I hid behind an old desk so the men wouldn’t see me if they glanced in as they came by the doorway. I heard the two of them rolling her past, their labored breathing and hushed curses, and after waiting a bit of time for good measure, I crept down the hall after them to that big metal door. It was slid shut again, the edges of the blood smear now thickening up to a dark, ketchupy red, and although the door wasn’t padlocked this time, there was no way to slide such a heavy thing open without being heard.