The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  I stepped back into the hall to resume my search. A peek inside the other maid’s room next door revealed that it was indeed Dani’s dad’s study. But it wasn’t safe to sneak in there yet, I realized. Coming from the kitchen, just a few steps away, I could hear the gravelly murmur of a stultifyingly dull man boring someone to tears with his conversation: “…a manifest abdication of city government’s fiscal responsibility…short-term debt obligations of $3.4 billion…unsustainable reliance on the municipal bond market…”

  I poked my head around the corner and saw a small man in a tweed jacket leaning against a butcher-block countertop with a glass of red wine in his fist. His back was to me. Opposite him, more or less pinned against the stove by the guy’s torrent of blather, was Kathleen Shaw, a pretty ninth-grader who wore her painter’s pants too high. Her mouth seemed paralyzed in the shape of a phony half smile and her eyes had a look of pained stupefaction, as though she would rather slit her own throat with a rusty penknife than listen to even one more tedious word. It was obvious she would make a break for freedom at the first opportunity, so I was definitely going to need help keeping Dani’s father occupied while I snooped around in his study.

  I couldn’t find my buddy Rafferty anywhere—maybe he’d been one of the lucky kids smooching in that dark room—but Kyle was in the living room, perched on a leather chair next to a kid with a bowl haircut whom I’d never seen before. Kyle waved me over. He looked as serious as I’d ever seen him.

  “Griffin, come have a seat. Me and Greeley here were just talking religion.”

  I said hi and sat down.

  “Greeley goes to St. David’s. Headed for church college when he graduates—seminary, he said they call it.”

  The kid nodded self-importantly. He had milky eyes and a bland, kindly face.

  “Kyle clearly hasn’t had much religious instruction,” he told me. “But he has an open heart, and that’s all one can really ask.”

  Kyle leaned in close to Greeley. “Now, I admit I’ve never been much of a religious guy,” he told his new friend, “but what you’ve been telling me is totally fascinating. Because if I understand you properly, God is everywhere.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Everywhere?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “So God is all over the world at this very moment,” Kyle said. “He’s in this room, He’s at the top of the Eiffel Tower, He’s down on the Bowery—”

  “Yes, that’s all true,” Greeley interrupted. “But it’s not just the physical world we’re talking about, of course. It’s the spiritual world. God isn’t just all around us, He’s within us.”

  “Within us.” Kyle’s eyes lit up.

  “Within us.”

  “So God really is everywhere.”

  Greeley smiled. “Yes, that’s what I’ve been saying.”

  “He’s in you.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s in Griffin here.”

  “Of course.”

  “He’s in me.”

  “Sure he is.”

  “He’s in my soul, and in my mind, and in my heart.”

  “Now you’ve got it.”

  “He’s infusing me, filling every part of me.”

  “Yes, he’s everywhere.”

  Kyle leapt to his feet. He couldn’t suppress his glee.

  “So God is in my butt!” he crowed.

  “I’m sorry?” Greeley looked up, astonished.

  “God…is in my BUTT!” Kyle cackled. “You just said he’s everywhere! So God is in my butt!”

  There was no holding him back now. Every other conversation stopped and all eyes turned to Kyle as he cavorted joyously around the room doing an exuberant, sashaying booty dance, his chin down near the carpet, his buoyant rear end hoisted high in the air: “God is in my butt! God is in my butt!”

  By the time Kyle finally stopped to catch his breath, Greeley had melted away into the party, utterly mortified. I caught Kyle by the sleeve.

  “That’s quite an epiphany you just had there,” I said. “Talk about finding God.”

  “Yeah,” Kyle said, his face flushed. “Turns out you just have to know where to look!”

  I told him I had a little something going with Dani, and I desperately needed him to run interference with her dad while I made my move in one of the maid’s rooms. We both knew I’d never really made a move on anyone—not one that worked, anyway. But boys have to have aspirations, and for Kyle to point out my miserable track record would have been to cast doubt on the very viability of our eternal shared goal of getting in a girl’s pants.

  “You gonna get her to tickle your Twinkie?” Kyle asked.

  I hesitated.

  “Yank your Yodel? Surely you’re gonna get her to yank your Yodel.”

  “Kyle…”

  “Dandle your Devil Dog! You should totally—”

  “Dandle?” I asked.

  “Dandle, yeah. It’s dandle, isn’t it?”

  “I think you mean diddle. Dandle is something you do to babies. On your knee.”

  “It’s not dandle?” His brow furrowed. “You sure it’s not dandle?”

  “Jesus, Kyle, will you shut up already? Are you gonna help me out or what?”

  In the end, he was everything a friend could ask for in a wingman, chatting up Dani’s father in the kitchen while I slipped into the old guy’s study just down the hall.

  Mr. Gardner’s desk lamp, one of those pretentious old-timey brass ones with the green glass shade, was already on when I snuck in there. It was a very skinny room. One of the two long walls was lined with cork and covered floor to ceiling with photos and blueprints of buildings, all overlapping and shoving one another out of the way. The bookcase on the long wall opposite was stuffed with volumes bearing titles like Historic Preservation: Curatorial Stewardship of the Built Environment. On the shelves in front of the books, jutting into the room at all angles, were dusty balsa wood models of buildings. The effect of being in this overcrowded space was like that of walking down a narrow city street with all the façades leaning aggressively inward from both sides.

  I ignored this shiver of claustrophobia and went to work. Most of the blueprints on the wall had client names in the lower right corner, but none said Laing. Some of the models had names or addresses written on their bases, but again I didn’t see what I was looking for—though I did find a hip-flask-shaped bottle of Smirnoff vodka tucked inside an apartment house marked 840 Fifth Avenue. (A fifth on Fifth: Was this a private joke of Gardner’s, or just a way to remember where he’d left his hooch?) I took a swig from the bottle, but the stuff was so nauseating that I instantly spat it all over the bookcase, showering several townhouses with a boozy monsoon.

  The house phone buzzed in the hall outside the study, making me jump. Mr. Gardner answered it and told the doorman, in his lugubrious monotone, that it was okay to send someone-or-other up.

  “That’s just so interesting what you were telling me,” Kyle was saying now, just outside the study door. “I didn’t know that something as hard as stone could be so, you know, vulnerable.”

  “Oh, yes, sandstone is notoriously fragile, especially in this climate, and brownstone is just a species of sandstone.” As I rifled through the papers on Mr. Gardner’s desk, his soporific murmur oozed right into the room: “Sedimentary rock is formed in layers, you see, in planes parallel to the earth. But when the city’s townhouses were constructed, their brownstone façades were typically installed with the sedimentary plane parallel to the plane of the building.”

  “Wow, that’s just sooo intriguing.”

  The drawers of Gardner’s desk were mostly filled with junk: nasal spray, ticket stubs, another vodka bottle, binders full of plumbing specifications.

  “That’s why brownstone façades spall so terribly,” Mr. Gardner blathered on. “They’re weak along those planes, and gravity simply flakes off the strata.”

  As quietly as I could, I eased open the top drawer of the green metal file cabi
net behind the study door and began going through it. Mr. Gardner was uncomfortably close; I could see a tweedy swatch of him through the crack between the door’s hinges.

  About halfway through the second file drawer, I found it: a folder marked Laing, Edgar. Inside it was a sealed manila envelope and a few receipts. I stuck the whole folder in my knapsack and slid the drawer closed gingerly.

  “That’s really just absolutely fascinating,” Kyle was saying now. “You know, I learned something else fascinating tonight, Mr. Gardner. Did you know that God is everywhere?”

  I froze. But instead of answering him, Mr. Gardner suddenly barked out: “Whoa whoa whoa! Hold on a minute there, Piggy. Do you really need to have seconds on birthday cake, when you’re only having one birthday? Here, let me toss that out for you.”

  The study’s doorknob gave a little jiggle. I grabbed my knapsack and fled into the bathroom between the two maid’s rooms, quietly pulling the door closed behind me. When I tried to shove open the bathroom’s far door, I found it was locked, but from my side. I slid the little bolt open and pushed my way into the other maid’s room, where I bumped right into Dani. She gave a little gasp of fright and then hit me in the chest with her open palm when she realized it was me.

  “You jerk!” she cried, fighting tears. “What are you doing in my room?”

  I closed the bathroom door behind me and glanced around. Her pizza-tray shield was still on the floor, along with a jumble of album covers and sneakers and a worn copy of The Fellowship of the Ring. I reached out and took Dani by her slight shoulders. They were warm and smooth in my palms.

  “Hey,” I said gently.

  She shook me off. “Where have you been? I’ve been wandering all over the place with your stupid cake, looking for you!”

  “You shouldn’t let him make you feel bad,” I said. “It’s idiotic what he said. It’s just cake.”

  “But I didn’t even want the cake, I hate cake, it’s your cake!” She was shaking.

  “I was only saying—”

  “Get out of here, will you? Get out of my party!” Her eyes were rimmed with red. “I don’t want you here, don’t you get it, dumb-ass? You weren’t even invited.”

  I was confused, but did as I was told, edging out of the room as best I could without crushing any albums underfoot. My stomach felt awful.

  I found Kyle alone in the kitchen, gorging himself on the disputed dessert. Instead of cutting himself a slice like a civilized person, he had impaled the entire remaining half a cake on the tines of a bone-handled carving fork, which he was rotating methodically so that not a single square inch of frosted surface area could escape his wide-open maw. His eyes were alight with amusement.

  “What?” he spluttered with balloon-cheeked mock innocence when he saw me, a small avalanche of cake crumbs spilling from his mouth and down his shirt. “Why are you looking at me like that?” His face was smeared with a disturbing clown smile of brown frosting, and he was very, very pleased with himself. He stifled a giggle.

  “We’ve gotta go,” I told him. “We’re not welcome here anymore.”

  “We?”

  We got our jackets, and Kyle followed me out the kitchen door, across the hall, and into the back stairwell. It was grimy and dimly lit, each floor with a clouded window and a wide gray door behind which elevator cables ticked and sang.

  On the far side of the landing, I stopped and regarded the fire hose, all neatly coiled in its hanging rack and culminating in a brass nozzle.

  “What?” Kyle asked.

  “You ever wonder how they get water pressure all the way up here? It’s a miracle of mechanics, really. Fighting gravity all the way.”

  “No, Griffin. I never wondered that.” He continued down the stairs. “Come on.”

  “But the thing is, how do you really know it’ll work unless you test it?”

  “I’m sure they do test it. Just like the elevator. Let’s go.”

  I put my hands on the red wheel.

  “Griffin?” There was urgency in Kyle’s voice, distrust maybe.

  “But how do you know?” I asked. “How do you know how safe you really are until you test it?”

  I leaned into the red wheel and gave it a twist. It resisted a moment, then began to turn. There was a jerking rumble from somewhere far below, then a delay during which nothing much seemed to happen. And then, as Kyle’s eyes grew big as Super Balls, there came a distant jolt—I could feel the vibrations in my hands—followed by a surging shhhhh­hhhhh­ sound from somewhere downstairs, rapidly growing louder. We stared at each other a long moment, expectant and half-disbelieving, as the sound rushed closer—until the base of the coiled hose lurched spasmodically and began to thicken with water.

  Kyle let out a cackle. “You jackass!” he cried. “You total jackass!” And then we were running, giggling and sprinting down the stairs, feeding off each other’s laughter.

  The wheel on the next landing turned more easily. This time there was much less delay before the coiled hose began filling itself.

  “Griffin! That’s enough!” Kyle could barely get the words out, he was laughing so hard. “Seriously!” We ran. Ran and giggled.

  By the following floor I had my technique down, slap-gripping the wheel with my left hand, turning it just enough to open the valve while keeping my overall momentum moving down the stairs. It was crucial that we reach the lobby ahead of the deluge.

  And the deluge was coming now. At first the flow was just a leisurely plashing from above, descending step by step. But as the waters from the uppermost hose reached the waters from the hose on the landing below, their force and volume multiplied, rushing down to join the next hose’s output, and the next, the stream becoming a river becoming a flash flood.

  “Dude,” Kyle chortled, “Poseidon Adventure! I’m Ernest Borgnine!”

  “No way! I’m Borgnine! You’re Gene Hackman.”

  “I don’t want to be Hackman!”

  “You’re Hackman,” I insisted. “The priest who’s questioning his faith—wondering if maybe God is in his butt!”

  “All right, all right,” Kyle said. “But if I’m Hackman, you have to be Shelley Winters.”

  “Is that the annoying fat lady who swims up a storm and then keels over?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Bastard!”

  We discovered we could move faster if we alternated floors. While Kyle spent a few moments turning a hose wheel enough revolutions to really open the floodgates, I sprinted right past him and spun open the next one. I liked the rumbling vibration in my fist, the feeling of power as my palm flew off the wheel.

  Things were getting pretty wet. Somewhere above us, the water had risen high enough to spill through the metal uprights into the stairwell’s open center, waterfalling the full eleven stories from Dani’s floor to the lobby level. By the time we got down to the bottom, the center of the first-floor landing was filling with water, the pool widening as the stairwell Niagara poured into it. Kyle high-stepped it around the edge of the pool, and I tried to follow, but halfway across, my stomach hurt so much from laughing that I had to stop and collect myself.

  “Hurry, Shelley, hurry!” Kyle cried. “You can make it, old girl! Remember those swim lessons from your youth!”

  Together we stumbled, giggling, through a heavy door, slamming it shut behind us. We found ourselves in an ornate side hall of the lobby, with gilded moldings and chandeliers whose bulbs were shaped like flames. We stood on the Persian carpet, still snorting with laughter, and stared expectantly at the door through which we had just come, wondering when the water would begin flowing from the crack at its bottom.

  “What are you boys looking at?” the doorman’s grumpy voice demanded from behind us. “What’s going on here?”

  We turned to face him.

  “I’m thinking maybe someone left the tub running or something,” Kyle said. “Because things are getting a tad moist back there. You should really do something about that.”


  We speed-walked past the doorman and out to the sidewalk, and though I never actually saw him open the stairwell door, I told Kyle as we hurried down Ninety-Third Street that I liked to imagine the guy being carried straight out to West End Avenue in a raging flood, arms cartoonishly akimbo.

  We were almost at Riverside, where the bums slept behind the bushes that surrounded the Joan of Arc statue, when a booming voice caught up with us: “Hey! You two!”

  We turned around to see a cop loping down the street toward us, holding his flashlight like a cudgel. At the corner behind him was a police cruiser. A second cop was standing beside it listening to the doorman, who was pointing at us and gesticulating furiously.

  “Yeah, you! Come back here!” the nearer cop yelled at us. “I wanna talk to you!”

  He stopped, maybe fifty yards away, and waited for us to obey.

  Kyle and I looked at each other, flabbergasted.

  “What the hell?” I said under my breath. “How’d they get here so fast?” It didn’t make any sense; it was as if they’d just beamed down from the Enterprise.

  “I don’t think they came ’cause of us,” Kyle said. “Some Collegiate boys were throwing soggies out Dani’s window before you even got there.”

  “So we’re innocent.”

  Kyle looked at me, slack-jawed and petrified.

  “We’re totally innocent,” I said, and I started walking, unhurried, back toward the cop. Kyle came along. “That’s why we’re so relaxed,” I told him. “You’re relaxed, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” he said, sounding anything but. Then, after a pause: “Why am I relaxed?”

  “Because we didn’t do anything. We simply left the party after those terrible Collegiate guys, and now we’re just walking on back to talk to the nice policeman.”

  “Right,” Kyle said, still walking alongside me. “And we’re just chatting together in the unworried sort of way that innocent people talk.”

  We had nearly reached the cop by now. He looked bigger up close. He had two thick, angry eyebrows joined by a furry isthmus. He gave us the once-over.