The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  Shelby took Mom and Quig and me to dinner once, at one of those expensive hole-in-the-wall bistros near Madison Avenue, where everything on the menu was too disgustingly obscure and French for me to eat. Quig ordered the snails and gulped them down with effort, her eyes popping uncomfortably with each sophisticated swallow. Another time, he invited us to a performance of The Front Page at the Amateur Thespians Society, a black-tie-and-Champagne-bubbles theatrical group whose all-male membership—moonlighting bankers and lawyers and the like—had been putting on shows at their Murray Hill clubhouse since 1884. Shelby had just a small role, as a jaded, smart-alecky reporter haranguing the sheriff to move a scheduled hanging up a couple of hours so it could make the morning paper. But he cut a dashing figure up there on the stage in his checked vest and shirtsleeves, barking into the tube-like mouthpiece of the old-fashioned phone.

  After that, Quig was always in Shelby’s room of the brownstone, having scared up whatever excuse she could to gain entry. He let her. He had an enormous collection of antique Playbills he kept in a thrift-store set of Mark Cross luggage. She loved to leaf through them, smell the musty theatricality of their old pages. She asked him questions about the Barrymores, which he answered patiently and fondly. He poured out steaming Darjeeling tea for the two of them and played obscure show tunes for her on his turntable, his door always slightly ajar.

  There was a night, a quiet one, the sound of the streets muffled, when I came home from Kyle’s to find the house darkened. I don’t know why I didn’t turn on the lights, or what made me keep climbing the stairs after I’d reached my own floor. I don’t know what I was expecting to find. On the landing outside Shelby’s room, unlit like all the others, a sharp sliver of light slanted from his door crack. I crept closer and peered through the narrow opening, squinting into the shock of light. They were kneeling on the floor, the two of them, face-to-face. My sister’s hands were clasped behind her head, her eyes cast down. His hands were raised, doing something to her. He was touching her, the tips of his long fingers rubbing white cream on the raw pink knobs of her extended elbows. I could hear her breathing.

  He lowered his hands, struggled with something in front of his body I couldn’t see. He gave a little grunt of effort, then delicately raised his right hand and held it in the space between him and Quig, something wide and sheer dangling from his fist. Saran Wrap. He murmured something to her. She nodded, smiling shyly, and unfolded one of her arms for him. He touched it with his free hand, turned the inflamed knob of her elbow to face him. Tenderly, without a word, he draped the clear plastic over her wound and wrapped it like a gift.

  16

  I LEARNED TO BE FLEXIBLE with my scavenging. Like the time one of my church numbers (595) took me to the intersection at the southeast corner of Central Park after midnight. With all the liveried doormen around, I had no shot at chiseling any stonework off the Plaza or the Sherry-Netherland, and the GM Building had no ornament worth taking, unless you counted the décor of the Auto Pub in its sunken plaza, where we used to have family dinners in booths shaped like race cars.

  So instead, I boarded the RR, the angriest subway in the world, and headed downtown to the next target on my list, Twenty-Seventh Street and Fourth Avenue (274). Though I didn’t know that area at all, I had teased the RR strand out of the underground map’s spaghetti tangle of train lines.

  When the doors jostled open at Twenty-Eighth Street, however, I was greeted on the platform by a jabbering silver-haired lady wearing a soiled drum-majorette’s hat, who looked to be either squatting like a baseball catcher or taking a dump. I opted not to find out which.

  The next station, Twenty-Third Street, was empty, thank God—just a gum-splotched platform whose tiled walls were the usual riot of graffiti. I climbed a grimy stairwell and emerged opposite a flat dark park edged with the shadows of skyscrapers. Across the street on my right, below the park, was the great prow of the Flatiron Building, looking like it might sail right up the avenue and crush me if I didn’t get moving.

  Though it was surely a stupid thing to do, I crossed over and walked uptown through the deserted park so I could get a good look at the buildings around it. The view seemed worth the risk. On the park’s eastern fringe, an Italian-looking clock tower needled its way into the night sky. Across the next side street, two office buildings were conjoined high above the pavement by a pedestrian bridge far grander than the little one down on Staple Street. And a couple blocks north stood perhaps the most extraordinary building of the bunch: a lavishly ornamented, multi-tiered wedding cake of a tower, surging skyward and topped by a golden pyramid.

  I ventured over to this vertical extravagance and did a slow lap around it, discovering that the building took up the entire city block. NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY read a bronze plaque beside its Madison Avenue entrance. Had the street coordinates been the ones I was searching for, the building would have been the perfect candidate for my architectural salvage, as the curving bands above its street-level archways were magnificently carved with all manner of animals, plants, and fairy-tale characters.

  But the skyscraper occupied the block from Twenty-Sixth to Twenty-Seventh Streets between Madison and Park Avenue South. It was not in the right spot, and in fact nothing was in the right spot. I double-checked the church number in my notebook—274—and walked all the hell over the place trying to find where Twenty-Seventh Street crossed Fourth Avenue. But it never did. I found Fifth Avenue, and I found Third Avenue several blocks to the east, but there was no such thing as Fourth.

  It was maddeningly disorienting. I leaned against a mailbox on Park Avenue South, trying, I guess, to steady myself on the city grid.

  “You oughta say hi,” a scratchy voice said from behind me.

  “What?” I whirled around to see a dark lump in a vestibule a couple doors down.

  “That’s three times you pass by me now. You oughta say hi.”

  I was a little alarmed. “Oh, um, sorry. I didn’t see you.”

  “No,” the voice said with amusement, “I guess maybe you wouldn’t this time a night, but I been seein’ you.”

  The lump arose from its darkened nook and revealed itself to be a very tall, stooped black man in a droopy brown overcoat. He had a ragged gray-flecked beard and was sucking on a lime wedge.

  “I been watchin’ you tramp back and forth all around here. Look like you lookin’ for somethin’ you don’t know what it is.”

  He came closer, but not too close. He only made me a little nervous; something about the loose-limbed way he carried himself gave me the idea he was okay.

  “I know what I’m looking for, all right,” I said. “Fourth Avenue. I mean, who in his right mind designs a city that jumps right from Third Avenue to Fifth Avenue? Where did the geniuses hide Fourth, anyway?”

  “But you on it,” the man said.

  I squinted at him, more confused than ever, until I saw that he was pointing, across the avenue and toward the sky. I followed his finger. High up, at least twenty stories above the street, the brick side wall of an old office tower was painted, in faded white block letters, with the words FOURTH AVENUE BLDG.

  “What the hell?” I said. “Then why do all the street signs say Park Avenue South?”

  The man shrugged and gave his lime a suck. “Things change,” he said.

  I was grateful to him and all, but even after I said goodbye and thanks, I couldn’t get rid of the guy. He followed me up the block to the big arched entrance of the New York Life building and watched me scope out the multitude of carvings on its white stone façade. One especially caught my eye. The band that curved along the edge of the archway was incised with leaves and berries and doodads, culminating, maybe ten feet above the sidewalk, with the grinning head of a man. Big-nosed and snaggletoothed, this bulbous cranium hung like an irreverent teardrop off the bottom of the band of ornament.

  I could sense the humor of the anonymous artist who had carved it, and I wanted it, wanted Dad to have it.

 
; A few feet below and to the right of the head, an old-fashioned rectangular bronze sign jutted from the wall: INTERBOROUGH SUBWAY. This massive hunk of bronze looked to be an ideal platform for my salvage work. But there was no way I could have reached it without my new friend. Maybe it was because I gave him my RC Cola and half my bologna sandwich, or maybe he just had nothing better to do, but as soon as he saw what I was up to he went and wheeled over the shopping cart from his vestibule. He let me stand on it, then let me climb up his shoulder to the subway sign.

  “Just one boost and I’m outta here,” he said. “And you oughta get gone, too—get right home to your parents, you know what’s good for you.”

  “I will, I will. Soon as I’m done.”

  He handed me up the crowbar and hammer from my violin case and then took off. The irregular, abrasive sound of his cart grew fainter until I stopped hearing it anymore.

  The crowbar was just long enough for me to reach the carved head. But the most I could hope to remove was its big crooked nose; the rest of the carving was too firmly embedded in the wall. I pressed my right shoulder against the building, angled the sharp edge of the crowbar against the side of the nose, and went to work.

  My technique had improved over the past couple months. After probably no more than five or six minutes of hammering the end of the crowbar, the nose popped off its face and fell to the pavement.

  “Shit!” I cried, when I saw a little corner of the nose chip off and skitter away as it hit. But when I lowered myself to the sidewalk I found that the damage to the nose was pretty minor. And as proboscises went, this one really had a lot of character. Up close, you could see how much effort the carver had put into delineating the tiny veins, not to mention the bemused flanges of the nostrils. It was my favorite city fragment yet. I pocketed it, quickly gathered up my tools in Quig’s violin case, and headed up the darkened side street toward the subway.

  I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. I imagined Dani giving me one of her challenging smirks and asking, “Is that a nose in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?”

  The jittery black guy who leapt out of the doorway in front of me caught me completely by surprise. He was breathing heavily, his nostrils flaring, and he held a souvenir wooden Yankees bat cocked menacingly above his right shoulder. The chips in the bat’s blue paint suggested that it had seen prior service.

  “Gimme your money!” he said. “Quick. Quick!”

  I was petrified. I pulled all my cash—a wad of three or four dollar bills—from my pocket and extended it to him. He grabbed the bills in his left fist and snorted at their meager denomination.

  “Don’t fuck with me!” he said. “What else you got in your pockets? I want it all!”

  I yanked my left pocket inside-out to show it was empty. From my right I withdrew the freshly harvested nose and held it out to him, my palm shaking.

  He stared at it incredulously, his eyes bugging out. “I said don’t fuck with me!”

  “I’m not! It’s a sculpture! You can sell it! It’s history!”

  He looked at me hard. “You a wack dude, you know that? What the fuck do I want with a fuckin’ nose?” He shook his head furiously and turned to go, then, almost as an afterthought, wheeled around and smashed me across the bridge of my nose with the bat.

  I went down, blood pouring from my face. Overcome with nausea, I felt sure my nose was destroyed, shattered bone and smeary pulp smashed down into my skull. The pain was so staggering as I lay on the pavement that I didn’t even feel the guy yank off my Pumas and take the twenty-dollar bill I’d hidden under my left insole.

  —

  “You poor bastard,” Dad said when I turned up at his studio. “That’s a pretty good knock you got there.”

  He carried me to an old soft chair with stuffing sprouting from its arms and had me lean my head back with a bag of frozen peas on my nose. He stroked the hair from my forehead. The throbbing had retreated from my nose and settled behind my eyes. I must have seemed pretty down in the dumps, because Dad tried to make me feel better by telling me about the time he’d gotten knocked down and kicked in the face by a bartender who caught him stealing a neon Ruppert Beer sign in college.

  “I was three sheets to the wind, and I’d forgotten to unplug the sign,” he told me. “I stuffed the thing under my sweater, and as I got up to go with my roommate, the bartender saw my sweater blinking: RUPPERT!…RUPPERT!…RUPPERT! Not my finest moment.”

  Dad now clasped his hands behind his back and regarded the piece of New York I’d brought him, which sat atop an otherwise empty worktable.

  “Anyway, Griffin, you did good tonight. This, my boy, is a nose to be reckoned with. A schnozzola of stature.”

  I looked up from my haze. “Yeah? So where’d I get it?”

  Dad peered down at me, impressed. “Ah, even struck down on the field of battle the young jackanapes thinks he can stump the band, does he?” He plucked up the nose and held it up to the lightbulb above the table. “I’m afraid this is an easy one, son: the New York Life building, on Madison Square. Not much challenge there. It’s one of the most celebrated skyscrapers in the city. Designed by Cass Gilbert, one of the big boys of New York architecture, and put up right before the Depression.”

  “You’re good, Dad.”

  “Yes, I am. And as I think about it, as bad a bonk as that bandit gave you, you’re in pretty good company being assaulted on that spot. Maybe it’s a pedigree to be proud of.”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, there’s a bit of a history of violence there, you might say. The old Madison Square Garden—probably Stanford White’s greatest New York building, mind you—was built on that site around 1890, and old Stanny liked it so much that he actually kept a studio in its tower. The building had a famous roof garden the smart set would go to, and White was taking in a musical up there one night when a deranged Pittsburgh millionaire, the jealous husband of a girl White had bedded back when she was a teenager, strolled up and shot him dead. Just like that.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Yeah, it was about the most famous scandal of its day. And then, if being killed on his own roof weren’t indignity enough, the green-eyeshade gang at New York Life came along a few years later and ripped down the whole damn Garden to make way for their new Cass Gilbert tower. We’re talking about maybe the signature building of New York’s most revered architect—smashed into rubble for the landfill.” He sighed. “New York Life indeed.”

  The bag of peas was thawing and getting squashy. I sat up to remove it.

  “Boy, you look rotten,” Dad said. “But you know, maybe there’s some good to be salvaged from all this. Maybe there was something serendipitous in your bringing me an artifact off that particular building.”

  “What do you mean?” Had he guessed that I knew about the church numbers?

  “Well, I’ve had it in mind for a while to liberate a major sculpture from the crown of an even more remarkable Cass Gilbert tower. It’s probably an opportune time, ’cause they’re restoring the original Gothic terra cotta, and it seems a pretty good bet that in order to finish their work, the restoration contractors are going to have to do us the kindness of building some scaffolding up there in the clouds. A Stairway to Heaven, if you will.”

  He paced around a bit, tapping his lips with an index finger in thought.

  “Dad, I’m not sure if I really—”

  “Nonsense. It’s about time we raised our sights. No more scraps of things! We’re better than that. From now on, we take only entire ornamental sculptures, and only the most spectacular ones from the most spectacular buildings.”

  He went to the big wall of windows and shoved open the iron shutters on one of them.

  “There!” he said, pointing exultantly downtown.

  I struggled up from my chair and stood beside him. It was probably four in the morning. Other than a few stray lighted windows, Lower Manhattan was dead. Beyond the loft building across the street, all I could make out was di
fferent qualities of darkness layered atop one another.

  “I don’t see anything,” I said.

  “Oh, you will. You will. And you’ll see it in a way few New Yorkers ever have.”

  17

  THE PITY AND ADMIRATION I was counting on were nowhere to be found when I got home to the brownstone the following afternoon. All the way uptown on the subway I had crafted a touching and heroic tale to explain my swollen-potato nose and the throbbing mask of mottled purple around my eyes. The story involved my fighting off a couple of teenage thugs who’d been abusing either a limping old Polish lady or an adorable stray dog (I hadn’t settled on which). But I never got to tell either version. There was a major ruckus going on upstairs in Mom’s room.

  “Protecting me?” Quig shouted. Her voice sounded freckled and raw. “Oh, come off it! You fill the house with one creepy soup-kitchen reject after another, and then suddenly you’ve got this big problem with the one guy I can talk to?”

  “It’s not the talking I’ve got a problem with,” Mom said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t know anything about us!”

  “You’re barely fifteen years old. It’s inappropriate.”

  “Oh, that’s a good one,” Quig snorted, “coming from you!”

  She stormed out of the room and clomped up the stairs a few steps before turning to shout down one last thing: “We both know why you did this!”

  —

  When silence had settled over the house—and boy, was there a silence—I quietly climbed the stairs past Quig’s bedroom to take a peek at the top-floor studio Shelby was renting. Everything was gone: his luggage full of Playbills, his fancy suits, him. It was jarring how quickly the room’s emptiness took me back to that worst of all days. The only things left on the floor were that same old mattress and sad little hot plate Dad had left behind when he had moved out.