Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

— The woman in the bathroom: who is she?

— My hero. Martha Gellhorn. She’s in the bathroom so I’ll see her every morning. And night.

A vague memory stirs in him. Professor Norman’s class at NYU…

— She was married to Hemingway, right? Fonseca says.

— Wrong. He was married to Martha Gellhorn. As a journalist, Hemingway wouldn’t make a pimple on her ass.

And laughs. So does Fonseca. She squeezes his hand. His flesh is warm now. They are quiet. Finally, she clears her throat.

— Did you read CelineWire tonight?

— Life is too short for that asshole. He’s a nasty little prick that Briscoe fired a couple of years ago. Why should I read his crap?

— He says the World is folding this weekend.

— He’s always saying that. He wants it to be true, even if it isn’t.

— Just thought you should know, she whispers.

They are silent again.

— Would Martha Gellhorn read CelineWire? he whispers.

She giggles.

— If it was about Hemingway, she would.

And pushes her butt against him.

8:10 a.m. Sam Briscoe. Third Avenue and East 53rd Street, Manhattan.

HE STANDS WITH HIS BACK to the Citibank Building, a steel and glass structure too big to fail. After three hours napping on the couch in his darkened office, a quick shave in the john, a fresh shirt, a glance at the papers, Briscoe is twenty minutes early for his appointment with the F.P. The Dominican driver from the car service explained that traffic is thinner now, with fewer limousines, not as many cars coming in from Brooklyn and Queens and New Jersey. Briscoe doesn’t mind being early on this bright cold morning after too much rain and too little sleep. He would not want to give the publisher an edge by being late. And he needs to get out of his solitude, to look at other people, to stop thinking for a little while about Cynthia Harding and Mary Lou Watson and the dark horror of the night.

Across the avenue, the publisher’s office is halfway up the more than thirty stories of the Lipstick Building, the gleaming tower where Bernie Madoff pulled off his immense robberies. Thus achieving tabloid immortality. Hell, even immortality in the Times and the Washington Post. Briscoe imagines the gullible rich arriving in a steady, discreet stream to be conned with a smile and a shoe shine. Except Madoff didn’t have the soul of Willy Loman. Madoff knew that his victims were rich by most standards, certainly by the standards of his own Far Rockaway childhood. And so they came to him during the boom, believing that Madoff would make them even richer. Acolytes of the religion of more. Obese capitalism. They knew from whispery chats that he had done it for some select friends. He had done it for universities. He had done it for Holocaust survivors and their children and even for Elie Wiesel. Why not ask him to turn their spare ten million bucks into sixteen? His reputation made them believers. And once again, Briscoe remembers Paul Sann’s ancient city room creed: “If you want it to be true, it usually isn’t.”

He turns his eyes away from the rising ovals of the Lipstick Building, with its arrogant red-brown and pink bands, gazes downtown, sees a thirty-ish hatless man in a dark blue overcoat, staring at the page 1 wrap of the World. His jaw is slack. And Briscoe wonders if Cynthia Harding had ever arrived on this corner. To cross into the Lipstick Building and ride up the silent elevator to meet Madoff. To create wealth for the library. To create wealth for herself. And Briscoe thinks: Never.

Cynthia was a reader, one who could read human faces too, including mine, read the practiced smiles of others, the rehearsed patter, the movements of eyes, the posture of hands. She knew that books in neat or disordered shelves revealed the character of their owners too, and as a guest in any luxurious apartment always found her way to the library, and was filled with a kind of joy to discover those leathery older volumes whose pages had never been cut. Briscoe was beside her on two such investigations, moving around the edges of crowded parties. She didn’t say much, showing him a volume that was only a piece of interior decoration. She never needed to italicize a word. She just moved her brows in an amused way. “Henry James would love these people,” she whispered on one such patrol. “His own books have never been opened.”

An imaginary flash of her astonished face slices into his mind.

Oh.

Her beautiful mind drained of life. And irony. And art. And love. With a knife, on a rain-soaked night.

You fucker.

And realizes that he is thinking now about Cynthia in the past tense.

For the first time. And for the rest of his life.

He inhales hard, turns to watch the thickening morning crowds rising from the subway stairs or stepping out of the few limousines, or finishing the last lap from Grand Central. Hundreds of them. And sees past them, or through them, or under them, into a world they don’t know ever existed, right here. Where the Lipstick Building rises like a triumphant sneering monument. Briscoe sees the corner when he lived in this neighborhood as a boy, in another century, another world. He sees the great black steel girders of the Third Avenue El rising above the summer street during the war. He climbs the worn stairs at 53rd Street with his mother and goes through the turnstile. He rides all the way to the last stop in the Bronx, East 149th Street, peering from the front car at the tracks ahead of him, the steel rails stretching to a vanishing point, or making abrupt turns, while Briscoe looks into the windows where other people lived, sipping tea, drinking beer from tin pails, eating or laughing or locked in morose solitude, smoking cigarettes. He sees their heads and shoulders beyond the rooftop canopies, tending flocks of pigeons, or hanging wash.

On another day, he takes the El downtown to Chatham Square and he and his mother have chop suey in Chinatown and walk over to the entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge, his mother gripping his hand, and they are walking across to Brooklyn, just the two of them, high above the crowded river, then walking back that summer afternoon and seeing the skyline for the first time outside of a movie. On the way home, they get off early and stop in St. Agnes to pray for Briscoe’s father, who is off at the war.

And then Briscoe sees V-E Day, when he was seven, and the war is over at last in Europe and everyone who lived on these side streets came surging out to Third Avenue, and out of the saloons, out of P. J. Clarke’s and the World’s Fair and others whose names he can’t remember. Retired cops and old bootleggers, butchers and bakers, shipyard guys. longshoremen, shoemakers, plumbers, ice men, thieves, black marketeers, cabdrivers, all of them roaring, singing, drinking. There were even more women than men, most of them crying for sons and boyfriends and husbands who would now be on the troopships steaming back into the harbor. And his mother said, “Now, Sam, now your father will come home, Sam. He and his friends, they beat that old Hitler.” Nobody said anything about the war in the Pacific that was not over. They took what they could get here, Briscoe thinks. Right where my feet are planted.

And though his father was a New York cop, and could have stayed home, he had to go to the war, his mother explained, because he was a Jew, and Hitler was killing Jews, and so his father had to kill some Nazis back. That’s what his mother told him. On the crowded street now, in the rushing Friday crowds, he can still hear her voice, the Irish curl, the Belfast rhythm.

He sees his father too, months later, coming up the tenement stairs where they lived on East 49th Street, wearing his army uniform, a big lumpy duffel bag on his shoulder. Sam was sitting on the third-floor-hallway steps with his friends, all of them eight years old, waiting and waiting. Until Jimmy Hartigan from the first floor started yelling up at them, He’s here, Sam! He’s here! And Briscoe remembers clomping down the flights of stairs, two steps at a time, leaping to each landing, and on the first flight he saw his father, who saw him, and dropped his duffel bag, and the boy leaped to his father’s arms, and the two of them froze there, bawling and bawling, man and boy. No words said. The father’s body heaving. The boy trembling. The fucking war was over.