Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

Hide all that, he thinks. Save it here in my head, in the cave of memory, like a secret pulse. To die when I die.

6:15 p.m. Consuelo Mendoza. Sunset Park.

The lock clicks. Raymundo is home. The girl starts shouting, Papi, Papi, Papi, and the two boys leave the television set to greet him. Raymundo is smiling, and hugs each kid, then turns to Consuelo, and hugs her too.

— Ah, mi amor, cómo estamos? he says.

She whispers in his ear: Good news, mi amor.

She pulls away, while the kids race around, and Raymundo removes his coat and looks at her. He makes a move with his head, raising it an inch to say, What’s wrong?

She takes his coat and says, Ven.

They go to the bedroom together. She hangs the coat, then opens the top drawer of the bureau, her drawer, and removes the envelope.

— There’s a story here, she says, holding the envelope.

He looks puzzled. And she tells the story of the old gringo she worked for in Cuernavaca, a sweet man, old then, older now, blind, a painter. Señor Lewis. She does not say what they did in bed. She never will. But she tells Raymundo that she reached out to the gringo viejo today. For help, finding a new job. The first time she had seen him in fifteen years. Then she hands him the envelope.

— Open it, she says in Spanish. He takes it, a wary look on his face. Then opens it.

— Hijole, he says, holding the thick wad of hundred-dollar bills in thumb and forefinger. Then he falls back on the bed. He looks up at her.

— This is true? he says in a soft doubting voice. Not a lie?

— You know me better than anyone in the world, Raymundo.

— I just, I mean, who does such a thing?

— A good man. Old now. With no children. We can go over to see him tomorrow. Bring the kids. You can meet him. We can bring him flowers. Help him clean up. Make him eat.

She sits beside Raymundo on the bed. There are tears in his eyes.

— How much money is it? he whispers.

— Five thousand dollars.

He grabs a pillow and sobs into its soft thickness.

Then Marcela pushes into the bedroom.

— Papi, let’s go to the snow!

He pulls the pillow away.

— Sí, mi querida, pero primero la comida, he says. Yes! But food first!

He starts to laugh then, and sits up, and hands the envelope back to Consuelo, and hugs the little girl, and says in English, Food first! And then the snow.

Consuelo thinks, Yes, the snow. All of them. And thinks: Then we can return exhausted to sleep in our own beds.

6:20 p.m. Bobby Fonseca. The A train.

He holds the pole in his gloved right hand, the other World guys close around him. They are packed together in the rush-hour train, maybe eight of them, including Helen Loomis. Murmuring jokes. Chuckling. Fonseca is silent. Thinking: I get a double wood and the paper folds. Fuck. He flashes on the faces of the night: Harding, Watson, the woman whose son had been killed. Remembers a professor at NYU, an old reporter, telling him: Ya gotta learn to forget. Ya gotta leave all the pain in the city room. Report it, write it, and go home.

Not that easy. Maybe if I had Victoria Collins with me every night. Maybe then it would be a home, instead of a place to sleep. Now it’s a fixed-up Brooklyn tenement full of college kids, with a view of a red-brick factory turned into condos. Growing up in New Jersey, Fonseca imagined Brooklyn before he saw it. From movies. From photographs. Saw its light. Its beautiful brownstones. He found his pad in his last year at NYU, paid $350 a month for a chopped-off slice of a railroad flat. Too much, for a place the size of a small attic in Montclair. Still, it’s bigger than Victoria’s place. The bathroom has a sink, for fuck’s sake.

His father and mother came once to visit and his father said, “For this, I spent all that money?” And never came again. But it was Brooklyn, in a neighborhood renamed the South Slope by the real estate guys, with the subway three blocks away and places to eat on all the corners. It just never became a home, even after I got hired at the World. Where I wanted to work fifteen hours a day. For the rest of my fucking life.

He hears Barney Weiss mention CelineWire and that nasty shit Wheeler who writes it. That asshole probably even thinks he brought us down. Not the recession and the loss of ads. Not the delivery system. Him. Well, at least I had it for a while. He remembers what Mr. Briscoe told him when he handed Fonseca his first working press card. When I got mine, Briscoe said, I wore it to bed for a month, like it was a dog tag. Fonseca did the same thing. And that first week his father called, after seeing Fonseca’s byline in the paper, and said, “Damn, Bobby, I am so goddamned proud of you.” He could hear a tremor in his father’s voice, and then heard him say, “Maybe now you can get a decent place to live.” And Bobby Fonseca laughed.

The train slows. The World crowd faces the doors as the 14th Street station appears. Fonseca sees the sign: IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. Nah, if I see something, I write something. I’m a reporter, man.

6:45 p.m. Sam Briscoe. Patchin Place.

AS THE SNOW FALLS SOFTLY, he stands with his back to the Jefferson Market Branch of the public library. There are still lights burning in the tall former courthouse, rising still out of the nineteenth century. How Cynthia loved having a house a block from a library! On his head is a woven wool cap he found in the office, made years ago by Kevin & Howlin in Dublin. He was in Dublin with Cynthia on a day of sun, showing her the sights. Where Yeats lived on Merrion Square and Shaw not far away and the monument in St. Patrick’s to Jonathan Swift. The bookstores on Dawson Street. The National Library. She said: Sam, I could live here. And he laughed. So could he. “Of all the money that e’er I had…”

He is facing Patchin Place, where two bundled uniformed cops remain on guard and the gates are draped with yellow crime-scene tape. A patrol car is parked on the Sixth Avenue side of the entrance, its windows opaque with steam.

He is not much of a believer but he tries to pray. No words come. Except “sorry.” Cynthia was not much of a believer either, but told him once that she tried to read a poem each night as if it were a prayer. Maybe, Briscoe thinks, memory is a prayer. And he remembers fragments of snowy nights when he walked with her from the Lion’s Head, one long block away, and came here with her and she made tea and they snuggled before a movie on the couch in the den. The snow is now general all over New York. Softly falling into the dark mutinous Atlantic waves. He thinks: No, not Atlantic. It has to be Shannon, two syllables. Joyce was right.

He has entered from the Sixth Avenue end of West 10th Street. He notices that a woman is now standing in the snow-flecked shadows at the Greenwich Avenue end. A heavy fur hat on her head. Long down coat. Heavy boots. Very still. Alone. She is staring into Patchin Place too, where the snow is now gathering on Cynthia Harding’s stoop, tamped down in the center by the feet of cops.

Briscoe moves slightly to the left, stamping his feet as the uniformed cops did. The lights are still burning on every floor. He can see shadowy figures moving in the windows. Technicians. Crime-scene guys. Examining every hair. Down the block the light from street lamps seems spectral. Trucks moan up Greenwich. Buses on Sixth Avenue. The woman is still there. He can’t see her face.

Then a door of the police car opens. A detective steps out. In civilian clothes. With a hat over his black face. He stares at Briscoe. And walks over. The snow pelting him. Briscoe knows him.