Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

He has watched the place for an hour, has seen limousines arriving, and chauffeurs holding umbrellas over the heads of the passengers. The long black cars then moving around the corner, to wait for a call when their owners are ready to leave. Watched people bowing. Smiling. Even laughing. He sees guys with cameras. Snow on their shoulders. Thinks: Must be press. He sees guys dressed like characters from old movies about Arabs. Not real Arabs. Not Arabs in Baghdad or Fallujah.

He looks to his left, down to what he knows now is called the High Line. Nobody up there. Snow blowing hard. Like that storm when he was eleven, coming home from school in Norman, the wind lifting him, the snow blinding him, afraid he’d never make it home. Confused and lost. No cars. No houses. Just snow. Howling. He started to cry that afternoon.

Until his father came in the pickup and found him. And he tried to hide his tears.

And Josh was ashamed. Of his fear. Of his panic.

The way he felt after they all got hit. Together in Iraq. The explosion. Two seconds of blinding panic.

And waking up in Germany.

Now thinking: Never woulda happened they didn’t knock down the World Trade Center. Never woulda happened if we didn’t invade Iraq. Never. I’d still have Wendy. The little girl. Maybe a son too. One I’d never let get lost in a blizzard.

Under his poncho, and his blanket, he caresses the MAC-10 with a gloved hand.

Thinking: Wait.

8:31 p.m. Sam Briscoe. His loft.

He keeps searching for a book that will help him sleep. Something he has already read and therefore doesn’t engage that part of his brain that argues. Or won’t demand that he get to the end. What always happens at the end is death.

Parts of his conversation with his daughter return. Her words were cool despite her late-night anguish. Nicole was now old enough to console him, the way he had consoled her during her own nights of terrible times.

— Put all of her pictures away, Dad, she said. Wrap them up. Put them in storage. For a year, at least. But don’t leave them where you can see them.

Yes. That was smart. But not tonight. I’m too exhausted.

— Go off somewhere, she said. So your friends can’t call. Where the papers — or worse, television reporters — don’t run follow-ups and ask for your reactions. Go someplace where you once were young. Mexico. Rome. Or better, a place you never visited with Cynthia. Turkey. Ecuador.

She was right, of course. Get out of town. Now. Nothing beats murder at a good address. So they will follow this thing for at least three days. Maybe more.

— And hey: you can come here, Dad. Come to Paris. Stay with us in the guest bedroom. Go to museums. Eat in bistros. Buy books along the river. The weather is cold, but not dismal. And there are no tourists.

Paris.

Briscoe didn’t care much for Nicole’s husband. But he loved his smart, feisty daughter, Nicole. And loved too their wonderful apartment on the Avenue Émile Acollas, with its high trees and wide sidewalks. At the foot of the Champ de Mars. The fifth floor front. The tiny elevator. The entrance hall, with the youthful painting by Lew Forrest of the Seine at dawn. A wedding gift from Cynthia Harding. The three rooms along the balcony, like an elegant railroad flat. Public rooms, they called them. Living room, petit salon, dining room. Each with a door opening to the balcony and a view that included the Eiffel Tower. Like a cornball romantic movie. Or cornball majesty. Didn’t every example of the romantic include death?

He could call the airline now. He could leave tomorrow. Leave the clerical duties to others. Let someone else execute the wishes of the dead. Or put the whole thing off for a month. Paris. Call Mary Blume and Alan Riding and the remaining veterans of the Brigade Rue de Berri of the Paris Herald. Sit together in the Deux Magots. Make remarks. Laugh. Paris. Yes. Then he remembers Nicole’s other words of advice. Go to a place where Cynthia Harding had not shared the bed. Caracas. Istanbul. Maybe—

The phone rings. He hopes it’s not Sandra Gordon. But knows instantly that it’s not. She would never call him at home, after dark. He picks up the phone. Static and word gaps.

— That you, Helen?

— Yeah.

— What’s up?

— I’m in a joint with, uh, some of the gang from the paper and I hate it, and uh, shit, I want to go home.

— So go home, Helen.

— I can’t… I mean, I tried. No cabs in this goddamned snow. Nothing over here… I’m way over near the High Line, Sam. Uh. On Fourteen’ Shtreet. If I try to walk home… I die in a snowdrift, Sam. Christ, I’m a year older than you are, Sam.

Her voice is blurred with drink, exhaustion, age. He can hear mocking laughter behind her. Drunks. The early shift. He can see the snow falling.

— Where are you?

— Fourteen’ Shtreet. Over near the High—

— No. You told me that. The name of the joint.

— The, uh, Ali Baba, something like that… No, no… the Aladdin Lamp. A pretty scary dump.

— They have a bouncer? he says.

— Uh, yeah, I guess.

— You know my rule, Helen. Never go in a joint that needs a bouncer.

He remembers doing a column about the mosque that once stood there. Thirty-odd years ago. When Muslims were a curiosity in New York.

— Can you, uh, come pick me up, Sam? Drop me home, uh, keep going to your house.

Briscoe pauses. He thinks: What the hell, the last act in an endless day. A kind of penance. And this is special: across all the years, Helen Loomis never asked me for anything.

— Sure, Helen. What’s your cell number?

— I don’t have a cell, Sam. I left it somewhere. The paper, I think… This nice girl… Janice. She dialed you for me on her own cell.

— Let me talk to her.

A younger voice gets on.

— Hello? This is Janice.

Briscoe talks quickly.

— Okay, listen, Janice. I’m in SoHo and I’ll try to get a cab. Could you take Helen to the corner of Fourteenth Street and the High Line? Washington Street, I think it is… You know, where those wooden overhangs stick out? Give me fifteen, twenty minutes. I’ll come by cab and hold the cab until she’s in it.

— Uh, I—

— Please, Janice. She’s one of the best journalists this town ever had, and her paper folded today.

Janice says, with annoyed reluctance in her voice: Okay.

He scribbles her cell number and starts dressing. Thinking: Au revoir, Paris. Farewell, Istanbul. I’m heading into a blizzard, to a place with a bouncer.

8:40 p.m. Freddie Wheeler. Aladdin’s Lamp.

On the dance floor, Wheeler thinks, He made me … That kid reporter… That Fonseca. Across the room, past the dancers, past this blond jerk dancing with me like a Gulfport shitkicker… Fonseca… His press card hanging from his neck. The others too. That tall broad from the World. Helen Loomis. Fonseca says something to the guy next to him, turns behind him and talks to another guy… Looking this way… A fucking posse… Is there a back door to this place? I don’t think so… If there is, it’s locked… Keep the crashers out or the check beaters in… Hey, Fonseca, he thinks. I don’t want any trouble, man. I was just doing my job, man… Fuck with me, you end up in the can… Never get a job at the Times that way.

He turns his back on the dancing blond guy and goes left, under the stairs. Harder to see… Into a knot of necktie assholes… Nobody here I know or care about… Nobody… Just me.

8:45 p.m. Malik Shahid. Fourteenth Street.

He stands a bit apart from the homeless guys, hands jammed in the pockets of his coat, beret pulled low on his brow. The homeless guys are joking and laughing, all growls. Malik can’t hear their words. Just the hoarse laughter. Glimpses the sudden red glow of cigarettes. Turns his head. Malik is watching the door across the street. Up on the platform. Over the heads of the gawkers and the photographers. Past the ropes. Three weeks earlier, when he first saw this obscenity of a building on a morning bright with sun, Glorious was still alive. The infidel bitch was still slaving for her white mistress.