Pete Hamill - Forever

“Before I leave, I’ll let the Wax Man’s friends know that this exists,” she said. “And that it will be made public if anything happens to me. If anything does happen, I want you to put this in your newspaper.”

“I’ll do my best. It’s never up to me.”

“Yes. I understand. I know, better than most, who decides what goes into newspapers….” She sighed. “Just do your best.”

She then opened a panel above the bed, slipped the letter into a small safe, and handed Cormac the key. Then she sat down hard on one of her chairs, while snow fell steadily beyond the windowpanes behind her.

“I don’t want you to go,” he said.

“But for us, the timing might be right, no?”

“What do you mean?”

He sat beside her and she huddled against him while he played his fingers in her hair.

“I mean something has happened to us,” she said. “When Monsieur Breton arrived, it meant that each of us had a past, and that was too much to carry. The fire was just… a kind of way to end things.”

“I can’t accept that.”

“You didn’t think we would grow old together, did you? Sitting in chairs somewhere, gray and full of years, looking at the sea?”

“No.”

“Nor did I.”

“But you could move with me somewhere else for a while. Say you’re going to Paris and actually live in a house up on top of the island until they forget you. They’ll know you’ve said nothing because there’ll be nothing in the newspapers.”

“Yes, and one night, some fool is passing by, lost and needing directions. And he sees my face, and they come for both of us.”

She eased away from him, poured a glass of white wine. “And you? In such an arrangement, you’d be a prisoner. You’d be living my life, protecting me, my Irish knight, and slowly going crazy. No, that won’t work. And if I’m quiet, you’ll think I’m remembering Monsieur Breton. And if I play piano, you’ll think of him with his violin. And you might be correct.”

She stood up and stared out at the snow.

“Sooner or later, you would go.”

“I don’t think so.”

She turned to him and smiled a radiant smile.

“If you wouldn’t go, then I would,” she said.

He returned her smile.

“Who will teach me to play piano?” he said.

“You will.”

Later that night, they made love while snow fell upon the wounded city. She left for South Street before dawn.

For three days and three nights, he never left the house on Duane Street. He told the Evening Post that he was exhausted, sick from the smoke of the Great Fire, and needed some time to recover. They gave it to him graciously. The women came to offer him flesh and biscuits. He accepted the biscuits. All day, he played the piano, caressing the keys, trying to remember the melody of Berlioz while failing to club it out of the piano. At night, he lay alone, his mind full of death.

They all danced for him in the flickering light of a single gas lamp. His father waltzed with his mother. Bridget Riley danced with Mary Burton. The Earl of Warren danced alone, juggling three balls in three-quarter time. Here came all the black women, dancing with Bantu and Silver and Aaron, Big Michael and Carlito, all young and free. There was Quaco dancing with his wife, safe from the fires of the fort. And Dubious Jones with Beatriz Machado. While Kongo watched in the shadows. Cormac hummed as the dance unfolded in the gaslit room and the snow fell steadily and he ached with loneliness.

It’s time to go, he told himself. It’s time to move on. I have lived too long in this refuge, with its water and scent of lavender. I have lived in a parenthesis of time, and now it has come to an end. The countess is gone, and I must go too. I can’t live in a haunted house.

He found new lodgings on Mott Street, avoiding the pillowy consolations of Sara Long. Four days later, a mob of puritanical zealots, including Hughie Mulligan, newly converted to the banners of God, stormed the house on Duane Street, beating the women, rousting the customers, carting away the art and the candelabra and the furnishing, and then set the building on fire. When Cormac arrived the next day, scavengers were poking in the rubble. He looked for the safe for hours and in late afternoon found it under some glistening timbers. The metal was still hot. He wrapped it in burlap, cooled it in some blackened snow, carried it to Mott Street, and opened it with a key (using oil to lubricate the lock). The last note of the Countess de Chardon had been baked into ashes.

Two weeks after that, he was in the office at the Post when news arrived that the Black Flag packet to Le Havre had been lost at sea. There were 216 passengers on board. Cormac scanned the list. The name of the Countess de Chardon did not appear, but he knew she was among them.

That same week, the clearing of the ruined houses was well under way. The work was done quickly, efficiently, almost ruthlessly. New buildings made of granite blocks and Corinthian pillars began to rise from the rubble. The most important of them looked like temples, dedicated, of course, to Mammon.

The bells of the Essex Market Tower were tolling six times when Cormac went up the steps of the Ludlow Street Jail. It was a mellow April evening, and he could hear a piano playing from the open doors of Erchberg’s Saloon across the street. He pulled a bell. A slot opened in the thick iron doors.

“Who do you want?”

“Mr. Tweed.”

“You on the list?”

“I should be.”

“Name.”

“Devlin.”

A pause. The slot slammed shut and the door squeaked open. A ruddy man in a pale gray uniform sat on a stool, holding a book. He was in a wide gray room with gray women and a few gray lawyers sitting on benches. There was a gray photographic print of the mayor on one wall, and a sad American flag nailed to another.

“Sign here,” the guard said, offering the book.

Cormac signed in as Devlin.

“What’s in the pail?”

“Ice cream,” Cormac said, lifting the lid.

“You been here before?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know the way.”

“I do.”

He walked through the gray room and down a corridor to a door at the rear. He knocked twice. The door opened and a young black man was there. He smiled at Cormac.

“Evenin’, sah.”

“Hello, Luke. How is he?”

“Not so good. The doctor bin here, and it don’t look none too good.” He smiled. “But he lookin’ forward to you comin’.”

Cormac entered the bedroom, where there was a narrow bed beside a curtained window, steel bars outlined by the street-lights beyond. A mattress was beside the bed, where Luke slept at night, watching over his boss. A pot of geraniums sat on a small night table, which also held a single candle.

“Jes’ go on through,” Luke said.

He opened a door and walked into the larger room. Tweed was sitting in a Windsor chair, a colorful quilt over his shoulders. The chair had been built wider than most such chairs, with special orders from Tweed, who was particular about his chairs, since he’d spent his youth making them.

“Well, you’re the first decent face I’ve seen since the last time you were here,” he said. The voice was lower, but had the old gravelly texture.

“How are you, Bill?”

“Not worth a fiddler’s fuck, if the truth be known. The doctors tell me I’ve got bronchitis, cystitis, some other fuckin-itis. My feet are numb with the diabetes. My head hurts. I feel like a bag of bonemeal.” He laughed. “But I’ve still got a heartbeat. Pull up a chair.”