Chapter 8

For the first ten minutes he was funny.

He hit every button in the car, he did Mayor Beame on Con Ed's gross negligence, he said he'd get a rebate.

I kept my mouth shut.

Click, went the Zippo, click, click, and after a while he quit the jokes and just did that.

"Turn on the flashlight, Marty."

I breathed through my mouth.

"You and the super. Okay. That's cute. You know what's under this building? You, her, every old lady in the place. I won't need a doormat."

He came across the car on his hands and knees.

I can keep quiet, but I can't stop breathing.

He got my collar and then he got my throat, and he put my head against the wall.

"Turn it on," he said. "Turn it on, turn it on."

All I had to do was say Bathgate, and I couldn't say anything.

There were lights going off in my eyes, the only ones in that car.

I got the three-cell out of my back pocket and swung it low, at the sound of him, and it hit his knee.

He let go and went away across the floor.

It was a while before I could have said Bathgate, and by then I wasn't going to.

I didn't say anything for eleven minutes. That's what the tape says.

He started talking low, the way he had in July, the Poconos and a guy he knew in Yonkers who got stuck in a car wash, and this time I could hear what was under it.

It went faster.

He offered me four thousand dollars, and then ten.

When he got to where he was crying or laughing, and with him it had always been the same noise, I used my voice, the work one.

"Fire Department," I said.

It stopped.

"What?"

"Fire Department. What's the address?"

"Marty, cut it out."

"What's the address, sir?"

I waited.

I have waited on a lot of people.

"Fox Street," he said, in a voice I wouldn't have known.

"What floor are you on?"

"I wasn't there. I told you. Ask the nun. I was at the school till eight."

"Nobody said eight, sir."

I listened to him breathe.

"What floor are you on?"

"The cellar," he said. "I'm in the cellar."

"Who's with you?"

"Nobody. It's empty. Gallagher swore, he swore on his mother. I got it going and I got gas on this hand and I'm on the stairs, I'm going out. And I hear somebody talking."

"Talking where?"

"All the way up. Some old guy, real polite, in an empty building." He was going fast now. "So I went up. I don't know why. I never hurt anybody. Six flights, and you can't see, you can't see your hand, it's all coming up behind me, and I'm banging on this door. Pop! Open up! It opens this far, on a chain, and he's looking at me, this old guy in two sweaters. He says excuse me, one moment. He shuts it, and I hear him walk away, and I hear him talking in there. He doesn't have a hat, he says. To who? Who's he talking to?"

I knew who he was talking to.

I had my eyes open and I couldn't see anything, and I could see that door.

"And it opens again," Vic said. "This far. He's got his teeth in now. He says-"

It was a while before he could do it.

"He says, 'The Fire Department says to stay put. Thank you anyway.' And he shuts it."

He screamed the next part, and they heard it on seventeen without any trouble.

"Thank you anyway! I had my shoulder on that door! I went out over the roof in the dark with my hand on fire, and you told him! You told him, Marty! That was you!"

So that was who was at the door.

That was how he knew what never ran in any paper.

That was the funny part he had been telling people since March, as loud as he could, in the dark.

I had both halves of it on my back now, the man who lit it and the man who kept the door shut, and anybody with a machine could play it: a lawyer, a deputy chief, Janine.

I already had plenty.

"I know," I said. "Say it again, sir. What did he say? Nice and clear."

He said it again.

"Okay," I said. "Stay on the line with me. They're coming."

I said Bathgate.

The light came on, the car came up two feet, and the door slid open on seventeen, on Ortega's flashlight and two patrolmen from the 50th Precinct.

Vic was in the corner with his knee, in that big collar, holding the dead Zippo in both hands.

"Thank God," he said. "Oh, thank God. Leave that on. Would you leave that on?"

He thanked them all the way to the lobby, the only man I ever saw glad about it.

The cops were only half listening, because their radio was going.

They had just gotten Son of Sam, ten minutes up the road in Yonkers, sitting in his car, and nobody in New York read about anything else for a month.

Vic Fusco got four lines on page 38, under an ad for air conditioners.

A judge might have thrown out my tape, Ortega told me, but nobody ever had to find out.

They played part of it for Dennis Gallagher in a room at the DA's, and by Christmas he had a lot to say about his policies.

They had the rate book out of the Monte Carlo, with Janine's handwriting in it, and they had Janine, with immunity, telling twenty-three strangers on the grand jury about April.

Ortega showed me his pad from July, the one word I couldn't read upside down.

It said "How?"

In the spring Vic pled to arson and manslaughter, eight and a third to twenty-five.

I always wondered about the third.

They turn the lights out up there at night, every night.

The Department gave me a hearing in October and played the tape with the whole room listening.

A deputy chief asked if I had followed the card on March ninth, and I said yes, and he said then there was nothing to discuss.

They docked me thirty days for Bathgate.

The card still says don't open it, and I still say it when it's right.

I also ask who's at the door.

The day after Labor Day I came up the stairs in the morning with the paper and her closet was empty.

The thermos was on the counter, washed.

Her key was on the refrigerator, under the picture of us at Orchard Beach, under the magnet, with a page off a Jacobi pad.

"I didn't forget your thermos," it said. "I kept it back. I couldn't say it to your face, so I figured you'd come up for it and see. I'm sorry it took five hours. Talk to somebody. J."

I read it standing up.

I left the picture where it was.

The night the Department took me back I made the coffee myself, with too much milk, and it wasn't as good.

I went out the door at nine, like a clock, past Car Two, which Artie keeps very nice.

I work nights. I live on nineteen. I take the stairs.