“Don’t cry on me,” he told her at first. He needed a tough cookie to pass the word.
He also called a former police surgeon named Sorkin, a friend of a friend, who would not give him barbiturates but called in a prescription for Ambien. The Ambien worked well enough for him to handle a call the next day from Gerry’s despised ex, Charlie Kinsella, a dapper and much-feared former policeman. Stack feared Charlie as much as anyone and was not pleased to hear that Kinsella promised to drop by later in the day.
“Aw, God, Eddie,” Charlie said when he came. He took Stack in his arms, affording him a whiff of his cologne. “I’m so sorry.”
Charlie had his hair cut in a place that actors went to. He looked like an actor who might play an Irish cop on television and in fact had provided filmmakers with constabulary advice until even the most rash and reckless of the aspiring moguls had become afraid of him. Stack watched his former brother-in-law enter his living room with princely condescension. Stack thought he might actually be waiting to be shown a seat.
“Have a seat, Charlie.”
Kinsella took off his overcoat in a way Stack thought showed every facet of the Harris weave. He had no idea what such an overcoat might cost. A thousand dollars? Five thousand dollars? More? The dark suit he wore was most impressive.
Charlie Kinsella took Stack’s best chair, carefully removing the past week’s newspapers from it, including a copy of the Gazette. He rested his resplendent overcoat over an adjoining rocking chair, leaving the sofa to Stack, and looked around the room.
“No pictures of Barbara?” He spread his hands, almost smiling, seeming really to require an answer.
“No pictures.”
“I put them up myself, pictures of the departed. I’m not afraid of living in the past.”
I must show nothing to him, Stack thought. Not a wariness of the eye nor a flicker of tongue to lips. Nor the rage he felt at the sound of his dead wife’s name on the thin lips of this man who could dazzle her with a glance, before whom she blushed and melted from shame. Who can freeze me with undifferentiated fear in the throes of my grief when I care nothing whatever for living.
Stack thought he knew where the coat and the cloth of his suit had come from. From an expensive tailor’s shop he was reasonably certain could not be far from Ground Zero on the flame-lit night of the day in question.
“Yez should keep a picture of Maudie.”
“I don’t think so, Charlie. Wouldn’t put one up for a while, I believe.”
How crazy he was, Stack thought. How foul he was! That he should refer to my lost child as “Maudie.” For many years, between the time Maud was a small child and an occasion when she was almost grown, Charlie had not seen the girl. And when introduced to the young adult Maud, he had taken her hand and looked into her eyes with astonishment. Stack knew why. Because Charlie had seen there the youthful married Barbara whom it had been his delight to seduce and perhaps even display once or twice to his hoodlum company, to her mortification.
So Maud had met him. And after meeting him she had said, “Oh, my God. This man is my uncle! He says ‘yez.’ He says ‘I ain’t.’ He’s a cretin!”
And Stack had said, “The word is troglodyte.”
Stack and his daughter had had a laugh. But Charlie was not a troglodyte or a cretin. He was of the rarest.
Kinsella’s eye fell on the bottle of whiskey Stack had not troubled to put aside.
“Oh no, Eddie. This is not the way.”
“Fuck you, Charlie. I mean, go fuck yourself, Charlie.” His adding the second part risked making Charlie Kinsella cross.
“I think I know how you feel,” Charlie said. “You said this thing was a hit-and-run?”
“That’s what I was told.”
“They get him, it might be resolved. To some satisfaction. They get him, he’s ours, Eddie.”
Stack let it pass, but a similar thought had not spared him.
“Gerry was a lot of help to me when Barbara passed.”
“Certainly you can count on her,” Charlie said curtly.
They sat in silence for a moment.
“Listen, Eddie,” Charlie Kinsella said. “There isn’t a chance that in the recovery operation somebody misunderstood something? That something got out and some fuck saw it wrong?”
“You mean heard something and hurt Maud?” Stack stared at him. At first he failed to grasp what Kinsella was asking him.
“You didn’t hear about what she wrote?”
“Yeah, sure,” Charlie said. “But I thought just to eliminate… you know.”
“You know I didn’t touch that shit, Charlie. You know that!”
So the evil of Kinsella and Stack’s own weakness caused the shadow of the dark side to flicker over his grief. The man was suggesting Maud was struck down in vengeance for a guilt that never touched her. Or so lightly. So hardly at all.
“As though I ever fucking referred to it. You’re crazy.”
Charlie did not see himself as crazy. Ever.
Many understood that more personal possessions — cash on a primitive level, credit cards, financial documents, keys and codes, little things and larger things — were found in the dreadful ruins of the twin towers than could ever be returned or passed along or released in an orderly manner to every one of the survivors, if any. Many understood that early in the day on September 11 a brutal, lawless element accompanied the responders, requiring, demanding a share of what was gathered up in that inferno. It happened all the time. It was the world. It was mere humanity.
Old criminal conspiracies that had been, so to speak, present in the pilings under the river, the shafts, the salt-encrusted drowned alleys and bricked-up tunnels, with the eels’ nests and the wrecked rope walks — that had been there in spirit since the first white men, with their bindles and kit, and before them — had emerged with the fire coming down. The word had gone out. Competing villainies saying, It’s ours. Nobody ever suggested such a thing was common or general or even frequent. It was despised and aberrant. Still, it happened.
In depraved quarters, greed and suspicion. “We said all. All over a certain figure. We said all what yez got!” Were all your average citizens a hundred and fifty percent better? No way! So mistakes were made. Charlie Kinsella and associates had a crust. A crust and maybe a crumb besides. It wasn’t more.
Eddie Stack was present that day. His share was emphysema. Placed where he was, he knew a little of what was going on. He could no more have picked up some poor lost soul’s posthumous possession than he could have plunged his hand into a molten girder or into the guts of some poor woman who might have been his own wife or daughter. It was impossible not to half know it, in flashes and fits and the edge of vision, at the rim of a policeman’s mind. And of course there was his then brother-in-law Charlie Kinsella. Stack never saw him that day, but Charlie was there.
Days later the smoke was still everywhere, seeming to be the only source of light. Stack was beginning to understand that he would never draw his breath as before. Maud was safe in her classy Catholic boarding school, where the nuns were long gone but underpaid youths of the Ivy postgraduate faculty struggled to balance the tragedy of the city’s martyrdom with the understandable grievances of the Third World. Barbara had been dead and gone for more than a year, but he still talked to her and still felt she heard him. Then appeared what some old party in an immigrant past might call “a wee man”—sure enough, a little fellow. A little Pinocchio face of a guy. He looks like UPS but he’s not. He’s wearing a messenger’s uniform but you look at his mug, Stack does, and sees not a messenger in the usual sense. He’s come in a panel truck and there are two men with him, not messengers either. The small man has a big box.