The owner of the building was converting it to cooperative apartments, and he’d placed a stack of brochures for prospective buyers on the small table in the lobby. Corman picked one up as he headed toward the elevator, and read it idly while he waited.
The writer had done a good job, and as he read, Corman saw elegant people going in and out of the building, heard cabs honking impatiently outside, felt the syncopated rhythm of this part of the old city, its once jazzy life. And yet, in the end, the writing had come out faintly sad and sentimental, nostalgic in a way that turned nostalgia itself into a form of letting go, of hoisting the white flag.
He dropped the brochure into the small metal garbage can between the elevator doors and looked at Lucy. “What’d you do to day?”
“Nothing,” Lucy said, rolling her eyes slightly.
“What’s the matter?”
“You always ask that.”
“It’s something I want to know.”
“But it’s always the same,” Lucy told him. She shifted about impatiently, popped her gum. “We read about Columbus, that’s all.”
“The man who discovered America.”
Lucy looked at him scoldingly. “Not really. The Indians were already around.”
“Yes, they were,” Corman said. “Even in Manhattan.”
The elevator arrived. They rode up slowly, then walked down the long, somewhat smelly corridor toward their apartment.
“Mr. Ingersoll’s cooking sausage again,” Corman said. He twitched his nose. “Jesus.”
A small white envelope had been taped to the door of the apartment. Corman quickly snapped it off, sank it into his coat pocket.
“What’s that?” Lucy asked.
“Just a note,” Corman said. “From the landlord.”
Lucy looked at him worriedly. “Are we behind again?”
“Just a little,” Corman told her as he opened the door.
Once inside, Lucy went directly to her room while Corman sat down at the small dining table and read the note with the little edge of panic that always pressed against his flesh when money was tight. He waited a few minutes for it to subside, then began assembling the rolls of film he’d taken during the day: a fire in the Village, but nothing spectacular, an auto accident on the Upper West Side, a broken water main in the Garment District. He’d taken seven rolls of film but there was nothing worth developing.
He unstrapped the police radio from his belt, set it down on the table and turned it on. For a few seconds it was quiet. Then a patrolman mentioned a woman who’d jumped out a window on West 47th Street almost an hour before. He ended with something about a baby or a doll or something. Static covered the last of it.
He sat back and waited for something else to break, but the radio remained silent except for the usual traffic mishaps, petty thefts, domestic squabbles, nothing Pike or any of the other photographic editors would be interested in, no heroic measures or last minute rescues.
He stood up and paced the room restlessly. He could feel his own edginess building slowly, insistently, like a pressure beneath his skin. He knew part of it was money, the rest just his nature. Finally it overtook him and drove him to Lucy’s room. He tapped lightly at the door.
“Come in.”
Corman opened the door, peeked inside. “I have to go out for a shoot,” he told her.
Lucy looked up excitedly. “Can I come?”
“No.”
Her face fell slightly. “I never get to go on the night shoots.”
“You have school.”
“But I want to see things, too.”
Corman shook his head. “No.”
CHAPTER
TWO
THE RAIN WAS falling heavily by the time Corman got to 47th Street. The photographer from the Crime Scene Unit was perched on a small portable ladder, his body bent forward, the camera pointed toward the woman. His name was Shepherd. Corman had seen him many times before, knew the old brown hat, pea-green raincoat, thick white socks, all now completely soaked in rain.
“Just finishing up,” Shepherd said dully as Corman stepped up to him. He aimed the camera steadily, seemed to freeze.
Watching him, Corman admired the care he took, the way he never let things distract him. He supposed the photographers of the old city had worked the same way, as if they’d had no lives outside, nothing to break their concentration, but only the darkness beneath the short black hood, the single tunnel of silver light. And yet, he thought, there was a dark flip side to such intense concentration, since focus shut out everything it didn’t center on.
A bright flash swept the street as Shepherd shot the picture. Corman flinched, turned to the left and made his way toward the two men who slouched idly under a green cloth awning a few yards away.
The awning was badly tattered. Its torn flaps snapped softly in the breeze. It would make a marketable picture, had what Pike called “symbol potential.” In this case, urban decay. As Corman moved toward it, he could see that it only fitfully protected the two men from the hard, pelting rain.
“Lousy weather,” Santana said as Corman joined him under the awning.
Santana was a shooter for a lower Manhattan weekly who sometimes turned up at fire and crime scenes when things were slow in Soho or Tribeca. He was always friendly, almost jaunty, insensibly happy in the way birds seemed happy, along with other lower forms.
“It always rains on a street shoot,” Santana added. His skin was smooth and brown. He looked around thirty, but Corman had noticed that he liked to act the old pro, even when talking to men who’d been on hundreds of street shoots when the air had been bright, hot, dry, no rain in sight.
“Christ, look at that,” Santana said. He pointed to a cascading sheet of water that plunged from the top of a tenement to the street below. “Like fucking Niagara.”
“Yeah,” the other man said. His name was Fogarty, a shooter for a Brooklyn biweekly.
“You’re late on this one, Corman,” Santana said after a moment. “The whole world’s come and gone. What’s the matter, you don’t keep glued to the police frequency anymore?”
Corman’s fingers reflexively moved to the radio handset which hung in a black holster from his belt. “I was taking a walk with my daughter.”
Santana waved his hand. “Well the ME’s already been here. And Shepherd’s the only guy left from CSU.” He shook his head. “He’s taken a full roll already. God knows why.”
“He’s got a morbid streak, that’s why,” Fogarty said with a grim smile.
Santana looked at him doubtfully, the little black moustache twitching to the right.
“No lie,” Fogarty said firmly. “He hangs around like a fucking fly, sniffing, sniffing, rubbing his skinny little fingers together.” He did his standard imitation of a fly frantically raking its front legs. “Like that, you know?”
A single car swept by, throwing arcs of water from behind. Fogarty’s eyes followed it, squinting slightly to see who was behind the wheel.
“Shepherd’s a pro,” Santana said. “The way I hear it, first he shoots the hole, then the splinters on the floor.”
Fogarty faked a shiver.
Santana laughed. “You got a moral streak, Fogarty, a belief in humanity. I admire it.”
“Bullshit.”
Corman’s eyes shifted back to Shepherd. He’d stepped off the ladder and was now breaking it down, getting ready to tuck it under his arm, return it to the CSU wagon. As he bent forward, small bursts of water leaped from the back of his coat, as if to strike at him was the whole secret purpose of the rain.
“A couple shooters rushed over right after the jump,” Santana told Corman. “One from the News. One from the Post. Some video cams, too. But nobody looked that excited.”