PHIL'S STORY
Chapter 1
The thunderbolt of Harry Randall's death hit Phil Constantine at Grainger's Tavern. It was thrown from the TV over the bar by a glossy-haired anchorwoman in an insistent blue suit. The news blasted him with a powerful jolt, though no one watching would have seen that: just his eyes opening slightly, his jaw tightening as his focus narrowed and intensified.
In court Phil would sometimes cock his head, lean forward when a witness spoke—a prosecution witness, never his own—as though what he was hearing made no sense. As though he were trying to understand by moving closer to the source of his confusion. That gesture, though, was ruthlessly tactical. A lawyer who admitted to confusion was a fool. Real surprises, like being told by the evening news that that bastard reporter had jumped off the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, called for control.
Facing gravely into the camera, a trench-coated reporter spooled off as many facts of Harry Randall's life and death as he could jam into forty-five seconds. Behind him a weary-looking cop ripped down crime-scene tape. Two more linked tow chains to Randall's empty car. When the story was done, Phil asked Steve, behind the bar, to switch the channel, to try to catch it again.
“Something going on?” Steve glanced apprehensively up at the TV, tensing with someone's just-opened beer bottle in one hand.
“No, nothing new.” Phil spoke reassuringly—reassurance was one of the tones in his automatic repertoire —“just someone I know,” he added, to explain. Steve nodded but gave the TV another distrustful look as he reached for the remote, handed it to Phil.
Everyone was like this now. Every siren, every subway delay, every unexpected crowd as you rounded the corner, made your heart speed, your palms sweat. You walked along thinking of your day or your date or your dinner, and then you saw someone on the street run up to someone else and whisper, and before you could stop yourself you were thinking, That's it, something else happened. What this time? Sarin in the subway? Car bombs in the tunnels, dynamite on the bridge? Smallpox, assassination, poison in the water?
Everyone was like this, Phil as much as anyone. You just had to control yourself and go on anyway: it wasn't going away.
Phil flicked through channels. He found the Harry Randall story again, just ending, heard only what he'd just heard, learned nothing new. Either the other stations weren't running it, or, Harry Randall being one of their own, they'd led with it and he'd missed it already. Probably that. The death of a reporter, even a washed-up drunk like Harry Randall, was news to reporters. It would have been, even without the bullshit stories the
Phil laid the remote on the bar. Steve came over and picked it up, Phil thanking him but really only half there, half aware of one televised story ending and another beginning. An anchorman offered him scenes of the war and developments in homeland defense. He paid no attention to the rest of the news or the rest of the crowd, sparse still, though Grainger's, barely a dozen blocks from Ground Zero, had never closed.
On the night of the day itself, Phil, stunned, exhausted, and alone, had stood at his window looking out over the dark, silent streets of Lower Manhattan. Down the block, flickering lights caught his eye: candles in Grainger's window. That Steve had lit them that first night as a beacon was clear, though whether he was offering rescue or hoping to be rescued, Phil was never sure.
The light brought Phil down four flights from his blacked-out apartment to a bar nearly but not totally dark, nearly but not totally empty. That first night there were five of them, all longtime regulars who lived inside what was suddenly the perimeter, in places without power but still habitable thanks to the arbitrary nature of currents of wind and smoke.
In Phil's memory of that night, they huddled in a room that stank of smoke and sweat. Compulsively they told one another their stories: the avalanche roar, the choking black cloud, then the silence, sudden, absolute, and horrifying; and then, as in a nightmare, roar and cloud and silence again as the second tower fell.
Grainger's had no ice and no TV, but someone had brought a radio. They twirled the dial until they found a station still broadcasting. In the shuddering candlelight they sat late, drank, and talked—Phil, no, Phil not talking, just silent, just listening to others' words swirling around him, like sounds from afar brought on a whirlwind, Phil saying almost nothing but not leaving—and all of them alert to changes in the newscaster's tone as though to rumblings of the heavens from which the gods might speak. Phil remembered drinking steadily but remaining sober, scotch slipping past the numbness at his core like wind whistling around a rock.
Now, tonight, Phil sat here again, as he had almost every night before (when Grainger's was just a place, somewhere to unwind) and every night since (when anything familiar was a parachute and everyone was falling). With barroom solidarity the other regulars ignored what Harry Randall had written about Phil, as though they hadn't read the stories (unlikely); or they made it a point to tell Phil that they didn't buy one single word of that crap (to Phil's mind, people being what they were, equally unlikely). A third reaction, one nobody voiced but Phil sensed in the appraising looks he caught when he glanced in the mirror above the bar, was a surprised respect: That string- bean Jew lawyer? Mixed up with Eddie Spano, for all these years? Whaddaya know?
There was a fourth reaction now, too: Phil could see it on cops or firefighters who'd known Grainger's from before, who were working the rescue but had to get away from the tent. They'd come to the bar bringing other cops and firefighters with them, ones who'd come down from Massachusetts, up from Kentucky or Virginia. If they knew who he was—and the ones who did would point him out to the ones who didn't—they would glare at him in anger, in disgust, as though it was Phil Constantine who'd brought the great Jimmy McCaffery low. The untruth of that, the twisted irony, was so great, and secret-keeping so long a habit, that Phil could only shake his head and turn away.
Phil sipped his scotch, stared into the dimness. Harry Randall's voice, demanding, insinuating, churned in his memory. It drowned out the bar's mindless chatter and the anchorman's bland modulation. Phil watched as Randall's creased, pugnacious face formed and floated in the air before him.
In the end, Randall had won. Phil had fought him with all his courtroom weapons of exaggerated rationality, sarcasm, feigned innocence, and personal attack. He'd buried his knowledge at the center of a blinding maze of argument, tirade, sermon, and bitter humor. But Randall, with his irritating shrug, had merely to turn and go
