elsewhere. Randall hadn't found his way to the truth, not all the way in. But he'd gotten his story. True? Did it matter? He'd won.
But now, it seemed, he had lost.
Phil slipped a ten onto the bar, left his drink unfinished. It was his second; he never finished the second. Before September 11 he'd never ordered a second. But early on, the crowds thin as they were, he'd tried way overtipping for the one he'd had. Steve had pointedly left the extra bills on the bar. Now Phil ordered two, left the second, tipped on both. Neither he nor Steve ever said anything about it.
Phil pushed out of Grainger's into stillness. The streets were almost empty of people, no cars at all; down here the perimeter still held. The rumble of heavy equipment faded as he moved south, away from the site. Behind him the sky glowed with an icy gleam from the enormous lights lent by filmmakers to the rescue effort. No, not rescue now; now, just recovery.
A faint breeze brought him the smell of burning. At Battery Park he walked past the wary eyes of two young men wearing military camouflage, holding rifles, serving their country on the tip of Manhattan. Kids with guns, Phil thought. Once that would have meant either a threat or a client. Now, God help us, they were here to protect him.
He leaned on the railing near the ferry terminal. He knew this place so well, he was sometimes surprised his shoes hadn't made grooves in the pavement, his hands hadn't worn down the rail. He'd stood here so many times in the beginning years, staring across the water, letting the ferries go, telling himself he'd take the next one. And in the end turning, walking home.
Telling himself it didn't matter. Telling himself it was better. Going for coffee in the morning with the blond photographer in the top-floor loft whose boyfriend had just walked out on her. Buying drinks for a girl from some southern college while she marveled at how everything was just so different here. Phil thinking, My God, they'll eat you alive, taking her home, leaving her, perplexed and a little hurt, at her apartment door.
And waiting. Until—collapsing under the weight of a need as great as his? or just simple loneliness? he was never sure—the walls Sally built to keep him out would crumble. Then for months he'd cross the harbor nearly every evening to her world, that alien place of quiet houses on shaded streets, Sunday morning church bells, and neighbors who lived in the homes they'd grown up in. He'd stay until morning, then sneak away, sailing back through the breaking mist to the sparkling towers of his own world like a prince from some idiotic fairy tale. Trying to avoid being transformed by the sun's first rays into what, exactly? What could getting caught with Sally Keegan in the hard light of day turn him into that he hadn't already become?
Phil stared across the harbor, watched the ferry, but tonight he couldn't go.
Now, when the death of Jimmy McCaffery was only one of many deaths that Sally's Staten Island neighborhood was trying to stand up under—McCaffery, gone from the place for over twenty years but still a hero there, how well Phil knew—Phil was staying away. Not because he gave a damn how the people of Pleasant Hills looked at him, the silent stares as he walked down their streets. Truth was, it wasn't so different now from the way it had always been. He'd always felt eyes on him, known things were said beyond his hearing that he wouldn't want to hear. The idea that the people of Pleasant Hills thought less of him than before Harry Randall's muckraking was almost laughable.
But Sally. She'd read the articles, too. She had never cared any more than he what her neighbors thought, and she didn't care now: but Sally wanted to know the truth. Demanded explanations he didn't have. Refused the ones he gave her.
Sally didn't believe what Randall had written about Jimmy McCaffery. Kevin didn't, either. In Pleasant Hills, no one did.
It might, though, be true.
But it appeared they were all willing to believe what he'd written about Phil.
And Phil?
Phil had to admit (but so far, only to himself) that what Randall had written about him might also be true.
He turned, to look not across the harbor but anywhere else. Up the Hudson, at buildings and ships and, above them, tiny pale stars just opening into a perfect cobalt sky. Harry Randall. That bastard Harry Randall had killed himself. And why the hell, Phil thought, gripping the rail as though to choke the truth out of it, why the
The river went on and the stars didn't blink. Phil's fury faded, unsustainable. The answer, of course, was that without the McCaffery story and the shitstorm that followed it, the old bastard would never have done this at all.
Staring north through the haze of the filmmakers' lights, Phil considered the crushing weight of guilt Randall must have carried these past weeks. The truth about McCaffery might have mattered once. But not now. New Yorkers didn't need truth now. Now New Yorkers needed what Sally and Kevin had always needed: for the sainted Jimmy McCaffery to have actually been the hero they thought he was.
Randall's article had come too late to do anything but harm. And Randall must have finally come—too late—to see that.
And so Phil accepted the facts of Randall's death as they had been spread before him. Oh, he had questions, when was he without questions? But not among them, not yet, was the question of whether Harry Randall's death had actually been suicide.
BOYS' OWN BOOK
Chapter 3
Now it's later, though not by much, and changes have come, but not so many. Not the important ones; or if they have begun, you cannot see them.
