Jimmy's a fireman. Aces the Academy and has a choice of houses; and though he could have had Manhattan, where the television cameras always come, or Bed-Stuy, where the trucks go screaming out two, three times a night, Jimmy asks for and gets Engine 168, around the corner. Wants to be close, so he can trot down to the house on days off, to drink coffee, listen to the old-timers. He loves the stories, Jimmy does: lunatic bravery, elaborate pranks, offhand memories of laughing just out of Death's reach.
Four years old: Jimmy across the street, wearing the red plastic fireman's helmet he got for Christmas, so excited he can't stand still as the bell clangs and the door flies up so 168 can go tearing out. Firefighters yank their coats on, swing up on the truck as it starts to roll. One of them grins, waves to Jimmy. Jimmy's father grabs him: The kid was gonna run right up onto it, he tells Jimmy's mother later, shaking his head. He was going to the fire, weren't you, Jim? I wanted to go, Jimmy says, I wanted to go to the fire. His mother asks, You wanted to help the firemen? Jimmy nods hard. But Daddy said, Daddy said they don't let kids, kids aren't big enough. I can help when I'm bigger. When I'm bigger, I'll go to the fire and help. Jimmy's dad musses Jimmy's hair and smiles. His mother smiles, too, but then she looks at him without saying anything, just looks and looks at him.
Now, when the smoke is whipping and the flames are roaring, someone still has to hold Jimmy back, someone senior screaming, No! some soot-streaked face in his, yelling, Don't play Superman, kid, just do your job, that way you make it out and all your brothers, too. What Jimmy wants, what he
But Brother: they're calling him that already.
So he nods through the smoke, follows his orders, shrugs when his captain shouts to him,
Jimmy's happy.
LAURA'S STORY
Chapter 2
Laura was on the street, blundering through the scattering of midtown pedestrians. End-of-the-day rush hour, but no crowds; mostly office workers, residents, people who had to be here. Finally, on a corner, a cluster of defiant tourists, pointing cameras at the Empire State Building because it was still standing.
Laura barely noticed any of these people, or the sun, or the softness of the air. She was thinking about other afternoons, and nights, mornings, too, about the dry rough feel of Harry's hands and the taste of gin when he kissed her.
Leo had been too smart to try to send her home, to try to give Laura Stone some time off. But a dazed, hollow-eyed reporter isn't much use around a newsroom, in fact gets in the way. Too many others feeling like they have to say something, too much swampy thickness in the atmosphere. What Leo had done instead was rearrange the week's Metro sections, pulling someone's piece on the teachers' union from Friday to tomorrow, pushing Laura's SoHo merchant story to later in the week, maybe even Monday or Tuesday. Because the teachers' union piece was more timely, he'd growled as she stood in his doorway, and she should goddamn know better than to even ask.
So when Laura left soon afterward, she could have been assumed to be working: seeking out more sources, interviewing Prince Street businessmen she'd skipped in her rush to deadline, taking the extra days to dig deeper. No one really did assume this, but Laura's dry-eyed fierceness and the rigid lock of her shoulders set up enough of a barricade that the sympathetic glances and kind comments were mercifully few. As Laura jabbed and jabbed again at the elevator button—slowest frigging elevator in New York, Harry always said, especially when thirsty reporters needed their beer—Georgie appeared and stood sadly, but Laura, her focus inward, living again an afternoon not so very long ago, did not turn his way.
Harry Randall's explosive piece on the real James McCaffery—the third story, following by two weeks the one Leo had assigned as a soft feature on the Fallen Hero, a heartstring-tugger (and assigning it to Harry, the newsroom knew, was further proof of how far Harry himself had fallen)—had been brilliant, and Laura had told him so.
But Harry had not been so easily bought.
It was the trailing edge of an afternoon in late October. Harry had discreetly absented himself as she sifted through his copy. She ran through it once, then again, was on it for a third time when he brought his worry and his gin back with him into the bedroom.
“Terrific,” Laura told him, scooting over to make room. “Jesus, Harry, this'll light the fuse. It's fabulous.”
Neither of them was on that day, and they had not left Harry's apartment. While Harry hunched over his desk, the clicking of keys stopping only when he was rifling through papers, flipping notebooks open and shut, or shifting folders from pile to pile, Laura kept herself mostly to the bedroom. Once or twice, pulling her robe around her, she slipped into the kitchen to make coffee. Each time she left him his without a word and carried hers back to bed, where she was working her way through a stack of yesterday's newspapers.
This was Laura's habit from journalism school days, to scan rags from all over, every week. Harry had groused when she'd first brought her habit to bed on a Sunday afternoon: “Hey, Stone, you're smearing ink all over my sheets.” Laura reminded him he was supposed to be an ink-stained wretch and went on reading. She needed to know: Someone might have thought of an angle she hadn't. Someone's prose might be making readers sit up and take notice. And some young reporter—younger even than she—someone still in the sticks, might be breaking out, a star rising. She needed to know.
Though, if truth be told, the bedroom was a little chilly, the view from its windows dull, a neighbor's brick wall. Laura might have been happier out where Harry was, in the living room, wrapped in a blanket in Harry's reading chair, where she could glance up from an op-ed piece to see the river roll by and to watch Harry work. She would have preferred some conversation, maybe even a kiss and a cuddle, between the
But the muttering Harry Randall in the other room, tossing papers, dropping folders, banging the keys nonstop as the sun slid in orange squares across the wall—this was the Harry Randall of legend. The man the newsroom, with Laura the sole exception, said was gone for good, drowned in gin and futility.
