Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

Columbus Circle—some public place where he can shake hands and fade into the crowd. You may want to hug him, but you can’t, which is just as well because he hates being touched. By the time you turn to ask one last question and sneak in a thank-you slap on the shoulder, he’s gone.

He vanishes before you know that you and he are done.

You thought you were friends, but for all he knows, you might follow him home and rip off his Van Gogh or trash his beautiful things; you might just murder him, dispose of the body, and move into his vacant life. Don’t try to call; he keeps the business phone set on silent. It’s on the Pugin table in his front hall, and if you don’t know who Pugin was, you certainly don’t belong in his house.

The house is everything Weston hoped. Meticulously furnished, with treasures carefully placed. A little miracle of solitude. Leaving the upper-class grid at venerable St. Paul’s and Harvard was like getting out of jail. No more roommates’ clutter and intrusions, no more head-on collisions with other people’s lives. He sees women on a temporary basis; he’ll do anything for them, but he never brings them home, which is why it always ends. It’s not Weston’s fault he’s fastidious. Remember, he’s an orphaned only child. To survive, he needs everything perfect: sunlight on polished mahogany in his library, morning papers folded and coffee ready and housekeeper long gone, no outsiders, no family to badger him; they all died in that plane crash when he was four.

He spends days at his computer, although he deletes more than he types, lunches at a club even New Yorkers don’t know about, hunts treasure in art galleries and secondhand bookstores, can get the best table wherever he wants, but girls?

He’s waiting for one who cares about all the same things.

* * *

Too bad that Wings Germaine, and not the first tourist he booked, the one with the lovely phone voice, whom he loved on sight at the interview, shows up for the last-ever Weston Walking Tour. While thirteen lucky tourists gather at the subway kiosk on Seventy-second at Broadway, Wings is waiting elsewhere and for unstated reasons —down there.

Weston has no idea what’s ahead. It’s a sunny fall Saturday, light breeze, perfect for the classic Central Park walk, so what could be easier or more convenient? It’s a half block from his house.

All he has to do is collect his group outside the kiosk, where they are milling with vacant smiles. They light up at the sight of his neatly lettered placard. Grinning, he stashes it in the back of his jeans, to be used only when for some unforeseen reason he loses one of them.

A glance tells him this is a Starbucks bunch. With their cameras and sagging fanny packs, they wouldn’t be comfortable at chic old Café des Artistes, which is right around the corner from his house. It’s not their fault their personal styles are, well, a bad match. But they are. He’s one short, which bothers him. Where is that girl he liked so much? Too bad he has to move on, but maybe she’ll catch up. Nice day, nice enough people, he thinks—with the possible exception of the burly tourist in the black warm-up jacket with the Marine Corps emblem picked out in gold, who walks with his shoulders bunched, leaning into a scowl.

Never mind. It’s a beautiful day, and Weston is in charge. Happy and obedient, his tourists trot past the spot where John Lennon died and into the park on a zigzag, heading for the east side, where the Metropolitan Museum bulks above the trees like a mastodon lumbering away. He keeps up a lively patter, spinning stories as his people smile blandly and nod, nod, nod, all except the man with the scowl, who keeps looking at his watch.

Weston looks up: Ooops. Like a cutting horse, his ex-marine has the herd heading into a bad place.

Time to get out of here. He’ll walk them south on Fifth, point out houses owned by people he used to know. “All right,” he says brightly, “time to see how the rich people live.”

“Wait.” The big marine fills the path like a rhino bunched to charge. “You call this the insider tour?”

Smile, Weston. “Didn’t I just…”

He points to a gap in the bushes; Weston knows it too well. “TAKE US THE FUCK INSIDE.”

No! Behind those bushes, a gash in the rocks opens like a mouth. He can’t go back! Weston struggles for that tour-guide tone. “What would you like to see?”

“Tunnels.”

The ground underneath the park is laced with unfinished city projects—tunnels, aborted subway stations, all closed to them; Weston has researched, and he knows. “Oh,” he says, relieved, “then you want City Spelunking Tours. I have their number and…”

“Not those. The ones real people dug. Nam vets. Old hippies.”

“There aren’t any—”

The big man finishes with a disarming grin. “Crazies like me. I have buddies down there.”

“There’s nothing down there.” Weston shudders. He’s a client; don’t offend. “That’s just urban legend, like a lot of other things you think you know. Now, if you like legends, I can take you to Frank E. Campbell’s, where they have all the famous funerals, or the house where Stanford White got shot by Harry K. Thaw.…”

“No. DOWN!” The renegade tourist roars like a drill sergeant, and the group snaps to like first-day recruits. “Now. Moving out!”

Weston holds up his placard, shouting, “Wait!”

Too late. Like a pack of lemmings, the last-ever Weston Walking Tour falls in behind the big man.

They are heading into a very bad place. No, Weston doesn’t want to talk about it. He waves his arms like signal flags. “Wrong way! There’s nothing here!”

The marine whirls, shouting, “You fucking well know it’s here.”

The hell of it is, Weston does. He is intensely aware of the others in his little group: the newlyweds, the dreary anniversary couple, the plump librarian and the kid in the Derek Jeter shirt, the others are watching with cool, judgmental eyes. In spite of their cheap tourist claptrap and bland holiday smiles, they are not stupid people; they’re fixed on the conflict, eager to see something ordinary tourists don’t see. The authority of their guide is at issue. They are waiting to see how this plays out. There is an intolerable pause.

“Well?”

One more minute and the last Weston Walking Tour will die of holding its breath.

* * *

If you knew what Weston knew, you would be afraid.

His only friend at St. Paul’s vanished on their senior class trip to the city. One minute weird Ted Bishop was hunched on the steps of the Museum of Natural History, shivering under a long down coat that was brown and shiny as a cockroach’s shell and zipped to the chin on the hottest day of the year. Then he was gone.

Last winter Weston ran into Bishop on Third Avenue, with that same ratty coat leaking feathers and encrusted with mud. It was distressing; he did what he could. He took him into a restaurant and bought him hot food, looked away when his best friend stuffed everything he couldn’t devour into his pockets with the nicest smile. “I went crazy. I hid because I didn’t want you to know.”

“I wouldn’t have minded.” Weston’s stomach convulsed.

“At first I was scared but then, Weston. Oh!”

It was terrifying, all that naked emotion, so close. He shrank, as if whatever Ted had was catching.

“Then they found me.” Bishop’s pale face gleamed. “Man, there’s a whole world down there. I suppose you think I’m nuts.”

“Not really.” Weston reached for a gag line. “I thought you’d gotten a better offer.”

“I did!” Ted lit up like an alabaster lamp. “One look and I knew: These are my people. And this is my place! You have to see!”

“I’ll try.” He did; he followed the poor bastard to the entrance—it’s right behind these bushes, he knows—and stopped.… “Wait.”

… and heard Ted’s voice overlapping, “Wait. I have to tell them you’re coming. You will wait for me, right?”

Weston wanted to be brave, but he could not lie. “I’ll try.”

He couldn’t stop Ted, either. The tunnel walls shifted behind his friend as if something huge had swallowed him in its sleep. Its foul breath gushed out of the hole; Weston heard the earth panting, waiting to swallow him. Forgive him, he fled.

* * *