Like People in History (51 page)

Now, in a single phone call, that was changed forever.

The seaplane alighted on its pontoons in the East River. I searched through the window for the familiar dumpy figure of the Grunt, who was supposed to be meeting me there. No Grunt. But I did see a gypsy cab from the usual company our cheapskate editor always hired whenever a car was needed. And there, walking toward the dock to meet me, was, of all people, Sydelle Auslander.

"Where's Bernard?" I asked, letting her take my bag. She shrugged and handed me an envelope. I opened it and took out an official-looking press pass. We'd barely gotten into the cab when it took off.

With all the fire engines, Twenty-eighth Street would be impossible. But not Sixth Avenue, and I stopped our driver there, leapt out, and began threading my way through the dozen or so fire trucks. There were three companies represented, including those from the West Village, always the cutest firemen in Manhattan—a few of centerfold quality.

"No press past dis here spot!" a detective in a streaked trench coat said and held me back. The fire had evidently been put out. I had to hurry.

"I have to get in. I know someone who was in there."

He looked me straight in the eye and said, "No one was in there. That's an abandoned building."

"Like hell it is!" I said. I spotted a guy wearing a heavy poncho over what looked like a fire department uniform.

"Captain," I called out, getting his attention, "I've got a press pass and this flatfoot isn't letting me through."

A good-looking heavyset guy in his fifties, clearly in his element and not happy with the police, the captain came over to us and took a look at my pass. He reminded me of someone, a young Cap'n Kangaroo or... I don't know.

"Pass looks good to me," he told the cop.

"No press on the premises. I've got orders."

I mentioned the magic name Alistair had given me. "He thinks the press should be
on
the premises. At least he did when I spoke to him about this, a half hour ago," I told the cop. "You want to call his office and explain to him why you're not letting me through? Or should I call myself from the pay phone and give him your badge number while I'm at it?"

He glared at me. "You stay here," the cop said, suddenly very nervous.

I saw him talk to someone in civilian clothes, evidently his superior. As I waited, the fire department captain looked me over.

"You've got some fancy friends, Mr...."

"Sansarc. Roger."

"Fahey. John Anthony," he offered his name but no hand to be shaken. "I take it there's a reason your fancy friend wants you inside?"

"He wants me to see if there are any bodies. To I.D. them. To count them. He's afraid the count might be incorrect at Arson Division."

Captain Fahey bit his lower lip. "What bodies? That's an abandoned building."

"That's the official lie. The unofficial truth is that it's a well-known and heavily attended homosexual bathhouse," I said, "and it was operating when the fire broke out. I take it that the employees split at the first whiff of smoke, and I assume the management is at this moment booking long vacations in the Bahamas. But I'm going inside!"

Trench coat returned. "We don't know nothing," he said. I noticed that he'd covered over his badge with a wrapped hanky and that the guy he'd been speaking to had vanished. "But we don't want any trouble."

So I pushed my way through the wooden horses, ignoring his faint attempt at a protest, and addressed myself to Captain Fahey.

"You going to help me?"

"It's going to be... No one knows where to look."

I looked directly at one merry pale-blue eye and said, "I know the layout of the place pretty well."

Without flinching, he asked back, "Upstairs and down?"

"The whole place. I've been inside several times."

"You're full of surprises, aren't you? How easily do you throw up?"

"Doesn't matter. I've still got to go in."

"Okay, tough guy, let's see how big your chops really are," he said, handing me a hard fire hat and an axe, and taking one up himself, along with a long, deadly-looking flashlight.

The space directly behind the entrance booth had been knocked completely in. The ground floor of the bathhouse looked strangely open and gutted. It smelled really awful. It was still pretty dark and smoky and almost comfortingly warm.

"Downstairs!" I pointed. "The showers and the pool."

"Whoever was down there got out." He pointed up the half-burned-away stairs. "Same here. All the staff. So did the people on the next floor. If there's a problem, it's up top."

There were plenty of firemen chopping away at the remnants of the thin walls as we ascended. The captain borrowed an oxygen unit from one, and he and I both took sips from it.

The stairs to the top floor were gone. We had to be hoisted up there by rope. The air was better: no wonder—the roof had come down in sections and the place was open to the gray morning.

Fahey held a building plan in his hands. I glanced at it.

"Forget it! The place was remodeled a few years ago!"

I remembered that dozens of new, low-ceilinged booths had been installed up here in the remodeling. Some had been around a corner. It took me a while to locate them: they were through another doorway. Here, the walls were still warm, the cubicle walls still standing. It was darker too: the ceiling had held here, although it could be heard dropping in places behind us. Surely this was the least affected area of the place. It must be vacant.

As we advanced, I held up the axe protectively as Fahey instructed. Our flashlights provided only dull gleams of light. Even so, as we kicked our way into booth after booth, I ended up seeing far more than I wanted to.

Three bodies. All of them alone. Given the way his body was twisted and the contortions of his facial features, only one man had come to consciousness during the fire. It seemed to have been a momentary awareness, a rising out of sleep perhaps, though much too late for him to do anything but claw his way out the cubicle door, then retreat back inside from the smoke, and lie huddled down, and choke to death. The others both appeared to have been overcome by fumes in their sleep. Possibly drugged sleep, I thought. Doubtless exhausted-after-sexual-climax-sleep. I'd seen two of the men before. Even knew the name of one. Ironically, it turned out that a cardboard pane had been installed instead of a window on the other side of the pressboard wall in one cubicle. Had he known it and awakened, he might have punched a hole, crawled onto the ledge—and lived.

I remained outside the line of cubicles while the captain left and returned with a Homicide photographer and Forensic detectives, both of whose names I took down. I witnessed them opening the wallets and I.D.-ing each victim. Then I went with another firefighter looking for any more hidden rooms.

We didn't find any. Only the three on the top floor.

That's what I corroborated with Captain Fahey and a lieutenant from Arson Division once we were down on the street again. I saw a few reporters from the daily city desks of big papers, and I told them. My job was now done; once they moved in with their sharklike instincts for news, I could leave.

"Can I have that back?" Fahey asked.

I looked down at the fire axe I was still gripping.

Only then did I realize I'd also been clenching my teeth for maybe the past hour,

Fahey made a big show of shaking my hand.

"You were right," I said. "I wanted to barf a half dozen times."

"But you didn't," Fahey said, still holding my hand. "I've got ten-year men wouldn't have poked around like you did, looking for what you didn't want to find."

"You don't get it! I could have been one of those guys."

And when he didn't respond, I tried again.

"Those three? They're... We're like... brothers!"

"Ah!" he said quickly, darkly, with a look of agony. So he did understand.

"By the way, you happen to count the ceiling sprinklers?" I asked.

He looked at me as though I were crazy and began laughing. I could still hear him guffawing as I threaded my way through the hook-and-ladders down the block.

Sydelle Auslander jumped up from a doorway where she'd been sitting doing the
Times
crossword puzzle. "Forrest said to call him right away. There's a pay phone in there!"

A Greek luncheonette. She was smart enough to have taken the receiver off the hook so no one else could use it, to have found us a booth, and to have ordered me coffee and a bear claw for when I was done telling our editor everything I knew. I gobbled up the pastry in seconds.

"You were awfully brave," Sydelle started to say.

I thought, Come on, Harriet! Certain she was putting me on with all the bullshit about how she could never go into the building like I had.

"We were afraid of a cover-up. Interdepartmental collusion," I quickly said, watching her closely. "You know, no bodies—no fire!" She picked at her corn muffin.

I kept thinking, Okay, she doesn't smoke cigarettes.... She's drinking juice, not black coffee. ,.. Her fingernails aren't bitten halfway down the digits.... Her makeup isn't off a sixteenth of an inch.... Why then does she seem to be a complete nervous wreck?

I ordered more food. When the waitress was gone, Sydelle said, "I
asked
to come here, today. Instead of Bernard."

That was news. I'd assumed Harte was up to something, throwing us together, hoping we'd act human toward each other. I'd meant to ask him during the call, but forgot in the barrage of his questions about the fire.

"The reason I asked," she went on, "was I wanted to be alone with you when I asked why it is that you act like... well, not like Marcy Lorimer says she knows you to be."

I could have acted surprised, but on some level I'd been expecting this question for a month.

"You're not Marcy," I said by way of explanation. "You're an employee. Not an old friend." "What I mean is. why are you acting like by my being here I'm taking something from you?"

She said it with intensity, and immediately pulled away from her question, as though dissociating herself from it, or allowing it to stand on its own and do its own work.

Was I really acting like that?

"You are, you know," she answered my unspoken question, which only half fazed me: I like to think my basic honesty shows up on my face, in my attitude. "And you shouldn't," she said. "You
have
everything you could want!"

Her assurance amused me. "Oh, I do, do I?"

"You have a great job that pays well and has the potential for shaping and influencing gays all over the country. You've got terrific connections in the arts and media. You get tickets to everything. I hear you've got a nice apartment, rent-stabilized. You take a big house with great views in the Pines. You have interesting and talented friends. You're good-looking, with a nice body. You're healthy and relatively well-off. You have a handsome, famous lover, whom every gay in the city envies you for... despite the rumors."

I'd been listening to her, rapt, wondering exactly how much longer she intended buttering me up, and where exactly she was heading, until she'd arrived at that last, intriguing, problematic phrase.

"What rumors are those? That we're breaking up?"

She began to waffle until I gave her my own brand of "deadeye."

"Well... he is reportedly seen out with other guys."

"Thad Harbison is the only other guy! I know all about it. Completely platonic! Not that all of Matt's—or my own—affairs, for that matter, have been without sex. We're liberated. We've been together a few years. We have an open marriage."

"The rumors I meant weren't about Thad but..."

But what? She was holding firm. And of course, simultaneously withdrawing into objectivity.

"...about Matt's background," she said.

His background? Did she mean the war?

"Matt was a gunner on a Navy destroyer and served in Southeast Asia," I said. "He received a medical discharge after two tours. Medal of

Honor. He's not particularly proud of it. Neither will he deny it. Matt was a kid when he joined up. Satisfied?"

"I didn't know he was in Nam or wounded. I was talking about something else in his background... his family."

"What about his family?"

"Loguidice Carting in Rye is the largest private sanitation contractor in three counties."

"What's that have to do with Matt?"

"Don't you know? I mean, he's your lover for how many years and you don't even know your lover is a major Mafia princeling!"

"He's
what
?" I began to laugh. "Wait a minute here, Mizz Auslander! The reason I know little about Matt's family is that he has virtually nothing to do with them! He talks to his folks maybe once a month on die phone. Sees them maybe once a year. He's hardly Al Capone's heir....
If
what you're saying about Loguidice Carting being connected to the mob is even true..."

"It's true. When I was a reporter in White Plains, I found out all about private sanitation contractors upstate."

"...And even if they are crooked, it's Matt's grandfather who owns it, for Chrissakes! Not Matt. Even his dad has nothing to do with it."

"What kind of work does his father do?" she asked.

I'd never heard that Matt's father ever held a job. "He doesn't. He has some sort of medical history...." I left it vague, since that was all I really knew. "The old man, Matt's Grandpa Loguidice, pretty much takes care of the family. Which," I was fast to add, "doesn't mean he's Mafia. I've met the old man maybe twice in all these years. He wasn't even close to being Mr. Monster. Any other rumors?"

None evidently, since she was silent. My breakfast arrived and I attacked it. After being withdrawn with her juice for a while, she said, "Okay, maybe I'm out of line with all those rumors."

"Matt would probably be tickled to hear them. I, however, am offended for him. And for his ethnicity."

"I said I apologize! Let's get back to the magazine. What I'm saying is I just want a chance there."

"The
cri de coeur
of every assistant editor hired! Look, it's nothing personal," I said. "I just happen to think it's an especially stupid idea having women's stuff in
Manifest.
It'll be patronizing to the few women readers we have and ignored by the many men readers. Harte knows where I stand. I told him he ought to start another, different magazine and have you write for it."