Absent Friends

PHIL'S STORY

Chapter 1

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The Man Who Sat by the Door

October 30, 2001

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 Tribune had been running these past few weeks. Stories that started from the pure bright light of that fallen hero, Jimmy McCaffery, and spread in so many directions like a scorching flame. Stories with Randall's byline over them as though his name still meant something, stories meant to reignite a career long since cooled to ash.

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 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 hell, if the old bastard was going to do this, couldn't he have done it weeks ago and spared everyone all this shit?

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.