Baba Yaga, kill your husband, but please don’t eat my child.
The chef and the butler had been getting on each other’s nerves and it was “Cookie” who cracked. The chef’s default setting was complaint anyway, he was the maestro of the moan, endlessly undervalued and misunderstood, longing to serve up banquets cooked in his beloved extremist style, derived from the work of the grandmasters Adrià and Redzepi, food as performance art, plates billowing with seas of foam, and pieces of toast upon which black ants, still living, had been baked into lean strips of rare wagyu beef. Instead he was asked to make kids’ food for Little Vespa, burgers and more burgers, and vegan rabbit food for Vasilisa. Nero Golden himself didn’t care what he ate as long as it contained plenty of meat. “Cookie” Cucchi’s laments fell upon deaf ears. He had threatened to quit almost every week but had stayed for the money. Now, in the short-staffed house, tempers were frayed and finally McNally ordered the would-be gastronome to shut up and cook. The chef tore off his white hat and apron and waved a meat cleaver in the majordomo’s direction. Then with a grand thump he buried the blade of the cleaver in a wooden chopping board, leaving it there like Excalibur in the stone, and stormed out of the house.
Nero was drowsy and distracted. (This description is a version of the testimony afterwards given by Michael McNally to the police.) Mostly he stayed in his room, half asleep, but sometimes he was to be found wandering downstairs like a sleepwalker. But he could spark into sudden, shocking life. On one occasion he grasped McNally by both shoulders and shouted into his face, Don’t you know who I am, you asshole? I have built cities. I have conquered kingdoms. I am one of the rulers of the world. I don’t know who he imagined he was talking to, McNally said. It wasn’t me. He was looking into my eyes but who knows who he saw. Maybe he saw himself in those days as the emperor whose name he bore. Maybe he thought he was in Rome. I couldn’t honestly say, McNally confessed. I don’t have that level of education.
He’s being poisoned, Vito Tagliabue called me to repeat. No question in my mind.
There was a strange occurrence two days before the fire. The Golden house awoke to find that an enormous gunnysack of dirty laundry had been left on the Macdougal Street doorstep. There was no note. When the sack was opened it was found to be full of what McNally described as foreign clothes. Could he be more specific? From his attempts to describe them I understood them to be Indian clothing. Kurtas, pajamas, lehngas, veshtis, sari blouses, petticoats. There were no instructions and the sender was unknown. Vasilisa, annoyed at the mistake, ordered them to be left out with the trash. There was no need for the master of the house to be informed. The house was not a laundry. Some ignorant foreigner had made an ignorant foreigner’s mistake.
There were construction workers digging up the street. Something to do with vital repairs to the neighborhood’s infrastructure. When McNally was sent out by Vasilisa to ask how long the disruption would last he was told, three months, maybe, shrug. Which could mean six, nine or twelve. It meant nothing except that the workers were settling in for a substantial period of time. Construction work was the city’s new brutalist art form, erecting its installations wherever you looked. Tall buildings fell and construction sites rose. Pipes and cables rose from and descended into the hidden depths. Telephone landlines ceased to work and water and power and gas services were randomly suspended. Construction work was the art of making the city become aware of itself as a fragile organism at the mercy of forces against which there was no appeal. Construction work was the mighty metropolis being taught the lessons of vulnerability and helplessness. Construction workers were the grand conceptual artists of our time and their installations, their savage holes in the ground, inspired not only hatred—because most people disliked modern art—but also awe. The hard hats, the orange jackets, the buttocks, the wolf whistles, the strength. Truly this was the trans-avant-garde at work.
Parking was suspended and the song of the jackhammers filled the air, radical, atonal, the kind of urban percussion Walt Whitman would have loved, driven by the potent sweat of large uncaring men.
From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements,
The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,
Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,
They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.
So it was for the two days after the incident of the laundry.
Then came the explosion.
Something to do with a gas main. The blame shifting between agencies, this safety check not carried out, that human error, a leak, a spark, kaboom. Or it might have been a cynical landlord illegally connecting pipes underground, a leak, a spark. A possible crime, an illegal gas line concealed from ConEd inspectors, possible manslaughter charges, the landlord not answering calls and unavailable at his registered address. Who sparked the spark? Unknown. Investigations will be made and a report issued in due course. Terrorism instantly ruled out. No workers injured, mercifully. The blast smashed windows and shook walls and a fireball billowed and one house, owned by Mr. Nero Golden, caught fire. Four adults and one child in the building at the time: the owner and his wife, her mother, their young son, and an employee, Mr. Michael McNally. It appeared that the building had not been correctly maintained, the indoor sprinkler system had not been serviced for a considerable time and failed to function. Mr. McNally was in the kitchen heating olive oil in a pan, preparing to cook lunch for the family. According to his initial statement the blast blew out the kitchen windows and knocked him off-balance and dazed him. He believes he lost consciousness, then recovered, and scrambled for the door into the Gardens between Macdougal and Sullivan Streets. There he lost consciousness again. When he came to his senses the kitchen was on fire and the flames were spilling out of the burning frying pan and spreading rapidly across the entire first floor. The other residents were upstairs. They had no way of getting out. The fire department responded with its usual alacrity. There were some access problems resulting from the construction work. But the fire was rapidly contained, limited to one single residence. All other properties in the neighborhood were unharmed.
In the age of the smartphone, it was natural that many photographs were taken and videos made. Many of these were afterwards submitted to the proper NYPD authority to be studied in detail for any further illumination they might provide.