Then she is outside on Gansevoort St. with no recollection of the in-between, sucking in great gulps of air, the baby clutched against her breast still wailing. Around her are spinning lights atop fire engines, police cars, ambulances; firemen laying hoses, incomprehensible squawks over walkie-talkies; streams of water pouring into the now-crackling inferno. She stares at the apartment building, amazed that she has come through it, astonished that she had paused even for a moment.
Maryam brt’ Yarosh has employed different names in different milieus but in this time-and-place, she is Stacey Papandreou. In a town of such eclectic habitants as New York City, even the most outré can swim in anonymity, though it is best not to press the matter too far. This milieu is more tolerant than most, but tolerance too often depends upon what is at stake.
The mother shrieks up the sidewalk, the milk she had ducked out to buy a splash of white on the paving behind her. She blubbers gratitude and smothers babe and rescuer alike with kisses. Stacey does not know her name, but she smiles and says it is nothing. The infant stares alternately at mother and neighbor, as if suddenly realizing that something has happened. Its eyes are a deep brown and seem far too large for its head.
Then the baby is taken up by professionals with oxygen masks and other accouterments of care. Stacey too is given aid. Smoke inhalation, burns, who knows what injuries she may have sustained? The oxygen is cool and pure and she sucks it in gratefully.
Around the firemen and EMTs and flashing lights and garbled voices, circle the vultures, aching to fill the 24/7 news-void, thrusting microphones in her face like… No wonder they are called news organs! They bark unanswerable questions. Why’d ya do it? She cannot enlighten them. How’dya not get burned? Just lucky, I guess. How’s it feel to save a life? A century from now no one will know this baby ever lived, let alone that it lived a little longer.
But no, we don’t say such things. It is too startling and interrupts the smooth glide of thought as it skips from cliché to cliché like a stone across a pond. Experience has taught her that it is better to pass unnoticed, and naked truth is the pornography of discourse. It always draws more attention than the decently costumed kind. So she pronounces the expected platitudes instead and nestles invisibly within the journalistic paradigm. Almost, the story can write itself.
She turns half-away from the cameras, enough to shadow her features but not so much as to excite curiosity. She has spent many years learning the arts of obscurity and care has become a second nature. Come across as mysterious or evasive and the organs would push in deeper. But present oneself too openly and some geezer might recognize her on the tube from some older milieu.
Farther down the street, within the fire line, a dark woman with cropped, platinum-white hair and wearing an ID on a chain around her neck scans the crowd. There is a fire marshal by her side, and Stacey guesses that someone suspecting arson has brought in a profiler to spot the firebug among the gawping onlookers.
Though if anyone had set the fire, Stacey thinks, it would have been the owner. The building hangs like an albatross around his neck. Gentrification is creeping up the West Village on little cat feet, and the site is worth more sold to developers than rented to residents.
The platinum-haired woman locks gazes with her for a moment and Stacey recalls that some people set fires in order to play the hero. She wonders if she is being profiled.
If so, she must not have fit, because the woman turns aside and both she and the marshal move on to another part of the crowd.
The news organs will vie for some fresh angle on the story. Seeking a human-interest hook, someone will thrust into the Heroine’s past and discover that she has none. It is time to move on. She has already lost her possessions in the fire; discarding the rest of “Stacey Papandreou” wants little more.
She can get clothing at a nearby discount shop, perhaps on charity, and rinse the soot from her face in their washroom. She has jewels cached in various places. Making herself presentable, she can convert the cache to cash, and sink back into the anonymous masses.
But as she turns away, an iron hand seizes her wrist and she gasps and looks up into the intense, troubled face of a Chinaman. She draws a breath to shout for help, but the man says, “I know you,” as if making an accusation.
And Stacey forebears to shout, for shouting would attract attention, would draw eyes toward her at just that moment when she would fade quietly away.
The bubble of fame expands slowly, obeying an inverse square law. Out toward the edge of the crowd, newcomers crowd up behind those who have arrived earlier, leaping a-toe, craning necks, hoping to catch a glimpse of tragedy. No one recognizes her as “the Heroine” or even knows as yet that there has been one. But, barefooted and night-gowned, Stacey is clearly a Victim and people tug at her sleeves and ask her what has happened, appealing to the special gnosis with which Victims are endowed.
The man pushes through them, saying, “She must be attended.” He has a long coat slung over his arm with a pair of sandals tucked into its pockets. Once they reach the other side of the street, he pauses while she puts them on. He says something to her in what she takes to be Chinese, though he does not sound much like Mr. Lu at the take-out. She has a hazy recollection that she had seen him, a long time ago: His face flashes through her mind, quaffing wine across a rude wooden table. There is more, but the memory is a dry, brittle leaf in an autumn forest.
He guides her uptown rather than down, and that is all the same to Stacey. There is no particular place she needs to go to just yet, so one direction pleases as well as another. He strides with determination, now and then snapping something to her in Chinese. When Stacey fails to answer, the grim set of his mouth deepens.
They duck around the corner to Little West Twelfth, and then under the High Line to a block where enough meat packers hang on to justify the neighborhood’s name. One of the buildings is abandoned and he urges her toward it through a gap in the chain-link fence that halfheartedly encloses it.
Stacey grows hesitant. Among the reasons a man might have for leading a woman into an abandoned building, few inspire great confidence. Granted, he has rescued her from the curious crowds, but Stacey begins to wonder how he had known to bring a coat and sandals.
Her knives have been left behind in the burning apartment, but she knows various forms of unarmed combat, and most common objects can be used as weapons by the keenly imaginative. A woman alone must learn such things. But Stacey also knows the limitations of such methods for one with a woman’s frame. A woman may equal a man in combat only so long as she remains beyond arm’s reach. One time, when she had worked as a spy in…
It comes upon her in a flash, as if the wind has scoured the dead clouds from an overcast sky…. In Constantinople. She had met this man in the City by the Golden Horn. She had been using the name “Macedonia” then, and had been a dancer for the Blues. But covertly, she had also worked for the emperor’s nephew, who had been magister militum. She had passed along treasonous pillow-talk and brought persons of interest—especially foreigners—to the magistrate’s attention.
Yes! She had met this man in the kapeleîon of Nicholas of Urfa, near the palace district. He had been staying in the pandocheia that Nicholas kept for foreigners and he had entered the tavern with the actress Theodora on his arm and a plate of meat for Nicholas to cook. Macedonia had been entertaining a Syrian merchant she suspected of harboring Persian sympathies and Theodora had brought this stranger to join them.