Through the hubbub of the birds I can hear a dog screaming in agony, and more dogs barking. Many more dogs.
“Okay, come on out and take a look. You know Times Square?”
“I lived in this city for eighteen years,” I say.
“So I don’t have to talk.”
The dogs are in front of Bond’s Disco. They are dark, scruffy things. Two of them are worrying something long and angled like an arm. Our guide keeps her pistol in her hand.
“Many dog packs?”
“Yeah.”
“You love this city, don’t you?”
“I was born a few hundred yards from here, at St. Clare’s. It’s stripped. They stripped the hospitals first. I went to Dalton and then to Stuyvesant. I was in my senior year when it hit.”
“And you stayed on?”
“Most of my class did. We formed a volunteer action group. I’ve been working ever since. I haven’t had a vacation in five years.”
“What’s your group called?”
“At first we were Volunteers to Save the City. Now we’re part of the city government. Officially we’re called the Office of Salvage Management. I’m area manager for Chambers Street to the Battery. My job is to make sure that all salvage in my area is carried out by licensed salvors, and that the withdrawals are duly recorded and entered into the city’s record books.”
A glance at her hands tells me that she doesn’t wear a wedding ring. “Are you married—if you don’t mind me getting personal.”
“I haven’t got time.” She gets back into the car. “Come on. Next stop Sixth Avenue.”
“You don’t call it Avenue of the Americas,” Jim says.
“What’s the point?”
We move slowly down Forty-second. A narrow passage has been cleared between reefs of abandoned cars. Once again she takes out her pistol as she stops the car. There are no dogs about this time, so we get out. Through the distant overgrowth of Bryant Park I can see an immense and familiar shape. My heart almost breaks. There are vines pouring out of the windows of the Main Branch of the New York Public Library. I have the horrible thought that they must be somehow rooting in the books. Rot and mildew and moisture are changing them to a fertile soil.
“Is there any salvage for the library?”
“One-of-a-kind books only.”
It is a kind of lobotomy, the loss of a place like that.
Jim asks another question. “Do you actually live in the city?”
For the first time, she smiles. “I have a house on Eleventh Street. It once belonged to Nikos Triantaffilydis, the Greek shipping magnate.” Her smile widens. “I commandeered it for special purposes. We have that authority.”
As she speaks I hear a faint but very familiar sound. “Surely that’s not the subway?”
“You better believe it.” She glances at her watch. “That’ll be the 9:00 A.M. Westsider. It runs on the old D line from 145th Street to Grand. A lot of salvors live up in Washington Heights and commute into the salvage areas.”
“I thought the subway was flooded on Warday.”
“Below Twenty-third. It drained away over the six months after Warday. There are two working lines, the Westsider and the Eastsider. Each runs a three-car train. There are three morning and three afternoon runs, and one at noon. At nine-thirty the Westsider will be back.”
Suddenly Jim curses and slaps furiously at his head. “A bird! It flew in my hair.”
“It’s probably hunting for nesting materials. They don’t see enough people to worry about hands. It thought you were a nice hairy dog.”
I smell a faint tang of diesel smoke rising from the subway grating. I want to ask Jenny Bell if we can ride on that subway, if we can go down to the Village, to my old neighborhood. My chest is tight. Until now I haven’t realized just how much it means to me.
Jenny has opened up a little, but her steel shell is just waiting to snap closed again. This matter will have to be approached very carefully. “You live on Eleventh Street. That means that the Village is—”
“It’s almost a countryside down there. Fires leveled most of the West Village, and now everything’s covered with green. I like it. I like the look of it. And I like the sound of the wind in the ruins.”
I think of 515 West Broadway, where Anne and I raised Andrew, and had some very happy years. I knew everybody in that building—there were only fourteen apartments—but I lost track of them all. We left every single thing we owned at 515.
This is an entire city of haunted houses, rows and rows and towers and towers, softly crumbling into obscurity.
“Can we go down to the Village on the subway?”
“We’d have to go over to Grand Central. The nine-thirty Westsider is an uptown train. The Eastsider’s downtown. They’re staggered like that.” She gets in the car and starts it. Soon we are once again moving along the cleared path in the center of Forty-second Street. The silence in the car is split by a loud crash and a lingering roar somewhere off to the left. “Masonry falling,” Jenny says.
“The Facade Law’s unenforceable without any owners. And we haven’t got the manpower to identify all the cracked walls. We just have to let it go.”
I wonder if there were civil servants like Jenny Bell in ancient Rome—smart, tough people managing the death of their city.
The world has always had a great city, one place where all races and occupations met—a rich, dangerous place where the best men and women make themselves fabulous and the worst come to unravel them. First the World City inhabited Ur. A thousand years later it took its bells and moved to Babylon, then briefly to Athens, then to Alexandria, then to Rome. In Rome it lingered and made legends. Then the site was Constantinople, later Paris. It remained Paris for three hundred years, until, like all before it, the City of Light became too ripe, too perfect, and wars and fortune passed the jewel to London. Sometime between the first two world wars, the treasured office of man’s great city came to New York.
I lived in its evening, when the sorrow was already painted on the walls. The World City has left America altogether. I don’t know if the party has settled yet, in Tokyo or perhaps back in London.
A squirrel sits on some vine-covered stones that have long ago fallen from 500 Fifth Avenue. It is eating some sort of nut. The trees in Bryant Park, I realize, are swarming with creatures. There are so many birds that their sound is a roar. They rise in a cloud as the car passes, and the squirrels leap from limb to limb. A pack of dogs laze in the morning sun at the corner of Fifth and Forty-second. They pant at us, their eyes full of lusty interest.
We stop at the corner of Vanderbilt and Forty-second, across the street from Grand Central.
Here there is little foliage and the frozen, rusting traffic is solid the other side of Vanderbilt. I can see why the street hasn’t been cleared further: there are at least thirty buses between here and Lexington. They stand silent, motionless, amid the Hondas and the Buicks and the yellow cabs and the vans. Details: A cab from the Valpin Cab Company, its windows rolled up, doors neatly locked. The inside is thinly filmed with gray.
Signs on a bus: an ad for the musical Willard at the Uris. Another for Virginia Slims, a third for McDonald’s.
Avan from Wadley and Smythe, florists. When I was a gofer on The Owl and the Pussycat, I used to call in producer Ray Stark’s orders. Flowers for Barbra Streisand, the film’s star. Flowers for others of his friends. Spectacular flowers, exotic flowers, perfect flowers.