It was the color changes that told him it was bad. It was a second-due job. Third and Thirty-Seventh. Ben was hauling himself up the stairwell of the apartment block by the rickety wooden handrail, ninety pounds of equipment hanging off him, when he noticed the wallpaper darkening. It was a subtle thing. A slow tanning from white to beige. But he knew as he kept stomping upward that the little blue flowers on the paper were cooking from the heat of the fire on the first floor as surely as if they were in an oven. Soon the wallpaper would peel as the glue reliquefied. Then it would blister like human skin. Then it would burn. The fire was in the walls, which for a place built in the eighties, probably under the Mafia’s Concrete Club, meant every soul on the floors above him was in peril.
He split off from the stairwell on the third floor, kicked in an apartment door, and crashed through the home, knocking over a coffee table, trudging clean through a pile of laundry to bust the window out with the handle of his axe. He was on ventilation duty with Jake while Engo and some Ladder 2 guys fought the blaze below. Everybody should have been out, but Ben never counted on that. People ignored alarms. They slept with AirPods or earplugs in. They panicked and huddled into closets or under beds.
Right on cue, he met Jake in the hall, and a frail figure joined their gathering, swimming out of the swamp-thick smoke in his plaid boxer shorts. The old man was carrying a saucepan of water, his thin arm trembling with the effort of holding the pan aloft.
“Fire!” he stammered. He raised a shaky finger toward his own apartment. “I think there’s a fire! But I can’t—I can’t—I can’t—I can’t see it!”
“Jake.” Ben flicked his head. Jakey took the saucepan from the old man’s hand and set it down on the carpet, scooped the guy up like a babe in his arms, and started carrying him down the stairs. Two years’ extended probation and the kid was still like that. Gentle with civilians. Polite and respectful, even when they were all at risk of being flash-fried to a crisp. But the microsecond it would have taken to bat the saucepan out of the guy’s hand instead might have counted for something. Jake would lose that gentleness, Ben supposed, as he trudged on. It would go, the first time he had to punch a woman in the head to knock her out because she was gripping onto a grand piano in a flaming house like it was her child, refusing to leave it behind. If Jake didn’t get tired of Matt extending his probie signoff until he was in his goddamn midforties and quit, Jake was going to have to wrestle grown men to stop them climbing into burning cars after their kids. He was going to have to push old ladies off ledges. The tenderness in him would be boiled bone-hard.
On the fourth floor, a woman in a headscarf rushed toward Ben out of nowhere, almost slamming into him. “Come! Come this way, please! We need help!”
“Ah, shit!”
He followed, angry, calling in to the ground team as he went.
“Matt, the fourth floor is crawling with civilians!”
“Well, you’re cut off. Second floor is about to flash. So stop venting and start an evac.”
Ben stumbled into the dark apartment and went to the nearest window facing north. He looked down and saw Jake handing the old man off to ambulance workers. It was like a concert out there; lights, noise, upturned faces, open mouths. The woman in the scarf was pulling at him. In a bedroom he found another woman crouched in a corner with a bundle in her arms.
“He’s not breathing!”
Ben raked his mask off to get a better look. The carpet all around them was steaming. Hot air in his throat. He tried to grab at the baby but the woman twisted away.
“He’s not breathing! He’s not breathing! Oh my God!”
“Give it to me!” Ben made another swipe at the kid. He’d seen this before. People so desperate for help, they couldn’t see that that help was right in front of them. “Give me the kid! Jesus Christ!”
“Mom, give him the baby! He’s a fireman!”
“He’s not breathing! Help! Help me!”
The woman put the baby on the carpet, started pounding on the bundle with her open hands like she was trying to shove clothes into an overpacked suitcase. Ben grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her aside. The infant’s lips were the blue-gray of the ocean.
“Fuck this.” He took the child to the window and shoved it open. On either side of him, ladders were accessing other apartments, people crawling down them, aided by firefighters. There was no time. He clicked his radio, tucking the newborn under his arm like a football.
“Matt!”
It was all he needed to say.
The fire chief caught his eye, even from so far below, even through the smoke and mist and light and chaos. Matt tore his gloves off. Ben waited until his boss had gotten into position between two police squad cars, legs set, eyes wide. The women were screaming and begging and clawing at Ben. One of them got her hand up under the collar of his jacket and raked her nails down his neck. The other was hanging off his shoulder. He barely noticed.
Ben held his breath, stepped back, and threw the baby out the window.
The bundle seemed to hang in the air.
The crowd roared—a wave of collective horror.
Matt made the catch.
He accepted the bundle into his chest like a seasoned quarterback.
On the sidewalk, crews from uptown were unrolling the air safety cushion. The ground was awash with yellow and red, men from the crowd emboldened by the baby toss darting in to hold the edges of the cushion alongside the firefighters.
The two women were hugging each other. Ben grabbed the nearest one by the shoulders.
“You’re next,” he told her.
Microseconds. That’s what it all came down to in the end. Ben knelt on the wet sidewalk beside Matt as they worked on the baby, and Ben wondered whether the microseconds Jake had spent putting the saucepan on the floor instead of smacking it out of the old-timer’s hand meant that the man had sucked in one more mouthful of smoke than he should have. He wondered whether that breath could have damaged anything inside him. Darkened a corner of his lung tissue, or killed a handful of brain cells. Had Jake made the decision to exchange a microsecond of unnecessary politeness for a day, or an hour, of the old man’s life?
Would the microseconds it would have taken Matt to hand the CPR duty on the baby over to the paramedics make the difference between life and death for the child? How long would a handover take? One beat on the tiny chest? Two? Were those the deciding beats on that small, blue, grape-sized heart? Ben didn’t know. Once Matt had started resus on the kid, he just kept doing it. Ben held the infant’s delicate head in his bare palms, keeping it tilted and safe from the concrete, while Matt pumped the tiny chest with two thumbs. Ben tried not to think about Gabriel’s head in his hand, the weight of it as he set the kid down in his bed after he fell asleep on the couch.
He realized he was looking at Matt only when his boss glanced up at him.
Lightning passed between them.
Matt worked. His huge hands swaddled the baby’s torso, encircling him completely from armpits to hips. There were five people in the huddle around the child: two paramedics, Ben and Matt, and some guy from the crowd who might have been a doctor. Their heads were bent together, now and then touching. Sweat dripped on the kid’s onesie. Ben had flashes of memories from when he was a child. Five boys examining a skinned knee. The voices trapped in the hot and humid press of bodies were growling with frustration and urgency.
How long has it been?
Who’s got the count?
Come on, buddy. Come on.
You got this, Matt.
Shut up. Shut up. You’re distracting him.
You’re doing good, Chief. Keep going.
I got the count. It’s been four minutes.
Jesus, fuck. Come on, kid. Come onnnnn.
The deciding beat came.
The baby squeaked and vomited foam, arching its back. The eyelids fluttered. The huddle broke. Matt handed the infant to the medic nearest to him, who rushed it to a waiting stretcher. He marched off toward the engine, his head down and his shoulders up. Ben knew better than to follow.
McSorley’s was out. So was Plug Uglies. Anywhere that FDNY were known to hang out, because that would bring the inevitable parade of local civilians who had seen the apartment-block fire or heard about it and were now wanting to buy them drinks as payment for inside stories. They wouldn’t even ask—they’d send drinks over, and the tall tables would be littered with flat undrunk beers, and husky stockbrokers would be peppering them with stupid questions and wanting selfies. Did anybody die? How did it start? Who threw the baby? Offering up their own tales of heroism and terror when a Himalayan salt lamp shorted out and destroyed a patio table.
Matt was sitting across from Ben now on an unlucky wooden stool in some cozy but crowded place off Hudson Street, well out of the zone of the apartment fire, a place too narrow to suit firefighters, who tended to be loud and broad-shouldered. Matt was looking like he’d strangle the next person who asked him anything about anything. Ben didn’t even know where they were. There was an Irish flag over the bottle shelf and sawdust on the floor. That’s all that counted. He was sitting there looking at his open palm on his lap where the baby’s head had lain.
“You need to fuck something,” Matt said.
Ben looked over. Glowing embers in Matt’s eyes.
“What?”
“I need you to fuck something.” Matt tapped his chest. “Because you gave me some kinda look while I was working on that baby back there. And the next time you do that I’m gonna knock your teeth in.”
“I didn’t give you a look.”
“Yeah you did.” Matt gripped his beer. “It was a look like maybe you were wondering what kind of man I was.”
Synapses were snapping in Ben’s brain, frantic warnings about the shark in the water, circling beneath him. He slid around on his stool and faced his boss. He needed to focus, shake off the slowness the whiskey had brought into him.
“I wasn’t giving you any kind of look, Matt.”
The chief said nothing, just glared.
“Or maybe I was looking at you trying to figure out if you were pissed about me throwing the baby out the window.” Ben tried to laugh. “Jesus. I just threw a baby out a fucking window, Matt. I’m recovering here. I’m trying to pan what the fuck I’m going to say when Command hauls my ass over the coals for that.”
“You yeeted a baby out a window!” Jake wandered up, hearing the tail end of Ben’s words, swinging his arm around Ben’s neck. “I still can’t believe it!”
“Fuck off, Jake,” Ben growled.
Jake fucked off.
“It wasn’t that kind of look,” Matt said.
“What was it then? You tell me.”
“It was a look like maybe you think that me or somebody else on this crew had something to do with Luna and Gabriel being gone.”
“Christ, do we have to get into this?”
“If that’s what you’re thinking, you need to come right out and say it.”
“I’m not saying that. I’ve never said that.”
“I didn’t kill your goddamn girlfriend, or her boy,” Matt said. There were muscles in his jaw pulsing beneath the stubble. “I just spent ten minutes trying to drag a kid back from the light at the end of the tunnel. You think I could kill one?”
“I have never said—”
“I’m tired of you moping around.” Matt’s eyes flashed under his heavy brow. “Sitting there staring at your hands like you’re Lady fucking Macbeth.”
“Who?”
“Whatever happened to that woman, wherever she is, it had nothing to do with this crew.”
“‘That woman’?” Ben told himself to ease off but didn’t. “Her name is Luna.”
“I know.”
“You had her at your house.”
“You’ve been looking at us all weird since she left,” Matt said. “There’s something in your tone. You keep bringing up Engo’s ex, what maybe happened to her. Then I see you staring at me while I’m working on that baby back there.”
“You’re talking crazy.”
“Everybody on that scene was looking at that kid except you.”
“I can look at whatever the fuck I want, Matt.”
“Luna is gone, Ben. She ran off on you.” Matt reached across the table and seized a handful of his shirt, got chest hairs with it. “She. Ran. Off. On. You.”
“Okay,” Ben replied. Because a guy says what he has to when his leg’s in the jaws of a great white. “Okay, Matt.”
“Fuck something. Get it out of your system.”
“I got it.”
The door jangled open. A bunch of twentysomethings rolled loudly in. Ben felt his clean-shaven face and thought about the woman who called herself Andy. It had been a week. She’d not wanted him to expect her, and yet every time a door opened or a phone rang he hopped. Jake seemed to know the frat boys who had just arrived, grinned and went over, shaking hands. The probie had two beers in him by Ben’s count. He was half a glass away from being anybody’s man.
Engo hooked an arm around Ben’s neck. “Don’t look now, buddy boy,” he sang stomach-ulcer-stink into Ben’s face, “but you’ve got nibbles on the liiiine.”
Ben followed his gaze. At the back of the bar, a woman was shooting pool by herself. He didn’t recognize her until her eyes lifted from the three ball she was lining up and locked on to his.
Andy.
The beer glass slipped out of Ben’s fingers, popped and shattered on the floor.
The bar erupted. Engo slapped his back, hard. “Smooth, man.”
“Don’t worry.” Jakey was tottering back over, handsy, patting Ben’s chest like he was comforting a nervous dog. “You’re just out of practice, that’s all. Don’t panic. Nobody panic! We can do this. I can be your wingman. I can—”
“Fuck off, Jakey.”
“Order her a cocktail,” Jake slurred. He pointed to the chalkboard behind the bar, almost took Engo’s head off with his yacht-boom arm. “I know some good ones.”
“Don’t buy her a drink. Get her to buy you one. Go over there and make her do it.”
“No, no, no, that’ll never—”
“It’s what they want. They’re all feminists now.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Both of you get your fucking hands off me.” Ben pushed them away. They were like dance moms prepping a toddler for a pageant. “I don’t need you to hold my dick.”
Ben walked to the back of the bar. Past the douchebag frat boys. Past the music machine. He was stiff-legged, awkward. She didn’t look anything like she had when he’d first seen her. She seemed to have spent every second since they’d met working out and starving herself. Her arms were toned and her forearms and hands were veined from lifting. Her hair was black and pulled back into a ponytail over one of those punky shaved undercuts. She looked less like she was going to disembowel a guy in family court now, and more like she was going to hold a guy down and tattoo something on him.
Halfway across the bar Ben wondered if he had been supposed to approach or not. But when he met her eyes, she was smiling at him, head cocked, inviting.
“What is this?” Ben asked. “What are we doing?”
“We’re meeting for the first time.” Andy stood her pool cue on its end and leaned on it, appreciated him. “Try to look less like you’re meeting with your parole officer, will you?”
Ben shielded his eyes. “We—They—Engo and Jakey … they think you’re trying to pick me up right now.”
“I am trying to pick you up right now.”
Ben stared at her, uncomprehending.
“So don’t blow it,” she said. “Smile.”
Ben breathed, jammed his hands in his pockets, forcing a smile. It ached on his face.
“Great. Now jerk your thumb toward the bar,” Andy said. “Like you’re asking if you can buy me a drink. Glance at my tits.”
“This is crazy.”
“Do what you are told.” She was smiling, but the words were icy. “Now.”
He did. The question came out robotic and flat and stammering. Would you-would you-would you— She nodded. He went to the bar and came back with two whiskeys, neat, because that was what his body was screaming for and he couldn’t think what to order for her. When he looked back at the crew, Jakey was slapping his palm to his forehead and gesturing madly at the cocktail list. Engo was shaking his head, disappointed.
“We can’t do this.” Ben leaned in close to Andy, stared unseeing at her breasts like he’d been told to. “I can’t pretend you’re my … my girlfriend, if that’s what you’re thinking. They’ll never believe it.”
“You’re going to have to make them believe it, Ben,” Andy said. “And I said glance.”
His eyes shot up to hers.
“How else do you think I’m going to help you pin these guys?” She was so close to him now, he felt like his blood was boiling beneath the surface of his skin. “I need to get into your world. Into their world. If we’re going to find out what happened to Gabriel and Luna, you and me are going to need to be in close quarters every day. And telling the crew you’ve hired a personal trainer isn’t going to cut it.”
“I expected you to just, you know … investigate from the outside.”
“That’s not the kind of specialist I am.”
“But I’ve had no warning.”
“That’s the best way to do it,” she said. “Now touch me.”
Ben could feel Engo’s and Jakey’s eyes on him. He forced a hand up, stroked his knuckles down the back of her arm.
“Not bad.” Andy smiled. “Now tell me a story. Tell me about this.” She reached up and touched the scratch on his neck. The mother of the baby, her fingernails under the collar of his jacket. He looked at the ceiling and told the story. Facts only, his brain spinning. She drank her whiskey and hung on his every word.
“Now shrug humbly,” she said. “Like it was no big deal.”
He did.
“My turn. I’ll tell a story. You listen. And would it kill you to laugh at something I say? We’re flirting. We’re not planning your return to Sing Sing.”
“Who the hell are you?” he asked. Her hand on the edge of the pool table was right by his. He tried not to flinch when she lifted it and hooked a finger into the hem of his jeans, in the hollow of his hip, right by his dick. “This is what you do? You just come into people’s lives and—”
She laughed. He laughed with her. It hurt worse than the smile.
“—pretend to be someone you’re not? That’s your specialty?”
“Kind of.” She gave a cute little shrug. That finger was tracing his body inside his jeans to the small of his back. “Now put a hand on my waist.”
“Aren’t we moving too fast?”
“It’s a one-night stand,” she said. “For now.”
“What does that mean?”
She kissed him. His reality split. On the one side, his body caught on and did what it was supposed to do; got hard, drew her in, grabbed her ass with one hand and tugged her hips to his and dived deep and tasted her. That half of the moment was fueled by a blessed relief—loneliness and fear and alcohol and memories of Luna. On the other side of his mental divide was a frantic awareness of everything happening around them. Engo and Jakey cheering and being stupid across the bar. Matt burning like a human fireball in the corner while one of the young frat boys talked at him, the rest of the douchebags rumbling around the room like fresh-caught mustangs trying to escape a corral.
She pulled away sharply. It was Matt’s voice that did it. Ben looked over, saw the big man was standing, Engo and Jakey crowding one of the douchebags in. They divided the young guy off from his herd as skillfully as hyenas. The hunt was on. Andy was pushing a phone into Ben’s ribs, trying to get his attention back.
“Put your number in here,” she said. “Before you have to go.”
He did, handed the phone back to her. Matt was towering over the douchebag, the stocky, shaven-headed kid with his hands up, trying to back off, finding himself boxed in. Ben went there. The little guy’s friends were all standing at the bar, speechless, their beers in their hands. Ben was only thirty-eight. But it seemed like he was remembering a time forgotten, when young men rushed into a fight whether they knew what it was about or not. Ben had been so drunk and angry at the world in his late teens he’d sometimes accidentally rushed into frays without knowing any of the combatants, just so he could get the skin off his knuckles before he went home.
“What’s the problem?”
“Listen”—the little shaven-headed guy was wasted but wide-eyed—“I-I-I-I was just trying to tell him; I know who he is.”
“So what?” Ben yanked the kid out of the triangle of hyenas. “Fuck off, son.”
“My uncle is in the job.”
“Great.” Ben walked him toward the door. “Nobody cares.”
“I just wanted to buy Matt a drink. To-to-to show respect.”
“He’s got a drink.”
“I’m going to the academy next year. I applied.”
“Buddy.” Ben was gripping the guy’s biceps so hard he was bending and twisting to try to loosen it. “I’m telling you. Stop talking. Start walking.”
“I didn’t mean no offense!”
“I’m warning you.”
Engo and Jakey and Matt were at their heels.
“I just want to be a part of it, that’s all.” The young guy stumbled. Ben righted him. “I want it more than anything. That’s why I joined. I’ve seen Matt around. I thought if I introduced myself, maybe he’d remember me, and after I’ve done my training I could be a part of his crew. Some of the old guys told me about him. I know Matt was there on 9/11.”
Ben stopped.
The numbers. The kid had said the magic numbers.
All Ben could do then was drop the douchebag and get out of the way. Matt picked the young man up by the shirt like a rag doll and punched him so hard he flew six feet across the room, hit the door like he’d been rammed by a bus. Twenty people in the bar; nobody did a thing. Matt dragged the kid into the street to beat the snot out of him. Ben and Jakey and Engo followed, because that’s what you did.
An hour later they were all standing on the corner of the empty block smoking, nobody talking, three-quarters of the crew thinking that maybe the young buff with the hard-on for Matt probably hadn’t deserved a four-way beatdown. That buffs, firefighter groupies, had always been a thing, long before 9/11. It was just something that came with the job. But Ben also knew that they had a choice: they could hand out a real beating to someone stupid enough to approach Matt about 9/11 once a year, or they could go softer with someone about it once a month. Putting a guy in the hospital—that was gossipworthy, for guys on the job and members of the public both. While crews around Manhattan were constantly approached by print journalists, podcasters, documentarians, 9/11 truthers, kids doing high school assignments, buffs, and naive tourists and asked about that day, Matt almost never was, because he’d built a reputation. Carefully, deliberately, one overhanded beating at a time.
Ben’s phone dinged in his pocket and Engo’s eyes lit up like headlights.
“Is it her?”
Ben pulled his phone out. “Yeah.”
Jakey went to the wall two stores down from the bar and put his hand on the bricks and threw up on the sidewalk. Matt was just standing there on the corner, looking at his hands like Lady fucking Macburnie or whoever the hell it was.
“What does it say?” Engo tried to lean in. “Are there pics?”
“No pics.” Ben put his phone back in his pocket. “She just wants to meet. See ya.”
“Fifty percent of women in America under the age of thirty report having had a girl-on-girl experience,” Engo said.
Ben looked at him. He had no words. A cab was crawling up the block. Ben stuck his arm out and prayed.
“It’s true, man. Google it.”