At the time of the fire, the building was empty except for eleven-year-old Albert Ruiz, who was asleep in 2A. He and his friends had claimed the apartment as their “clubhouse.” Like on The Little Rascals, but infested with roaches. The boys had been convening there since the weather warmed up. The junkies hadn’t gotten a foothold, or the bums—there was no shortage of abandoned buildings, and the park across the street was inviting, judging from the sheds and lean-tos. Albert and his pals dragged in battered folding chairs, set up a milk crate for a card table. One boy raided his brother’s Penthouse stash and started a lending library. On Thursday, Albert had arranged to meet his friend Pete at the clubhouse before they went to the movies: Midway. Pete got tied up playing duck and weave with his father, who’d been laid off two days before and had found his scapegoat. Albert fell asleep on the beanbag chair while waiting.
The firefighters said it looked as if he’d been trying to open the apartment door. It was stuck fast. Smoke got him. Five days later, he was out of the coma, attached to a machine that inflated his scored lungs. His mother, Mrs. Ruiz, stared at the ground when she told Carney what had happened.
Mrs. Ruiz and her three children—Albert had two younger sisters—had moved into the third floor above his store two years ago. She was short and thickset, harried but determined, her body tipped forward as if battling headwinds. Carney gave her the once-over when she first came to see the place but they had rarely interacted since; Marie handled that side of things now. Marie had informed Carney one day that she was “bored” and “unfulfilled” with her current store duties, which was convenient because managing the two buildings left him bored and unfulfilled. He started paying her to run the properties. You got a headache, you buy aspirin, and tenants were the mother of headaches.
On the first of the month Mrs. Ruiz crossed the showroom to drop her rent check on Marie’s desk. Sometimes she paused before a DeMarco lounger or Egon credenza, a dreamy look overtaking her face as she arranged the piece in her living room upstairs.
The day after the fire, Carney was heading to Freedom National to make a deposit when he came upon Mrs. Ruiz struggling to open the residential door. He said, “Must be sticky.” She gave him her key. It opened easily. He offered to help with the groceries even though she was the type to say no. She surprised him and when they arrived at her landing she said, “I told him I was making spaghetti and meatballs tonight but if he wanted some he had to wake up.”
Carney tracked down the story in the Post that evening. The building had recently changed hands. The new owner, Excelsior, owned regiments of property uptown and in the South Bronx, and an alarming number of their buildings had been the victim of suspicious fires. The management company could not be reached for comment. The newspaper item concluded with “Last year there were a record 12,000 structural fires in the Bronx. One fire department official estimated that a third of them were set deliberately.”
Carney told Marie the next day to keep tabs on Mrs. Ruiz and her son. “The store would like to help if it’s possible.” His idea of Albert was unformed; it was entirely possible the bowl haircut and chubby cheeks were produced by Carney’s imagination to fill in the hospital scene.
A plane dragged black letters through the air: Happy Birthday America—200 Years of Liberty and Independence. Who paid for it? He couldn’t tell, so he added: Love, Buckwheat. The words zipped over the line of tenements, disappeared over the eaves of 371 West 118th. Cinder blocks sealed the front door and windows on the first floor. No more intruders until the wrecking ball came through. Case closed—certainly the cops were never going to investigate who put the boy in the hospital. If Oakes was serious about helping the city, he would’ve taken down the arson racket when he worked in the DA’s office, instead of letting it get out of control. You pocket some fat envelopes working down there, Munson’d had plenty of stories.
Carney cut across Morningside Ave, into the park and toward the stairs that led up the ridge to Columbia’s domain. The trees and scrabbly brush had mustered some green business, weeds drooped between the hexagonal paving stones, and the ancient rock dominated all with its craggy arrogance. Growing up he and his cousin Freddie had clambered and leapt from it in wild exuberance, detonated firecrackers and scraped their knees on its unforgiving planes, but he’d never known its name: Manhattan schist. Didn’t exist anywhere else in the world, as John had explained it to him last spring. Morningside Park, one of the places where the bedrock foundation poked through, had been John’s homework assignment for a unit on city landmarks.
“It’s four hundred million years old!” John told him, poking the illustration in his library book. The result of two plates in the earth colliding under terrific, elemental pressure to heave up mountain ranges. The mountains were long gone but the unique rock remained, twinkling in the sunlight from embedded mica, holding the city aloft. High-rises—with their staggering tons of steel, concrete, and glass—can only stand where the schist is close enough to the surface to bear the weight. “Look at the skyline, Dad, there are skyscrapers on Wall Street and midtown, but not in Greenwich Village—the bedrock’s too deep down.” The spine of the city, keeping it all together. You can’t see it except in magical spots where it will not be contained. Carney admired the dedication.
Since this uptown stretch of schist was too pricey and complicated to excavate, the neighborhood got a park out of it, and Columbia University claimed its royal perch over Harlem to the east, looking down on the peasantry below. Carney made a survey when he topped the staircase, like one of those long-dead city planners figuring out where to lay the grid.
These days Morningside Park was a no-man’s-land separating the Ivy League kingdom from the residents on the other side. The park had always been dicey, but in the last ten years the muggings and assaults had ascended to myth: Welcome to Fear City. Last year Mayor Beame, staring down the city’s impending bankruptcy, had threatened to lay off police and corrections officers, and the cops retaliated by handing out Fear City pamphlets to horrified tourists. When they warned visitors to “restrict your travel to daylight hours” and “remain in midtown areas,” it was places like Morningside Park they drew their monstrous exaggerations from. The university warned its students to circumnavigate the park rather than take the stairs up the hill, and today Carney appreciated the advice. Bunch of money in his pocket, plus out of breath because he was out of shape. Why had he come this way? He never came this way. At the stone retaining wall, he returned his attention to the townhouse below and it clicked: He and the intersection had a history.
Opposite 371 was 370 West 118th Street, a five-story yellow brick building that had gone up a few years ago, affordable housing. He and Rusty had argued about it after Carney questioned the delivery address of a Sterling dinette. “There’s no 3C in 370, I know the building. It’s Front and Rear. Has to be 3F or 3R.” The Sterling drivers—these crackers from Massapequa—always bitched over their Harlem deliveries and Carney wanted to forestall any complaints.
Rusty made the sad face he put on when Carney challenged his capabilities. “Ray, I double-checked it: 3C.”