place to stand. She had tried every way she could think of to make Harry Randall understand how crucial it was, right now, for everyone only to help. She had tried to make him see that truth was not, always, the highest good.
Randall, though, was a reporter. And though she had failed, she did understand his need, in these times, to cling to what he had always believed in.
But when the consequences of what he'd done began to become clear, he should have acted like a man. He owed them all that.
In times like these, no one had the right to suicide.
PHIL'S STORY
Chapter 1
The Man Who Sat by the Door
October 30, 2001
The thunderbolt of Harry Randall's death hit Phil Constantine at Grainger's Tavern. It was thrown from the TV over the bar by a glossy-haired anchorwoman in an insistent blue suit. The news blasted him with a powerful jolt, though no one watching would have seen that: just his eyes opening slightly, his jaw tightening as his focus narrowed and intensified.
In court Phil would sometimes cock his head, lean forward when a witness spoke—a prosecution witness, never his own—as though what he was hearing made no sense. As though he were trying to understand by moving closer to the source of his confusion. That gesture, though, was ruthlessly tactical. A lawyer who admitted to confusion was a fool. Real surprises, like being told by the evening news that that bastard reporter had jumped off the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, called for control.
Facing gravely into the camera, a trench-coated reporter spooled off as many facts of Harry Randall's life and death as he could jam into forty-five seconds. Behind him a weary-looking cop ripped down crime-scene tape. Two more linked tow chains to Randall's empty car. When the story was done, Phil asked Steve, behind the bar, to switch the channel, to try to catch it again.
“Something going on?” Steve glanced apprehensively up at the TV, tensing with someone's just-opened beer bottle in one hand.
“No, nothing new.” Phil spoke reassuringly—reassurance was one of the tones in his automatic repertoire—“just someone I know,” he added, to explain. Steve nodded but gave the TV another distrustful look as he reached for the remote, handed it to Phil.
Everyone was like this now. Every siren, every subway delay, every unexpected crowd as you rounded the corner, made your heart speed, your palms sweat. You walked along thinking of your day or your date or your dinner, and then you saw someone on the street run up to someone else and whisper, and before you could stop yourself you were thinking, That's it, something else happened. What this time? Sarin in the subway? Car bombs in the tunnels, dynamite on the bridge? Smallpox, assassination, poison in the water?
Everyone was like this, Phil as much as anyone. You just had to control yourself and go on anyway: it wasn't going away.
Phil flicked through channels. He found the Harry Randall story again, just ending, heard only what he'd just heard, learned nothing new. Either the other stations weren't running it, or, Harry Randall being one of their own, they'd led with it and he'd missed it already. Probably that. The death of a reporter, even a washed-up drunk like Harry Randall, was news to reporters. It would have been, even without the bullshit stories the Tribune had been running these past few weeks. Stories that started from the pure bright light of that fallen hero, Jimmy McCaffery, and spread in so many directions like a scorching flame. Stories with Randall's byline over them as though his name still meant something, stories meant to reignite a career long since cooled to ash.
Phil laid the remote on the bar. Steve came over and picked it up, Phil thanking him but really only half there, half aware of one televised story ending and another beginning. An anchorman offered him scenes of the war and developments in homeland defense. He paid no attention to the rest of the news or the rest of the crowd, sparse still, though Grainger's, barely a dozen blocks from Ground Zero, had never closed.
On the night of the day itself, Phil, stunned, exhausted, and alone, had stood at his window looking out over the dark, silent streets of Lower Manhattan. Down the block, flickering lights caught his eye: candles in Grainger's window. That Steve had lit them that first night as a beacon was clear, though whether he was offering rescue or hoping to be rescued, Phil was