Hells Kitchen

trucks and ambulances and burn victims and smoke victims and jump victims.
    And mud.
    “There was mud all over the place. You don’t think about mud at fires.”
    Some of us do, Sonny thought. Go on.
    Agent Scullery told Joe Buck the faggot cowboy about glowing-red bolts and melting glass and a man she’d seen pulling burnt pieces of chicken from the embers and eating them while people screamed for help. “It was . . .” she paused, thinking of a concise word, “excruciating.” Sonny had worked for a number of business people and he knew how they lived to summarize.
    “Did you see anyone near the building when it started?”
    “In the back I did. There were some people there. In the alley.”
    “Who?”
    “I didn’t pay much attention.”
    “You have any idea?” the cowboy persisted.
    Sonny listened intently but Agent Scullery couldn’t recall very much. “A man. A couple of men. That’s all I know. I’m sorry.”
    “Young. Teenagers?”
    “Not so young. I don’t know. Sorry.”
    Pellam thanked her. She lingered, maybe waiting to see if he’d ask her out. But he just smiled a noncommittal smile, stepped into the street, flagged down a cab. Sonny hurried after him but the cowboy was already inside and the yellow Chevy was speeding away beforeSonny even got to the curbside. He didn’t hear the destination.
    He was momentarily enraged that Pellam the tall Midnight Cowboy had gotten away from him so easily. But then he reflected that that was all right—this wasn’t really about eliminating witnesses or punishing intruders. It was about something much, much bigger.
    He held up his hands and noticed that they’d stopped shaking. A tatter of smoke, a dissolving ghost, wafted before Sonny’s face and, helpless, he could only close his eyes and inhale the sweet perfume.
    Remaining this way for a long moment, motionless and blind, he came back to earth slowly and dug into his shoulder bag. He found out that he only had a pint or so of juice left.
    But that was plenty, he decided. More than enough. Sometimes you only needed a spoonful. Depending on how much time you had. And how clever you were. At the moment Sonny had all the time in the world. And, as always, he knew he was clever as a fox.

FOUR
    Windy this morning.
    An August storm was approaching and the first thing Pellam noticed when he woke, hearing the wind, was that he wasn’t swaying.
    It’d been over three months since he’d parked the Winnebego Chieftain at Westchester Auto Storage in White Plains and temporarily forsaken his nomadic lifestyle. Three months—but he still sometimes had trouble sleeping in a bed that wasn’t atop steel springs badly in need of replacement. With this much wind today he ought to be swaying like a passenger in a gale.
    He also hadn’t gotten used to paying fifteen hundred a month for a one-bedroom East Village shotgun flat, whose main attraction was a bathtub in the kitchen. (“It’s called a bitchen,” the real estate woman told him, taking his check for the broker’s fee and first month’s rent as if he’d owed her the money for months. “People’re totally dying for them nowadays.”) Fourth-floor walk-up, the linoleum floor a dirty beige and walls green as Ettie Washington’s hospital room. And what, he’d been wondering, was that smell ?
    In his years doing location work Pellam had scouted in Manhattan only a few times. The local companies largely had the business locked up and, besides, because of the high cost of shooting here the Manhattan you saw in most movies was usually Toronto, Cleveland or a set. The films actually shot in the city had little appeal to him—weird little Jim Jarmusch student-quality independents and dull mainstreams. EXT. PLAZA HOTEL—DAY, EXT. WALL STREET—NIGHT. The scouting assignments had less to do with being the director’s third eye than filling out the proper forms in the Mayor’s Film Office and making sure cash went where it was supposed to go, both above and below the table.
    But scouting was behind him for the immediate future. He was a month away from finishing the rough cut of his first film in years and the first documentary he’d ever made. West of Eighth was the title.
    He showered and brushed his unruly black hair into place, thinking about the project. The schedule allowed him only another week of taping then three weeks of editing and post-pro. September 27 was the deadline for mixing and delivery to WGBH in Boston, where he’d work