Free Red on Red by Edward Conlon Page A

before the war and after, and he saw a pair of old hands close a window, muffling a piano concerto on the record player. When you crossed Dyckman Street, to Inwood, the last Irish bit of Manhattan, there were games in the park and beers in the bar, after Mass at Good Shepherd, the gray stone church where stony old monsignors gave stony sermons about what would not last, which was everything, almost.
    The monsignors were right about the neighborhood, at least, about the good times and the bad. Inwood was disappearing and had been since Nick’s childhood, as the working classes worked hardest at leaving. In the seventies, the city was a cesspool, bankrupt and flooded with heroin, but it was a golden playground for Nick and his friends. They would run across rooftops and hide in the park, Inwood Hill Park, green since the beginning of time. For a decade, the city was on the mend, until crack hit in the mid-eighties, and the Heights were narco central for the entire northeast. The Colombians brought in cocaine, and the Dominicans moved it, cut it, and cooked it into the little rocks that burnt people alive. For a time, the precinct that covered the Heights and Inwood logged a homicide every three days, and shootings, robberies, and break-ins beyond counting. But through the nineties and after, crime began to fall, and then to free-fall, so quickly it seemed like a stock market collapse—
Murder is now at two thousand … fifteen hundred … twelve … closing this year at less than a thousand … eight hundred, seven. We are now approaching six…. Sell, sell, sell!
Young people with money started to move to Inwood, consultant types and creative types who didn’t dressfor work, and worked not at jobs but in “fields” like software and graphic design. The newcomers were in the main thoughtful, respectful, and tasteful, and a lot of the old-timers liked them even less than they’d liked the Dominicans. They baffled bartenders with requests for wine lists. There goes the neighborhood….
    And then the apocalypse downtown, on a morning that began with the bluest of skies. For hours, it seemed that history had ended, that Manhattan would join the list of ancient lost places—Babylon, Byzantium, Troy. The two towers had possessed a flat magnitude that had made them seem ageless, though they’d been no older than the men who’d destroyed them. The cataclysm felt like a natural disaster or even a supernatural one, visited as it was by demonologies of the air, but it was history, its return and not its ending. The city had been built by foreign hatreds, after all. It had taken in throngs of exiles to such extravagant benefit. And New York was never more splendid than in the grieving season that followed, abundant in dignity and decency, even as cops and firemen fought with gulls in the rubble piles for fragments of what once had been friends. There were no unknown soldiers here—wakes were held for scraps of skin, funerals for bits of bone. For a while, if you got a bad feeling, a sudden intuition of fear, you looked up instead of over your shoulder. What to make of it all? What warnings and amends? Was it a singularity, a rogue wave, or just the first to break?
    But nothing else happened; nothing like it, not here, not yet. History departed for its old hunting grounds. Shopping resumed, at first under patriotic pretense. The anniversary ritual of listed names, flowers tossed into the still-gaping pits, grew more modest and peripheral to the public mind, and it was a matter of time before the event would be marked by department store specials: dinette sets, sectional couches, and throw pillows—everything must go!
    People did keep on buying things, until the economy collapsed. Trillions of dollars disappeared, too much to contemplate, let alone count. Nick could picture his father asking,
Where was the last place you left it?
Though the statements from his retirement fund did not make for pleasant reading, Nick had far