Small Town

Just the Carpenter, now. After that Friday night, after they’d been clever enough to see that the firebombings were his work as well, one newspaper referred to him as the Curry HillChelsea Carpenter, but that was cumbersome and not as catchy.

Since then, of course, they’d matched a fingerprint and knew about the Cauldwell Avenue fire in the Bronx. And they knew his name, and played off that in their stories and headlines, but mostly they called him the Carpenter, perhaps recognizing that his name (which he no longer used) and his address (where he no longer lived) were of far less significance than what he did.

The Carpenter. He’d disliked the name initially, irked at the way they were fixated on the physical implements he’d used on a single occasion, the hammer and the chisel. (They didn’t even know about the screwdriver.) He grew more accepting of the sobriquet as he came to see it as pointing up the workmanlike nature of his efforts. And then one day it struck him that the word was more appropriate than they could consciously realize, for wasn’t a carpenter more than a worker, more than the simple practitioner of a trade? Wasn’t he, first and foremost, a builder?

Reading the stories, one realized that they missed the point, that they saw only the destructive aspect of what he was doing. They had no way of knowing that he tore down only to rebuild, took life only to renew life. They had no understanding of sacrifice, his or anyone else’s.

And yet they must, on some unconscious level. That wasn’t why they named him the Carpenter, that was the natural result of his use of the tools, reinforced by the happy alliteration of craft and neighborhood. But perhaps that was why the name stuck, why they clung to it after they knew his name. He was a carpenter, a builder, and he was building their city, and would go on with his mission while he had breath in his body.

You’d think they’d have caught him by now.

At the beginning, he took it for granted he’d be caught, and didn’t expect it would take long. When he watched firefighters battle the blaze on Cauldwell Avenue, he’d have been unsurprised if some inspector had picked him out of the crowd, had walked right up to him and taken him into custody. All right, mister. We know you set the fire. Care to tell us why?

And he’d have told them why. They might not have understood, but he’d have made the effort.

But no one approached him, or even looked twice at him. And in the weeks that followed he realized that no one ever looked twice at him, that he might have been invisible for all the attention he received.

When he was a boy he used to like a radio program about a character named Lamont Cranston, alias the Shadow. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. The Shadow, an announcer explained each week, had the power to cloud men’s minds so they could not see him.

And didn’t he have that power?

Except he achieved it through no exercise of will. And he wondered if it might not be an effect of the losses he had sustained, the four sacrifices that had set him upon his own sacrificial mission. Could not those deaths, coming one upon another as they did, have taken away bits of his own very self? He had not felt the same since then, and knew he never would. Was it not possible that part of what he’d lost had been that quality that commanded attention from others? He was not literally invisible, like Lamont Cranston, but when people did see him he didn’t make much of an impression on their awareness. They took no notice of him and retained no memory of him.

As time passed, he came to take his invisibility for granted, to view it as a protective shield that would guarantee him invulnerability while he did his terrible work. He’d continued to take precautions, he’d made sure no one was looking when he hurled his jars of gasoline and when he wielded his razor, but he no longer expected to be captured, or even seen.

He hadn’t even thought about security cameras. Nor had he fully appreciated the nature of the manhunt that would be an immediate result of the three Chelsea bombings, or that they’d be tied almost immediately to the triple murder on Twenty-eighth Street. He should have assumed the latter, he’d deliberately constructed a pattern, choosing the three establishments because they, like the whorehouse, were cleaned every morning by the very same young man who’d discovered the body on Charles Street.