Small Town

Or the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, when 150 seamstresses, most of them young Jewish women, died when the sweatshop they worked in went up in flames. They couldn’t get out, the fire doors were locked, so they either jumped to their death or died in the fire.

Sacrificed, all of them. And each time the city, reeling in shock, bleeding from its wounds, had rebounded to become greater than ever. Each time the souls of the sacrificed had become part of the greater soul of the city, enriching it, enlarging it.

When this great insight came, this revelation, he stopped his front-to-back reading of the encyclopedia and began skipping around, looking for further examples to support his thesis. They were there in abundance, tragedies great and small, from the city’s earliest days to the eleventh of September.

The history of the city was the history of violent death.

The gang wars, from the pitched battles between the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits to the endless Mafia palace coups and clan wars. Albert Anastasia, shot dead in the barber chair at the Park Sheraton hotel. Joey Gallo, gunned down in Umberto’s Clam House. Throughout the five boroughs, blood seeped into the pavement. The rain couldn’t wash it away. It only made it invisible.

And fires, so many fires. You thought of the city as nonflammable, a city of glass and steel and asphalt and concrete, but hadn’t the world watched as buildings of glass and steel burned like torches until they melted and collapsed of their own weight? Oh, yes, forests could burn, and wooden houses could burn, but so could cities of concrete and steel.

Energized by what had emerged from his reading, he found it impossible to read. He would pick up a book only to put it down and pace the floor, consumed by the thoughts that came at him in battalions. He began to leave the apartment, walking for hours through the city’s streets. His feet took him to Little Germany, where no Germans had lived for years, and past the one-time site of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, and, more than once, to the barriers that still ringed Ground Zero.

And, walking, he had a further insight.

He was thinking of the fire in the unlicensed social club that had taken the lives of seventy or eighty Hondurans a few years earlier. It had been a great tragedy, certainly, but it had not come upon the poor people as an act of God. An embittered Honduran immigrant, furious over some real or fancied insult, had returned to the club with a container of gasoline and set the place on fire. He’d been caught and tried and convicted, and was serving a life sentence somewhere.

The people he’d killed had been sacrificed to the city of New York, he could see that clearly enough. They’d come to New York and died here so that others of their countrymen could follow them here and live and thrive and prosper. And the man who hurled the gasoline, the man who tossed the match, had surely been the architect of their sacrifice, and hadn’t he sacrificed himself in the bargain? He was alive (unless he’d been killed in prison, for he did seem the type to get killed in prison) but what kind of a life did he have?

Perhaps...

Well, take the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. A horrible fire, certainly, bad enough to consume the entire building, but the great loss of life occurred because the doors were locked from the outside. Otherwise there would have been fatalities, certainly, but some, even most of the young women would have been able to get out alive.

Was it pure happenstance that the doors were locked? Was it, as some claimed, that the bosses locked the doors to keep the women at their sewing machines?

Or...

Or could the same hand have locked the doors and set the fire?

That’s what had happened. He was sure of it. Someone had made the great tragedy happen, someone intent upon causing as much loss of life as possible. Maybe it was sheer villainy, as inexplicable as all evil is inexplicable, or maybe, maybe...

Maybe it was someone with a vision. Maybe it was someone willing to sacrifice those lives, and to give up his own morality in the process, his morality and his hope of eternal reward (for what fate but Hell could await a man who’d do such a thing?), to give up everything, to sacrifice everything, for the sake of the greater good?

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

The Latin phrase came to him from somewhere in the past. Sweet and decorous it is to die for one’s country. Or for one’s city, and how would you say that in Latin? He’d forgotten everything he ever knew of the language, except for a few odd words and phrases. Still, the things you’d forgotten tended to come back to you.

Dulce et decorum est...

And the General Slocum disaster? There were all sorts of explanations advanced for the tragedy, several of them plausible enough, but were any as apt as that someone had sabotaged the ship, someone had set the fire, someone had deliberately made the whole thing happen?