If Angels Fight Read Online Free PDF Page B

Place. Behind them were a couple of cops, a few auxiliary police, and one or two guys in civilian clothes with IDs of some kind pinned to their shirts. All of them looked tired, subdued by events.
    At the barricades was a small crowd, ones like me waiting for friends from neighborhoods to the south, ones without proper identification waiting for confirmation so that they could continue on into Soho, people who just wanted to be outside near other people in those days of sunshine and shock. Once in a while, each of us would look up at the columns of smoke that hung in the downtown sky then look away again.
    A family approached a middle-aged cop behind the barricade. The group consisted of a man, a woman, a little girl being led by the hand, a child being carried. All were blondish and wore shorts and casual tops. The parents seemed pleasant but serious people in their early thirties, professionals. They could have been tourists. But that day the city was empty of tourists.
    The man said something and I heard the cop say loudly, “You want to go where?”
    “Down there,” the man gestured at the columns. He indicated the children. “We want them to see.” It sounded as if he couldn’t imagine this appeal not working.
    Everyone stared at the family. “No ID no passage,” said the cop and turned his back on them. The pleasant expressions on the parents’ faces faded. They looked indignant, like a maitre d’ had lost their reservations. She led one kid, he carried another as they turned west, probably headed for another check point.
    They wanted those little kids to see Ground Zero!” a woman who knew the cop said. “Are they out of their minds?”
    “Looters,” he replied. “That’s my guess.” He picked up his walkie-talkie to call the check points ahead of them.
    Mags appeared just then, looking a bit frayed. When you’ve known someone for as long as I’ve known her, the tendency is not to see the changes, to think you both look about the same as when you were kids.
    But kids don’t have gray hair and their bodies aren’t thick the way bodies get in their late fifties. Their kisses aren’t perfunctory. Their conversation doesn’t include curt little nods that indicate something is understood.
    We walked in the middle of the streets because we could. “Couldn’t sleep much last night,” I said.
    “Because of the quiet,” she said. “No planes. I kept listening for them. I haven’t been sleeping anyway. I was supposed to be in housing court today. But the courts are shut until further notice.”
    I said, “Notice how with only the ones who live here allowed in, the South Village is all Italians and hippies?”
    “Like 1965 all over again.”
    She and I had been in contact more in the past few months than we had in a while. Memories of love and indifference that we shared had made close friendship an on and off thing for the last thirty-something years.
    Earlier in 2001, at the end of an affair, I’d surrendered a rent stabilized apartment for a cash settlement and bought a tiny co-op in the South Village. Mags lived as she had for years in a run-down building on the fringes of Soho.
    So we saw each other again. I write, obviously, but she never read anything I published, which bothered me. On the other hand, she worked off and on for various activist leftist foundations and I was mostly uninterested in that.
    Mags was in the midst of classic New York work and housing trouble. Currently she was on unemployment and her landlord wanted to get her out of her apartment so he could co-op her building. The money offer he’d made wasn’t bad but she wanted things to stay as they were. It struck me that what was youthful about her was that she had never settled into her life, still stood on the edge.
    Lots of the Village restaurants weren’t opened. The owners couldn’t or wouldn’t come into the city. Angelina’s On Thompson Street was, though, because Angelina lives just a couple of doors down from