by Mark Joseph
“Anybody hurt up here?” the captain asked.
“No, but one of my checkers had his leg broken,” Spillman said, “and a guy had a heart attack.”
“The paramedics are out front. They’ll be okay. I think all of you should lock up and go home.”
“I can’t,” Spillman said. “I have to clean up and stay in contact with the technical people in Pleasanton.”
The policeman’s radio crackled and he pressed it to his ear. “Garcia.”
“Central dispatch here, captain. We have another disturbance at 99th and Amsterdam. A large assembly of people are on their knees praying in the middle of the street, and they’re blocking the intersection.”
“Mother of God. Okay, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“More trouble?” Spillman asked.
“I have a feeling this is going to be a day to…” He didn’t finish the thought.
“A day to what?” Amanda asked. “What are you saying, captain?”
“Judgment Day,” Garcia said, almost in a whisper, “when we find out who we are.”
Outside, a siren shrieked as an ambulance carried away another casualty. Amanda burst into tears.
“Don’t worry,” Denise consoled her. “We’ve been through the worst. It’s over.”
“Oh, no,” Amanda wailed. “Don’t you understand? It’s just starting.”
“Go home, both of you,” Spillman said. “There’s nothing you can do here now.”
Amanda shook her head. “How? There’s no way I’m getting on a train with all those disgusting people.”
“Look,” Spillman said. “Go to my house. Denise, get a cab. I’ll call Shirley and let her know you’re coming. She’s home today. All right?”
“I’ll take Amanda to my house,” Denise said. “I want to go home to my kids. Let’s go, Amanda. It’ll be all right.”
“No,” she said, her voice rising. “Nothing will ever be the same again.”
Amanda dropped her glass, ran downstairs, stumbled, picked herself up and rushed toward the front of the store. Denise and Spillman were right behind, trying to stop her.
“Amanda, wait!”
It was no use. Amanda ran out of the store, pushed through the crowd on the sidewalk and disappeared.
Spillman saw media vans pulling up in front of the store and stopped short of the doors. “Let her go, Denise,” he said. “Stay inside. We don’t want to be on TV on the day the world is falling apart.”
In the back of the store, the automatic sprinklers came on in the produce department. Looking fresh and delicious, the lettuce was lost in cyberspace and would rot on the shelves. Spillman rolled up his sleeves and went looking for the hand-valve to shut off the spray.
* * *
On the far side of the globe, the millennium bug was approaching the most densely populated regions of Asia. Unlike Russia, all of China occupied one time zone, and huge celebrations were scheduled at the Great Wall. Illuminated along its 1200-mile length, the wall was visible from space, and a gigantic digital clock set in the wall just north of Beijing was counting down the minutes. The Great Wall, like the wooden barricade that once ran along Wall Street, had been built to stop alien invaders from reaching the Forbidden Palace. It didn’t work in the 14th Century, and wouldn’t help in the 21st, either.
8
Looking over the crowd outside the Safeway, Garcia noticed that the usual I’ve-seen-it-all-before-so-what New York attitude was missing. Everyone appeared glazed and shocked, a rare thing on the island of Manhattan. He stuck his nose in the air and sniffed. Like every city, New York has a unique smell, and Manhattan had always smelled like ozone, salt and sweat. Garcia recognized another odor. He smelled fear.
An invisible enemy was approaching his city, and a fifth column of terror was already loose and attacking from within. He’d seen this before. As an eighteen-year-old Marine, he’d witnessed the fall of Saigon. In those last, terrible days he’d seen panic sweep over a great city and compress a million individual traumas into a single, incomprehensible conflagration. Fear makes people run when there is nowhere to go, sometimes trampling their own children. Desperation creates instant heroes and accidental villains, rends the social fabric and makes a policeman’s job impossible.
Garcia decided not to make a statement about the Safeway, but before he could find his driver, microphones and cameras were thrust in his face. The cameras were rolling, and he knew some of the feeds were going out live. Eschewing the grim face the public expected from police officials, he smiled and waved at several reporters he recognized while trying to inch toward his car.
“Where’s the store manager?”
Continuing to smile, Garcia said, “He doesn’t have time for you fine people, either. He’s busy cleaning up his market.”
“What happened here, Captain?” came the first shouted question.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said, “but I don’t have time to chat.”
“How many people were hurt?”
“Four, I think, but I’m not sure.”
“Was this caused by computers?”
“How many arrested?”
He gave in and patiently answered their questions.
* * *
One hundred blocks south, Donald Copeland had just entered the steamy reception room of his favorite massage parlor on Mott Street in Chinatown. Copeland treated sex like everything else, as a business transaction. In moments of great stress, when his mind descended to his genitals, he dealt with his libido efficiently and in great haste.
“You wan’ massah?” queried the Chinese madam who knew him well.
Behind her, three young Chinese massage girls were watching TV, and without warning Copeland found himself watching the aftermath of the Safeway riot. Holy shit, he thought, his friend Jonathon Spillman was the manager of the store.
“Crazy people wreck supahmahket,” said Madam Wo. “New Yawk crazy town.”
On screen a cop was talking to a crowd of reporters, and he realized the policeman being interviewed was another of his breakfast buddies, Ed Garcia.
“All I know is that the store’s computers went down and the checkers couldn’t handle the long lines,” Garcia was saying. “People went nuts.”
“Captain Garcia, we’re getting reports that all the computers in the entire Safeway grocery chain have crashed. Do you have any comment on that?”
“No, I don’t know anything about that. I’m sorry. You’ll have to excuse me. I have to go.”
Copeland could scarcely believe his ears. It had to be Y2K, but it made no sense. Spillman was a member of Safeway’s Y2K oversight team. A smart company, Safeway had spent a fortune to become compliant, and they’d done everything right.
“You wan’ massah or you wan’ watch TV? TV talk about new disease call millennium bug. You know what it is? Is it like flu?”
“Just a minute,” he said to Madam Wo, whipping out a cellphone. He punched in Spillman’s private number, and the store manager answered on the first ring.
“What happened, Jon?”
“I’m tired of answering that question, Donald. I don’t know. Safeway is dead, all 1,450 stores.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Yeah, right, impossible. I thought so, too. Ed was here, but he’s gone. There’s another riot somewhere in Harlem.”
“He’s on TV right now outside your store. I’m watching him.”
“Shit,” Spillman said. “TV is getting people excited. I think these people who trashed my store saw all that crap on TV before they came in. They were primed. I’m thinking about going home and sitting in my house with a shotgun, you know what I mean?”
“What’s wrong, Jonathon? You sound agitated.”
“For Chrissake, Donnie, my store is dead, my company is dead, but across the street Blockbuster Video is doing fine. They have a window display of every disaster movie ever made, and people are going to celebrate New Year’s Eve by watching ships sink and comets hit the
earth. Not me. I don’t have to watch a movie. I just got run over by a freight train.”
“Come downtown. We can have lunch.”
“Are you serious? Lunch? You yuppie bastard. I can’t leave. I have to stay on-line with Pleasanton while they try to find out what happened. They got corrupted code from somewhere, but frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. I just sent four people to the hospital. One of my checkers was trampled and the bastards broke his leg. A customer had a heart attack, and God knows what else. Ever seen a riot?”
“Only after the Superbowl, but that’s just drunks.”
“They could sell tickets,” Spillman said. “People would pay to see what I saw today.”
“Save the tapes from your security monitors,” Copeland said. “Maybe you can sell them.”
“That’s my Donnie boy, always trying to turn a buck. For your information, Ed wants the tapes. I don’t care.”
“Look,” Copeland said. “I’m very interested in finding out what happened to your systems, Jonathon. Mind if I talk to your people in Pleasanton? Maybe I can get Safeway as a client. Nice account. We have all these Y2K people working on the banks who won’t have that much to do next week.”
“I swear to God, Donnie, your mind is one of the wonders of the universe, but be my guest. Hey, if you want lunch, we got lunch. It’s all over the floor, a quarter acre of it. I’ll be here.”
Copeland clicked off his phone, surveyed the three girls, picked the chubby one, and gave Madam Wo eighty dollars.
“You wan’ special, like always?”
Copeland grunted and followed his prize down the red satin corridor.
* * *
When Captain Garcia arrived at 99th and Amsterdam Avenue, a busy intersection in a primarily Spanish-speaking neighborhood, one hundred fifty people were on their knees, praying in Spanish in the middle of the street.
Garcia’s 24th Precinct stretched from 86th to Cathedral Parkway on the West Side and included some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in America, as well as some of the city’s poorest barrios where less than half the population spoke English. From his friends, Garcia had learned quite a bit about the millennium bug and what to expect, and he knew damned well that many of the poverty-stricken Caribbean Islanders and Central Americans in the Two-Four didn’t have a clue. What they did know was that the millennium was coming full-blast and bearing the fruit of two thousands years of mystical numerology and scrambled Christian theology.
People were spilling out of the evangelical church on the corner and into the street, falling to their knees, blocking traffic and attracting a large crowd of gawkers on the sidewalks. Garcia wasn’t sure whose side they’d take if things got out of hand.
Garcia could feel another riot in the making. The mayor was in Washington for a millennium photo opportunity with the President. His Honor intended to return for another photo op in Times Square at midnight, leaving the safety of the city during the day in the unprepared hands of five borough presidents, four deputy mayors, and one police commissioner. Garcia had no doubt these politicians would barrage him with useless orders and directives. No matter what happened, Garcia would receive no help from the hierarchy because what was happening in the 24th Precinct was certain to be repeated all over the city before long. Like every other NYPD precinct captain, Garcia was on his own
The fire department was on the scene, and the fire commander was ready to turn the hoses on the crowd. Garcia knew Fire Commander Graviano as a stone-cold racist who considered the fire department a weapon in his private war against the people of New York. Graviano was willing to let a tenement burn, a process he called urban renewal.
“I’m ready to squirt ’em,” Graviano said. “Just say the word.”
“Let me talk to them first,” the captain said.
“Talk to them?” Graviano sneered. “Fuckin’ A, captain. These people don’t even speak English.”
Garcia moved into the kneeling crowd and found the minister, a young man in a flowing red-and-white robe who was in the throes of an ecstatic communion with the Lord.
“Excuse me,” Garcia said in Spanish, using the most formal and courteous of verb tenses, “but why are you and your congregation here in the street and not inside your church? It is most certainly a church to be admired.”
“We want to show ourselves to God. We want to prove ourselves as martyrs. We are waiting for you, my captain, to help us reveal ourselves to Jesus.”
All the other evangelicals had stopped praying and were watching them.
“We must suffer to prove ourselves worthy,” the preacher said. “Will you accommodate us, captain?”
My God, thought Garcia, I thought I’d seen everything.
“You want me to take all of you to jail?”
“Yes.”
“All right, but you’ll have to walk.”
“Oh, no, captain, you must arrest us, put us in chains, and throw us in your dungeon.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible, padre. I don’t have the manpower,” Garcia said, gesturing toward the firemen. “If you don’t move, the bomberos will turn their hoses on you, and people will be hurt.”
“So much the better, captain.”
“You have women and children with you.”
“We’re all martyrs in the eyes of the Lord.”
“I don’t think so,” Garcia said, shifting from the formal to the informal, trying to throw the preacher off balance. “You’re going to wake up tomorrow morning and feel like an idiot. You’re deceiving these people. You’re under arrest. Just you, no one else.”
“I can’t leave my congregation.”
“You can and you will.”
Garcia waved over two uniforms who lifted the minister from his knees and pushed him toward a patrol car. Struggling, flailing wildly, he shouted, “It’s starting, brothers and sisters, our journey to meet our Lord on Judgment Day is starting. Pray, brothers and sisters. Jesus is our witness. Jesus will see what they do to us today!”
The congregation began to writhe on the asphalt as the cops wrestled the screaming minister into the back of a patrol car.
“Take him to the precinct, captain?” asked one of the arresting officers.
“No, take him to his church. Maybe the rest will follow.”
“I can’t wait around here all fuckin’ day,” the fire commander said. “If I get another call, I’m gone.”
“If we can get him out of here,” Garcia said patiently, “and they don’t have anyone to tell them what to do, maybe we can disperse the crowd peacefully.”
“It’s not gonna happen, Garcia,” said the fireman, pointing to the crowds assembled on all four corners of the intersection. “What about them?”
The crowd was mesmerized by 150 people writhing and moaning in religious ecstasy in the middle of the street. Missing was the usual rumble of catcalls and jeers, and Garcia heard only a few shouts directed at the police and firefighters.
Garcia was an expert at crowd control and also had a deep empathy for the people of New York. He believed he was a public servant and a guarantor of public safety, and he hated officials like Graviano who used their authority to further their own misconceived agendas. If the firefighters turned on their hoses, the crowd would respond with rocks and bottles and rip the neighborhood to shreds.
There was another way. He gathered all the cops and firefighters around him and announced his decision.
“Okay,” he said. “Set up permanent barricades at 100th Street, 98th Street, Amsterdam Avenue and Central Park West. I declare this area the Millennium Religious Sanctuary of the 24th Precinct. That’s it. Do it.”
“What?” screamed Graviano. “You don’t have the authority to do that.”
“I just did it, you stupid jerk, and I’m going to announce it to the press. Richards, get those reporters over here. I’ve already had one riot today, and I’m not going to have another. Commander, when I was in the Marines I learned it’s much easier to ask forgiveness later than perm
ission first. This is my precinct, and if these people are looking for God, the best they’re going to get is me, Captain Ed Garcia. Let’s have a little religious tolerance. These people only want to pray. They believe. I can’t mess with that. Don’t you get it? Every religious nut in New York will show up here, and we’ll have them all in one place. That way, they won’t be doing this all over town. Only once every thousand years do people want to pray in the streets of New York, so I say, let ’em. Get the minister out of the car, Richards. What the hell, I’ll do it myself. Go back to your fire station,” he said to the commander. “We don’t need you anymore. Thank you.”
“You’ll lose your job for this, Garcia.”
“Maybe, but my successor will have a precinct in one piece, at least,” Garcia said as he stepped away. “Here’s the media.”
Garcia waved at the reporters, most of whom had followed him from 96th Street, and gestured for them to come closer.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in his best booming public relations voice. “I have an announcement to make. As you know, the city intends to block off several designated areas for New Year’s Eve and millennium celebrations. Well, I’ve just added to the list. As I’m sure you’re aware, the millennium has great religious significance for many people in this city, and while we may not agree with their beliefs and aspirations, we must respect them. Therefore, in the name of religious tolerance, the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and the people of the City of New York, I’m closing Amsterdam Avenue to traffic as of right now from 98th to 100th. Welcome to the official Millennium Religious Sanctuary of the 24th Precinct.”
The press was aghast. This was unprecedented, unheard of, almost unthinkable, but as word of Captain Garcia’s decree spread among the people in the street, an explosion of joy erupted from the throats of the believers.
Garcia beamed. “Let God smile on New York City today,” he said. “We’re gonna need all the help we can get.”
* * *
Copeland was back in the massage parlor lobby in time to see the tail end of Ed Garcia’s second sound bite of the day. The official Millennium Religious Sanctuary of the 24th Precinct. Wonderful. Why the hell not. As he was thanking Madam Wo, the TV cut away from Spanish Harlem to the ABC anchor desk in Washington.