Then one day, Sunday, the phone rings and to my surprise it’s Angelina. She’s all upset. The drug dealers who bought the house next to hers are having a party. Everyone in this neighborhood knows they’re drug dealers. They’ve got so much money they don’t know what to do with it. Two guys. One of them is really handsome, in a dark and dangerous, drug-dealer sort of way. I personally thought he looked kind of nice. Running slowly to his four-by-four with darkened windows in a happy, thrifty gait.
They have a fiberglass boat on the driveway, wrought iron bars on the windows and doors. Right away when they moved in, it was instant landscape and all exotics; bonsais, eucalyptus, and palm trees even outside. They have no idea what winter is like here. The cement people from Howard Beach arrived in a beautiful truck and did the whole driveway and the courtyard in pink cement. The word on the street is the pink comes from the blood of the drug dealer’s tardy clients. Only that’s too good to be true, my husband says. On feast days, they have so many lights up it looks like carnevale. Sometimes, when you hear shots at night, you know right away where they’re coming from.
So Angelina is very upset on the phone because these people are having a party since yesterday and the dog can’t take that mambo jambo music no more. Also, a van pulled up and eleven blond Polish girls were ushered in from a van. Or maybe Russian. They could have been Russian! She called the cops but they won’t do nothing till eleven at night and she’s going potza. Bruno barks the whole time. If they don’t a stop soon, she’s a gonna get out her husband Jasper’s pistoli he had since Mussolini and she’s a gonna shoot a the bastards one a by one in the head!
“Calma, Signora.” I soothe her as best I can over the phone, and peek out through my blinds upstairs from my bedroom. There’s a whole posse of snazzy cars with bras on their front fenders and smoked windows you can’t see through parked by that house. One of the cars bumps up and down on humungous tires to rectum-vibrating hip-hop.
What am I supposed to do? I listen to her go on and on. She’s “a gonna move to Florida!” She’s “a gonna take a the dog and never talk a nobody again!”
I feel bad because there’s something in her voice that tells me maybe she believes it herself. My husband’s busy helping Lefferts Louie and Richie the jeweler put the new air-conditioner in the wall. “Who is that?” Tony jerks his head and wants to know, in a bad mood.
“Angelina,” I mouth silently.
“Oh,” he grunts, “the ball-breaker.”
I’ve got my cutlets ready for frying and the water’s starting to roll for the pasta. I figure as long as you let somebody vent, you mostly don't have to do anything at all.
“So, Tony,” Louie jokes, “how long do you think till you get the hell out of this neighborhood?”
“Seven years, I figure,” Tony tells him, shifting the air-conditioner up and off of his shoulder.
Seven years. Frozen, I sit down with the phone on Anthony’s little trucks on the floor.
So it’s two days after that, it’s raining and I’m upstairs in my closet with the cardboard box from the new air-conditioner, playing emotional tug-of-war with clothes I haven’t worn in over a year. The doorbell rings and it’s two detectives, the one short, the other tall. Now we have gold badges, close shaves, and the unforgettable smell of Old Spice. They’re investigating a drug deal that’s about to go down around the corner.
“About time,” I mutter.
“Are you aware there is drug traffic from that location?” the tall one says suspiciously.
“Yeah. Everybody knows,” I say right back. Who the hell is he? “It’s not like they’re living the low profile.”
“Let me put it to you this way,” the short cop says. “We’d like to use your upstairs back window in the next couple of days.”
“Come on in,” I say, and they do. Wait till I tell Angelina this, I think.
“What are the chances of getting a reward?” I ask the short one while we’re going up the stairs.
“Let me put it to you this way,” he says, “none.”
As soon as they leave, I put a leash on Molly and nonchalantly we walk over there. It’s five o’clock and butter yellow. We’re just turning the corner when I see Angelina’s daughter’s car parked in front of my Dutch neighbor Elly’s house. That takes care of that, I think, and Molly and I head slowly home. Molly is no fast walker, it’s more like you’re accompanying a serious student of dirt. So I’m still out on the corner when I see Angelina drive by in her daughter’s car. I’m happy to see she’s done something to her hair. She’s driving with the top down and there’s Bruno on the front seat, tongue jauntily flapping like a long necktie. I didn’t even know Angelina could drive. Angelina looks right at me and gives a sort of a start of a wave but she’s busy driving. I watch her drive all the way down Lefferts, past Don Peppe’s and onto the Belt.
For a while I linger outside. It’s still hot but the air doesn’t hurt like all day. Tony and Anthony are over at Holy Child playing CYO basketball so I have some time to kill before I start supper. There’s this new little cappuccino place on Lefferts and I go there for a ristretto. It’s kind of a rickety place and they let me bring Molly if I sit outside and she stays under the table. On the inside there’s this big mural on the wall of the hills of Abruzzi and I sit there looking in at it. A big loneliness fills up my heart as I sip my coffee and feed biscotti crumbs to my Molly. Who would have thought I’d have seven more years to live out in South Ozone Park? I read on the menu that the mural is not of the Italian hills but the Colombian rain forest. I don’t know what’s come over me. Then I get up and go home.
The kids from down the block come running up when they see me. They’re wild with excitement. “Did you hear what happened?”
“What?”
“All the cops were around the corner!”
I thought of my upstairs window and how now no undercover cops would be sitting there spying and my heart sank. “Did they arrest them already?”
“Nope. She got away!”
“Who? She?”
“Angelina! She got the hell away!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Yeah! She got away with a lotta the money.” Abel bounces up and down. “She took it from the safe house!”
“No, dopey”—Frankie smacks him—“she was the safe house!”
“I don’t understand,” I wail.
“She got clean away on the bus,” fat Anita says.
“They’re gonna catch her up by Union Turnpike,” Melissa—eyes like saucers—informs us. “I heard them yellin’ when they got in the car.”
I say, “How about the two guys next door who are dealing the drugs?”
“They no drug dealers, man,” Abel says like I’m stupid, “they two gay guys.”
I look down the boulevard. There’s no traffic on the Belt. She could be in south Jersey by now. She probably is. All of a sudden the sun falls onto the roof of Don Peppe’s restaurant and at the same time Mikey lets his racing pigeons fly off. They circle over our heads and then out over Kennedy airport. It’s a beautiful sight.
I wonder if Bruno is going to like Florida.
Let me put it to you this way, if it was just Angelina, maybe I’d tell. But Angelina and Bruno? Hey. Bona fortuna.
THE REMAINING UNKNOWNS
BY TONY BROADBENT
They say your whole life passes before you at the moment of death.
They’re wrong; their timing’s way off, not even close.
Not if you count life in seconds. Not when a single second can seem to stretch for an eternity and a millisecond carry the weight of a lifetime, several lifetimes, sometimes, and the very next instant buy a subway ticket to heaven or hell for anyone within blast range. Fiat lux. Fiat nox. Fiat nex.
Latin? From a kid from Brooklyn?
Believe me, there are times it surprises even me, but you’d be amazed what you can pick up sitting cross-legged in a library; be it guarded by snow-covered lions way across the Eas
t River or one that arrives in a stack of moving boxes filled with nothing but dread sorrow.
Patience. Fortitude. Lessons carved in stone or wisdoms clawed from mountains of rubble. If life teaches you anything it’s that you take what insight you can, when you can, from wherever you can find it. Then you hold on to it by every means possible. In the end there’s nothing else. You go out with what you came in with. Beyond that first cry and last sigh, there’s really nothing else.
Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes.
Smithereens to smithereens.
Illegitimum non carborundum.
I suppose I’d daydreamed of another life; not too clearly that I remember or anything very much in particular; simply a thousand and one other things for me to do than follow family tradition and don the uniform of a New York cop.
Fat chance.
My older brother had upped and escaped the inevitable and done so with rare distinction, all but barring my path out with the measure of his success and the towering nature of his achievements. Inimitable? You better believe it. On my best day I couldn’t even come close to reaching such unfathomable heights. At least that’s what I thought, no matter what Teddy did to try to ease the gap, ease the burn. A little difference of eight years between us; it might as well have been eighty; he was always the golden boy, I only ever had feet of clay.
He was the hero; I was the hothead. And so it goes.
Teddy was nothing if not all-conquering. A scholarship to Holy Cross, topped by what must’ve seemed a preordained Sanctae Crucis Award, and from there on to Dartmouth and an MBA garlanded with the laurel leaves of a Tuck Scholar. The inevitable siren calls from the big Wall Street investment banks and huge early success in the worlds of high technology and the Internet even before most people knew what in hell any of it really amounted to and all the world soon in every way his very own oyster. In rapid succession: an impossibly beautiful wife; a four-story Park Slope town house that everyone said was “to die for” even if it was only in the better part of Brooklyn; an unending passion for vintage Rolex sports watches and purple silk ties, dozens of each; a place out on the Vineyard for the summer; a private jet to call on whenever he needed to hop down to the Islands for some much-needed R&R and some time on his sailboat. And then September 11th. And all our worlds come crashing down.
And I am born again.
“You on air, Bobby?”
The voice sounds a thousand miles away, even with the amplifiers inside my blast helmet, but I give a thumbs-up, get a quick slap on my shoulder from my partner, Brad. I’ve got air coming through my respirator. I’m good to go.
All nearby buildings have now been evacuated, all nearby roads blocked off, all vehicular and foot traffic diverted, inner and outer perimeters marked by lines of yellow police tape. The outer perimeter pushed back more than double the usual distance and reinforced with aluminum barriers and faded blue NYPD sawhorses; any damn thing that can be dragged into service. The inner perimeter now a rectangle of fluttering plastic tape not one but two hundred feet from the target vehicle, doubly secured by squad cars and fire trucks parked nose to tail, three deep in some places. And I begin another Long Walk.
It’s the job of the NYPD Bomb Squad to attend any suspicious package or potentially lethal device found anywhere in the city’s five boroughs. For any number of reasons, the Squad never consists of more than thirty or so officers. Any more than that, on “the Job,” would have way too many cooks in an already overheated kitchen and to keep things focused we work in teams of two.
Two heads being better than one, it was up to Brad and me, crouched down behind our NYPD emergency vehicle, to interpret the pale-gray tones of the X-ray as seen on a laptop computer screen. Our very lives, mine certainly, depended on how carefully we read it. What we saw was an image of a complexity and level of sophistication previously only reported in terrorist bomb incidents abroad and, up to that moment, not seen anywhere on the US mainland. The X-ray images also showed additional dark spots and instances of flaring, which could indicate the presence of shielded radiological material.
The heart of the improvised explosive device appeared to be a lead-lined box—eighteen inches or so, by six, by nine—attached to a mess of wires and metal tubes, some of which would be functional, some not. All of it meant to blind us to the exact nature of the bomb and the full extent of what without any sense of irony we refer to as our “unknowns.” And with the distinct possibility “the package” could be “hot,” the ripples of concern spread further and further out, as Brad enlarged, enhanced, then wirelessly transmitted the X-ray images to ever higher and higher command posts and to other more experienced bomb techs for further analysis and advice. Yet even after everyone and his scrambled-egg-wearing brother has weighed in on how best to render the package safe and a reversal of standard protocol has given us early success, it still comes down to me taking the Long Walk armed with only a set of hand tools; knives, clippers, hooks, forceps, scalpels, crimpers, tape; your everyday toolbox.
I’ve never been sure whether my father died of a heart attack or a broken heart. He’d more than proved himself the toughest of old birds. No one made detective supervisor without having been to hell and back and then some, but Teddy going like that, out of a clear blue sky, without warning, only for it to be relived over and over and over again on television and in every newspaper and magazine, and the shock of it forever ongoing, there were dimensions to it he just couldn’t grasp or didn’t want to. It wasn’t the world he’d given his life to protect, it was something other; it was as if he’d died of what someone in one of Teddy’s books had once called Future Shock. And with Teddy having always been the apple of her eye, I’m sure Mom would’ve gone the same way, but breast cancer had already savaged and taken her. And looking back on it, a small mercy perhaps in the bigger scheme of things, but at least Teddy had been there by her bedside when she’d left us, we all were.
A bomb requires very few working parts: a power source, a switch, an initiator, explosives, and a container. The low- or high-explosive incendiary device; a mix of solid, liquid, jelly, or powder; made from over-the-counter firecrackers, propane, gasoline, and ammonium nitrate–based fertilizer; or from illegally sourced commercial and military-grade nitroglycerine, dynamite, TNT, or plastic explosives. When such a bomb explodes it can create blinding light, searing heat, toxic gas, and blast waves moving at up to 26,000 feet per second. An invisible, utterly incomprehensible force that nothing on earth can outrun and that compresses and hits with such speed and violence it’s not until a second wave follows, a few milliseconds later, that any bystanders can even hear the deafening eruption. And by then the pitiless, shapeshifting, shrapnel-filled horror is already upon them and has utterly devoured them.
My father had always held himself a good Catholic, in that he’d strived all his life to adhere to all Ten Commandments, as well as the thousand and one rules in the NYPD Patrol Guide. The fact that he pretty much succeeded in following most all of them, in spirit, if not always the exact letter of the law, said a lot for him. Not that anyone ever called him out on anything; there was never any hint of wrongdoing. It’s just that New York policing is tough business and New York City mired in politics, at every level, in every department. And ends sometimes justify means. So, Christmas and Easter and weddings and funerals aside, he’d venture into the confessional only after whatever high-profile case he’d been working on had been officially closed, as then both his desk and his conscience were perfectly clear. It was much tidier that way, for New York, and for him. He was ever a pragmatist. I think that’s why he stopped going to Mass after 9/11; God had struck out the two apples of his eye in an almost wrathful vengeance, after which there was little left worth praying for or even living for anymore, at least not in his book.
It sobers me to know that the amount of highly enriched uranium needed to build a bomb that’d bring New York or any major US city to its knees need weigh no more than seventy-five pounds, would fit inside a suitcase,
and could all too easily be transported by any size car or SUV. Our worst imaginings delivered in the kind of vehicle we see on our city streets every single day and that we’re utterly blind to and can’t positively ID without inside information. So I always ask myself: Is this a “dirty bomb” designed to release a radioactive cloud that would render parts of Manhattan uninhabitable for generations to come? Or does it contain some biological agent or toxin that would spread death and disease on the wind?
If the NYPD Bomb Squad is called out, all of New York City’s own prevention measures and all of the nation’s many security resources; everything from border checks to cargo monitoring at port of entry; all the countless airline security checks; as well as the entire intelligence-gathering apparatus of every department of Homeland Security; every single one has failed. One single fact alone enough to stop me dead in my tracks: nine million shipping containers enter US ports every year and only five percent of them are inspected before they get loaded onto trucks and trains and vans that head everywhere in the contiguous Forty-Eight.
The Bomb Squad is the last line of defense, the very last of the first responders. It’s only after a terrorist bomb has exploded and extracted its bloody toll that the ambulance and triage teams, the doctors and nurses, aid workers and morgue attendants, all arrive; enough officially planned-for bodies to man all the border crossings to all nine circles of hell.
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