by Paul Batista
The CNN announcer said, “Ever since the city released this security footage three hours ago we’ve been trying to identify this man, already called the Angel of Life. Police estimate that he was treating the wounded just one minute after the last of the three explosions, at a time when more explosions were likely. This is being hailed as an extraordinary act of heroism.”
Cam stood behind Gabriel, both hands on his shoulders. The announcer said, “It was obvious that this heroic man had experience in providing emergency medical assistance. Now we know that he is Gabriel Hauser, a doctor at the prestigious Mount Sinai Hospital just ten blocks north of the epicenter of the explosions. We’re told Dr. Hauser is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghan wars, a graduate of Stanford and Cornell Medical School.”
Gabriel, without turning around, put his hand over Cam’s left hand. Gabriel said, “I don’t like this.”
They cherished their privacy. They were a close and loving couple. Cam was born and raised in Alabama. After graduating from Ole Miss, he left the South because he was gay and lonely. When he arrived in New York, he had found satisfaction in training in public relations, comfort in living without falsehood and pretexts as a gay man, and love. “I don’t like it either,” Cam said in his genteel Deep South accent. “God help us. I’ll have to learn what it’s like living with a hero.”
“And how much of a hero do you think I’m going to be when America finds out I was tossed out of the Army for being gay?”
Three interviews followed on CNN with other doctors at Mount Sinai. Gabriel wasn’t even certain he knew them. They were asked about Dr. Hauser and, in a strange inversion of reality, as though they were speaking about someone else, Gabriel heard himself described as “compassionate and caring,” an “extremely skilled emergency room doctor,” and a “courageous man.”
He knew he was completely unprepared to deal with the fame that was now obviously cascading over him. He had never sought notoriety. When he and Cam made contributions to groups like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, they asked to be listed as “anonymous.”
Gabriel had been through challenging experiences in his life. Even before he enlisted in the Army, he’d led a life he now rarely talked about. His father was Jewish, his mother Puerto Rican. His father had trained as a flautist at Julliard and played briefly with the New York Philharmonic. He was a failed musician who refused to find other work and lived an increasingly alcoholic and embittered life. Gabriel’s mother was a flamboyant woman who loved Manhattan nightlife and spent most of the early years of Gabriel’s life at places like Studio 54, CBGB OMFUG, and the Mudd Club, those legendary party spots of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She spent her days in melodramatic hugging and praising of Gabriel before she left for what his father called the nightly whoring around. “I’m a concert flautist,” he’d shout at her, as though the words meant he was royalty. She’d answer, “You’ve got your flute stuck up your ass.”
As a teenager, Gabriel each day left the chaos of their messy West Side apartment for high school at Collegiate, the exclusive all boys’ private school he attended on a scholarship on West 77th Street. He was introverted and a very gifted student. By the time he was in high school he dreaded going home. He managed to find several other boys who were as shy as he was who lived in stately apartments on West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. Their parents had opened their doors to Gabriel, who was intelligent, well-spoken and respectful, to spend the afternoons and evenings studying in their homes.
And when he was fifteen, just weeks after his gorgeous mother abruptly left for a rehab in California, Gabriel had the first exciting experience of his life. Jerome Fletcher was a partner in a huge law firm and the father of Bobby Fletcher, one of Gabriel’s classmates. One school night, after a short run in Riverside Park when he was first learning the running that he later pursued throughout his life, Gabriel showered in one of the four bathrooms in the Fletcher apartment. Jerome was in his mid-forties. He had been a track star at Cornell and a serious decathlon athlete who almost qualified for the 1992 Olympic team. He volunteered that spring to help Gabriel train as a distance runner. It was exactly the kind of lonely, demanding sport that Gabriel was born for.
When Gabriel emerged from his shower after that first run in the park, Jerome Fletcher, with muscles in his legs and arms like chain meshing, was standing naked just outside the door. Gabriel realized in the instant before Jerome embraced him that he had found the excitement, comfort, and love he wanted. As Jerome rubbed his heavily veined, fully engorged penis against his, Gabriel was deliriously happy, somehow freed from the craziness of his mother and father, the wrecked apartment, the insanity of that life.
Jerome, in love with this boy who was exactly his own son’s age, carried on his affair with Gabriel for two years before arranging to send him to Stanford on a full scholarship. Gabriel felt he had been sent into exile. He wanted to go to Columbia, only fifteen blocks away from Jerome’s apartment, but Jerome’s wife, Carol, who had learned about the affair between her husband and her son’s best friend, insisted that Gabriel leave for the West Coast or she would tell the police and Jerome’s law partners about her husband’s involvement with a boy. Even though Carol Fletcher had no intention of leaving Jerome, she was jealous and angry. Jerome told Gabriel that his wife was deadly serious about the threat, she had pictures of them together in bed, and copies of sweet notes Jerome had regularly slipped into Gabriel’s gym bag. “I’d go to jail for life if the police found out, Gabe. That’s the world we live in. We have to do what she wants.”
Gabriel spent his first semester at Stanford lovesick and homesick. He was in love with Jerome and called him often at the office. For months Jerome happily took the calls. Then one day Jerome stopped accepting them and stopped sending e-mails and text messages. Gabriel became not only lovesick and homesick, but heartsick as well. The pain was acute; he was obsessed with it.
And then after two weeks of silence Gabriel received an envelope with no return address. Inside was a copy of the New York Post. The headline on the front page read, Deadly Sex Games of the Rich and Famous. There were three long articles on a murder, in a pay-by-the-hour Bronx motel next to the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx, of the leading corporate partner in the whitest of white-shoe New York law firms. According to the Post, Jerome Fletcher had been a frequent guest at the motel under the name Robert Smith. He was found strangled with a belt and stabbed fifteen times, mainly in the face. A seventeen-year-old black boy, who had arrived at the motel just minutes after Robert Smith checked in, was under arrest for the murder. He had several prior arrests for prostitution.
Jerome’s death was searing to Gabriel. He had lost, violently, a man he loved. He was also angry. Jerome’s cruel and abrupt suspension of the letters, e-mails, the texts, and the cell calls had wounded Gabriel profoundly in the two weeks before the killing. Gabriel had never been in love before Jerome and so had never been spurned or hurt in that way. He had no equipment in his life for dealing with a lover’s rejection, the abrupt and painful fact of separation; he had written a series of e-mails and texts, even a letter, to Jerome that expressed his longing, asked questions, and begged forgiveness for whatever he’d done that led Jerome to drop him. Gabriel devoutly believed that if anyone would be able to explain to him the vagaries and mysteries of love, and how to deal with the loss of love, it would have been Jerome. After all, Jerome had taught him how to run, how to think, how to relate to and assess other people, and how to spend quiet time listening to music and reading. Now Gabriel had no mentor. And no lover.
And in the weeks before the murder, Gabriel, for the first time, had experienced the torments and pettiness of jealousy. He had no doubt that Jerome had replaced him with another lover or lovers. He found himself imagining what Jerome was doing and how: Where did Jerome and the new boy or man spend time together? Who had been the seducer? How often were they making love?
It was three days after Gabriel read the articles
in the Post and elsewhere, including the Internet and even the West Coast newspapers, that Detective Talbot called him.
“Is this Gabe Hauser?”
“Yes.”
“I’m a detective with the NYPD.”
Gabriel felt a rush of anxiety. He was eighteen. He had never once talked to a cop. “Yes,” he said.
“Need to talk to you about a buddy of yours, Jerome Fletcher.” In Talbot’s grating Brooklyn accent Gabriel for the first time heard the scorn reserved for gay men. The sarcastic words, the malicious tone, and the edge of mockery. A buddy of yours.
Gabriel asked, “Who?”
“Guy named Jerome Fletcher.”
Gabriel tried to sound respectful, even childlike. “He was a friend of mine.”
“Listen, Gabe, we know he was more than a friend. We got his e-mails, texts, voice mails to you, the works. Yours, too.”
Gabriel said nothing, thinking, Why would Carol Fletcher give that stuff to the police?
Detective Talbot said, “We want to help you, and you can help us.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Can you come back to New York? We’ll pay for it.”
“I’ve got finals soon.”
“Your friend was dangerous, Gabe. You’re not the only boy he did what he did to you. Your friend knew other men who liked to do what he did. We want to find them, too. Mr. Fletcher was part of a little club of guys who liked boys.”
“What did Mr. Fletcher do?”
“Come on, Gabe. He raped you. He did it to others, including the boy in the motel.”
Raped. That word haunted him for years afterwards. When he was in medical school his course in psychiatry described any sex between an adult male and a boy under eighteen as rape and instructed on the troubled, terrible lives that the victims later suffered. Posttraumatic stress disorder, acute anxiety, manic depression, suicidal tendencies.
In truth, Gabriel had experienced none of that. Over time he did wonder what borders Jerome Fletcher crossed to bring himself to stand naked that day after their first run together and to initiate that first embrace, when Gabriel, his young torso almost hairless, was still gleaming and wet from his shower. As an adult, Gabriel never sought out boys, and there had to be some deep-seated reason for that restraint, some taboo that Jerome Fletcher had set aside and that ultimately killed him in a rancid motel room in the Bronx. Even as an adult, Gabriel wouldn’t apply the word rape to the two years he and Jerome had passionately pursued their afternoons together, often at the Regency on Park Avenue and sometimes in the West End Avenue apartment.
“I wasn’t raped, Mr. Talbot.”
He knew he was a continent away from New York and couldn’t be forced to return and at that stage in his life didn’t want to go back. New York was where his father had in effect barricaded himself in the grungy apartment on upper Broadway. And it was where the places were to which Jerome Fletcher had introduced him, such as the grand Metropolitan Museum, the cobblestone streets of Soho, the cozy warmth of the West Village and the vital, alert men striding on Christopher Street, many of them holding hands. And New York was where Jerome had met his squalid death.
“Sure you were, Gabe.”
Before Talbot could go on, Gabriel Hauser hung up. It was an act of courage, defying authority for the first time. Defiance of authority: he liked the feeling. He never heard from Talbot again.
Now, as they listened to the broadcast on CNN describing him as the Angel of Life, Cam asked, “What do you plan to do?”
“Sell my memoirs.”
Cam chuckled. “I’ll write them for you.”
“I’m headed back to the hospital. I came home to catch my breath, remember? I have work to do.”
Just as he was rising from the sofa, he was riveted by the scene on the television. The police commissioner, a woman whom he and his friends described as the cop who looked like Cher, announced that the police were searching for a man named Silas Nasar, a United States citizen “of Afghan descent.”
There on the screen was a picture of the man Gabriel knew both as Patient X52 and Silas Nasar: a face with a distinct, seahorse-shaped birthmark. It was a face, too, he had seen before: a grainy image sent from Kabul to his cell phone not long ago and then on the shattered steps of the Met and again in the emergency room at Mount Sinai.
Gabriel’s cell phone had slipped between the pillows on the sofa where he had been sleeping. As soon as he found it he scrolled to the contacts window and pressed the screen for Vincent Brown, who was still in the hospital. Brown answered on the first ring.
“Gabriel, how are you?” Brown’s cell had identified the incoming caller.
“Rested. And you? Why are you still there?”
“Hey, man, why leave? Where else can I have as much fun as this?”
“I’ll be back soon.”
Brown could be sardonic, like one of the doctors on M*A*S*H*. He said, “Why don’t you stay there and rest? I don’t think any more patients have come through the door since you left. It’s funny, but when there’s something like this all the usual street stuff we get just stops. No beatings, no stabbings, no overdoses. Strange way to get peace on the streets. If we had a big bomb going off every day, there’d be no more muggings.”
Gabriel asked, “Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“There’s a patient we only know as Patient X52. He’s the first guy I treated and then I saw him again in the ER.”
Brown had an immediate answer. “You signed him out just before you left.”
“What are you talking about?”
“A woman claiming to be his sister came in. She talked to you. And that guy X52 walked to the elevator with her.”
“Where did you get this? Where’s the joke in this?”
“No joke. I saw it.”
“Not possible, it never happened.”
“Sure it did. You said she told you she was a doctor from Los Angeles.”
“This,” Gabriel said, “is all made up.”
Brown’s tone of voice never changed: sardonic, determined, almost rehearsed. “You looked at her. You said ‘Fine.’ You had one of the nurses bring you the discharge papers. She said her brother couldn’t sign them, his hands were damaged. She signed for him. And then they left.”
“You’re out of your fucking mind, Brown.” Gabriel was furious. “Or this is a joke.”
For a long moment Vincent Brown said nothing. “You need to remember, Dr. Hauser, who your friends are.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IT WAS FINALLY dark. Roland Fortune, exhausted, his senses dulled by the fresh Vicodin that spread through his system, sat alone on a wicker chair on the terrace of Gracie Mansion overlooking Carl Schurz Park and the East River. A cool fragrant breeze blew in from the river. In the distance the long expanse of the Triboro Bridge glittered in the darkness. There was no ordinary traffic. Red-and-blue emergency lights rotated everywhere: on the FDR Drive, the bridge, and the Queens waterfront. On the surface of the river, which normally was alive even at night with heavy tug boats and barges gliding noiselessly upriver and downriver, there were only police and Coast Guard patrol boats. Their glaring, probing beams swept through the darkness. An hour earlier, two men had drowned trying to swim from Manhattan to Queens. The currents in the East River, which was not really a river but an immense estuary of the Atlantic, were powerful, overwhelming, controlled by oceanic tides.
There were no lights on the terrace. For the fifth time, Roland touched his cell phone, its light illuminating his face, and scrolled to John Hewitt-Gordan’s number in England. Sarah’s father had left three messages for Roland since early afternoon. By the time of the last message, John’s clipped aristocratic voice had weakened slightly. “Roland, please, if you can call that would be much appreciated. I know you must be hellishly busy.”
Roland genuinely liked the man, although they could not have come from more distinct worlds. John had a wry sense of humor. He called Roland “Mr. M
ayor,” and Roland called him “Mr. Major.” It was their way, simply by changing a letter, to get comfortable with each other.
Roland knew that John Hewitt-Gordan loved his daughter profoundly. She was his only child. His wife had died ten years earlier in a horrific car crash. Roland knew he had to speak to him, but he was mentally and emotionally disorganized by the craziness of the day, the lingering clamor of event after event, fear after fear, pain, anger, and the images of dead bodies and the voices of the dying and the wounded.
Tom Greenwood, a police lieutenant Gina Carbone had assigned to lead a squad of armed guards to follow Roland through the night, said, “Mr. Mayor, it’s not a good idea to sit out here with that cell phone screen shining. Anybody can see it from a mile away.”
In fact, Greenwood and Gina hadn’t wanted Roland to spend the night at the mansion. There were hotel rooms, preselected as part of the emergency plans, where he and other high-ranking officials could stay as anonymously as tourists. Gracie Mansion, a cream-colored colonial house completely different from any other building in Manhattan, was a target of opportunity. When he had told her he was headed to the mansion for the night because, he said, it was “home,” Gina Carbone answered, “Not a good idea, Roland. The mansion’s vulnerable. Impossible to guarantee your safety.”
Fixing his stare on the Triboro Bridge, Roland tapped the screen where John Hewitt-Gordan’s name appeared. It was the middle of the night in England. He hoped that John was sleeping, oblivious to the vibration of his cell phone or its ring.
John picked up on the first ring. “Roland?”
“John?”
John was a consummate realist. His training at Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point, and his thirty-year career in the British Army’s intelligence service had infused him with the rigors of truth, candid assessments, and the ability to differentiate between rumor and fact. He asked, “Is it true? Is Sarah dead?”