Manhattan Lockdown

by Paul Batista

  Almost from the day more than six months earlier when his byline first appeared in the Times as a writer covering the city, Raj started receiving calls from PR people representing companies, executives, lawyers, actors, and sports stars, all that vast array of people who wanted favorable coverage for every jerk in the world in the New York Times. One of the cardinal rules Raj had learned when he was in journalism school at Columbia was that you never relied on PR people for information.

  Raj was familiar with the firm where Cameron Kennedy Dewar worked. Raj also knew that, if he placed a call there asking for Cameron Kennedy Dewar and identifying himself as a reporter for the Times, he would get instant attention. This was his conduit to Gabriel Hauser. For any PR agency, a call from a reporter for the Times was like a summons from royalty.

  “Can I ask you to hold?” a perky young woman who answered the phone said.

  Sixty seconds later, an older woman with a crisp corporate style came on the line. “Mr. Gandhi? This is Jessica Brown. So good to hear from you. What can we do to help you?”

  “I’m trying to reach Cameron Dewar.”

  “Cameron’s not in the office today. Can I help you?”

  “I’d like his cell phone number.”

  “We haven’t heard from him since the attack. His cell may not be working. He lives right next to the museum. Are you sure I can’t help you?”

  “You can, Miss Brown. I’d like his cell number.”

  “Are you working on a story?”

  Raj Gandhi was always unnervingly polite. “I’m really not sure. I’m just making calls that I need to make. I’d very much appreciate his number.”

  “It’s 917-631-0011.” She paused, and in that pause Raj thought about how indifferent this woman was to the fate of someone she knew well. She clearly had no idea whether he was alive or dead, injured or not. She was all business. “Do you want me to repeat that?”

  “No, I have it, thank you.”

  “I hope I can take you to lunch when the dust settles.”

  Raj, who never went to lunch with anyone, said, “That would be nice, Miss Brown.”

  ***

  Three hours later Raj sat on a bench near the merry-go-round in the heart of the southern expanse of Central Park. The afternoon was limpid, as clear as the day before. Incredibly, the merry-go-round was operating. Gleeful-sounding kids sat on the big shiny horses while, less than a mile away, smoke still rose from the shattered museum. Most of the plaster horses reared up, forelegs in the air, perpetually ready to gallop. Raj, who had never seen a merry-go-round while growing up in India, was struck by how terrifying the frozen, brightly painted animals looked.

  He recognized Gabriel Hauser. Dressed in a blue blazer and white shirt open at the neck, Gabriel walked toward Raj although he’d never seen him before. It wasn’t difficult to recognize an emaciated, intelligent-looking Indian man sitting in the area where they had agreed to meet.

  Raj stood up. “Dr. Hauser, thanks for coming.”

  Gabriel, who was at least a head taller than Raj Gandhi, said, “Not a problem.”

  They sat next to each other. Raj let five seconds pass before he spoke. “I heard what you said on television.”

  “That’s good. I said it because I wanted people to hear it.”

  Gabriel was a man who had learned to hesitate before trusting anyone. He had never before dealt with journalists. He was still stung by that question he had heard two hours earlier as he walked through the door of the brownstone: Why were you thrown out of the Army? He realized that he shouldn’t have been taken aback by the question. There were hostile people in the world who were quickly searching Google and Yahoo for and finding negative, private information about him. Gabriel said, “Cam told me about your conversation with him.”

  “I’m developing a story about the government’s reaction to the bombings. More precisely, about violations of people’s civil rights.”

  “So Cam told me. Now I want to hear you tell me.”

  Raj knew that sometimes he needed to give information before he got it. Often the information he let out was not completely accurate, just as many times information he got in exchange wasn’t accurate either. With his usual precise diction, an accent that he knew put some people off, he said, “I have sources who tell me secret arrests are taking place.”

  Gabriel for the first time managed to get Raj to look into his eyes. He wondered whether the frail-looking man was shy or evasive. Or even a closeted gay man. Gabriel said nothing.

  “I have reason to believe there are secret detention centers, black prisons, in Manhattan where these men have been brought.”

  Between Gabriel and the frail-looking man was a silver commemorative plaque embedded in the bench’s green-painted wood. The engraved lettering read: To J.C. Lover of the park and of life. Gone too soon. C.T.

  Who, Gabriel wondered, were these people? Did C.T. still grieve?

  “So tell me,” Gabriel said, “why you wanted to see me.”

  “I’m looking into more than the violation of their rights, if, in fact, these arrests and detentions have happened.”

  “Draw the connection for me.”

  “Your rights. Someone has tried to terrorize you.”

  “No one is going to terrorize me, Mr. Gandhi. Do you know who’s doing all this?”

  “I’m not sure, Dr. Hauser. The mayor? The police commissioner? Rogue agents? Homeland Security? I was hoping you’d have some information.”

  “Do you?”

  There was no trace of bitterness or sarcasm in Gabriel’s voice. His eyes were almost blue despite his black and lustrous eyebrows that, set in the perfect symmetry of his face, had attracted so many men and women since Jerome Fletcher first embraced him years ago as he emerged at age fifteen, naked, from the shower in the apartment on West End Avenue.

  Raj said, “I have to be honest with you, Dr. Hauser. I have another source who says it was no coincidence that you were near the museum at exactly the same time the bombs went off.”

  The automated tin-pan-alley music from the merry-go-round switched from the theme song to Annie to the theme of The Sting.

  “Really? And what genius was that? I live on that block. I was walking the dog I love.”

  “The source tells me you were scheduled to work that morning and that you were uncharacteristically insistent on not doing it.”

  Gabriel’s voice was calm. “Who are we talking about?”

  “The source?”

  “That word makes him sound like an oracle of truth. Who is he? I need to talk to him. I want to hunt down the people who attacked my partner and my dog this morning. Was he one of them?”

  “I wish I could tell you, Dr. Hauser. I promised him anonymity. I can’t do my work if I can’t keep those promises.”

  Suddenly a green Army helicopter, its rotors swirling through the sunlight, passed overhead through the tranquil summer sky. The kids and the parents near the merry-go-round looked up excitedly. Gabriel didn’t have to look up because he recognized the unique thudding pulsation of the transport helicopters that had brought wounded men to him.

  “The source said you developed contacts in the Middle East.”

  “I did. I treated civilians and soldiers, anyone who was brought to the hospitals. It was the most intimate kind of contact you could ever imagine.”

  “They say you are bitter.”

  “Did they say why?”

  “Because you were forced out of the military.”

  Gabriel’s voice was still calm, the voice of a man who had many times spoken quietly as he was operating on people who were near death and had often died from their irreparable wounds while he did his work. “Who are these people? I became a jihadist because I was forced out of the Army?”

  “There are many disturbing things going on right now, Dr. Hauser. Some of them are happening to you.”

  Although the last traces of the sound from the Army helicopter were fading, the thuds from the rotors were still almost
tangible. The music from the merry-go-round had changed again. It was now a quick, lively version of God Bless America.

  Gabriel gazed at Raj’s absolutely black eyes. “I know that. But what about you, Mr. Gandhi? You’re working on troubling things, aren’t you? Do you think that being a reporter for the New York Times gives you some kind of immunity from harm?”

  “I’m not worried about myself, I’m looking for facts.”

  “And so am I.”

  “Don’t you think,” Raj asked, “that we can help each other?”

  Gabriel paused. A refreshing breeze, creating glittering green in the leaves, swept over them. “Let me have your iPhone.”

  Without asking anything, Raj passed his phone to Gabriel, who added his number to the contact list on Raj’s cell phone. “This is a special number for me. No one else has it. Use it when you want to.”

  “Do you want mine?”

  “I have it. You called me, Mr. Gandhi. As they say in the movies, I’ve got your number.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ROLAND FORTUNE LIKED people. He loved walking the streets of the city. He often left City Hall to make unexpected appearances in all the boroughs, walking several blocks each time, instantly and always recognizable. He ran almost every weekend in races in Central Park, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, and Flushing Meadows in Queens. He attended Mass in churches throughout the city and spoke at Baptist churches in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. And he was a regular presence at parties in the houses of the rich on the Upper East Side and in Tribeca. He was a man who loved the joy of living each day.

  He was also an unrepentant liberal who knew how to practice an old style of politics. The police and fire department unions, overcoming their initial reluctance about a Puerto Rican mayor, embraced him because he cooperated with them on pay and benefits. This was a sea change. Ever since the Giuliani and Bloomberg years, the unions had expected resistance from City Hall. The leaders of the immense civil service populations, men and women in the sanitation department, the schools, all the myriad government agencies praised him as “cooperative, farsighted, inspirational.”

  So when word had spread that Roland was very disturbed that he didn’t know where Sarah’s body was located, a group of men and women in the medical examiner’s office organized themselves to track down her remains. They found her in a temporary morgue that had been installed at the long-abandoned St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. The exterior white walls of the increasingly derelict building were graying under the steady accretion of rain and sunlight, soot and time. But even these decaying buildings on this bright afternoon somehow looked fresh.

  Roland was wearing sunglasses as he left the unmarked sedan which took him from City Hall to St. Vincent’s in the Village. He had ordered the car and only two security officers in plain clothes to accompany him. They walked near him as he approached the single functioning door, the access to the chilled room where at least seventy-five bodies were stored in the emergency morgue. This morgue was the one to which bodies that had no identification—no licenses, no passports, no wallets, no pocketbooks—were brought. Sarah Hewitt-Gordan was the first of these wrecked bodies that had been identified.

  Roland was stunned by what he saw in the room as he entered: three orderly rows of dead bodies stretched out on the concrete floor. They were covered in identical plastic blankets, all blue. Even in the artificial chill, there was the faint but unmistakable odor of dead flesh. Sarah’s body, he knew, was one of the sources of that odor.

  A huge black man, a nurse in blue hospital scrubs, approached Roland, who asked, “Where is she?”

  The nurse didn’t speak. He led Roland down the aisle between two of the rows of bodies. Only one of the blue blankets had a sheet of paper attached to it. Her name was on it.

  Visibly shaking, Roland Fortune knelt on the concrete floor. After several seconds, he reached toward the blanket. The massive nurse finally spoke, “That ain’t a good idea, sir.”

  Roland looked up. “Is it bad?”

  The man nodded. “Big time.”

  “How do you know it’s her?”

  “We had a picture.”

  Roland glanced at his unsteady hands and then completed the movement he had started. He pulled at the upper edge of the blanket, revealing her head.

  At first he saw her face in profile. Her eyes were open. There was a scratch on her forehead. The once vibrant skin was now gray.

  He leaned closer to her. He gently turned her head so he could have a last look at the face he had loved. He recoiled. “Christ,” he screamed.

  There was no right side of her face, only a mess of torn flesh and bone.

  Roland jumped to his feet. The nurse grabbed the edge of the plastic sheet to cover Sarah’s head. At the same time he reached across her body to Roland, who appeared about to fall. He grabbed Roland’s left arm to steady him. Still bracing Roland up, he hustled him to the door. He was a powerful man and although Roland, too, was large, the man handled him as if he were a dish towel.

  ***

  Roland sat in the back of the car for fifteen minutes. His guards had sensitive instincts. They stood fifteen feet away, waiting. Behind the tinted windows, Roland wailed, a crying that he hadn’t experienced since he was a boy, when his father had just walked away from the family and disappeared for good. Roland never saw him again. If he were still alive, Reuben Fortune must have known his son had become one of the most famous people in the country. For some unidentifiable reason, Roland had a sense his father was living. Had Reuben ever returned, Roland would have kissed and embraced him.

  Roland needed to reconnect to life. He left the car. Greenwich Village, his favorite part of the city, looked so profoundly quiet and peaceful in the afternoon sunlight: the old-world brownstones, the mature leafy trees that lined both sides of the narrow streets, and the roofs with their water tanks made of curved wood bound in hoops of iron.

  He walked downtown on Seventh Avenue South. On any normal Monday afternoon the streets would be alive with people, but this was not a normal Monday. No subway trains were running. The elongated accordion-style city buses were off the streets. Light traffic, mainly empty yellow taxis, raced down the avenue. There would soon come a point when no gasoline would be left at any station in Manhattan, and even that light traffic would then stop.

  Roland turned right, his security detail trailing him by several feet. Perry Street stretched out before him. Twenty years earlier, he had been in love with a young woman who lived in a single room studio apartment at 18 Perry Street. He remembered her name. She was Marilyn Botteler, a Kansas girl who sang with a rock band at places like CBGB in the seedy, druggy East Village. But he remembered most the intimacy of the small apartment. It was on the third floor at the back of the building overlooking a small patio with rusty lawn furniture surrounded by frail trees and with debris on the ground. He spent three summer months with her. Where in this vast world was she now? Was she even alive? He had once done a Google search for her. There were no results.

  As he passed the steps of the building, wondering how many men and women had lived in that cozy apartment over the last two decades, he was recognized by two men walking hand in hand. They wore tight-fitting shirts, short pants and hiking socks and boots, one of the most recognizable outfits of gay men. They were startled when they recognized him. The taller man said, “It’s you.”

  The instinctive politician, Roland stopped to shake their hands. “It is indeed.”

  The taller man said, “This is really surprising.” Smiling, he waited several seconds before asking, “Why are you here?”

  “To see with my own eyes how people are doing. How are you?”

  “Enjoying the day. It’s like the days after 9/11. We don’t have to go to work, it’s like a weekday holiday. One of the fringe benefits of disaster.”

  Roland was struck by the callousness of what the man said, and by the honesty. He was used to people filtering what t
hey told him, often trying to anticipate what they believed he wanted to hear. But this man frankly was saying something Roland never expected to hear: his dominant selfish thought about the bombings and the deaths of a thousand men, women, and children was that he’d been granted a day and possibly more off work. Roland didn’t know what to say, but there was no need to respond because other people were recognizing and approaching him. He continued to walk, surrounded by a small crowd. He felt revived. The presence of other people energized him.

  For him the most familiar landmark in the West Village was the cigar store, Village Cigars, at the intersection of Seventh Avenue South and Christopher Street. The store and its vivid red-and-white sign had been there since the time he first saw the Village, when he was seventeen and on his first exploratory trip into the lower parts of Manhattan from the Bronx. He had come out of the No. 1 subway train at the intersection of Seventh Avenue South and Sheridan Square. The Village, as intimate and companionable then as it was now, was another country for him, so different from the housing project where he was raised. In all the years since that first sighting, he had seen that sign hundreds of times, in rainy weather, snow, fog, and crystalline days such as this day.

  Before he could reach the store, three police cruisers and two unmarked cars arrived. They had come for him. His two security people had contacted their bosses, and word that the Mayor of New York City was walking essentially unguarded through the streets of the Village had reached Gina Carbone. “Who the hell are these bozos to leave him out there?” she had asked. “Get over there and pick him up. All I need today is a dead mayor.”