by Paul Batista
Reacting like a teenage truant, Roland said to Rocco Barbiglia, the lieutenant who had first told Gina about the attack as she had lunch with her family on Staten Island, “So she found me out?”
“Hey, Mr. Mayor, she’s going to send you to the principal’s office.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
GABRIEL HAUSER LOVED his work. The seventy-hour weeks never fatigued him. In fact, they gave him a purpose and energy. He had reached the stage in his career when he could have left the demands of the emergency room, where the pace was dictated by the randomness of stabbings, shootings, accidents, heart attacks, and drug overdoses, for a private practice with its regular hours, predictability, and bigger income. But he had learned his trade in war zones. He’d experienced the miracle of repairing shattered bodies and restoring life. And he accepted the fact that often people were brought to him so damaged that the ingenuity of his hands and the creativity of his mind could not prevent their deaths.
Whenever he walked into the hospital, Gabriel felt a sense of relief, comfort, and the return to the familiar. He had the same reaction when he entered the apartment where he lived with Cam, the reassurance that he was in the place where he was meant to be. The doctors’ entrance, through which he passed simply by waving a plastic card over an electronic eye, opened into a gleaming hallway.
The changing room had the look and feel and atmosphere of a locker room in a men’s gym. There were rows of steel lockers, a sauna, a steam room, and shower stalls. As in a locker room at an old gym, the air was always moist.
When he reached his own locker, he was immediately taken aback by something totally unexpected: the combination lock to his locker was missing. He pulled the door open. The locker was empty.
Gabriel heard Vincent Brown speak behind him. “Dr. Hauser, we had quite a scene this morning. Too bad you weren’t here for it.”
Gabriel turned. Brown was in his starched scrubs. He was the senior doctor in the emergency room and, like a commanding officer in the Army, his uniform always looked “strack”—the Army expression for neat and stiff.
“What happened?”
“Mama Bear, Papa Bear, and Baby Bear came to take away your stuff.”
“Do you think, Vincent, that you can stop for once with the sarcastic shit? What’s going on?”
Vincent Brown approached him. He was shorter than Gabriel. He had a neat mustache and the haughty look of a minaret. He was angry. “What the hell are you up to, Hauser?”
“Up to? I came here to work.” Gabriel, too, was angry. Suddenly he had the sense that he might hit Brown or that Brown might hit him. It was that infusion of street adrenaline.
“There were cops all over this place. They smashed your locker, they took your clothes. They showed me a picture of Patient X52.”
“So what?”
“So what? They asked whether you treated him. I said ‘yes’. They asked for how long. ‘Thirty minutes.’”
“Thirty minutes? That’s bullshit.”
“They asked whether I saw you talk to him. ‘Yes’. How long? ‘The full thirty minutes,’ I said.”
“I was with him for three minutes, you know that. What are you doing to me?”
“And they wanted to know whether you took anything from him. ‘Probably,’ I said, ‘possibly.’”
“That’s a lie, and you know it.”
“Or whether you gave him anything. I said something went back and forth between the two of you.”
“You weren’t even on the floor then.”
“They asked to take a look at your treatment notes on Patient X52. You didn’t make any.”
“Nobody made notes. This place was chaotic.”
“They asked if you knew that Patient X52 was really named Silas Nasar?”
“Silas who?”
“Certainly you did. That’s the name written on the discharge papers you signed.”
“That’s crazy. I never signed discharge papers.”
“You want to know what else?” Brown was trembling, the shaking that rage created. And Gabriel was trembling, too; it was the same rage. Brown said, “They took your personnel records.”
“Don’t tell me you let them do that?”
“Of course I did.”
“Those are private, really private.”
“So what?”
“Did they have a search warrant?”
“Search warrant?”
“They can’t just take my records.”
“Why not? What are you now? An ACLU lawyer and not just the Angel of Life?”
Gabriel stepped backwards, wanting to put enough distance between Brown and himself so that he didn’t follow through on the urge to punch or push him.
“Tell me, Brown, what is it about me that you hate?”
“Just about everything.”
“Why are you lying? Why did you tell a reporter that I refused to work on Sunday?”
“Why was the guy with the birthmark the guy you ran to first? Silas Nasar? The cops wanted to know that. Why was Silas Nasar so special to you?”
“What bullshit is that? He was the first hurt person I saw. Everyone else was dead.”
Brown, too, stepped back, widening the gap between them. He now had the familiar sardonic look. “I’m e-mailing the board of the hospital to ask for an immediate suspension of your privileges. I want you out of my hospital. Angel of Life. What unmitigated crap.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
WHEN GINA CARBONE arrived at the gritty corner of East 125th Street and Lexington Avenue, she saw that her orders had been carried out, as they always were. She had personally given the order one hour earlier, at three in the afternoon, to cordon off entirely a ten-block area from East 125th Street to East 135th Street and from Lexington to Second Avenues. That area was now entirely quarantined—no one was allowed to move into it and no one could leave it.
And that heady rush of anticipation came from the view, which she had last seen during the night before the invasion of Kuwait and Iraq in 1991, of hundreds of armed men and women massed quietly in green uniforms, helmets and body armor, and the lethal mobile equipment of warfare. As a soldier in the strange, starlit desert of Saudi Arabia, she had been awestruck and excited by the vision of an immense Army concentrated and ready to move, only awaiting orders. And now she was the person who would issue the orders.
Billy O’Connell, the smartest of her deputy commissioners, said, “They’re in Building 5 in Carver Towers.”
The George Washington Carver Towers were a bleak brick public housing project built in the 1940s or 1950s. Gina knew about the Carver Towers because they were constructed over the blocks where her father had been raised when East Harlem, in the 1930s and 1940s, was still an Italian neighborhood.
“What floor?” she asked.
“Parts of the fifth and sixth floor on the southwest side.”
“Do we still think there are six of them?”
“Not completely sure. Maybe more.”
“And what about the hostages?”
O’Connell said, “There may not be any. Our people are saying that they may be straw hostages. Fakes, members of the crew pretending to be hostages.”
“In the Army,” Gina said, “we used to complain about pain-in-the-ass civilians getting in the way.”
Billy O’Connell was cautious and quiet-spoken as usual. “Like I said, Commissioner, there could be hostages or not.”
“We’ll find out soon enough. As soon as Reilly says it’s a go, we’re going.”
“Are you sure? It could be just a street gang caught up in something they can’t understand.”
“Really, Billy? I’ve got enough information to see it otherwise. A street gang would just walk out the front door when they saw armed vehicles and hundreds of my people dressed up like ninja warriors. Gang guys are punks, not heroes.”
“It’s your call, Commissioner.”
“That’s right, Billy, it is.”
***
Three minutes l
ater, Tom Reilly, an ex-Marine with three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and now the leader of a squad of twenty heavily armed and well-trained men, and one combat-trained woman, called Gina Carbone. He said, “The cat’s on the roof.” It was their code to signal that his crew was ready.
“Go,” she answered.
Almost immediately there was a deafening succession of detonations from stun grenades designed to be loud enough to disorient anyone within fifty yards of the explosions. During the concussions, six men and one woman in uniform raced across the housing project’s grassless, cheerless lawns. As they smashed through the service door on the ground floor of Building 5, they heard a three-second burst of shots from an M-16 several flights above them in the urine-stained and urine-smelling stairwell. On a receiver in his left ear as small as a hearing aid, Ike Tapscott heard Hank Carbornaro, the head of the squad of seven descending from the roof of the building, ask, “That you?”
“No,” Hank answered. “Motherfuckers are firing up the stairwell.”
A grenade bounced from side to side down the center of the stairwell, exploding only three flights above Harry Stonecipher, the point man of Ike Tapscott’s squad. As Stonecipher wailed through his excruciating pain, another man shouted, “I see the fucker who tossed the grenade!”
No one in Tapscott’s squad would shoot in the stairwell since an upward rising or downward fired bullet could strike one of his people or Carbonaro’s or any of the tenants who might be in the stairwell. As they had been trained to do, the disciplined members of his squad continued to run up the stairs. At the landing on the fourth floor Stonecipher lay on his back, his legs and arms sprawled in a pattern that only a corpse could make.
And then there was silence in the stairwell. They were at the door that led to the east entrance of the fifth floor. Carbonaro’s crew was now behind the door at the west entrance at the other end of the grimy hallway. There were sixteen apartments lining the cinder block walls of the fifth floor. Tapscott, glancing through the small porthole window in the metal door, saw that the hallway was cluttered with bicycles, baby carriages, and even a barbecue grill. The tenants used the hallway as a storage room.
Only Tapscott had been in close combat before. He glanced at the six remaining members of his crew. He saw in their faces the terror he had seen so often in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their green uniforms were soaked with sweat.
Tapscott waited for Reilly’s voice to speak in his earbud. The helicopter aloft around the tower had devices that could pinpoint the location of objects such as rifles and canisters that contained explosives. Tapscott knew that no technology that was supposed to work in this kind of chaos was perfect.
Reilly’s voice, small and intense, suddenly materialized in his ear. “Apartment 5G. To your left, seven doors down from where you are. There’s a dried-up Christmas wreath on the door. At least six people inside. It’s a very hot spot. The experts in the helicopter say they’re all hot. The place is filled with men with assault rifles, grenades, all kinds of shit like that.”
Tapscott flung the door open. “Move, move!” Crouching, he ran toward the door with the dried-out wreath. He vaulted like an Olympic steeplechase runner through the clutter of tricycles, baby carriages, and shopping carts.
He halted at the far side of the door to Apartment 5G, waiting for the other crew members. In that instant, in the din of shouting men, clattering objects, and the roar of blood in his own head, he saw two men leap into the hallway from an apartment five doors beyond Apartment 5G. In a frozen instant, he recognized that the men were identical to the Iraqi and Afghan fighters he had seen over the last seven years, except that they were dressed in civilian clothes. They had assault rifles.
In the first burst of fire, Ike Tapscott was shot in the face. His head disintegrated.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
GABRIEL HAUSER IMMEDIATELY recognized, as only someone who had been in a war zone could know, that the intense pop pop pop sounds were from the exchange of rifle fire, not the repercussions of firecrackers. Several times in Afghanistan and Iraq he had been less than a hundred yards from fully engaged combat. Although the clatter of rifle fire was harrowing each time he heard it, it also had an odd resonance, as though it couldn’t be serious, it had to be a game that boys were playing, not a situation that could maim or kill. Just play-acting—nobody was going to get hurt. It always took seconds for that sense of unreality to wear off and for the fear of dying to overwhelm him, as it always had.
As a doctor, Gabriel had the instinct to run to people who might be injured. It was the reason he went to medical school and enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Army just as the Afghan war began. He wanted to help, not to harm, to restore people to life, not see them die. He first heard the unmistakable noise of gunfire as he was walking downtown on Fifth Avenue under the mature, rustling branches and leaves overhanging the tall stone wall that bordered the park. The bright air was just as it was on any other glorious, life-giving day in June. He turned and ran east in the direction of the dangerous clamor.
Ever since that time more than two decades earlier when the now-dead Jerome Fletcher had led him in his first runs on the long paths in Riverside Park, and then had waited in all his energetic vitality for the fifteen-year-old Gabriel to emerge from the shower, Gabriel had been an ardent, fluid runner. He had learned the terrain of the city through long runs everywhere in Manhattan when he was a resident at Mount Sinai working fourteen hours a day, seven days in a row followed by four days off. In those four-day intervals, he spent serene and dedicated hours running in Central Park and Riverside Park, along the concrete waterside walkways on the borders of the Hudson River and the East River, and from the windswept Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan about which Melville wrote in the first chapter of Moby Dick to the heights of the George Washington Bridge on the West Side and the Triboro Bridge on the east.
Gabriel also learned the internal streets of the island: the shining old cobblestones on Greene Street and Mercer Street in Soho on which the worn stones glowed in sunlight or glinted in the rain; the intimate, exciting length of Christopher Street in the West Village; and the sweeping empty corners of far West 14th Street as it opened out to the Hudson River.
But he rarely ran on the grid of streets in East Harlem even though the western edge of it started on Madison Avenue just behind Mount Sinai. He knew there were housing projects spread through the area and that there were some old blocks with rundown brownstones in parts of East Harlem that were once Italian neighborhoods and had later become crack houses.
The closest he ever came to this section of the city was in the four New York City marathons he had run. A three-mile stretch of the course was on First Avenue from 96th Street to 124th Street where the avenue veered onto a ramp that led up to the old Willis Avenue Bridge and then into the South Bronx. Block after block on First Avenue was lined with old tenements where the ground floors were occupied by thrift shops, bodegas, bars, and even places that fixed flat tires on the sidewalks. There were one or two storefront evangelical churches with Spanish names. To the left some blocks were occupied by grim, red-brick housing projects named for African American men, most of them scientists, who had been famous in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but were now forgotten, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver. On this stretch of the autumn marathon there were no cheering crowds, unlike the thousands of ecstatic, applauding crowds in Brooklyn and the frenzied people at the long turn from the arduous two mile route of the 59th Street Bridge arching from Queens over the East River into Manhattan.
On largely deserted upper First Avenue, grinning children bolted into the stream of thousands of runners, all of them by now silent and beaten up by the eighteen miles they had already covered. The kids wanted to high five as many runners as they could touch. Most of the determined, increasingly exhausted runners pressed straight ahead, no longer fueled by the thousands of onlookers. But not Gabriel: he slapped each hand that reached out t
o him.
Now on this limpid Monday afternoon, Gabriel trotted uptown on Madison Avenue from 86th Street. He passed the small Parisian-style stores—the shops with French names carrying expensive baby clothes, the old-fashioned pharmacy at 90th Street called simply the 90th Street Pharmacy with its odor of medicinal compounds and ladies’ powder, and, at 93rd Street, the cozy, companionable Corner Bookstore with its bright red façade and windows behind which new books were arrayed as deliciously as pastries. Above 96th Street, the avenue changed into the same type of unappealing stores that lined the street level on First Avenue.
It was the acrid smell of cordite, the odor of igniting powder that was at the core of every gunshot, grenade, and explosive device, including roadside bombs and fireworks, ever made, that first arrested his attention and led him toward the blocks between 125th and 129th Streets. Some of the wounded men he had treated in Iraq and Afghanistan still exuded cordite’s odor when the injuries were closely inflicted.
Intensely flashing emergency lights on cars, police vans, and ambulances rotated everywhere. Gabriel saw at least five military armored trucks, each of them mounted by a bulky soldier in protective gear next to a machine gun. There were soldiers in the bleak inner spaces among the project’s towers. Even windows on the high floors had iron mesh, as if the tenants on the fifteenth floor needed protection from outside break-ins. On the ground floor of one of the buildings was a fluorescent-lit community center. Its windows were smashed.
Gabriel, dressed in his ordinary street clothes, a blue sports jacket, white button-down Brooks Brothers shirt, green chinos, brown loafers and no socks, realized that his next step was absurd. He approached a bored cop, a man who clearly was not one of the police warriors, and said, “I’m an emergency room doctor.” As if to validate himself he took his stethoscope out of the inside pocket of his jacket and held it out like a talisman. “Can you tell someone I can help if I’m needed?”