Tabloid City

by Pete Hamill

  Then walking again.

  Toward the river. A cheap market down there someplace. Buy more food for the money.

  Until he saw this obscene place.

  The next day in a library, he Googled “Aladdin’s Lamp.” Read that it was once a mosque. One of the first in New York! Now a corrupt temple of sins of the flesh! Faggots and whores. He stood for an hour before it, walked to the side, around the back, looking for access, trying to shape a plan. The next day, the plan forming, Allah’s plan, he went up the stairs to the High Line and saw the place from other angles, saw into it when some skinny Mexican was washing the upper windows. Malik tried looking like just another tourist. From Abu Dhabi, maybe. Or Nigeria. Thinking at the time: If I ever need a target, this is it. In other parts of the city, there were cops everywhere, and concrete barriers, and surveillance cameras, and men on high floors with field glasses. Men like his so-called father. Men who had found Islam, and then renounced the Prophet, renounced Allah. Fought jihad. Men who must die.

  He looks carefully now through the falling snow at Aladdin’s Lamp. Imagine if a mosque in Kandahar had been transformed into a palace for whores! What would the Taliban do? Make it vanish, that’s what. The corrupted building is set back a good twenty feet from the curb, with a wide space that must have provided for eight or ten cars carrying faithful Muslims, and now serves by day as parking space for beer and drink trucks making deliveries. It’s filled on this night of destiny with photographers and drifters and those who have substituted celebrities for God. They have money. They have homes. They even have umbrellas. I have nothing. Not anymore. No woman, no son, no father, no mother, no friends. I have only my own body. To give you, Allah.

  He thinks: I must get through them, and up the three stairs to the platform with the velvet rope held on poles with minarets at the top. Past the bouncer in his costume. Get through the door with my holy container, dash inside, fast. Surprise is everything. He knows from his daytime observations that there is a stairway inside, leading to an upper floor, secret rooms. I am God’s martyr. He thinks: It should be simple. Inshallah. The vest is ready. The detonator is hooked up and ready. I’m ready. He waits for the moment that says now.

  8:47 p.m. Josh Thompson. Fourteenth Street.

  He flexes and unflexes his hands, trying to give them warmth. He feels something ebbing away in him, like a tide going out on a seashore. He gathers himself. Soon all the shithead rich guys will come out. Then…

  Across the street, off on the right, a short dark woman eases out of a side door next to some kind of clothing store. Head down. Hat. Walking fast on short legs. And he knows who she is. The Mexican woman who got the guys to carry him into that church. Goo-add-a-luppy. Where it was warm. Her God was a warm God. Not like some of the others. The goddamned Christians back home that want everybody to suffer, except themselves.

  For a moment, he thinks about going after her. To that church.

  But tells himself: Stay here. This is where it’s at. Where the payback comes.

  Over on the left of the front door, there’s an open shed, with people smoking and bullshitting while the snow falls. Christ: There’s even an old lady there, tall and skinny and smoking. Beside her, talking on a cell phone, he sees one young woman who looks like Wendy before she got fat. Could she be his lost wife? Nah. Never. Maybe I should track Wendy down. He wonders where she is and whether little Flora is with her and whether it’s snowing there too. He loved her once. Now he has trouble remembering her face. That fat broad smoking over there? Maybe she’s Wendy.

  Nah, he thinks. She couldn’t find her way to New York with a tour guide. She’s somewhere in the sun. Thinking about the guy she’s meeting later. The guy whose joint she’ll cop before the night’s over.

  He removes a glove and caresses the MAC-10. Cold. Very cold.

  Go, he whispers. To the warmth.

  Go.

  He doesn’t move.

  8:48 p.m. Helen Loomis. Outside Aladdin’s Lamp.

  She hasn’t been this cold in years. Where was it? In Gstaad that time, with Willie? He was skiing. She stayed in the bar. The Rolling Stones were on TV. Black-and-white. Some big European music contest. They sang “Satisfaction.” That long ago. And where is Sam? The snow must have the streets screwed up. Can’t feel my feet. I’m still here, Sam. Watching the corner, like you said. Looking at the High Line, which I’ve never visited. The young guys from the paper all inside. Why’d I listen to them? Why’d I come here? An old bag like me?

  Across the street, she sees homeless guys. Faceless. Bulky. Carved from black ice. Like the figures in the painting at the top of the stairs inside. Nobody can tell them to go home. What home? Some shelter that smells like piss? She thinks: At least I got whiskey in me. Too much. One more, I’m legless.

  Where’s Sam? He always keeps his word. Why’d I call him? To say a proper good-bye, I guess. He’ll be gone in a day or two. Somewhere. Yeah. Wind coming hard now. From New Jersey. Of course. Or Siberia. Blowing snow off the High Line.

  She takes out her cigarette pack. Pops one loose. Two left. Lights it with the one she’s smoking. Thinks she hears sirens. Fire engines, maybe. Christ, I’m cold.

  8:49 p.m. Bobby Fonseca. Aladdin’s Lamp.

  His back is to the bar. He sips a beer. Thinking: Still here. Woozy. The guys coming on to different women, using their dangling blue press cards as conversation pieces. Helen out for a smoke or something. Or maybe gone, the way Barney Weiss split after fifteen minutes in the snow. My brain mushed from the music, the deejay dressed like Ali Baba, waving his hands from the balcony. Where’s his scimitar? No scimitars in Brownsville. The deejay’s to the left of the VIP party. Some are leaving now, in coats, hats, and scarves. Their limos must have a foot of snow on the rooftops. Shit: here’s that small broad again. Too much lipstick. Chewing gum.

  –Sure you don’t wanna dance, big boy?

  –Not tonight. I’m in mourning, babe.

  –In this joint?

  She laughs and moves into the thick crowd. Tall women made taller by high spiked heels. Women with impossible breasts. Women giggling, bursting into tequila laughter. The guys all in heat. Some of them sweating. Others talking into female ears. Fonseca thinks: I can almost reach out and grab the lies out of the air. He hopes he can see Victoria Collins before the night is over. Flashes on her thighs. Her wet hair. The feel of her skin.

  And across the room, beyond the dancers, he sees Freddie Wheeler again.

  Makes Wheeler from some story he read months ago in Wired. His ferrety face. Coat under his arm. Wheeler has seen Fonseca too. He starts pushing through the crowd. Heading to the left door.

  Fonseca sets down his beer bottle and goes after Wheeler.

  –Hey, you! he shouts in the din. Wheeler!

  Wheeler stops as Fonseca reaches him. The two of them moving out the left door to the platform. The snow heavy. Wheeler looking at the photographers and beyond.

  –What’s your problem, man? Wheeler says, turning to face Fonseca. Making a sliver of his mouth.

  –You, Fonseca says. And the evil crap you print each day, all of it wrong.

  –I’m a reporter.

  He lifts Fonseca’s blue press card with thumb and forefinger. Tugs it. Face full of contempt.

  –And this? This tells the world you are a fucking loser, kid. You and Briscoe and all the other—

  Then Fonseca clocks him. Wheeler goes down on his back, his eyes blinking, his jaw moving.

  –Get up, you asshole!

  Fonseca’s over him.

  And then the black bouncer is there.

  –Hey, hey, none of that shit now, he yells.

  He shoves Fonseca toward the smoking deck. Flashes from cameras. Shouts. And here comes the upstairs bouncer. The fat white guy. He lifts Wheeler, swings him in a half circle, and hurls him into the crowd of camera people. Hitting bodies and heads. Umbrellas go airborne. Shouts of protest and shock. The black bouncer tries to intervene, but the white bouncer moves aroun
d him, shoves Fonseca, then grabs him by collar and ass and heaves him toward the smoking shed. Fonseca slams into Helen Loomis and she falls. The ashtray goes over too, spilling butts and sand across the deck. The snow is almost horizontal.

  8:51 p.m. Malik Shahid. Fourteenth Street.

  Now. He runs, slipping on the cobblestones, but not falling. A wave of photographers surges left to photograph the white dude in the crowd in the street. Still down. Trying to get up through the mass of legs. Off on the side of the platform another white guy, younger, stunned and rubbery.

  Nobody pays attention to Malik.

  End run, he thinks. Go.

  He is up the steps, feeling stronger now than he has ever been before. He rips away the velvet rope, toppling the minaret poles, and he reaches the doors. The right door is ajar about a foot. Leading to the dark sinful rooms. From the snowy distance, the muffled sound of a siren.

  Then Malik is into the devil’s workshop, into the whoring crowd, stopping, drawing the pistol from his trouser belt. Turns behind him. Kicks the door shut.

  –Stop! Every fuckin’ one of you! he shouts.

  Malik’s right arm is straight out. He rotates the .38 with a circular wrist movement, left, to the dance floor, right to the bar, then up the stairs. People at the top. Fancy clothes. Wide eyes. Turns behind him again. Seven or eight people at the doors. None of them move. All eyes on the gun. The room suddenly resembles a still photograph.

  –You move, I shoot you!

  He starts up the stairs. Three steps. Four. Then he opens his jacket.

  In small awkward motions, he starts to unbutton his coat with his free hand, pistol still in his right. Now people are moving again. On the main floor, a tall blonde woman breaks from the frozen pack of dancers, starts across the floor, buckles, and falls hard on her hip. A shriek, cutting through the hip-hop soundtrack. Malik’s coat is open.

  And now they see the vest.

  Taut across Malik’s chest. The six red slabs of Semtex resembling soldiers at attention. The hip-hop rant keeps pounding. Punctuated by groans and weeping and another woman’s shriek.

  Malik thinks: I have them now. They must look at me. They must listen. I’m the last man they will hear in their filthy lives.

  8:51 p.m. Beverly Starr. The balcony of Aladdin’s Lamp.

  She has her coat on, leaving with others, gloveless. Five steps down the stairs. Hears the screams. Looks down. Blinks. Sees a young black man waving a gun. Words lost in the pounding music. Turning. Gesturing. His eyes wide with rage and doom. Jesus Christ. She eases down the stairs, gripping the banister on her left. Freezes as he waves the pistol at her. Sees a jam at the door.

  The young man turns so all can see what he’s wearing under the coat.

  Now she sees the vest across his chest. Familiar to all of them from bad television shows. A suicide vest.

  The music scrapes into silence. The deejay tearing off his costume. One voice is piercing the air. The man with the vest.

  –Whores! Degenerates! Listen up!

  He shoves the gun in his belt. Now he’s addressing the people on the dance floor. Maybe sixty of them. Men. Women. All of them frozen. As if blood and sweat are both coagulating. Some cowering, trying to make themselves smaller.

  –You have filled this world with filth and sin! You have sent soldiers to Muslim countries, and killed Muslim men, and Muslim women, and Muslim children!

  Beverly moves. Passes behind the man as he addresses the dance-floor people. She eases past a heavyset older man. A guest from the benefit. Heads for the crowd jammed against the doors. The doors open in, not out. Pushes into the crowd. Looks back at the stairs. Sees the enraged eyes of the gunman. His audience is not giving him what he has demanded: their attention. He’s talking but she hears no words. She’s shoved by the deejay, then turned sideways by a guy in a business suit. Smells sweat and perfume. Rush hour in hell. A chorus of shrieks. Jesus Christ: I could die here.

  She takes a ballpoint pen from her pocket. Thinking: Not much of a weapon, but I could hurt somebody.

  Beverly looks back. The young man on the stairs is holding a small object in his hand. A wire runs into the suicide vest. She knows what that is too. A detonator. Right out of 24. Out of fucking comic books.

  –You have been offered Paradise, and refused it!

  Beverly sees a long-haired blond guy vault over the banister of the staircase, fall hard on one leg, pause and grimace in pain, then limp forward. To join the pack at the doors. A blink.

  –Allah has given you life and he will soon give you death!

  The jam tighter now, all breathing hard, panting, cursing. Shouts of move, move and step back, let it fuckin’ open! The doors forced shut by the pressing weight of the panicky group. To Beverly’s right, a small young woman leaps onto the shoulders of a shouting man, trying to claw her way over people’s shoulders, heading to escape. Then slips. Falls facedown, wedged between a fat woman and a beefy man. Beverly blinks again. Record this. So if you get out… The goal for all of them is the twin vertical rectangles of the glass-paneled doors. And the snow falling beyond. She looks back. At the top of the stairs, her painting stands on its easel, abandoned, alone.

  Thinking: I am about to die.

  8:51 p.m. Sam Briscoe. Fourteenth Street.

  Briscoe’s taxi turns into the street and suddenly stops. Twenty feet ahead of them, four police cars have skidded on the cobblestones, then braked, red domes now turning. Cops out. Some fumbling under overcoats for sidearms. Briscoe asks the driver to wait, and the driver says, No, no, police! Trouble! Briscoe hands him a twenty-dollar bill and gets out, slamming the door. In the distance, he sees a chaotic, panicky tide of women and men squeezing one at a time out of one of the doors of Aladdin’s Lamp. Then down the steps in a kind of stampede. Night of the locust. None are dressed for snow. No time for coats. He sees the right door open a bit wider. Hears the word “bomb.”

  He hurries to them while some rush past him toward Ninth Avenue. A gray-haired hatless guy in a suit hauls his wife across cobblestones. The man glancing behind him. Fear in his eyes. The woman yelling: My coat, my coat!

  All that Briscoe sees is happening at once. Women in filmy blouses, short skirts, high heels. Men in sweaters and shirts. A woman slips coming down the steps from the platform. Falls backward. A young man stomps on her to get by, and then he loses balance and pitches forward, facedown on the iced cobblestones, and another man stomps on his back and keeps going. One lone woman, about twenty, earrings large and bobbing, totters toward Briscoe, seeing nothing, weeping, holding a bleeding elbow. The others resemble terrified civilians after a bombardment. They slip, fall, pile up. Throats are stabbed by heels. A heavy boot lacerates a young man’s lips. Upper and lower.

  Briscoe sees blood on others, torn flesh. Discarded women’s shoes on the wet stone street. A young woman grabs another’s blouse from behind, tears it away, and the woman begins bawling as she covers her breasts. Naked in a snowstorm. Then drops her hands to run. More piling up, nobody looking back. Dozens now. Screaming. Splayed, stomped, bleeding. One hopeless shriek. A bare-chested guy in Ali Baba trousers comes out the door, limping. Too thin to be a bouncer. Maybe a deejay? A waiter? Shaking both fists. In triumph? Or challenging the fallen. Photographers dart around, recording it all.

  Helen, Briscoe thinks. Where are you, Helen?

  Now four uniformed cops come running awkwardly from the police cars. No traction on the snowy cobblestones. Guns drawn. One goes up the steps to the doors, shoves the gun into his holster, raises one palm toward the people inside, ordering them to halt, to step back, to allow both doors to open. They don’t obey. Looking over their shoulders. Below the platform, another cop points to the far side of the street, gesturing east. Briscoe hears the first cop shout: Run. Run like hell!

  Briscoe drapes his press card around his neck and finally sees Helen Loomis over to the left, on the platform rising from the sidewalk. Standing there. Rigid, dazed, as the panicky young tide flows past
her. She fumbles with a cigarette, looking toward the High Line. Briscoe calls her name but she can’t hear him in the din. No way yet for him to get up the main stairs to her. Too many people coming down in terrified flight from whatever the hell is happening inside.

  He goes to the left, trying to squeeze through the photographers, sees Fonseca making notes at the foot of the smoking shed, wiping with his coat sleeve at blood dripping from his nose. Briscoe calls his name. Fonseca hears nothing. And Briscoe can’t reach him through the wall of cops and photographers. Moving now, like a quarterback, left, then right, then forward. Looking for an opening. He waves at Helen, calls her name, but she doesn’t see or hear him. She is still staring toward the High Line. Washington Street. Briscoe thinks: She’s waiting for me. I told her Washington Street, didn’t I? The cabbie wouldn’t go that way. A woman wearing pearls comes down the main stairs and someone grabs at the pearls and the string snaps. The woman looks down, pain on her face, starts to bend, then chooses to run. Briscoe shouts once more. Nobody can hear.

  8:51 p.m. Ali Watson. Fourteenth Street.

  Ali walks cautiously on the cobblestones, his eyes fixed on the doors. Alone. Wearing his badge. His gun hanging loose in his right hand. No time for vengeance, he thinks. This is my son. I loved him as a boy and I love him still. Done in by belief. The worst human disease. Only one goal right now: to stop horror. That’s my fucking job. To prevent another Happy Land. Knowing that if he lives, this night will be with him for the rest of his days. And nights.

  Behind him, Malachy and some uniformed cops are checking the people against the wall across the street. Homeless guys. Wanding them. Patting them down. Then, finding nothing, telling them to get the hell out of there, this thing could blow. Some move quickly. Others are slower, watching the show.