It was a multimillion dollar Baedeker to the unthinkable, right down to how many nurses, pediatricians, osteopaths, plumbers, hospital beds, airport runways, and, naturally, government tax records, would survive in each corner of the affected area. Hannon methodically toted up the horror encapsulated in those dark chains of numbers.
“The total dead, sir, for the conditions we’ve been given in the five boroughs and New Jersey would be 6.74 million.”
PART V
MONDAY, DECEMBER 14:
9:15 A.M. TO NOON
“Fox Base has cut the circuit.”
An interminable clutter of New York traffic loomed up before Angelo Rocchia’s four-year-old Chevrolet, blocking its route to the exit ramp.
Beside Rocchia, Jack Rand gave his watch an anxious glance. “Maybe we ought to check in.”
“Check in? What for, for Christ’s sake? To tell them we’re stuck on the Brooklyn Bridge?” This kid’s really got a bug up his ass, Angelo thought.
He plucked a peanut from the bag tucked into the pocket of his suit jacket.
“Here,” he said, “relax. Enjoy the sights. The good part’s coming up. The asshole of Brooklyn.”
Slowly, painfully, he funneled the car off the bridge ramp, sped along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and then the Gowanus Expressway, until he turned toward Second Avenue, Brooklyn, and his destination. The young agent gawked at the sight spreading along their route: a line of three-and four-story tenements, every other one of them, almost, a gutted shell. The walls, those that were still standing, were covered with obscene graffiti. Windows were broken everywhere. Those on the ground floor were barred. Doors were padlocked. Rubbish littered the sidewalks. The place stank of urine, of feces, of ashes.
On the street corners, men and kids warmed their hands over flickering fires of rubbish set in old trashcans or lit on a patch of the sidewalk.
Rand stared at them, blacks and Hispanics, an occasional flash of hatred for their passing car illuminating the otherwise expressionless faces of those for whom the American dream was a nightmare, a distant, unobtainable mirage quivering mockingly from across the narrow neck of water over which their car had just passed.
“Got anything like this in South Dakota?” Angelo asked. “You know what they get for murder one down here? Ten bucks. Ten bucks to kill a man.” He shook his head sadly. “Used to be a nice neighborhood, too. Italian. Few Irish.
Some of these people they got here now, they live worse than animals in the Bronx Zoo. Arabs be doing us a favor, they gas the place.”
The FBI radio on the seat between them crackled. There was no mistaking the speaker’s flat Midwestern accent. Angelo burst into laughter.
“You remember when they snatched Calvin Klein’s kid a couple of years ago?”
Rand didn’t.
“We had a bunch of you guys from South Dakota in on that one too. I’m riding in this thing monitoring your frequency plus the pigeon with a wire.
We’ve already sprung the kid got the perp, but the FBI, they wanted to stay out. Thought there might be more people. And suddenly I hear”-Angelo mimicked the accent—” `Foxtrot Four to Base. There are two suspicious-looking Negro males loitering on the corner of One Hundred Thirty-fifth and St. Nicholas Avenue.’” Angelo laughed again, a short, harsh burst of noise. “Shit! That’s all they got up there, for Christ’s sake, is suspicious-looking spades. Hanging around. Scoring dope. You could rupture every nose in South Dakota with the coke they sell up there.”
Rand looked at him. There was a taut, teeth-baring smile on Angelo’s face, but there was no smile in his eyes. Something, the young agent thought, is disturbing this man.
“Angelo, I live in Denver.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Considerable, in fact. Have you ever been out West?”
“Out West? Sure, I been out West.” Angelo gave the agent a regard that mixed pity with contempt. “I was up in Albany once.” He produced another mirthless laugh. “You know what they say, kid? Once you get past Yonkers, everything out there’s Bridgeport.”
He waved a hand past the sagging fagade of a Catholic church. “Over there,” he noted, with a certain pride in his voice, “is Joey Gallo’s old turf. His docks are down there.”
Rand followed his gesture toward the lowlying piers pushing into the gray sludge of the harbor. “Do the rackets still control the piers?”
What’s with this guy? Angelo thought. Next thing he’ll want to know is, is the Pope Catholic? “Of course. Profacci family. Anthony Scotto.”
“And you guys can’t break them?”
“Break them, you kidding? They own all the stevedore companies that lease the piers. And the union local on every pier is owned by the mob that owns the stevedore company. If a guy hasn’t got an uncle, a brother, a cousin inside the union to recommend him, forget it, he don’t work. What happens his first day down there, guy comes up to him, says, `Hey, we’re taking a collection for Tony Nazziato. Broke his leg over to Pier Six.’ He says, ‘Tony who?’ and he never works again. Because old Tony, he’s up there in the union hall, and he could run the hundred on that broken leg of his.
It’s an understanding. Like everything on the piers.”
Enough of this, Angelo thought. He gave the agent a quizzical regard. “They sent you all the way from Denver just for a crummy barrel of chlorine gas.”
Rand swallowed hastily. “I’d hardly call chlorine gas crummy. You heard what they said about how toxic it was.”
“Yeah, well, you know what I figure? At least two thousand of you guys been pulled in here, all for that little barrel.”
The New Yorker’s face, Rand noted, seemed relaxed, but the cold set of his gray eyes had not changed.
“I wouldn’t know about that,” the agent replied. He hesitated a moment.
“You must be getting close to retirement age, Angelo.”
Okay, Angelo said to himself, the kid wants to change the subject, we’ll change the subject. “Sure. I could retire. I got the years. But I like the job. Like the excitement. Nobody’s breaking my balls. What would I do, I retire? Sit out there on Long Island somewhere and listen to the grass grow?”
Just the thought of retirement reminded him that it was here, in this precinct, that he had walked his first beat. In 1947. He’d been so close to home he could drop in for coffee in the house where he’d been born, kiss Ma, talk with the old man in the tailor shop he had set up when he came over from Sicily after the first war, lounge in the back room where Angelo had pushed the needle himself on Saturday afternoons, listening to the Metropolitan Opera, to his old man belting out Rigoletto, Trovatore, Traviata. Knew them all, his old man. Where did they go, all those years, Angelo thought, where did they go?
“You been with the Bureau long?” he asked Rand.
“Three years. Since I got out of Tulane Law School.”
Figures, Angelo thought. I always get the veterans.
Angelo fell silent for a moment, looking again at the once familiar neighborhood, resembling now the blastedout villages he’d fought over north of Naples in the winter of ‘43. Those years in the service, the force. He’d done all right. For an Italian. The Police and Fire Departments in the city belonged to the Irish. The Italians had the Sanitation. Jews owned the teachers. They said New York was a melting pot, but its heat could thaw things out only so much.
“You married, kid?”
“Yes,” Rand replied. “We have two children. How about you?”
For the first time he noted a softening in the detective’s gray eyes. “I lost my wife to cancer some years ago. We had one child, a daughter.” The words were issued like pronunciamento, a definitive statement that permitted no further questions.
Angelo turned off the avenue and drew up to a gate. He flashed his detective’s shield at the guard inside, who waved them ahead. They rolled down a slight incline to a huge three-story fagade of yellowing cement opening before a dark cavern that looked a little like a cov
ered railroad stand. Overhead, a walkway linked the building to a pair of massive warehouses. They were quintessential U.S. government functional: squat and tasteless, without any redeeming frill or folly. Four railroad tracks ran into the pier’s dim recesses. Painted overhead in black block letters were the words “PASSENGER TERMINAL.”
“The end of the line for the kid in Upper Seventeen,” Angelo mused.
“What?” the startled Rand asked.
“Shit. Forget it. It was an ad during the war. You weren’t even born then.”
He flicked a peanut into his mouth and shook his head as though in disbelief. “I shipped out of here in ‘forty-two.”
A bitter gust of wind tore off the bay, flinging up to their nostrils the putrid odor of the dirty sea water lapping the docks. Angelo headed toward a shacklike booth at the end of the pier, its windows coated with fly specks, grime and dust.
“Would you believe that?” he asked. “U.S. Customs Office. You could walk a circus elephant past those windows and the guy inside wouldn’t notice.”
Angelo led the way into the dimly lit office. Decals of the Knicks, the Jets, old postcards, a yellowing Playboy centerfold were stuck to the walls. In one corner sat a hot plate in a little puddle of cold coffee. It was surrounded by an open can of Nescafe, a pair of mugs, their handles chipped, a jar of Creem, a few cubes of sugar, each capped with its matching crown of flies. The Customs officer had his feet up on the desk, a copy of the Daily News open to the sports page on his lap.
“Oh, yeah, they told me you were coming,” he said at the flash of Angelo’s gold shield. Without getting up, he added, “They’re waiting for you next door in the stevedores’ office.”
That office was little different from Customs. Stacked by month on a table were six piles of paper, almost a foot high, the manifests of the ships that had called at the pier in the last six months.
Angelo took off his overcoat and folded it neatly over a filthy cabinet. He plucked a few peanuts from his pocket and offered them to Rand. “Have a peanut, kid, and let’s get to work. Remember, the va piano, va sano.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means, my friend, a good cop is a guy who takes his time.”
* * *
The Mayor’s chubby hands, the hands Abe Stern had once imagined jabbing and punching their way through the glare of a prize ring, were pressed flat against the White House windowpane. Despair etched every line that seventy years of toil and struggle had left upon his face. Six million seven hundred thousand people, he thought over and over again, six million seven hundred thousandl A holocaust even worse than the tragedy that had swept the remnants of his father’s family into the gas chambers of Auschwitz; and all of it accomplished in the glare and incandescence of a few terrible seconds.
“Mr. President.” His voice was a harsh plea. “We gotta do something for those people up there. We got to.”
The President was perched on the corner of his desk, his weight supported by one foot. He had brought the Mayor back here to his private office after the NSC meeting to try to both brace and prepare him for the ordeal they were going to share.
“We are, Abe,” he answered. “We’re going to negotiate our way out of it. No man can be as unreasonable, as irrational as this. In the meantime, what’s important is to keep calm, not to let ourselves give in to panic.”
“Mr. President, that’s not enough for me. You have to perceive your responsibilities in this mess to the people of this country as a whole. Me, I have to perceive mine in terms of those six million people up there that that fanatic is threatening to kill. What are we going to do to save them, Mr. President?”
The President rose and walked to the window. His countrymen had elected him to this high office because they yearned for a return to the simpler, sterner values he’d tried, in his campaign, to incarnate. Now his abilities as a leader were being tested as no American President’s had been since the war. In the last great national crisis President Kennedy had been able to stand eyeball to eyeball with Khrushchev, he knew, because he had behind him the awesome power of the United States. That was denied him here. How could he even threaten Qaddafi with the U.S.‘s military power when the Libyan well knew its use would mean three or four American dead for every Libyan killed?
“Abe, for God’s sake,” he said, his voice cracking slightly as he spoke, “don’t you think if I knew something more we could do for those people we’d be doing it?”
“How about evacuating the city?”
“You read his letter, Abe. If we start doing that, he says he’s going to explode the bomb. Do you want to risk that? Before we’ve even talked to him?”
“What I don’t want to do is let that son of a bitch dictate his terms to us, Mr. President. Can’t we find some way to clear the city without his finding out about it? Do it at night? Cut the radios, the television, the phone systems? There’s got to be a way.”
The President turned from his window. He could not bear the beauty of that sight this morning, the clean sweep of snow, the Washington Monument soaring into the blue sky, the spartan rigidity of its design bespeaking another, simple time.
“Abe.” His voice was quiet and reflective. “He’s thought this through very carefully. The whole key to his strategic equation is the fact that in New York he’s got that uniquely vulnerable dense concentration of people. All his calculations depend on that. He knows if we clear the city he’s dead.
He’s got to have someone hidden up there with a powerful shortwave radio transmitter ready to flash him the word the moment someone says ‘evacuation.’”
“Mr. President, there’s only one thing I can think about and that’s the six million seven hundred thousand people in New York City this thing may kill.
The least I can do for them is to warn them. Get on radio and television and tell them to run for the bridges.”
“Abe.” There was no reproach in the President’s voice. “Do that and maybe you’ll save a million people. But they’ll be the rich with cars. How about the blacks, the Hispanics in Bedford 5tuyvesant and East Harlem? They’ll barely be out of the front door when the bomb goes off.”
“At least they’ll write on my tombstone, `He saved one million of his people.’”
The President shook his head, agonizing with the little man in his dilemma.
“And the history books may also say, Abe, that you helped cause the death of five million others by acting precipitously.”
For a minute, neither man said anything. Then the President went on.
“Besides, Abe, can you imagine the pandemonium you’d cause trying to evacuate New York?”
“Of course I can.” Petulance flared from the Mayor like a flame spurting from a sharply struck match. “I know my people. But I’ve got to do something. I’m not going back up there and sit around Gracie Mansion for the next thirty hours, Mr. President, waiting for your charm and persuasive talents to save six million New Yorkers from a madman.”
The Mayor thrust an outstretched index finger toward the vista beyond the window. “How about all those guys over there in Civil Defense at the Pentagon, been spending millions of dollars of our money for the last thirty years? What are we waiting for? Let them start earning their money.
Give me the best people you got. I’ll take them back with me and sit them down with my people. We’ll see if they can’t come up with something.”
“All right, Abe,” the President replied, “you got them. I'll have Caspar Weinberger get them out to Andrews right away.” He placed one of his outsized hands on the Mayor’s shoulder. “And if they come up with something, anything, that looks like it might work, we’ll do it, Abe. I promise you.” He squeezed the old man’s shoulder. “But it won’t come to that. Once we get through to him, we’ll find a way to talk him out of this.
Believe me. In the meantime,” he sighed, “we’ve got to put up a good front.” He took a slip of paper from his desk and stood up. “I guess the time to start
is right now.”
A score of White House journalists were waiting outside. The President smiled, bantered with a couple of them, then read the innocuous three-line statement on his paper. They had discussed the question of federal aid for New York in the new budget, it read, and had agreed to close, continuing discussions on the matter over the next few days.
“Mr. Mayor,” a voice called from the circle of reporters, “what the hell’s going to happen to New York if you don’t get the money?”
The President could see that the question had caught Abe Stern by surprise, his thoughts far closer probably to the East River than to the Potomac.
“Don’t you worry about New York City, young man,” be snapped, when his mind had returned to the White House. “New York City can take care of itself.”
* * *
Jeremy Painter Oglethorpe spooned the egg from the double boiler at the first tinkle of his three-minute timer, flicked a slice of Pepperidge Farm stohemill oatmeal bread toast from the toaster, and poured a cup of coffee from his Mr. Coffee machine. With meticulousness born from twenty years of habit, he set the ingredients of his breakfast down in the breakfast nook of his Arlington, Virginia, split-level. Breakfast, like the rest of Oglethorpe’s life, was a series of well-worn rituals. He would close the working day now opening before him as precisely as he had begun it, a rigid eight and a half hours hence, with the rattle of the ice in a pitcher of martinis on the sideboy in the dining room.
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