Crosby’s is a down-at-the-heels Irish haunt with linoleum floors and backless stools with chrome legs and red vinyl seats and little hand-lettered signs above the bar listing the prices of the ridiculously dated drinks they serve there. Manhattans, Rob Roys, Rusty Nails. Who ever heard of these concoctions? Crosby’s is the most depressing joint I’ve ever been in. It’s not even dark like a bar. It reeks of urine and old men. But Manning hits it every night.
His drinking is another character anomaly. Ask him any other time of day and he’ll order a club soda like he’s in AA (which he’s not). But after work he downs an Old-Fashioned like clockwork and many nights more than one. I don’t even know what an Old-Fashioned is.
Leaving Crosby’s, Manning resumes his trek east along Seventy-Second till he reaches the Dakota on the park. He takes this same route every night. The Dakota was bombed in ’27 during the Migrant Riots, when 1.7 million flooded into the States from Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, made refugees by crop failures, famine, and intertribal genocide. The Americans they displaced still haven’t been resettled and they’re all armed to the teeth. The forecourt of the Dakota remains charred black. The place still hasn’t been reoccupied. The massive wrought-iron gates that were the Dakota’s trademark when John Lennon was assassinated there back in 1980 have been replaced by concrete barriers topped with concertina wire. You can still smell the cordite as you walk past. What this means to Manning I have no idea.
He passes the Dakota and turns south, in other words backtracking, and walks down Central Park West, always on the west side of the avenue, away from the park where the tent cities of the displaced used to be and still sometimes are.
One time, about three months ago, Gleason sent me to fetch Manning when he had bolted from a conference without a word to anybody. I found Manning here, south of the Dakota, on the park side, standing just inside the stone wall that runs along the sidewalk of Central Park West.
A religious revival of some kind was in progress. A speaker, an African-American man, stood on an elevated platform spouting fire and brimstone to a flamboyantly responsive throng of women, middle-aged or older, conservatively dressed, mostly black. The preacher was declaiming about the sins of the race of mankind. The man-made eco-disasters of recent decades were proof that humanity was inherently evil and unworthy of its Creator’s love. The Almighty, the speaker declared, had lost patience with us, as He had before in the time of Noah. Buses, a dozen or more—big interstate motor coaches—were parked at the curb along CPW. I couldn’t help myself. I snapped a few pix with my phone.
FREE WILL BAPTIST CHURCH, Lee, MA
FOURSQUARE BIBLE FELLOWSHIP, Eufala, AL
CHRIST THE REDEEMER CHURCH, Marblehead, MA
NEW HOPE ASSEMBLY, Whitney, DE
I asked a man in the crowd if this kind of rally happened here often. He said gatherings like this had been taking place on this spot for years.
Manning stood at the rear of the crush. He was so engrossed that I held back for long moments, reluctant to break in on his absorption. The women of the congregations were apparently en route to the Holy Land. New York was their staging place. From here the buses would take them to Atlanta, where they would board charter flights crossing first to North Africa and from there to Israel. “Why are they going?” I asked the man who had told me about the gatherings.
“For the end of the world,” he said.
Why Manning was so held by the speaker, I have no clue.
From here each evening, from this site by the park, Manning turns west on Sixty-Eighth. He enters the Midtown Athletic Club, his residence, not via the lobby, from which I pick him up on the mornings when I’m sent for, but through the kitchen, which has a delivery entrance off an alley just east of Amsterdam Avenue. Manning’s mail is waiting for him at the front desk but he doesn’t check it till morning. I’ve never seen him respond to postal correspondence. He scans the return addresses and chucks everything in the trash.
From the kitchen, Manning rides the service elevator (he never takes the passenger lift) up to his room on the fourth floor. I’ve been in this room. Manning sent me once to pick up a file he had forgotten. His instructions were to have the desk clerk retrieve the papers while I waited in the lobby, but when I got there the guy was so busy he gave me the keys (old-time brass implements that you insert into the lock and twist) and sent me up. When I opened the door I thought I had stepped through a time portal.
Manning’s room is like a cell, a chamber for a monk.
From the bed, which is so narrow it looks like you couldn’t turn over in it without falling out onto the floor, a person can touch three of the four walls. The fourth is only a few steps away. There’s no closet, only an armoire that looks like it came from the Goodwill store, a single straight-backed armchair, and a rickety half desk/half bedside table.
On the wall beside the bed is a crucifix, one of those creepy three-dimensional relics with Jesus wearing a diaper and bleeding from a wound in his side. I have no idea if the thing came with the room or if Manning brought it himself. A single framed photo sits on the nightstand, of a woman and a young boy. The bed looks like the one from Psycho. I mean it. It’s fucking scary.
I refuse, as I said, to probe into Manning’s past. I don’t wanna know where he used to live when his wife and kid were alive. But I worry. There’s not even a radio in that room.
10
CHINATOWN
MY OWN PLACE is on Howard Street in Chinatown. I catch the Broadway–Seventh Avenue Line at Seventy-Second; I’m home in six stops with a change to the local at Fourteenth Street. My block, between Broadway and Mercer, was a hellhole till the ’20s, when hipsters discovered it. The Flood of ’29 and then construction on the Lower Manhattan Seawall drove them out. Now it’s a hellhole again. Rents are cheap; I wouldn’t live anywhere else. I’m in a second-story loft that’s so big I could park a truck in it, with eighteen-foot ceilings and windows on two sides. I’m directly above a Korean greengrocer. My place smells like jicama and bok choy.
There’s no such thing as off-line in DivSix. You keep your locator on around the clock and your earbud in 24/7. Mine chimes now, as I’m surfacing from the subway at Canal Street, with a voice mail from Gleason’s tech sergeant instructing me for the third time not to waste any more time following up on that “crazy Jewish shit” that came in yesterday via text. The sergeant makes it clear that Gleason knows that Manning, with me in tow, has today hit the sweatshop in Canarsie and the contraband dealer in Little Hong Kong.
This note is succeeded immediately by a text from Manning.
BULLSHIT. DO WHAT I TOLD YOU.
Manning pretends not to like or to understand tech. But I’ve noticed that very few messages, even those with his in-box blacked out, get past him.
I grab a slice and a Diet Coke at the stand-up Ray’s next to the greengrocer’s. Ethnic prejudice is interesting in Chinatown. The Chinese hate the Koreans and the Vietnamese, whom they call gooks, dinks, slants, and slopes; the Vietnamese and the Koreans hate the Filipinos, whom they call flips. Laotians and Cambodians are beneath the notice of any civilized human. And everybody hates the Japanese. Whites are a joke to the Asians downtown. In my neighborhood the man or woman on the street literally can’t tell an Irishman from an Italian. The quirk in intra-Asian bigotry is that money and social class override all. I’ll be shopping in my greengrocer’s; she’ll catch my arm and start bitching about the gooks and slopes pouring into the States by millions, fleeing the rising seas and year-round monsoons in Southeast Asia. “See those two flips over there? They steal something every time they come in.”
To her I’m not a flip because I’m a cop.
Two great things about my loft. One, it’s elevated enough to catch the breezes between the rivers and off the Battery. The temperature sign on the Bowery Bank reads 112° tonight as I hike past, but with my big windows open and four industrial fans cranking, my place will be down to ninety-five by midnight. I can sleep in that. Two,
I can work better from home than I do from the office. I’ve set up a standard consumer-grade VPN with basic encryption so my digital identity looks normal from the outside. Beyond that I’m pretty much invisible. I’ve masked my actual IP address, and with a sequence of homemade firewall hacks I can tap into all the databases at headquarters. Yeah, I would get into big trouble at work for accessing from off-site, except the only peeps at DivSix geeky enough to glom onto this subterfuge are the ones who would not only not turn me in but would actively abet me in continuing my depredations. In ninety minutes I’ve got enough background on the Righteous Man legend, not to mention apocalyptic coding, Hebrew language gematria, and End of Days eschatology, to print a dozen pages for Manning.
Just before midnight two more texts come in from Gleason’s assistant. Both are team alerts for the upcoming SWAT raid on Russian Mafia headquarters in Brighton Beach. The date of the action is Saturday, April 22, seventy-two hours from now, but I am instructed to be present without fail, with Manning, tomorrow p.m. for weapons and body armor issue (the teams will carry assault rifles and possibly shotguns), test firing, and comm channel setup, at which each team member will receive his or her headset and frequencies will be tested and locked.
A SWAT raid.
What the fuck am I doing with my life? Every time my job forces me to confront the violent reality of this city, not to mention the male-dominated grab-your-bitch-ass culture within the department (including elite units like DivSix), I find myself asking these questions. What the fuck was I thinking when I signed up for this shit? What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I be normal?
I take my pizza crust and the last of my Diet Coke and perch by the northeast corner window. The industrial fans are wailing; temp will be down to the high nineties soon.
Should I be married?
Why don’t I have children?
I’m twenty-fucking-eight, for God’s sake.
But how can a responsible adult bring kids into this world? I mean seriously. I remember in second grade the teacher sitting us down, like every other class of seven-year-olds on the planet, and showing us videos of the vanishing Greenland ice cap and the death of coral reefs across the entire southern hemisphere. I’ve seen ten thousand worse since then. Or if you really want to scare the shit out of yourself, take a look at the sky at noon. I’m no scientist, but that shade of viridian ain’t natural.
Sure, I’d love to have a baby. But how much time has the human race got? Fifty years? Thirty? Every report says the planet is past the point of no return.
I try not to think about it. Why bring innocent life into this world? So they can choke on CO2 or go under in a tsunami of refugee gooks, dinks, and slopes?
11
THE DOROT LIBRARY
MANNING COMES ONLINE the next morning at 0650. “Well?” he says.
He has finished his wrestling regimen and powered up his phone. The GPS pin on my screen locates him on foot, having departed the Midtown Athletic Club, trekking down Broadway toward Columbus Circle.
I tell Manning I’ve got twelve pages for him. They’re waiting on his desk right now.
I’m in the office already, ostensibly running research on Russian murder victim #2, Dr. Alexsandr Golokoff of Filvovsky Park, Moscow, per Manning’s (and Gleason’s) instructions, but actually bouncing back and forth between monitoring Manning as he moves and sneaking peeks at a ’28 TED talk on climate change given by the Israeli anthropologist and Rabin Prize winner, Amos Ben-David.
Moscow, the news says this a.m., is roasting at 111° in the hottest April on record. Wildfires are scorching the suburbs. Civilian brigades are being recruited to fight wind-driven blazes that by nightfall could be threatening the city center.
On my screen Dr. Ben-David paces a stage in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His talk, I remind myself, is from six years ago, so any impending climate calamities are likely to be considerably more imminent today.
BEN-DAVID
What would have to happen for the Earth to turn back from the brink? What would mankind need to do? First the race would have to reduce global population, currently 8.7 billion, to 4.1 billion, with the intention of decreasing it over time to a maximum planetary carrying capacity of 2.3 billion. Fifty to seventy percent of the land currently in use for agriculture would have to be taken out of cultivation and replaced either by reforestation or restored to native grasslands for CO2 recapture and sequestration. Use of fossil fuels (and every other energy source producing greenhouse gases, including methane from livestock) would have to decrease to no more than fifteen percent of the current rate and preferably to zero.
Swell. I hit pause and toggle over to Manning’s lapel cam. It’s 0743. He’s digging into a plate of eggs with hash browns and wheat toast at Donovan’s on Fifty-Seventh and Sixth.
I go back to Golokoff, our Russian Victim #2. Could he be called “righteous”? He served four and a half years at Dostoenko Prison outside Saint Petersburg for publishing works by dissident writers. His wife and eldest daughter were killed by a runaway panel van that jumped the sidewalk outside the GUM department store in the Kitay-gorod section of Moscow, facing onto Red Square. The driver fled and was never apprehended.
Back to the TED talk.
BEN-DAVID
Is this possible? Technologically, yes. Politically? My view is considerably more pessimistic. Forecast: global ecological catastrophe on a biblical scale within our lifetime. Everything in the Book of Revelation about the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse—famine, pestilence, war, and death—is on course to take place. I see nothing to stop it. The end of human life on Earth within a generation and possibly considerably sooner.
Wow, that’s cheery. I work on Golokoff for another ninety minutes, then click back to Manning.
He has exited Donovan’s, schlepped across to Fifth, then hiked south another fifteen blocks. He is just now entering the Public Library, the main branch with the stone lions out front at Fifth between Fortieth and Forty-Second. I monitor his progress via his lapel cam, past the security station, jog to the right and up the stairwell to the third floor. Manning emerges into a broad, marble-floored hallway and turns left. A clutch of Orthodox students passes him, speaking in Hebrew, or maybe it’s Yiddish, I can’t tell. A sign appears ahead:
DOROT LIBRARY
Manning turns left and enters. I google “Dorot.” It’s a research library of Judaica, funded by various Jewish individuals and philanthropic agencies.
The library’s physical plant is laid out in the three sections—the main reading room, the librarian’s station, and an inner reading room adjacent.
A few minutes later Manning has taken a seat in this latter chamber.
He’s at one end of a lamplit oaken table. Three or four students or scholars sit in chairs at this same table. All are immersed in arcane volumes.
Manning’s glance scans the scholars (all male). He takes in the beards, the payot side curls, the black jackets, and the knotted strings extending from the hems of the tzitzit vests under their white shirts.
The research librarian enters from the adjacent station. He’s an academic-looking fellow about forty, wearing a kippah skullcap. He crosses to Manning, carrying three oversized, occult-looking volumes.
LIBRARIAN
(to Manning, in a whisper)
These are the books you asked for on the lamed-vav-niks . . .
Manning thanks the librarian and clears a space on the table. “I’d suggest you start with this one,” the librarian says. “It’s the most accessible.” He opens one of the books and sets it on the table before Manning.
MANNING
This is in Hebrew.
LIBRARIAN
This is the Jewish library.
Manning’s lapel cam switches focus to his knees and the floor. Audio sounds like snickering from several scholars at the table.
The librarian asks Manning if he wishes to keep the three volumes. Manning lets his silence answer. The librarian reclaims the books, excuses himself, and w
ithdraws.
Two chairs down, a different scholar—apparently one who did not giggle—turns toward Manning.
SCHOLAR
You’re researching the tzadikim. The Thirty-Six Righteous Men.
Manning acknowledges this.
SCHOLAR
What have you learned so far?
MANNING
Damn little.
With a gesture the scholar asks Manning’s permission to join him. Manning nods. The young man crosses to the chair next to Manning.
The scholar looks about thirty—tall, clean-shaven, athletic—dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and hoodie. He extends his hand.
SCHOLAR
Jake Instancer. I’m an associate professor at Columbia in Judaic studies. I know a little about this stuff.
Fifteen minutes later, Manning and the professor have relocated to the café on the ground floor of the library. Plates and coffee cups sit on the table before them. The younger man is leaning forward, scribbling on a notepad, which he positions so that Manning can see it.
JAKE INSTANCER
Every letter in the Hebrew alphabet is associated with a number. “Lamed” [LAH-med] is L. It’s associated with the number thirty. “Vav” is V. It’s associated with six.
Lamed vav, Instancer says, is obviously thirty-six.
JAKE INSTANCER
Any Jew would connect this immediately to the legend of the Thirty-Six Righteous Men.
As Manning leans forward listening, the professor’s eye chances upon the SIG Sauer P226 in the shoulder holster beneath Manning’s jacket.
If this surprises Instancer, his expression doesn’t show it.
JAKE INSTANCER
Remember the story of Noah and the Flood? God resolved to destroy the human race because people had turned out to be so evil. The Almighty repented that He had even created men and women. He sent the Deluge to wipe us out.
36 Righteous Men Page 5
