by Paul Batista
“Andrew, my primary obligation is to the people of this city. And what that means today, in this moment, is to keep them safe. And to do that I can only use the resources Commissioner Carbone has.”
“And we’ve done everything we can to help you with that. We’ve activated an Army reserve division which I’m told is already in Manhattan.”
“And guess what? Hundreds of them are gathered around Times Square, attracted by the bright lights, big city. We have zero information that there’s any threat in Times Square. Do you?”
Another pause, this one filled by an old-fashioned audio screech like the sudden roar of a 1960s loudspeaker system.
“Your press conference is problematic, Roland. What will you say about the role of Homeland Security?”
“Don’t worry, I won’t describe this as a joint operation. I will thank Homeland Security for its continued assistance and cooperation.”
“I want one or two of our people to be there standing behind you.”
“Not Lazarus.”
“The judge has no intention of being there.”
“Now that’s cooperation I can genuinely appreciate.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
RAJ GANDHI, WHO had just spent several years in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, had what he called on-the-job-training in the petty corruption, greed, arrogance, and blind egotism of politicians. When he started as a journalist fresh out of graduate school a decade earlier, he had Plato’s idealized view of politicians as men who exercised their creative powers for the common good. But what he had seen on a daily basis during nine years overseas were powerful elected and unelected men who lied, diverted immense amounts of money to themselves and their families and clans, and never hesitated to order murders. They weren’t statesmen. They were harlots who made no effort to conceal what they were doing.
When he returned to New York, he made a deliberate decision to give politicians in the United States the benefit of the doubt. He saw his role as a journalist in an old-fashioned way, and for him objectivity was an important goal. But nothing he had seen during the months he’d already spent in New York justified the giving of the benefit of the doubt. He wanted to resist the pull of gravity in the direction of viewing local politicians as New York versions of the ruling men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, but it was difficult not to see the men and women who were city council members and their staffs, local New York state assemblymen, and borough presidents as mirror images of the men in the clans that surrounded the presidents in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yet, Roland Fortune had consistently impressed him. Raj had attended only two of his press conferences, and each time the mayor was relaxed, responding to the questions he was asked instead of delivering a speech about the issues he wanted to discuss, and he was respectful. And often funny in the understated way Raj, never a backslapper, preferred. The only thing about Roland Fortune that had aroused Raj Gandhi’s critical instincts was that when the mayor called on him at a press conference he used Raj’s first name. Roland had taken the time to know the new faces in the press corps at City Hall, obviously for the purpose of stroking their egos. Raj decided not to let his ego be stroked or to hold this against Roland Fortune.
Raj Gandhi was one of six Times reporters who watched the elevated television screen in the newsroom as Roland Fortune made a statement and then answered questions at the press conference about the battle at the George Washington Carver projects. His delivery was deliberate, sober, informative, even modest. He described the murdered police as antiterrorism officers and never once used the constantly repeated word hero. As the anonymous caller had said, since 9/11, every fireman was a hero, every cancer survivor was a hero, all soldiers were heroes, every first responder was a saint. Strangely the weird caller in the mocking way he spoke had confirmed what Raj had privately thought for a long time. Raj cringed at the use of the word hero, and admired Roland Fortune for not invoking it.
He listened as the mayor lucidly and calmly said as the conference was coming to an end, “The simple truth is that we do not yet precisely know who is responsible for these despicable acts against the people of New York, indeed, against the entire country. There could be more than one group. Or there could be elements of one centrally controlled group. And we don’t know whether the men who are doing these things are Muslim, anarchists, fringe right-wingers or far-out leftists. And I will not speculate.”
An unseen reporter said, “There are rumors that the slain men in the apartment were all dark skinned.”
“I don’t want to comment on that. Their skin color won’t tell us who they were, what organization they had, or whose orders they were carrying out. Certainly I authorized the action that was taken because I had crystal-clear evidence that a group of six to ten men had seized control of a floor in a public housing project. That they were heavily armed. That the floor might have been only a staging area from which they would soon disperse and mount other operations. That we had one last clear chance to stop them. That they refused to negotiate. That they may have had one or more hostages.”
“Who made the decision to go in?”
“I did, with the assistance of Commissioner Carbone.”
“Aren’t you concerned that they are all dead?”
“It was not our objective to kill any one or all of them. It was our objective to stop them. But this was combat in very close spaces. Our team’s highest priority once they were engaged was to protect themselves. I’ve never been in combat, nor have any of you. I won’t second-guess any of our people. All or almost all of them were infantry veterans of multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. They sustained terrible losses within seconds. Obviously they had to do whatever they thought was necessary to avoid more losses.”
Then a voice behind Roland Fortune, the voice of the Brooklyn-accented Irv Rothstein, firmly intoned, “That’s what we have for now, ladies and gentlemen.”
And Roland Fortune, cool, formidable, and extraordinarily handsome, turned away from the podium, and like an actor at the end of a scene, slipped through a door behind the stage.
***
Raj Gandhi’s cell phone vibrated in the left pocket of his pants. He had several seconds of trouble extracting it. When he finally had the phone in his hand, he touched the icon that resembled a telephone receiver.
“Hey, man, did you ever hear such bullshit?” It was, unmistakably, the voice with the Queens accent.
“What?”
“That bullshit.”
Always polite and formal, Raj said, “I am not sure what it is you’re referring to.”
“Our slick mayor.”
“Tell me, please,” Raj said, “what is it that I missed?”
“Come on.” He paused. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. You miss a lot.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Don’t apologize. Just do your job.”
Raj didn’t answer. More bantering with this strange man, he felt, was a waste. He had called for a reason, and Raj felt that if he said as little as possible this man would reach the point of his calling. The man was a talker.
“I keep on looking at the Times’ fucking website for the story I led you to. All of your other reporters are writing obvious stuff. Garbage on the streets, uneasy populations, scared-to-shit Upper East Siders. Like, this is news to me, right?”
“Do you want to tell me something?”
“That’s what I’ve been doing. And you’ve done diddly-squat with it. I gave you this big story. You know, Mr. Gandhi, I could’ve given it to somebody else. Somebody who’s more industrious. Like, more daring, one of those guys from the New York Post.”
“I drove up and down the FDR Drive. I saw all the abandoned piers below Houston Street.” Raj had only recently learned that the street was called Howston, not Hewston. He had been embarrassed when he pronounced the word to sound like the city in Texas. “And they were all just abandoned piers.”
“Sure they were, Raj, sure they were. T
hat’s what they’re supposed to look like to ordinary pain-in-the-ass civilians driving on the FDR. But you needed to get out and walk around. Look what Woodward and Bernstein did: they used shoe leather, they walked around. That’s how they got that Watergate shit. Now all you great reporters do is sit on your asses and Google for info.”
Scorned and demeaned and repeatedly insulted as an overtly bright Indian teenager living in tough neighborhoods in Bombay, Raj had learned not to respond when someone provoked him. Patience, he thought, just listen.
“I’m willing to give you a second chance.”
“Thank you.” He used what he thought of as his Gunga Din voice. He intentionally sounded compliant, appreciative.
“Did you hear the Soldier of Fortune talk about all the dead guys in the apartment?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, they weren’t all dead. One got only a little boo-boo on his arm. They dressed the fucker in one of their uniforms after they had him clean himself up. He was such a brave martyr that he’d shit all over himself.”
Raj didn’t respond. He breathed slowly. This had the feel of extraordinary news or extravagant invention. The man laughed in that odd way, the loner’s laugh, not the kind of laughter people learned from laughing together. “Are you there, Mr. Gandhi-baby?”
“I’m here.”
“So they marched him out of the building, holding on to him like he was one of them but only a little shaken up. They put him in an ambulance. It was all playacting.”
Quietly Raj said, “How do you know this?”
“I don’t answer questions, Mr. Gandhi. I’m not in this to get famous.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m your friend. I’m trying here to give you insights into the war on terror.”
“Where is this man now?”
“Tell me this, Mr. Gandhi: Where you grew up, did they have little books with dots? The kind where you draw a line between the dots, and, before you know it, you have a picture of a duck, or a house, or a bridge or Jesus H. Christ?”
“Can you give me your e-mail address?”
“I’m not an e-mail kind of guy.”
“Who else knows about this?”
“You leave me in a constant state of worry, Mr. Gandhi. Who else do you think knows about this? Do you think the police commissioner might know? Do you think the Soldier of Fortune might know? Hey, try to find Tony Garafalo. He just got his brains fucked out by his girlfriend at their love nest at the Regency. She needed a break. War is a bitch on the nerves. Maybe the commissioner gave up this info when she was taking her break in what Sinatra called the afterglow of lovemaking.”
“I know you want me to believe you. And I want to believe you. But you make that hard to do sometimes.”
“Hey, I’m sorry if I offended you. It’s not a nice way to talk about our public servants, I know.”
“Where are you getting this information?”
“What did I tell you before? Remember? If I told you I’d have to kill you.”
Raj heard that loony loner’s laugh, and then the sound of the call ending. He tried to redial the number. It was blocked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
MOHAMMAD HUSSEIN WAS a slender man. From the very beginning, from the moment Gabriel Hauser first saw him enter the grim ward where amputees were briefly held before their flights to Germany and then on to a lifetime of permanent disability in the United States, Gabriel’s attention was arrested by Mohammad’s striking face, absolutely black hair. His eyes were not just brown, but virtually black, his nose straight and narrow, his lips full, and he had a cleft chin like Cary Grant. Gabriel was too accomplished as a doctor to stop the painful conversation he was having with a bitter soldier whose right arm below the elbow was severed, but he sensed the presence of the new male nurse in the ward.
Gabriel had not had a lover in the almost two years he spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once, for three days, he had taken a leave in Amsterdam and had so much sex that he was alarmed, even disturbed with the intensity. He had come of age long after the years of bathhouses, the gay clubs around Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, all of which had closed when AIDS became rampant, the modern Black Death, in the early to mid-1980s. He had in fact been put off by accounts he had read and stories he had heard from older gay men about the reckless, endless orgies of the late 1970s. He imagined that Jerome Fletcher had taken part in them in the era before AIDS, the era, as Gabriel sometimes thought, before Jerome made the transition from sex with multiple anonymous men to intercourse with boys. Gabriel still wanted to believe that Jerome had loved him, alone, during the three years their lives overlapped, but he knew that wasn’t so. The horrific trial of Dayvon Williams, the black prostitute who had strangled Jerome with an electrical cord before stabbing him repeatedly in the face at the now-closed motel in the South Bronx, had in three days of testimony disclosed Jerome’s long-standing insatiable taste for boys under the age of eighteen. Gabriel’s three crazy days in Amsterdam had evoked the question, Who am I really?
Gabriel found time and opportunity over the next two weeks to come into contact with Mohammad. Three days after they met, Mohammad accepted Gabriel’s invitation to have tea at a dusty, beaten up café not far from the cinder-block hospital in Kabul. Gabriel soon learned that Mohammad was married and had three children. On his iPhone there were pictures of his wife, their two daughters, and their son, a miniature version of Mohammad. In the vivid color pictures of her, Mohammad’s wife was smiling, ravishing. She looked like a model, not hooded and dour like the typical, silent women of Afghanistan.
Although Gabriel smiled at the sequence of family portraits, he was disappointed. He had hoped that Mohammad, gentle, intelligent, attentive, and so fundamentally different from the thousands of menacing and taciturn Iraqi and Afghan men Gabriel had encountered for two years, was attracted to him. But Mohammad’s marriage to a vibrant woman undermined Gabriel’s hopes, expectations, and desires.
But then Gabriel learned that it had been many months since Mohammad had seen his wife and children, who lived with his parents in Helmand province. Mohammad, who learned to speak English extremely well from a man who had worked with CIA advisers during the ten years of the futile Soviet invasion, had been recruited by the Army to train and work with American soldiers. He had been essentially unemployed since the 2001 invasion and the opportunity to work with the U.S. Army carried rich rewards. He was given a new skill, nursing, and a salary far richer than anything he had ever earned.
Gabriel lived in a building not far from the hospital. Constructed with cinder blocks in two months, the building was integrated, meaning that Army officers had most of the apartments, but Afghan civilians who worked for the Army as medical personnel, security guards, and translators also lived there. Gabriel’s place was neat and Spartan. He actually liked its feel of austerity and orderliness.
It took an enormous amount of planning and tension for Gabriel to pull together the nerve to invite Mohammad to the apartment for the first time. Once they were there, Gabriel served tea and cookies. He didn’t drink booze by choice and Mohammad didn’t drink it because of the rules of custom and religion. They faced each other over a glass coffee table, Gabriel on a hard white sofa and Mohammad in an ersatz Eames-style chair. In the background, the civilized voices of the NPR anchors spoke about the civil war in Syria and a new movie by Woody Allen.
Mohammad was a reader. Like almost every other Afghan associated with Americans, he owned a cell phone and an iPad. It often struck Gabriel as he walked in the streets of Kabul that people who had little or no food did have cell phones. Mohammad had a subscription to the New York Times and the Guardian on his iPad.
Their conversations were always easy, wide-ranging, and unrestrained except for one area, Gabriel’s love for men. Mohammad rarely mentioned his wife and never talked about sex. For his part, Gabriel found it difficult to shift his attention away from the slender man’s handsome face, the elegant gestures of his hands, a
nd lucidity of his intelligent eyes. It didn’t escape Gabriel’s notice that in all the hours they spent together at the hospital, he never once saw Mohammad give even a furtive, much less leering, look at any of the female doctors and nurses.
On a hot Thursday night after Mohammad had left his apartment, Gabriel Hauser made a decision: the next evening when they were drinking tea in his apartment he would reach out for Mohammad’s slender, almost hairless hand and say simply, “I’m in love with you.” He was prepared to lose this alluring, gratifying friendship, and to risk a horrified reaction, or to provoke a beating, on the frail hope that this man might kiss him and slip out of his clothes to reveal a body that Gabriel was certain was sleek and sylph-like.
But that moment never came. It was on that Friday morning that the unctuous colonel asked, “Can I have a few words with you, Major Hauser?” and told him he was being removed from Afghanistan that night, sent to Germany, and dishonorably discharged from the Army. Three hours before reporting to Bagram Air Base for his flight out of the country, he met Mohammad in the shabby café that had become the place where they regularly took their breaks together. He told Mohammad he was being exiled from the country immediately. “Do you want to know why?” he asked Mohammad.
“I know why, Gabriel.”
Mohammad walked through the stifling, dusty Afghan evening to Gabriel’s apartment building. Gabriel’s duffel bag and soft suitcases were already in the lobby of the building, and the locks to the apartment door had already been changed. In the dark in the last twenty yards of their walk Mohammad’s soft right hand sought out and clasped Gabriel’s hand. Gabriel was overwhelmed by love for this man. And by hatred for the Army.
***
Cam was visibly distressed. When he was angry or disturbed, he repeatedly moved small objects from place to place. There were clean coffee mugs on the small dining table, and Cam was shifting them as if they were inverted cups in a shell game.
Even as he registered that Cam was upset and distracted, Gabriel kissed him on the shoulder as soon he entered the apartment. Cam had taken the responsibility for bringing the wounded Oliver to the office of their friend John Higgins, a gay veterinarian whose cozy animal hospital on East 84th Street was the most popular veterinary hospital on the East Side. John loved Oliver. The wonderful dog reciprocated that love. Even though Oliver knew that the brownstone where John lived and worked was the place where he was poked and pinched and sometimes put in the kennel for a weekend, he always bounded happily up the steps and barked joyously when he saw Dr. Higgins in his immaculate white coat.
