Manhattan Lockdown

by Paul Batista

  Gabriel gave Raj a charming smile, saying something that Raj had never heard from anyone who had given him permission to record an interview. Reaching into the pocket of his well-tailored slacks, Gabriel brought out his own iPhone and held it aloft alongside Raj’s identical iPhone. “Not that I don’t trust you,” Gabriel said, still smiling. “But I’ve read about the famous eighteen-minute gap in the Nixon Watergate tapes.”

  Although surprised, Raj remained impassive.

  Gabriel started, “Not Silas Nasar. His real name is Hakim Khomani.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I had a close friend in Afghanistan. When I left the country, we continued to e-mail one another. He was, and I hope still is, a friend.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A nurse. He worked with me at the central hospital in Kabul. I was hustled out of Kabul quickly. I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye. I did have his e-mail address. Caregiver7@aol.com.”

  Gabriel, a man who was trained to observe people as a whole person so that he could detect and diagnose conditions such as fear, deceit, illness, or comfort that other people might not see, for the first time looked at Raj Gandhi as he might look at a patient. Raj had slightly jaundiced eyes, thin hair, fingernails that were almost transparent, cheeks that were in the early stages of waste. He was either an incipient diabetic or a man who didn’t yet know he was HIV-positive. He was also, Gabriel saw, shy and sincere. Reliable, a truth teller. And doomed.

  “How do you know Khomani?”

  “My friend in Afghanistan—we were lovers, Mr. Gandhi, as well as friends—told me he had relatives in the U.S. who had been able to come here during the Russian invasion in the ’80s. Khomani, my friend’s cousin, had a degree from MIT in electrical engineering. So when that war was under way, and Khomani told the American embassy he wanted to come here, he had easy access. Clans, blood relationships, those kinds of ties are important among Afghans. The cousins stayed in touch. First by phone, expensive land lines at the time, by letters, and then by e-mails and text messages. They were both science types, well-educated, interested in technology, very early users of the Internet.”

  The simple marble bench in front of the elegant church, which was like a cathedral on a small scale and one of the most beautiful buildings on the Upper East Side, was a popular resting place for people who had finished long runs in Central Park and for tourists to sit. Raj and Gabriel stopped speaking when a young woman runner, sweating, wearing a baseball cap from the back of which her braided blond hair extended to her shoulders, sat on the bench next to them. She took a slender cell phone from a pouch on her waistband. “Chumley’s,” they overheard her say, “just reopened. Let me shower and change. See you there in two hours.”

  Gabriel knew Chumley’s was a bar on Second Avenue at 80th Street. When she said, “Ciao,” Gabriel for the first time smiled at Raj Gandhi. When she stood up, moving effortlessly, she said to them, “Have a nice day.” And on her perfect legs she began running east on 90th Street.

  Gabriel, noticing that Raj had not looked at this exquisitely built young woman, said, “Life goes on.” Raj smiled. Gabriel had never met a gay Indian.

  “Did you,” Raj asked, “meet Silas Nasar? Or Khomani?”

  “I didn’t, but I planned to.”

  “Why?”

  “I cared very much about Mohammad, my Afghan friend. He wrote that Khomani had married, and now lived under the name Silas Nasar. He had e-mailed pictures of Khomani’s wife and their two sons. The wife was an Afghan beauty, as I could see from the pictures. But the younger son had cerebral palsy. He was three. From the pictures, I could see, Mr. Gandhi, that his condition was terrible. I felt that Mohammad, who was a very compassionate man with children of his own, wanted to know more about his cousin and his family.”

  “Mohammad was married?” For the first time Raj, impassive and matter of fact, looked surprised.

  “Yes. Haven’t you ever heard of such a thing before? It was once known as closeted gay men.”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you have children?” Gabriel asked.

  “No, I work. I’m one of those people married to my work. No children, either.”

  Gabriel’s tone became more intense. He cultivated a quiet, comforting demeanor, that doctor’s style of reassurance. “You told me that you had crucial news for me. Your words, Mr. Gandhi. I’ve said a lot. I’m a doctor. I’ve learned to listen. Where is Cameron?”

  “Cameron Dewar is missing because he was arrested.”

  “Say that again.”

  “Arrested.”

  “Where is he?”

  “The Secret Service has him.”

  “Why?”

  “Why, Dr. Hauser? Because he knows you.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Gabriel was for a moment angry with this evasive, overly well-mannered, fragile-looking man. “How do you know he was arrested?”

  “The source I mentioned.”

  “Who the fuck is this source? I want to talk to him.” “I truly don’t know who he is.”

  “First you tell me you can’t tell me who he is. Now you tell me you don’t know who he is.” Gabriel caught himself. His anger at various times during the last two days was, he believed, far too intense and unpredictable. His work as a doctor had taught him that quiet persistence drew out more of the truth and more information from patients. “What else did this man say? Or is the source a woman?”

  “It’s a man. Quite sarcastic, unpleasant to deal with. But so far everything he’s told me has been accurate. He is what we call in our business a reliable source.”

  “What else did he say about Cam?”

  “He’s in a secret place. He’s being asked questions about who you know, who you have conversations with, what you hear, what you write, to whom you write.”

  “What are they doing to him?”

  “So far just talking to him. And he is talking to them. How the two of you met? When did the two of you become sexually active? Do you have HIV? What have you told him about the Army? Has he read the letters you wrote to the president, congressmen, the secretary of defense, even the editor at the Times when you were objecting to Don’t ask, don’t tell. They seem to have copies of every letter you wrote.”

  “Of course they do,” Gabriel said. “I sent them. I wanted them to be read. I kept copies. They were all in a Barneys shoebox in our apartment. I don’t think Cam ever looked at them until a few hours ago.”

  Raj paused. He, too, was patient. Like Gabriel he knew that patience, not anger, not threats, not shouting, extracted information. Raj said, “Most of all, though, they want to know about you and Silas Nasar, the cousin.”

  “Silas Nasar? They already know about Silas Nasar.”

  “They also believe,” Raj said, “that you met him and knew him before the bombings.”

  “Knew him? No, I never saw him. But we spoke. Several times. We exchanged e-mails and texts. He sounded so much like his cousin. They were raised together. I knew he was going to be on the steps of the museum on Sunday. He told me he resembled his cousin. He even sent me by text a not particularly clear picture of himself. I knew we would recognize each other. The picture did make me believe they were related.”

  “They believe,” Raj said, “that you had already met him and knew him. How often did you talk to Silas?”

  “Not really sure. He was very easy to talk to. He had lots of opinions, as did his cousin. But Mohammad was more difficult to speak with, although his English was completely understandable. But the language was a Sunni dialect. Silas was almost, you would think, a native English speaker.”

  Everything about the elegant Church of the Heavenly Rest was symmetrical. The two identical low spires, the carved facades that were mirror images of one another, the twin huge medieval doors whose gold hinges were identical. And that remarkable name, almost symmetrical itself: the Church of the Heavenly Rest which, as Gabriel had tho
ught since he was a boy, had a distinctive name so unlike any other church he’d ever heard of except possibly the immense, poorly maintained, and never completed Cathedral of Saint John the Divine near the Columbia campus on upper Amsterdam Avenue. That cathedral stood at the edge of the then still dangerous Morningside Park, dense as a jungle, boulder-strewn, an ideal haven for thieves and muggers.

  The Church of the Heavenly Rest was so symmetrical, so balanced, that there was a marble bench on the other side of the ornate wooden doors. And there were large concrete planters next to each bench that bore slender yew trees newly planted because the previous harsh winter destroyed the earlier, more mature ones. A banner imprinted with the single immense word Rejoice was suspended over the doors. It rustled in the mild summer breeze.

  Minute recording devices had been implanted in the tender flesh of the new trees in the planters as soon as Gina Carbone had learned that the two men had arranged to meet on one of the church’s smooth granite benches. Across the avenue just inside the entrance to the Engineers’ Gate, a thickset man who had the heft and dimensions of a college football player and a skinny woman, both in runner’s clothes, listened on earbuds to every word that Gabriel Hauser and Raj Gandhi spoke. So, too, did Gina Carbone.

  The man posing as a runner asked into a small microphone that was a part of the earbud, “What do you want us to do?”

  ***

  Naked, Tony Garafalo stretched out on the sheets on the bed near the desk at which Gina was seated. She was naked, too, except for a thick Regency Hotel towel draped around her waist.

  Tony was staring at the profile of her remarkably shapely, youthful breasts.

  Gina said, “Remember, you’re runners. Keep moving. These two guys are smart. They’ll notice you if you’re just standing around.” Gina was one of those rare people who knew the arts of command. “Get your asses moving. You have the drop on them for five hundred yards. Your equipment will pick up everything they say even when they can’t see you.”

  Then Gina heard Gabriel Hauser’s increasingly edgy, aggravated voice. “Mr. Gandhi, when I called you because I couldn’t find Cam you said you could help. So far you know only something I had already suspected. That the bastards have arrested Cam. You haven’t told me how much danger he is in, where he is, how I can get him back.”

  “I believe I know where he is.”

  “Where?”

  “There’s a dark prison in an old pier on the East River. In it are about two dozen Islamic men who were secretly arrested within minutes or hours after the first explosions yesterday.”

  “I’m going down there. I have a bike in the basement of my building. Where is it?”

  “A derelict pier just below Houston Street. I’ve tried to get in a few times. Haven’t succeeded. Pier 37.”

  Two casually dressed men, both Sunni Muslims, stood at the iron fence surrounding the Cooper-Hewitt Museum just across 90th Street on the east side of Fifth Avenue. Behind the ornate fence the museum itself was shrouded, as it had been for two years, by gauzy, translucent veils that protected the museum and passersby from construction debris during the long course of the museum’s reconstruction. Using slender, essentially invisible equipment that Silas Nasar had given them, they, too, listened to the conversation between Raj Gandhi and Gabriel Hauser. They could have been the tourists they appeared to be.

  “Mr. Gandhi, I have no confidence in reporters, their newspapers, CNN, the New York Times. I made every effort I could when I was hustled and bundled out of my hospital in Afghanistan, where I loved my work as a doctor, and then out of the Army, where I planned to stay for years. No one, no one, in your business paid any attention to me. I felt like a leper.”

  Quietly Raj said, “I’m sorry. But now Don’t ask, don’t tell has been eliminated.”

  “Too late, not to mention the twenty years it was in effect and all the years and years before that when openly gay people could not serve. I’m one of thousands and thousands of people with what the Army still calls less-than-honorable discharges.”

  “You can ask to have that changed.”

  “I’m not interested in asking. I have a thing about asking the Army or the government for anything.”

  “That must be painful.”

  Gabriel leaned closer to Raj. “Why haven’t you done anything, Mr. Gandhi? It’s been many, many hours since you learned important things, things that need to be exposed. But here you are, on a bench, talking to me about what you know.” Gabriel paused, continuing to gaze at Raj’s delicate face. “What are you going to do?”

  “I work for a paper with an opaque hierarchy. Layers of editors. Their watchword is verification, corroboration.”

  “You have your source.”

  “I don’t know who he is.”

  “You have me. You know my life partner has disappeared and is under arrest. I see stories from the Times on my cell phone about our courageous mayor, the extraordinarily brave police commissioner, garbage on the streets, the count of the dead, lists of names of the dead. But I don’t see anything about the underside of all this.”

  Raj Gandhi spoke slowly. “You’re wrong, Dr. Hauser. I have a blog and access to YouTube. I have the secret caller on tape. I have a video I took of Gina Carbone slipping into Pier 37. I even have a video of her going in and out of the Regency. And I have a source on the service staff at the Regency who tells me that Gina Carbone has a different kind of captive at the Regency, a lover. I even have his name. Tony Garafalo. And like the rest of the world I have Google. It took me ten minutes of a Google search to find out that this Tony Garafalo served at least eight years in a federal prison, the worst one, in fact, the Supermax facility in Florence, Colorado, where the Unabomber and the shoe-bomber are held, where John Gotti was once a prisoner. Mr. Garafalo was an associate of the Gambino family. And that Garafalo was convicted of using force to silence witnesses who were about to testify about the Gambino family.”

  “And the people you work for have no interest in that?”

  “Not yet.”

  “When will yet come? After Cam is dead? After the pier is empty? After I’m arrested?” Gabriel stood up. “You’re wasting my time, Mr. Gandhi.”

  “Don’t leave.” Gandhi’s delicate voice was as loud, as definitive as it could be. “In two hours I am putting everything I know, corroborated or not, on my blog. On YouTube, on Snapchat, on Twitter, on all those instantaneous social media devices. The pier and its dark prison. The movements of the police commissioner. You, your injured dog, your lover. Even this interview.”

  “I don’t believe you, Mr. Gandhi. You don’t have the inner strength to do that. It’s not in your DNA. The Times will fire you. You’re the only Indian there. You have all that prestige, that loyalty. You’re Gunga Din, loyal to the British, to the powers that be.”

  “Are you a racist, Dr. Hauser?”

  “Far from it. I’m a realist.”

  Gabriel Hauser turned off his cell phone. “I’ll take care of this myself,” he said. He stood and disappeared around the corner on East 90th Street. His beloved apartment was only eight blocks away. He cried all the way to the home he loved.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  RAJ GANDHI’S WALK east from Fifth Avenue and the Church of the Heavenly Rest took him, once he crossed Lexington Avenue, through the dreary streets filled with decaying brownstones in which multiple small apartments, some of them only the size of a small living room, had been partitioned with thin walls. Garbage cans and wooden bins, most of them overflowing with the ordinary debris of human life, stood next to each fluorescent lobby.

  Now, so many hours after the bombings and the lockdown started, there were mountain ranges of huge black plastic bags on the curbstones. In the gathering dark Raj Gandhi saw rats on the sidewalks. They reminded him not only of his early years in his native Mumbai but the fictional rats that suddenly proliferated at the start of Camus’s novel The Plague. Oran in that novel had been quarantined, a whole population confined by the prese
nce and fear of a disease that was a modern Black Death. The noblest characters in the book, doctors and journalists, had died as the epidemic progressed and before it came to its natural, miraculous end. Raj had read the novel often. He felt he was now living it.

  His own building was constructed ten years ago. It looked to him as if a refugee Soviet-era architect had designed it. At thirty-three stories, it was one of dozens of anonymous new apartment buildings lining cheerless York Avenue. It had a comfortable lobby and friendly uniformed doormen who knew his name.

  His own apartment, a studio, was on a high floor with a view of the East River. For a curtain on the single large window he had tacked up a burlap fabric which he never opened and so never looked at the majestic expanse of the river and its legendary bridges. The apartment was replete with gadgets, laptop computers, iPads, a variety of cell phones, four television sets that had access to every available news and cable station, CNN, Fox, Al Jazeera, even the Weather Channel. He spent almost all of his income on these technological marvels. He had a pull-out sofa on which he slept, as uncomfortable as a plank, and three small tables he had assembled from IKEA for his equipment. There were three folding wooden chairs. No carpets.

  As soon as he unlocked the door to the apartment, the voice he heard was shockingly familiar. “Jesus, Gandhi, you live like a college freshman at a bad school. Look at all of this crap.”

  Fear seized Raj. “How did you get in here?”

  “Don’t worry. This isn’t exactly a first-class building. And a quadriplegic with a blindfold could open your door.”

  As Raj saw in the glare from the two unshaded lights, the man in the wooden chair was exceptionally good-looking, obviously Italian. He was large, not at all fat, but tall and muscular. His powerful appearance was for Raj entirely different from the voice he had heard in the calls from the unknown source. The man Raj had envisioned from the sound of the voice was scrawny, bald, furtive.

  Still seated, the man said, “I thought it was time we should meet. I’m losing my patience.” No accent. A clear voice Raj couldn’t place, easily the voice of a man who was literate and persuasive. But this man was obviously a great mimic, able to sound like a crank from Queens or Brooklyn whenever he wanted to.