by Paul Batista
“What do you want?” Raj asked. His own voice, as he recognized, had a tremor.
Standing, the man gestured at all the technological devices on the desks. “I’ve seen your blogs and Twitter feeds, Mr. Gandhi. You have an impressive audience. Hundreds of thousands of followers. More than your namesake, the great Mahatma. And you work for people at that godawful newspaper of yours who will not let you write the information I give you. It’s time for you, Mr. Gandhi, to get the word I’ve been giving you out to the world all on your own. I decided to help you write it.”
“I’m not sure,” Raj said. “Who are you? What’s your name?”
“Linda Lovelace. Deep Throat.”
Raj recognized the names, but had never seen Lovelace’s movies. He had never in fact despite all the gadgetry even glanced at porn. He said, “I still haven’t quite finished my work.”
“You have. Let’s get on the computer. We’ll write it together.”
Raj sat at the table with the laptop computer at which he ordinarily wrote his blog and Twitter feeds. Almost daily he used his blog to summarize or elaborate on his stories as they had appeared in the Times. Some of those blogs were written in his native language, Hindi. Far more were in English.
The well-dressed man pulled one of the folding chairs next to Raj.
“Let’s start, Mr. Gandhi. Listen to me and start typing. Write this down: In the midst of violence on the streets, officials in the government, particularly members of an elite, highly secretive unit of the New York Police Department, have unleashed a campaign involving secret arrests, kidnappings, torture and assassinations of dozens of men, some of them United States citizens, all of them of Middle East and African descent.”
Raj rapidly typed those words. Whoever this man was, his voice, the way he was able to put together words, phrases, and sentences, were so different from the crude, mocking voice Raj had heard on those strange phone calls.
As if sensing Raj’s surprise, the man reverted to the accented tone of the caller. “Listen carefully, Mr. Gandhi. Here are your next sentences. Sources who have spoken on condition of anonymity because of fears of reprisals have disclosed that, within minutes of the devastating explosions that began with the murders of more than a thousand people at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art two days ago, the secretive unit made a sweep of almost two dozen men who were taken to a dark prison on an abandoned New York pier on the East River.’
The man paused and had Raj scroll through the words that he had merely transcribed. “You’re a good typist, Mr. Gandhi. At least there’s something you can do right.” It was again the sardonic, sarcastic voice of the man on the cell phone.
And then the voice changed again, surprisingly literate, sounding like a broadcaster, the voice of someone who had done a great deal of reading.
He dictated, Sources reveal that the unit was conceived and implemented by Gina Carbone, the first female commissioner of the police department and a veteran of the Gulf War of the early 1990s. It is known as the Black Unit and consists almost entirely of former CIA and NSA officers who for several years have been nominally assigned to the NYPD with innocuous titles such as ‘community liaison representatives.’ They are, according to the sources, primarily men and two women responsible for extraordinary renditions, torture, and murder in the Iraq and Afghan conflicts. Commissioner Carbone recruited them for their unique talents. Some are veterans of discredited mercenary organizations such as Blackwater.
During a pause, Raj looked at the muscular man in the chair beside him. “How do I know you haven’t made this all up?”
So quickly that the movement of his hand was almost invisible, the man punched Raj’s left cheek. The pain was immediate, intense, and excruciating. Raj’s dark skin almost instantly turned purple, a bruise.
“Don’t you wiseass with me, you fucking dothead.” Once again it was the tone of the loony caller.
His fingers trembling over the keyboard, Raj wrote as he listened. Commissioner Carbone has not divulged the existence of this death cadre to anyone except its ten to twenty members. Publicly she is credited with coordinating the assault several hours ago on the George Washington Carver Towers in East Harlem where, it is believed, as many as several members, one of them a woman, of actual and known members of the Counterterrorism Unit of the NYPD were killed in intense, close, virtually hand-to-hand combat with men said to be ISIS or Boko Haram veterans, all of whom, with what is believed to be one exception, were killed. Thirteen members of the NYPD counterterrorism unit that conducted the assault survived.
Staring at the bright screen, his virtually black eye sockets sunk deeply into his face despite the screen’s otherworldly glow, still afraid, Raj asked, “How do you know these things? This is my blog. I’m expected to write the truth.”
“You’re a Hindu, right, Mr. Gandhi?”
“No. I was born into a Hindu family. But no, I’m not.”
“Did you ever read our Bible?”
“No.”
“If you had, you’d know that Jesus was always being asked, What is truth? And he always answered, What I tell you is truth.”
Raj had no reaction other than to stare at the screen, even more afraid.
“What I tell you, Mr. Gandhi, is the truth. Don’t worry. Your readers will believe you.”
Raj glanced at him. Despite his bruise and his pain, he wanted to remember the face.
“You can stare at me as long as you want. But we’re not finished. And you’ll never remember me, anyhow.”
Raj turned again to the keyboard. Listening in the barren room, he wrote what was said to him. Sources have also said that one man was taken alive from the shattered apartment at the Carver Houses. Known to the secret squad and Commissioner Carbone as Silas Nasar, but also utilizing the name Hakim Khomani, the survivor is said to be a naturalized U.S. citizen with a degree from MIT and a specialist in the use of highly sophisticated communications devices. It is believed, the sources have disclosed, that he is one of the people who conceived and implemented the initial attacks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Raj said, “I know that name. Those names: Silas Nasar and Hakim Khomani.”
“That’s no surprise to me, Mr. Gandhi. I know what you know. Now listen again. Dr. Gabriel Hauser, hailed over the last thirty hours as the Angel of Life, is and for some time has been a ‘special friend’ of Silas Nasar. It is not clear to Commissioner Carbone or her elite group whether the Angel of Life knew of the plans for the initial attacks, but his presence at the scene of the first explosion was, according to the sources, no random coincidence. He and Silas Nasar had prearranged their encounter.”
Raj Gandhi, still afraid of another hit from this man who was completely unlike anyone he’d ever known, stopped typing and glanced over his shoulder. This time the man simply reached into one of the inner pockets of his well-tailored blue jacket, pulled out his cell phone, and put it on the table next to Raj.
For ten minutes, his expression utterly impassive, Raj watched on the stranger’s own cell phone the interview he had just conducted with Gabriel Hauser on the bench at the Church of the Heavenly Rest.
“How did you get this?” Raj asked.
“It doesn’t fucking matter, Mr. Gandhi. It just doesn’t matter.” Raj said nothing.
“Now, Mr. Gandhi, let’s make believe I’m your editor. Print out a copy of what you just wrote.”
“I didn’t write anything. You did.”
For a furtive moment Raj glanced at an object he kept on the table, a letter opener shaped like a dagger. It was a relic from another era. Raj lived completely in the modern cyber world. He never received ordinary snail mail, he had no use for a letter opener. But he kept this like a sacred object because his father, a civil servant in the city then known as Bombay, had given it to him as a present when the intellectually gifted but shy and awkward Raj left for Oxford at the age of sixteen.
When he was in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Raj knew that from time to t
ime journalists and photographers were kidnapped. While he was in those distant countries, he had thought about strategies for evading a kidnapping. His main strategy was running. As a kid, barefooted, he had loved to run. He was fleet, light, evasive. But here there was nowhere to run. His speed didn’t matter in this small room.
But the letter opener, for just a second, offered another strategy to Raj. He made the mistake of twice glancing at it. Raj had no way of knowing that he was in this tight and cluttered room with a man who since he was twelve had learned all the dirty arts of hurting others and protecting himself.
Deftly, Tony Garafalo picked up the nineteenth-century, ornate letter opener. He threw it to a far corner of the room. “I’m a mind reader, Mr. Gandhi. I didn’t like what was on your mind.”
Again not speaking, Raj turned to the computer, like a secretary waiting for instructions.
The instructions came. “I want you,” Tony Garafalo said, “to post this interview on your blog with what you’ve just typed up. And I also want you to post the scene you taped on your cell phone of Gina Carbone running through the fence and into Pier 37.”
Raj said, “Why do you want to do that? She’s your lover.”
“My, my, Mr. Gandhi.” It was the voice of the odd caller. The man, Raj thought, was Janus-like. He had two attached faces staring in opposite directions. “See, I was right about you all along. You do good work as an investigator. Sure, she is one of my girlfriends. But there is something you don’t know. She was one of the undercover cops eight years ago who worked on the crew that put me in prison. We grew up in the same neighborhood on Staten Island. My family knew hers. You know what? She should have given me a heads-up, not have helped to take me down. I learned a lot about payback, and she has a side of her that’s reckless. I got to know her again when I came out of prison, at a family get-together not long after she became the top cop. And she got to like me again. And she loves a good fuck. And so do I. Now I’m giving her the fuck of her life.”
More than anything else he had ever wanted, Raj Gandhi wanted this man to leave his apartment. He fed the scenes in his cell phone into the computer that contained his blog. The process took only seconds.
“Now,” Tony Garafalo said, “send it out into the wide, wide world.”
On his own cell phone he quickly found Raj’s blog. As Raj continued to sit in absolute silence, Tony Garafalo read on his cell phone the script he had dictated and watched the scenes of Gina Carbone and Gabriel Hauser.
“Mr. Gandhi, it says here that you have 253,673 followers. You’re already a celebrity.” It was the voice of the caller. “Now you’re going to be even more famous. I’m telling you, Mr. Gandhi, I see a fucking Pulitzer Prize for you. And when you give your acceptance speech, you’ll give me credit, won’t you?”
Raj simply continued to stare at the screen. He sensed that Tony Garafalo was moving toward the door.
“Mr. Gandhi, I want you to look at me and say thank you.”
When Raj turned to look, he saw that the handsome, well-dressed man held a pistol. The single shot entered the center of Raj’s forehead. It was a clean, red, small hole.
“The dothead” Tony Garafalo said aloud just before he opened the door. Now he really is a dothead.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
IT WAS THREE in the morning when Roland Fortune, wearing only his underwear, looked at the Raj Gandhi blog that, as the reporters on CNN said, had “gone viral.”
Irv Rothstein and Hans Richter stood behind him in his bedroom at Gracie Mansion, the bedroom in which Sarah Hewitt-Gordan had slept with him, and made love to him, almost every night for the last year.
“Why,” Roland asked, “should I believe any of this? Why didn’t the Times publish this? If it was reliable, you’d think this guy’s newspaper would have it on its Internet site and on the front page.”
Irv said, “I spoke to this guy’s editors at the Times. They said he was following leads to this but they weren’t satisfied there was any adequate support, at least not yet.”
“And what does this guy Gandhi have to say? This was posted five hours ago.”
“Mr. Gandhi,” Hans said, “is dead.”
“What?”
“Gina sent cops to his apartment three hours ago,” Hans Richter said. “The door was closed but unlocked. There was a single gunshot wound in the middle of his forehead.”
Roland stood up. He was shivering. He draped his bathrobe over his shoulders. On the nightstand below the warm glow of a table lamp was the brown bottle that contained his replenished Vicodin. He opened the cap and picked up a glass of water. As he was shaking two of the pills into his palm, Irv said, “Do you really need those?”
“Who the fuck are you to tell me what I need and don’t need?” Roland shouted.
“It took us four fucking hours, Mr. Mayor, to wake you up so that you could look at this blog,” said Irv, also shouting. “Four fucking hours. You must have had five of those before you went to sleep.”
Roland, raising the palm of his hand to his mouth, drank water. “Now that’s two more.”
Irv said, “Hans, why don’t you tell Mr. Mayor what’s happened while he’s been in Wonderland, beyond the Looking Glass?”
“Harlan Lazarus, the once-upon-a-time judge himself as he reminds everyone, got a federal judge to sign a search warrant four hours ago, not long after this blog was posted, to have the FBI and Secret Service go into Pier 37.”
“And?” Roland asked.
“They found a completely modern operation setup, with prison cells.”
“And?”
“No one was there. All the cells were empty. They examined the cells for fingerprints and DNA. When they checked the federal data banks, they found no matches for anyone.”
“What is this place?”
“Gina used money from the police budget to have this facility constructed over the last three years.”
“She never told me about this.”
“That’s interesting,” Irv, now calmer but still intense, said. “She claims you authorized it. That you both thought it was useful to have a secure facility if there was a terrorist attack.”
“That never happened. She never discussed that with me.” Roland paused. “What did she say about the blog?”
Hans answered, “That it was all a fantasy. The place was never used. She says everyone who has been arrested so far is accounted for and is now being held in Central Booking downtown or in a heavily guarded wing on Rikers Island. No secret prisoners. Everything by the book. Everything is transparent, she says.” “Where is she now?” Roland asked.
Irv answered. “She just finished a press conference. Here’s another thing you don’t know because you were in the land of dreams. Three hours ago she led a military-style operation on the lower East Side. She wiped out a group of Arabs who had been living in apartments for the last few months around Tompkins Square Park. Seventeen of them were killed. Four arrested. The television films make it look like a major battle in Baghdad, Syria, places like that.”
“Why didn’t I know about this?”
“Are you kidding, Mr. Mayor?” Irv asked. “This happened three hours ago. Every time we woke you up, you dropped back to sleep.” Irv picked up the pharmacy bottle that held the Vicodin. “Dr. Sleep. Eventually, you know, Dr. Death comes with enough of these magical little pills. What were we supposed to do? Take you out in front of the cameras in your underwear?”
“Where is Gina now?”
“She’s at the Regency, resting with her boyfriend.”
“The Mafia guy?”
Irv said, “The once Mafia guy, if there is such a thing. Mr. Garafalo is supposedly now a reformed member of the human family. He’s a sales manager at that beautiful Mercedes dealership in Queens. Don’t you remember? You said two years ago that it was nobody’s business what lovers a grown woman decided to have. That male police commissioners all had girlfriends. Power is an aphrodisiac, you said, and that was as true, you said, for
women as for men.”
“That’s right. It’s her business. One of my male commissioners has several boyfriends.”
“And,” Irv said, “Mr. Garafalo is married to a nice Italian girl and they have a nice house in Bay Ridge.”
Roland, now fully awake as if his screaming had rejuvenated him, said, “What else has happened while I was sleeping, apparently deep in the cave of Morpheus?”
“Andrew Carter’s people have been trying to reach you. And your buddy Harlan Lazarus landed by helicopter fifteen minutes ago at Pier 40 on the Hudson River and wants you to go see him.”
“Me go to see him? Pigs will fly before that happens. He knows where I live if he wants to see me.”
Inside the shower stall were the bottles of fragrant soap and shampoos and other jars that Sarah Hewitt-Gordan had last used just two days earlier. At the sight of the liquids that gave her the scent that he always found so alluring, Roland felt completely alone in the world, realizing that her death meant something essentially simple: He would never see her again. He had never lost anyone so close to him. When he suddenly recognized that he was about to cry, he turned the flow of shower water as high as it could run and stood directly under the powerful, noisy stream, and cried. There was no way, he believed, that the two men standing near the big bathroom’s entrance could hear him. His tears were swept away by the cascading shower water. Eventually he turned off the water only when he believed that his urgent, unexpected, convulsive need to cry had passed. When Roland stepped out of the shower he draped a towel over his head and rubbed his abundant black hair and his eyes, convinced that, if these two men on whom he so much relied saw the redness of his eyes, they would think it was caused only by soap and shampoo.
Glancing into the steamy mirror as he prepared to shave, he said, “Irv, I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
