Manhattan Lockdown

by Paul Batista

  Irv said, “Not to worry, Roland. My wife does it all the time, especially when I wake her at three in the morning for a fuck. She gave up the ‘I’ve-got-a-headache’ routine years ago. Now she just yells and tells me to go fuck myself.”

  ***

  An hour later, as they sat in Gracie Mansion’s gleaming kitchen, Gina Carbone looked radiant, confident, and utterly at ease. She sipped coffee and with a small sharp knife slit in half the two hard-boiled eggs that Juanita, the full-time cook from Guatemala who lived in a neat little apartment on the second floor of the mansion, had prepared for the commissioner of the New York City Police Department and the movie-star mayor. The commissioner and the mayor often had predawn meetings. Juanita, heavy and matronly, loved the always polite mayor and was in awe of the vivid police commissioner.

  “I had room in the department budget to renovate and modernize that pier, Roland. I had no reason to ask you if I could authorize a space that I thought might be useful if there was unrest in the city. And you’ve always told me I had a free hand to make New York the safest city in the world.”

  “My concern,” Roland Fortune said, “is not that you had an off-the-books, unpublicized facility built, Gina. My concern is that a New York Times reporter told the world that you had made secret arrests.”

  “Nobody did that, Roland. There’s never been a single person locked up there. Your friend and mine, Judge Harlan Lazarus, had his agents go through it. No one except people on my staff was ever there. And the New York Times didn’t report any of this. This Mr. Gandhi was off on a frolic of his own. Just two hours ago the Times posted a statement on its website saying its editors were aware that he was investigating the pier, the arrests and me, but that Gandhi never gave his editors enough information to corroborate anything.”

  Roland picked up his cell phone. It had been facedown on the table next to his coffee cup. “Gina, I have a text message from Harlan Lazarus that came to me about an hour ago. He wants you to resign.”

  “So what?” She was, as always, direct, all business. “Do you want me to resign? Do you?”

  “I need to know the truth.”

  “The truth, Roland, is that I’m the only person who has fought this battle. Harlan Lazarus hasn’t. Andrew Carter hasn’t. I’m the one who has been in the ring. I’m the one who has stopped cadres of fanatics from carrying out more attacks. I’m the one who has made arrests of dangerous people. I’m the one who has developed the information and sources that prevented three goons from blowing up St. Patrick’s.” Gina took a sip of hot coffee. “And, Roland, I’m the one who has given you the credit for masterminding this war. Harlan Lazarus wants me to resign? That’s rich.”

  “And what have you been doing with Gabriel Hauser?”

  “Roland, what’s the matter with you? I’ve got a police force with 40,000 people. Seven, just seven, have taken an interest in an outspoken, discredited, holier-than-thou queer who has been in the wrong places at all the wrong times, a guy with an axe to grind that would make Harry Reems seem like an altar boy. Why wouldn’t I have seven people treat him as what we in the business of law enforcement like to call a PIN—a person of interest? I’m sorry his dog got hurt. He has shown up in too many of the wrong places at the wrong times.”

  “Where is this doctor now?”

  “Among the missing. We started looking for him as soon as the blog went out. His apartment is empty. Nobody’s there.”

  “What about his boyfriend?”

  “If you think we have him, we don’t. That’s bullshit, too. We have had our people talk to him. He’s a spurned lover. He knows nothing except what is in those e-mails, those love notes, between Gabriel Hauser and the man he loved and had to leave behind in Afghanistan. And that man, the CIA has told us, is a dedicated jihadist. And that man, Dr. Hauser’s lover boy, wanted the doctor to meet Silas Nasar.”

  “And who, Gina, is Silas Nasar?”

  “We wish we knew.”

  “The Times reporter said you had him.”

  “Wish I did. We think he’s the cousin of Gabriel Hauser’s love interest in Afghanistan.”

  Roland’s cell phone vibrated with another incoming text message. It was from Harlan Lazarus. You must announce that Capone has resigned. Imperative.

  Gina ate a segment of the boiled egg. “Do you want to tell me what that is?”

  “More from Lazarus. He still thinks your name is Capone. And he still wants you to resign. Now.”

  “So tell him Capone will resign. After all, Capone has been dead for seventy-five years.”

  Roland stared at her. Somehow she was different now from the competent, straightforward woman he had known for three years. He was, he now realized, afraid of her for there was another dimension to her. She was not the hard-working and intuitively smart girl from the outer boroughs in whom he had had so much confidence.

  When the next incoming text message made his cell phone vibrate, and as he reached to pick it up, Gina said, “I’ll bet it’s Lazarus again. This is the era of the serial texter.”

  Roland read the text, leaned across the kitchen table, and held his phone in front of her. The message read: This order is from the president.

  As Roland retrieved the cell phone, he was surprised to hear Gina say in Spanish, “Juanita, leave the kitchen. Mr. Mayor and I need to talk.” Roland was surprised because he had no idea she could speak Spanish with such apparently effortless fluency or that she would give an order to a member of his personal staff.

  Juanita left.

  “Talk to me, Mr. Mayor, what do you plan to do about this?”

  “No,” Roland said, “you’re the strategic thinker. What is your plan? What, for example, just as starters, do you plan to do about the questions every pain-in-the-ass reporter will ask you about the last blog of a dead reporter?”

  “I already answered that. Haven’t you seen the press conference I did at one this morning after what’s being called the Battle of Tompkins Square?”

  “No, I was sleeping.”

  “I know that. I tried to get you involved. Hasn’t Irv shown you reruns?”

  “Not yet.” Roland waited. “And so enlighten me, Gina. What did you say about the blog?”

  “That of course my department had multiple complex facilities for dealing with unprecedented acts of hostility. That we had people trained in the arts of counterinsurgency. That we had confidential informants and invisible as well as visible resources for protecting a city with more than seven million people.”

  “And what did you say when they asked you about secret arrests, dark prisons, torture?”

  “That Mr. Gandhi had brought the concerns he had to our attention and that they were unfounded. Those things never happened. That even the editors of the Times had distanced themselves from him and his concerns.”

  “You don’t think that will stop the questions, do you? You’re living in dreamland, Gina, if you think that will satisfy anybody.” He stared at her, trying not to appear as unsettled as he now was. “And you know what, Gina? I still have questions and doubts. There was a great deal of difficult, disturbing information in Gandhi’s report.” He sliced the hard-boiled egg. “And much of it was about you.”

  Gina Carbone placed her own cell phone on the table. “Now listen carefully to me, Mr. Mayor. Only you can fire me. Not our invisible president who is still missing in action, a candy ass who still hasn’t found the time to come to our city. And that scarecrow Lazarus can’t fire me. Only you can.”

  “Commissioner, you can resign.”

  “That’s not going to happen. It’s not in my nature.”

  “Who,” Roland asked, “is Tony Garafalo?”

  Ignoring the question, Gina spun her iPhone on the table. “Do you want to know why you’re not going to fire me and why I’m not going to resign?”

  Roland stared at her, waiting. His right hand trembled.

  “Because,” Gina said, “you’re a drug addict, a pillhead, what’s called on the street a
garbagehead.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? I have a damaged shoulder. The doctors gave me Vicodin to deal with it.”

  “Listen to me real carefully, Roland. That’s the first and only prescription from an actual doctor you’ve had in years. From the start your security detail has had officers who are totally devoted to me. In this tiny magic phone and on my office computer I have confidential reports and dozens of pictures of well-dressed men and women, otherwise known as classy drug dealers, going to your office and coming here to deliver Vicodin, Xanax, Percocet, Oxycodone, every scheduled drug known to modern chemists, and in those pictures you’re handing over cash for these yummy pills.”

  After staring at her for twenty seconds, Roland said, “Let me tell you something, Gina. I am the mayor of the largest city in this country. I take that responsibility seriously. I didn’t get here by being just a pretty boy, or the son of famous parents, or by winning the lottery. I got here, believe it or not, by hard work and by caring about people. I came up off the streets. I’ve been threatened by people before. When I was a kid my father taught me that if a bigger kid pushed me around I should go find a baseball bat and swing hard at the other kid’s head.”

  She was as steady as ever. “Roland, I’ve got the bat. It’s in this phone. I know how to swing at heads, too. We’re not that different. In fact, we’re brother and sister.”

  “Let me ask you something. Who are you? We have a city out there that’s under siege. Thousands of people are dead. No one, no one, seems to have an exit strategy. Do you really think that by threatening me with being a garbagehead I’m going to make decisions, or not make them, that I think are in the best interests of the city? It’s not a good idea to threaten me.”

  The commissioner of the New York City Police Department stood up. “You know what, Mr. Mayor. I’ve got my responsibilities, too. It’s not good for the city to be run by a drug addict.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  GABRIEL HAUSER, AS soon as he changed into fresh clothes in the quiet apartment, walked four miles down Fifth Avenue, all the way to the enormous nineteenth-century arch that dominated Washington Square Park. During most of the walk he was in the middle of the grand avenue. Thousands of people crowded the sidewalks and the avenue itself. There were no barricades. It was like one of those street fairs that sometimes closed long segments of other avenues, but never the jewel of Fifth Avenue.

  Gabriel turned left instead of entering the park that he always associated with the early Henry James novel, Washington Square, which he’d read in his last year in high school. He headed to the East Village. At the corner of Kenmare and Mott Street, in the old, largely abandoned St. Vincent’s Church, was the homeless shelter where, for three years, he had volunteered once each week to treat the street people, an ever-shifting population of suspicious, sometimes bizarre, men and women, often with stunned, always silent children, who drifted in and out of the fetid shelter. It had sixty beds, no partitions, and two toilets that smelled like Army latrines. At one far end of the gymnasium-sized room was a door that led to a smaller room where, three times each day, groups of people from Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous gathered for their meetings.

  One of the full-time staff members, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict who had tattoos even on his face, shouted, “Listen up. The doctor’s here. Anyone want him to take a look-see?”

  Five hands went up, all from black and Puerto Rican mothers with small children. Gabriel spent ten or so minutes with each of the kids. Not one had even an elevated temperature. All of the mothers bore that shell-shocked look of the displaced Iraqi and Afghan women he had often seen in tent camps. Not all of these women in the church basement, he realized as he spoke to them either in English or his sufficiently effective Spanish, had any idea or cared that bombings and battles had been raging for days on the streets of the city in which they lived. The poor lived entirely in their own heads. Nothing and no one else concerned them.

  Gabriel was here to hide. On his long walk downtown to the shelter he had looked at his cell phone and saw Raj Gandhi’s blog, together with the entire video of his meeting on the bench of the church. And then an automatic e-mail from NPR entered his phone, carrying the news that Raj had been murdered, shot one time in the center of his forehead. Fear had given a special urgency to Gabriel’s original plan to treat the homeless, a job that normally took hours, but this time, on this day, it had taken far less than even an hour.

  Still frightened and confused, not wanting to leave the homeless shelter, Gabriel walked into the big kitchen adjacent to the basement with its dozens of neatly arranged rows of cots. The kitchen, at least forty years old, was immaculately clean. Gabriel had arrived during the long interval between meals, and there were no cooks, food servers, or other volunteers there.

  Everything in the kitchen, the countertops, the sinks, the industrial-size stoves, was made of gray steel and the surface of the stove was black iron. All that steel and iron had been cleaned hundreds of thousands of times with steel wool pads and ammonia. It shined with a scoured luminosity.

  And the pots, pans, and kettles, all carefully put away, many of them dented, were polished and clean as well. The old linoleum floor glowed. Obviously it had just been swept and washed with a mop soaked in ammonia and water. Gabriel felt an urgent need not only to remain in this anonymous but familiar place but to work with his hands. As he looked at the entire basement from the vantage point of the kitchen, he saw that at least half the cots were abandoned, unused. He’d learned that the transient men, women, and children who came and went from this place never made the beds in which they had slept or just rested for a few hours. So each unused bed was covered with crumpled, off-white sheets, wrinkled wool blankets, and pillows with half-removed pillowcases. Worn, dirty towels were dropped everywhere.

  Gabriel went to the row of steel green army-style lockers in which newly washed and freshly pressed sheets and blankets were stored. He was a methodical man. From the lockers he collected two sheets, a blanket, a pillowcase, and a towel. He carried them to the first cot in the nearest row of cots. He put the fresh bedding on the floor next to the first cot and stripped away from that cot the soiled sheets, blankets, and towels.

  Whoever had last used the cot was foul. There were stains of shit and urine on the sheets. He piled the filthy sheets, blankets, and towels on the other side of the bed. With a practiced hand he swept bits of debris off the bare, exposed mattress and then carefully spread the clean, fitted sheet on the mattress. Once he had created a smooth surface, he carefully draped the top sheet and the green wool blanket over the bed, turning down the upper edges of the top sheet and the blanket. He then stripped the stained pillowcase off the pillow, shook the exposed pillow which had indelible sweat stains, and then slipped the fresh pillowcase over it. He placed the pillow in the center of the cot. The cot’s simple orderliness was a marvel. It had taken him fifteen minutes to create this.

  Always adept at math, Gabriel calculated he would use six hours to remake each of the unoccupied beds. He could even extend the time by helping to prepare suppers, serve the food, and eat the same food. His plan was to spend the night in one of the cots if the shelter was not completely filled. It almost never was. The fact that the city would likely remain locked down for the rest of this night made no difference since stranded out-of-towners would never spend the night and sleep among street people in a homeless shelter.

  But Gabriel Hauser didn’t spend the night in the basement shelter. At seven, as he was scrubbing the last of the dishes in the hot, soapy water—there was no automatic dishwasher—six men, two in suits and the rest in combat gear, entered the basement. He knew instantly why they were here, even though he had never seen any of them before. Gabriel’s hands were soapy. He shook his hands vigorously but didn’t bother reaching for the already soaked dish towel to dry them as the lead man, in a suit, approached him. He carried handcuffs. “Put your wrists together behind you,” the man
said.

  Gabriel did that. They were plastic handcuffs. They were pulled so tightly he worried about the circulation to his hands. But he said nothing. Everyone, all the homeless people he had fed and cared for and whose beds he had cleaned, was absolutely quiet. Whatever was happening to the doctor was none of their business.

  ***

  The Holland Tunnel, unlike the Lincoln Tunnel two miles further uptown, could only be reached by following the maze of streets in old downtown Manhattan. Despite all the new buildings in that area, including the new triangular tower, the tallest building in the world constructed on the site of what had been in Gabriel’s eyes the two ugliest buildings he had ever seen, the World Trade Center Towers, the access to the Holland Tunnel still was a crazy complex of streets such as Vesey, Carlton, and Canal Streets that he had always avoided.

  Still in the blood-constricting handcuffs and still silent despite the questions he heard from the three other men in the unmarked, over-powered Chevy Impala, Gabriel didn’t see any other vehicle as they approached the mouth of the brightly illuminated tunnel. He did see dozens of Army soldiers, dressed in the same desert-gray uniforms he had worn in the Army, on the sidewalks. The barriers that blocked access to the tunnel were moved to the side as the Impala, at a steady ten-mile-per-hour speed, approached. This trip, he knew, had been prearranged. How, he wondered, had the men who entered the homeless shelter known he was there?

  And then the answer, the painful answer, came to him. Cam had told them.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  HARLAN LAZARUS WAS furious. When he had arrived at PS 6 thirty minutes earlier, he had expected Roland Fortune to be waiting. Lazarus had sent two text messages to the mayor, messages which closed with the words “Judge Lazarus,” directing Roland to be there. As soon as he walked through the bright red school doors, he asked, “Where is Fortune?” The answer in a crisp voice from one of Lazarus’ staff members was, “No sign of him, Judge.”