Manhattan Lockdown

by Paul Batista

  In one much smaller stack of papers, as Cam saw, Gabriel had assembled those e-mails that in any way referred to Mohammad’s “cousin,” Silas Nasar, and his family. Some of those e-mails had grainy, black-and-white images of Silas, images in which the evidently handsome, bearded cousin had traces of a seahorse-shaped birthmark on the left side of his face.

  Cam went to the kitchen and took out one of the big, black opaque garbage bags he used for trash. He stuffed the hundreds of pages containing all the e-mails into them and neatly tied the twisted neck of the bag when it was filled. Then, because he and Gabriel were frequent travelers, particularly to Paris, Cam went to the large closet where they stored their suitcases. He opened them on the bed with the elaborate quilt on which they had so frequently made passionate or tender love, depending on their moods or needs.

  Cam carefully laid in the suitcases his own newly laundered shirts and pants, socks, and underwear. Although he still suffered through gusts of grief and fear, he made certain he took nothing that belonged to Gabriel.

  Once the suitcases were packed, he carried them one flight down the bannistered wooden stairwell to the apartment where Gloria and Everett Jordan lived. They were married and in their mid-thirties. Neither of them worked and they made no secret of the fact that they were both trust fund babies who spent eight months of each year at apartments they owned in London and Rome. They were friendly, open and engaging. They liked Cam and Gabriel, and left the key and the codes to their security system with Cam so that he could water their plants, replace those that had died, and just generally watch over their small, beautifully decorated New York home.

  At that moment Cam had only two specific plans in mind. One was to leave his luggage in their bedroom, and the other was to return for one last time to the apartment in which he and Oliver and Gabriel had so happily lived until less than a week ago and take the doctor’s prescription pad that Gabriel kept for emergencies in a drawer in the kitchen. Cam precisely and carefully tore six prescription slips from the pad.

  He left the apartment with the heavy plastic bag into which he had placed all the printed pages with the e-mails Gabriel and Mohammad and Silas Nasar had written. Even on elegant East 82nd Street there were mountains of identical black plastic bags. He dropped his anonymous bag into the center of the mountain range of bags. Since most of the other bags contained a pervasive odor of the rotting of household stuff—food, diapers, all the other detritus of daily living that except for the lockdown would have been picked up virtually every day by the big white city garbage trucks—he was certain no one would ever go near the bag filled only with pages of paper.

  He knew that in the city’s attempt to return even to the rudiments of normalcy that the century-old, quaint pharmacy at the corner of 90th Street and Madison Avenue was open. After years of living with Gabriel he had developed, for no particular reason, a passable facsimile of his lover’s handwriting, a kind of skill at draftsmanship that, when he was a little isolated boy living in the Deep South, gave him the dream of becoming an architect who would design antebellum mansions. Besides, imitating a doctor’s script was not an art.

  Cam prescribed thirty Vicodin. He dated the slip a week earlier. The pharmacist knew Gabriel and knew Cam, and Cam was concerned that the man might have seen or heard that Dr. Hauser had been put to death in a cage in a fire on the Hudson River just an hour earlier. The pharmacist, bald and bland and friendly, simply glanced at the script and said, “This’ll take about ten minutes. You can come back or wait.”

  “I’ll wait,” Cam said. There was an old leather chair, its surface all cracked from years of use but still intact, near the front of the store. He sat in it, tremendously comforted by its all-encompassing softness and the view, through the window, of the beautiful intersection of Madison Avenue and 90th Street. He had often walked Oliver here. And he knew he would never see it again.

  And there was something else that he loved during the quiet ten minutes he waited. Old pharmacies, like old hardware stores, all somehow retained the unique comforting odors they must have had a hundred years ago.

  Finally, he heard George say, “It’s ready, Mr. Dewar.”

  “Do me a favor, George, I’ll pay for this in cash.”

  George knew Cam had insurance. “It’s one hundred and twenty dollars that way. Ten dollars only with your insurance co-pay.”

  “It’s fine, George.”

  He took the bottle and placed it deep in the right pocket of his pants.

  Ten minutes later and fifteen blocks further downtown, he walked into one of those awful, fluorescent Duane Reade stores. He always avoided them. They had become, in his eyes, the scourge of the city, the steady conversion of Manhattan to a suburban mall. He walked past rows of paper towels, headache and sinus medicines, and beauty and makeup products to the pharmacy area. He handed a script for thirty Xanax to a beautiful Punjabi woman who was the pharmacist on duty. She asked whether the Duane Reade stores had his insurance information. He said no. He wanted to pay in cash. He had always expressed a hostility to the computerized world in which, he believed, every movement and transaction and event of his life could be instantaneously tracked. Cash was not only the coin of the realm. For him it was the coin of anonymity.

  Cam handed her the one hundred and forty dollars for the Xanax bottle. He stuffed the brown circular bottle deep into his left pocket. He felt fortified now: that he had the ability to choose between life and death. When he was a boy his father, the Baptist pastor, had a large plaque in the kitchen. It contained the words from Deuteronomy in which God says each morning, “I put before thee life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life.”

  Cam took an hour to walk to the homeless shelter near Tompkins Square Park which he quickly disclosed, when asked, as a place where Gabriel might be. It was one of the very few places in Manhattan where Gabriel Hauser regularly went—the hospital, the Boat House in Central Park, the Angelika Theater and the Film Forum, both on West Houston Street, the Three Lives Book Store at the quiet intersection where, oddly enough, Waverly Place intersected with Waverly Place. But, Cam had told the agents, given the state of the city, the homeless shelter and the chaos and pain, the shelter was the most likely place where Gabriel would be.

  The big basement room in the old church wasn’t crowded. It was getting dark. Some of the ceiling lights were already on. As Cam knew from his sometime visits with Gabriel, the huge basement room was usually dark even on the brightest days.

  The only sounds were the sounds children made—cries, laughter, chatter. He’d never had much tolerance for children. He’d never regretted for a minute that he had never and would never have kids—his father had once thundered that it was God’s will that men have and raise and nurture the young.

  The adults in the room for the most part were quiet and seated on the cots. Only half the cots were occupied. Everyone was alone, except for the mothers of the noisy kids.

  Something else Cam had never imagined was that he’d lie down in one of the cots. Gabriel had told him the cots—the steel frames, the mattresses and the sheets, blankets and pillows were clean, although sometimes torn. Cam knew that Gabriel often used his own money to replace the torn bedding.

  In the kitchen, as big and clean and orderly as it always was between mealtimes, Cam found on the scrubbed steel counter one of those tall amber-colored plastic glasses that New York City diners used. He filled it with water. He carried it to what appeared to be the darkest area of the big basement. No one spoke to him. He carried nothing but the brimming glass of water. He realized that to anyone who saw him he must have had the look of one of those stranded suburbanites who had literally been locked in the island of Manhattan for more than three days and had finally decided to use one of the long-established homeless shelters rather than the makeshift encampments in the city parks. Those were now out of control with garbage, overloaded mobile latrines, every imaginable type of debris.

  Cam found the cot, its blanket, pillow, and sh
eets clean—one of the cots that Gabriel, just hours earlier, had cleaned.

  The corner of the church’s vast basement was cool and comfortable even on a hot evening. There was no one in the nearby cots. As he lay quietly on his back, with his wrists and hands under his head, he recalled for the first time in many years words his stentorian father had frequently quoted from John’s Gospel in which Jesus said, I have the power to keep my life and to lay down my life.

  So do we all, Cam thought, nothing unique about Jesus in that or anyone else. We all have that power.

  Somewhat furtively, Cam sat up on his cot although he knew no one in this place could care what he did or didn’t do. He shook from the brown prescription bottle fifteen of the Vicodin tablets into his right palm and from the other bottle fifteen of the pills. Then he took up from the floor next to his cot the big glass of water and in twenty seconds swallowed all thirty pills.

  ***

  Nothing in his life had ever granted him such bliss for the few minutes he stretched out on his cot. I chose death, he said in a whisper, not life. The right choice, my choice, unlike Gabriel, who was not blessed with the choice.

  Cam had the sense that he was afloat on his back in a warm, only slightly undulating ocean. And finally, still on his back in that ocean, he drifted below the surface of the benign and all-enveloping water.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  JUDGE HARLAN LAZARUS was waiting alone for Andrew Carter in the ancient basement of Gracie Mansion, over two hundred years old and unchanged in all that time, and rose to his feet as Carter, alone, stepped down the creaking wooden stairwell. Carter, with the aid of his speechwriters who were in the Executive Office Building in Washington and linked to him by a large video screen, had finished preparing a five-minute speech that was to be broadcast around the world. He had just been told by one of the Secret Service agents that the director of Homeland Security had “absolutely vital information” he needed to give the president before he demonstrated to the world that he was unharmed and still completely in charge of the freeing of Manhattan and the defeat of the ISIS onslaught. “The judge,” the agent had said without a trace of irony, “is alone in the basement. And the basement is completely secure, a medieval fortress.”

  There was only a single unshaded 75-watt bulb in the basement. It had the odor of old cold stone. Lazarus looked liked a spectre as he emerged from the semidarkness to the foot of the stairwell. Carter waited for him. Even under the light bulb, Lazarus’ face looked like a death mask.

  “So what is it now?” Carter, annoyed and somewhat apprehensive, asked.

  “Two assistant U.S. attorneys and some of my agents just had a long, tell-all interview with Tony Garafalo. They have enough information now to go in front of a grand jury and have Gina Carbone and Roland Fortune indicted today.”

  “Why,” Carter asked, “would I let that happen?”

  “Because justice is important.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Mr. President, the police commissioner of the largest city in the country has been having a two-year affair with a serious mobster. And that commissioner has since Sunday been engaged in secret arrests. And she has for years developed a cadre of what, in effect, are mercenaries, some of them once Blackwater mercenaries, and put them on the NYPD payroll as community liaison officers whose only real work has been to illegally, without warrants or court approval, put wiretaps and secret surveillance devices on people her mercenaries believe are security risks, people, by the way, who as I’ve just had my experts check, are not on any suspicious persons list—in my department, the CIA, or the NSA. She had a high-tech, off-the-books detention facility built on what, in effect, is a camouflaged and abandoned pier. And she has told all this to a mobster who has been her lover for several years. They were together as recently as last night. And it is obvious to us that her unusual confidante passed this information along to an investigative reporter for the New York Times. And that this lifelong gangster shot that reporter to death last night.”

  “And you are telling me this,” Andrew Carter asked, “for what reason?”

  Lazarus, who from the skeletal sockets in which his eyes were deeply set, looked at the president with the same skepticism and contempt with which he had glared at Ivy League law students when they had given him the wrong answer. He said, “Mr. President, she’s the hub of the wheel of a kidnapping and murder syndicate. At a minimum, a grand jury in two hours could, given what Garafalo has confessed to two experienced assistant U.S. attorneys and several seasoned federal law enforcement agents, indict her for these things, and she could then be arrested on that indictment in fifteen minutes.”

  “Judge, do you have any idea how fundamentally off base you are?” Carter stared at him. “And what is this about indicting the mayor? Where did you get that idea? Is it against the law to be so good-looking?”

  “Mr. President, the mayor is a drug addict. Garafalo on his cell phone had dozens of YouTube-style films secretly taken by Fortune’s security detail of Fortune taking and paying for deliveries of banned opiate substances from known drug dealers during all the years he has been in office. The security detail gave the live recordings to Carbone, to whom the detail members are extraordinarily loyal. The recordings were transferred to her cell phone. She either transferred them to Garafalo for the love of the game—maybe they learned those kinds of games when they were kids in the same neighborhood on Staten Island long before Steve Jobs gave the world cell phones—or he just roamed through her cell phone for the fun of it when she was sleeping. Whatever the way, he has the images. And now I do.”

  Lazarus removed his iPhone from the internal pocket of the loose fitting suit he wore and held it up before the president. Lazarus said, “They’re both criminals. She has no respect for the Constitution. And she spends all of her spare time with Garafalo, who is a walking crime wave. And the mayor has enough banned substances to open a warehouse.”

  Andrew Carter reached out and took Lazarus’ cell phone from him. Lazarus said, “I’ll cue up some more of the images for you. You can see for yourself.”

  And then Carter deliberately let Lazarus’ cell phone drop from his hand. It hit the old stone of the basement floor, which was cobbled together two centuries ago. The phone was intact. Thinking that Carter had inadvertently lost his grip on the sleek silver object, Lazarus, in an uncommon gesture of cooperation, began to lean over to pick up the phone.

  And it was then that the heel of Andrew Carter’s two-thousand-dollar shoes covered Lazarus’ cell phone and ground it into splinters.

  “Here is what you’ll do, Judge, beginning immediately. First, if a grand jury is already sitting, disband it. Make sure if it is sitting that all of the people on it are told to disregard whatever they’ve heard so far and have them reminded that grand jurors are bound by law to total secrecy. If they’ve heard anything at all from the government lawyers or the agents they will be indicted themselves if they repeat anything they heard.

  “Second, if any of the government lawyers have any of the tapes that were on this phone they are to turn them over to your people immediately and then your people are to bring them to my Secret Service agents. I will tell my agents to give me any of those devices.”

  Lazarus was utterly motionless, like a medical school skeleton suspended in midair. He didn’t say a word.

  “Finally, and most important, you are to fly back to Washington and stay in that little bachelor apartment you have in Anacostia and not leave it until I tell you to, and at that point I’ll have my press secretary announce I’ve received your resignation and accepted it with deep regret. And you will remember forever that before you took the job you signed an agreement never to write about or speak about anything you ever learned while serving as Director of Homeland Security. If you do I’ll have you indicted, since you seem to get such pleasure from indictments.”

  Carter turned and began walking up the creaking stairs. “And don’t ever let me see yo
ur face or hear your voice again.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  THERE WAS NO need for Gina Carbone and Roger Davidson to speak again since they had many times, in the isolation of her office at One Police Plaza, spoken about strategies to follow depending on how what they called “war games” developed. One of the endgames had now happened in the Holland Tunnel. This was one of the possible scenarios they had discussed. They had known that if they ever had to seize the men on the hit list it might be necessary to move them from Pier 37 to another secure location. One of those was the never-used labyrinth, built in the Depression, that connected the tunnel to the huge, eerie complex that was designed as a “safe” place in the event of a disaster in the tunnel. Davidson and his crew had taken the prisoners in sealed NYPD vans to the tunnel complex as soon as Davidson learned that Harlan Lazarus had ordered a cadre of Homeland Security agents to invade and search Pier 37.

  Gina had given Davidson—a name she knew was not his real one although she knew everything about his background from the time he first landed as a United States advisor in Afghanistan to train local Afghan fighters during the failed Soviet invasion in the 1980s—the power to use Plan A, Plan B, or Plan C of Code Apache. He was to decide when the end game had been reached and that there was no longer a need for the eighteen or so men on the hit list who had been taken down in the immediate aftermath of the first bombings at the Met.

  Plan A was simply to return the men to the small houses and apartments where they had been when they were seized in the first hours of Code Apache. Of course the men would be likely to speak out if Davidson put Plan A in place, but he and the commissioner were certain no one would believe or care about their stories.

  Plan B was to bring them into the standard criminal justice system, booking them at several different precincts in Manhattan, as if they had been separately arrested on weapons charges, putting them in holding cells, and then several hours later bringing them in front of different judges for arraignment; they would all be denied bail and then held in separate cells at the sprawling Rikers Island prison complex. And, Gina and Davidson also agreed, no one would believe their stories.