by Paul Batista
On the inbound side of the bridge leading into Manhattan was an endless stream of empty white city garbage trucks. All of them had been inspected for explosives and cleared. Not a single Arabic man or crew member was in the trucks. The mayor and the president had decided hours earlier that the first and most important steps in the restoration of the stricken city was to remove the mountains of black garbage bags and strange, often inexplicable other debris that had filled the sidewalks for days.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
JOHN HEWITT-GORDAN, WHO had arrived on the second flight into the reopened LaGuardia, was driven in one of the mayor’s unmarked, all-black SUVs over the same bridge that the president and the mayor had crossed two days earlier. But the retired British major didn’t glance out of the window as the SUV made the long and curving sweep on the upper roadway from the dreary Queens neighborhoods to the view of the celestial city.
Today there were mist and rain for the first time in more than a week. But, even in the midday gloom, the eastern skyline of Manhattan was still visible.
His thirty-year career in Her Majesty’s Army had brought him to the city only three times. The utilitarian and homely Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were still standing then, and his beloved Sarah had been studying at Cambridge.
Instead, as this over-powered vehicle Roland Fortune had insisted on providing him sped over the wide surfaces of the renovated bridge, John absentmindedly thumbed through worn copies of popular magazines that had accumulated in the elastic pouches along the sides of the rear doors. Utterly coincidentally, he picked up a worn copy of People, a magazine at which he had never once glanced before. The frequently thumbed pages were flexible and dirty, almost distasteful.
He was about to slip it back into the elasticized pouch at the moment he saw a large picture of Sarah Gordan-Hewitt and Mayor Roland Fortune. They were radiant, life infused, in evening dress. Never, he thought, had his daughter, this flesh of his flesh, looked so beautiful, a woman obviously in love with the man holding her hand, and with life, with all the years she was entitled to believe she had before her.
The SUV didn’t make the customary turn to the left as it approached the Manhattan side of the long bridge beyond the toll-booths. Instead, it took the direction to East 125th Street, to the heart of East Harlem, and as it sped down that wide street to the West Side, its sirens began to blare and its police cruiser lights flashed. Other traffic stopped. The mountainous bags of garbage had already been removed from the sidewalks. The loud, light-flashing SUV did not stop at any of the red lights. At the end of West 125th Street it turned onto the West Side Highway and sped downtown.
Given all he had heard over the last several days on the BBC, John Hewitt-Gordan expected to see a scarred city. So far, to the extent he sometimes stared out of the tinted windows, the city was unmarked, unharmed, intact. To his right the Hudson River flowed gently seaward, to New York Harbor, as it had done for thousands of years. To his left were the staid, monumental buildings lining Riverside Drive.
The van exited the West Side Highway at West 14th Street. The closed, steadily deteriorating St. Vincent’s Hospital was only five minutes from the exit. Standing on a concrete platform, just as he had promised, was Roland Fortune.
As soon as the van’s door was opened for him, John Hewitt-Gordan, agile and graceful, stepped out effortlessly even though he was nearly seventy. He embraced Roland, the first time this had happened instead of their customary and formal handshake.
John asked, “Can we see her?”
“She’s inside.”
Together they walked through the white industrial doors that had once served for deliveries to the now decaying hospital. The big room was far cooler than it had been when Roland was brought there a day after the first explosion, when the rows of bodies lay under blue tarpaulins. Now, although the warehouse room still served as a temporary morgue, the rows of the dead were in identical silver caskets. Roland noticed that the space was cooler, and he noticed too that the unique, unmistakable odor of rotting human flesh had largely dissipated, although it was still there in traces.
“My God,” John whispered, “how many people have died?”
“More than fifteen hundred. This is one of at least thirty temporary morgues.”
“Where is my daughter, Roland?”
The huge black nurse who had first taken him to Sarah, and who had warned him not to pull back the tarpaulin to look at her, was still there. Roland wondered how many breaks the dedicated man had taken in the last four days.
Someone had alerted the nurse to the fact that the mayor was returning. Just as a few days earlier when there were no names on the tarps but only seemingly random combinations of numbers and letters, today the metal coffins also were marked with letter and number combinations. Only in the last twenty-four hours after the lifting of Manhattan’s siege had dental and DNA samples been brought to the city from all over the country and the world so that the long process of identifying the unknown dead could start.
But the immense nurse, the man with earrings and tattoos who could just as easily have been a boxer or a wrestler rather than a caregiver, stood patiently in one place. Roland knew it was the area where Sarah had been laid out days earlier on the damp concrete floor. He was certain that the nurse stood at the aluminum casket that contained her body.
For the first time ever, John Hewitt-Gordan looked suddenly distracted and old as the moment of seeing Sarah approached. He followed while Roland walked deliberately to the immobile nurse. John glanced up at the industrial-style ceiling. Naked light bulbs without even metallic shades hung from the ceiling. Along one wall was a row of seven forklifts designed to carry the caskets. As a onetime commander of a supply battalion in the British Army, he knew how to drive the ungainly machines.
And then he was brought back from his mental world of pure disbelief when he heard the nurse say, in a Bronx accent totally new to him, “This is the one you’re looking for, Mayor.”
The top of the silver coffin bore the large handwritten words, in black magic marker, “Sarah Hewitt Gordan.”
Standing over the coffin, John said, “That’s not how her name is spelled.”
Roland said, “It is, John, for these people.”
“The hyphen. The hyphen is missing.”
The nurse, saying nothing, rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. He knew from ten years of this work that the living often refused to believe in the deaths of children, husbands, wives, or lovers even when the inert bodies lay in front of them.
“Roland, may we ask to have the lid raised?”
“John, it’s Sarah. Trust me. I saw her myself. This wonderful nurse was with me.”
“How long ago was that?” John asked. “Wasn’t it four or five days ago when we spoke? Mistakes can be made.”
“I don’t remember exactly, John. I’ve been too confused to count days. I do know that the woman in this casket is Sarah. This nurse warned me not to look at her. But I did. It was not a good idea even then, days ago.”
“Let me see this person.” There was the steely edge of the voice of command Major John Hewitt-Gordan must have used thousands of times in his long career.
The nurse spoke to the mayor, “Like I said before, that ain’t a good idea.”
Roland said simply, “Open it.”
The nurse leaned forward and snapped open the two steel latches that held in place the upper half of the casket lid, which he raised. As soon as he did, an overpowering odor of dead flesh rose from the box, so powerful that it was almost palpable. Roland put his hand over his nose and mouth; he gagged.
John Hewitt-Gordan stared into the casket. He didn’t flinch. Almost involuntarily, Roland, too, glanced inside, and immediately regretted it, searing into his memory a vision he knew he would never forget. Death had worked its terrible magic swiftly. Dozens of lines had formed over Sarah’s upper lip, which were drawn down over her upper teeth. Her open eyes seemed to have disappeared. Her hair looked like straw.
Her skin color was an unnatural white. A death mask.
Roland looked away. The nurse simply waited, holding the lid open for as long as John wanted. Then John finally said, “Thank you.”
The nurse lowered the lid.
***
Roland Fortune and John Hewitt-Gordan stood on the cracked cement loading platform. The mist and fog had now turned to rain. There was a tin roof, with many rusted fissures, above them. They managed to stay dry. On the sidewalk near the loading dock were five unmarked black SUVs, including the one that had brought John here from LaGuardia.
Roland said to the suddenly frail man, “I have you scheduled for the nine p.m. Flight 767 on British Airways to London. Sarah’s coffin will soon be taken to LaGuardia for that same flight tonight.”
“Thank you,” John said. He wasn’t moving. The rain droned on the tin roof. Finally, he said, “I had hoped, Roland, that one day you would be my son.”
“I am your son,” Roland Fortune said.
They stared at each other. Without touching or embracing, they both cried, quietly, their faces contorted.
CHAPTER FIFTY
AT SIX THAT night, in much steadier rain that made the early summer day prematurely dark, like a century-old Stieglitz photograph of Manhattan, Irv Rothstein said, “No one will worry about not seeing you, Mr. Mayor, in the next thirty-six hours.”
They were in an unmarked police van driving to the same heliport at the UN building where President Andrew Carter had landed and from which he had already left for Washington hours earlier. “I’m still not sure,” Roland answered, “that this is the right thing to do.”
“I hate to burst your bubble, Mr. Mayor, but no one in Manhattan or the world will give a shit that New York City’s mayor has gone quiet for a day and a half. Bloomberg used to fly to his island in the Caribbean every weekend, come hell or high water, and nobody complained. Besides, the public is overloaded with you. It’s natural, as we’ve announced, that the mayor of the City of New York, wounded as he was in the first minutes of the attack before bravely ignoring his injuries, brought the city back to life. The dancing clubs are packed, the movie theaters are open. Nobody can even make a restaurant reservation because they’re filled. Gina Carbone has everyone’s back covered, and a grateful president has said you and the commissioner will be given special Presidential Medals of Honor soon. So it makes all the sense in the world that for the next thirty-six hours the mayor, with a team of doctors, is resting quietly, healing.”
Irv smiled, relishing as always his role as comedian, court jester, and the wizard of public relations. “And,” he said, “it’s never good to disappoint Carolina. She made us promise.”
Carolina Geary was the chairman of Goldman Sachs. She had early on in her rapidly expanding career recognized Sarah’s talents and was her “godmother” at the firm. Carolina, the first woman to lead Goldman Sachs, was all business. She had twice met Sarah’s boyfriend, the mayor of New York City. Geary had been at her estate in East Hampton when the first explosions at the Met detonated, and she had stayed in East Hampton. When the siege was lifted, one of her key assistants contacted Irv Rothstein and said Carolina would have her private helicopter fly Roland directly to the secluded, oceanfront estate for a day or two of rest.
At first, Roland had hesitated. “Irv,” he had said, “I’m no Bloomberg. I barely know Carolina. And how will it look if the mayor of the City of New York, with all this shit going on, suddenly decides it’s time for a vacation getaway?”
But Roland relented. “Let’s go,” he said.
The interior of the Goldman Sachs corporate helicopter resembled one of those immensely expensive entertainment rooms that people with enormous wealth built into their Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue apartments; plush seating, an ultramodern television screen, even two nineteenth-century Impressionist paintings. There were two pilots who didn’t know that the chief passenger they were carrying for the one hour flight was Roland Fortune. The three flight attendants were long-term employees of Goldman Sachs who, given their salaries and the rules of the firm, had for years learned the artistry of complete secrecy, a kind of corporate omertà.
It was already dark when the helicopter rose from the UN heliport and, in the rain, flew southward over the East River. Roland was in a seat next to a large window. Because of the tilt of the helicopter as it gained altitude, he was able to see, even through the shroud of rain and mist, the sights that were so profoundly familiar to him: the southern end of Roosevelt Island where the broken, eerie, nineteenth-century, long-abandoned insane asylum was; the stone outcropping in the middle of the East River on which was placed the powerful lighthouse that warned the river traffic; and the heights of the now heavily traveled Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn Bridges. Dimly, too, he could see through the rain and fog the millions of lights that filled the Manhattan skyline.
The helicopter’s flight path was to reach the Verrazano Narrows Bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island and then abruptly turn left to fly over the edge of the ocean on an almost straight course along the south shore of Long Island to Carolina’s estate in East Hampton.
Spread out below him were the rigid grids of light from the myriad small homes in Brooklyn and Queens, as well as full views of LaGuardia to the north and the larger terrain of JFK airport to the south. And, of course, there was the vast blackness of the Atlantic Ocean. There were ships at sea, with their toy-like lights; freighters, Naval and Coast Guard ships, pleasure boats. It seemed there were hundreds of freighters for ten to twenty miles near New York Harbor, backed up and immobilized during the days and nights before the lifting of the lockdown.
When Roland checked the time, he realized that, if it was on schedule, British Airways Flight 767 at LaGuardia, with the body of Sarah Hewitt-Gordan in the cargo compartment, was about to leave or was already airborne. He thought of the usually stoic John Hewitt-Gordan, who had once to Roland appeared to be a caricature of a British officer, on the same plane. Now, Roland thought, he and they might be in the air at the same time flying east, with John in the first-class compartment and Sarah’s casket in the baggage area in the British Airways plane and Roland in a powerful helicopter. Just as the ocean was filled with the lights of hundreds of vessels, so, too, the sky was filled with the twinkling lights of many aircraft suddenly freed from the lockdown.
***
Fire Island, a fragile enclave of land that somehow had survived millennia of geological change which had submerged hundreds of other similar land masses off the south coast of Long Island, glimmered below the helicopter. He knew the island well and quietly gazed out at its peaceful outlines. The summer season had just started, the parties were under way, men were meeting men, women were joining women, and young men and women were coming together, too. To them, the siege of Manhattan must have been a riveting nightmare, but it was over now, and now was the time to party.
Just as the sight of Fire Island receded, Roland heard the pilot’s voice. It was a startled command, “Look at that.”
Ten miles away and fifteen thousand feet higher, a fireball like an exploding star illuminated the sea. In the vivid light, the waves resembled molten lead, suddenly frozen.
The object in the sky that created the spectacular glare was a British Airways Airbus. Roland watched as one of its immense wings, all enflamed, detached itself from the body of the plane that, although it was now gradually descending toward the ocean, continued its forward motion on its powerful momentum. Irregular fragments of the plane spun away, all in flames.
What a sight, Roland thought. This can’t be real. And then he was jarred into reality as the calm pilot said, “Traffic control wants to know if any of you saw a rocket or an object hit that plane.”
No one answered. The Airbus had just been one of the many planes in the air, in the beauty of the immense night as they flew above the low-lying cloud cover. Roland had certainly seen nothing rise to or toward the Airbus. It was only when the pilot first spoke out that he became t
ransfixed, horrified, mesmerized.
Without the severed wing that was still dropping, spinning, to the ocean’s illuminated surface, the remainder of the Airbus revolved slowly. The cockpit was gone, plummeting faster than what remained of the plane. The crazed thought occurred to Roland that now the burning, shredding plane could not be saved because the two men or women who knew how to control it were in free fall, doomed.
The burning remnants of the Airbus rolled yet again as it descended into almost an upright, normal position. And then, incredibly, the tail separated from the rest of the fuselage, as if it were made of frail balsa wood.
Then another blast exploded from the bottom of the fragmented airplane, and the contents of the cargo compartment were released from the blazing plane. Hundreds of objects fell like confetti into the ocean.
The helicopter pilot announced, “We have word now that the plane was British Airways Flight 767 to London.”
***
At that moment, the helicopter tilted radically, as if it was struck. Only the seat belt Roland wore kept him from being thrown from his plush seat and smashed against the other wall. Is this how I’m going to die, too? he thought, near her?
The calm pilot, using his skills to straighten the reeling helicopter, said, “The commissioner of the New York City Police Department has ordered us to return to the city and fly over the middle of Long Island itself, not the shore. Ms. Carbone said a flight over the ocean might not be safe. Don’t be alarmed: you’ll soon see Air Force fighter jets over us, to our sides, behind and ahead of us. The mayor is safe.” Am I? Do I want to be?
Roland Fortune strained to his side to look out the window again. In the distance, all he saw on the remote ocean surface was a faint glow from the remnants of the destroyed plane, like ashes that the ocean would soon absorb.
