The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  She thought of a line from Sartre: “Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself.”

  There was no one there to make her move that hand, to put her feet onto the course she had chosen for them. The will to act — or not to act — was hers, and her alone.

  Her eyes stared into the darkness overhead. We have no destinies, Sartre had written, other than those we forge ourselves. Well, she thought, I have forged mine. And for better or for worse, the time had come to accomplish it.

  She took her free hand and lifted Michael’s wrist from her breast. She drew it to her lips and tenderly kissed his fingertips. He stirred.

  “You’re not going?” His eyes blinked reluctantly open and peered up to her.

  Sleep had softened their hue from bright blue to a gentle gray.

  “I have to, my love, the time has come.”

  “Stay,” he whispered.

  “Michael, my love, my darling. I can’t. I have to go. I have to.”

  She lay there an instant, then she slid out from under his arms and slithered to the floor.

  Michael watched dreamy-eyed as she wriggled into her tight black pants, pulled her blouse over her head, scooped her panties from the floor and stuffed them into her handbag.

  “When will I see you again?”

  “I don’t know, Michael.”

  “Let’s have lunch. My shooting will be finished at twelve.”

  “I can’t today.” There was an aching in her stomach now. “I’m having lunch with Calvin Klein’s people.”

  “Then we’ll go to Capote’s lunch together tomorrow.”

  Laila felt as though someone had jammed a thick wad of wool into her mouth.

  She nodded, but it was seconds before her larynx formed the words she wanted.

  “Yes, Michael. We’ll go to Truman’s together.”

  She came back to the bed and threw herself on top of him. Her mouth flayed at his, her twisting lips driving his back against his teeth until they hurt, her belt buckle, the heavy buttons of her blouse, driving into his bare flesh. Finally she slipped a hand around his neck, clasped the hair over his forehead, and slowly pulled his head back down onto the pillow.

  For a moment, she lay there on top of him, staring down at his face with such intensity it frightened him. Then, like an awakening dreamer, she shook her head. She got up.

  “Don’t move, darling. I’ll let myself out.”

  He heard her voice calling to him through the shadows. “Goodbye, my love.” Then he heard the door slamming behind her and she was gone.

  * * *

  A police ambulance on emergency call hurtled through the orange haze of Columbus Circle, the heehaw bleat of its siren filling the empty square with a sound that was to many the background music of New York City.

  Laila Dajani watched it go, then continued her march toward the Hampshire House. Just ahead of her, Sanitation Department workers hurled black plastic sacks of garbage into the maw of their truck, its clanging metallic jaws piercing the slumber of the apartment dwellers in the buildings above them. In the darkened park to her left, the sneakers of the earlymorning joggers were already crunching over the dry snow. From Brooklyn Heights to Forest Hills, in Harlem and the South Bronx, along Park Avenue and down to the Village, the lights were blinking on in the darkened facades as the seven million residents of the city she and her brothers meant to destroy prepared to face another day.

  The proud, cantankerous, dangerous, dirty, awesome, difficult yet finally magnificent metropolis to which they all belonged was unique, the ultimate expression of man’s eternal vocation to gather himself in communities. New York was emphatically not just another city; it was the very essence of cityhood, the example of the best and the worst the urban experience had produced. From the marshes beyond Jamaica to the tenements of Queens, the developments of Staten Island and the ghettos of Harlem, New York was a microcosm of mankind, a Tower of Babel in which all the races, peoples and religions of the world had their representation. The city contained such an assembly of peoples its population statistics were a cliche, yet, like most cliches, accurate. There were more blacks in New York than there were in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria; more Jews than there were in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa combined; more Puerto Ricans than in San Juan, more Italians than in Palermo, more Irish than in Cork. Somewhere, in some corner of the five boroughs, there was a touch of almost everything the world had spawned: the smells of Shanghai, the clamor of Naples, the beer of Munich, the bossa-nova beat of Porto Allegro, the patois of Haiti.

  Tibetans, Khmers, Basques, Galicians, Circassians, Kurds, every oppressed and dissident population on earth chose to voice its miseries here. Its crowded, often decaying neighborhoods housed 3,600 places of worship, at least one for every cult, sect and religion invented by man in his ceaseless search for God.

  It was a city of contrasts and contradictions, of promises made and promises unfulfilled. New York was the heart of the capitalist society, a symbol of unsurpassed wealth; yet it was also so broke it could barely meet the interest payments on its debts. New York contained the finest medical facilities in the world; yet every day, people who couldn’t afford them died from lack of care, and the infant mortality rate in the South Bronx was higher than it was in the bustees of Calcutta.

  New York possessed a city university whose student body was larger than the population of many cities, yet one person in eight in New York couldn’t speak English and her public-school system produced a regular flow of barely literate graduates.

  As the pharaohs of Egypt, the Greeks of Antiquity, the Parisians of the Napoleonic era had set the architectural standards of their times, so the New Yorkers of the age of glass and steel had stamped the seal of their architectural genius on the urban skyline of the world. Yet a quarter of all the buildings in the city were substandard, and beyond the glittering magnificence of lower Manhattan, Park and Fifth Avenues loomed the wastelands of the South Bronx, Brownsville and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

  No other metropolis in the world offered its inhabitants greater hope of material success or a wider variety of intellectual and cultural rewards.

  Its museums, the Metropolitan, the Modern, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, housed more Impressionists than the Louvre, more Botticellis than Florence, more Rembrandts than Amsterdam. New York was the United States’s bank, its fashion model, designer and photographer; its publisher, advertiser, publicist, playwright and artist. The theaters, concert halls, ballets, jazz clubs of Broadway, off Broadway and off-off Broadway were the incubators in which a nation’s taste and thought were nurtured.

  The people awakening this Monday morning on the island purchased by Peter Minuit in 1626 for twentyfour dollars could, if they had the resources, buy virtually anything in their city: the ridiculous gold Mickey Mouse watches at Cartier’s; the sublime, a Renoir at the Findlay Galleries; diamonds from black-frocked Hasidic Jews on Forty-seventh Street; stolen television sets in fence operations as elaborate as small department stores; chocolate-covered ants from Argentina, pola-bear steaks from Nepal, wildcat gizzards from Canton. Yet, in the midst of all that material affluence, an eighth of the population in New York lived on welfare. Half the nation’s drug addicts crowded her streets. Her police precincts recorded a theft every three minutes, a holdup every twelve, four rapes and two murders a day. More prostitutes circulated through her streets than in the avenues of Paris.

  There were, in fact, three New Yorks: the oases of mid-and lower Manhattan, of corporate headquarters and highrise splendor; a glittering world of discotheques, penthouses, Carey Cadillacs and rented limousines, candlelit sit-down dinners high in the glass sheaths of the Olympic Towers, 800 Fifth Avenue, the United Nations Plaza. There were the declining working-class suburbs of Queens, the Bronx, those parts of Brooklyn where trees still grew and a dwindling population clung to memories of the Brighton Beach Express, Ebbets Field and Coney Island’s Steeplechase. There was the necropolis, the dying ghet
tos of Bronxvdle, Hispanic Harlem, Williamsburg, the South Bronx. And, in a sense, there was yet another New York, a transient city of 3.5 million people who daily crowded into the nine square miles south of Central Park. Space salesmen, television executives, lawyers, stockbrokers, doctors, odd-lot dealers, publishers, ad men, commodity brokers, bankers-they were the administrators of America’s Rome, controlling an empire from their glass-and-steel towers.

  Wall Street’s name might be an epithet to the Marxists of the globe; it was still, seventy years after Lenin’s voyage to the Finland Station, the unchallenged financial center of the world. On this December morning, men in its board rooms would discuss loans to France’s railroads, Vienna’s waterworks, Oslo’s public transport, the governments of Ecuador, Malaysia and Kenya. Copper mines in Zaire, tin in Bolivia, phosphate in Jordan, sheep in New Zealand, rice in Thailand, hotels in Bali, shipping fleets in Ceylon would all be affected by the decisions made or postponed this Monday morning in two of the world’s largest banks, the First National City and the Chase Manhattan.

  At Rockefeller Center, CBS’s “Black Rock” and the ABC Building, the United States’s three television networks ordered programs that set values, influenced behavior, affected social change in the remotest areas of the earth.

  Two blocks away were the citadels of the Prophets of Consumerism, the ad men of Madison Avenue. They had forced a revolution on the world, the revolution of rising expectations. Spread to every corner of the earth by the communications they had so effectively mastered, its contagion had brought to millions the material benefits and spiritual dissatisfactions which were the malaise of the American Age.

  Collectively, they were, those men and women, the most affluent, the most capable and the most influential people on earth.

  They were also the ideal hostages for an austere zealot burning to reorder the world with the very technology and communications of which they were the proud inventors and masters.

  * * *

  The man who had the awesome and frustrating job of administering their city made an effort to scrunch down against the worn upholstery of his black Chrysler as it slipped through the early-Monday-morning rush-hour traffic already clogging the East River Drive. The gesture was understandable; no mayor of New York was anxious to be spotted by his constituents seventy-two hours after a major snowstorm had hit the city.

  Abe Stern flailed at the pall of smoke filling his official limousine with a little pawlike hand. The Mayor was a diminutive fireplug of a man, barely five feet, two inches tall. He was completely bald and in three weeks he would be sixty-nine; yet vitality still snapped from his figure as static electricity sometimes snaps from light switches on a cold dry day. He turned to the source of the smoke, his three-hundred-pound detective bodyguard puffing an afterbreakfast Dutch Master while he read the Daily News sports pages in the front seat.

  “Richy,” he growled. “I’m going to tell the Commissioner to give you a raise so you can buy yourself a decent cigar for a change.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Mayor. Smoke bother you?”

  Stern grunted and turned his attention to his press aide in the seat beside him. “So how many trucks did we finally put on the streets?”

  “Three thousand one hundred and sixty-two,” Victor Ferrari replied.

  “Son of a bitchl”

  In barely two hours, Stern would have to face a snarling City Hall press corps, its members ready to savage him for his administration’s failure to clean the city’s streets quickly enough after Friday’s snowstorm. It was an experience to which he looked forward with a delight akin to that of a man going to his dentist for a root-canal treatment.

  “Six thousand fucking trucks this city’s got and the Sanitation Department can barely get half of them out on the streets!”

  Ferrari squirmed. “Well, you know how it is, Mr. Mayor. Most of them trucks is twenty years old.”

  “Are, Victor, are. God,” Stern groaned, “I’ve got a bodyguard who wants to choke me to death, a Sanitation Commissioner who can’t get the snow off the streets and a press officer who can’t speak English.”

  The press officer cleared his throat apprehensively. “There’s another thing, Mr. Mayor.”

  “I don’t want to know about it.”

  “Friedkin of the Sanitation Workers wants triple time for yesterday.”

  Stern stared angrily out at the black surface of the East River, trying to think how he could skewer the union leader at his press conference. For all his protesting to the contrary, he delighted in the rough give-and-take of a press conference. “Feisty” was the adjective most commonly employed to describe Abe Stern, and the word was well chosen. He’d been born in a tenement on the Lower East Side, the son of a Polish-Jewish immigrant father, a pants presser in a tailor shop, and a Russian-born mother who stitched up cheap frocks in a nonunion sweatshop in the Garment District.

  It had been a tough neighborhood, predominantly Jewish with satellites of Irish and Italian immigrants along its fringes, a neighborhood where a kid’s stature was measured by his skill with his fists. That had been fine with Abe Stern. He loved to fight. He dreamed of becoming a prizefighter like his idol, the light heavyweight champion Battling Levinsky. He could still recall drifting off to sleep in the tenement on the stifling summer nights, the murmur of conversation flowing through the open windows from the adults on the fire escape, while he dreamed of the triumphs his fists would win him one day.

  A brutal physical reality had ended that dream of Abe Stern’s. At sixteen, he stopped growing. If God had not given Abe the body to fulfill his boyhood dream, however, He had given him something much more precious: a good mind. Abe trained it first at CCNY, then studying the law by night at NYU. By the time he passed his bar exams, he had a new idol, a different kind of fighter from the boxer he had idolized as a boy. It was the cripple in the White House whose patrician accent offered hope to a nation mired in depression. Abe had become a politician.

  He’d begun in the 1934 Congressional campaign as a Tammany district captain in Sheepshead Bay, working door to door, getting out the vote, cementing the first of the friendships that would ultimately carry him to City Hall and what was often regarded as the second elective office in-the United States. There was no one who understood the complex chemistry of New York City and its governing structures better than the cocky little man in the back of his official limousine. Abe Stern had done it all in his long climb up the ladder. He’d worked the synagogues and the soda fountains, made the Wednesday-night smokers, the maudlin Irish wakes, the bingo games; sat attendant at saints’-day dinners honoring a procession of saints of a variety to bedazzle the most religious of minds. His stomach had been assaulted by enough blintzes, pizzas, chop suey, knishes, pretzels and foot-long red hots to ruin the digestive tracts of a battalion of Gaylord Hausers. His off-key tenor voice had sung the “Hatikvah” in Sheepshead Bay, “Wrap the Green Flag Round Me, Boys” in Queens, opera in Little Italy and Spanish love songs in Hispanic Harlem. Indeed, consciously or unconsciously, many of his electors had given him their vote because they saw in his tough little figure a mirror image of what they thought of as themselves. To them, Abe Stern was New York.

  The car phone rang. Ferrari started to reach for it, but the Mayor’s little hand shot past his.

  “Gimme that. This is the Mayor,” he barked. He grunted twice, said, “Thanks, darling,” then hung up. As he did, a beatific smile lit up his face.

  “What’s up?” Ferrari asked.

  “Would you believe it? The President wants to see me right away. White House just called the Mansion. They even got a plane waiting for me out at Marine Air Terminal.” Abe Stern leaned close to his press aide and his voice fell to a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s about the South Bronx redevelopment scheme. I got a hunch they’re finally going to come up with our two billion bucks.”

  * * *

  Laila Dajani, ravenous after her long night of lovemaking, blotted up the yellow remnants of her softboiled
egg with a scrap of the slightly burned toast whose acrid aroma filled the kitchen of her Hampshire House suite.

  She took a final nervous swallow of the Chinese tea she had brewed herself as soon as she returned to the hotel, piled her dishes into the sink and looked around the suite. Everything was ready.

  “WINS, ten-ten on your dial. It’s seven-thirty and a chilly twenty-three degrees in mid-Manhattan,” a voice announced from the transistor on her coffee table. “The weather man has promised us another clear, cold one. And don’t forget, there are only twelve more shopping days left until Christmas …”

  Laila snapped off the radio and picked up her Hermes address book. She ran a crimson fingernail down the entries under “C” until she found the one she was looking for-“Colombe.” She stepped to the phone and dialed the number written beside it, methodically adding as she did the number 2 to each of its seven digits.

  For a long time the phone rang unanswered. Finally Laila heard the click of a receiver being lifted from its cradle.

  “Self…’ she said in Arabic.

  “… Al Islam,” came the reply-the Sword of Islam, the code name Muammar al-Qaddafi had assigned to his nuclear program in 1973.

  “Begin your operation,” she ordered, still using her native tongue. Then she hung up.

  * * *

  The man who had answered Laila’s call stepped into the storeroom of a Syrian bakery just off Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Two men waited for him. All three were Palestinians. All three were volunteers. All three had been chosen by Kamal Dajani from among two dozen volunteers in a training camp of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, outside Aleppo in Syria, over a year before.