The Fifth Avenue Series Boxed Set

by Christopher Smith

  “The one at the end of the street? Just before Fifth?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How could I miss it? Those cars are obnoxious. Why?”

  “You know what McVeigh used to blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma?”

  She didn’t answer. A part of her froze.

  “That’s what’s in the Escalade.”

  “But that will take down several blocks.”

  “Actually, we don’t know what it will do. We used only a quarter of what McVeigh used. I know it will level its share of buildings and give us our distraction, but I don’t know to what extent. When you’re certain Dean is there, I want you to detonate those bombs.”

  “Who put the Escalade there?”

  “I have friends all over this city, Carmen. Who did it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he was able to do it.” He reached behind him and grabbed the camera. He held it up to his face to see if he could zoom in properly down the street. Perfect. With a lens this powerful, he easily could focus on the events as they occurred, which would make Wolfhagen happy. And that’s what mattered.

  “Let’s do this,” he said.

  “Just a minute. You say you don’t know what will happen when the Escalade blows. But look at us—we’re pointed in that direction. What’s the plan on getting us out of here?”

  He patted her knee. “It’s simple. We’re going to run like hell in the opposite direction. I have a car waiting four blocks behind us. It’s all taken care of, Carmen. You just need to be able to run.”

  “From an explosion of that magnitude? We’re essentially in a tunnel, Vincent. A fireball is going to roll down this street. It will incinerate us.”

  He stepped out of the car with the camera and moved to the street corner. Over his shoulder, she heard him say, “That’s why you need to run fast.”

  * * *

  Emilio DeSoto retrieved his wooden Geisha shoes from the second floor, squeezed his sore feet into them in the first-floor living area and looked out again at the legs that were between the two cars outside his home.

  It had been fifteen minutes since he called the police and there was no sign of that they were anywhere close to coming. No sirens. No flashing lights. Nothing.

  Twice, he had gone to his door and opened it, hoping to hear something, hoping not to be attacked. But nothing had happened—the rodents were gone. More compelling, each time he opened the door, he could see those feet, which ignited in him a curiosity that was impossible to stuff down.

  Who did they belong to? Who was murdered and why? Was it someone he disliked? He hoped it was someone he disliked.

  He went to a mirror and checked his Kabuki makeup. Flawless. He held out his arms and allowed the Halston caftan to fan out and then ripple softly against his sides. Brilliant. He put his hands up to the turban and moved it slightly on his head. Perfect.

  If he had time, he would have changed into different clothes and removed his makeup, but time was running out and if he didn’t act now, he might miss this moment. Naturally, the police would show up at some point—likely soon—which meant he had a limited window in which to go to the sidewalk and see who was attached to those dead feet before this neighborhood was consumed again by the police.

  Awkwardly, he walked away from the mirror, click, click, clicked to the desk across the room and removed the loaded pepperbox he kept there for protection.

  He held it at his side, just as Joan Crawford did in his favorite movie, “Johnny Guitar,” and made the supreme effort of walking across the room to the front door, which was no easy task given the shoes on his feet.

  Still, there was no way in hell he was going to wear anything else but these shoes. If someone saw him on the street—if the paparazzi were there to take his photograph, which he knew could happen at any moment because he was a celebrity—he needed to be seen in this new creation as it was meant to be seen. Nothing else would do.

  Stealing himself, he opened the door.

  He looked each way down the street, saw no one, and then looked at those feet sagging against each other between the two cars. With his free hand grasping the iron rail, he descended the few steps that lead to the sidewalk and stood there, listening. Ahead of him, over the buildings and a few blocks away, he could hear sirens, but they were stationary and not growing louder. They were on another street.

  Emilio frowned, though you wouldn’t know it given the upward lift of his Kabuki lips. This was one of Manhattan’s finest neighborhoods. What was it coming to? Years ago, as a young artist living in the Village, he’d felt safer in his sixth-floor, one-room walk-up than he did here.

  Pepperbox in hand, he worked through his tunnel vision and clicked forward on unsteady feet, ready to shoot if anyone approached him, ready to kill if that’s what it took.

  There was a breeze on his face and it kicked up the caftan, allowing it to take flight behind him in ways that gave him new ideas about how he’d officially present this when the time was right. He’d use fans. Dry ice would be employed because of its retro hook and because it would capture that Studio 54 vibe he was going for.

  As he stood there, billowing, he thought of Diana Ross blowing kisses in a Central Park monsoon. Arms open to the breeze, his gun pointing at the house across the street, he let his wings fly as he hobbled forward and stopped at the dead feet.

  Because he couldn’t see well, he needed to lean almost directly over the body to see the face. And when he did, he saw the ruined face of that pretty Asian slant who worked for Helena Adams. Part of her head was blown off. Emilio put the back of his hand to his mouth and looked closer. One side of her face was missing. She was resting in the congealed fallout of her own blood.

  He felt nauseous. Violated. This was taking place on his street? His Geisha shoes took several steps backward. The only other time in his life that he had confronted death was during his black period, when he went inward and explored it with his own vision.

  But it looked nothing like this.

  He click, click, clicked over to the car to his right, came around it and leaned down again so he could have a better look at the slant’s face. But he couldn’t see anything. He was casting a shadow. He was about to move so light could slip through when suddenly her face bloomed orange as the cars at the far end of the street began to ignite in a series of rapid explosions.

  Emilio moved so he directly faced the center of the street and could see all of it. And what he saw was a horror show. Cars on each side of the street were flipping high into the air and pinwheeling into the buildings on either side of them. Windows smashed, fireballs rushed toward the heavens and, in the vacuum created by the broken windows, he watched fire being sucked into those buildings. Soon, they’d burn.

  His pepperbox dropped to his feet. When one car exploded, it caused the car in front of it to explode. And so on. It was unfolding quickly—too quickly—and the lot of it was roaring his way.

  E turned toward Fifth Avenue and ran.

  Tried to run. Because of his shoes, he nearly tripped. He tried to kick the damn things off but they were too tight. His feet had swelled in them. He struggled to remove the shoes, but it was impossible. And so he hopped and he hobbled, his arms held out on either side of him for balance while behind him, all hell was unleashed as this part of 75th Street was smashed and burned beyond reason.

  He tried to scream for help, but all that left his Kabuki lips was a frazzled peep of a shriek. Out of nowhere, a car door flew over his head and smashed in front of him on the street. It was like a fiery comet morphed into something else by the heated atmosphere.

  Emilio looked over his shoulder and saw that death was upon him. He looked ahead of him, where the traffic was rearing to the right and colliding on Fifth. People leaped out of their cars. On the sidewalks, others ran.

  He was almost there. He could make it. He pushed harder. Click, click, click! Click, click, click! Another car erupted. And another. The sound was deafening. He could hear the vehicles rising int
o the air behind him. There was a great yawning as metal twisted against metal and melted in the rising heat.

  Something caught his eye. He looked down the length of his spread-eagle arms and saw that the caftan, once white, was now glowing orange in the flames licking behind him. He was morphing from a moth into a spectacular-looking butterfly and he wasn’t that far gone to realize the terrible beauty of it.

  He rounded Fifth, where now masses of people were running down the avenue to what they hoped was safety. He hit the middle of the street and was about to cut left when a fiery tire bounced hard beside him and sprayed liquid flames onto his face before it somersaulted over the sidewalk and jackknifed like a demonic Halloween pumpkin into Central Park.

  People were running alongside him. He tried to keep up, but couldn’t. The heat was becoming unbearable. Hobble, hobble, hobble. Click, click, click. He watched them look at his Kabuki face and what he saw in their terror-filled eyes wasn’t what he expected. The look was unmistakable. What he saw was pity.

  And then Emilio burst into a sphere of light.

  The tire also had sprayed fire onto his caftan, and now it was he who was erupting. In a matter of seconds, the fire curled up his body, rounded his legs, tasted the edges of the scalloped fabric and raced toward his outstretched wings.

  He stood in the middle of the street as the flames consumed him. The polyester caftan melted into him, searing his skin as it sank inward toward the bone. Hands reaching and pulling, he tried to yank the caftan over his head, but he couldn’t—it now was part of him. The art he created literally was part of him.

  Cars were still exploding, still turning in the air, still shattering the faces of the buildings on either side of them. More debris fell from the sky. Something struck his head and his turban became alight with flame. He batted his hands at it, but the polyester glued itself to his palms, destroying them.

  The heat of it all caused his Kabuki makeup to melt. He was aware of people coming near him in an effort to help, but the moment they saw his face, their lips twisted back in horror and they kept running. “Sorry,” they said. “Sorry.” He was watching them run from him when his shoes hooked a manhole and he fell face first in the street. With his arms stretched out at his sides, he now looked like a burning cross.

  “WOAT!” he shouted as the flames seared his throat. “FLAK!”

  Something heavy struck his back. He expelled a rush of air and managed to crane his neck around. He was pinned beneath a car’s burning hood. He writhed beneath it like a trapped bug. Glass exploded into the street. At this level, all he could see were feet running past him. Why wouldn’t they help him?

  “SHELP!” he cried. “GLOP!”

  And then, as the polyester continued to burn into him and cause him to melt along with the heat from the car’s burning hood, Emilio DeSoto, once one of New York’s most revered artists, realized through the pain that he was becoming every artistic expression he ever hated.

  As his body roasted, his frying mind was aware that he had long passed any kind of impressionism, post-impressionism or realism. He now was a bloody, sizzling abstract blob, which proved to him again just how cruel life could be and that there was no God.

  He was floating, floating. People stepped on him and screamed in the gathering rage of chaos. And then, just before life left him, he was aware of the biggest explosion yet as a vehicle at the end of the street exploded.

  But it wasn’t just any explosion. It was more like a bomb and its force was enough to flip the hood off him. As his eyesight faded, he watched people lift off the street and somersault weightlessly in the air. Others were vaporized in the ferocious funnel of flames. And then there was something else, something he barely could see.

  All around him, the buildings were crumbling.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  10:37 p.m.

  Wolfhagen checked his watch, turned on the television, backed away from it and watched New York City burn.

  He flipped through the news stations and saw the same thing on all of them—part of the Upper East Side was destroyed. Dozens of buildings had either collapsed or were severely damaged. People were running in the streets. Commentators were calling it a terrorist attack, but all were wondering why anyone would target this section of Manhattan since it was a residential area, which didn’t make sense to them.

  As he listened, he learned that the explosion had leveled a portion of East 75th Street, with the damage spreading to 76th and beyond to parts of 73rd. Hundreds were feared dead. There was a crater on the corner of 75th and Fifth that suggested a powerful bomb was employed after two rows of cars parked curbside exploded from 75th and Madison and rolled west to 75th and Fifth.

  Wolfhagen turned off the television. This was no longer his city. It and its people had turned against him years ago. He could care less about the damage or the dead.

  And besides, tonight was a night for many endings.

  Earlier, he pulled the glass out of his feet. The vase was too thick to cause any real damage—if it had been more delicate, then he really would have been in trouble as the glass would have cut more deeply into him. It hurt to walk, but he’d bandaged his feet the best he could. Like the pain in his split lip, he could handle it.

  He went to his dressing room and changed into something casual—khaki pants, blue polo, comfortable sneakers. Perfect for running if running is what he had to do, though given the condition of his feet, he hoped that wasn’t the case.

  He stepped into the bathroom, combed his hair and removed a small bottle of makeup from the silver tray to his left. He dabbed some beneath his eyes so he looked younger and less tired, and then stood back and appraised himself. He hated what he saw and reached over to dim the lights. It was magic. Ten years fell from his face. Already, the stubble was starting to show in spite of having shaved earlier, but it was tolerable.

  For the past several hours, Carra had held him captive in this suite of rooms. They’d fought earlier—certainly one of their uglier fights, but nothing like the one they’d had years ago in Paris, when he’d beat her so hard with a belt at the Ritz, there was a moment when he thought he killed her. Now, he tried to remember what they fought about then but it escaped him. Like so many things in his life, his memory had nearly given up on him. He had difficulty recalling elements of the past, which probably was for the best given their smothering weight. But it didn’t matter.

  Right now, for Wolfhagen, it was all about the present.

  He moved out of the room and into the bedroom, where the door across from him was bolted shut. Before she left, Carra called her security team and now four men with outsized bodies and brains the size and consistency of rabbit shit were making sure he didn’t leave.

  When she left earlier, he knew where she was going because Carra made sure he heard her on the phone, just to rub it in. She was out on the town with Ira Lasker, a man Wolfhagen once had trusted everything to, just as he had with Peter Schwartz, Hayes and the rest. At some point over the past year, Carra and Ira had started dating.

  Fucking, he thought. They started fucking.

  Along with everyone else, he’d seen their photographs in Vanity Fair, on Page Six, in the Times, all over the tabs. Usually, their heads were held back and they were laughing in that way that the rich laughed when their only security was money and power, which could slip away from them at any moment. And so they laughed on camera to sustain the illusion of lives others craved to have, but didn’t.

  He’d read articles about her philanthropy work, which actually was quite cunning on Carra’s part because the grotesque amount of cash she threw around lifted her profile in ways that distanced her from him. She was the largest pink ribbon breast cancer awareness ever had seen sweep through its doors. She was PETA’s go-to person for the past five years, going so far as to pose nearly nude because God knows, when it came to saving animals, Carra would rather be naked than wear a piece of fur. How she had rebuilt her image was ingenious. She found the correct, high-pro
file ways to give back. Have an obscure disease that needs funding and attention? Just call Carra!

  Lately, in each article that was written about her, she always managed to mention Ira, who betrayed Wolfhagen as so many others had along with him—including Carra—when he took the stand and testified against him. Those people now were being slaughtered and Wolfhagen felt nothing for them.

  He smoothed his hand down the back of his hair and thought again of Wood’s severed head. He still could see her dead eyes frozen in sightlessness, her blue face crisp with death’s rotten imprint and her bloody lips curling up from him as if they’d been dipped in week-old ketchup. The image delighted him. She was one of the biggest hypocrites he’d ever met. She’d locked him away for three years even though she’d been one of the more enthusiastic members of his club. Karma had caught up with her. Karma grabbed her by the throat and took her down. He couldn’t help a smile.

  Maybe she still has a shot, he thought. Maybe she won’t burn in hell. Maybe God will show her mercy and she’ll become one of his little angels.

  With a giggle, he went to the door and knocked on it. There were footsteps, groans and then the door swung open to reveal the four goons. “What?” one of them said.

  Wolfhagen sized him up. Years ago, when he was at the very top of his game and the world bended to its knees to service him, often literally, he occasionally used to sleep with men to spice things up. He liked sex and he was nothing if not sexual. To him, a body was a body, and this was exactly the type of body he used to hire to fuck the hell out of him.

  The man was tall, thirtyish, masculine, built. Like the rest of them, he also was wearing a black suit because that’s how Carra rolled. In this case, he agreed with her. He loved a man in a suit. He loved it when he used to wear one. Wear the right clothes by the right designer and, if you could pull them off, doors opened for you.