The Bone Vault

by Linda Fairstein

  Now the only street noise was sirens, a shrieking cacophony blitzing the area from every direction. Directly below the window on Centre Street, the scene unfolded like a 1950s movie about nuclear warfare. Hordes of men and women, dressed in business clothes, carrying briefcases, began to head north, some walking, others beginning to trot.

  The only people moving south were those in uniform. I knew that every fire truck in the city and beyond must have headed to the towers when the first plane hit. Now every one of the hundreds of police officers assigned to the DA’s office for trial appearances or preparation, each of the thousands who had business at headquarters, and all of the uniformed court officers who supervised activity in our buildings, were running to the World Trade Center. At that point in time, I couldn’t begin to imagine what they would encounter. I only knew that something inside these people’s heads and hearts gave them the courage to go help when everyone out of uniform was moving in the opposite direction.

  I picked up the phone and started to make calls. I found my parents first, and my brothers, assuring them that I was out of harm’s way. By the time I reached Jake at the NBC studio in Washington, where he was assigned for the week, he was scrambling to put a crew together to go out to the Pentagon. Another plane had just hit. “It’s Bin Laden again. They should have taken the bastard out after the ninety-three attack. How are you going to get out of there, Alex?”

  “Don’t worry. There’s a group of us here,” I lied. “Do what you’ve got to do and I’ll find you later.”

  The phones didn’t stop ringing. Parents and spouses of young lawyers were calling to see whether they had reached work, especially those whose subway routes took them through the World Trade Center hub. Assistant district attorneys who were stuck below-ground on trains or in cars that were stopped at bridges and tunnels called to offer help, not knowing when or how they would ever reach the office.

  “Hey, Alex, it’s Mercer. What the hell are you doing there?”

  He had just been released from the hospital a week earlier, recovering from a bullet wound that had almost killed him. “There are no words to describe what’s going on down here. Thank God you’re grounded. Have you tried to find Mike?”

  Before he could answer me I heard a new wave of wails from the street below and looked out the window. “Oh my God! It’s collapsing. Mercer, the south tower is going down!” The implosion seemed to be playing itself out in slow motion, and nausea gripped my stomach as I thought of the thousands of people being buried alive under tons of concrete and steel.

  “Mike’s way down there somewhere. He didn’t get home until six this morning. His mother called to check on him when she heard the news about the first plane. He would have slept through the whole damn thing if she hadn’t been worried. He wants you out,now. ” Mercer raised his voice to bring home his point. “My orders are to hound you till you leave.”

  I closed my eyes and hoped against hope that Mike hadn’t gotten there in time to be near the buildings when the second tower crumbled to the ground. Half the kids he had grown up with were cops or firemen, and he would follow them into the mouth of hell if he thought there was a single man he could save.

  There was no need for me to argue with Mercer. The phone line went dead. I looked at the other desks and could tell by the unlighted consoles that all service had been cut off. Our provider’s antennae must have been part of the communications center located on top of the World Trade Center complex.

  Smoke began to drift down the corridor. The mild wind was blowing our way now, carrying with it an acrid odor and soot-filled debris. I went from office to office, shutting the windows, coughing as the downtown air spread its coating of pulverized concrete and burning jet fuel-a toxic mixture that stung my eyes and irritated the lining of my throat.

  I walked to Battaglia’s wing, crossing the main hallway, which was as deserted as a ghost town. Three of his executive assistants were in with him, while the other two had not been able to get near the office. They were making a triage plan for the rest of the week, already knowing that we would be at war, with no way to carry on the ordinary business of the criminal justice system. The four of us plotted with him for almost two hours, cut off from the city around us except for some of the cell phones, which worked some of the time.

  When I got back to my wing, shortly before 1P.M., the streets below, which had been teeming with fleeing workers after the two towers had collapsed, were eerily still and empty. Coffee carts had been abandoned on every corner, and empty cars were lined up in the municipal lot, many of them belonging to the officers who had sped downtown on foot. Papers swirled everywhere in the breeze, and now ashes were settling on the sidewalks and roadways.

  I looked out the window and cringed at the sight of the sky without its landmark towers. What was it that was said of people who had limbs amputated? That the missing arm or leg ached forever, in some kind of phantom phenomenon. We, too, would ache forever as we looked for those towers in the sky, thinking of the thousands who would never be seen again by loved ones, and never be found.

  By four o’clock, Rose came around to tell me that Battaglia had gone to meet with the mayor and governor. The police commissioner’s office had sent a cop over to see her, insisting that we close our doors and send everyone home. The air quality had become so bad that if we did not leave immediately, no one could guarantee that we’d be safely evacuated that evening.

  I pulled a pair of old loafers out of the back of a filing cabinet, closed up the office, and took the elevator to the lobby. Four uniformed cops from the precinct were guarding the entrance, handing out face masks to each of us as we left the building. I spoke to one I recognized, who had arrested a man who had been doing stickups and rapes in Chinatown a month earlier. Now he was gray from head to toe, covered in residue and reeking from the stench of burned flesh.

  “I need to get down near the towers. You got any patrol cars going over? There must be something I can do to be-”

  “Forget it, Miss Cooper. Nobody’s getting in but cops, firefighters, Emergency Services. No amateurs. It’s a war zone.” He thumbed his hand northward. “Be grateful you can’t go, ma’am. You’d never sleep again.”

  I stood at the intersection of Centre Street and Hogan Place, adjusting the mask to ease my breathing. How many men and women did I know who at this very moment were risking their lives-or had already given them-to try to rescue people from this cataclysmic event?

  Tears had formed, and I tried to convince myself they were caused by the debris in the air. I wanted to find Mike Chapman. I needed to know he was safe. I took my cell phone out to try to dial his number but got no signal. A cop with a bullhorn shouted at me and two other pedestrians on the nearly deserted street. “Move along, miss. D’you hear me? Move it north, guys. This is a frozen zone.”

  I headed uptown, past empty Chinese restaurants and across Canal Street. The trendy shops of SoHo were all closed and shuttered as I continued walking across Houston Street and up Fourth Avenue. The only vehicles moving south were emergency trucks, now bearing the gold lettering on their sides from counties in upstate New York, and neighboring areas like New Jersey and Connecticut.

  Two hours had passed when I reached the approach to Grand Central Terminal. As with all the landmark buildings in the city-potential targets-the small amount of traffic that was moving on the streets was being diverted away from the station. I walked east, breathing better here but exhausted from the day’s emotion. As I waited for the light on Forty-fourth Street, a cop called out to me from the driver’s seat of his RMP-radio motor patrol car.

  “Hey, Al. You comin‘ from downtown? We’ll give you a lift the rest of the way.”

  Lester Gruby had been a detective in Special Victims years before. He’d been flopped back to uniform when he lost his gun in a drunken brawl outside a racetrack in Nassau County.

  “Still on Seventieth Street?”

  I nodded and got in the back of the patrol car. “What do you
hear?”

  “Real bad. The numbers are staggering. Engine Forty, Amsterdam Avenue at Sixty-sixth Street? Twelve guys missing or dead. A whole company.” His voice broke. “It’s like that every time I check in with the desk.”

  “Maybe you could drop me at New York Hospital. At least I can give blood.”

  Gruby looked at me as though I were crazy. “Guess you haven’t heard. They’re turning people away from the blood banks. They’re not gonna need much. People who escaped, most of them have minor injuries. Anybody in range of the buildings that collapsed, they’re dead.”

  The police radio crackled the rest of the way to my building, with urgent calls about falling beams and hazardous shifts in the settling structures. It was after seven when I unlocked my door. There were eighteen messages on my machine, family and friends becoming more frantic as the day wore on. I returned the most urgent calls, then asked two friends to get in touch with a list of the others for me.

  Jake had left two voice mails, telling me he was fine but that the airports were closed both in D.C. and New York. He had no idea when he’d be coming home.

  What was the point of sharing your life with someone if he was never available when it really counted?

  I undressed and balled up my clothes to take to the incinerator later. I stepped into the steamy shower and stood beneath the head for almost five minutes, tears streaking down my cheeks as they mixed with the hot water. I got out and toweled off, putting one of Jake’s business shirts on with my jeans. It was not a night to be alone.

  For the rest of the evening I sat in front of the television, forgetting to eat or drink as I watched the towers fall over and over again, listening to survivors tell miraculous stories of their escapes, and watching the distraught families of women and men who had not been heard from since 8:46A.M.

  I caught Jake on MSNBC, doing remotes from the Pentagon, and later that night, from the steps of the Capitol. What does it take to be a newscaster? I wondered. I could never have reported this story-or many less tragic than it-without being overcome by emotion.

  At midnight, I called Mercer for the last time that evening.

  “Any word?”

  “Your prayers have worked before, Alex. Just get some sleep.” I didn’t know then that Vickee’s cousin, who worked as a secretary for the Port Authority, had been missing from the time of the second crash. Vickee and Mercer had more to worry about than my concern for Mike. I hung up the phone.

  Sometime after two I must have dozed off. The doorbell awakened me at four-thirty. I had told Nina that much of the story before, and now I picked it up from Mike’s arrival.

  “I knew it was Mike when I was startled out of my sleep. The doormen would never have let anyone up who wasn’t a close friend. When I pulled the door back, I threw my arms around his neck and held my head against his chest until he pushed me down.”

  I breathed in and bit my lip. “You can’t imagine what he looked like. You’d never have known his hair was black. He was absolutely caked in cinders. His clothes, too-sweatshirt and pants. There were dark stains on his chinos that looked like dried blood. I told him to go in and take a shower, but he wouldn’t do it. He didn’t want to wash off anything from the scene, like it was sacred to him. He took me by the hand and led me into the living room. All he wanted to do was talk.”

  “But that’s what I mean. Wasn’t he going out with Valerie then? Why wasn’t he ather place?”

  “Well, I didn’t even know about Val then. He hadn’t told me.”

  “But when you found out about her, that he had started to see her last summer, don’t you think it’s weird that he didn’t want to be withher?”

  “I, uh, I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it.”

  “Maybe nobody else knows when you’re full of crap, but I certainly do.”

  I paused. “I guess it was two things. I don’t think anybody understands what a cop puts himself on the line to do for other people-for total strangers-unless you are one. Or in my case, unless you’ve been with him to see him do it. You think even one lawyer, one person in a business suit, rantoward the towers that day?

  “And the second thing, about Val, is that she had been facing the possibility of her own mortality for most of that year. Mike saw so much death in the space of those twenty hours that I don’t think he could bring himself to her doorstep to talk with her about it.”

  “Are you just blind to the third thing, Alex? Didn’t everybody in America want to be with the person, the people, they cared most about? Do you know anyone who didn’t want to find whoever meant the most to them and just cling to them like the world was going to end? I brought Gabe into bed with Jerry and me and just rocked him in my arms all through the night.”

  “I’m telling you, Nina, you’re seeing something in this that just isn’t there.”

  She knew she was irritating me and moved on. “Did he tell you what it was like, being there, I mean?”

  “Yeah. He couldn’t stop talking for hours. I had seen the explosion. I had smelled death. I hadn’t heard anything except sirens. The first thing he heard when he got out of his car were the screams. He’s still got nightmares. You don’t want to hear what he told me about, I promise you.”

  “Where was he when the buildings fell?”

  “When the south tower went down, he was in a stairwell of the other one. There was a pregnant woman who’d been walking down from the seventy-eighth floor. A bad diabetic. She’d collapsed after she reached the tenth floor landing and was getting trampled by the others, so she crawled off into the landing and just refused to move. She didn’t want to slow anyone down. She just gave up.

  “Her coworkers got firemen to try to help her. Mike ran into them a few flights up and offered to carry her down. He was just coming out of the stairwell and setting her down in the lobby when the first building went. Picked her up again and didn’t stop moving till he got her up to Vesey Street. His last image was the single-file line of firemen heading up the stairs, as he scanned their faces to look for guys he knew.”

  “Did he-did he lose many friends?”

  “A cop who’s lived in this city all his life? He went to funerals and memorial services for months. That’s why he stayed most of that first night at the scene, helping to pull bodies out and keeping up the hopeless vigil for signs that anyone was still alive in the rubble.”

  “The girl you said you’d tell me about, is that the first time since you’ve known Mike that he had ever talked about her?”

  I nodded my head. “Her name is Courtney. Yeah. That’s another reason why he probably didn’t want to go to Val’s, to talk about his unrequited love.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Neighborhood kid who grew up with him. Prom queen, good student with big dreams. They dated on and off through high school. When he was a junior at Fordham, studying history, she was chasing him like crazy. She was pushing him to go to law school, make something of himself, buy her all the things she wanted.

  “Remember what I’ve told you about Mike’s dad? Spent twenty-six years with the NYPD. Then two days after he retired, turned in his gun and shield, he dropped dead of a massive coronary. Mike finished college, but he idolized his father. Took the test and went to the Academy right after his graduation.”

  “And this Courtney?”

  “Dumped him. Broke his heart, the way he told the story that morning. She pursued one of his roommates, who went on to Fordham Law School and got a job on Wall Street. Married him five months after she walked out on Mike. Big house in Manhasset, three kids, two cars-all the material things she wanted. She told him she’d never marry a cop, she didn’t want to live her mother’s life. Not because of the danger of it, not because of the hard work and unpredictable hours, but because she wanted to escape from her background, her milieu.”

  “Did you know anything about this?”

  “Never. I’ve known women he’s dated. All very casual till now. I just assumed that he was so busy with sports
and school and friends that he’d never had a serious romance.”

  “What happened?”

  “Courtney had come into the city that morning for an early breakfast meeting at Windows on the World. She was planning a celebration for her husband, who had made partner at his firm. The banquet manager was helping her do a menu, select the wines, make the seating arrangements.”

  “And Mike knew she was there?”

  “That’s one of the reasons his mother called him. Courtney’s mom called Mrs. Chapman, begging her to send Mike to try to find Courtney, to get her out of the building and safely away from the disaster scene.”

  “You think that’s why he went?”

  “Wild horses couldn’t have kept him away. He didn’t go because of her, but he was damn determined to try to save her once his mother gave him that mission.”

  “That’s another difference between guys like him and people like you and me. Some creep had dumped me years ago? I wouldn’t have had a charitable bone in my body.”

  “It didn’t matter. She never had a chance, like everybody else up there.”

  “Mike told you all this?”

  “He must have talked for three hours.”

  “About Courtney?”

  “Sure. About how he had always felt so inadequate after she broke up with him. That there was only one thing in his life that was a passion, other than his love for her, and that was police work. That he was afraid to become involved with other women for fear they would reject him, ultimately, for the same reasons. You know the great irony of it?”

  “I can guess. Here’s the one event that makes everybody in the world stand up and pay their respects to the cops, the firemen, the everyday heroes who did such extraordinary things in the face of certain death.”

  “Yeah. And Courtney doesn’t live to see him right in the middle of it all.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “I didn’t have to tell him anything. He wasn’t there to listen to me. He just wanted to vent some of this, to let me in a little bit. Explain some of his behavior to me, in a way.”