He had never been this close to a general disaster—personal disasters had been enough for him—but he found himself strangely calm in the midst of it. In all his other encounters with the forces of evil, he had been a lone man, facing another lone man, both of them holding a sidearm. The romance of the movies was that men fired at each other from great distances with pistols, but Byrne knew from bitter personal experience that in urban confrontations your opponent was usually standing right in front of you, so it was not a matter of marksmanship but alacrity. Despite the caterwauling from the sissies and the nancy boys on the city council and the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an officer’s first job was to go home safe every night.
Even as an NYPD officer, Byrne had never experienced anything like this: a rain of fire, of molten brick and steel and plastic. When he was finally able to peek around the corner, a stunning sight met his eyes: shredded bodies, some of them headless, many of them limbless, all of them dead.
Despite the increasingly militarized nature of urban police forces, cops weren’t supposed to be soldiers. They kept the peace up close and personal, not from a marksman’s dispassionate remove. They fought one-on-one, like the street fighters they had once been, battling the thugs, grifters, and second-story men their forebears knew so well. In the old days, back when Byrne’s grandparents had come over from Ireland and settled first on the Lower East Side and later in Queens, you grew up with the criminals you would eventually put in jail. Today, they came from thousands of miles away, disembarking at Kennedy Airport, their support staff already in place along Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, just waiting for a signal, whether from their controllers or Allah.
Right now, what he had to do was get to the AMC Theater and figure out what the hell was going on.
All thoughts of the hot dog vendor guy were lost. Given what was unfolding in front of his eyes on 42nd Street, Times Square was a million miles away. The uniformed officers in place would have to deal with it, and the reinforcements that were undoubtedly already on their way. Although it was clear that this was an attack on the order of 9/11, Byrne found himself hoping that the feds would let the NYPD handle it—this was their turf, and nobody knew it better. It was already a blow to the department’s pride that something like this was happening, but in fact this is what they had trained for, prepared for—it was not their fault that geopolitical developments had intervened. The job of a New York City police officer was to protect and serve, and that was exactly what he intended to do.
The AMC, or what was left of it, was only a couple of hundred yards ahead.
“Dinner at the Four Seasons it’s ragheads,” said Sid Sheinberg.
Lannie Saleh piloted the unmarked police car at top speed through traffic. From time to time, he skirted the shoals of the sidewalk, expertly navigating around rogue parking meters, illegal sidewalk cafés and the usual urban flotsam and jetsam that wouldn’t have known the city was under attack if the Last Trump was being sounded by the New York Philharmonic. “You don’t know that.”
“Sure I do,” said Sheinberg. “It ain’t nuns or Norwegians. Probably al-Qaeda.”
“Now I know you’re an ignoramus,” said Lannie, negotiating around a couple of BMWs with New Jersey tags. “And probably a bigot, too.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because if,” began Lannie, “and this is a big if, this is some kind of Muslim assault, it’s far more likely to be Twelfthers than Sunnis.”
“Who cares? What’s the diff?”
Lannie downshifted, even with the automatic transmission, and nearly threw Sid into the windshield. “If this is as big as I think it is—as big as we both think it is—then this isn’t al-Qaeda. All they want to do is kill us.”
“As opposed to—”
“As opposed to starting the apocalypse.” Lannie glanced over at Sid and saw that he had no idea what he was talking about. “Look,” he said, “Christians and Shi’as believe in the Last Days. The rest of us, not so much. If and when they come, they come, but we have no intention of hastening them. When al-Qaeda attacks, it’s because they’re pissed off, refighting some fucking battle against El Cid or whatever. Let’s face it, since Mohammed swept out of Arabia and Islam conquered everything to the east, including Persia, India, and Indonesia, we’ve been on a hell of a losing streak.”
The street buckled. “Holy shit!” shouted Lannie.
The force of the blast knocked the car sideways, then up in the air. It sailed for just a moment, hit the pavement, spun. Lannie tried desperately to control the vehicle, its siren still wailing, but the Crown Vic was being tossed around like a skiff at sea. The car hit a mailbox, rebounded, and caromed off a fire hydrant. The hydrant ripped a huge gash in the passenger’s side and exploded, water geysering straight up. They clipped several parked vehicles, flipped, and came to rest, upside down, in the middle of street.
A couple of miles to the south, Lisa Richmond was headed home to Jersey after a lunch in SoHo. She didn’t come often to New York anymore, even though she had been born in the Bronx. What had once seemed close now seemed so very far away, what with a family and all, and despite everything she had believed as a young career woman working on Wall Street twenty years ago, Jersey had turned out to be not such a bad place to live and raise a family after all. Sure, the taxes were a killer, although the new governor was making noises about reducing them—yeah, right—but the air was a bit cleaner, parking was less of a problem, and the schools were a heck of a lot better.
The approach to Holland Tunnel was always a pain. It was as if the city planners hadn’t reckoned on the population of northern New Jersey mushrooming, so they decided to cram it in down here where Canal Street met Varick and Hudson streets. No matter how you approached it, or what time of day, you were practically guaranteed at least a twenty-minute wait to enter the tube. Lisa shuddered at the memory of the old days, when the squeegee men had lurked around the tunnel entrances, wielding their spray bottles and their dirty rags and their threatening countenances as they shook you down for a quarter. A lot of her friends paid them, just to make them go away, but she never did. For one thing, she was too frightened to open the window, and for another she felt instinctively that the service they offered was an indirect form of assault. Her husband, Adam, always gave them money, explaining that it was safer and easier to pay them off rather than to risk their probably drug-addled wrath. It was one of their many areas of disagreement.
At least there were no squeegee men anymore, not in New York and certainly not in Montclair, New Jersey.
Lisa’s mind was still on the squeegee men, inching her 2010 Jeep forward toward the mouth of the tunnel, when she felt the earth tremble. At first she thought it was just the rumble of the subway, the vibrations, but then, as she began to take notice, she realized that the car was moving—not forward, but from side to side, as if it were in an earthquake. The next thing she knew she was looking down at lower Manhattan from a very great height, and screaming to earth at the speed of gravity.
Raymond Crankheit was a tourist from Wahoo, Nebraska, or so he had told everybody he met, especially the girls. New York City girls were not like the girls back home, which in fact was not Wahoo, Nebraska, but that didn’t matter at the moment. Contrary to popular myth, or at least what he saw in the movies, New York City women were harder to get than the tramps back home, snooty and stuck-up; they could smell a rube like him a mile away, and their noses visibly crinkled as he approached, so Raymond Crankheit had decided to get even. Which was why he was here, standing by the Central Park Reservoir, waiting for a call on his cell phone.
For a long time he had wondered precisely how he was going to go about it. New York City had tough gun laws, and he didn’t own a gun himself, you couldn’t take one on a plane, he was too scared to drive across the country with a heater in his glove compartment. Originally, the family named had been spelled Krankheit, but that meant “disease” in German and his father had quickly had enough of such jokes back
home in Pullman, Washington, and so in partial homage to the host of the CBS News program, he’d changed the spelling, although he still got it wrong, and moved the family across the Cascades to Seattle, where they left unspoken the implication that they were related to the famous newscaster.
Luckily, the flat accents of Wahoo were very similar to the flat accents of Pullman, so Raymond had to work only moderately hard to be able to pass for a Nebraskan. For some reason, he had decided that for this mission to succeed—“Operation Revenge,” he had dubbed it in his own mind—his cover story was going to have to be perfect, and he practiced like Travis Bickle in front of a mirror, holding a broken broom handle instead of the gun he didn’t have, and coldly shooting down every woman who had ever refused him a date.
Raymond Crankheit wouldn’t have said that he hated women, exactly. He was not a mishshogomast or whatever the term was that one of the crazy shrinks his parents had sent him to after the second incident, the one with the neighbor’s dog, had used, but on the other hand, it really pissed him off when some cunt blew him off and called him a dork or a geek or an asshole or any of the other unladylike terms girls were using these days. Yeah, those same girls that tattooed themselves up like the cheap whores working the old Skid Road back in Seattle. It was payback time for a life of rejection.
Pullman, Washington, was just across the state line from Moscow, Idaho, and for a time as a kid Raymond had fantasized about running away from home by “defecting,” as he thought of it, to Idaho. Eastern Washington State was a pretty dreary place, apple farms where there was water and alkaline deserts was there was not, and in his youthful imagination Idaho was a land of green mountains and secret communists. Then he got uprooted and transplanted, and that was the end of that notion, although he kept his lifelong fascination with the Soviets, the heroic protectors of the Third World and of people of color everywhere. There weren’t many people of color, except for the odd Mexican migrant worker, in Pullman, Washington, and so in the absence of people at whom to direct his compassion, Raymond’s sense of injustice burned even fiercer.
And so Raymond left home without telling anybody, not the ’rents or the parole officer or anybody. He hitched his way down to Frisco, and that had pretty much been the extent of the plan except that he never actually made it to Frisco. Instead, he wound up across the bay, in Oakland, where his money ran out, and he decided to find a place to crash in the Oakland flats. Everybody told him the Oakland flats were no place for a white boy like him, but by chance he had wandered into a little bakeshop not far from the Berkeley border, a Black Muslim bakeshop, the kind of place that attracted big black tough guys and those hot little white girls and Asian tramps from the UC campus, the ones that liked to walk on the wild side and pretend they were fucking for social justice when in fact they were just fucking.
The place was called the Malik Shabazz, Jr., Bakery and Book Store, and it was a place where you could bum a halfway decent, if halfway eaten croissant if you promised to help with the washing-up, and there was always plenty to read. That’s where Raymond encountered the Holy Koran, which at first he found hard to understand until one of the Brothers explained some of the more interesting suras to him. It was one of those moments he had wished for all his life, when a flash of knowledge, of revelation, comes and all at once he could see exactly what he had to do and how to do it.
The Brothers saw the flash of light in his eyes and knew they had found a soul mate. Instruction had begun immediately. Raymond was an apt pupil.
And now here he was. He glanced around at the cityscape, a 360 maneuver that rotated him from the top of the park to the residential towers of Central Park West, south to the wall of 59th Street and then back around again, east, across Fifth Avenue.
His cell phone rang. It was one of the Brothers, telling him that all his dreams were about to come true.
Even though he knew everything was A-OK, Raymond checked the backpack that had been stashed for him, as promised, in a trash can behind the National Academy. All the tools were there, everything he had trained with. He’d never be readier. He slung the backpack over his shoulder and stepped across Fifth Avenue. If he had any regrets for what he was about to do, it was that, despite what the Brothers had preached, he personally had nothing against the Jews.
Janice Gottlieb left her office at the 92nd Street Y to nip around the corner for a quick coffee with a cultural critic for the New York Times. Ms. Gottlieb had been at the Y for almost five years, having landed a plum job as assistant director of public relations for the Y’s ongoing series of concerts and speakers. Out-of-towners were always amazed when she told them that she worked at the Y, helping to put on concerts. For most of them, gentiles, “the Y” conjured up visions of indoor swimming pools and basketball courts, but she always patiently explained that this was a Jewish Y, the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association, one of New York’s foremost cultural institutions since its founding in 1874.
One of the best things about her job, thought Janice as she stepped onto Lexington Avenue and headed for a little Greek coffee shop, was that it made her parents so proud. Unlike most of the Jewish women who worked at the Y, Janice hailed from Omaha; New York was more than a thousand miles away, a fabled land that stood as a living monument to Jewish achievement in America.
Her head was still full of these thoughts as she left the building. The fresh air felt good. It was hot today, but not as hot as it was going to get. Janice had already been through a few New York Augusts, when the steam rose off the pavements and the garbage reeked and the city’s denizens stripped down to the bare minimum of clothing that decency, or what was left of it, and New York City’s public lewdness laws allowed. Which was almost nothing.
She didn’t mind. It was something you didn’t see back home in Omaha.
There was a young man trying to cross the street, from the look of him obviously not a New Yorker. Instinctively, Janice recognized a kindred spirit, a fellow midwesterner, baffled by the city and intimidated by the traffic. Against the light, he’d gotten halfway across, then chickened out and dashed back to the safety of the curb on the west side of the street. That was how she could tell: a real New Yorker, once committed to jaywalking, would proudly continue carrying out the crime.
“Come on, you can make it!” she shouted at him. The lights on Lex were synched, and even though the crossing showed red, he had plenty of time before the taxis came flying down from Spanish Harlem.
The man looked at her and smiled. Definitely a non–New Yorker. New Yorkers, even transplants, just didn’t look like him, or dress like him, or give off that vibe. In fact, as he approached, Janice thought he seemed a little weird, and was briefly sorry she had encouraged him. Out-of-towners had strange ideas about New York and New Yorkers. Instead of waiting to greet him, she turned away.
“Hey, miss!” he shouted and now she really was sorry. And ashamed of the—what was it? Could it be called bigotry?—what she felt. It wasn’t danger, probably, it was just difference. Diversity. Yes, that was it. Diversity.
The man was pointing at the Y, smiling. “Is that the 92nd Street Young Men’s Hebrew Association?” he asked and then she knew. But it was too late. She had already nodded and words had already tumbled out of her mouth—
“Yes. I work there.”
Raymond was still smiling when he produced a machine pistol and shot her in the chest and in the head, just the way the Brothers had taught him. One Jew down, so many more to go.
He sprinted into the Y, firing as he went. The guards, the metal detectors—nothing was stopping him. It was so easy to squeeze the trigger, and they all went down so fast.
“You okay, Sid?” From a distance, Sheinberg could hear Lannie’s voice calling to him. “Sidney, talk to me!” There was a terrible pressure on his chest, which was one of the things that was hindering his reply. Sid took a deep breath and winced at the pain.
“What happened?” He tried to focus his eyes, then realized he was upside down
, still strapped into his seat and dangling in midair.
“Some kind of bomb. While they blinded us.”
“Eyeless in Gaza,” muttered Sid, although why that particular expression came to him at this moment he could not know. But he knew he was right.
“Come on.”
Sid could feel Lannie’s fumbling with the seat belt clasp. In the distance he could hear explosions, maybe gunfire. Aside from training, he had never used his weapon; in the parlance of the squad room, he was a virgin. “A virgin Hebe,” some of the guys called him, in honor of the character in Q&A, which was every detective’s favorite movie, but he didn’t care: the virgin Hebe had been the guy who, at the end, took down Nick Nolte’s rogue Irish cop.
Sid hit the top of the car with the thud, but didn’t feel a thing. “I think my legs are fucked, Lannie,” he said, but Lannie wasn’t listening. Instead, he was pulling Sid through one of the shattered windows, out of the car and into the street. The pavement was burning hot. Lannie hauled him to his feet.
“I can’t walk, Lannie. I can’t.” The pain was excruciating.
“I don’t give a shit,” shouted Lannie. “You walk, I carry you, it doesn’t matter. We gotta get out of here.”
The two men were face-to-face. Amazing how all that had divided them didn’t matter anymore. Not ethnicity, not religion. It was a cliché, but it was true: right now, they were both Americans, fighting for their lives and their country.
“Whoever these fuckers are,” Lannie was shouting, “I am personally going to fuck up their shit two times.”
Through his pain, Sid Sheinberg smiled. Lannie was such a Brooklyn boy.
Michael Walsh Bundle Page 49
