Manhattan Lockdown (12 page)

As he drove under the elevated portion of the FDR Drive along the East River, he felt for reasons he couldn't clearly identify, the first stirrings of the body-wide sensation he knew as fear. The steel pillars upholding the elevated highway were a maze. The space was dark and moist-looking, like a basement. Even with only a few cars moving, it was as noisy as a wind tunnel. The parked cars under the FDR looked abandoned as they, in fact, temporarily were because of the lockdown of Manhattan.

He drove slowly, looking for signs of anything unusual at the long-disused warehouses on the piers. “They stuffed these guys in some pier over on the East River in Manhattan,” said the foul-mouthed man who had called him early that morning. “Not sure which. Near the old Fulton Fish Market. Maybe they sleep with the fishes already, you know. Maybe the spirit lives on.”

After six years with a bare apartment in Beirut that he used only as a jumping-off point for his assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan, Raj had now lived for seven months in New York in a sterile one-room studio apartment in a high-rise apartment building on un-glamorous York Avenue. He hadn't developed, and he recognized he would never develop, that discerning ear of long-time New Yorkers who could identify by their accents the boroughs in which people lived. But he did know, when he received a call that registered as an
Unknown
number that the man spoke with an accent that had its origins in one of the boroughs, probably Queens.

For Raj, one of the rules of his profession, at least in the old-fashioned way he'd been trained to practice it, was that you did not ignore a tip or a source simply because you didn't like an accent or a messy way of speaking. Even the inarticulate could have crucial information. Content, not style, was important. “Are you the guy who writes for the
Times
?” the man asked.

“I am.” Raj's own voice, he knew, would never lose that clipped accent that his youth in Bombay had implanted in him just as permanently as the color of his eyes.

“I've got an unbelievable story for you. Listen up, you'll win the fucking Pulitzer Prize with it.”

This began as one of those contacts that was likely to be from a loony, lonely man, the kind of guy who spent large amounts of his time listening to and calling live sports talk radio shows. But patience could have its benefits. “I'm listening,” Raj said.

“A bunch of Arabs, probably a dozen or more, were picked up out of their houses yesterday by special details of cops right after the bombs went off. These cops were like Navy SEALs, except they didn't have the flippers.” The man laughed at his own joke, a hacking sound. Raj, a reserved person who had learned exquisite manners from his Hindu mother, didn't join the laugh.

Raj asked, “Where did this happen?”

“Queens, mostly. Where the hell do you think the fucking Arabs live? The Upper East Side?”

Raj knew he was dealing with a racist, but he increasingly accepted that this might be a source with at least some information. He asked, “What happened to them?”

“What happened to them was that they were hustled over the East River and locked up in a warehouse on an old pier. Made to
disappear. You know the fucking government. They get to do what they want, they get to take away your money, sic the fucking IRS on you, make you disappear.” The caller paused, and in that pause, he made the same sucking noise that was probably laughter. “Maybe you haven't been here long enough to know all that kind of shit.”

Raj ignored what he recognized was the baiting sarcasm. The man wanted to annoy and provoke him. Raj asked the critical question, “How do you know all this?”

“Good question, Mr. Gandhi. By the way, are you related to the big guy?”

There were millions of Gandhis in India, but he had been asked this question again and again, sometimes from people who should have known better. Raj asked again, “How do you know all this?”

“This is New York, Gandhi. There are seven million souls in the naked city. Thirty-five thousand of them are on the job or have been on the job. Are you following me, Mr. Gandhi?”

There were two things Raj derived from what this angry, sardonic, and bizarre man had just said. He had to be over fifty or have spent time at home watching television reruns because there was a program in the '50s, the
Naked City
, about New York police. That show ended with a solemn voice-over announcing, “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”

And the reference to the “job” let Raj know that the man might have once been in the police department or known cops because that was how they described the institution they worked for, the “job.” Raj was a serious student of everything, and since his new assignment to the city bureau of the
Times
he had become a dedicated student of the city and its history by reading and learning about it from books and articles and watching old television shows and movies. He had the time to learn; he wasn't married and never dated. He
had lost the habit of developing friendships since he didn't stay in any one place for any real amount of time. He was, he thought, in his own way like the loner now speaking to him. Raj needed to lure the man. “No,” he said, “I'm not really following you.”

“One thing they don't want you to know is that the people who run the job aren't saints. They want you to believe they're heroes. Everyone's a hero these days. Cancer survivors, people who hide in the basement in fucking Kansas during a tornado, cripples who ride bikes, even female police commissioners. Know what, Mr. Gandhi? A canary told me that there are guys on the job who work for that Italian bitch who do all her dirty work.
Unterschtuppers
. You know what that is, don't you? You need to know Yiddish to get anywhere in New York, you know that, don't you? The
unterschtupper
is the guy who does somebody else's dirty work, usually around the asshole.”

Raj waited through the man's odd laugh. And then the man said, “So yesterday morning this what-do-you-call-it elite group fanned out over the city and took down these Arabs and put them into cold storage.”

“Where?”

“The canary didn't tell me that.”

“Who's the canary?

“If I told you that, I'd have to kill you.”

“Are you the canary?”

“Boy, Mr. Gandhi, you are a smart man, that's a good question. Smart, that's why I picked you for this call.”

“Can I meet you?”

“Now maybe you're not so smart. No, you can't meet me.”

“Can I call you?”

“My God, you're thick. No fuckin' way.”

“So what do I do if I need to reach you?”

“I'll keep in touch. I'll know what you're doing.”

And then the screen on Raj's cell phone flashed:
Call Ended
.

***

As he emerged from under the elevated FDR Drive into sunlight, Raj Gandhi noticed that the esplanade next to the shore of the East River was thronged with walkers, runners, rollerbladers, and bicyclists. There was light traffic on the drive. He wasn't surprised by either the carefree runners or the ordinary traffic even though explosions at one of the world's greatest museums had killed more than one thousand people just twenty-four hours earlier. Through his years in cities under attack and in war, he'd witnessed this almost immediate resurgence of the semblance of normal life even while fighting was underway nearby and often escalating. There had been open markets in Baghdad; men, women, and children on the dust-choked streets of Kabul; and even a soccer match in Aleppo as Assad's warplanes streaked overhead. Often that surge toward the restoration of normal life had collapsed, but he had always seen it and was seeing it now in Manhattan. There were even people fishing, most with their poles leaning on the railing that separated the walkway from the East River as they sat on the nearby benches and on plastic lawn chairs.

He drove slowly on the rutted service road that ran along the side of the FDR. There were only five remaining piers, all abandoned. They were all huge, several stories high and several football fields long. Not one had windows, just vertical aluminum siding. Rusted chain-link fences surrounded all of them. The fences were topped by razor wire and the gates were locked. In the East River steel pilings rose over the surface of the water, blocking access to the loading areas. No one, not even homeless people, was inside
the steel fencing. Under each pier were boulders and rocks that the excavators had left in place. In fact, all of the East River had rocky, uninhabitable outcroppings that were small islands, many of them with small towers and flashing beacons to warn river traffic.

Nothing here
, Raj thought. He had followed false leads before and this one had taken far less of his time than most. It came with the territory of his work. As he approached Houston Street, he saw an exit leading up to the FDR from the service road. There were no more piers further uptown.

It was when he began the gradual turn toward the exit that he saw the black Ford sedan behind him. He was instantly alert. The Ford had normal license plates, not government or police plates and not the plates with the letter
T
that designated private hired cars or limousines. The Ford also had tinted windows behind which he saw the outlines of the driver and a passenger.

Raj had been followed while driving in foreign countries. Each time the tail was obvious. The Jeeps or Land Rovers were banged up and sometimes rifles were visible, even at times thrust out of open windows. The tailing vehicles sometimes pulled up alongside him or drove so close behind that there was a slight jolt on the rear bumper at red lights or stop signs.

But the black Ford behind him now slowed when he slowed and accelerated when he did, always maintaining the same distance. Raj thought about stopping, leaving his car, and walking over to the Ford to speak to the driver. But he was afraid. He drove rapidly up to the drive. The Ford followed.

Raj felt a slight surge of relief when he merged into the uptown traffic. There was protection in numbers. And there was the spectacular view. In the center of the river, a powerful fountain shot incandescent water at least thirty feet into the daylight. Further upriver, at the southern end of Roosevelt Island, were the skeletal
remnants of a nineteenth-century asylum. It was an eerie, medieval structure, and Raj was intrigued by it. Why was it left standing? Along the eastern shore of the river the exterior of the United Nations Building, still looking futuristic almost seventy years after it was built, glinted in the sunlight.

Raj pulled his car over to the narrow shoulder of the elevated drive. He turned on the blinking warning lights, staring in the rear-view mirror as the black Ford, moving slowly, passed by. The men in it looked deliberately at him, as if to intimidate him.

R
OLAND FORTUNE WAS
one of the few people in the world who knew how President Andrew Carter smelled when he was under pressure. In their basketball games in the White House gym, Roland usually played guard to cover the president. He still wore his Los Angeles Lakers shirt. “I never needed to wash it in the two seasons I played for the Lakers,” the president joked. “Because I never got off the damn bench.”

The president's odor when he was sweating was acrid, distinct, and really unpleasant. Although Andrew Carter was sleek and tall, with carefully combed blond hair streaked with gray, his body was densely covered with darker hair that, when it wetly adhered to his body, emitted a sharp odor that trailed him wherever he moved on the court.

Now as they spoke on a secure speakerphone, Roland heard a tremor in the president's voice. “It's very complex, Roland, to get food into Manhattan.”

“It is? Why so? The entire West Side waterfront is open. There are piers at West 42
^nd
Street where the big tour boats are moored along the Hudson. I'm no longshoreman, but the pier where the
Intrepid
is looks huge and very accessible. And the
Queen Mary
regularly comes and goes from the pier at 59
^th
Street.”

Harlan Lazarus' brittle voice spoke out in the background: “The quantities of food to feed one million people are beyond the capacity of the piers to handle.”

“Is that a reason,” Roland asked, “not to get some food and supplies in here? I'm sure the Parisians didn't close down their fabled restaurants after the
attacks
there.”

“No, it isn't,” Lazarus said, ignoring the remark about Paris. “I'm pointing out some of the reality of this.”

“My reality is that the supermarkets, the bodegas, the big drug store chains, the delis, the places where people in Manhattan buy food, paper napkins, baby wipes, beer, cigarettes, condoms, have empty shelves.”

The president asked, “Why wasn't this adequately taken into account before?” It wasn't clear whether the president was asking Roland or Harlan Lazarus or someone else this question. Roland refrained from answering.

“It was,” Lazarus said. “But we didn't anticipate a series of attacks on Manhattan that would require more than a few hours of quarantine. We envisioned, frankly, a single hit, like 9/11. Even the attacks in Paris were separated by only a few coordinated minutes.”

Roland was standing restlessly in his huge City Hall office. Its walls were mahogany. The big windows overlooked the old leafy trees of City Hall Park, whose gates were locked. He said, “That's not an acceptable answer, you know that.”

“Let's look at this, Roland,” the president said. “What kind of problem, real-world problem, is the food shortage presenting? The food didn't just vanish. It's in people's apartments, don't you think? Are there any reports of people starving in the streets?”

For Roland there was something liberating about the fact that this was not a video conference; it was on speakerphone only. He was annoyed, focused yet again on Harlan Lazarus' presence in the room with Andrew Carter in Washington. He had the sense that Lazarus passed that question along to the president. Roland glanced around the office at the other people he had assembled for
the conference. He rolled his eyes to the ceiling. He said, “Hans Richter is here. He oversees much that happens on the streets. His people are out there. They have eyes. And there is less waste being picked up at supermarket sites, because the stores have been swept clean by customers. Is that right, Commissioner Richter?”