Manhattan Lockdown (6 page)

“Like what?”

“Mr. Fortune, they are things that are way above your security clearance.”

“What kind of bullshit is that?”

Lazarus' stare conveyed nothing but contempt. “I'm about to let the president know that we have a rogue mayor.”

Roland had at least once a month been invited to play basketball with the president, a Rhodes scholar who after two years at Oxford had played for two seasons with the Los Angeles Lakers before leaving for law school at Stanford. Roland had never seen Lazarus at any of those private games in the White House gym. “What is this, the eighth grade? Call him right now. Get him on the line.”

“You need another pain pill, Mr. Fortune.”

Harlan Lazarus turned away and left the classroom.

Into the silence that filled the room after the door slammed, Gina said, “Roland, we need his help.”

“Are we getting it? How often did he call you today?”

“Never.”

Roland was now touching his shoulder, as if the act of rubbing it would dissolve the pain. “Gina, I want you to find those two guys. Make arrests. Do you get that?”

***

Fifteen minutes later, Mohammad Alizadeh and Ali Hussein, two livery car drivers who had been parked since the first explosion in the chilly shadow under the elevated section of the FDR Drive at the eastern end of Wall Street, were thrown against their shabby Lincolns by heavily armed members of the counterterrorism squad of the NYPD.

Word of the arrests was sent as they were happening to Gina Carbone.

After listening quietly on her cell phone, she turned calmly to Roland. “We've got two arrests. They're wearing what looks like the same clothes as two guys on the tape.”

Within ten minutes Roland Fortune was standing in front of PS 6. The Vicodin he had just taken was beginning to work its magic. The throbbing in his shoulder was muffled. He announced into the microphones arrayed in front of him, “A team of elite members of the New York City Police Department's antiterrorism unit has just made arrests in connection with the murder of a New York City police officer near the World Trade Center Memorial. Let this be a signal that we will find, and quickly find, anyone who harms us. And that we
will
stop harm before it happens.”

T
HEIR APARTMENT WAS
on the fourth floor of a classic, five-story New York City brownstone. Its windows overlooked the trees that lined East 80
^th
Street between Madison and Fifth. It was Cameron Dewar who had found the place three years earlier. “Gabe, you've got to get over here,” he had said. “I've found the place for us. It's just what we want. It's amazing, my love.”

They had dated for only three months before they decided to live together. Cam volunteered to do the work of looking for a home for them. They had agreed that they wanted to rent an apartment in an Upper East Side brownstone and hoped they could avoid living in a new, cookie-cutter high-rise building. Cam, an engaging, attractive man who worked in public relations, knew many people. A friend had told him that the owner of a brownstone wanted to rent to a quiet couple. Within five days he and Gabriel Hauser were in the apartment. They had turned it into a cozy Victorian home. They often called themselves Holmes and Watson and the apartment 221-B Baker Street.

Now Cam whispered into Gabriel's ear. “Gabe, there must be three hundred reporters out there now.”

Gabriel had slept for less than an hour on the leather Chesterfield sofa in the living room. Numb with exhaustion, he had come home just as early dusk was gathering. He'd drifted quickly into sleep without even changing his clothes. As he woke, he heard the sound of voices on the street. “What's up, Cam?”

“They found out where you live.”

“Who?”

“Reporters. They started calling just after you fell asleep. There are pictures of you all over the news. The police released security footage of the museum just after the blasts went off. You're as clear as day in the tapes and they identified you.
Gabriel Hauser, the Angel of Life
. The tapes show you there on the steps, taking care of people, the only man standing.”

“This is a joke, right?”

“No joke. Take a look.”

Cam waved the remote at the television set. With perfect timing, an announcer's voice on CNN said, “New York City officials have identified the man on the security tapes we've been showing you for the last several hours, the man who was treating the injured in the immediate aftermath of the museum explosions.”

The footage had an uncanny clarity, almost movie-like. It was taken from one of the multiple security cameras installed on the tall poles of street lamps thirty-five feet above the steps. It showed Gabriel applying the tourniquet to the first person he treated. It also showed Gabriel sliding something loose and silvery over the man's wrist. So powerful was the camera that it revealed the face of the injured man. Dead and injured people were sprawled all around him on the monumental stairway. In the silent footage, the food wagons and the stalls where vendors sold pictures of New York memorabilia for tourists were still on fire. The delicate Parisian-style benches and chairs on the plaza at the museum's front were grotesquely twisted. Somehow water still gushed up from the fountains.

The CNN announcer said, “Ever since the city released this security footage three hours ago we've been trying to identify this man, already called the Angel of Life. Police estimate that he was treating the wounded just one minute after the last of the three explosions,
at a time when more explosions were likely. This is being hailed as an extraordinary act of heroism.”

Cam stood behind Gabriel, both hands on his shoulders. The announcer said, “It was obvious that this heroic man had experience in providing emergency medical assistance. Now we know that he is Gabriel Hauser, a doctor at the prestigious Mount Sinai Hospital just ten blocks north of the epicenter of the explosions. We're told Dr. Hauser is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghan wars, a graduate of Stanford and Cornell Medical School.”

Gabriel, without turning around, put his hand over Cam's left hand. Gabriel said, “I don't like this.”

They cherished their privacy. They were a close and loving couple. Cam was born and raised in Alabama. After graduating from Ole Miss, he left the South because he was gay and lonely. When he arrived in New York, he had found satisfaction in training in public relations, comfort in living without falsehood and pretexts as a gay man, and love. “I don't like it either,” Cam said in his genteel Deep South accent. “God help us. I'll have to learn what it's like living with a hero.”

“And how much of a hero do you think I'm going to be when America finds out I was tossed out of the Army for being gay?”

Three interviews followed on CNN with other doctors at Mount Sinai. Gabriel wasn't even certain he knew them. They were asked about Dr. Hauser and, in a strange inversion of reality, as though they were speaking about someone else, Gabriel heard himself described as “compassionate and caring,” an “extremely skilled emergency room doctor,” and a “courageous man.”

He knew he was completely unprepared to deal with the fame that was now obviously cascading over him. He had never sought notoriety. When he and Cam made contributions to groups like the Gay Men's Health Crisis and the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, they asked to be listed as “anonymous.”

Gabriel had been through challenging experiences in his life. Even before he enlisted in the Army, he'd led a life he now rarely talked about. His father was Jewish, his mother Puerto Rican. His father had trained as a flautist at Julliard and played briefly with the New York Philharmonic. He was a failed musician who refused to find other work and lived an increasingly alcoholic and embittered life. Gabriel's mother was a flamboyant woman who loved Manhattan nightlife and spent most of the early years of Gabriel's life at places like Studio 54, CBGB OMFUG, and the Mudd Club, those legendary party spots of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She spent her days in melodramatic hugging and praising of Gabriel before she left for what his father called the nightly whoring around. “I'm a concert flautist,” he'd shout at her, as though the words meant he was royalty. She'd answer, “You've got your flute stuck up your ass.”

As a teenager, Gabriel each day left the chaos of their messy West Side apartment for high school at Collegiate, the exclusive all boys' private school he attended on a scholarship on West 77
^th
Street. He was introverted and a very gifted student. By the time he was in high school he dreaded going home. He managed to find several other boys who were as shy as he was who lived in stately apartments on West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. Their parents had opened their doors to Gabriel, who was intelligent, well-spoken and respectful, to spend the afternoons and evenings studying in their homes.

And when he was fifteen, just weeks after his gorgeous mother abruptly left for a rehab in California, Gabriel had the first exciting experience of his life. Jerome Fletcher was a partner in a huge law firm and the father of Bobby Fletcher, one of Gabriel's classmates. One school night, after a short run in Riverside Park when he was first learning the running that he later pursued throughout his life, Gabriel showered in one of the four bathrooms in the Fletcher
apartment. Jerome was in his mid-forties. He had been a track star at Cornell and a serious decathlon athlete who almost qualified for the 1992 Olympic team. He volunteered that spring to help Gabriel train as a distance runner. It was exactly the kind of lonely, demanding sport that Gabriel was born for.

When Gabriel emerged from his shower after that first run in the park, Jerome Fletcher, with muscles in his legs and arms like chain meshing, was standing naked just outside the door. Gabriel realized in the instant before Jerome embraced him that he had found the excitement, comfort, and love he wanted. As Jerome rubbed his heavily veined, fully engorged penis against his, Gabriel was deliriously happy, somehow freed from the craziness of his mother and father, the wrecked apartment, the insanity of that life.

Jerome, in love with this boy who was exactly his own son's age, carried on his affair with Gabriel for two years before arranging to send him to Stanford on a full scholarship. Gabriel felt he had been sent into exile. He wanted to go to Columbia, only fifteen blocks away from Jerome's apartment, but Jerome's wife, Carol, who had learned about the affair between her husband and her son's best friend, insisted that Gabriel leave for the West Coast or she would tell the police and Jerome's law partners about her husband's involvement with a boy. Even though Carol Fletcher had no intention of leaving Jerome, she was jealous and angry. Jerome told Gabriel that his wife was deadly serious about the threat, she had pictures of them together in bed, and copies of sweet notes Jerome had regularly slipped into Gabriel's gym bag. “I'd go to jail for life if the police found out, Gabe. That's the world we live in. We have to do what she wants.”

Gabriel spent his first semester at Stanford lovesick and homesick. He was in love with Jerome and called him often at the office. For months Jerome happily took the calls. Then one day Jerome
stopped accepting them and stopped sending e-mails and text messages. Gabriel became not only lovesick and homesick, but heartsick as well. The pain was acute; he was obsessed with it.

And then after two weeks of silence Gabriel received an envelope with no return address. Inside was a copy of the
New York Post
. The headline on the front page read,
Deadly Sex Games of the Rich and Famous
. There were three long articles on a murder, in a pay-by-the-hour Bronx motel next to the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx, of the leading corporate partner in the whitest of white-shoe New York law firms. According to the
Post
, Jerome Fletcher had been a frequent guest at the motel under the name Robert Smith. He was found strangled with a belt and stabbed fifteen times, mainly in the face. A seventeen-year-old black boy, who had arrived at the motel just minutes after Robert Smith checked in, was under arrest for the murder. He had several prior arrests for prostitution.

Jerome's death was searing to Gabriel. He had lost, violently, a man he loved. He was also angry. Jerome's cruel and abrupt suspension of the letters, e-mails, the texts, and the cell calls had wounded Gabriel profoundly in the two weeks before the killing. Gabriel had never been in love before Jerome and so had never been spurned or hurt in that way. He had no equipment in his life for dealing with a lover's rejection, the abrupt and painful fact of separation; he had written a series of e-mails and texts, even a letter, to Jerome that expressed his longing, asked questions, and begged forgiveness for whatever he'd done that led Jerome to drop him. Gabriel devoutly believed that if anyone would be able to explain to him the vagaries and mysteries of love, and how to deal with the loss of love, it would have been Jerome. After all, Jerome had taught him how to run, how to think, how to relate to and assess other people, and how to spend quiet time listening to music and reading. Now Gabriel had no mentor. And no lover.

And in the weeks before the murder, Gabriel, for the first time, had experienced the torments and pettiness of jealousy. He had no doubt that Jerome had replaced him with another lover or lovers. He found himself imagining what Jerome was doing and how: Where did Jerome and the new boy or man spend time together? Who had been the seducer? How often were they making love?

It was three days after Gabriel read the articles in the
Post
and elsewhere, including the Internet and even the West Coast newspapers, that Detective Talbot called him.

“Is this Gabe Hauser?”

“Yes.”

“I'm a detective with the NYPD.”

Gabriel felt a rush of anxiety. He was eighteen. He had never once talked to a cop. “Yes,” he said.