Manhattan Lockdown (7 page)

“Need to talk to you about a buddy of yours, Jerome Fletcher.” In Talbot's grating Brooklyn accent Gabriel for the first time heard the scorn reserved for gay men. The sarcastic words, the malicious tone, and the edge of mockery.
A buddy of yours
.

Gabriel asked, “Who?”

“Guy named Jerome Fletcher.”

Gabriel tried to sound respectful, even childlike. “He was a friend of mine.”

“Listen, Gabe, we know he was more than a friend. We got his e-mails, texts, voice mails to you, the works. Yours, too.”

Gabriel said nothing, thinking,
Why would Carol Fletcher give that stuff to the police?

Detective Talbot said, “We want to help you, and you can help us.”

“I don't understand.”

“Can you come back to New York? We'll pay for it.”

“I've got finals soon.”

“Your friend was dangerous, Gabe. You're not the only boy he did what he did to you. Your friend knew other men who liked to do what he did. We want to find them, too. Mr. Fletcher was part of a little club of guys who liked boys.”

“What did Mr. Fletcher do?”

“Come on, Gabe. He raped you. He did it to others, including the boy in the motel.”

Raped
. That word haunted him for years afterwards. When he was in medical school his course in psychiatry described any sex between an adult male and a boy under eighteen as rape and instructed on the troubled, terrible lives that the victims later suffered. Posttraumatic stress disorder, acute anxiety, manic depression, suicidal tendencies.

In truth, Gabriel had experienced none of that. Over time he did wonder what borders Jerome Fletcher crossed to bring himself to stand naked that day after their first run together and to initiate that first embrace, when Gabriel, his young torso almost hairless, was still gleaming and wet from his shower. As an adult, Gabriel never sought out boys, and there had to be some deep-seated reason for that restraint, some taboo that Jerome Fletcher had set aside and that ultimately killed him in a rancid motel room in the Bronx. Even as an adult, Gabriel wouldn't apply the word rape to the two years he and Jerome had passionately pursued their afternoons together, often at the Regency on Park Avenue and sometimes in the West End Avenue apartment.

“I wasn't raped, Mr. Talbot.”

He knew he was a continent away from New York and couldn't be forced to return and at that stage in his life didn't want to go back. New York was where his father had in effect barricaded himself in the grungy apartment on upper Broadway. And it was where the places were to which Jerome Fletcher had introduced him, such as
the grand Metropolitan Museum, the cobblestone streets of Soho, the cozy warmth of the West Village and the vital, alert men striding on Christopher Street, many of them holding hands. And New York was where Jerome had met his squalid death.

“Sure you were, Gabe.”

Before Talbot could go on, Gabriel Hauser hung up. It was an act of courage, defying authority for the first time.
Defiance of authority:
he liked the feeling. He never heard from Talbot again.

Now, as they listened to the broadcast on CNN describing him as the Angel of Life, Cam asked, “What do you plan to do?”

“Sell my memoirs.”

Cam chuckled. “I'll write them for you.”

“I'm headed back to the hospital. I came home to catch my breath, remember? I have work to do.”

Just as he was rising from the sofa, he was riveted by the scene on the television. The police commissioner, a woman whom he and his friends described as the cop who looked like Cher, announced that the police were searching for a man named Silas Nasar, a United States citizen “of Afghan descent.”

There on the screen was a picture of the man Gabriel knew both as Patient X52 and Silas Nasar: a face with a distinct, seahorse-shaped birthmark. It was a face, too, he had seen before: a grainy image sent from Kabul to his cell phone not long ago and then on the shattered steps of the Met and again in the emergency room at Mount Sinai.

Gabriel's cell phone had slipped between the pillows on the sofa where he had been sleeping. As soon as he found it he scrolled to the contacts window and pressed the screen for Vincent Brown, who was still in the hospital. Brown answered on the first ring.

“Gabriel, how are you?” Brown's cell had identified the incoming caller.

“Rested. And you? Why are you still there?”

“Hey, man, why leave? Where else can I have as much fun as this?”

“I'll be back soon.”

Brown could be sardonic, like one of the doctors on
M*A*S*H*
. He said, “Why don't you stay there and rest? I don't think any more patients have come through the door since you left. It's funny, but when there's something like this all the usual street stuff we get just stops. No beatings, no stabbings, no overdoses. Strange way to get peace on the streets. If we had a big bomb going off every day, there'd be no more muggings.”

Gabriel asked, “Can you do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“There's a patient we only know as Patient X52. He's the first guy I treated and then I saw him again in the ER.”

Brown had an immediate answer. “You signed him out just before you left.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A woman claiming to be his sister came in. She talked to you. And that guy X52 walked to the elevator with her.”

“Where did you get this? Where's the joke in this?”

“No joke. I saw it.”

“Not possible, it never happened.”

“Sure it did. You said she told you she was a doctor from Los Angeles.”

“This,” Gabriel said, “is all made up.”

Brown's tone of voice never changed: sardonic, determined, almost rehearsed. “You looked at her. You said ‘
Fine
.' You had one of the nurses bring you the discharge papers. She said her brother couldn't sign them, his hands were damaged. She signed for him. And then they left.”

“You're out of your fucking mind, Brown.” Gabriel was furious. “Or this is a joke.”

For a long moment Vincent Brown said nothing. “You need to remember, Dr. Hauser, who your friends are.”

I
T WAS FINALLY
dark. Roland Fortune, exhausted, his senses dulled by the fresh Vicodin that spread through his system, sat alone on a wicker chair on the terrace of Gracie Mansion overlooking Carl Schurz Park and the East River. A cool fragrant breeze blew in from the river. In the distance the long expanse of the Triboro Bridge glittered in the darkness. There was no ordinary traffic. Red-and-blue emergency lights rotated everywhere: on the FDR Drive, the bridge, and the Queens waterfront. On the surface of the river, which normally was alive even at night with heavy tug boats and barges gliding noiselessly upriver and downriver, there were only police and Coast Guard patrol boats. Their glaring, probing beams swept through the darkness. An hour earlier, two men had drowned trying to swim from Manhattan to Queens. The currents in the East River, which was not really a river but an immense estuary of the Atlantic, were powerful, overwhelming, controlled by oceanic tides.

There were no lights on the terrace. For the fifth time, Roland touched his cell phone, its light illuminating his face, and scrolled to John Hewitt-Gordan's number in England. Sarah's father had left three messages for Roland since early afternoon. By the time of the last message, John's clipped aristocratic voice had weakened slightly. “Roland, please, if you can call that would be much appreciated. I know you must be hellishly busy.”

Roland genuinely liked the man, although they could not have come from more distinct worlds. John had a wry sense of humor. He called Roland “Mr. Mayor,” and Roland called him “Mr. Major.” It was their way, simply by changing a letter, to get comfortable with each other.

Roland knew that John Hewitt-Gordan loved his daughter profoundly. She was his only child. His wife had died ten years earlier in a horrific car crash. Roland knew he had to speak to him, but he was mentally and emotionally disorganized by the craziness of the day, the lingering clamor of event after event, fear after fear, pain, anger, and the images of dead bodies and the voices of the dying and the wounded.

Tom Greenwood, a police lieutenant Gina Carbone had assigned to lead a squad of armed guards to follow Roland through the night, said, “Mr. Mayor, it's not a good idea to sit out here with that cell phone screen shining. Anybody can see it from a mile away.”

In fact, Greenwood and Gina hadn't wanted Roland to spend the night at the mansion. There were hotel rooms, preselected as part of the emergency plans, where he and other high-ranking officials could stay as anonymously as tourists. Gracie Mansion, a cream-colored colonial house completely different from any other building in Manhattan, was a target of opportunity. When he had told her he was headed to the mansion for the night because, he said, it was “home,” Gina Carbone answered, “Not a good idea, Roland. The mansion's vulnerable. Impossible to guarantee your safety.”

Fixing his stare on the Triboro Bridge, Roland tapped the screen where John Hewitt-Gordan's name appeared. It was the middle of the night in England. He hoped that John was sleeping, oblivious to the vibration of his cell phone or its ring.

John picked up on the first ring. “Roland?”

“John?”

John was a consummate realist. His training at Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point, and his thirty-year career in the British Army's intelligence service had infused him with the rigors of truth, candid assessments, and the ability to differentiate between rumor and fact. He asked, “Is it true? Is Sarah dead?”

“Yes.” Suddenly Roland felt his throat constrict. “She is. I'm so, so sorry, John.”

“What happened?”

“She put together a birthday party for me. It was on the roof garden of the museum overlooking Central Park. She was very happy. And then the bombs went off.”

Roland heard this austere, elegant man inhale sharply and sob. Roland quietly asked, “Do you want to hear more?”

“Indeed, I need to hear this, Roland.”

“There were three explosions. She died instantly in the first one, John. She couldn't have suffered.”

John was crying now, a long wail that Roland couldn't associate with the man he knew. Still staring at the array of twinkling and flashing lights on the expanse of the bridge, Roland just waited. He had to accept this man's pain.

At least a minute passed before John's ravaged voice came back. “Where is her body?”

Roland rubbed his gritty eyes, which were still scratched, dry and irritated from the explosive dust. Sarah Hewitt-Gordan, a woman who looked forward to the gift of life every day, a woman who made him laugh and gave him ideas in the brilliant flow of her conversation, and who made love to him with a wild passion that always astonished him, was now a torn body temporarily lost somewhere in this wounded city.

“No one's been able to tell me that, John. There are over one thousand people who are dead. It's impossible at this point to know who
all of them are. The morgues are overwhelmed. For years we've designated places to use as temporary morgues if this ever happened.”

More calmly, more like the stiff upper lip British Army officer, John said, “I understand.”

“The recovery people probably have no way of knowing who she is.”

“I want to retrieve her. And bring her back here.”

“Of course.”

“Do you have any idea when we will be able to fly there? When the airports will open?”

“There's no way to know, John. Not tomorrow, maybe not for days.”

There was a pause. “Roland, my daughter loved you.” “She loved you as well, John.”

Roland Fortune heard another profound sob. Then silence. His cell phone pulsed and the screen abruptly read
Call Ended
. He sat in the cool dark, crying.

G
INA CARBONE HAD
never been to Pier 37, even though she'd authorized building a secret, dark, unknown prison there. Until today it had never had inmates. The skeletal staff assigned to it posed as janitors and maintenance men, and their only role was to make sure that vagrants and kids never entered the pier. The prison inside, as she had ordered when it was installed, had to remain secret.

Gina left PS 6 soon after an armored Hummer had taken Roland Fortune away to Gracie Mansion. His departure had drawn a wave of attention from the dozens of reporters who thronged Madison Avenue, and in that confusion Gina and three of her staff members slipped out a side door of the school to an unmarked Ford. The black car raced down Park Avenue. Forty blocks downtown, it sped into the strange and unique circular roadway that ran through the base of the old Helmsley Building and the towering Met Life Building over Grand Central Station. The curving, dark passageway was like a medieval tunnel, and the driver went at a speed that was so much like a race car that Gina, forced backward in the seat by the tug of the car's velocity, said, “Who's driving this? Mario Andretti?”

There were men with rifles who were almost invisible in the dusk settling over the pier, the East River, and the low skylines of the Brooklyn and Queens waterfronts across the river. Further to the south were the spans of the dreary industrial-looking Manhattan
and Williamsburg bridges and then the glamorous Brooklyn Bridge, whose hundreds of suspension wires shined like the strings of an enormous harp in the final light of this bright day.

The main entrance to the pier was a massive roll-up door installed in the 1950s, when the longshoreman's union still dominated the waterfront, the long-gone era of
On the Waterfront
. Its surface was covered with rust and marked with bold swirls of spray-painted graffiti. The car stopped near the rolled-up gate. The gate opened only with manually operated pulleys. Leaving the car, Gina bent forward and passed under the gate as soon as it was high enough. The chain pulleys screeched.