Heart of the City (29 page)

AFTER SUNSET, Marcel’s unit had moved from West Forty-fifth Street and Broadway to West Forty-seventh and Seventh Avenue, near the McDonald’s. It was a busy night: they had to break up a couple of fistfights, call in tows of illegally parked cars. But, knock on wood, nothing serious. At around nine, Marcel studied the stream of pedestrians moving along Seventh Avenue and saw the girl with long hair who’d asked for restaurant advice a few hours earlier. The sight of her—purse over one shoulder, camera over the other—bobbing along with her friends was enough to make him chuckle. When she got within about five yards, Marcel grinned, winked at his partners, and called out, “Hey, Minnesota!”

She stopped for a second, and a group of camera-toting tourists behind her wavered before excusing their way past. Then her face flashed with recognition, and she waved and walked over. “Did you call me Minnesota?”

“That’s where you’re from, right?”

“My actual name is Robin.”

“Robin, huh?” Marcel said.

“Yes, like the bird.”

She was attractive, Marcel saw now, with long, dirty-blond hair, a moon-shaped face, and eyes that seemed by default to express both merriment and surprise. But she was a piece of work. Everything you said, she took at face value. Was she for real? Couldn’t she see he was yanking her chain? Or was she just playing the straight man? Either way, Marcel thought, you couldn’t resist razzing. “What’s a robin bird?” he said, squinting. “I’ve never seen a robin bird.”

She described its reddish orange breast and explained that they typically left northern regions during the winter because of the cold. She concluded by looking at the gold pin beside his badge and said, “I see your name is Officer Sim.”

“Good. Good. You ever think about, you know, joining a detective squad?”

While her friends looked on silently smiling, she and Marcel made small talk: about museums worth visiting, about her college, about his job, about street smarts (“Any stranger that comes up to you that’s not another tourist, keep walking,” he counseled).

Charlotte looked at her watch and faked a yawn. “Robin, I think we should get going.”

Marcel reached into his pocket for a card. “Here,” he said, talking to the whole group but handing it to Robin. “If you guys need some security pointers or other ideas, whatever, give me a call.”

“I’ll take the number,” Robin said, looking him in the eye. “But I would never call.”

“Then give me your number. I’ll check in after you see some of the museums, make sure you’re behaving yourselves.”

Robin looked at her friends. Charlotte shook her head. Jim shrugged. Then Nancy said, “Just give it to him.”

“If you officers ever need a break,” Robin said, “you should come to the Midwest.”

“Sure,” Marcel said, the sarcasm back now. “That would be my, like, number-one destination.”

“I’m not kidding. I bet you’d love hot dish.” Robin was referring to the ground beef and tater tot casserole that Minnesotans hold up as a kind of state dish. “Have you ever tried it?”

Marcel had no idea what she was talking about. A hot dish was what cops called a good-looking lady, but there was no way this girl would have known that.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, jerking his head at the other officers. “These guys’ll tell ya, I
love
a hot dish.”

Before saying their goodbyes, Robin asked if the officers would pose for a photo. She handed Jim her camera and stepped between the younger officer and one of his partners. Nancy got on his other side and put her arm around a bored-looking third
officer, on her left. Charlotte, having none of it, hung back with Jim.

“Is it okay if I put my arms around your shoulders?” Robin said. The officers chuckled.

“Yeah,” Marcel said. “Just don’t touch the gun belt.”

Then Jim froze the image: Robin and Nancy beaming amid three stony-faced cops, and in the background a blaze of orange lights.

BACK HOME on Long Island the next evening, Marcel opened his billfold and found the ATM receipt he’d written that girl’s phone number on. Robin.
Like the bird.
He looked at the unfamiliar area code, smiled, and shook his head. It was amazing how innocent some people could be. The easy-breezy body language, the aw-shucks questions. Not a care in the world. The girl didn’t even seem to realize that his remark about her being from Brooklyn was a joke; she answered as if he’d just made an honest mistake, one that she’d be happy to correct. Kumba
frickin
’ ya. If she really were from Brooklyn, she would have instantly detected his sarcasm, and probably flipped him the bird.

Still, he had to admit: there was something nice about her happy-go-lucky shtick. Did everyone have to see the world as darkly as New Yorkers did?

ROBIN WAS walking back to the hotel after another tough day of street interviews when her phone rang.

“Oh, hi there,” Robin said. She was surprised but pleased.

How were they doing? Officer Sim wanted to know. Did they need any other recommendations?

This is the nicest cop, she thought. And who would have thought to find him in New York City, where people were supposed to be so cold?

He told her that Sunday was his day off. He had some errands to run near Times Square. He could meet her and her friends for coffee. He had some other ideas, he said, for good restaurants and places to see and whatnot.

“We’re leaving the next day,” she said. “But um, well, okay, I guess that would be fine.”

They agreed to meet in her hotel’s lobby two days later, at 5 p.m.

As soon as she hung up, though, she felt something amiss. In the heat of the phone call, she’d forgotten that Jim and Nancy were returning home on Saturday. And Charlotte was leaving Sunday morning. That would mean just her and this cop.

“What do you think, Nancy?” she asked over breakfast the next morning.

“He seemed supernice to me. Plus, he was a good-looker.”

“I know,” Robin said. “But he’s a police officer, and from what you hear sometimes, a lot of them are players.”

“Hear where? In the movies? I thought you said he wanted to meet all of us.”

Two days later, after saying goodbye to her friends, she turned on the TV in her hotel room to catch up on the news. But she couldn’t concentrate. Hearing an ambulance siren, she looked out her window and down at the swarms of anonymous New Yorkers striding, their bodies turned in on themselves, in the streets far below. That officer was due in the lobby in about a half hour.

She slipped his business card out of her pocketbook and reached for her cellphone. “Officer Sim?”

“Call me Marcel.”

“It’s Robin.”

“Like I couldn’t tell. Robin, like the bird, right?”

“I’m so sorry, Marcel,” she said. “We’re all kind of feeling rundown. I don’t think we’re going to be able to meet up.”

There was a short silence before he spoke, and she thought she could hear him clearing his throat. “No sweat, Robin, of course,” he said. “Safe travels home, all right? Be good.”

MARCEL, WHO lived with his father and stepmom in Nesconset, had been well into the hour-and-a-half drive to Manhattan when Robin called to cancel. It sounded like an excuse. But women were unpredictable like that. It was one of the reasons being a bachelor sometimes felt easier than being married: no expectations. At thirty-six, he’d seen enough of life to know that at the end of the day, you only had yourself. When he was a teenager, gangs moved into Elmont Memorial High and shot dead one of his best friends. That year, he learned to defend himself with his fists. By the time he joined the NYPD in 2000, he had already worked as a firefighter, EMT, and rescue diver. He had divorced two years earlier—he wanted kids, she didn’t. He saw himself becoming one of those cops who was married to the job. From what he’d heard about the NYPD, you kind of needed to be. The biggest and most storied police force in America—there was no greater test of mettle. But just how soon that test would come was something he would never have predicted.

Not much changed in the weeks after that Minnesota girl blew him off. He kept up the twelve-hour shifts in Times Square, often now in plainclothes. His conversations weren’t with tourists anymore but with the homeless who slept in building vestibules and brushed off referrals to shelters. He brought them leftover soup and bread from nearby food pantries and restaurants. Before long, they rewarded him with information about street criminals. Many were military vets who would have easily qualified for public services but refused. He admired their determination to wrestle demons alone.

As July turned to August, buzz on the force turned to the first anniversary of September 11. The talk of tributes, benefit concerts, and memorials stirred memories that Marcel had long tried to wall inside. The cellphones in the rubble that wouldn’t stop ringing. The sight of severed arms and legs. The hats, the jackets. The wedding
ring on someone’s finger. The wallet-size photos of children floating in the flooded tunnels of the destroyed PATH station.

Marcel had been on a rare day off nearly a year earlier when his older sister called and told him to turn on the TV. One tower was already on fire, and now, as he watched, a plane vaporized into the second one. His heart flailing against his chest, Marcel leaped into a car with a few cop neighbors and sped toward the city. When he arrived at the Midtown North Precinct, his captain, remembering Marcel’s EMT training, ordered him to Ground Zero to help set up a forward triage center. No sooner had he arrived than the second tower fell, scattering clouds of debris through the streets and sowing pandemonium. Surrounded by screams and sobs, Marcel clawed through the whiteout and directed dazed pedestrians to safety.

Around noon, when some of the dust began to settle, he found his way to the Ten House fire station—so-called because it housed Engine 10 and Ladder 10, which had already lost several firefighters in the attack. In this grief-wracked setting, Marcel helped set up the South Forward Treatment and Triage Center, which was fast becoming a makeshift morgue. In between treating rescuers for injuries, respiratory problems, and exhaustion, he descended into the funereal quiet of the tunnels beneath the PATH station, bagging personal belongings and body parts.

A death that would haunt him for a long time was that of Officer Moira Smith. She was guiding people out of the South Tower and trying to save a woman from an asthma attack when the building collapsed. She would be the only female NYPD officer to die in the attacks. Marcel had met her a couple of times—she worked with one of his friends at a precinct attached to the police academy, where Marcel occasionally went for professional training. Smith was a thirteen-year veteran with a young daughter. Marcel had been impressed by her ability to balance motherhood with risky police work. No one had ordered her to Ground Zero—she went on her own, out of a sense of duty. And for her bravery, for doing her job, she lost her life.

Word had reached other officers that Smith’s mother had refused to accept her daughter’s death. She pleaded with rescuers to find her—or some sign of her. When a police dog returned from the debris one day with a gun belt that looked like Smith’s, Marcel put on a harness and dropped into the warren of voids the dog had emerged from. But after forty feet, the rubble-choked voids grew too narrow for passage. As he turned back, his heart sinking, he thought about Officer Smith’s mother and husband and daughter. He saw how 9/11 would be unlike any other tragedy he’d seen in his many years as an EMT and firefighter. He saw how its devastation would ripple for decades across an untold number of lives. The grief of survivors, he was sure, would soon give way to rage, depression, guilt, substance abuse, domestic violence, psychosis.