Manhattan Lockdown (15 page)

Roland was wearing sunglasses as he left the unmarked sedan which took him from City Hall to St. Vincent's in the Village. He had ordered the car and only two security officers in plain clothes to accompany him. They walked near him as he approached the single functioning door, the access to the chilled room where at least seventy-five bodies were stored in the emergency morgue. This morgue was the one to which bodies that had no identification—no licenses, no passports, no wallets, no pocketbooks—were brought. Sarah Hewitt-Gordan was the first of these wrecked bodies that had been identified.

Roland was stunned by what he saw in the room as he entered: three orderly rows of dead bodies stretched out on the concrete floor. They were covered in identical plastic blankets, all blue. Even in the artificial chill, there was the faint but unmistakable odor of dead flesh. Sarah's body, he knew, was one of the sources of that odor.

A huge black man, a nurse in blue hospital scrubs, approached Roland, who asked, “Where is she?”

The nurse didn't speak. He led Roland down the aisle between two of the rows of bodies. Only one of the blue blankets had a sheet of paper attached to it. Her name was on it.

Visibly shaking, Roland Fortune knelt on the concrete floor. After several seconds, he reached toward the blanket. The massive nurse finally spoke, “That ain't a good idea, sir.”

Roland looked up. “Is it bad?”

The man nodded. “Big time.”

“How do you know it's her?”

“We had a picture.”

Roland glanced at his unsteady hands and then completed the movement he had started. He pulled at the upper edge of the blanket, revealing her head.

At first he saw her face in profile. Her eyes were open. There was a scratch on her forehead. The once vibrant skin was now gray.

He leaned closer to her. He gently turned her head so he could have a last look at the face he had loved. He recoiled. “Christ,” he screamed.

There was no right side of her face, only a mess of torn flesh and bone.

Roland jumped to his feet. The nurse grabbed the edge of the plastic sheet to cover Sarah's head. At the same time he reached across her body to Roland, who appeared about to fall. He grabbed Roland's left arm to steady him. Still bracing Roland up, he hustled him to the door. He was a powerful man and although Roland, too, was large, the man handled him as if he were a dish towel.

***

Roland sat in the back of the car for fifteen minutes. His guards had sensitive instincts. They stood fifteen feet away, waiting. Behind the tinted windows, Roland wailed, a crying that he hadn't experienced since he was a boy, when his father had just walked away from the family and disappeared for good. Roland never saw him again. If he were still alive, Reuben Fortune must have known his son had become one of the most famous people in the country. For some unidentifiable reason, Roland had a sense his father was living. Had Reuben ever returned, Roland would have kissed and embraced him.

Roland needed to reconnect to life. He left the car. Greenwich Village, his favorite part of the city, looked so profoundly quiet and peaceful in the afternoon sunlight: the old-world brownstones, the mature leafy trees that lined both sides of the narrow streets, and the roofs with their water tanks made of curved wood bound in hoops of iron.

He walked downtown on Seventh Avenue South. On any normal Monday afternoon the streets would be alive with people, but this was not a normal Monday. No subway trains were running. The elongated accordion-style city buses were off the streets. Light traffic, mainly empty yellow taxis, raced down the avenue. There would soon come a point when no gasoline would be left at any station in Manhattan, and even that light traffic would then stop.

Roland turned right, his security detail trailing him by several feet. Perry Street stretched out before him. Twenty years earlier, he had been in love with a young woman who lived in a single room studio apartment at 18 Perry Street. He remembered her name. She was Marilyn Botteler, a Kansas girl who sang with a rock band at places like CBGB in the seedy, druggy East Village. But he remembered most the intimacy of the small apartment. It was on the third floor at the back of the building overlooking a small patio with rusty lawn furniture surrounded by frail trees and with debris on the ground. He spent three summer months with her. Where in this vast world was she now? Was she even alive? He had once done a Google search for her. There were no results.

As he passed the steps of the building, wondering how many men and women had lived in that cozy apartment over the last two decades, he was recognized by two men walking hand in hand. They wore tight-fitting shirts, short pants and hiking socks and boots, one of the most recognizable outfits of gay men. They were startled when they recognized him. The taller man said, “It's you.”

The instinctive politician, Roland stopped to shake their hands. “It is indeed.”

The taller man said, “This is really surprising.” Smiling, he waited several seconds before asking, “Why are you here?”

“To see with my own eyes how people are doing. How are you?”

“Enjoying the day. It's like the days after 9/11. We don't have to go to work, it's like a weekday holiday. One of the fringe benefits of disaster.”

Roland was struck by the callousness of what the man said, and by the honesty. He was used to people filtering what they told him, often trying to anticipate what they believed he wanted to hear. But this man frankly was saying something Roland never expected to hear: his dominant selfish thought about the bombings and the deaths of a thousand men, women, and children was that he'd been granted a day and possibly more off work. Roland didn't know what to say, but there was no need to respond because other people were recognizing and approaching him. He continued to walk, surrounded by a small crowd. He felt revived. The presence of other people energized him.

For him the most familiar landmark in the West Village was the cigar store, Village Cigars, at the intersection of Seventh Avenue South and Christopher Street. The store and its vivid red-and-white sign had been there since the time he first saw the Village, when he was seventeen and on his first exploratory trip into the lower parts of Manhattan from the Bronx. He had come out of the No. 1 subway train at the intersection of Seventh Avenue South and Sheridan Square. The Village, as intimate and companionable then as it was now, was another country for him, so different from the housing project where he was raised. In all the years since that first sighting, he had seen that sign hundreds of times, in rainy weather, snow, fog, and crystalline days such as this day.

Before he could reach the store, three police cruisers and two unmarked cars arrived. They had come for him. His two security people had contacted their bosses, and word that the Mayor of New York City was walking essentially unguarded through the streets of the Village had reached Gina Carbone. “Who the hell are these bozos to leave him out there?” she had asked. “Get over there and pick him up. All I need today is a dead mayor.”

Reacting like a teenage truant, Roland said to Rocco Barbiglia, the lieutenant who had first told Gina about the attack as she had lunch with her family on Staten Island, “So she found me out?”

“Hey, Mr. Mayor, she's going to send you to the principal's office.”

G
ABRIEL HAUSER LOVED
his work. The seventy-hour weeks never fatigued him. In fact, they gave him a purpose and energy. He had reached the stage in his career when he could have left the demands of the emergency room, where the pace was dictated by the randomness of stabbings, shootings, accidents, heart attacks, and drug overdoses, for a private practice with its regular hours, predictability, and bigger income. But he had learned his trade in war zones. He'd experienced the miracle of repairing shattered bodies and restoring life. And he accepted the fact that often people were brought to him so damaged that the ingenuity of his hands and the creativity of his mind could not prevent their deaths.

Whenever he walked into the hospital, Gabriel felt a sense of relief, comfort, and the return to the familiar. He had the same reaction when he entered the apartment where he lived with Cam, the reassurance that he was in the place where he was meant to be. The doctors' entrance, through which he passed simply by waving a plastic card over an electronic eye, opened into a gleaming hallway.

The changing room had the look and feel and atmosphere of a locker room in a men's gym. There were rows of steel lockers, a sauna, a steam room, and shower stalls. As in a locker room at an old gym, the air was always moist.

When he reached his own locker, he was immediately taken aback by something totally unexpected: the combination lock to
his locker was missing. He pulled the door open. The locker was empty.

Gabriel heard Vincent Brown speak behind him. “Dr. Hauser, we had quite a scene this morning. Too bad you weren't here for it.”

Gabriel turned. Brown was in his starched scrubs. He was the senior doctor in the emergency room and, like a commanding officer in the Army, his uniform always looked “strack”—the Army expression for neat and stiff.

“What happened?”

“Mama Bear, Papa Bear, and Baby Bear came to take away your stuff.”

“Do you think, Vincent, that you can stop for once with the sarcastic shit? What's going on?”

Vincent Brown approached him. He was shorter than Gabriel. He had a neat mustache and the haughty look of a minaret. He was angry. “What the hell are you up to, Hauser?”

“Up to? I came here to work.” Gabriel, too, was angry. Suddenly he had the sense that he might hit Brown or that Brown might hit him. It was that infusion of street adrenaline.

“There were cops all over this place. They smashed your locker, they took your clothes. They showed me a picture of Patient X52.”

“So what?”

“So what? They asked whether you treated him. I said ‘yes'. They asked for how long. ‘Thirty minutes.'”

“Thirty minutes? That's bullshit.”

“They asked whether I saw you talk to him. ‘Yes'. How long? ‘The full thirty minutes,' I said.”

“I was with him for three minutes, you know that. What are you doing to me?”

“And they wanted to know whether you took anything from him. ‘Probably,' I said, ‘possibly.'”

“That's a lie, and you know it.”

“Or whether you gave him anything. I said something went back and forth between the two of you.”

“You weren't even on the floor then.”

“They asked to take a look at your treatment notes on Patient X52. You didn't make any.”

“Nobody made notes. This place was chaotic.”

“They asked if you knew that Patient X52 was really named Silas Nasar?”

“Silas who?”

“Certainly you did. That's the name written on the discharge papers you signed.”

“That's crazy. I never signed discharge papers.”

“You want to know what else?” Brown was trembling, the shaking that rage created. And Gabriel was trembling, too; it was the same rage. Brown said, “They took your personnel records.”

“Don't tell me you let them do that?”

“Of course I did.”

“Those are private, really private.”

“So what?”

“Did they have a search warrant?”

“Search warrant?”

“They can't just take my records.”

“Why not? What are you now? An ACLU lawyer and not just the Angel of Life?”

Gabriel stepped backwards, wanting to put enough distance between Brown and himself so that he didn't follow through on the urge to punch or push him.

“Tell me, Brown, what is it about me that you hate?”

“Just about everything.”

“Why are you lying? Why did you tell a reporter that I refused to work on Sunday?”

“Why was the guy with the birthmark the guy you ran to first?
Silas Nasar? The cops wanted to know that. Why was Silas Nasar so special to you?”

“What bullshit is that? He was the first hurt person I saw. Everyone else was dead.”

Brown, too, stepped back, widening the gap between them. He now had the familiar sardonic look. “I'm e-mailing the board of the hospital to ask for an immediate suspension of your privileges. I want you out of my hospital. Angel of Life. What unmitigated crap.”

W
HEN GINA CARBONE
arrived at the gritty corner of East 125
^th
Street and Lexington Avenue, she saw that her orders had been carried out, as they always were. She had personally given the order one hour earlier, at three in the afternoon, to cordon off entirely a ten-block area from East 125
^th
Street to East 135
^th
Street and from Lexington to Second Avenues. That area was now entirely quarantined—no one was allowed to move into it and no one could leave it.

And that heady rush of anticipation came from the view, which she had last seen during the night before the invasion of Kuwait and Iraq in 1991, of hundreds of armed men and women massed quietly in green uniforms, helmets and body armor, and the lethal mobile equipment of warfare. As a soldier in the strange, starlit desert of Saudi Arabia, she had been awestruck and excited by the vision of an immense Army concentrated and ready to move, only awaiting orders. And now she was the person who would issue the orders.

Billy O'Connell, the smartest of her deputy commissioners, said, “They're in Building 5 in Carver Towers.”

The George Washington Carver Towers were a bleak brick public housing project built in the 1940s or 1950s. Gina knew about the Carver Towers because they were constructed over the blocks where her father had been raised when East Harlem, in the 1930s and 1940s, was still an Italian neighborhood.

“What floor?” she asked.

“Parts of the fifth and sixth floor on the southwest side.”