The Fifth Avenue Series Boxed Set (131 page)

He tried to scream for help, but all that left his Kabuki lips was a frazzled peep of a shriek.
 
Out of nowhere, a car door flew over his head and smashed in front of him on the street.
 
It was like a fiery comet morphed into something else by the heated atmosphere.
 

Emilio looked over his shoulder and saw that death was upon him.
 
He looked ahead of him, where the traffic was rearing to the right and colliding on Fifth.
 
People leaped out of their cars.
 
On the sidewalks, others ran.
 

He was almost there.
 
He could make it.
 
He pushed harder.
 
Click, click, click!
 
Click, click, click!
 
Another car erupted.
 
And another.
 
The sound was deafening.
 
He could hear the vehicles rising into the air behind him.
 
There was a great yawning as metal twisted against metal and melted in the rising heat.
 

Something caught his eye.
 
He looked down the length of his spread-eagle arms and saw that the caftan, once white, was now glowing orange in the flames licking behind him.
 
He was morphing from a moth into a spectacular-looking butterfly and he wasn’t that far gone to realize the terrible beauty of it.
 

He rounded Fifth, where now masses of people were running down the avenue to what they hoped was safety.
 
He hit the middle of the street and was about to cut left when a fiery tire bounced hard beside him and sprayed liquid flames onto his face before it somersaulted over the sidewalk and jackknifed like a demonic Halloween pumpkin into Central Park.
 

People were running alongside him.
 
He tried to keep up, but couldn’t.
 
The heat was becoming unbearable.
 
Hobble, hobble, hobble.
 
Click, click, click.
 
He watched them look at his Kabuki face and what he saw in their terror-filled eyes wasn’t what he expected.
 
The look was unmistakable.
 
What he saw was pity.

And then Emilio burst into a sphere of light.

The tire also had sprayed fire onto his caftan, and now it was he who was erupting.
 
In a matter of seconds, the fire curled up his body, rounded his legs, tasted the edges of the scalloped fabric and raced toward his outstretched wings.
 

He stood in the middle of the street as the flames consumed him.
 
The polyester caftan melted into him, searing his skin as it sank inward toward the bone.
 
Hands reaching and pulling, he tried to yank the caftan over his head, but he couldn’t—it now was part of him.
 
The art he created literally was part of him.

Cars were still exploding, still turning in the air, still shattering the faces of the buildings on either side of them.
 
More debris fell from the sky.
 
Something struck his head and his turban became alight with flame.
 
He batted his hands at it, but the polyester glued itself to his palms, destroying them.
 

The heat of it all caused his Kabuki makeup to melt.
 
He was aware of people coming near him in an effort to help, but the moment they saw his face, their lips twisted back in horror and they kept running.
 
“Sorry,” they said.
 
“Sorry.”
 
He was watching them run from him when his shoes hooked a manhole and he fell face first in the street.
 
With his arms stretched out at his sides, he now looked like a burning cross.

“WOAT!” he shouted as the flames seared his throat.
 
“FLAK!”
 

Something heavy struck his back.
 
He expelled a rush of air and managed to crane his neck around.
 
He was pinned beneath a car’s burning hood.
 
He writhed beneath it like a trapped bug.
 
Glass exploded into the street.
 
At this level, all he could see were feet running past him.
 
Why wouldn’t they help him?
 

“SHELP!” he cried.
 
“GLOP!”

And then, as the polyester continued to burn into him and cause him to melt along with the heat from the car’s burning hood, Emilio DeSoto, once one of New York’s most revered artists, realized through the pain that he was becoming every artistic expression he ever hated.
 

As his body roasted, his frying mind was aware that he had long passed any kind of impressionism, post-impressionism or realism.
 
He now was a bloody, sizzling abstract blob, which proved to him again just how cruel life could be and that there was no God.

He was floating, floating.
 
People stepped on him and screamed in the gathering rage of chaos.
 
And then, just before life left him, he was aware of the biggest explosion yet as a vehicle at the end of the street exploded.
 

But it wasn’t just any explosion.
 
It was more like a bomb and its force was enough to flip the hood off him.
 
As his eyesight faded, he watched people lift off the street and somersault weightlessly in the air.
 
Others were vaporized in the ferocious funnel of flames.
 
And then there was something else, something he barely could see.

All around him, the buildings were crumbling.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

10:37 p.m.

Wolfhagen checked his watch, turned on the television, backed away from it and watched New York City burn.
 

He flipped through the news stations and saw the same thing on all of them—part of the Upper East Side was destroyed.
 
Dozens of buildings had either collapsed or were severely damaged.
 
People were running in the streets.
 
Commentators were calling it a terrorist attack, but all were wondering why anyone would target this section of Manhattan since it was a residential area, which didn’t make sense to them.
 

As he listened, he learned that the explosion had leveled a portion of East 75th Street, with the damage spreading to 76th and beyond to parts of 73rd.
 
Hundreds were feared dead.
 
There was a crater on the corner of 75th and Fifth that suggested a powerful bomb was employed after two rows of cars parked curbside exploded from 75th and Madison and rolled west to 75th and Fifth.

Wolfhagen turned off the television.
 
This was no longer his city.
 
It and its people had turned against him years ago.
 
He could care less about the damage or the dead.
 

And besides, tonight was a night for many endings.

Earlier, he pulled the glass out of his feet.
 
The vase was too thick to cause any real damage—if it had been more delicate, then he really would have been in trouble as the glass would have cut more deeply into him.
 
It hurt to walk, but he’d bandaged his feet the best he could.
 
Like the pain in his split lip, he could handle it.
 

He went to his dressing room and changed into something casual—khaki pants, blue polo, comfortable sneakers.
 
Perfect for running if running is what he had to do, though given the condition of his feet, he hoped that wasn’t the case.
 

He stepped into the bathroom, combed his hair and removed a small bottle of makeup from the silver tray to his left.
 
He dabbed some beneath his eyes so he looked younger and less tired, and then stood back and appraised himself.
 
He hated what he saw and reached over to dim the lights.
 
It was magic.
 
Ten years fell from his face.
 
Already, the stubble was starting to show in spite of having shaved earlier, but it was tolerable.

For the past several hours, Carra had held him captive in this suite of rooms.
 
They’d fought earlier—certainly one of their uglier fights, but nothing like the one they’d had years ago in Paris, when he’d beat her so hard with a belt at the Ritz, there was a moment when he thought he killed her.
 
Now, he tried to remember what they fought about then but it escaped him.
 
Like so many things in his life, his memory had nearly given up on him.
 
He had difficulty recalling elements of the past, which probably was for the best given their smothering weight.
 
But it didn’t matter.

Right now, for Wolfhagen, it was all about the present.

He moved out of the room and into the bedroom, where the door across from him was bolted shut.
 
Before she left, Carra called her security team and now four men with outsized bodies and brains the size and consistency of rabbit shit were making sure he didn’t leave.
 

When she left earlier, he knew where she was going because Carra made sure he heard her on the phone, just to rub it in.
 
She was out on the town with Ira Lasker, a man Wolfhagen once had trusted everything to, just as he had with Peter Schwartz, Hayes and the rest.
 
At some point over the past year, Carra and Ira had started dating.

Fucking
, he thought.
 
They started fucking.

Along with everyone else, he’d seen their photographs in Vanity Fair, on Page Six, in the Times, all over the tabs.
 
Usually, their heads were held back and they were laughing in that way that the rich laughed when their only security was money and power, which could slip away from them at any moment.
 
And so they laughed on camera to sustain the illusion of lives others craved to have, but didn’t.
 

He’d read articles about her philanthropy work, which actually was quite cunning on Carra’s part because the grotesque amount of cash she threw around lifted her profile in ways that distanced her from him.
 
She was the largest pink ribbon breast cancer awareness ever had seen sweep through its doors.
 
She was PETA’s go-to person for the past five years, going so far as to pose nearly nude because God knows, when it came to saving animals, Carra would rather be naked than wear a piece of fur.
 
How she had rebuilt her image was ingenious.
 
She found the correct, high-profile ways to give back.
 
Have an obscure disease that needs funding and attention?
 
Just call Carra!

Lately, in each article that was written about her, she always managed to mention Ira, who betrayed Wolfhagen as so many others had along with him—including Carra—when he took the stand and testified against him.
 
Those people now were being slaughtered and Wolfhagen felt nothing for them.

He smoothed his hand down the back of his hair and thought again of Wood’s severed head
.
 
He still could see her dead eyes frozen in sightlessness, her blue face crisp with death’s rotten imprint and her bloody lips curling up from him as if they’d been dipped in week-old ketchup.
 
The image delighted him.
 
She was one of the biggest hypocrites he’d ever met.
 
She’d locked him away for three years even though she’d been one of the more enthusiastic members of his club.
 
Karma had caught up with her.
 
Karma grabbed her by the throat and took her down.
 
He couldn’t help a smile.
 

Maybe she still has a shot
, he thought.
 
Maybe she won’t burn in hell.
 
Maybe God will show her mercy and she’ll become one of his little angels.