City of Shadows

Chapter 6

11 September 2001, New York

Liam lifted the last of the bags into the back of the SuperChief. Maddy took them from him. ‘That the last of the stuff piled in the middle?’

He looked back into the dark interior of the archway. ‘Aye.’

‘Good. Because there’s no room left anyway.’ She ducked back inside, looking down the middle of the vehicle, an assault course of plastic bags and cardboard boxes. And that was just their essentials. ‘I guess I’ll find somewhere to tuck these. What’s in these bags anyway?’

‘Some of me books.’

‘We can replace books, Liam.’

He shrugged. ‘And a few comics.’

Maddy sighed, leaned over and pulled open one of the bags. ‘Oh, come on… and the Nintendo too?’

‘Well…’ He looked sheepish. ‘I thought…’

‘Jesus, we can pick another one of those up at any computer game store.’ She shook her head. ‘Just the difficult things. Just things we can’t easily replace, I’m afraid.’

He sighed and swung the bag ruefully into the open rubbish bin beside the vehicle.

Maddy poked her nose into his other bag. ‘OK, I guess these books can come aboard.’ She took the bag off him and disappeared inside the RV.

Liam looked back under the shutter. It was dark and gloomy: a vacant space once more, strewn with the cables and rubbish, boxes of tools, cartons of nuts and bolts, spools of electrical wire. A desk with the gutted remains of a dozen Dell computers left beneath it.

A large wardrobe that had contained, until this morning at least, a bizarre collection of garments. A twelfth-century leather jerkin, two Wehrmacht army tunics. Several Roman togas. An Edwardian-era suit and lady’s gown, a steward’s tunic and more. The clothes were all squirrelled away aboard the RV now.

It looked like the abandoned premises of some black-market, cash-in-hand PC repair shop. A sweatshop, a squat, a student dosshouse; the Aladdin’s cave of some foraging vagrant.

He offered it a lukewarm farewell wave. Thanks for the shelter. And smiled with amusement at his own mawkish sentimentality. How daft it was that a pile of damp bricks and crumbling mortar could make him feel guilty for abandoning it like this.

The RV’s motor rattled to life.

‘Come on, Liam.’ Maddy’s head was poking out of the passenger-side window at the front. ‘The sooner we’re off, the better!’

‘Aye.’ He raised his hand in acknowledgement and turned back to the dark interior. ‘Well there, Mr Archway, you’ve still got a job to do,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘After all… there’s this bridge above you that needs holding up for a while yet.’

‘Liam!’

‘I’m coming!’

Sal sat in the back of the RV on an oat-coloured seat worn through at the corners and showing yellow foam. Her seat belt didn’t work. She decided Bob could have stolen something that looked a little less old-fashioned, beaten-up and threadbare. She’d spotted glistening, spotless tour vans rolling through the streets of New York. Ones that looked almost futuristic, like spaceships on wheels. Instead they had this.

She looked out through the rear plastic window, scuffed and foggy, someone’s name and a love heart scratched into it. She watched Brooklyn receding like a movie back-projection: busy with cars, bumper to bumper at each intersection, waiting to get on the two lanes across the Williamsburg Bridge on to the lower east side of Manhattan; the morning ebb and flow of commuters, regular as bowel movements.

There was some relief mixed in with the sadness of a goodbye. At least she wasn’t going to see this particular morning ever again. Tuesday 11 September was at last playing through for them the way it did for everyone else. Once. One terrifying morning albeit seemingly running in slow motion.

Relief she wasn’t going to have to see that again. The swooping airliner. A sky filled with billowing smoke and the confetti cloud of millions of pieces of fluttering paper.

But, yes, sadness too. Brooklyn — this place, this side of the East River, had become so familiar to her. Almost as familiar as the suburbs of Mumbai that she’d grown up in. The Chinese laundromat with that old lady so proud of her office-worker son. The coffee shop from which she’d collected countless cardboard trays of coffee and paper bags of assorted doughnuts. The YWCA whose skanky showers with hair-clogged drains she and Maddy had had to use more times than she cared to remember. Their alleyway always cluttered with rubbish, the cobbles underfoot slightly tacky, the walls with fading sprayed gang tags.

And their archway.

Their home.

The RV juddered to a halt at a traffic light and just then — Sal knew it was due any second now — she spotted a subtle flash on the distant skyline: the pale sliver of a fuselage catching the morning light, moving fast and descending towards the twin pillars of Manhattan shimmering in the sun-warmed morning.

She lost sight of it among the skyscrapers, but then a moment later the distant sky was punctuated by a roiling cloud of orange and grey that drifted lazily up into the empty sky. No sound. Not yet. Just a silent eruption like an undubbed movie special effect.

Then, half a dozen seconds later, even through the closed window, over the chugging of the RV’s engine, she heard it. A soft, innocuous-sounding whump. Like the door of an expensive saloon car being slammed shut. The heads of pedestrians on the pavements either side of them turned to look towards the sky above Manhattan… and never turned back.

Green light. The Winnebago motorhome crossed the intersection and turned left on rolling and slack suspension that made the vehicle sway like a boat on a choppy sea.

Behind a row of apartment blocks, Sal finally lost sight of Manhattan, the Twin Towers and the billowing mushroom cloud of smoke and the frozen pedestrians as they headed up Roebling Street — a place where people and cars and taxis and trucks continued to move from one traffic light to the next in blissful, clockwork ignorance, at least for the moment.