Manhattan Lockdown

CHAPTER TWELVE

GINA 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.

Unlike Pier 37’s decaying exterior, the inside glowed with the crafted, high-tech clarity of the inside of a spaceship. Gina walked to an interior door, which slid open noiselessly. There were thirty-two gleaming prison cells. She knew there were eighteen men in the cells, all seized that morning in the coordinated, secretly conducted raids. They were all silent as Gina passed by them. Some of them looked astonished to see a woman.

Her destination was a room whose door was printed with the words “Interview Station.” A bearded thirty-year-old man named Abdullah Hasan sat at a table. There were two detectives in sports jackets in the room, each far larger than Hasan. They were unarmed. Hasan seemed to smirk when a woman entered the room.

“You’re supposed to stand up when I come into a room,” Gina said.

He looked puzzled, as if wondering why anyone would ever stand up for a woman.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked.

Hasan glanced at the two men, obviously looking for answers from them, for sympathy, for intervention. They were men, after all, cohorts.

“Do you know who I am?” she repeated.

He shook his head. There was an arrogance in the gesture, a look she recognized as contempt.

He said, “You tell me.” Just those three words made it obvious he was fluent in English.

Gina punched the side of his head. It was a sharp strike. He wasn’t wearing handcuffs or restrained in any way. Although staggered by the unexpected force of the punch, he managed to stand up. He scowled at her.

Gina stepped forward. She hit him in the stomach. He bent forward, struggling for breath.

“Don’t you talk fresh to me, fella,” she said.

One of the guards picked up the overturned chair and eased Hasan into it. When Hasan stopped gasping, the guard poured water for him. In a polite voice, he said, “Drink this.”

Hasan did.

“Let me tell you something, Mr. Hasan,” Gina said. “I know you know who did this. You’re a smart man. We’ve known about you for a long time. We know you like to do deals. We can do a deal for you. Tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Tell us who worked on this with you, who had the idea, who acted on the idea, and where all your friends are now. What their plans are. You help us and we can help you. You give us something and we give you something. We know what a good businessman you are. You’re great at bargaining. We have the bargain of a lifetime for you. Give us the truth and you can get anything you want.”

Bargaining was indeed familiar territory to Abdullah Hasan. “What do you think I know?”

“Come on, Mr. Hasan. That’s not the way bargaining works. You think about where you are right now, and let me tell you what happens to you if you don’t tell me the truth. Nobody knows where you are. You don’t know where you are. We know. Lots of people were killed today. Who knows, maybe you were, too.”

His absolutely black eyes stared at her, barely blinking. Gina, who had for years dealt with street drug dealers, leaders of Puerto Rican and Nicaraguan gangs and Italian Mafia soldiers, recognized that this was an intelligent man. She also recognized, instinctively, that he was the kind of man who might roll over on his cohorts and cooperate. He was a coward, a punk, an opportunist. She actually admired those few Italian, Russian, and Puerto Rican gang members who would never rat on their buddies and would go to jail for years in the crazy belief in the integrity of their silence and loyalty.

He said, “I’m hungry. Can I have some food?”

This was a good sign. He wanted something. Smiling gently at him, Gina said, “Detective, please get him some food.” She paused. “Mr. Hasan, remember, we can help you. Just relax. These men will stay with you. Talk to them.”

Gina Carbone left the cell.

A panel truck marked with the words Jeeves Linen came to a stop on 61^st Street between Madison Avenue and Park Avenue. Engine running, the van idled for thirty seconds near the service entrance to the elegant Regency Hotel. Three men dressed as hotel workers scanned the nearby areas. One of them gave a signal, an upraised hand waving slightly, and the rear door of the van opened. An automated lift brought down to the sidewalk a large bin containing neatly folded sheets, napkins, and tablecloths. As the bin was rolled on its steel wheels toward the open service entrance, Gina Carbone walked alongside it and into the hotel.

With three armed guards, she took the service elevator to the tenth floor. Her room was the closest one to the service elevator on that floor. As she opened the door, she said to the guards, “Did you make sure you put a mint on the pillow?”

It was the kind of quick, joking comment that made the cops she came into contact with relaxed and loyal; one of the reasons why, even as a woman, she had the respect of most of the forty thousand cops who worked for her. The commissioner she replaced was a lawyer from a big law firm, a partner of the last mayor. That commissioner, her predecessor, was a haughty bald guy who was derided as an ineffective, effete snob by the whole force, from captains to the new recruits.

The cops who regularly served on her security detail were so loyal that they never broke the code of silence about her personal life. They knew about Tony Garafalo, who was waiting for Gina Carbone in the living room of the suite. He was the supervisor of the service department at a big Mercedes Benz dealership in Brooklyn. He was married. He had three teenage kids. He had once served eight years in a federal prison after he was convicted of intimidating witnesses who had been called to a grand jury to testify about the Gambino family.

Tony Garafalo stood in the middle of the living room. “Hey, babe,” he said.

Tony Garafalo was Gina Carbone’s lover.