Manhattan Lockdown

CHAPTER TWENTY

ROLAND FORTUNE LIKED people. He loved walking the streets of the city. He often left City Hall to make unexpected appearances in all the boroughs, walking several blocks each time, instantly and always recognizable. He ran almost every weekend in races in Central Park, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, and Flushing Meadows in Queens. He attended Mass in churches throughout the city and spoke at Baptist churches in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. And he was a regular presence at parties in the houses of the rich on the Upper East Side and in Tribeca. He was a man who loved the joy of living each day.

He was also an unrepentant liberal who knew how to practice an old style of politics. The police and fire department unions, overcoming their initial reluctance about a Puerto Rican mayor, embraced him because he cooperated with them on pay and benefits. This was a sea change. Ever since the Giuliani and Bloomberg years, the unions had expected resistance from City Hall. The leaders of the immense civil service populations, men and women in the sanitation department, the schools, all the myriad government agencies praised him as “cooperative, farsighted, inspirational.”

So when word had spread that Roland was very disturbed that he didn’t know where Sarah’s body was located, a group of men and women in the medical examiner’s office organized themselves to track down her remains. They found her in a temporary morgue that had been installed at the long-abandoned St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. The exterior white walls of the increasingly derelict building were graying under the steady accretion of rain and sunlight, soot and time. But even these decaying buildings on this bright afternoon somehow looked fresh.

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.”