Manhattan Lockdown

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

GABRIEL HAUSER IMMEDIATELY recognized, as only someone who had been in a war zone could know, that the intense pop pop pop sounds were from the exchange of rifle fire, not the repercussions of firecrackers. Several times in Afghanistan and Iraq he had been less than a hundred yards from fully engaged combat. Although the clatter of rifle fire was harrowing each time he heard it, it also had an odd resonance, as though it couldn’t be serious, it had to be a game that boys were playing, not a situation that could maim or kill. Just play-acting-nobody was going to get hurt. It always took seconds for that sense of unreality to wear off and for the fear of dying to overwhelm him, as it always had.

As a doctor, Gabriel had the instinct to run to people who might be injured. It was the reason he went to medical school and enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Army just as the Afghan war began. He wanted to help, not to harm, to restore people to life, not see them die. He first heard the unmistakable noise of gunfire as he was walking downtown on Fifth Avenue under the mature, rustling branches and leaves overhanging the tall stone wall that bordered the park. The bright air was just as it was on any other glorious, life-giving day in June. He turned and ran east in the direction of the dangerous clamor.

Ever since that time more than two decades earlier when the now-dead Jerome Fletcher had led him in his first runs on the long paths in Riverside Park, and then had waited in all his energetic vitality for the fifteen-year-old Gabriel to emerge from the shower, Gabriel had been an ardent, fluid runner. He had learned the terrain of the city through long runs everywhere in Manhattan when he was a resident at Mount Sinai working fourteen hours a day, seven days in a row followed by four days off. In those four-day intervals, he spent serene and dedicated hours running in Central Park and Riverside Park, along the concrete waterside walkways on the borders of the Hudson River and the East River, and from the windswept Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan about which Melville wrote in the first chapter of Moby Dick to the heights of the George Washington Bridge on the West Side and the Triboro Bridge on the east.

Gabriel also learned the internal streets of the island: the shining old cobblestones on Greene Street and Mercer Street in Soho on which the worn stones glowed in sunlight or glinted in the rain; the intimate, exciting length of Christopher Street in the West Village; and the sweeping empty corners of far West 14^th Street as it opened out to the Hudson River.

But he rarely ran on the grid of streets in East Harlem even though the western edge of it started on Madison Avenue just behind Mount Sinai. He knew there were housing projects spread through the area and that there were some old blocks with rundown brownstones in parts of East Harlem that were once Italian neighborhoods and had later become crack houses.

The closest he ever came to this section of the city was in the four New York City marathons he had run. A three-mile stretch of the course was on First Avenue from 96^th Street to 124^th Street where the avenue veered onto a ramp that led up to the old Willis Avenue Bridge and then into the South Bronx. Block after block on First Avenue was lined with old tenements where the ground floors were occupied by thrift shops, bodegas, bars, and even places that fixed flat tires on the sidewalks. There were one or two storefront evangelical churches with Spanish names. To the left some blocks were occupied by grim, red-brick housing projects named for African American men, most of them scientists, who had been famous in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but were now forgotten, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver. On this stretch of the autumn marathon there were no cheering crowds, unlike the thousands of ecstatic, applauding crowds in Brooklyn and the frenzied people at the long turn from the arduous two mile route of the 59^th Street Bridge arching from Queens over the East River into Manhattan.

On largely deserted upper First Avenue, grinning children bolted into the stream of thousands of runners, all of them by now silent and beaten up by the eighteen miles they had already covered. The kids wanted to high five as many runners as they could touch. Most of the determined, increasingly exhausted runners pressed straight ahead, no longer fueled by the thousands of onlookers. But not Gabriel: he slapped each hand that reached out to him.

Now on this limpid Monday afternoon, Gabriel trotted uptown on Madison Avenue from 86^th Street. He passed the small Parisian-style stores-the shops with French names carrying expensive baby clothes, the old-fashioned pharmacy at 90^th Street called simply the 90^th Street Pharmacy with its odor of medicinal compounds and ladies’ powder, and, at 93^rd Street, the cozy, companionable Corner Bookstore with its bright red façade and windows behind which new books were arrayed as deliciously as pastries. Above 96^th Street, the avenue changed into the same type of unappealing stores that lined the street level on First Avenue.

It was the acrid smell of cordite, the odor of igniting powder that was at the core of every gunshot, grenade, and explosive device, including roadside bombs and fireworks, ever made, that first arrested his attention and led him toward the blocks between 125^th and 129^th Streets. Some of the wounded men he had treated in Iraq and Afghanistan still exuded cordite’s odor when the injuries were closely inflicted.

Intensely flashing emergency lights on cars, police vans, and ambulances rotated everywhere. Gabriel saw at least five military armored trucks, each of them mounted by a bulky soldier in protective gear next to a machine gun. There were soldiers in the bleak inner spaces among the project’s towers. Even windows on the high floors had iron mesh, as if the tenants on the fifteenth floor needed protection from outside break-ins. On the ground floor of one of the buildings was a fluorescent-lit community center. Its windows were smashed.

Gabriel, dressed in his ordinary street clothes, a blue sports jacket, white button-down Brooks Brothers shirt, green chinos, brown loafers and no socks, realized that his next step was absurd. He approached a bored cop, a man who clearly was not one of the police warriors, and said, “I’m an emergency room doctor.” As if to validate himself he took his stethoscope out of the inside pocket of his jacket and held it out like a talisman. “Can you tell someone I can help if I’m needed?”

The cop’s name was Ballestros, brightly engraved on his plastic name tag. “I don’t think they need you. Everything that was going to happen here happened.”

It was not a rude or dismissive statement. The man had the relaxed attitude of a cop assigned to a street fair and accumulating overtime.

“Thanks, Officer,” Gabriel said. “How many people were hurt?”

“Don’t know.”

Suddenly a convoy of vehicles emerged from inside the cordoned area. They were mainly black SUVs with heavily tinted windows. The wailing of their sirens displaced all other sound.

“Important people?” Gabriel asked, nodding toward the convoy.

“They think so.”

Gina Carbone was in the back seat of the third vehicle. She gripped the handle embedded in front of her as the SUV made a sweeping turn onto 125^th Street. Almost instinctively, her long-ago training as a patrol cop still caused her to look at faces in a crowd. As clearly and distinctly as if she were staring at a photograph rather than scanning a chaotic crowd, she saw and recognized the Angel of Life, Gabriel Hauser.

“Can you believe it?” she said to Rocco Barbiglia.

Rocco-as good-looking as a young Robert DeNiro-glanced in the direction toward which Gina pointed. “What’s up, Chief?”

“Over there, look. The doctor who treated the guy with the big birthmark at the museum.”

“Right, I see him, Chief. The guy gets around.”

Gina said, “He’s Zelig, the man who shows up everywhere. He’s been talking to the cop next to him. Rocco, find out who the cop is and have him tell us what the Angel of Life had to say.”

Gina knew the ambulance that carried a person she described as “Gift No. 1” would not arrive at Pier 37 for another hour. She had given instructions for the ambulance to drive slowly through the West Village and the West Side Highway below 14^th Street as though on an ordinary cruise. That was a tactic, she knew, that would allow the ambulance to elude reporters or anyone else who might have seen it leave the George Washington Carver projects.

The ambulance was not going to any hospital. Silas Nasar was strapped and handcuffed to a gurney. Rifles were pointed at him.

Since she had some time before she, too, would arrive at Pier 37, she told her driver to stop at the service entrance to the Regency Hotel on 61^st Street. Accompanied by two guards dressed as hotel porters, she took the huge service elevator to the sixth floor. The elevator had the faint but distinct scent of the garbage which had been accumulating in the hotel’s basement during the long quarantine of Manhattan.

When she entered the room, Tony Garafalo was reading a book. One of the things that attracted her to him was that he was a complex, unpredictable man, so much more interesting than the conventional people who surrounded her in her daily life. During his years in the legendary Supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado, the most secure of all the prisons in the federal system, the place where the Unabomber, Arab terrorists, John Gotti, and Mexican drug lords were imprisoned, he had developed a passion for reading the classic books: Thackeray, Tolstoy, Conrad, even Jane Austen. As she approached him, he put down the Modern Library edition of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

“Hey, big guy,” she said, “pretty soon you can start teaching a course on the Great Fucking Books at Harvard.”

“Hey, doll. There’s only one course about fucking I want to teach.”

“I’m all ears, teacher.”

Tony led her to the elegant bathroom, all marble and glowing brass. Naked, she stood under the shower, her hair soon streaming black and straight, and Tony, muscular and powerful, stood behind her. She pressed her glorious ass into his groin. He kissed her hair and shoulders and the length of her spine. When he reached the firm cleavage of her ass, he gently turned her. He was on his knees. Her vagina was in front of his face. He pressed his tongue into her, the water flowing over his mouth. As his tongue caressed her clitoris from every angle, she moaned, “Tony, Tony.” Finally she said, “Fuck me.”

He stood. They were face to face, chest to chest under the clean flowing water. He entered her. She placed her hands on his shoulders. She was ecstatic. So was he.