Manhattan Lockdown

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

IT WAS THREE in the morning when Roland Fortune, wearing only his underwear, looked at the Raj Gandhi blog that, as the reporters on CNN said, had “gone viral.”

Irv Rothstein and Hans Richter stood behind him in his bedroom at Gracie Mansion, the bedroom in which Sarah Hewitt-Gordan had slept with him, and made love to him, almost every night for the last year.

“Why,” Roland asked, “should I believe any of this? Why didn’t the Times publish this? If it was reliable, you’d think this guy’s newspaper would have it on its Internet site and on the front page.”

Irv said, “I spoke to this guy’s editors at the Times. They said he was following leads to this but they weren’t satisfied there was any adequate support, at least not yet.”

“And what does this guy Gandhi have to say? This was posted five hours ago.”

“Mr. Gandhi,” Hans said, “is dead.”

“What?”

“Gina sent cops to his apartment three hours ago,” Hans Richter said. “The door was closed but unlocked. There was a single gunshot wound in the middle of his forehead.”

Roland stood up. He was shivering. He draped his bathrobe over his shoulders. On the nightstand below the warm glow of a table lamp was the brown bottle that contained his replenished Vicodin. He opened the cap and picked up a glass of water. As he was shaking two of the pills into his palm, Irv said, “Do you really need those?”

“Who the fuck are you to tell me what I need and don’t need?” Roland shouted.

“It took us four fucking hours, Mr. Mayor, to wake you up so that you could look at this blog,” said Irv, also shouting. “Four fucking hours. You must have had five of those before you went to sleep.”

Roland, raising the palm of his hand to his mouth, drank water. “Now that’s two more.”

Irv said, “Hans, why don’t you tell Mr. Mayor what’s happened while he’s been in Wonderland, beyond the Looking Glass?”

“Harlan Lazarus, the once-upon-a-time judge himself as he reminds everyone, got a federal judge to sign a search warrant four hours ago, not long after this blog was posted, to have the FBI and Secret Service go into Pier 37.”

“And?” Roland asked.

“They found a completely modern operation setup, with prison cells.”

“And?”

“No one was there. All the cells were empty. They examined the cells for fingerprints and DNA. When they checked the federal data banks, they found no matches for anyone.”

“What is this place?”

“Gina used money from the police budget to have this facility constructed over the last three years.”

“She never told me about this.”

“That’s interesting,” Irv, now calmer but still intense, said. “She claims you authorized it. That you both thought it was useful to have a secure facility if there was a terrorist attack.”

“That never happened. She never discussed that with me.” Roland paused. “What did she say about the blog?”

Hans answered, “That it was all a fantasy. The place was never used. She says everyone who has been arrested so far is accounted for and is now being held in Central Booking downtown or in a heavily guarded wing on Rikers Island. No secret prisoners. Everything by the book. Everything is transparent, she says.” “Where is she now?” Roland asked.

Irv answered. “She just finished a press conference. Here’s another thing you don’t know because you were in the land of dreams. Three hours ago she led a military-style operation on the lower East Side. She wiped out a group of Arabs who had been living in apartments for the last few months around Tompkins Square Park. Seventeen of them were killed. Four arrested. The television films make it look like a major battle in Baghdad, Syria, places like that.”

“Why didn’t I know about this?”

“Are you kidding, Mr. Mayor?” Irv asked. “This happened three hours ago. Every time we woke you up, you dropped back to sleep.” Irv picked up the pharmacy bottle that held the Vicodin. “Dr. Sleep. Eventually, you know, Dr. Death comes with enough of these magical little pills. What were we supposed to do? Take you out in front of the cameras in your underwear?”

“Where is Gina now?”

“She’s at the Regency, resting with her boyfriend.”

“The Mafia guy?”

Irv said, “The once Mafia guy, if there is such a thing. Mr. Garafalo is supposedly now a reformed member of the human family. He’s a sales manager at that beautiful Mercedes dealership in Queens. Don’t you remember? You said two years ago that it was nobody’s business what lovers a grown woman decided to have. That male police commissioners all had girlfriends. Power is an aphrodisiac, you said, and that was as true, you said, for women as for men.”

“That’s right. It’s her business. One of my male commissioners has several boyfriends.”

“And,” Irv said, “Mr. Garafalo is married to a nice Italian girl and they have a nice house in Bay Ridge.”

Roland, now fully awake as if his screaming had rejuvenated him, said, “What else has happened while I was sleeping, apparently deep in the cave of Morpheus?”

“Andrew Carter’s people have been trying to reach you. And your buddy Harlan Lazarus landed by helicopter fifteen minutes ago at Pier 40 on the Hudson River and wants you to go see him.”

“Me go to see him? Pigs will fly before that happens. He knows where I live if he wants to see me.”

Inside the shower stall were the bottles of fragrant soap and shampoos and other jars that Sarah Hewitt-Gordan had last used just two days earlier. At the sight of the liquids that gave her the scent that he always found so alluring, Roland felt completely alone in the world, realizing that her death meant something essentially simple: He would never see her again. He had never lost anyone so close to him. When he suddenly recognized that he was about to cry, he turned the flow of shower water as high as it could run and stood directly under the powerful, noisy stream, and cried. There was no way, he believed, that the two men standing near the big bathroom’s entrance could hear him. His tears were swept away by the cascading shower water. Eventually he turned off the water only when he believed that his urgent, unexpected, convulsive need to cry had passed. When Roland stepped out of the shower he draped a towel over his head and rubbed his abundant black hair and his eyes, convinced that, if these two men on whom he so much relied saw the redness of his eyes, they would think it was caused only by soap and shampoo.

Glancing into the steamy mirror as he prepared to shave, he said, “Irv, I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

Irv said, “Not to worry, Roland. My wife does it all the time, especially when I wake her at three in the morning for a fuck. She gave up the ‘I’ve-got-a-headache’ routine years ago. Now she just yells and tells me to go fuck myself.”

An hour later, as they sat in Gracie Mansion’s gleaming kitchen, Gina Carbone looked radiant, confident, and utterly at ease. She sipped coffee and with a small sharp knife slit in half the two hard-boiled eggs that Juanita, the full-time cook from Guatemala who lived in a neat little apartment on the second floor of the mansion, had prepared for the commissioner of the New York City Police Department and the movie-star mayor. The commissioner and the mayor often had predawn meetings. Juanita, heavy and matronly, loved the always polite mayor and was in awe of the vivid police commissioner.

“I had room in the department budget to renovate and modernize that pier, Roland. I had no reason to ask you if I could authorize a space that I thought might be useful if there was unrest in the city. And you’ve always told me I had a free hand to make New York the safest city in the world.”

“My concern,” Roland Fortune said, “is not that you had an off-the-books, unpublicized facility built, Gina. My concern is that a New York Times reporter told the world that you had made secret arrests.”

“Nobody did that, Roland. There’s never been a single person locked up there. Your friend and mine, Judge Harlan Lazarus, had his agents go through it. No one except people on my staff was ever there. And the New York Times didn’t report any of this. This Mr. Gandhi was off on a frolic of his own. Just two hours ago the Times posted a statement on its website saying its editors were aware that he was investigating the pier, the arrests and me, but that Gandhi never gave his editors enough information to corroborate anything.”

Roland picked up his cell phone. It had been facedown on the table next to his coffee cup. “Gina, I have a text message from Harlan Lazarus that came to me about an hour ago. He wants you to resign.”

“So what?” She was, as always, direct, all business. “Do you want me to resign? Do you?”

“I need to know the truth.”

“The truth, Roland, is that I’m the only person who has fought this battle. Harlan Lazarus hasn’t. Andrew Carter hasn’t. I’m the one who has been in the ring. I’m the one who has stopped cadres of fanatics from carrying out more attacks. I’m the one who has made arrests of dangerous people. I’m the one who has developed the information and sources that prevented three goons from blowing up St. Patrick’s.” Gina took a sip of hot coffee. “And, Roland, I’m the one who has given you the credit for masterminding this war. Harlan Lazarus wants me to resign? That’s rich.”

“And what have you been doing with Gabriel Hauser?”

“Roland, what’s the matter with you? I’ve got a police force with 40,000 people. Seven, just seven, have taken an interest in an outspoken, discredited, holier-than-thou queer who has been in the wrong places at all the wrong times, a guy with an axe to grind that would make Harry Reems seem like an altar boy. Why wouldn’t I have seven people treat him as what we in the business of law enforcement like to call a PIN-a person of interest? I’m sorry his dog got hurt. He has shown up in too many of the wrong places at the wrong times.”

“Where is this doctor now?”

“Among the missing. We started looking for him as soon as the blog went out. His apartment is empty. Nobody’s there.”

“What about his boyfriend?”

“If you think we have him, we don’t. That’s bullshit, too. We have had our people talk to him. He’s a spurned lover. He knows nothing except what is in those e-mails, those love notes, between Gabriel Hauser and the man he loved and had to leave behind in Afghanistan. And that man, the CIA has told us, is a dedicated jihadist. And that man, Dr. Hauser’s lover boy, wanted the doctor to meet Silas Nasar.”

“And who, Gina, is Silas Nasar?”

“We wish we knew.”

“The Times reporter said you had him.”

“Wish I did. We think he’s the cousin of Gabriel Hauser’s love interest in Afghanistan.”

Roland’s cell phone vibrated with another incoming text message. It was from Harlan Lazarus. You must announce that Capone has resigned. Imperative.

Gina ate a segment of the boiled egg. “Do you want to tell me what that is?”

“More from Lazarus. He still thinks your name is Capone. And he still wants you to resign. Now.”

“So tell him Capone will resign. After all, Capone has been dead for seventy-five years.”

Roland stared at her. Somehow she was different now from the competent, straightforward woman he had known for three years. He was, he now realized, afraid of her for there was another dimension to her. She was not the hard-working and intuitively smart girl from the outer boroughs in whom he had had so much confidence.

When the next incoming text message made his cell phone vibrate, and as he reached to pick it up, Gina said, “I’ll bet it’s Lazarus again. This is the era of the serial texter.”

Roland read the text, leaned across the kitchen table, and held his phone in front of her. The message read: This order is from the president.

As Roland retrieved the cell phone, he was surprised to hear Gina say in Spanish, “Juanita, leave the kitchen. Mr. Mayor and I need to talk.” Roland was surprised because he had no idea she could speak Spanish with such apparently effortless fluency or that she would give an order to a member of his personal staff.

Juanita left.

“Talk to me, Mr. Mayor, what do you plan to do about this?”

“No,” Roland said, “you’re the strategic thinker. What is your plan? What, for example, just as starters, do you plan to do about the questions every pain-in-the-ass reporter will ask you about the last blog of a dead reporter?”

“I already answered that. Haven’t you seen the press conference I did at one this morning after what’s being called the Battle of Tompkins Square?”

“No, I was sleeping.”

“I know that. I tried to get you involved. Hasn’t Irv shown you reruns?”

“Not yet.” Roland waited. “And so enlighten me, Gina. What did you say about the blog?”

“That of course my department had multiple complex facilities for dealing with unprecedented acts of hostility. That we had people trained in the arts of counterinsurgency. That we had confidential informants and invisible as well as visible resources for protecting a city with more than seven million people.”

“And what did you say when they asked you about secret arrests, dark prisons, torture?”

“That Mr. Gandhi had brought the concerns he had to our attention and that they were unfounded. Those things never happened. That even the editors of the Times had distanced themselves from him and his concerns.”

“You don’t think that will stop the questions, do you? You’re living in dreamland, Gina, if you think that will satisfy anybody.” He stared at her, trying not to appear as unsettled as he now was. “And you know what, Gina? I still have questions and doubts. There was a great deal of difficult, disturbing information in Gandhi’s report.” He sliced the hard-boiled egg. “And much of it was about you.”

Gina Carbone placed her own cell phone on the table. “Now listen carefully to me, Mr. Mayor. Only you can fire me. Not our invisible president who is still missing in action, a candy ass who still hasn’t found the time to come to our city. And that scarecrow Lazarus can’t fire me. Only you can.”

“Commissioner, you can resign.”

“That’s not going to happen. It’s not in my nature.”

“Who,” Roland asked, “is Tony Garafalo?”

Ignoring the question, Gina spun her iPhone on the table. “Do you want to know why you’re not going to fire me and why I’m not going to resign?”

Roland stared at her, waiting. His right hand trembled.

“Because,” Gina said, “you’re a drug addict, a pillhead, what’s called on the street a garbagehead.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I have a damaged shoulder. The doctors gave me Vicodin to deal with it.”

“Listen to me real carefully, Roland. That’s the first and only prescription from an actual doctor you’ve had in years. From the start your security detail has had officers who are totally devoted to me. In this tiny magic phone and on my office computer I have confidential reports and dozens of pictures of well-dressed men and women, otherwise known as classy drug dealers, going to your office and coming here to deliver Vicodin, Xanax, Percocet, Oxycodone, every scheduled drug known to modern chemists, and in those pictures you’re handing over cash for these yummy pills.”

After staring at her for twenty seconds, Roland said, “Let me tell you something, Gina. I am the mayor of the largest city in this country. I take that responsibility seriously. I didn’t get here by being just a pretty boy, or the son of famous parents, or by winning the lottery. I got here, believe it or not, by hard work and by caring about people. I came up off the streets. I’ve been threatened by people before. When I was a kid my father taught me that if a bigger kid pushed me around I should go find a baseball bat and swing hard at the other kid’s head.”

She was as steady as ever. “Roland, I’ve got the bat. It’s in this phone. I know how to swing at heads, too. We’re not that different. In fact, we’re brother and sister.”

“Let me ask you something. Who are you? We have a city out there that’s under siege. Thousands of people are dead. No one, no one, seems to have an exit strategy. Do you really think that by threatening me with being a garbagehead I’m going to make decisions, or not make them, that I think are in the best interests of the city? It’s not a good idea to threaten me.”

The commissioner of the New York City Police Department stood up. “You know what, Mr. Mayor. I’ve got my responsibilities, too. It’s not good for the city to be run by a drug addict.”