Manhattan Lockdown

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

GABRIEL HAUSER, AS soon as he changed into fresh clothes in the quiet apartment, walked four miles down Fifth Avenue, all the way to the enormous nineteenth-century arch that dominated Washington Square Park. During most of the walk he was in the middle of the grand avenue. Thousands of people crowded the sidewalks and the avenue itself. There were no barricades. It was like one of those street fairs that sometimes closed long segments of other avenues, but never the jewel of Fifth Avenue.

Gabriel turned left instead of entering the park that he always associated with the early Henry James novel, Washington Square, which he’d read in his last year in high school. He headed to the East Village. At the corner of Kenmare and Mott Street, in the old, largely abandoned St. Vincent’s Church, was the homeless shelter where, for three years, he had volunteered once each week to treat the street people, an ever-shifting population of suspicious, sometimes bizarre, men and women, often with stunned, always silent children, who drifted in and out of the fetid shelter. It had sixty beds, no partitions, and two toilets that smelled like Army latrines. At one far end of the gymnasium-sized room was a door that led to a smaller room where, three times each day, groups of people from Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous gathered for their meetings.

One of the full-time staff members, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict who had tattoos even on his face, shouted, “Listen up. The doctor’s here. Anyone want him to take a look-see?”

Five hands went up, all from black and Puerto Rican mothers with small children. Gabriel spent ten or so minutes with each of the kids. Not one had even an elevated temperature. All of the mothers bore that shell-shocked look of the displaced Iraqi and Afghan women he had often seen in tent camps. Not all of these women in the church basement, he realized as he spoke to them either in English or his sufficiently effective Spanish, had any idea or cared that bombings and battles had been raging for days on the streets of the city in which they lived. The poor lived entirely in their own heads. Nothing and no one else concerned them.

Gabriel was here to hide. On his long walk downtown to the shelter he had looked at his cell phone and saw Raj Gandhi’s blog, together with the entire video of his meeting on the bench of the church. And then an automatic e-mail from NPR entered his phone, carrying the news that Raj had been murdered, shot one time in the center of his forehead. Fear had given a special urgency to Gabriel’s original plan to treat the homeless, a job that normally took hours, but this time, on this day, it had taken far less than even an hour.

Still frightened and confused, not wanting to leave the homeless shelter, Gabriel walked into the big kitchen adjacent to the basement with its dozens of neatly arranged rows of cots. The kitchen, at least forty years old, was immaculately clean. Gabriel had arrived during the long interval between meals, and there were no cooks, food servers, or other volunteers there.

Everything in the kitchen, the countertops, the sinks, the industrial-size stoves, was made of gray steel and the surface of the stove was black iron. All that steel and iron had been cleaned hundreds of thousands of times with steel wool pads and ammonia. It shined with a scoured luminosity.

And the pots, pans, and kettles, all carefully put away, many of them dented, were polished and clean as well. The old linoleum floor glowed. Obviously it had just been swept and washed with a mop soaked in ammonia and water. Gabriel felt an urgent need not only to remain in this anonymous but familiar place but to work with his hands. As he looked at the entire basement from the vantage point of the kitchen, he saw that at least half the cots were abandoned, unused. He’d learned that the transient men, women, and children who came and went from this place never made the beds in which they had slept or just rested for a few hours. So each unused bed was covered with crumpled, off-white sheets, wrinkled wool blankets, and pillows with half-removed pillowcases. Worn, dirty towels were dropped everywhere.

Gabriel went to the row of steel green army-style lockers in which newly washed and freshly pressed sheets and blankets were stored. He was a methodical man. From the lockers he collected two sheets, a blanket, a pillowcase, and a towel. He carried them to the first cot in the nearest row of cots. He put the fresh bedding on the floor next to the first cot and stripped away from that cot the soiled sheets, blankets, and towels.

Whoever had last used the cot was foul. There were stains of shit and urine on the sheets. He piled the filthy sheets, blankets, and towels on the other side of the bed. With a practiced hand he swept bits of debris off the bare, exposed mattress and then carefully spread the clean, fitted sheet on the mattress. Once he had created a smooth surface, he carefully draped the top sheet and the green wool blanket over the bed, turning down the upper edges of the top sheet and the blanket. He then stripped the stained pillowcase off the pillow, shook the exposed pillow which had indelible sweat stains, and then slipped the fresh pillowcase over it. He placed the pillow in the center of the cot. The cot’s simple orderliness was a marvel. It had taken him fifteen minutes to create this.

Always adept at math, Gabriel calculated he would use six hours to remake each of the unoccupied beds. He could even extend the time by helping to prepare suppers, serve the food, and eat the same food. His plan was to spend the night in one of the cots if the shelter was not completely filled. It almost never was. The fact that the city would likely remain locked down for the rest of this night made no difference since stranded out-of-towners would never spend the night and sleep among street people in a homeless shelter.

But Gabriel Hauser didn’t spend the night in the basement shelter. At seven, as he was scrubbing the last of the dishes in the hot, soapy water-there was no automatic dishwasher-six men, two in suits and the rest in combat gear, entered the basement. He knew instantly why they were here, even though he had never seen any of them before. Gabriel’s hands were soapy. He shook his hands vigorously but didn’t bother reaching for the already soaked dish towel to dry them as the lead man, in a suit, approached him. He carried handcuffs. “Put your wrists together behind you,” the man said.

Gabriel did that. They were plastic handcuffs. They were pulled so tightly he worried about the circulation to his hands. But he said nothing. Everyone, all the homeless people he had fed and cared for and whose beds he had cleaned, was absolutely quiet. Whatever was happening to the doctor was none of their business.

The Holland Tunnel, unlike the Lincoln Tunnel two miles further uptown, could only be reached by following the maze of streets in old downtown Manhattan. Despite all the new buildings in that area, including the new triangular tower, the tallest building in the world constructed on the site of what had been in Gabriel’s eyes the two ugliest buildings he had ever seen, the World Trade Center Towers, the access to the Holland Tunnel still was a crazy complex of streets such as Vesey, Carlton, and Canal Streets that he had always avoided.

Still in the blood-constricting handcuffs and still silent despite the questions he heard from the three other men in the unmarked, over-powered Chevy Impala, Gabriel didn’t see any other vehicle as they approached the mouth of the brightly illuminated tunnel. He did see dozens of Army soldiers, dressed in the same desert-gray uniforms he had worn in the Army, on the sidewalks. The barriers that blocked access to the tunnel were moved to the side as the Impala, at a steady ten-mile-per-hour speed, approached. This trip, he knew, had been prearranged. How, he wondered, had the men who entered the homeless shelter known he was there?

And then the answer, the painful answer, came to him. Cam had told them.