Manhattan Lockdown

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

JOHN HEWITT-GORDAN, WHO had arrived on the second flight into the reopened LaGuardia, was driven in one of the mayor’s unmarked, all-black SUVs over the same bridge that the president and the mayor had crossed two days earlier. But the retired British major didn’t glance out of the window as the SUV made the long and curving sweep on the upper roadway from the dreary Queens neighborhoods to the view of the celestial city.

Today there were mist and rain for the first time in more than a week. But, even in the midday gloom, the eastern skyline of Manhattan was still visible.

His thirty-year career in Her Majesty’s Army had brought him to the city only three times. The utilitarian and homely Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were still standing then, and his beloved Sarah had been studying at Cambridge.

Instead, as this over-powered vehicle Roland Fortune had insisted on providing him sped over the wide surfaces of the renovated bridge, John absentmindedly thumbed through worn copies of popular magazines that had accumulated in the elastic pouches along the sides of the rear doors. Utterly coincidentally, he picked up a worn copy of People, a magazine at which he had never once glanced before. The frequently thumbed pages were flexible and dirty, almost distasteful.

He was about to slip it back into the elasticized pouch at the moment he saw a large picture of Sarah Gordan-Hewitt and Mayor Roland Fortune. They were radiant, life infused, in evening dress. Never, he thought, had his daughter, this flesh of his flesh, looked so beautiful, a woman obviously in love with the man holding her hand, and with life, with all the years she was entitled to believe she had before her.

The SUV didn’t make the customary turn to the left as it approached the Manhattan side of the long bridge beyond the toll-booths. Instead, it took the direction to East 125^th Street, to the heart of East Harlem, and as it sped down that wide street to the West Side, its sirens began to blare and its police cruiser lights flashed. Other traffic stopped. The mountainous bags of garbage had already been removed from the sidewalks. The loud, light-flashing SUV did not stop at any of the red lights. At the end of West 125^th Street it turned onto the West Side Highway and sped downtown.

Given all he had heard over the last several days on the BBC, John Hewitt-Gordan expected to see a scarred city. So far, to the extent he sometimes stared out of the tinted windows, the city was unmarked, unharmed, intact. To his right the Hudson River flowed gently seaward, to New York Harbor, as it had done for thousands of years. To his left were the staid, monumental buildings lining Riverside Drive.

The van exited the West Side Highway at West 14^th Street. The closed, steadily deteriorating St. Vincent’s Hospital was only five minutes from the exit. Standing on a concrete platform, just as he had promised, was Roland Fortune.

As soon as the van’s door was opened for him, John Hewitt-Gordan, agile and graceful, stepped out effortlessly even though he was nearly seventy. He embraced Roland, the first time this had happened instead of their customary and formal handshake.

John asked, “Can we see her?”

“She’s inside.”

Together they walked through the white industrial doors that had once served for deliveries to the now decaying hospital. The big room was far cooler than it had been when Roland was brought there a day after the first explosion, when the rows of bodies lay under blue tarpaulins. Now, although the warehouse room still served as a temporary morgue, the rows of the dead were in identical silver caskets. Roland noticed that the space was cooler, and he noticed too that the unique, unmistakable odor of rotting human flesh had largely dissipated, although it was still there in traces.

“My God,” John whispered, “how many people have died?”

“More than fifteen hundred. This is one of at least thirty temporary morgues.”

“Where is my daughter, Roland?”

The huge black nurse who had first taken him to Sarah, and who had warned him not to pull back the tarpaulin to look at her, was still there. Roland wondered how many breaks the dedicated man had taken in the last four days.

Someone had alerted the nurse to the fact that the mayor was returning. Just as a few days earlier when there were no names on the tarps but only seemingly random combinations of numbers and letters, today the metal coffins also were marked with letter and number combinations. Only in the last twenty-four hours after the lifting of Manhattan’s siege had dental and DNA samples been brought to the city from all over the country and the world so that the long process of identifying the unknown dead could start.

But the immense nurse, the man with earrings and tattoos who could just as easily have been a boxer or a wrestler rather than a caregiver, stood patiently in one place. Roland knew it was the area where Sarah had been laid out days earlier on the damp concrete floor. He was certain that the nurse stood at the aluminum casket that contained her body.

For the first time ever, John Hewitt-Gordan looked suddenly distracted and old as the moment of seeing Sarah approached. He followed while Roland walked deliberately to the immobile nurse. John glanced up at the industrial-style ceiling. Naked light bulbs without even metallic shades hung from the ceiling. Along one wall was a row of seven forklifts designed to carry the caskets. As a onetime commander of a supply battalion in the British Army, he knew how to drive the ungainly machines.

And then he was brought back from his mental world of pure disbelief when he heard the nurse say, in a Bronx accent totally new to him, “This is the one you’re looking for, Mayor.”

The top of the silver coffin bore the large handwritten words, in black magic marker, “Sarah Hewitt Gordan.”

Standing over the coffin, John said, “That’s not how her name is spelled.”

Roland said, “It is, John, for these people.”

“The hyphen. The hyphen is missing.”

The nurse, saying nothing, rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. He knew from ten years of this work that the living often refused to believe in the deaths of children, husbands, wives, or lovers even when the inert bodies lay in front of them.

“Roland, may we ask to have the lid raised?”

“John, it’s Sarah. Trust me. I saw her myself. This wonderful nurse was with me.”

“How long ago was that?” John asked. “Wasn’t it four or five days ago when we spoke? Mistakes can be made.”

“I don’t remember exactly, John. I’ve been too confused to count days. I do know that the woman in this casket is Sarah. This nurse warned me not to look at her. But I did. It was not a good idea even then, days ago.”

“Let me see this person.” There was the steely edge of the voice of command Major John Hewitt-Gordan must have used thousands of times in his long career.

The nurse spoke to the mayor, “Like I said before, that ain’t a good idea.”

Roland said simply, “Open it.”

The nurse leaned forward and snapped open the two steel latches that held in place the upper half of the casket lid, which he raised. As soon as he did, an overpowering odor of dead flesh rose from the box, so powerful that it was almost palpable. Roland put his hand over his nose and mouth; he gagged.

John Hewitt-Gordan stared into the casket. He didn’t flinch. Almost involuntarily, Roland, too, glanced inside, and immediately regretted it, searing into his memory a vision he knew he would never forget. Death had worked its terrible magic swiftly. Dozens of lines had formed over Sarah’s upper lip, which were drawn down over her upper teeth. Her open eyes seemed to have disappeared. Her hair looked like straw. Her skin color was an unnatural white. A death mask.

Roland looked away. The nurse simply waited, holding the lid open for as long as John wanted. Then John finally said, “Thank you.”

The nurse lowered the lid.

Roland Fortune and John Hewitt-Gordan stood on the cracked cement loading platform. The mist and fog had now turned to rain. There was a tin roof, with many rusted fissures, above them. They managed to stay dry. On the sidewalk near the loading dock were five unmarked black SUVs, including the one that had brought John here from LaGuardia.

Roland said to the suddenly frail man, “I have you scheduled for the nine p.m. Flight 767 on British Airways to London. Sarah’s coffin will soon be taken to LaGuardia for that same flight tonight.”

“Thank you,” John said. He wasn’t moving. The rain droned on the tin roof. Finally, he said, “I had hoped, Roland, that one day you would be my son.”

“I am your son,” Roland Fortune said.

They stared at each other. Without touching or embracing, they both cried, quietly, their faces contorted.