Tabloid City

NIGHT

6:45 p.m. Sam Briscoe. Patchin Place.

AS THE SNOW FALLS SOFTLY, he stands with his back to the Jefferson Market Branch of the public library. There are still lights burning in the tall former courthouse, rising still out of the nineteenth century. How Cynthia loved having a house a block from a library! On his head is a woven wool cap he found in the office, made years ago by Kevin & Howlin in Dublin. He was in Dublin with Cynthia on a day of sun, showing her the sights. Where Yeats lived on Merrion Square and Shaw not far away and the monument in St. Patrick’s to Jonathan Swift. The bookstores on Dawson Street. The National Library. She said: Sam, I could live here. And he laughed. So could he. “Of all the money that e’er I had…”

He is facing Patchin Place, where two bundled uniformed cops remain on guard and the gates are draped with yellow crime-scene tape. A patrol car is parked on the Sixth Avenue side of the entrance, its windows opaque with steam.

He is not much of a believer but he tries to pray. No words come. Except “sorry.” Cynthia was not much of a believer either, but told him once that she tried to read a poem each night as if it were a prayer. Maybe, Briscoe thinks, memory is a prayer. And he remembers fragments of snowy nights when he walked with her from the Lion’s Head, one long block away, and came here with her and she made tea and they snuggled before a movie on the couch in the den. The snow is now general all over New York. Softly falling into the dark mutinous Atlantic waves. He thinks: No, not Atlantic. It has to be Shannon, two syllables. Joyce was right.

He has entered from the Sixth Avenue end of West 10th Street. He notices that a woman is now standing in the snow-flecked shadows at the Greenwich Avenue end. A heavy fur hat on her head. Long down coat. Heavy boots. Very still. Alone. She is staring into Patchin Place too, where the snow is now gathering on Cynthia Harding’s stoop, tamped down in the center by the feet of cops.

Briscoe moves slightly to the left, stamping his feet as the uniformed cops did. The lights are still burning on every floor. He can see shadowy figures moving in the windows. Technicians. Crime-scene guys. Examining every hair. Down the block the light from street lamps seems spectral. Trucks moan up Greenwich. Buses on Sixth Avenue. The woman is still there. He can’t see her face.

Then a door of the police car opens. A detective steps out. In civilian clothes. With a hat over his black face. He stares at Briscoe. And walks over. The snow pelting him. Briscoe knows him.

— You waitin’ on something, man?

— I’m not, Lieutenant Watson.

Ali Watson brushes snow off his eyelashes and squints. Then smiles thinly in recognition.

— Hello, Sam.

— Ali. I’m so sorry about what happened. Mary Lou was a wonderful human being.

Ali sighs.

— The same with Cynthia. I know, uh, that you and her…

— Yeah. A lot of years.

— What are you doing here, Sam?

— Trying to pray.

A pause.

— That’s not easy, is it?

— Not anymore.

They are both silent for a long moment. The snow is blowing east.

— I heard about you and the newspaper, Sam. It was on the radio.

— What the hell. I had a long run.

— So did me and Mary Lou.

They stand in silence.

— You got a suspect?

— Yeah. But I can’t talk about it. Not yet.

— Of course.

Briscoe removes a glove, takes a card from his wallet, writes his home number on the back and hands it to Ali.

— When this is over, Ali, you want to talk, we’ll have dinner somewhere.

— That’s a deal.

Ali walks slowly back to the police car. He did not produce a card and Briscoe knows why. Briscoe turns. The woman who was waiting down the block is gone.

He moves to Greenwich, passes the small garden, and turns left onto Sixth Avenue. She’s on the corner, trying to flag a taxi. And then he sees her face. He hurries to her side.

— Sandra Gordon…

She looks startled. Then relaxes.

— Oh, Sam. I thought that was you, but—

— Were you praying too?

— Sort of… Really just telling her how, as long as I’m alive, she’s alive.

She has the same vocal rhythm she had when she came to New York, at once clipped and melodic. The sound of the islands. He remembers her going with Cynthia to buy clothes for interviews at colleges, and later for job interviews. He remembers her at Cynthia’s old place uptown, and then in Patchin Place. For lunches. For parties. Never for fund-raisers, even after Sandra started making good money. Polite, but never servile. Able to speak when asked questions, but not a performer. A listener.

— Want some dinner? he says.

— Of course, she says.

They cross Sixth Avenue and walk east on 8th Street. She hooks a gloved hand to his arm. The snow falls heavier. Driven by a wind off the North River. Coming from Jersey. The Great Lakes. Canada. They pass shops for rent, and a pair of middle-aged women, their heads lowered as the snow blows in their faces, and three drunk college boys, one of whom looks at Sandra, shouts a sentence as he passes that ends with “Obama.”

— It’s comforting, Briscoe says, to know that young guys are still assholes.

Sandra Gordon laughs.

— They get worse, Sandra says, as they get older.

They cross Fifth Avenue. To the right through the snow, the lights make the Washington Square Arch lovelier than ever. A man stands at the corner, staring into the whitening park, holding skis. They move on to the east, passing more empty shops, and others that are closing early because of the storm. A scrawny man in a camouflage jacket and worn jeans stands huddled in a doorway, holding a cardboard cup. He says nothing. His eyes are dead. Briscoe has no change. They move on. Briscoe thinks: How many times have I walked this street? Five thousand? Ten? More? How many times with Cynthia Harding?

Here at last is University Place. Across the street was where the Cookery stood for so long, with Barney Josephson running it.

— Didn’t Alberta Hunter sing there? Sandra says. I was too young to ever see her. But I heard she was great, here in the Cookery.

— You’re right. It was full of life, that place.

— She’s gone too.

— She is.

Sandra squeezes his arm a bit harder. He doesn’t mention the Cedars, doesn’t try to explain that it stood right here, where this ugly fucking white-brick building is now, that Pollock used to come here, shit-faced, and Franz Kline, with his grace and good manners, and how Briscoe was infatuated one winter with Helen Frankenthaler, and her big swashbuckling paintings, and her beautiful face, and how Frankenthaler was in love with a critic. A critic, for Chrissakes!

At the corner of 9th Street they cross University Place. Sandra releases her grip. Briscoe takes her elbow and opens the door to the Knickerbocker. They go in. To the right, in the bar, five or six people are watching New York One and images of the storm. He turns away. He doesn’t want to see the rest of the news, and he’s sure Sandra doesn’t either. The large dining room is half empty. Sandra unzips her coat and smiles as the maitre d’ comes to greet them. Sandra has a beautiful smile.

They are led to a booth for four, lots of room for coats and hats and a handbag, and out of the sight line to the TV. Sandra is wearing a black sweater, black slacks, no jewelry, no lipstick. He doesn’t stare at her. But when she speaks, he can see her full lips, her cheekbones, the many variations of ebony. He flashes on the ebony pencils that copy editors used for marking stories written on paper by typewriters.

— For the first time in my life, Sandra says, I fainted this morning.

She tells him about seeing the front page of the World in the lobby of the Lipstick Building, and coming to with men leaning over her.

— It was like someone had punched me in the heart, she says.

— Yes. I know.

— Oh, Sam, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say this is about me. Above all, it’s about Cynthia. That means it’s about you too. In a different way, a larger sense, it’s about a lot of people who never met her.

— That’s the truth, Sandra. But it is about you too.

— We have to make sure that her… work goes on.

— It will.

A waiter comes and takes a drink order. White wine for Sandra. Diet Pepsi for Sam.

— How long since you stopped drinking? she says, smiling.

— I don’t know. Years. Maybe thirteen?

— So you were drinking still, that time in Jamaica, when I got my first job as a waitress?

Sam smiles.

— I was. You did a hell of a job.

She smiles again.

— Thanks. That’s when I first met Cynthia too. That same party. And she got me to talk about books. Above all, about the pictures in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I couldn’t even read yet.

— Books were her favorite subject.

The past tense again. Drinks arrive. She stares into her wine.

— Oh, Sam, what are we going to do?

The question hangs there. The waiter returns and takes their food orders. Shrimp for Sam, arugula salad for Sandra. Lentil soup for both. Then he remembers the slip of paper with her number, plucks it from his shirt pocket, shows it to her.

— I was going to call you when I got home.

— To tell me what?

He recites the clerical details. About the possible Mass at Old St. Patrick’s, and the burial up in Woodlawn in the Bronx, as close as possible to Herman Melville. He tells her that the library on 42nd Street would surely have a memorial service too. There’ll be a scholarship at NYU in Cynthia’s name, he says, for students of library science. This while they sip on soup.

— What about the house on Patchin Place?

He pauses.

— She told me once that she wanted it to be used by poets, from all over the world. Maybe four or five at a time. Poets who need time off, just to brood. Now—

He shrugs. Now the house is one of the most notorious murder scenes in the city. He doesn’t need to tell her that. Or that some poets might actually be inspired by the ghosts.

— And you? he says, changing the subject. How are things, otherwise?

She tells him about Myles Compton, how he left, how the FBI came to visit, how she had to get a lawyer, and how she has not heard from the man, not yet. She doesn’t know if he’s in America or Europe or Peru, doesn’t know if he’s dead or alive. He feels an unstated sadness in her voice, but says nothing.

— And you? she says.

He tells her about the death of the World, and the wake in the city room, and the website that starts Monday. She squeezes his forearm.

— Oh, Sam, what a day for you.

— You too.

From the bar he hears a burst of whiskey laughter, rising above some music. Lady Day. “Moonlight and love songs / Never out of date…” He thinks: I need to call my daughter again. I need to sleep.

6:50 p.m. Beverly Starr. Belleville restaurant, Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Almost time, she thinks. Check paid. Coffee still hot. She is at a corner table on the side of the long bistro, sitting alone on the banquette, with a view of the restaurant from one wood-paneled end to the windows on Fifth Avenue. Snow is falling. Chester Gould snow. Big fat flakes falling on Shoulders or Flattop or Mumbles. She is drawing in a small notebook, making notes. And enjoying the comforts of the familiar. The bar stacked with bottles and a few high stools. Mirrors on both sides of the long room, for tracking waiters or prospects.

She often comes here in summer, when the doors are open to the air, walking up the hill from her house, then three blocks to the left. It’s always packed with young mothers who park their Hummer-sized strollers outside and hold kids on their laps. On this night of snow, only a half dozen other tables are occupied, three of them by couples. The snow falls steadily on the parked cars.

To the right of her table, four young women from the Like Brigade are drinking margaritas. The dreaded four-letter word is fired in tremulous salvos. She wishes she could call on the exterminating angel of her graphic novel. She blinks. Blinks again.

She dials the car service on her cell.

— Hey, it’s Beverly. How about ten minutes? In front of the Belleville.

— Sure t’ing, Bev.

She slides out from behind her table, walks to the coat rack, grabs her coat and hat, and heads for the door. Then goes out into 5th Street. And stands there. The snow is clean. The snow is odorless. The snow doesn’t lie.

Under a lamp, she pauses and looks up at the snowflakes as they fall. She focuses on one, about fifteen feet above her. Separating from the others. Blinks. The flake has just been born. It sways from side to side, as if hearing soothing music. She blinks again. Then the flake hurries down to the cement of the city. She counts, and at the number two, the snowflake is gone forever.

A car horn beeps on the corner. She turns.

6:55 p.m. Josh Thompson. Fourteenth Street, Manhattan.

That Old Guy with the white beard had warned him about the snow. The Old Guy in his own wheelchair. He was outside the church when the Mexicans carried Josh down the steps. Josh looked up at the sky, which resembled water in a glass when you pour some ink in it. The Old Guy pulled up beside him. He told Josh it was coming. The snow. He said, Don’t even think about being out in the snow, soldier.

Then the Old Guy started giving Josh a short course in living in a wheelchair in New York. Those grades at the corner? the Old Guy said. We call them “cuts.” They are suppose to be one-eighth of an inch at the bottom. Surprise, surprise! Some of them are a full inch! Try to get up one! You need to use your weight! Lean forward, then move the fucking wheels like your life depends on them, which it does. Going down the cuts, lean back and lie low, go slow, don’t let your weight topple you face-first into the fucking street. For sure, some asshole driving a sanitation truck will back up and run over your head and turn the chair into an ashtray!

— When you stop somewhere to admire the view or the ass of some broad, lock the chair. So it don’t roll in any direction! Don’t go near Sixteenth Street. It’s the worst street in New York. And stay off Madison Avenue in the Sixties, where all the rich people live. They don’t want cripples in the neighborhood, so they don’t have cuts. Or they’re at an angle. And late in the day and especially at night, don’t let any young assholes offer to carry you anywheres. Or push you. They think it’s funny to race you along a block or two, then let you roll… I’d like to shoot the fuckers!

— In the snow you can’t even see the potholes so you’re goin’ along crossing the street and everything looks even and whoof! You go into a fucking hole full of snow and fall on the side and hit your head maybe, and break a fucking arm maybe, and the buses and trucks and cars, especially them Jersey drivers, are all honking and yelling, and you figure: Fuck it, I may as well die. And here in Fourteenth Street, especially with snow, don’t go over past Ninth Avenue. There’s cobblestones there and they get like glass from the snow and you slide all over the fucking place and there’s Pakistani limo drivers don’t know where they are, tryin’ to fine some restaurant in the Meatpacking District, they call it now. And shplat! They kill you too. All right now, soldier, the Old Guy says, his beard as white as the snow. Enjoy New York.

And he was gone, moving in the other direction. And here is Josh Thompson alone, with fewer people on the sidewalks, fewer cars or buses or trucks. He is aimed at the river, facing the street of cobblestones leading to the old mosque, leading to Aladdin’s Lamp.

He begins pushing the wheels, slowly. Heading west. To the minarets. He looks back for the old Mexican woman who was so nice to him. She’s nowhere in sight.

7:10 p.m. Malik Shahid. Muhlenberg Branch of New York Public Library, West 23rd Street, Manhattan.

Malik is alone at a small table near the windows, the snow falling on the street behind him. Again, he is trying hard to look normal. A solitary man among seven or eight other solitaries. Wearing his coat as if permanently cold. His cheap black beret stuffed in a pocket. Far from the radiator on the far end of the room. He is making marks on a ruled yellow pad with a new ballpoint pen. Both letters have been written and he wants to read the long one again. The envelope is addressed to Michael Daly at the Daily News. The columnist. They’ll put it on the front page, with big fat headlines. The envelope already carries a stamp. It is not yet sealed.

Malik has a large book open in front of him, and is trying to look as if he is studying it and making notes. The book is The Thousand and One Nights. The heathen book that tells the story of Ala’ad-din, meaning “nobility of the faith.” What faith? Not Islam. He looks intensely at a page, holds a finger to a sentence, then writes on the yellow pad. Like a scholar doing research. Pressing angrily with his ballpoint pen. If the heavy white bitch behind the desk even bothers to look at him, she will see a young black man, doing work toward a degree, maybe. The words written on his yellow pad say something different from the words he fingers in the book. He does not see the words in the book.

Aladdin’s Lamp.

Aladdin’s Lamp.

Aladdin’s Lamp.

Aladdin’s Lamp.

In his head, the words are like a chant. From a madrassa. Or like Sirhan Sirhan in his journal, the words used as the name of a book Malik once read.

RFK must die.

RFK must die.

Malik glances at the clock. Thinks: Almost time to leave. He removes the longer letter and reads:

To Everybody:

If you read this, I am in Paradise. I have obeyed the commands of Allah to do my best to cleanse the world of sin and corruption. I have chosen to obey the Quran. In the filthy corrupt West, all sin is permitted. I have chosen to follow the command of Allah. To erase. To purge. To cleanse.

I have purged my own mother, as commanded. I have purged her slave owner. I have purged the sinful imam who defied his faith by collaborating with enemies. I wish I could have purged my so-called father, who is a policeman for the oppressors, and dared to use the name Ali. That will be the duty of some future servant of Allah, some other soldier in jihad. In another few hours I will purge many other sinners who defile what was once a holy mosque.

In Paradise, I shall live forever in the company of those I love and those who loved me. I shall live with the blessed ones. I shall live with Allah’s heroes and servants. I hope my example will inspire others.

Allahu akbar!

His signature is boldly written at the bottom. With the date.

He folds the letter, slips it into the stamped envelope, licks the gummed edges of the flap, and seals it. He does not need to read the stamped and sealed letter to his so-called father. It’s very short. Addressed to him at the house in Brooklyn.

All I wanted was to borrow some money to take my woman to a doctor. Your wife sneered at me, told me to leave, threatened to call the police. She is dead now, along with her slave owner, and so is my woman and our child. And the fake imam.

I didn’t kill them.

You did.

M.

Time to go. He pulls on his beret and closes the book, tears off the top page of the yellow pad, and slips the pad beneath the book. He folds the page and pushes it into his back pocket. Thinking: I don’t care if they find out I did it. After I do it. But some cop stops me on the way, he might wonder what this nigger is doing with a yellow pad. Malik stretches in a feigned sleepy way, zippers his coat, pulls the beret more snugly on top of his head. Then he nods and smiles like a young Uncle Tom at the white woman behind the counter, and goes out into the snow.

Across the street, Malik sees a young woman leave the Chelsea Hotel with a large black dog on a leash. A Lab. Thinking: Just like the Lab we had at home when I was what? Ten? His name was Sarge. My so-called father trained him. Had a guy come over from the bomb squad to help. Taught Sarge to wait. Taught him to sit. Teaching me at the same time. Telling me to sit. Like it was a joke. Doing that to me all my life, even after Sarge died, only four years old. Blamed me for the dog’s death too. I was walking him down by Myrtle Avenue, and some bitch crossed his path, some bitch in heat most likely, and Sarge lunged for her, I lost the leash, and a bus hit him and killed him. Allah surely had some reason. But I didn’t know that then.

He walks to Eighth Avenue, drops the letters in a mailbox, crosses the street, heads downtown. Thinking: I better not take another bus. The bus I took to 23rd Street, that worked. A gamble I won. Thinking: They don’t check the buses like they do the subways. They put a cop on every bus, they’d have to start a New York draft. Subways are different. He remembers the signs: IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. Yeah. Be a snitch. God bless America.

He sees a black man in the doorway of a shuttered store. Cardboard cup loose in his right hand. His eyes closed. No hat. No gloves. One leg under his ass, the other stretched out, snow gathering on his jeans and his unlaced sneaker. Malik thinks: How you like that fucking Obama now, baby?

He walks to the next block, steps into a deep doorway of a store with metal shutters covering the windows. Stamps his feet. Flexes his hands. Stands there watching the snow fall. And remembers that meeting he went to, out past Brownsville in East New York. Two years ago? Three? Less? Set up by Aref. Four other believers showed up. No names, please, said Aref. Malik didn’t know one of them. Most of them Malik’s age. Two guys with Paki accents, but all of them arriving separately. Nothing in the room but a table, folding chairs, and couches. A safe house. For believers on the run.

Then an older guy arrived, maybe sixty, clean-shaven, a little fat, losing his hair. Gray suit and tie. Carrying a briefcase. He looked like a professor Malik had during his first semester at CUNY. Teaching some course in literature. He laid the briefcase on the table, nodded at Aref, who locked the door. Then he snapped open the top of the briefcase and took out a vest. Spread it wide. Said, “You all know what this is, right?”

They all knew. They’d seen the vests on all the filthy anti-Muslim TV shows and the pages of tabloid newspapers. Yeah, they knew. Holding the vest, the older guy gave a brief lecture. Explained that Semtex was a plastic explosive, made in the Czech Republic. That it had no smell, he explained, but even one of those red bars had tremendous explosive power. The vest held six. They could only be ignited by one of these. At which point he held up a small detonator. “You slide the wire inside one of the pouches, attach it to a wire wrapped around a Semtex bar, and then press the button. That’s all.” And if the wearer is shot at, one bullet hitting a Semtex bar would do the same thing. Ka-boom.

The older man paused, then explained that Semtex was used by various groups around the world. The most famous case, he said in his flat voice, happened in 1988, when a small amount was used to blow up a Pan Am plane over Lockerbie, Scotland. This model, he said, was developed by Hamas. Malik saw two of the other students nodding in approval. Then the man was finished. He folded the vest, laid it back in the briefcase, closed the top. He paused, and said: “Allahu akbar.” And walked to the door.

Standing in this doorway on Eighth Avenue, staring at the snow, Malik wonders where that man is right now. And the four others who were his audience that night. He knows where Aref is. Tomorrow, all of them, except Aref, will remember that night. No matter where they are. The South Bronx or Somalia. They will see Malik’s face in the papers or on the TV, and know him. And pray for him. And praise him. For rubbing the magic lamp.

7:20 p.m. Beverly Starr. Washington Street, Manhattan.

They are making good time. The driver took the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, then West Street, where she saw snow falling through the emptiness of the place where the twin towers once stood. Then side streets. The driver explaining in the rhythms of old Brooklyn: Figget Fourteen’ Street. Cobblestones there, in this weather we’d slide right inta a furniture store… Then here, with the High Line rising to the left. Straight out of Gotham. Bob Kane would have loved it. Jerry Robinson would’ve drawn it. The wind blowing snow from the west.

The car stops on the corner of 14th Street. She looks across the street and sees the whirls and curves and minarets of Aladdin’s Lamp. She blinks. Records it. Then laughs out loud. Who says comic books make things up? She sees the palace as part Aubrey Beardsley, part Prince Valiant on a trip to the Orient, part Cecil B. DeMille. She hears Tony Curtis of the Bronx saying his famous line from some fifties desert flick: Yonda lies da castle of my fodda, da Caliph. If he ever said it.

— I’ll call you when I’m ready, Harry.

— Take ya time, the driver says. I’m goin’ to a diner an’ eat.

Beverly Starr gets out of the car, her back to the High Line. Sees a crowd of about twenty people standing below a platform that must have once been a loading dock. Flashbulbs. Snow-muffled shouts. Stairs, a railing, the platform, then the doors. A black man in an Arabian Nights costume checking invites. Then to her right sees four homeless men in long overcoats and caps. Standing under an overhang from the days when they actually packed meat around here. Way past them in the snow, a guy in a wheelchair. Not moving. Beverly thinks: You can’t make some things up.

She walks cautiously across the glistening cobblestones to the crowd, moves around the edge, starts up the stairs, hears shouts. Hey, lady, lady, look this way. Hey, lady. Smile. Lady, say “bellybutton.” She hears the last word and smiles. Then crosses the platform to the door. Hearing: Hey, lady, what’s your name? The black bouncer smiles at her, and starts to say something, maybe an apology for his silly costume, when one of the double doors opens and a man in a gray suit steps out, smiling.

— Beverly! he says. Beverly Starr. How good of you to come.

Stan Seifert. The advertising guy who asked her to do the painting and invited her here.

He takes her elbow and leads her inside, saying: Your painting is just awesome.

She thinks: Please don’t say “like.”

7:28 p.m. Bobby Fonseca. Aladdin’s Lamp.

He walks four feet into the loud, thumping room, the others behind him, and he wants to turn around. It’s music for shouting, not talking. Tonight, of all nights, is for talking. For us, anyway. Or singing. He looks up the stairs, sees a dark painting on an easel, people pulling coats off suits and dresses, a tall guy smiling in welcome. That must be the benefit. Maybe they’ll let us in. Gotta be quieter than this.

— I’ll go up and check it out, he says to Helen Loomis, who looks pained and lost. She nods. The others are squeezing a path to the bar, all except Barney Weiss. No cameras allowed inside. He’ll take some shots outside, he said, while they find out the deal.

Fonseca goes up the stairs. A white bouncer in an Arabic costume stops him at the top. Built like a safe. Fonseca takes his press card from his jacket pocket, attached to the cheap chain around his neck.

— Press, he says.

— No press yet, the bouncer says. Fonseca thinks he looks like a guy from one of those ultimate-fighting shows.

— We’ll let yiz know, the bouncer says. They got stuff to do first in there. Hit the bar, we’ll find you.

Fonseca turns to go back. He leaves the press card dangling.

8:05 p.m. Sandra Gordon. Her apartment, Manhattan.

She undresses in the bedroom. The lights are out but the drapes are open to the falling snow and the room is filled with a luminous blackness. She sees herself in the mirror. Thinks: My kind of blackness. The same blackness that drew so many white men to me. Including Myles. The blackness of night and all its secret promises. Or so they think. Blackness can be banal too, baby. Ask a black woman.

In the living room, the telephone rings. She pulls on a robe and goes out into the large chilly space. On the fifth ring, the answering machine takes over. Then she hears her friend Janice. Fired five months ago. Self-medicating ever since. Booze and pills. They were supposed to have lunch that day but Sandra called her to cancel, got the machine, left a message. Her voice is clear.

— Hi, Sandra, it’s me. Janice. I just got your message. I was suicidal in the morning, went to the shrink, and she prescribed some goddamned pill. I slept for ten hours. I’m okay, I hope. But hey, there’s some kind of gig in the Meatpacking District. I’m inside now. For the homeless. Lots of dancing and some hot guys. I got an extra ticket, you want to come here. Call me on the cell and I’ll bring the ticket outside to the smoking shed.

She clicks off. Sandra stares at the phone. Thinking: Thank God I didn’t pick it up.

Thank God I can be here alone, while the snow falls silently and sleep comes quick.

8:10 p.m. Ali Watson. Muhlenberg Branch of New York Public Library.

Malachy Devlin pulls up in front of the library. The lights are turned off. Ali opens the door, turns to Malachy.

— She said she’d wait in the Chelsea, right?

— Yeah. I’ll stay here, watch your back.

Ali closes the door and starts across the street in the falling snow. He pauses in the center lane while an empty bus goes by, heading east. A taxi follows the bus. Then he hurries to the entrance. He brushes the snow off his shoulders and slams his hat against his thigh. He goes in.

Against the wall on the left, an old man sits on a banquette with a large black dog at his feet. The dog looks up, but doesn’t growl. At the desk, a fifty-ish black man leans on the counter, reading a newspaper. To Ali’s left, beside a fireplace, is a middle-aged white woman, her large handbag on her lap. Ali goes to her, peeling off his gloves.

— Mrs. McNiff?

— Miss McNiff, she says.

— Nice to meet you. I’m Detective Watson. May I sit down?

— Of course.

She takes a manila envelope from her bag and lays it on the low table before Ali.

— I used gloves when I picked it up, Officer, so it—

— Thank you.

He puts his gloves on again and slides the yellow pad out of the envelope. The top page is blank. He holds it up to the light. And sees indents in the paper. Thinking: You dumb son of a bitch.

— Excuse me, ma’am.

He rises again. The dog’s eyes follow him. The old man doesn’t turn his head. Ali walks to the desk at the rear of the lobby. The night clerk looks up.

— Excuse me, brother, Ali says. Do you have a pencil?

— Sure thing.

The clerk fumbles under the counter, comes up with a yellow Eberhard Faber pencil.

— Thank you, Ali says.

He moves a few feet away and starts lightly rubbing the side of the lead point across the paper. Words emerge. Repeated four times. Like a chant. He shakes his head, turns back to the night clerk, and hands him the pencil.

— Thank you, Ali says.

He walks back to the woman.

— Thank you very much, Miss McNiff. This might be very helpful.

— Hey, you never know.

— Can I help you get home?

— Oh, I live way out in Bay Ridge.

— Wait here, if you can. We’ll have a squad car take you home.

— Oh, that’s okay. Not necessary. This weather, the subway’s faster.

She stands as Ali writes down her name, address, and phone number, away out there in area code 718. He thanks her again and rushes out the hotel door.

8:15 p.m. Beverly Starr. VIP Room, Aladdin’s Lamp.

She thought she’d be gone by now. But here she is in this soundproofed room up a flight of stairs from the main floor. The only evidence of the place outside the door is the physical thumping of a bass line. They had waited for a while to start the night until all the invited guests could arrive in the awful weather. Beverly went up the stairs with them, glancing at her painting of the homeless to the left of the door. Inside, the door finally closed, Stan Seifert had them all take ten seconds to remember a woman he said had done so much for this city and its less fortunate people. Cynthia Harding. Many seemed to know her, and bowed their heads. A few even looked teary. Beverly used the shutters of her eyes to record them. And stood through a politely furious speech by an advocate for the homeless. Someone must have warned the speaker: Don’t mention Goldman Sachs or AIG or Lehman Brothers. And Beverly thought: They must be hoping for contributions fueled by guilt.

Then Stan Seifert made one of those eloquent pleas for the homeless fund. He mentioned the homeless men right across the street from where they all were gathered. He reminded the group that there were far more in the outer boroughs. He applauded the gathering for their decency and for braving the fierce weather. They applauded themselves. Seifert gave special thanks to Beverly Starr for the gift of her painting. The crowd clapped with what she chose to believe was enthusiasm. Finally, he reminded them that the result of the silent auction of Beverly’s painting would be announced in fifteen or twenty minutes.

A few people began moving to the door. Those who had made no bid. Each time the door opened they could hear the pounding music. Beverly wanted to leave too, but Seifert said, Please, no, we want a photograph of you with the winner.

So she waits. Looks for great faces. Blinks.

8:20 p.m. Josh Thompson. Across the street from Aladdin’s Lamp.

He’s against a wall, out of the falling snow, looking at the gathering crowd outside Aladdin’s Lamp. Cold. Thinking: That Old Guy was right. Told me to stay away from here. The cobblestones making cars skid and women slip and the goddamned chair go every which way. But I’m an asshole. This ain’t no mosque. It’s a disco or something. Kind of place they’d never let me in.

He has watched the place for an hour, has seen limousines arriving, and chauffeurs holding umbrellas over the heads of the passengers. The long black cars then moving around the corner, to wait for a call when their owners are ready to leave. Watched people bowing. Smiling. Even laughing. He sees guys with cameras. Snow on their shoulders. Thinks: Must be press. He sees guys dressed like characters from old movies about Arabs. Not real Arabs. Not Arabs in Baghdad or Fallujah.

He looks to his left, down to what he knows now is called the High Line. Nobody up there. Snow blowing hard. Like that storm when he was eleven, coming home from school in Norman, the wind lifting him, the snow blinding him, afraid he’d never make it home. Confused and lost. No cars. No houses. Just snow. Howling. He started to cry that afternoon.

Until his father came in the pickup and found him. And he tried to hide his tears.

And Josh was ashamed. Of his fear. Of his panic.

The way he felt after they all got hit. Together in Iraq. The explosion. Two seconds of blinding panic.

And waking up in Germany.

Now thinking: Never woulda happened they didn’t knock down the World Trade Center. Never woulda happened if we didn’t invade Iraq. Never. I’d still have Wendy. The little girl. Maybe a son too. One I’d never let get lost in a blizzard.

Under his poncho, and his blanket, he caresses the MAC-10 with a gloved hand.

Thinking: Wait.

8:31 p.m. Sam Briscoe. His loft.

He keeps searching for a book that will help him sleep. Something he has already read and therefore doesn’t engage that part of his brain that argues. Or won’t demand that he get to the end. What always happens at the end is death.

Parts of his conversation with his daughter return. Her words were cool despite her late-night anguish. Nicole was now old enough to console him, the way he had consoled her during her own nights of terrible times.

— Put all of her pictures away, Dad, she said. Wrap them up. Put them in storage. For a year, at least. But don’t leave them where you can see them.

Yes. That was smart. But not tonight. I’m too exhausted.

— Go off somewhere, she said. So your friends can’t call. Where the papers — or worse, television reporters — don’t run follow-ups and ask for your reactions. Go someplace where you once were young. Mexico. Rome. Or better, a place you never visited with Cynthia. Turkey. Ecuador.

She was right, of course. Get out of town. Now. Nothing beats murder at a good address. So they will follow this thing for at least three days. Maybe more.

— And hey: you can come here, Dad. Come to Paris. Stay with us in the guest bedroom. Go to museums. Eat in bistros. Buy books along the river. The weather is cold, but not dismal. And there are no tourists.

Paris.

Briscoe didn’t care much for Nicole’s husband. But he loved his smart, feisty daughter, Nicole. And loved too their wonderful apartment on the Avenue Émile Acollas, with its high trees and wide sidewalks. At the foot of the Champ de Mars. The fifth floor front. The tiny elevator. The entrance hall, with the youthful painting by Lew Forrest of the Seine at dawn. A wedding gift from Cynthia Harding. The three rooms along the balcony, like an elegant railroad flat. Public rooms, they called them. Living room, petit salon, dining room. Each with a door opening to the balcony and a view that included the Eiffel Tower. Like a cornball romantic movie. Or cornball majesty. Didn’t every example of the romantic include death?

He could call the airline now. He could leave tomorrow. Leave the clerical duties to others. Let someone else execute the wishes of the dead. Or put the whole thing off for a month. Paris. Call Mary Blume and Alan Riding and the remaining veterans of the Brigade Rue de Berri of the Paris Herald. Sit together in the Deux Magots. Make remarks. Laugh. Paris. Yes. Then he remembers Nicole’s other words of advice. Go to a place where Cynthia Harding had not shared the bed. Caracas. Istanbul. Maybe—

The phone rings. He hopes it’s not Sandra Gordon. But knows instantly that it’s not. She would never call him at home, after dark. He picks up the phone. Static and word gaps.

— That you, Helen?

— Yeah.

— What’s up?

— I’m in a joint with, uh, some of the gang from the paper and I hate it, and uh, shit, I want to go home.

— So go home, Helen.

— I can’t… I mean, I tried. No cabs in this goddamned snow. Nothing over here… I’m way over near the High Line, Sam. Uh. On Fourteen’ Shtreet. If I try to walk home… I die in a snowdrift, Sam. Christ, I’m a year older than you are, Sam.

Her voice is blurred with drink, exhaustion, age. He can hear mocking laughter behind her. Drunks. The early shift. He can see the snow falling.

— Where are you?

— Fourteen’ Shtreet. Over near the High—

— No. You told me that. The name of the joint.

— The, uh, Ali Baba, something like that… No, no… the Aladdin Lamp. A pretty scary dump.

— They have a bouncer? he says.

— Uh, yeah, I guess.

— You know my rule, Helen. Never go in a joint that needs a bouncer.

He remembers doing a column about the mosque that once stood there. Thirty-odd years ago. When Muslims were a curiosity in New York.

— Can you, uh, come pick me up, Sam? Drop me home, uh, keep going to your house.

Briscoe pauses. He thinks: What the hell, the last act in an endless day. A kind of penance. And this is special: across all the years, Helen Loomis never asked me for anything.

— Sure, Helen. What’s your cell number?

— I don’t have a cell, Sam. I left it somewhere. The paper, I think… This nice girl… Janice. She dialed you for me on her own cell.

— Let me talk to her.

A younger voice gets on.

— Hello? This is Janice.

Briscoe talks quickly.

— Okay, listen, Janice. I’m in SoHo and I’ll try to get a cab. Could you take Helen to the corner of Fourteenth Street and the High Line? Washington Street, I think it is… You know, where those wooden overhangs stick out? Give me fifteen, twenty minutes. I’ll come by cab and hold the cab until she’s in it.

— Uh, I—

— Please, Janice. She’s one of the best journalists this town ever had, and her paper folded today.

Janice says, with annoyed reluctance in her voice: Okay.

He scribbles her cell number and starts dressing. Thinking: Au revoir, Paris. Farewell, Istanbul. I’m heading into a blizzard, to a place with a bouncer.

8:40 p.m. Freddie Wheeler. Aladdin’s Lamp.

On the dance floor, Wheeler thinks, He made me… That kid reporter… That Fonseca. Across the room, past the dancers, past this blond jerk dancing with me like a Gulfport shitkicker… Fonseca… His press card hanging from his neck. The others too. That tall broad from the World. Helen Loomis. Fonseca says something to the guy next to him, turns behind him and talks to another guy… Looking this way… A fucking posse… Is there a back door to this place? I don’t think so… If there is, it’s locked… Keep the crashers out or the check beaters in… Hey, Fonseca, he thinks. I don’t want any trouble, man. I was just doing my job, man… Fuck with me, you end up in the can… Never get a job at the Times that way.

He turns his back on the dancing blond guy and goes left, under the stairs. Harder to see… Into a knot of necktie assholes… Nobody here I know or care about… Nobody… Just me.

8:45 p.m. Malik Shahid. Fourteenth Street.

He stands a bit apart from the homeless guys, hands jammed in the pockets of his coat, beret pulled low on his brow. The homeless guys are joking and laughing, all growls. Malik can’t hear their words. Just the hoarse laughter. Glimpses the sudden red glow of cigarettes. Turns his head. Malik is watching the door across the street. Up on the platform. Over the heads of the gawkers and the photographers. Past the ropes. Three weeks earlier, when he first saw this obscenity of a building on a morning bright with sun, Glorious was still alive. The infidel bitch was still slaving for her white mistress.

That day he wandered through Chinatown to Cooper Union to Washington Square, avoiding Patchin Place, wandered alone, still bearded, everything a jumble, looking for money, looking for a dropped wallet, an old fool counting his cash at an ATM, a woman with an open purse, any kind of money for Glorious, money for the coming of the baby, money for food. Heading west on 14th Street. Walking, planning, then seeing a Muslim on a prayer mat at five o’clock. Removing his own shoes. Kneeling beside him. On the bare concrete of the sidewalk. Praying. Speaking the words of the Quran. The man gave him ten dollars.

Then walking again.

Toward the river. A cheap market down there someplace. Buy more food for the money.

Until he saw this obscene place.

The next day in a library, he Googled “Aladdin’s Lamp.” Read that it was once a mosque. One of the first in New York! Now a corrupt temple of sins of the flesh! Faggots and whores. He stood for an hour before it, walked to the side, around the back, looking for access, trying to shape a plan. The next day, the plan forming, Allah’s plan, he went up the stairs to the High Line and saw the place from other angles, saw into it when some skinny Mexican was washing the upper windows. Malik tried looking like just another tourist. From Abu Dhabi, maybe. Or Nigeria. Thinking at the time: If I ever need a target, this is it. In other parts of the city, there were cops everywhere, and concrete barriers, and surveillance cameras, and men on high floors with field glasses. Men like his so-called father. Men who had found Islam, and then renounced the Prophet, renounced Allah. Fought jihad. Men who must die.

He looks carefully now through the falling snow at Aladdin’s Lamp. Imagine if a mosque in Kandahar had been transformed into a palace for whores! What would the Taliban do? Make it vanish, that’s what. The corrupted building is set back a good twenty feet from the curb, with a wide space that must have provided for eight or ten cars carrying faithful Muslims, and now serves by day as parking space for beer and drink trucks making deliveries. It’s filled on this night of destiny with photographers and drifters and those who have substituted celebrities for God. They have money. They have homes. They even have umbrellas. I have nothing. Not anymore. No woman, no son, no father, no mother, no friends. I have only my own body. To give you, Allah.

He thinks: I must get through them, and up the three stairs to the platform with the velvet rope held on poles with minarets at the top. Past the bouncer in his costume. Get through the door with my holy container, dash inside, fast. Surprise is everything. He knows from his daytime observations that there is a stairway inside, leading to an upper floor, secret rooms. I am God’s martyr. He thinks: It should be simple. Inshallah. The vest is ready. The detonator is hooked up and ready. I’m ready. He waits for the moment that says now.

8:47 p.m. Josh Thompson. Fourteenth Street.

He flexes and unflexes his hands, trying to give them warmth. He feels something ebbing away in him, like a tide going out on a seashore. He gathers himself. Soon all the shithead rich guys will come out. Then…

Across the street, off on the right, a short dark woman eases out of a side door next to some kind of clothing store. Head down. Hat. Walking fast on short legs. And he knows who she is. The Mexican woman who got the guys to carry him into that church. Goo-add-a-luppy. Where it was warm. Her God was a warm God. Not like some of the others. The goddamned Christians back home that want everybody to suffer, except themselves.

For a moment, he thinks about going after her. To that church.

But tells himself: Stay here. This is where it’s at. Where the payback comes.

Over on the left of the front door, there’s an open shed, with people smoking and bullshitting while the snow falls. Christ: There’s even an old lady there, tall and skinny and smoking. Beside her, talking on a cell phone, he sees one young woman who looks like Wendy before she got fat. Could she be his lost wife? Nah. Never. Maybe I should track Wendy down. He wonders where she is and whether little Flora is with her and whether it’s snowing there too. He loved her once. Now he has trouble remembering her face. That fat broad smoking over there? Maybe she’s Wendy.

Nah, he thinks. She couldn’t find her way to New York with a tour guide. She’s somewhere in the sun. Thinking about the guy she’s meeting later. The guy whose joint she’ll cop before the night’s over.

He removes a glove and caresses the MAC-10. Cold. Very cold.

Go, he whispers. To the warmth.

Go.

He doesn’t move.

8:48 p.m. Helen Loomis. Outside Aladdin’s Lamp.

She hasn’t been this cold in years. Where was it? In Gstaad that time, with Willie? He was skiing. She stayed in the bar. The Rolling Stones were on TV. Black-and-white. Some big European music contest. They sang “Satisfaction.” That long ago. And where is Sam? The snow must have the streets screwed up. Can’t feel my feet. I’m still here, Sam. Watching the corner, like you said. Looking at the High Line, which I’ve never visited. The young guys from the paper all inside. Why’d I listen to them? Why’d I come here? An old bag like me?

Across the street, she sees homeless guys. Faceless. Bulky. Carved from black ice. Like the figures in the painting at the top of the stairs inside. Nobody can tell them to go home. What home? Some shelter that smells like piss? She thinks: At least I got whiskey in me. Too much. One more, I’m legless.

Where’s Sam? He always keeps his word. Why’d I call him? To say a proper good-bye, I guess. He’ll be gone in a day or two. Somewhere. Yeah. Wind coming hard now. From New Jersey. Of course. Or Siberia. Blowing snow off the High Line.

She takes out her cigarette pack. Pops one loose. Two left. Lights it with the one she’s smoking. Thinks she hears sirens. Fire engines, maybe. Christ, I’m cold.

8:49 p.m. Bobby Fonseca. Aladdin’s Lamp.

His back is to the bar. He sips a beer. Thinking: Still here. Woozy. The guys coming on to different women, using their dangling blue press cards as conversation pieces. Helen out for a smoke or something. Or maybe gone, the way Barney Weiss split after fifteen minutes in the snow. My brain mushed from the music, the deejay dressed like Ali Baba, waving his hands from the balcony. Where’s his scimitar? No scimitars in Brownsville. The deejay’s to the left of the VIP party. Some are leaving now, in coats, hats, and scarves. Their limos must have a foot of snow on the rooftops. Shit: here’s that small broad again. Too much lipstick. Chewing gum.

— Sure you don’t wanna dance, big boy?

— Not tonight. I’m in mourning, babe.

— In this joint?

She laughs and moves into the thick crowd. Tall women made taller by high spiked heels. Women with impossible breasts. Women giggling, bursting into tequila laughter. The guys all in heat. Some of them sweating. Others talking into female ears. Fonseca thinks: I can almost reach out and grab the lies out of the air. He hopes he can see Victoria Collins before the night is over. Flashes on her thighs. Her wet hair. The feel of her skin.

And across the room, beyond the dancers, he sees Freddie Wheeler again.

Makes Wheeler from some story he read months ago in Wired. His ferrety face. Coat under his arm. Wheeler has seen Fonseca too. He starts pushing through the crowd. Heading to the left door.

Fonseca sets down his beer bottle and goes after Wheeler.

— Hey, you! he shouts in the din. Wheeler!

Wheeler stops as Fonseca reaches him. The two of them moving out the left door to the platform. The snow heavy. Wheeler looking at the photographers and beyond.

— What’s your problem, man? Wheeler says, turning to face Fonseca. Making a sliver of his mouth.

— You, Fonseca says. And the evil crap you print each day, all of it wrong.

— I’m a reporter.

He lifts Fonseca’s blue press card with thumb and forefinger. Tugs it. Face full of contempt.

— And this? This tells the world you are a fucking loser, kid. You and Briscoe and all the other—

Then Fonseca clocks him. Wheeler goes down on his back, his eyes blinking, his jaw moving.

— Get up, you asshole!

Fonseca’s over him.

And then the black bouncer is there.

— Hey, hey, none of that shit now, he yells.

He shoves Fonseca toward the smoking deck. Flashes from cameras. Shouts. And here comes the upstairs bouncer. The fat white guy. He lifts Wheeler, swings him in a half circle, and hurls him into the crowd of camera people. Hitting bodies and heads. Umbrellas go airborne. Shouts of protest and shock. The black bouncer tries to intervene, but the white bouncer moves around him, shoves Fonseca, then grabs him by collar and ass and heaves him toward the smoking shed. Fonseca slams into Helen Loomis and she falls. The ashtray goes over too, spilling butts and sand across the deck. The snow is almost horizontal.

8:51 p.m. Malik Shahid. Fourteenth Street.

Now. He runs, slipping on the cobblestones, but not falling. A wave of photographers surges left to photograph the white dude in the crowd in the street. Still down. Trying to get up through the mass of legs. Off on the side of the platform another white guy, younger, stunned and rubbery.

Nobody pays attention to Malik.

End run, he thinks. Go.

He is up the steps, feeling stronger now than he has ever been before. He rips away the velvet rope, toppling the minaret poles, and he reaches the doors. The right door is ajar about a foot. Leading to the dark sinful rooms. From the snowy distance, the muffled sound of a siren.

Then Malik is into the devil’s workshop, into the whoring crowd, stopping, drawing the pistol from his trouser belt. Turns behind him. Kicks the door shut.

— Stop! Every fuckin’ one of you! he shouts.

Malik’s right arm is straight out. He rotates the.38 with a circular wrist movement, left, to the dance floor, right to the bar, then up the stairs. People at the top. Fancy clothes. Wide eyes. Turns behind him again. Seven or eight people at the doors. None of them move. All eyes on the gun. The room suddenly resembles a still photograph.

— You move, I shoot you!

He starts up the stairs. Three steps. Four. Then he opens his jacket.

In small awkward motions, he starts to unbutton his coat with his free hand, pistol still in his right. Now people are moving again. On the main floor, a tall blonde woman breaks from the frozen pack of dancers, starts across the floor, buckles, and falls hard on her hip. A shriek, cutting through the hip-hop soundtrack. Malik’s coat is open.

And now they see the vest.

Taut across Malik’s chest. The six red slabs of Semtex resembling soldiers at attention. The hip-hop rant keeps pounding. Punctuated by groans and weeping and another woman’s shriek.

Malik thinks: I have them now. They must look at me. They must listen. I’m the last man they will hear in their filthy lives.

8:51 p.m. Beverly Starr. The balcony of Aladdin’s Lamp.

She has her coat on, leaving with others, gloveless. Five steps down the stairs. Hears the screams. Looks down. Blinks. Sees a young black man waving a gun. Words lost in the pounding music. Turning. Gesturing. His eyes wide with rage and doom. Jesus Christ. She eases down the stairs, gripping the banister on her left. Freezes as he waves the pistol at her. Sees a jam at the door.

The young man turns so all can see what he’s wearing under the coat.

Now she sees the vest across his chest. Familiar to all of them from bad television shows. A suicide vest.

The music scrapes into silence. The deejay tearing off his costume. One voice is piercing the air. The man with the vest.

— Whores! Degenerates! Listen up!

He shoves the gun in his belt. Now he’s addressing the people on the dance floor. Maybe sixty of them. Men. Women. All of them frozen. As if blood and sweat are both coagulating. Some cowering, trying to make themselves smaller.

— You have filled this world with filth and sin! You have sent soldiers to Muslim countries, and killed Muslim men, and Muslim women, and Muslim children!

Beverly moves. Passes behind the man as he addresses the dance-floor people. She eases past a heavyset older man. A guest from the benefit. Heads for the crowd jammed against the doors. The doors open in, not out. Pushes into the crowd. Looks back at the stairs. Sees the enraged eyes of the gunman. His audience is not giving him what he has demanded: their attention. He’s talking but she hears no words. She’s shoved by the deejay, then turned sideways by a guy in a business suit. Smells sweat and perfume. Rush hour in hell. A chorus of shrieks. Jesus Christ: I could die here.

She takes a ballpoint pen from her pocket. Thinking: Not much of a weapon, but I could hurt somebody.

Beverly looks back. The young man on the stairs is holding a small object in his hand. A wire runs into the suicide vest. She knows what that is too. A detonator. Right out of 24. Out of fucking comic books.

— You have been offered Paradise, and refused it!

Beverly sees a long-haired blond guy vault over the banister of the staircase, fall hard on one leg, pause and grimace in pain, then limp forward. To join the pack at the doors. A blink.

— Allah has given you life and he will soon give you death!

The jam tighter now, all breathing hard, panting, cursing. Shouts of move, move and step back, let it fuckin’ open! The doors forced shut by the pressing weight of the panicky group. To Beverly’s right, a small young woman leaps onto the shoulders of a shouting man, trying to claw her way over people’s shoulders, heading to escape. Then slips. Falls facedown, wedged between a fat woman and a beefy man. Beverly blinks again. Record this. So if you get out… The goal for all of them is the twin vertical rectangles of the glass-paneled doors. And the snow falling beyond. She looks back. At the top of the stairs, her painting stands on its easel, abandoned, alone.

Thinking: I am about to die.

8:51 p.m. Sam Briscoe. Fourteenth Street.

Briscoe’s taxi turns into the street and suddenly stops. Twenty feet ahead of them, four police cars have skidded on the cobblestones, then braked, red domes now turning. Cops out. Some fumbling under overcoats for sidearms. Briscoe asks the driver to wait, and the driver says, No, no, police! Trouble! Briscoe hands him a twenty-dollar bill and gets out, slamming the door. In the distance, he sees a chaotic, panicky tide of women and men squeezing one at a time out of one of the doors of Aladdin’s Lamp. Then down the steps in a kind of stampede. Night of the locust. None are dressed for snow. No time for coats. He sees the right door open a bit wider. Hears the word “bomb.”

He hurries to them while some rush past him toward Ninth Avenue. A gray-haired hatless guy in a suit hauls his wife across cobblestones. The man glancing behind him. Fear in his eyes. The woman yelling: My coat, my coat!

All that Briscoe sees is happening at once. Women in filmy blouses, short skirts, high heels. Men in sweaters and shirts. A woman slips coming down the steps from the platform. Falls backward. A young man stomps on her to get by, and then he loses balance and pitches forward, facedown on the iced cobblestones, and another man stomps on his back and keeps going. One lone woman, about twenty, earrings large and bobbing, totters toward Briscoe, seeing nothing, weeping, holding a bleeding elbow. The others resemble terrified civilians after a bombardment. They slip, fall, pile up. Throats are stabbed by heels. A heavy boot lacerates a young man’s lips. Upper and lower.

Briscoe sees blood on others, torn flesh. Discarded women’s shoes on the wet stone street. A young woman grabs another’s blouse from behind, tears it away, and the woman begins bawling as she covers her breasts. Naked in a snowstorm. Then drops her hands to run. More piling up, nobody looking back. Dozens now. Screaming. Splayed, stomped, bleeding. One hopeless shriek. A bare-chested guy in Ali Baba trousers comes out the door, limping. Too thin to be a bouncer. Maybe a deejay? A waiter? Shaking both fists. In triumph? Or challenging the fallen. Photographers dart around, recording it all.

Helen, Briscoe thinks. Where are you, Helen?

Now four uniformed cops come running awkwardly from the police cars. No traction on the snowy cobblestones. Guns drawn. One goes up the steps to the doors, shoves the gun into his holster, raises one palm toward the people inside, ordering them to halt, to step back, to allow both doors to open. They don’t obey. Looking over their shoulders. Below the platform, another cop points to the far side of the street, gesturing east. Briscoe hears the first cop shout: Run. Run like hell!

Briscoe drapes his press card around his neck and finally sees Helen Loomis over to the left, on the platform rising from the sidewalk. Standing there. Rigid, dazed, as the panicky young tide flows past her. She fumbles with a cigarette, looking toward the High Line. Briscoe calls her name but she can’t hear him in the din. No way yet for him to get up the main stairs to her. Too many people coming down in terrified flight from whatever the hell is happening inside.

He goes to the left, trying to squeeze through the photographers, sees Fonseca making notes at the foot of the smoking shed, wiping with his coat sleeve at blood dripping from his nose. Briscoe calls his name. Fonseca hears nothing. And Briscoe can’t reach him through the wall of cops and photographers. Moving now, like a quarterback, left, then right, then forward. Looking for an opening. He waves at Helen, calls her name, but she doesn’t see or hear him. She is still staring toward the High Line. Washington Street. Briscoe thinks: She’s waiting for me. I told her Washington Street, didn’t I? The cabbie wouldn’t go that way. A woman wearing pearls comes down the main stairs and someone grabs at the pearls and the string snaps. The woman looks down, pain on her face, starts to bend, then chooses to run. Briscoe shouts once more. Nobody can hear.

8:51 p.m. Ali Watson. Fourteenth Street.

Ali walks cautiously on the cobblestones, his eyes fixed on the doors. Alone. Wearing his badge. His gun hanging loose in his right hand. No time for vengeance, he thinks. This is my son. I loved him as a boy and I love him still. Done in by belief. The worst human disease. Only one goal right now: to stop horror. That’s my fucking job. To prevent another Happy Land. Knowing that if he lives, this night will be with him for the rest of his days. And nights.

Behind him, Malachy and some uniformed cops are checking the people against the wall across the street. Homeless guys. Wanding them. Patting them down. Then, finding nothing, telling them to get the hell out of there, this thing could blow. Some move quickly. Others are slower, watching the show.

Ali goes up the steps two at a time, and the uniformed cops greet him. The right-hand door is now fully open. He asks a sergeant where the SWAT team is. On the way. No time, Ali says. I’m going in. Cover my back.

Then Ali is inside. A dozen men and women are huddled against the far edge of the empty dance floor. Faces frozen. Others peering from behind the bar. Maybe more upstairs, hiding in bathrooms or lounges. Son of a bitch.

He looks up the stairs and sees his son near the top.

Malik.

The only person who matters now.

Eyes wide. The suicide belt across his chest. Red Semtex. His lips are saying words, full of reverence and farewell.

Salem al-Hazmi.

Hani Hanjour.

Satam al-Suqami…

In his right hand, the detonator. Thumb on the button.

— Put that thing down. Malik, Ali says in a soft voice.

Waleed al-Shehri.

Abdulaziz al-Omari.

He is staring now at Ali, his voice rising in defiance as he recites the names of the September 11 hijackers.

— Malik, don’t do this.

— Who are you to tell me what to do?

— I’m your father. I still love you, son.

— My so-called father.

— No, your only father.

Ali raises his.38 and aims it at his son. Thinking: Don’t hit a Semtex charge.

Hamza al-Ghamdi.

Mohand al-Shehri.

Malik is breathing more heavily now, coming to the end of his private rosary. His eyes are calmer. Then he laughs.

— One more, Malik says. God’s commander.

Before he can say “Mohamed Atta,” Ali fires.

Malik looks frozen. There’s a small hole in his forehead. His eyes are wide. Then he crumples, falling down the stairs like a mannequin. His head hits several steps. His hands are open and still and empty.

Ali Watson exhales. So does the room. Malik is not moving. His open eyes see nothing and Ali knows that he is dead.

He walks over to Malik, looks down at his face. No longer masked with a thick beard. The face of his son, whom he often had bounced on his knee. Bright blood is leaking from his brow, running to the side of his nose, down his cheeks. Ali sits on a step, and drapes an arm over Malik’s shoulder, hugs him tightly, feeling his vanishing warmth. Tears fill Ali’s eyes.

He whispers: Oh, Mary Lou. I am so goddamned sorry.

8:54 p.m. Sam Briscoe. Fourteenth Street.

At the foot of the whitening staircase to the smoking area, he raises a hand to Helen Loomis and she takes it, coming down one step at a time. She’s unsteady. The side of her left cheek is scraped. Her eyes are blurry. He hugs her. She has heard the same sound. A single blam. Like a punctuation mark. Then silence. Then the uniformed cops relax. Opening both doors wide now.

— That’s that, Sam whispers. The snow is finer now and icier, blowing harder.

Now firemen in full gear are at the scene. The SWAT team has arrived, looking frustrated in dark blue combat gear as the sergeant waves to them that it’s over. Plainclothes cops are talking to the people now leaving, most wearing coats, witnesses now, showing identification. Some of them are weeping. Briscoe saw Ali Watson go in. He has not seen him come out. Most of the paparazzi have fled, to send out what they captured on their cameras, but a few remain, and reporters are arriving from other papers. Fonseca comes over to Briscoe, glancing at his watch, making notes in a spiral pad.

— Stick around, Briscoe says. This isn’t over.

— I know, Mr. Briscoe. Did you see the guy who ran in?

— No.

— Neither did I. I was flat on my ass. But one of the cops told me he might have been wearing a suicide vest. I did see the cop that went in to get him. The cop that must’ve shot him. It was Ali Watson.

— The kid with the vest might be his son, Malik…

— Jesus Christ.

— Check it out. Even a website needs wood.

Briscoe taps Fonseca lightly on the shoulder, then leads Helen to the street. He sees three cops near the far wall. Four photographers are shooting in a kind of frenzy, leaning in, squatting, aiming at something on the wet sidewalk, while a young plainclothes cop tries to control them. Briscoe moves past them slowly, guiding Helen by the elbow. They are looking down at a gun. To Briscoe, it appears to be a MAC-10. The contras loved it in Nicaragua. So did the crack dealers here at home. Maybe there was an accomplice? Nobody touches the MAC-10, not even a cop. Briscoe looks back at the rubble of shoes, hats, torn or discarded clothes, a handbag. No sign of Fonseca. He should see this. Maybe they let him inside.

He and Helen start walking east. The snow is thicker now.

— Sam, we’ll never get a cab around here.

— We gotta try.

— We could both end up in St. Vincent’s.

— Eventually. Not tonight.

The snow keeps falling. Helen Loomis starts to shudder, then shake, as if ice has pierced her body. Briscoe hugs her, until the shaking stops. She grips his arm and they resume walking. Across the street, mannequins in bikinis pose in the bright window of a place called La Perla. They pass the dark shop of the Ground Zero Museum Workshop. Briscoe looks back and sees photographers and TV cameramen shooting from the rails of the High Line. Two different TV guys are doing stand-ups. He sees signs on the street now:

LOFTS FOR LEASE

And

RETAIL SPACE

MADE TO MEASURE

Lights still burn in clothing stores. Hugo Boss. Moschino. No customers are gazing at the clothes. At the corner of Ninth Avenue, there are some people in the Apple store. Briscoe thinks: I should be calling in notes to the city desk. Helen should be taking them for tomorrow’s paper. Instead, we are here on a night of brutality, escaping like lost members of Napoleon’s army, Moscow behind us. Looking for a taxi.

Two ambulances from St. Vincent’s go by, making a slow throaty sound in the wet snow, followed by a vehicle from the fire department rescue squad. Each heading west. Into the snow. Briscoe and Helen cross Ninth Avenue to a small triangle of a park, the benches piling with snow. Across the street to the left is the Old Homestead Steakhouse, where there were usually cabs, even in snowstorms. But Briscoe can see whirling dome lights two blocks uptown, just past the Chelsea Market, sealing the avenue from any new traffic. There are no cabs arriving at the Old Homestead or waiting to depart. A car with NYP press plates turns into 14th Street, and the unseen driver taps the horn in greeting but keeps moving past them to Aladdin’s Lamp.

— I wish I could write tonight, Helen Loomis says in a sad blurred voice.

— You will. In your memoirs.

She chuckles. Then from 15th Street, a car turns, and a uniformed cop wearing an orange vest uses his club to point it downtown. The car moves slowly past the Old Homestead, aimed at 14th Street and what becomes Hudson Street on the far side. Briscoe steps out of the park, Helen behind him. The car slows, then stops on the far curb, the engine still pumping exhaust fumes into the falling snow.

— Christ, Helen, I hope these aren’t folks from “Vics and Dicks.”

— My people.

A young woman steps out of the back door. There are other people in the car, which has snow gathered on its hood and roof.

— Helen! Hey, Helen, it’s me, Janice!

Helen squints hard, then relaxes.

— It’s the woman who loaned me the cell phone, she says.

The young woman shouts, Where you going?

— Second Avenue and Ninth Street, Briscoe shouts.

— Come on! Janice shouts. We have room for one more.

Janice waddles awkwardly across the snow in a lumpy way to Helen, takes her arm.

— Go, Briscoe says. I can walk to the subway.

— I can’t leave you here alone, Sam.

— I’ll be fine, Briscoe says. Go.

Helen allows herself to be pulled to the open door of the car, where he can see the heads and blurred faces of others, packed tightly. Helen is shoved in by Janice, who follows her, and slams the door.

— Go, Briscoe whispers.

He waits until the car pulls away, crossing 14th Street, moving into Hudson Street, becoming two more dirty red eyes in the snow. Briscoe stands there for a long moment.

9:10 p.m. Beverly Starr. Pastis restaurant, Meatpacking District, Manhattan.

She is at the bar in the crowded restaurant. Waiting for the guy from the car service. Some streets blocked. Sipping a tequila and tonic. Her heart still beating fast. Her right cheek is scraped, and she pats it with a cloth napkin soaked in peroxide that the maitre d’ brought her. Other refugees from the benefit are at various tables, faces somber with a kind of blankness. She thinks: Post-traumatic stress disorder? They are whispering. Holding hands. Waiting for something that is not food.

She stares at her drink, closes her eyes. Sees her own slide show. A woman’s snapped ankle flopping like a sock. A gaping older man who has lost his front teeth. A fat guy in an Ali Baba suit falling back under a high-heeled stampede. Opens her eyes. Snow still falling.

This is the kind of night when I need some guy to hold me. To whisper to me. To tell me that everything’s gonna be all right.

Then smiles, and wonders who won the auction.

9:11 p.m. Sam Briscoe. Fourteenth Street.

He crosses the wide street to the downtown side, and begins to walk east, toward Eighth Avenue, where he can find a subway. The A or the C. He looks up at the buildings. Lights are burning in about half of them, with the shades drawn. Others are shadeless, windows on the storm. He sees one woman alone, watching the street, not moving. In another, there is diffused light from a television set. On the street, a lone woman walks a small dog. He steps around a Mega Millions sign, with a printed image of a man peering from behind the day’s prize. His face is hidden, but his hairline recedes. Can it be Rudy Giuliani?

He slows now. His feet in their socks and boots are losing feeling. His gloved hands are numb. He imagines Helen Loomis in her apartment now. Or soon. Warming. Smoking a good-night cigarette. He wonders if her friend Federico the mambo dancer is across the street, moving to Tito Puente while the snow falls harder. He hopes so. He imagines Matt Logan, at home with his wife, wondering whether he can handle the brave new World of a website. Of course he can. News is news.

Maybe Fonseca will file for the site tomorrow. Maybe he can talk to Ali Watson before the snow stops falling. Or do a portrait of the guy he shot. Whoever the hell he was. The best story? It’s his nutjob son. And he can be traced to Patchin Place. But maybe they don’t connect. Maybe he’s just a pissed-off former employee. Some neighbor says the music was too loud? An architecture critic? Who the hell knows? Maybe Fonseca will discover the guy had a co-conspirator, a backup, the one who dropped that MAC-10. Or discover what was most likely: the guy was alone. The story now is that one night after his wife was murdered, Ali Watson killed a guy in the line of duty. Those are the known facts. So far. No theories, please.

The dead guy will soon be on a slab somewhere. Maybe even in the same freezing morgue as Mary Lou Watson. And Cynthia.

Cynthia.

I could not pray for her down at Patchin Place, Briscoe thinks. Backed up to the library fence twenty feet from Sandra Gordon, seeing the grief in Ali Watson’s eyes. And here I am in front of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. When Briscoe was young, it was called St. Bernard’s. The gate is open. He looks up the wet stone stairs at the red church doors. A light is burning above the arch. He starts up, then pauses. One door opens, and an older Mexican woman emerges, pulls her zipper to the top of her coat, buries her jaw in her scarf. He goes up a few more steps. She nods in a welcoming way. He goes to the top. He opens the red door and goes in.

9:15 p.m. Sandra Gordon. Her apartment.

The local news from New York 1 is on the set in her study. For possible news about Myles. The sound is off. She sits in an armchair, nibbling salted almonds, sipping a beer. Then she sees pictures of Aladdin’s Lamp, police cars, panicky crowds, a woman reporter with a microphone. She turns on the sound.

… possible terrorist attack. At least one alleged terrorist is dead. Scores were injured fleeing the scene, when the armed terrorist displayed a suicide vest in the crowded club. Police say…

That’s the place Janice wanted me to go to! Yes. Is she okay? Did she get hurt? Where the hell is she? A terrorist attack? On a disco? Makes no sense.

Then the anchorman is on. Making a clumsy segue. Meanwhile, the investigation of the murders in Greenwich Village of… She clicks off the sound and looks away, sips the beer, gets up, walks to a window to watch the driving snow. She counts to fifty and turns to the set. The anchorman again. Then a head shot of Myles! A kind of mug shot, without numbers underneath. Flicks on sound. Police in Putnam County believe they have found the body of a Wall Street man who failed to show up at a federal grand jury today. The man: Myles Compton. The body was found by two snowboarders. The man was shot twice in the head. Federal investigators had no comment but—

She turns off the set.

Sits there in silence.

Thinking: God, I’m too old for this.

Refusing to shed even one more tear.

9:16 p.m. Sam Briscoe. Our Lady of Guadalupe, 14th Street.

There is no Mass under way, but the lights are shining. He has slipped into a pew in the rear. The familiar image of the Lady of Guadalupe is high on the altar, her dark Indian skin a sign of triumphant consolation, with some kind of painted blue stream spreading beneath her. He has seen her in many places. In Mexico, above all. In the old Mexico City cathedral where pilgrims come each December to celebrate her goodness, hundreds doing the last few miles on their knees, to leave painted tin retablos asking for her intercession. The lights in this church do not burn now at full strength, except on the Virgin herself. Green-painted pillars rise to the high dark ceiling. But Briscoe can see people scattered through the pews. Everyone is alone. No couples. No mothers and children. Few men at all. Up near the front on the right, there’s someone in a wheelchair. Out in the aisle. To the right and left of the altar, candles burn in rows, and one older woman goes up and drops a coin in a slot and lights a fresh one.

Briscoe is certain he can smell the burning wax. Even here, far from the altar. He considers lighting some candles of his own. For Cynthia and Mary Lou. Of course. But for Ali Watson too. For Sandra. For her asshole boyfriend. For all the others, in those solitary rooms above the streets. For women scrubbing offices until the midnight hour. For baffled junkies in doorways. For my long-dead wife. For everyone at the paper. For the Fonseca kid, who thought he’d wear the same press card for years, and now… For all of them. People of the night.

He hears the elegance of Gregorian chant seeping into the dark places of the church, imposing grace and order out of the past. A CD, for sure. Briscoe thinks: Maybe we could bury Cynthia out of this place.

Maybe.

She would like that.

Briscoe tries again to pray. Once more, the words won’t come. And he can’t convince himself to walk up to the rack of guttering candles. He stands and hurries back to the doors. The cold hits him hard. He shudders, moves his hands like a prizefighter, snorts. Then goes down a shoveled path on the steps. He starts walking east, into the snow-drowned city. The wind is at his back.