Terminal City

THIRTY-THREE

“The mayor wants you to come in, Alexandra,” the district attorney said to me, faking a smile as he held the door open for me.

“I thought we were going to wait for Commissioner Scully,” I said, smoothing my wrinkled shirt and concerned about the impression jeans would make in this formal setting.

“He wants to talk to you first, as long as you’re here. I told you he’s got his priorities all screwed up.”

Paul Battaglia couldn’t hide his contempt for the new mayor. During my entire twelve-year tenure as a prosecutor, a brilliant, creative, if not somewhat idiosyncratic chief executive ran City Hall. He had been respectful of the DA and our staff and had a truly collaborative relationship with his much-admired police commissioner.

The new regime was proving to be a crapshoot. Too many campaign promises that made no sense except to curry favor with voting blocs, and meddling into a pending civil lawsuit that undermined long-standing police procedures-setting off a frenzy of picketing against the new mayor by the detective union.

“C’mon in, Alexandra.” He motioned to me to sit opposite him, in a chair beside Battaglia. He held out his hand and reintroduced himself to me. I’d met him after the resolution of the murders in Central Park two months earlier. “Scully will be here any minute. I just wanted your take on something before we get started on these horrific crimes.”

“Certainly, sir. I’d like to apologize for my appearance. The cops and I have taken on the somewhat dusty veneer of the terminal regulars.”

“Dress-down Friday. No worries,” he said. “Look, Alex-may I call you Alex? I wanted to ask about a case you’ve been handling. Nothing inappropriate, nothing off the record. I’d just like a better understanding of what makes it a crime.”

I looked at Battaglia, who seemed to have caught the same vibe I did. Someone to whom he owed a political favor was pushing for the mayor to intervene on the Gerardo Dominguez case.

“Oh, Christ. Don’t play with me, Mr. Mayor,” Battaglia said. “You’ve got us here for a much more important reason. It’s almost five o’clock. First day in four without a murder and we’ve only got seven hours till midnight. Don’t sandbag me with this bullshit.”

The mayor feigned surprise. “Sandbag you? You’re a lawyer, Paul. I’m not.”

“Then what business did you have stepping in the middle of a ten-year-old lawsuit? You’re lucky you still have a police officer willing to walk a beat for you.” Battaglia stood up and walked to one of the tall windows overlooking City Hall Park. “Whose dirty work are you doing now?”

“Not fair, Paul. You know better than that. I don’t have a pony in this race. I’m just asking questions. What’s the basis for your case, Alex?”

“It’s not my case anymore. I don’t think I should be speaking about it.”

“Really? I’d just like to know when it’s against the law for me to be thinking about something really evil, and then getting arrested for it. What’s the tipping point?”

The mayor looked like a goofy, overgrown kid. He couldn’t have been more disingenuous, but then, he’d apparently formed his judgments about the workings of the city’s criminal justice system by watching bad movies and TV shows.

“You can tell him, Alexandra,” Battaglia said.

Someday I wouldn’t be working for a bureaucrat-even one I admired as much as Battaglia on most days-for whom I’d have to toady up from time to time. Someday I’d be free to tell the mayor that I thought he was a total asshole.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I think you have a teenage daughter, Mr. Mayor. Don’t you?”

“I do.”

“Suppose this-this man who has a different set of values than you do-”

“He’s entitled to those, isn’t he?”

“He certainly is. No problem for me there,” I said. “Suppose in between doing a Web search for recipes that involve the use of chloroform and then buying a Taser online, suppose his next search is for the name of your sixteen-year-old daughter-”

“Let’s leave my daughter out of this, shall we?”

“Sure, sir. Let’s make it somebody else’s daughter. It’s always somebody else’s daughter when you don’t want the reality to seem quite so immediate,” I said. “So Keith Scully has a teenager, too. And she might be harder to find than a girl who lives in Gracie Mansion. Everyone knows where to find that one.”

The mayor wasn’t amused. But it wasn’t my purpose to amuse him.

“So the guy with the odd thoughts searches out the name of the police commissioner’s daughter. Then he goes one further, trying to find out her address and which high school she attends. All pretty easy stuff to do.”

“It is.”

“Then his next e-mail to one of his fetish-friends talks specifically about what the best way is to kill a teenage girl.”

The mayor appeared to be uncomfortable. “Still not a crime, is it?”

“No, sir. I just think it’s a bit reckless, a bit out of control. But I’m still with you. No prosecution,” I said. “Now, may I ask what your favorite restaurant is?”

“I’m a Brooklyn kid. Why?”

“So pick one of those chic Park Slope places.”

“Got it.” He was twiddling his thumbs now, moving them around faster than a wheel in a gerbil cage.

“Suppose one of the waiters told you that the chef had a powerful fantasy about poisoning his customers. That he’d been saying that one evening it was going to come to that.”

The mayor laughed. It was the same inappropriate kind of giggle that had come out of him late one night at a press conference about the sixth snowstorm of the season this past February, when he announced the city was just plain out of salt and rich folk on the Upper East Side should think about sledding to work the following day.

“Then, every few days your chef would engage in conversations with other people about his desire to poison his customers-especially the regulars-and that he had gone online and was pleasantly surprised to find how many recipes for hard-to-trace poisons were actually posted on the Internet.”

Battaglia had his hand on the edge of the dark-blue curtains, smirking at the mayor while he listened to me.

“Now one of the guys in his chat room came to see him in the kitchen a few times a week. The chef shows him the list of names he wants to target. Elected officials at the top. ‘Hates those whores,’ he says.”

“My chef wouldn’t talk like that.”

“In my version, the chef has you in his sights. Says to his cyber buddy, ‘I just can’t wait to watch the top dog drop dead. The mayor of New York City. Know those french fries he loves? Just a tablespoon of cyanide-it looks so much like salt crystals-he’ll be drooling in his plate in fifteen minutes.’”

“Got me on the fries, Alex.”

“You going back to that restaurant, Mr. Mayor? You just going to play Russian roulette till the chef decides it’s your night to die? Actually, I think not. I think you might want to come with me to Rao’s or to Fresco for dinner. Much safer bets.”

“Give him the rest of it, Alex. Give him the facts.”

“She’s making her point, Paul. She’s-”

There was a sharp rap on the door, and Keith Scully walked in without waiting for an invitation.

“Mr. Mayor, Paul,” he said. “Sorry to keep you. I’m sure Alex has been filling you in.”

He patted me on the back before taking the seat on my other side.

“Actually no, Keith,” I said. “The mayor doesn’t like my take on Gerry Dominguez.”

“I told you he’s a sick puppy, sir. You’ve got to stay out of that one. And you’ve got bigger issues on your plate. Way bigger.”

“I know that.”

“I was held up at Federal Plaza,” the commissioner said. “My team was over meeting with the head of the Secret Service in New York. You won’t like this, Mr. Mayor, but the feds are closing down Grand Central Terminal for the weekend. They called me in to tell me the plan. My men are working with theirs right now.”

“They’re doing what? That’s impossible.”

“A little inclement weather and your constituents can all sled to wherever they’ve got to go, even in the summer. That line worked for you once,” Battaglia said.

Scully talked over Battaglia. “The terminal closes at two A.M.”

“I know that.”

“The feds want to take charge of the operation and-”

“And you’re willing to let them?”

“I’m willing to do anything to keep the public safe, Mr. Mayor. Transportation hubs-and this one is the most beautiful in the world-they’re magnets for trouble,” Scully said.

The mayor was practically foaming at the mouth. “I’m in charge of running this city. It’s what the people elected me to do.”

“Trains out of here go to a number of other states. That alone gives the feds jurisdiction,” I said. “And all the way to Canada. That’s international territory, in case you weren’t sure.”

“Watch your mouth,” the mayor said, pointing a finger at me.

“I’ve seen the bodies of the murder victim, Your Honor. It’s hard to swallow, sir.”

“The Service is also fighting with the president,” Scully said. “But he’s bound and determined to ride that train right into the terminal. Gateway to the Continent. He wants to connect to all that history. And I understand that he feels the need to show the country he’s not afraid.”

“It’s impossible to close the terminal,” the mayor said, stuttering and sputtering at the same time.

“As I started to say, it shuts down at two this morning. So there’s a natural break in the train schedule, and that’s when the police get to move all the stragglers out. It just won’t reopen at five thirty A.M. on Saturday. That’s the plan we’re going to put in motion. Jointly, with the feds.”

“It’s Saturday. The terminal should be crawling with tourists, full of people from the suburbs bringing their kids in to see Broadway shows and go shopping all over town. It’s an enormous amount of revenue for the city every minute that building is open, do you get that?”

“It’s better than doing this on a weekday, sir. It’s better than having all the commuters unable to get to work on Monday morning. Chances are with a joint task force manning this operation, we’ll have it solved within twenty-four hours.”

“You can’t close it, Scully,” the mayor said, pounding his fist on the desk. “I own Grand Central Terminal.”

There was silence in the room.

“Actually, Mr. Mayor, you don’t,” I said. “You don’t own it.”

“Not me personally, Alex. I realize it’s a public-private partnership. But I have control of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Don’t get in my way, Scully.”

“The MTA just rents the terminal, Mr. Mayor. There’s actually a landlord. There’s actually a man who owns the entire Grand Central building itself, as well as the tracks below-seventy-five miles up to Poughkeepsie-and the air rights above it.”

“Commodore Vanderbilt is long dead,” the mayor said, throwing one arm up in the air. “It’s like the old joke that the Brooklyn Bridge is for sale. Don’t take me for a fool, Commissioner.”

Keith Scully stood up, ready to make his exit. “The terminal was sold out from under you in 2006, sir. It’s owned lock, stock, and barrel by a fifty-five-year-old real estate developer. An hour ago we got his permission to shut the place down.”