“Auntie,” her thirteen-year-old niece Elena said, “Mom says you had a date last night.”
Gina was uncomfortable with the way Elena, her favorite niece, was changing. She had a small silver stud embedded in her left nostril. Gina had been tempted to tell her that it looked like snot, but she restrained herself. And now she noticed a tattoo in the shape of an eyelash on her niece’s left wrist.
And, of course, Elena had taken to teasing about her unmarried aunt’s love life.
“I did,” Gina said.
“But you got home before midnight and he didn’t stay. Like what’s that about?”
Gina Carbone spent at least one weekend each month at this three-story house where she’d been raised. The third floor had been converted into a separate apartment for her, complete with a state-of-the-art communications center. Gina felt deeply comfortable in this familiar home, redolent with the smell of slow-cooked food and her older brother’s cigars. She went to the early Sunday morning Mass at the Church of the Assumption, the granite church where her father had taken her every Sunday morning until she graduated from high school and enlisted in the Army.
“It was a first date, sweetie.”
“You didn’t even take him upstairs for a drink. I don’t get that.”
“Elena, you’ve been looking at too much TV. What channels are you watching?”
“How do you ever expect to get a man?”
Playfully, she raised her voice. “Linda,” Gina called out to her sister, “you need to take your daughter to church.”
Linda Kotowski-her estranged husband was a Polish plumber who had moved to Jersey City-laughed as she carried more food to the table. “What, and fuck up the nuns?”
Linda, a schoolteacher, was two years younger than Gina. She was a slender, physically softer version of her sister. There was no rivalry between them; they had always loved each other.
It was exactly 1:30 when Rocco Barbiglia, the lieutenant who traveled with her on the weekends, stepped through the door to the patio and said, in a subdued voice, “Commissioner? Can I see you for a second?”
Gina gave a playful slap to the side of Elena’s head, as if saying Wake up, kid, and rose from the table. She walked past Rocco, who followed her to the edge of the patio. A refreshing sea breeze raised his thin hair.
“What’s up, Rocco?” she asked. “Better be important. I was just about to tell my niece how to stay a virgin. I know a lot about that.”
“There’s been a big explosion at the Met.”
“When?”
“Two minutes ago.”
“Bombing?”
“For sure.”
“People hurt?”
“Lots. The bombs went off on the front steps. A sunny Sunday afternoon. You know how it is, must’ve been hundreds of people sitting out there. Enjoying the sunlight.”
“Bombs? More than one?”
“Three, four.”
“Send out the Code Apache order.”
Code Apache was the order to close every entrance and exit to Manhattan. There were many bridges, large and small, and four tunnels connecting the island of Manhattan to the Bronx, New Jersey, Queens, and Brooklyn. There were also helicopter landing pads in Manhattan and docks, wharves and ports. Code Apache closed them all. No one was to enter or leave the island. The idea was to seal Manhattan as thoroughly as a ship in the middle of the Atlantic. Only the president, the mayor, the police commissioner, the director of homeland security, the attorney general of the United States, and the chief of staff of the military could issue that order.
“And let’s saddle up,” Gina said.
A former Marine who had served in the Gulf War and still an agile man, Rocco jogged off the patio toward the unmarked van in which the mobile communication facilities were installed. At the same time Gina briskly walked toward the festive table on the patio. She was fearful and anxious. These were her brothers and sisters and their children and parents, all the people she loved in the world. The city was being attacked, people had been killed, and other assaults might soon happen. The possibilities of injury and death were endless, and there was no way, she knew, to predict whether the people she loved would be engulfed in it. And no way to protect them. Staten Island was in many ways a world unto itself, an island, but not immune.
“Hey, everybody, I just got some real bad news.” It took a second for the friendly clamor around the table to subside. “Somebody’s bombed the big museum. There are a lot of people hurt. I’m on my way into Manhattan.”
Gina was proud of the way she had organized the police department in the three years since her surprise appointment by Roland Fortune. She had spent thirteen years in the Army, first as an enlisted soldier and then as an officer. She had learned principles of management that enabled her to increase responsiveness in the police force into a more military precision. Only a few commissioners before her had ever served in the military. Most of them had been political appointees, and a few had served as chiefs of the police departments in other major cities. She was the first native of Staten Island, and the first woman, to command the NYPD. When she saw that the traffic was already suspended on the two-mile-long Verrazano Narrows Bridge as her convoy reached it three minutes after leaving her family home, she was gratified. At least the first step of what would be a long day had fallen into place perfectly, just as she had planned it.
Rocco, crouched in the jump seat across from Gina, handed her the secure phone, saying, “It’s Billy.”
“Talk to me, Billy,” she said.
Billy O’Connell, one of the five deputy commissioners, was on duty in the secret underground crisis command center at the corner of West 14th Street and Jones Street in the Meatpacking District, once the place where meat and pork were distributed to city restaurants and grocery chains. The Meatpacking District had for many years been legendary for its complete control by the Gambino family. That grip had long been removed. The district was now best known for some of its new state-of-the-art, expensive apartment buildings and a variety of drug-happy clubs with deafening music for teenagers and trendy men and women who danced all night to hip-hop and rap music.
The main entrance to the center, called Fortress America by those who knew it, was through a former meat warehouse that, at street level, appeared to be a boarded-up after-hours club, Le Zinc. It was a still seedy area of the city where no one would have expected to find a state-of-the-art security center inside a nineteenth-century warehouse.
“The area around the museum’s not secure yet,” Billy said.
“How many units are on the way?”
“Six more squad cars. And five crews from the 19th Precinct.”
Gina knew she had to stay steady and focused. But, as she also recognized, she was afraid. From the mid-span of the bridge, she looked out at the glittering expanse of New York Harbor and lower Manhattan, one of the most remarkable sights in the world. The day was absolutely clear, just as 9/11 had been. What was it about beautiful days and explosions? The Statue of Liberty, the office buildings that fronted Battery Park, the vast expanse of the Hudson River: the scene looked like a postcard or a montage in a romantic comedy. All that was different now was a diaphanous tower of smoke rising from the museum six miles away.