Charlie read the newest text message twice. He whispered, “The motherfucker.”
Gina could do a good street accent, often talking to Charlie as though they were in Grease. “You talkin’ to me, buddy?”
Charlie was grave. “This guy is on to us.”
“Who?”
“Mahatma Gandhi.”
“Say again?”
“Gandhi, that new reporter at the Times.”
“He’s on to what?”
“He wants to ask us questions about the eighteen or so men who were picked up yesterday in upper Manhattan and Queens. He claims to have information that they were all picked up in coordinated raids and that they are all in what he says is an ‘off-the-books’ prison.”
Gina Carbone, suddenly and visibly angry, asked, “How does he know that?”
“Fuck if I know. It’s in the text message he just sent.” He held up the cell phone so that the luminous screen shined in Gina’s direction. As he did so, the elegant and miraculous instrument vibrated again with a new text message. Charlie read it and then said, “I’m going to throw this guy in the river.”
“What now? We’ll talk about the river later.”
“You’re not going to fucking believe this. It says he also wants to talk to you about Tony Garafalo.”
She felt a rush of anger-driven adrenaline. “Check the guy out.”
Rajiv Gandhi had long ago, as a war correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan, learned to deal with fear. You didn’t ignore it because you couldn’t; you didn’t by an act of the will overcome it because you couldn’t; and you didn’t deny that you had it because there was no room for denial. At least in Raj Gandhi’s case, you told yourself that fear, like all other emotions, shall pass, sometimes in an hour and sometimes in days.
As he drove under the elevated portion of the FDR Drive along the East River, he felt for reasons he couldn’t clearly identify, the first stirrings of the body-wide sensation he knew as fear. The steel pillars upholding the elevated highway were a maze. The space was dark and moist-looking, like a basement. Even with only a few cars moving, it was as noisy as a wind tunnel. The parked cars under the FDR looked abandoned as they, in fact, temporarily were because of the lockdown of Manhattan.
He drove slowly, looking for signs of anything unusual at the long-disused warehouses on the piers. “They stuffed these guys in some pier over on the East River in Manhattan,” said the foul-mouthed man who had called him early that morning. “Not sure which. Near the old Fulton Fish Market. Maybe they sleep with the fishes already, you know. Maybe the spirit lives on.”
After six years with a bare apartment in Beirut that he used only as a jumping-off point for his assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan, Raj had now lived for seven months in New York in a sterile one-room studio apartment in a high-rise apartment building on un-glamorous York Avenue. He hadn’t developed, and he recognized he would never develop, that discerning ear of long-time New Yorkers who could identify by their accents the boroughs in which people lived. But he did know, when he received a call that registered as an Unknown number that the man spoke with an accent that had its origins in one of the boroughs, probably Queens.
For Raj, one of the rules of his profession, at least in the old-fashioned way he’d been trained to practice it, was that you did not ignore a tip or a source simply because you didn’t like an accent or a messy way of speaking. Even the inarticulate could have crucial information. Content, not style, was important. “Are you the guy who writes for the Times?” the man asked.
“I am.” Raj’s own voice, he knew, would never lose that clipped accent that his youth in Bombay had implanted in him just as permanently as the color of his eyes.
“I’ve got an unbelievable story for you. Listen up, you’ll win the fucking Pulitzer Prize with it.”
This began as one of those contacts that was likely to be from a loony, lonely man, the kind of guy who spent large amounts of his time listening to and calling live sports talk radio shows. But patience could have its benefits. “I’m listening,” Raj said.
“A bunch of Arabs, probably a dozen or more, were picked up out of their houses yesterday by special details of cops right after the bombs went off. These cops were like Navy SEALs, except they didn’t have the flippers.” The man laughed at his own joke, a hacking sound. Raj, a reserved person who had learned exquisite manners from his Hindu mother, didn’t join the laugh.
Raj asked, “Where did this happen?”
“Queens, mostly. Where the hell do you think the fucking Arabs live? The Upper East Side?”
Raj knew he was dealing with a racist, but he increasingly accepted that this might be a source with at least some information. He asked, “What happened to them?”
“What happened to them was that they were hustled over the East River and locked up in a warehouse on an old pier. Made to disappear. You know the fucking government. They get to do what they want, they get to take away your money, sic the fucking IRS on you, make you disappear.” The caller paused, and in that pause, he made the same sucking noise that was probably laughter. “Maybe you haven’t been here long enough to know all that kind of shit.”
Raj ignored what he recognized was the baiting sarcasm. The man wanted to annoy and provoke him. Raj asked the critical question, “How do you know all this?”
“Good question, Mr. Gandhi. By the way, are you related to the big guy?”
There were millions of Gandhis in India, but he had been asked this question again and again, sometimes from people who should have known better. Raj asked again, “How do you know all this?”
“This is New York, Gandhi. There are seven million souls in the naked city. Thirty-five thousand of them are on the job or have been on the job. Are you following me, Mr. Gandhi?”
There were two things Raj derived from what this angry, sardonic, and bizarre man had just said. He had to be over fifty or have spent time at home watching television reruns because there was a program in the ’50s, the Naked City, about New York police. That show ended with a solemn voice-over announcing, “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”
And the reference to the “job” let Raj know that the man might have once been in the police department or known cops because that was how they described the institution they worked for, the “job.” Raj was a serious student of everything, and since his new assignment to the city bureau of the Times he had become a dedicated student of the city and its history by reading and learning about it from books and articles and watching old television shows and movies. He had the time to learn; he wasn’t married and never dated. He had lost the habit of developing friendships since he didn’t stay in any one place for any real amount of time. He was, he thought, in his own way like the loner now speaking to him. Raj needed to lure the man. “No,” he said, “I’m not really following you.”
“One thing they don’t want you to know is that the people who run the job aren’t saints. They want you to believe they’re heroes. Everyone’s a hero these days. Cancer survivors, people who hide in the basement in fucking Kansas during a tornado, cripples who ride bikes, even female police commissioners. Know what, Mr. Gandhi? A canary told me that there are guys on the job who work for that Italian bitch who do all her dirty work. Unterschtuppers. You know what that is, don’t you? You need to know Yiddish to get anywhere in New York, you know that, don’t you? The unterschtupper is the guy who does somebody else’s dirty work, usually around the asshole.”