There was no trace of bitterness or sarcasm in Gabriel’s voice. His eyes were almost blue despite his black and lustrous eyebrows that, set in the perfect symmetry of his face, had attracted so many men and women since Jerome Fletcher first embraced him years ago as he emerged at age fifteen, naked, from the shower in the apartment on West End Avenue.
Raj said, “I have to be honest with you, Dr. Hauser. I have another source who says it was no coincidence that you were near the museum at exactly the same time the bombs went off.”
The automated tin-pan-alley music from the merry-go-round switched from the theme song to Annie to the theme of The Sting.
“Really? And what genius was that? I live on that block. I was walking the dog I love.”
“The source tells me you were scheduled to work that morning and that you were uncharacteristically insistent on not doing it.”
Gabriel’s voice was calm. “Who are we talking about?”
“The source?”
“That word makes him sound like an oracle of truth. Who is he? I need to talk to him. I want to hunt down the people who attacked my partner and my dog this morning. Was he one of them?”
“I wish I could tell you, Dr. Hauser. I promised him anonymity. I can’t do my work if I can’t keep those promises.”
Suddenly a green Army helicopter, its rotors swirling through the sunlight, passed overhead through the tranquil summer sky. The kids and the parents near the merry-go-round looked up excitedly. Gabriel didn’t have to look up because he recognized the unique thudding pulsation of the transport helicopters that had brought wounded men to him.
“The source said you developed contacts in the Middle East.”
“I did. I treated civilians and soldiers, anyone who was brought to the hospitals. It was the most intimate kind of contact you could ever imagine.”
“They say you are bitter.”
“Did they say why?”
“Because you were forced out of the military.”
Gabriel’s voice was still calm, the voice of a man who had many times spoken quietly as he was operating on people who were near death and had often died from their irreparable wounds while he did his work. “Who are these people? I became a jihadist because I was forced out of the Army?”
“There are many disturbing things going on right now, Dr. Hauser. Some of them are happening to you.”
Although the last traces of the sound from the Army helicopter were fading, the thuds from the rotors were still almost tangible. The music from the merry-go-round had changed again. It was now a quick, lively version of God Bless America.
Gabriel gazed at Raj’s absolutely black eyes. “I know that. But what about you, Mr. Gandhi? You’re working on troubling things, aren’t you? Do you think that being a reporter for the New York Times gives you some kind of immunity from harm?”
“I’m not worried about myself, I’m looking for facts.”
“And so am I.”
“Don’t you think,” Raj asked, “that we can help each other?”
Gabriel paused. A refreshing breeze, creating glittering green in the leaves, swept over them. “Let me have your iPhone.”
Without asking anything, Raj passed his phone to Gabriel, who added his number to the contact list on Raj’s cell phone. “This is a special number for me. No one else has it. Use it when you want to.”
“Do you want mine?”
“I have it. You called me, Mr. Gandhi. As they say in the movies, I’ve got your number.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
ROLAND FORTUNE LIKED people. He loved walking the streets of the city. He often left City Hall to make unexpected appearances in all the boroughs, walking several blocks each time, instantly and always recognizable. He ran almost every weekend in races in Central Park, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, and Flushing Meadows in Queens. He attended Mass in churches throughout the city and spoke at Baptist churches in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. And he was a regular presence at parties in the houses of the rich on the Upper East Side and in Tribeca. He was a man who loved the joy of living each day.
He was also an unrepentant liberal who knew how to practice an old style of politics. The police and fire department unions, overcoming their initial reluctance about a Puerto Rican mayor, embraced him because he cooperated with them on pay and benefits. This was a sea change. Ever since the Giuliani and Bloomberg years, the unions had expected resistance from City Hall. The leaders of the immense civil service populations, men and women in the sanitation department, the schools, all the myriad government agencies praised him as “cooperative, farsighted, inspirational.”
So when word had spread that Roland was very disturbed that he didn’t know where Sarah’s body was located, a group of men and women in the medical examiner’s office organized themselves to track down her remains. They found her in a temporary morgue that had been installed at the long-abandoned St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. The exterior white walls of the increasingly derelict building were graying under the steady accretion of rain and sunlight, soot and time. But even these decaying buildings on this bright afternoon somehow looked fresh.
Roland was wearing sunglasses as he left the unmarked sedan which took him from City Hall to St. Vincent’s in the Village. He had ordered the car and only two security officers in plain clothes to accompany him. They walked near him as he approached the single functioning door, the access to the chilled room where at least seventy-five bodies were stored in the emergency morgue. This morgue was the one to which bodies that had no identification-no licenses, no passports, no wallets, no pocketbooks-were brought. Sarah Hewitt-Gordan was the first of these wrecked bodies that had been identified.
Roland was stunned by what he saw in the room as he entered: three orderly rows of dead bodies stretched out on the concrete floor. They were covered in identical plastic blankets, all blue. Even in the artificial chill, there was the faint but unmistakable odor of dead flesh. Sarah’s body, he knew, was one of the sources of that odor.
A huge black man, a nurse in blue hospital scrubs, approached Roland, who asked, “Where is she?”
The nurse didn’t speak. He led Roland down the aisle between two of the rows of bodies. Only one of the blue blankets had a sheet of paper attached to it. Her name was on it.
Visibly shaking, Roland Fortune knelt on the concrete floor. After several seconds, he reached toward the blanket. The massive nurse finally spoke, “That ain’t a good idea, sir.”
Roland looked up. “Is it bad?”
The man nodded. “Big time.”
“How do you know it’s her?”
“We had a picture.”
Roland glanced at his unsteady hands and then completed the movement he had started. He pulled at the upper edge of the blanket, revealing her head.
At first he saw her face in profile. Her eyes were open. There was a scratch on her forehead. The once vibrant skin was now gray.
He leaned closer to her. He gently turned her head so he could have a last look at the face he had loved. He recoiled. “Christ,” he screamed.
There was no right side of her face, only a mess of torn flesh and bone.
Roland jumped to his feet. The nurse grabbed the edge of the plastic sheet to cover Sarah’s head. At the same time he reached across her body to Roland, who appeared about to fall. He grabbed Roland’s left arm to steady him. Still bracing Roland up, he hustled him to the door. He was a powerful man and although Roland, too, was large, the man handled him as if he were a dish towel.
Roland sat in the back of the car for fifteen minutes. His guards had sensitive instincts. They stood fifteen feet away, waiting. Behind the tinted windows, Roland wailed, a crying that he hadn’t experienced since he was a boy, when his father had just walked away from the family and disappeared for good. Roland never saw him again. If he were still alive, Reuben Fortune must have known his son had become one of the most famous people in the country. For some unidentifiable reason, Roland had a sense his father was living. Had Reuben ever returned, Roland would have kissed and embraced him.