“Can you believe it?” she said to Rocco Barbiglia.
Rocco-as good-looking as a young Robert DeNiro-glanced in the direction toward which Gina pointed. “What’s up, Chief?”
“Over there, look. The doctor who treated the guy with the big birthmark at the museum.”
“Right, I see him, Chief. The guy gets around.”
Gina said, “He’s Zelig, the man who shows up everywhere. He’s been talking to the cop next to him. Rocco, find out who the cop is and have him tell us what the Angel of Life had to say.”
Gina knew the ambulance that carried a person she described as “Gift No. 1” would not arrive at Pier 37 for another hour. She had given instructions for the ambulance to drive slowly through the West Village and the West Side Highway below 14th Street as though on an ordinary cruise. That was a tactic, she knew, that would allow the ambulance to elude reporters or anyone else who might have seen it leave the George Washington Carver projects.
The ambulance was not going to any hospital. Silas Nasar was strapped and handcuffed to a gurney. Rifles were pointed at him.
Since she had some time before she, too, would arrive at Pier 37, she told her driver to stop at the service entrance to the Regency Hotel on 61st Street. Accompanied by two guards dressed as hotel porters, she took the huge service elevator to the sixth floor. The elevator had the faint but distinct scent of the garbage which had been accumulating in the hotel’s basement during the long quarantine of Manhattan.
When she entered the room, Tony Garafalo was reading a book. One of the things that attracted her to him was that he was a complex, unpredictable man, so much more interesting than the conventional people who surrounded her in her daily life. During his years in the legendary Supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado, the most secure of all the prisons in the federal system, the place where the Unabomber, Arab terrorists, John Gotti, and Mexican drug lords were imprisoned, he had developed a passion for reading the classic books: Thackeray, Tolstoy, Conrad, even Jane Austen. As she approached him, he put down the Modern Library edition of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
“Hey, big guy,” she said, “pretty soon you can start teaching a course on the Great Fucking Books at Harvard.”
“Hey, doll. There’s only one course about fucking I want to teach.”
“I’m all ears, teacher.”
Tony led her to the elegant bathroom, all marble and glowing brass. Naked, she stood under the shower, her hair soon streaming black and straight, and Tony, muscular and powerful, stood behind her. She pressed her glorious ass into his groin. He kissed her hair and shoulders and the length of her spine. When he reached the firm cleavage of her ass, he gently turned her. He was on his knees. Her vagina was in front of his face. He pressed his tongue into her, the water flowing over his mouth. As his tongue caressed her clitoris from every angle, she moaned, “Tony, Tony.” Finally she said, “Fuck me.”
He stood. They were face to face, chest to chest under the clean flowing water. He entered her. She placed her hands on his shoulders. She was ecstatic. So was he.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“DO YOU HAVE any idea, Gina, how unacceptable that is?” Roland Fortune asked. “How bad, bad?”
“It’s what it is,” she said.
“It’s a disaster.”
“We knew there were risks.”
“Seven of our twelve people? Risks? Seven of our people dead? Every fucking guy in the apartment? That gives a whole new meaning to risks. It’s more like a suicide video game.”
Roland raised the right hand he had held like a visor over his eyes. Outside, the leafy trees in City Hall Park were suffused with the green, comforting glow of afternoon sunlight.
“When you act, there are consequences.”
Roland resisted the impulse to say Tell me something else I don’t know. Instead he said, “Have the families been told yet?”
“Of course not.”
“Has Lazarus been told?”
“No, not yet.”
“So who knows, right at this moment, in real time?”
“You. Two or three of my top people.”
“What did you find in the apartment? Beyond dead bodies, I mean.”
“Weapons, ammunition.”
“What about bombs?”
“None.”
“Bomb-making materials?”
“Nothing so far.”
“Computers?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Three-year-olds have computers.”
“We’re still searching.”
“Still? How big is the place?”
“One bedroom.”
“It’s not the Vatican. Do you really expect to find something?”
“I don’t expect anything, Mr. Mayor.” That abrasive bluntness of Gina which Roland had admired for so long emerged at the edge of her tone. “Whatever is there is there. Whatever isn’t there isn’t there.”
“Gina, we had a Defense Secretary once who spoke in enigmas. Remember? Rumsfeld? All that amusing crap about known unknowns. Known knowns.”
It was the Gina Carbone who never tried to be charming who spoke. “I don’t expect to find anything buried in the walls. What we have now, and what we know now, is likely to be all there is. Let me say it again: seven of our people dead, all nine of the Arabs dead. Ten assault rifles. Six pistols. Enough ammunition for those weapons, nothing like an arsenal. No grenades, no homemade bombs, no pressure cookers, no books, no computers.”
“How about cell phones?”
“Three cell phones. Those are in the hands of our technical people. Here is a known unknown: I don’t know what is in them.”
How many hours ago, Roland thought, did he wake in a sundrenched room in Gracie Mansion beside the still-sleeping, sweet-breathing, vibrantly alive Sarah Hewitt-Gordan? Sounding subdued, he said, “All right, Gina, keep me posted. Call at least every ten minutes, more if necessary.”
Gina said nothing about Silas Nasar, Gift No. 1, who, unhurt, even in the cauldron of gunfire and explosions in the apartment at the Carver Towers, was still being driven around the city in a quiet ambulance before he would be delivered to Pier 37.
The images on the immense high-definition television screen were somehow familiar, like images from Baghdad, Kabul, Damascus, Aleppo, anyplace where chaos was unfolding. Armored vehicles all over the streets, men and women in uniforms, the blackened side of a heavily damaged building, thousands of spinning emergency lights, ambulances. Roland said to the men, Irv Rothstein and Hans Richter, who were with him in his office, “Enough, turn it off, this isn’t telling me anything that hundreds of millions of people watching CNN and Fox don’t already know. This makes the Paris assaults look like a holiday.”
Seated in a wooden chair in front of Roland Fortune’s desk, Hans Richter removed the white earbud from his left ear just as the scene on the television screen dissolved into a pinpoint of evanescent light. He said, “The president is on the line now.”
Roland nodded, held up a silencing hand and instantly the room resonated with an electronic hum. There was no video this time, at Roland’s direction. The eerie electronic resonance lasted for at least ten seconds. It ended when Andrew Carter said, “Let’s have a head count. Mr. Mayor, who is with you?”
There were no gracious preliminaries this time, no greetings.
Roland was no more interested in introductory pleasantries than Andrew Carter was. “Two deputy mayors, Rothstein and Richter.”
“And what about the police commissioner? Capone?” Carter asked.