Gabriel propped the man’s head on a fragment of loose concrete. Then he heard a woman’s voice nearby. She was moaning, “Help me, God. Help me.”
He did.
Later that day, after the security footage was retrieved from the debris, the image of Gabriel Hauser wandering alone among the dead and injured was broadcast around the world. By that time the police knew his name. Gabriel Hauser, the Angel of Life.
CHAPTER FOUR
AS GINA CARBONES convoy approached 79th Street and Madison Avenue, the streets were wild. Hundreds of people were out, looking in the direction of the museum as dense smoke billowed above it and the elegant nearby apartment buildings. Traffic was at a complete standstill, a hopeless gridlock, a virtual parking lot, and she and her staff left the convoy and walked three blocks uptown to the public school building, PS 6, that occupied the entire block fronting Madison Avenue from 81st Street to 82nd Street. She had ordered that the building be taken over as her command center. There was so much confusion on the streets that no one seemed to notice that the commissioner of the New York City Police Department and a phalanx of uniformed officers carrying M-16s and other evil-looking assault weapons were steadily walking through the chaotic crowds. Some people in the crowd with cell phones held aloft were recording her.
She made her way to a classroom on the northern side of the building. She was able to look down 82nd Street toward the museum. Through the leafy trees she had a glimpse of Fifth Avenue and a portion of the museum’s steps. Using binoculars, she saw uniformed officers setting up barriers and beyond them what at first looked like multiple cigarette butts scattered on the steps.
They were charred bodies.
Gina Carbone had served in the Gulf War and from helicopters had seen the bodies of dead Iraqi soldiers scattered on the desert. She had no sense of connection with them. But now she realized that the smoking smudges were people just recently killed by shrapnel and fire. Part of her reputation was built on the perception that she was cool, unflappable, and tough, but she found herself audibly inhaling as though she was on the brink of screaming. These fuckers, she thought, how did they get here?
Donna Thompson, a black police captain, was waiting for her. Crisp and efficient, she had a sheet of paper on which she had written the information she knew Gina needed.
“How many dead people have I got?”
“Fifty at least,” Thompson calmly said. “We’ve only just now started letting EMT people through the barrier.”
“Why so long?”
“We had reports that there might be more bombers inside the museum itself.”
“How many wounded?”
“Not many so far. Ten. There are more likely more dead than wounded.”
Gina was an NYPD sergeant on 9/11. She had arrived in lower Manhattan six hours after the towers fell. At old St. Paul’s Church on lower Broadway, a church surrounded by a cemetery with gravestones from the 1600s and 1700s, doctors and medics were waiting to care for the wounded. It became chillingly obvious as the hours passed that there were very few wounded, just as there were very few intact bodies. Doctors and nurses stood around uselessly. Soon the church became a rest station with water and food for the people working at the scorched place where the towers had collapsed.
“What do we know about how many people were at the museum when this happened?”
“One of the security guards was at a coffee shop on a break. He said that on a pretty summer day they could have as many as three hundred people on the steps, sitting on the benches on the plaza, looking at the pictures and other stuff in the outdoor stalls, just hanging around. Not to mention tourists on the buses, those double-decker kinds. There were five tour buses lined up on the avenue.”
Gina was making notes on a pad of paper. She wrote columns of numbers as she listened.
“How about inside?”
“This guy is a guard in the Temple of Dendur on the northern end of the museum. Part of his job is to count as best he can the number of visitors in the area on one of those old-fashioned handheld clickers. He had a headcount of 350 when he left for his break. Pretty primitive, but at least it’s some info.”
Gina thought about the slanting expanses of panes of glass that encased the Temple of Dendur where Egyptian tombs and statues were displayed. The shattered glass would have been hurled to the sloping lawn at unimaginable velocity. There must have been sun-bathers on a gorgeous day there. Even a fragment of glass could maim or kill. When she wrote down the number 350 on her pad the lead point of her pencil broke. She was that tense.
“And what about the rest of the museum?”
“At any one time on a Sunday there are as many as a thousand people inside, more on a rainy day.”
“Anything else?”
“Sure. Every window facing Fifth Avenue in all the big apartment buildings was blown out from 86th Street down to 79th. All of the glass blown inward. There are dead and injured people there. We don’t have easy access. They’re Fifth Avenue apartment buildings, after all. The security system in every one of these rich people’s buildings is better than the Pentagon. Besides, God knows how many of them were at their houses in the Hamptons on the weekend.”
Some of the most famous people in the world lived in those buildings, the most desirable in Manhattan, with unobstructed views of the museum and all of Central Park. For the first time that morning, Gina gave some thought to the type of mind that could envision and execute all this. These were people who knew that large concentrations of vulnerable men, women, and children would be clustered together on a day of the week when the city was relaxed and festive, the numbers of police at reduced levels, and vigilance taken down a notch.
And whoever had done this knew the city especially well for another reason: not only would the massacre kill and maim many tourists from around the country and the world, but it was bound to kill and maim rich and famous people in the most expensive buildings in the world. Jackie Onassis had lived for years in a building directly across the avenue from the Met. The bombings on 9/11 killed thousands of innocent people but very few famous ones. The World Trade Center was a place where most of the people worked as clerks and technicians for big brokerage firms and government agencies. Although it was a huge, spectacular target of opportunity, it was not the place where members of the power elite were likely to be killed.
“And what about the roof garden?”
“Not sure, no word.”
“I know there were people up there for a party.”
“There are trees and plants up there,” Captain Thompson said. “It’s all still burning, like a forest fire.”
Gina Carbone didn’t like pretty boys, but Roland Fortune was more than a pretty boy. She first met him three days after he was elected mayor. He had campaigned in part on the need to replace the top people in the police department. She was at least three rungs below that level. He interviewed several men and two women who ranked higher than Gina and who were better educated and with more years of service. But he had responded well to her and five days later he held a televised press conference announcing her appointment in which he described her as a gritty, streetwise, brilliant officer who had vision, integrity, and drive. In private he never tried to charm her. He was a patient listener, often, but not always, endorsing anything she recommended. She admired him. The thought that he was blown to shreds or burned to death unnerved her.
She was on the verge of asking about the physical damage to the museum. But a hand touched her shoulder. “The president’s on the line.”