“Mr. Gandhi, I have no confidence in reporters, their newspapers, CNN, the New York Times. I made every effort I could when I was hustled and bundled out of my hospital in Afghanistan, where I loved my work as a doctor, and then out of the Army, where I planned to stay for years. No one, no one, in your business paid any attention to me. I felt like a leper.”
Quietly Raj said, “I’m sorry. But now Don’t ask, don’t tell has been eliminated.”
“Too late, not to mention the twenty years it was in effect and all the years and years before that when openly gay people could not serve. I’m one of thousands and thousands of people with what the Army still calls less-than-honorable discharges.”
“You can ask to have that changed.”
“I’m not interested in asking. I have a thing about asking the Army or the government for anything.”
“That must be painful.”
Gabriel leaned closer to Raj. “Why haven’t you done anything, Mr. Gandhi? It’s been many, many hours since you learned important things, things that need to be exposed. But here you are, on a bench, talking to me about what you know.” Gabriel paused, continuing to gaze at Raj’s delicate face. “What are you going to do?”
“I work for a paper with an opaque hierarchy. Layers of editors. Their watchword is verification, corroboration.”
“You have your source.”
“I don’t know who he is.”
“You have me. You know my life partner has disappeared and is under arrest. I see stories from the Times on my cell phone about our courageous mayor, the extraordinarily brave police commissioner, garbage on the streets, the count of the dead, lists of names of the dead. But I don’t see anything about the underside of all this.”
Raj Gandhi spoke slowly. “You’re wrong, Dr. Hauser. I have a blog and access to YouTube. I have the secret caller on tape. I have a video I took of Gina Carbone slipping into Pier 37. I even have a video of her going in and out of the Regency. And I have a source on the service staff at the Regency who tells me that Gina Carbone has a different kind of captive at the Regency, a lover. I even have his name. Tony Garafalo. And like the rest of the world I have Google. It took me ten minutes of a Google search to find out that this Tony Garafalo served at least eight years in a federal prison, the worst one, in fact, the Supermax facility in Florence, Colorado, where the Unabomber and the shoe-bomber are held, where John Gotti was once a prisoner. Mr. Garafalo was an associate of the Gambino family. And that Garafalo was convicted of using force to silence witnesses who were about to testify about the Gambino family.”
“And the people you work for have no interest in that?”
“Not yet.”
“When will yet come? After Cam is dead? After the pier is empty? After I’m arrested?” Gabriel stood up. “You’re wasting my time, Mr. Gandhi.”
“Don’t leave.” Gandhi’s delicate voice was as loud, as definitive as it could be. “In two hours I am putting everything I know, corroborated or not, on my blog. On YouTube, on Snapchat, on Twitter, on all those instantaneous social media devices. The pier and its dark prison. The movements of the police commissioner. You, your injured dog, your lover. Even this interview.”
“I don’t believe you, Mr. Gandhi. You don’t have the inner strength to do that. It’s not in your DNA. The Times will fire you. You’re the only Indian there. You have all that prestige, that loyalty. You’re Gunga Din, loyal to the British, to the powers that be.”
“Are you a racist, Dr. Hauser?”
“Far from it. I’m a realist.”
Gabriel Hauser turned off his cell phone. “I’ll take care of this myself,” he said. He stood and disappeared around the corner on East 90th Street. His beloved apartment was only eight blocks away. He cried all the way to the home he loved.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
RAJ GANDHI’S WALK east from Fifth Avenue and the Church of the Heavenly Rest took him, once he crossed Lexington Avenue, through the dreary streets filled with decaying brownstones in which multiple small apartments, some of them only the size of a small living room, had been partitioned with thin walls. Garbage cans and wooden bins, most of them overflowing with the ordinary debris of human life, stood next to each fluorescent lobby.
Now, so many hours after the bombings and the lockdown started, there were mountain ranges of huge black plastic bags on the curbstones. In the gathering dark Raj Gandhi saw rats on the sidewalks. They reminded him not only of his early years in his native Mumbai but the fictional rats that suddenly proliferated at the start of Camus’s novel The Plague. Oran in that novel had been quarantined, a whole population confined by the presence and fear of a disease that was a modern Black Death. The noblest characters in the book, doctors and journalists, had died as the epidemic progressed and before it came to its natural, miraculous end. Raj had read the novel often. He felt he was now living it.
His own building was constructed ten years ago. It looked to him as if a refugee Soviet-era architect had designed it. At thirty-three stories, it was one of dozens of anonymous new apartment buildings lining cheerless York Avenue. It had a comfortable lobby and friendly uniformed doormen who knew his name.
His own apartment, a studio, was on a high floor with a view of the East River. For a curtain on the single large window he had tacked up a burlap fabric which he never opened and so never looked at the majestic expanse of the river and its legendary bridges. The apartment was replete with gadgets, laptop computers, iPads, a variety of cell phones, four television sets that had access to every available news and cable station, CNN, Fox, Al Jazeera, even the Weather Channel. He spent almost all of his income on these technological marvels. He had a pull-out sofa on which he slept, as uncomfortable as a plank, and three small tables he had assembled from IKEA for his equipment. There were three folding wooden chairs. No carpets.
As soon as he unlocked the door to the apartment, the voice he heard was shockingly familiar. “Jesus, Gandhi, you live like a college freshman at a bad school. Look at all of this crap.”
Fear seized Raj. “How did you get in here?”
“Don’t worry. This isn’t exactly a first-class building. And a quadriplegic with a blindfold could open your door.”
As Raj saw in the glare from the two unshaded lights, the man in the wooden chair was exceptionally good-looking, obviously Italian. He was large, not at all fat, but tall and muscular. His powerful appearance was for Raj entirely different from the voice he had heard in the calls from the unknown source. The man Raj had envisioned from the sound of the voice was scrawny, bald, furtive.
Still seated, the man said, “I thought it was time we should meet. I’m losing my patience.” No accent. A clear voice Raj couldn’t place, easily the voice of a man who was literate and persuasive. But this man was obviously a great mimic, able to sound like a crank from Queens or Brooklyn whenever he wanted to.
“What do you want?” Raj asked. His own voice, as he recognized, had a tremor.
Standing, the man gestured at all the technological devices on the desks. “I’ve seen your blogs and Twitter feeds, Mr. Gandhi. You have an impressive audience. Hundreds of thousands of followers. More than your namesake, the great Mahatma. And you work for people at that godawful newspaper of yours who will not let you write the information I give you. It’s time for you, Mr. Gandhi, to get the word I’ve been giving you out to the world all on your own. I decided to help you write it.”