But the letter opener, for just a second, offered another strategy to Raj. He made the mistake of twice glancing at it. Raj had no way of knowing that he was in this tight and cluttered room with a man who since he was twelve had learned all the dirty arts of hurting others and protecting himself.
Deftly, Tony Garafalo picked up the nineteenth-century, ornate letter opener. He threw it to a far corner of the room. “I’m a mind reader, Mr. Gandhi. I didn’t like what was on your mind.”
Again not speaking, Raj turned to the computer, like a secretary waiting for instructions.
The instructions came. “I want you,” Tony Garafalo said, “to post this interview on your blog with what you’ve just typed up. And I also want you to post the scene you taped on your cell phone of Gina Carbone running through the fence and into Pier 37.”
Raj said, “Why do you want to do that? She’s your lover.”
“My, my, Mr. Gandhi.” It was the voice of the odd caller. The man, Raj thought, was Janus-like. He had two attached faces staring in opposite directions. “See, I was right about you all along. You do good work as an investigator. Sure, she is one of my girlfriends. But there is something you don’t know. She was one of the undercover cops eight years ago who worked on the crew that put me in prison. We grew up in the same neighborhood on Staten Island. My family knew hers. You know what? She should have given me a heads-up, not have helped to take me down. I learned a lot about payback, and she has a side of her that’s reckless. I got to know her again when I came out of prison, at a family get-together not long after she became the top cop. And she got to like me again. And she loves a good fuck. And so do I. Now I’m giving her the fuck of her life.”
More than anything else he had ever wanted, Raj Gandhi wanted this man to leave his apartment. He fed the scenes in his cell phone into the computer that contained his blog. The process took only seconds.
“Now,” Tony Garafalo said, “send it out into the wide, wide world.”
On his own cell phone he quickly found Raj’s blog. As Raj continued to sit in absolute silence, Tony Garafalo read on his cell phone the script he had dictated and watched the scenes of Gina Carbone and Gabriel Hauser.
“Mr. Gandhi, it says here that you have 253,673 followers. You’re already a celebrity.” It was the voice of the caller. “Now you’re going to be even more famous. I’m telling you, Mr. Gandhi, I see a fucking Pulitzer Prize for you. And when you give your acceptance speech, you’ll give me credit, won’t you?”
Raj simply continued to stare at the screen. He sensed that Tony Garafalo was moving toward the door.
“Mr. Gandhi, I want you to look at me and say thank you.”
When Raj turned to look, he saw that the handsome, well-dressed man held a pistol. The single shot entered the center of Raj’s forehead. It was a clean, red, small hole.
“The dothead” Tony Garafalo said aloud just before he opened the door. Now he really is a dothead.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
IT WAS THREE in the morning when Roland Fortune, wearing only his underwear, looked at the Raj Gandhi blog that, as the reporters on CNN said, had “gone viral.”
Irv Rothstein and Hans Richter stood behind him in his bedroom at Gracie Mansion, the bedroom in which Sarah Hewitt-Gordan had slept with him, and made love to him, almost every night for the last year.
“Why,” Roland asked, “should I believe any of this? Why didn’t the Times publish this? If it was reliable, you’d think this guy’s newspaper would have it on its Internet site and on the front page.”
Irv said, “I spoke to this guy’s editors at the Times. They said he was following leads to this but they weren’t satisfied there was any adequate support, at least not yet.”
“And what does this guy Gandhi have to say? This was posted five hours ago.”
“Mr. Gandhi,” Hans said, “is dead.”
“What?”
“Gina sent cops to his apartment three hours ago,” Hans Richter said. “The door was closed but unlocked. There was a single gunshot wound in the middle of his forehead.”
Roland stood up. He was shivering. He draped his bathrobe over his shoulders. On the nightstand below the warm glow of a table lamp was the brown bottle that contained his replenished Vicodin. He opened the cap and picked up a glass of water. As he was shaking two of the pills into his palm, Irv said, “Do you really need those?”
“Who the fuck are you to tell me what I need and don’t need?” Roland shouted.
“It took us four fucking hours, Mr. Mayor, to wake you up so that you could look at this blog,” said Irv, also shouting. “Four fucking hours. You must have had five of those before you went to sleep.”
Roland, raising the palm of his hand to his mouth, drank water. “Now that’s two more.”
Irv said, “Hans, why don’t you tell Mr. Mayor what’s happened while he’s been in Wonderland, beyond the Looking Glass?”
“Harlan Lazarus, the once-upon-a-time judge himself as he reminds everyone, got a federal judge to sign a search warrant four hours ago, not long after this blog was posted, to have the FBI and Secret Service go into Pier 37.”
“And?” Roland asked.
“They found a completely modern operation setup, with prison cells.”
“And?”
“No one was there. All the cells were empty. They examined the cells for fingerprints and DNA. When they checked the federal data banks, they found no matches for anyone.”
“What is this place?”
“Gina used money from the police budget to have this facility constructed over the last three years.”
“She never told me about this.”
“That’s interesting,” Irv, now calmer but still intense, said. “She claims you authorized it. That you both thought it was useful to have a secure facility if there was a terrorist attack.”
“That never happened. She never discussed that with me.” Roland paused. “What did she say about the blog?”
Hans answered, “That it was all a fantasy. The place was never used. She says everyone who has been arrested so far is accounted for and is now being held in Central Booking downtown or in a heavily guarded wing on Rikers Island. No secret prisoners. Everything by the book. Everything is transparent, she says.” “Where is she now?” Roland asked.
Irv answered. “She just finished a press conference. Here’s another thing you don’t know because you were in the land of dreams. Three hours ago she led a military-style operation on the lower East Side. She wiped out a group of Arabs who had been living in apartments for the last few months around Tompkins Square Park. Seventeen of them were killed. Four arrested. The television films make it look like a major battle in Baghdad, Syria, places like that.”
“Why didn’t I know about this?”
“Are you kidding, Mr. Mayor?” Irv asked. “This happened three hours ago. Every time we woke you up, you dropped back to sleep.” Irv picked up the pharmacy bottle that held the Vicodin. “Dr. Sleep. Eventually, you know, Dr. Death comes with enough of these magical little pills. What were we supposed to do? Take you out in front of the cameras in your underwear?”
“Where is Gina now?”
“She’s at the Regency, resting with her boyfriend.”
“The Mafia guy?”
Irv said, “The once Mafia guy, if there is such a thing. Mr. Garafalo is supposedly now a reformed member of the human family. He’s a sales manager at that beautiful Mercedes dealership in Queens. Don’t you remember? You said two years ago that it was nobody’s business what lovers a grown woman decided to have. That male police commissioners all had girlfriends. Power is an aphrodisiac, you said, and that was as true, you said, for women as for men.”