“That’s right. It’s her business. One of my male commissioners has several boyfriends.”
“And,” Irv said, “Mr. Garafalo is married to a nice Italian girl and they have a nice house in Bay Ridge.”
Roland, now fully awake as if his screaming had rejuvenated him, said, “What else has happened while I was sleeping, apparently deep in the cave of Morpheus?”
“Andrew Carter’s people have been trying to reach you. And your buddy Harlan Lazarus landed by helicopter fifteen minutes ago at Pier 40 on the Hudson River and wants you to go see him.”
“Me go to see him? Pigs will fly before that happens. He knows where I live if he wants to see me.”
Inside the shower stall were the bottles of fragrant soap and shampoos and other jars that Sarah Hewitt-Gordan had last used just two days earlier. At the sight of the liquids that gave her the scent that he always found so alluring, Roland felt completely alone in the world, realizing that her death meant something essentially simple: He would never see her again. He had never lost anyone so close to him. When he suddenly recognized that he was about to cry, he turned the flow of shower water as high as it could run and stood directly under the powerful, noisy stream, and cried. There was no way, he believed, that the two men standing near the big bathroom’s entrance could hear him. His tears were swept away by the cascading shower water. Eventually he turned off the water only when he believed that his urgent, unexpected, convulsive need to cry had passed. When Roland stepped out of the shower he draped a towel over his head and rubbed his abundant black hair and his eyes, convinced that, if these two men on whom he so much relied saw the redness of his eyes, they would think it was caused only by soap and shampoo.
Glancing into the steamy mirror as he prepared to shave, he said, “Irv, I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
Irv said, “Not to worry, Roland. My wife does it all the time, especially when I wake her at three in the morning for a fuck. She gave up the ‘I’ve-got-a-headache’ routine years ago. Now she just yells and tells me to go fuck myself.”
An hour later, as they sat in Gracie Mansion’s gleaming kitchen, Gina Carbone looked radiant, confident, and utterly at ease. She sipped coffee and with a small sharp knife slit in half the two hard-boiled eggs that Juanita, the full-time cook from Guatemala who lived in a neat little apartment on the second floor of the mansion, had prepared for the commissioner of the New York City Police Department and the movie-star mayor. The commissioner and the mayor often had predawn meetings. Juanita, heavy and matronly, loved the always polite mayor and was in awe of the vivid police commissioner.
“I had room in the department budget to renovate and modernize that pier, Roland. I had no reason to ask you if I could authorize a space that I thought might be useful if there was unrest in the city. And you’ve always told me I had a free hand to make New York the safest city in the world.”
“My concern,” Roland Fortune said, “is not that you had an off-the-books, unpublicized facility built, Gina. My concern is that a New York Times reporter told the world that you had made secret arrests.”
“Nobody did that, Roland. There’s never been a single person locked up there. Your friend and mine, Judge Harlan Lazarus, had his agents go through it. No one except people on my staff was ever there. And the New York Times didn’t report any of this. This Mr. Gandhi was off on a frolic of his own. Just two hours ago the Times posted a statement on its website saying its editors were aware that he was investigating the pier, the arrests and me, but that Gandhi never gave his editors enough information to corroborate anything.”
Roland picked up his cell phone. It had been facedown on the table next to his coffee cup. “Gina, I have a text message from Harlan Lazarus that came to me about an hour ago. He wants you to resign.”
“So what?” She was, as always, direct, all business. “Do you want me to resign? Do you?”
“I need to know the truth.”
“The truth, Roland, is that I’m the only person who has fought this battle. Harlan Lazarus hasn’t. Andrew Carter hasn’t. I’m the one who has been in the ring. I’m the one who has stopped cadres of fanatics from carrying out more attacks. I’m the one who has made arrests of dangerous people. I’m the one who has developed the information and sources that prevented three goons from blowing up St. Patrick’s.” Gina took a sip of hot coffee. “And, Roland, I’m the one who has given you the credit for masterminding this war. Harlan Lazarus wants me to resign? That’s rich.”
“And what have you been doing with Gabriel Hauser?”
“Roland, what’s the matter with you? I’ve got a police force with 40,000 people. Seven, just seven, have taken an interest in an outspoken, discredited, holier-than-thou queer who has been in the wrong places at all the wrong times, a guy with an axe to grind that would make Harry Reems seem like an altar boy. Why wouldn’t I have seven people treat him as what we in the business of law enforcement like to call a PIN-a person of interest? I’m sorry his dog got hurt. He has shown up in too many of the wrong places at the wrong times.”
“Where is this doctor now?”
“Among the missing. We started looking for him as soon as the blog went out. His apartment is empty. Nobody’s there.”
“What about his boyfriend?”
“If you think we have him, we don’t. That’s bullshit, too. We have had our people talk to him. He’s a spurned lover. He knows nothing except what is in those e-mails, those love notes, between Gabriel Hauser and the man he loved and had to leave behind in Afghanistan. And that man, the CIA has told us, is a dedicated jihadist. And that man, Dr. Hauser’s lover boy, wanted the doctor to meet Silas Nasar.”
“And who, Gina, is Silas Nasar?”
“We wish we knew.”
“The Times reporter said you had him.”
“Wish I did. We think he’s the cousin of Gabriel Hauser’s love interest in Afghanistan.”
Roland’s cell phone vibrated with another incoming text message. It was from Harlan Lazarus. You must announce that Capone has resigned. Imperative.
Gina ate a segment of the boiled egg. “Do you want to tell me what that is?”
“More from Lazarus. He still thinks your name is Capone. And he still wants you to resign. Now.”
“So tell him Capone will resign. After all, Capone has been dead for seventy-five years.”
Roland stared at her. Somehow she was different now from the competent, straightforward woman he had known for three years. He was, he now realized, afraid of her for there was another dimension to her. She was not the hard-working and intuitively smart girl from the outer boroughs in whom he had had so much confidence.
When the next incoming text message made his cell phone vibrate, and as he reached to pick it up, Gina said, “I’ll bet it’s Lazarus again. This is the era of the serial texter.”
Roland read the text, leaned across the kitchen table, and held his phone in front of her. The message read: This order is from the president.
As Roland retrieved the cell phone, he was surprised to hear Gina say in Spanish, “Juanita, leave the kitchen. Mr. Mayor and I need to talk.” Roland was surprised because he had no idea she could speak Spanish with such apparently effortless fluency or that she would give an order to a member of his personal staff.