Juanita left.
“Talk to me, Mr. Mayor, what do you plan to do about this?”
“No,” Roland said, “you’re the strategic thinker. What is your plan? What, for example, just as starters, do you plan to do about the questions every pain-in-the-ass reporter will ask you about the last blog of a dead reporter?”
“I already answered that. Haven’t you seen the press conference I did at one this morning after what’s being called the Battle of Tompkins Square?”
“No, I was sleeping.”
“I know that. I tried to get you involved. Hasn’t Irv shown you reruns?”
“Not yet.” Roland waited. “And so enlighten me, Gina. What did you say about the blog?”
“That of course my department had multiple complex facilities for dealing with unprecedented acts of hostility. That we had people trained in the arts of counterinsurgency. That we had confidential informants and invisible as well as visible resources for protecting a city with more than seven million people.”
“And what did you say when they asked you about secret arrests, dark prisons, torture?”
“That Mr. Gandhi had brought the concerns he had to our attention and that they were unfounded. Those things never happened. That even the editors of the Times had distanced themselves from him and his concerns.”
“You don’t think that will stop the questions, do you? You’re living in dreamland, Gina, if you think that will satisfy anybody.” He stared at her, trying not to appear as unsettled as he now was. “And you know what, Gina? I still have questions and doubts. There was a great deal of difficult, disturbing information in Gandhi’s report.” He sliced the hard-boiled egg. “And much of it was about you.”
Gina Carbone placed her own cell phone on the table. “Now listen carefully to me, Mr. Mayor. Only you can fire me. Not our invisible president who is still missing in action, a candy ass who still hasn’t found the time to come to our city. And that scarecrow Lazarus can’t fire me. Only you can.”
“Commissioner, you can resign.”
“That’s not going to happen. It’s not in my nature.”
“Who,” Roland asked, “is Tony Garafalo?”
Ignoring the question, Gina spun her iPhone on the table. “Do you want to know why you’re not going to fire me and why I’m not going to resign?”
Roland stared at her, waiting. His right hand trembled.
“Because,” Gina said, “you’re a drug addict, a pillhead, what’s called on the street a garbagehead.”
“What the hell are you talking about? I have a damaged shoulder. The doctors gave me Vicodin to deal with it.”
“Listen to me real carefully, Roland. That’s the first and only prescription from an actual doctor you’ve had in years. From the start your security detail has had officers who are totally devoted to me. In this tiny magic phone and on my office computer I have confidential reports and dozens of pictures of well-dressed men and women, otherwise known as classy drug dealers, going to your office and coming here to deliver Vicodin, Xanax, Percocet, Oxycodone, every scheduled drug known to modern chemists, and in those pictures you’re handing over cash for these yummy pills.”
After staring at her for twenty seconds, Roland said, “Let me tell you something, Gina. I am the mayor of the largest city in this country. I take that responsibility seriously. I didn’t get here by being just a pretty boy, or the son of famous parents, or by winning the lottery. I got here, believe it or not, by hard work and by caring about people. I came up off the streets. I’ve been threatened by people before. When I was a kid my father taught me that if a bigger kid pushed me around I should go find a baseball bat and swing hard at the other kid’s head.”
She was as steady as ever. “Roland, I’ve got the bat. It’s in this phone. I know how to swing at heads, too. We’re not that different. In fact, we’re brother and sister.”
“Let me ask you something. Who are you? We have a city out there that’s under siege. Thousands of people are dead. No one, no one, seems to have an exit strategy. Do you really think that by threatening me with being a garbagehead I’m going to make decisions, or not make them, that I think are in the best interests of the city? It’s not a good idea to threaten me.”
The commissioner of the New York City Police Department stood up. “You know what, Mr. Mayor. I’ve got my responsibilities, too. It’s not good for the city to be run by a drug addict.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
GABRIEL HAUSER, AS soon as he changed into fresh clothes in the quiet apartment, walked four miles down Fifth Avenue, all the way to the enormous nineteenth-century arch that dominated Washington Square Park. During most of the walk he was in the middle of the grand avenue. Thousands of people crowded the sidewalks and the avenue itself. There were no barricades. It was like one of those street fairs that sometimes closed long segments of other avenues, but never the jewel of Fifth Avenue.
Gabriel turned left instead of entering the park that he always associated with the early Henry James novel, Washington Square, which he’d read in his last year in high school. He headed to the East Village. At the corner of Kenmare and Mott Street, in the old, largely abandoned St. Vincent’s Church, was the homeless shelter where, for three years, he had volunteered once each week to treat the street people, an ever-shifting population of suspicious, sometimes bizarre, men and women, often with stunned, always silent children, who drifted in and out of the fetid shelter. It had sixty beds, no partitions, and two toilets that smelled like Army latrines. At one far end of the gymnasium-sized room was a door that led to a smaller room where, three times each day, groups of people from Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous gathered for their meetings.
One of the full-time staff members, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict who had tattoos even on his face, shouted, “Listen up. The doctor’s here. Anyone want him to take a look-see?”
Five hands went up, all from black and Puerto Rican mothers with small children. Gabriel spent ten or so minutes with each of the kids. Not one had even an elevated temperature. All of the mothers bore that shell-shocked look of the displaced Iraqi and Afghan women he had often seen in tent camps. Not all of these women in the church basement, he realized as he spoke to them either in English or his sufficiently effective Spanish, had any idea or cared that bombings and battles had been raging for days on the streets of the city in which they lived. The poor lived entirely in their own heads. Nothing and no one else concerned them.
Gabriel was here to hide. On his long walk downtown to the shelter he had looked at his cell phone and saw Raj Gandhi’s blog, together with the entire video of his meeting on the bench of the church. And then an automatic e-mail from NPR entered his phone, carrying the news that Raj had been murdered, shot one time in the center of his forehead. Fear had given a special urgency to Gabriel’s original plan to treat the homeless, a job that normally took hours, but this time, on this day, it had taken far less than even an hour.
Still frightened and confused, not wanting to leave the homeless shelter, Gabriel walked into the big kitchen adjacent to the basement with its dozens of neatly arranged rows of cots. The kitchen, at least forty years old, was immaculately clean. Gabriel had arrived during the long interval between meals, and there were no cooks, food servers, or other volunteers there.
Everything in the kitchen, the countertops, the sinks, the industrial-size stoves, was made of gray steel and the surface of the stove was black iron. All that steel and iron had been cleaned hundreds of thousands of times with steel wool pads and ammonia. It shined with a scoured luminosity.
And the pots, pans, and kettles, all carefully put away, many of them dented, were polished and clean as well. The old linoleum floor glowed. Obviously it had just been swept and washed with a mop soaked in ammonia and water. Gabriel felt an urgent need not only to remain in this anonymous but familiar place but to work with his hands. As he looked at the entire basement from the vantage point of the kitchen, he saw that at least half the cots were abandoned, unused. He’d learned that the transient men, women, and children who came and went from this place never made the beds in which they had slept or just rested for a few hours. So each unused bed was covered with crumpled, off-white sheets, wrinkled wool blankets, and pillows with half-removed pillowcases. Worn, dirty towels were dropped everywhere.