Cam handed her the one hundred and forty dollars for the Xanax bottle. He stuffed the brown circular bottle deep into his left pocket. He felt fortified now: that he had the ability to choose between life and death. When he was a boy his father, the Baptist pastor, had a large plaque in the kitchen. It contained the words from Deuteronomy in which God says each morning, “I put before thee life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life.”
Cam took an hour to walk to the homeless shelter near Tompkins Square Park which he quickly disclosed, when asked, as a place where Gabriel might be. It was one of the very few places in Manhattan where Gabriel Hauser regularly went-the hospital, the Boat House in Central Park, the Angelika Theater and the Film Forum, both on West Houston Street, the Three Lives Book Store at the quiet intersection where, oddly enough, Waverly Place intersected with Waverly Place. But, Cam had told the agents, given the state of the city, the homeless shelter and the chaos and pain, the shelter was the most likely place where Gabriel would be.
The big basement room in the old church wasn’t crowded. It was getting dark. Some of the ceiling lights were already on. As Cam knew from his sometime visits with Gabriel, the huge basement room was usually dark even on the brightest days.
The only sounds were the sounds children made-cries, laughter, chatter. He’d never had much tolerance for children. He’d never regretted for a minute that he had never and would never have kids-his father had once thundered that it was God’s will that men have and raise and nurture the young.
The adults in the room for the most part were quiet and seated on the cots. Only half the cots were occupied. Everyone was alone, except for the mothers of the noisy kids.
Something else Cam had never imagined was that he’d lie down in one of the cots. Gabriel had told him the cots-the steel frames, the mattresses and the sheets, blankets and pillows were clean, although sometimes torn. Cam knew that Gabriel often used his own money to replace the torn bedding.
In the kitchen, as big and clean and orderly as it always was between mealtimes, Cam found on the scrubbed steel counter one of those tall amber-colored plastic glasses that New York City diners used. He filled it with water. He carried it to what appeared to be the darkest area of the big basement. No one spoke to him. He carried nothing but the brimming glass of water. He realized that to anyone who saw him he must have had the look of one of those stranded suburbanites who had literally been locked in the island of Manhattan for more than three days and had finally decided to use one of the long-established homeless shelters rather than the makeshift encampments in the city parks. Those were now out of control with garbage, overloaded mobile latrines, every imaginable type of debris.
Cam found the cot, its blanket, pillow, and sheets clean-one of the cots that Gabriel, just hours earlier, had cleaned.
The corner of the church’s vast basement was cool and comfortable even on a hot evening. There was no one in the nearby cots. As he lay quietly on his back, with his wrists and hands under his head, he recalled for the first time in many years words his stentorian father had frequently quoted from John’s Gospel in which Jesus said, I have the power to keep my life and to lay down my life.
So do we all, Cam thought, nothing unique about Jesus in that or anyone else. We all have that power.
Somewhat furtively, Cam sat up on his cot although he knew no one in this place could care what he did or didn’t do. He shook from the brown prescription bottle fifteen of the Vicodin tablets into his right palm and from the other bottle fifteen of the pills. Then he took up from the floor next to his cot the big glass of water and in twenty seconds swallowed all thirty pills.
Nothing in his life had ever granted him such bliss for the few minutes he stretched out on his cot. I chose death, he said in a whisper, not life. The right choice, my choice, unlike Gabriel, who was not blessed with the choice.
Cam had the sense that he was afloat on his back in a warm, only slightly undulating ocean. And finally, still on his back in that ocean, he drifted below the surface of the benign and all-enveloping water.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
JUDGE HARLAN LAZARUS was waiting alone for Andrew Carter in the ancient basement of Gracie Mansion, over two hundred years old and unchanged in all that time, and rose to his feet as Carter, alone, stepped down the creaking wooden stairwell. Carter, with the aid of his speechwriters who were in the Executive Office Building in Washington and linked to him by a large video screen, had finished preparing a five-minute speech that was to be broadcast around the world. He had just been told by one of the Secret Service agents that the director of Homeland Security had “absolutely vital information” he needed to give the president before he demonstrated to the world that he was unharmed and still completely in charge of the freeing of Manhattan and the defeat of the ISIS onslaught. “The judge,” the agent had said without a trace of irony, “is alone in the basement. And the basement is completely secure, a medieval fortress.”
There was only a single unshaded 75-watt bulb in the basement. It had the odor of old cold stone. Lazarus looked liked a spectre as he emerged from the semidarkness to the foot of the stairwell. Carter waited for him. Even under the light bulb, Lazarus’ face looked like a death mask.
“So what is it now?” Carter, annoyed and somewhat apprehensive, asked.
“Two assistant U.S. attorneys and some of my agents just had a long, tell-all interview with Tony Garafalo. They have enough information now to go in front of a grand jury and have Gina Carbone and Roland Fortune indicted today.”
“Why,” Carter asked, “would I let that happen?”
“Because justice is important.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Mr. President, the police commissioner of the largest city in the country has been having a two-year affair with a serious mobster. And that commissioner has since Sunday been engaged in secret arrests. And she has for years developed a cadre of what, in effect, are mercenaries, some of them once Blackwater mercenaries, and put them on the NYPD payroll as community liaison officers whose only real work has been to illegally, without warrants or court approval, put wiretaps and secret surveillance devices on people her mercenaries believe are security risks, people, by the way, who as I’ve just had my experts check, are not on any suspicious persons list-in my department, the CIA, or the NSA. She had a high-tech, off-the-books detention facility built on what, in effect, is a camouflaged and abandoned pier. And she has told all this to a mobster who has been her lover for several years. They were together as recently as last night. And it is obvious to us that her unusual confidante passed this information along to an investigative reporter for the New York Times. And that this lifelong gangster shot that reporter to death last night.”
“And you are telling me this,” Andrew Carter asked, “for what reason?”
Lazarus, who from the skeletal sockets in which his eyes were deeply set, looked at the president with the same skepticism and contempt with which he had glared at Ivy League law students when they had given him the wrong answer. He said, “Mr. President, she’s the hub of the wheel of a kidnapping and murder syndicate. At a minimum, a grand jury in two hours could, given what Garafalo has confessed to two experienced assistant U.S. attorneys and several seasoned federal law enforcement agents, indict her for these things, and she could then be arrested on that indictment in fifteen minutes.”