“Let me see this person.” There was the steely edge of the voice of command Major John Hewitt-Gordan must have used thousands of times in his long career.
The nurse spoke to the mayor, “Like I said before, that ain’t a good idea.”
Roland said simply, “Open it.”
The nurse leaned forward and snapped open the two steel latches that held in place the upper half of the casket lid, which he raised. As soon as he did, an overpowering odor of dead flesh rose from the box, so powerful that it was almost palpable. Roland put his hand over his nose and mouth; he gagged.
John Hewitt-Gordan stared into the casket. He didn’t flinch. Almost involuntarily, Roland, too, glanced inside, and immediately regretted it, searing into his memory a vision he knew he would never forget. Death had worked its terrible magic swiftly. Dozens of lines had formed over Sarah’s upper lip, which were drawn down over her upper teeth. Her open eyes seemed to have disappeared. Her hair looked like straw. Her skin color was an unnatural white. A death mask.
Roland looked away. The nurse simply waited, holding the lid open for as long as John wanted. Then John finally said, “Thank you.”
The nurse lowered the lid.
Roland Fortune and John Hewitt-Gordan stood on the cracked cement loading platform. The mist and fog had now turned to rain. There was a tin roof, with many rusted fissures, above them. They managed to stay dry. On the sidewalk near the loading dock were five unmarked black SUVs, including the one that had brought John here from LaGuardia.
Roland said to the suddenly frail man, “I have you scheduled for the nine p.m. Flight 767 on British Airways to London. Sarah’s coffin will soon be taken to LaGuardia for that same flight tonight.”
“Thank you,” John said. He wasn’t moving. The rain droned on the tin roof. Finally, he said, “I had hoped, Roland, that one day you would be my son.”
“I am your son,” Roland Fortune said.
They stared at each other. Without touching or embracing, they both cried, quietly, their faces contorted.
CHAPTER FIFTY
AT SIX THAT night, in much steadier rain that made the early summer day prematurely dark, like a century-old Stieglitz photograph of Manhattan, Irv Rothstein said, “No one will worry about not seeing you, Mr. Mayor, in the next thirty-six hours.”
They were in an unmarked police van driving to the same heliport at the UN building where President Andrew Carter had landed and from which he had already left for Washington hours earlier. “I’m still not sure,” Roland answered, “that this is the right thing to do.”
“I hate to burst your bubble, Mr. Mayor, but no one in Manhattan or the world will give a shit that New York City’s mayor has gone quiet for a day and a half. Bloomberg used to fly to his island in the Caribbean every weekend, come hell or high water, and nobody complained. Besides, the public is overloaded with you. It’s natural, as we’ve announced, that the mayor of the City of New York, wounded as he was in the first minutes of the attack before bravely ignoring his injuries, brought the city back to life. The dancing clubs are packed, the movie theaters are open. Nobody can even make a restaurant reservation because they’re filled. Gina Carbone has everyone’s back covered, and a grateful president has said you and the commissioner will be given special Presidential Medals of Honor soon. So it makes all the sense in the world that for the next thirty-six hours the mayor, with a team of doctors, is resting quietly, healing.”
Irv smiled, relishing as always his role as comedian, court jester, and the wizard of public relations. “And,” he said, “it’s never good to disappoint Carolina. She made us promise.”
Carolina Geary was the chairman of Goldman Sachs. She had early on in her rapidly expanding career recognized Sarah’s talents and was her “godmother” at the firm. Carolina, the first woman to lead Goldman Sachs, was all business. She had twice met Sarah’s boyfriend, the mayor of New York City. Geary had been at her estate in East Hampton when the first explosions at the Met detonated, and she had stayed in East Hampton. When the siege was lifted, one of her key assistants contacted Irv Rothstein and said Carolina would have her private helicopter fly Roland directly to the secluded, oceanfront estate for a day or two of rest.
At first, Roland had hesitated. “Irv,” he had said, “I’m no Bloomberg. I barely know Carolina. And how will it look if the mayor of the City of New York, with all this shit going on, suddenly decides it’s time for a vacation getaway?”
But Roland relented. “Let’s go,” he said.
The interior of the Goldman Sachs corporate helicopter resembled one of those immensely expensive entertainment rooms that people with enormous wealth built into their Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue apartments; plush seating, an ultramodern television screen, even two nineteenth-century Impressionist paintings. There were two pilots who didn’t know that the chief passenger they were carrying for the one hour flight was Roland Fortune. The three flight attendants were long-term employees of Goldman Sachs who, given their salaries and the rules of the firm, had for years learned the artistry of complete secrecy, a kind of corporate omertà.
It was already dark when the helicopter rose from the UN heliport and, in the rain, flew southward over the East River. Roland was in a seat next to a large window. Because of the tilt of the helicopter as it gained altitude, he was able to see, even through the shroud of rain and mist, the sights that were so profoundly familiar to him: the southern end of Roosevelt Island where the broken, eerie, nineteenth-century, long-abandoned insane asylum was; the stone outcropping in the middle of the East River on which was placed the powerful lighthouse that warned the river traffic; and the heights of the now heavily traveled Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn Bridges. Dimly, too, he could see through the rain and fog the millions of lights that filled the Manhattan skyline.
The helicopter’s flight path was to reach the Verrazano Narrows Bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island and then abruptly turn left to fly over the edge of the ocean on an almost straight course along the south shore of Long Island to Carolina’s estate in East Hampton.
Spread out below him were the rigid grids of light from the myriad small homes in Brooklyn and Queens, as well as full views of LaGuardia to the north and the larger terrain of JFK airport to the south. And, of course, there was the vast blackness of the Atlantic Ocean. There were ships at sea, with their toy-like lights; freighters, Naval and Coast Guard ships, pleasure boats. It seemed there were hundreds of freighters for ten to twenty miles near New York Harbor, backed up and immobilized during the days and nights before the lifting of the lockdown.
When Roland checked the time, he realized that, if it was on schedule, British Airways Flight 767 at LaGuardia, with the body of Sarah Hewitt-Gordan in the cargo compartment, was about to leave or was already airborne. He thought of the usually stoic John Hewitt-Gordan, who had once to Roland appeared to be a caricature of a British officer, on the same plane. Now, Roland thought, he and they might be in the air at the same time flying east, with John in the first-class compartment and Sarah’s casket in the baggage area in the British Airways plane and Roland in a powerful helicopter. Just as the ocean was filled with the lights of hundreds of vessels, so, too, the sky was filled with the twinkling lights of many aircraft suddenly freed from the lockdown.
Fire Island, a fragile enclave of land that somehow had survived millennia of geological change which had submerged hundreds of other similar land masses off the south coast of Long Island, glimmered below the helicopter. He knew the island well and quietly gazed out at its peaceful outlines. The summer season had just started, the parties were under way, men were meeting men, women were joining women, and young men and women were coming together, too. To them, the siege of Manhattan must have been a riveting nightmare, but it was over now, and now was the time to party.