In small awkward motions, he starts to unbutton his coat with his free hand, pistol still in his right. Now people are moving again. On the main floor, a tall blonde woman breaks from the frozen pack of dancers, starts across the floor, buckles, and falls hard on her hip. A shriek, cutting through the hip-hop soundtrack. Malik’s coat is open.
And now they see the vest.
Taut across Malik’s chest. The six red slabs of Semtex resembling soldiers at attention. The hip-hop rant keeps pounding. Punctuated by groans and weeping and another woman’s shriek.
Malik thinks: I have them now. They must look at me. They must listen. I’m the last man they will hear in their filthy lives.
8:51 p.m. Beverly Starr. The balcony of Aladdin’s Lamp.
She has her coat on, leaving with others, gloveless. Five steps down the stairs. Hears the screams. Looks down. Blinks. Sees a young black man waving a gun. Words lost in the pounding music. Turning. Gesturing. His eyes wide with rage and doom. Jesus Christ. She eases down the stairs, gripping the banister on her left. Freezes as he waves the pistol at her. Sees a jam at the door.
The young man turns so all can see what he’s wearing under the coat.
Now she sees the vest across his chest. Familiar to all of them from bad television shows. A suicide vest.
The music scrapes into silence. The deejay tearing off his costume. One voice is piercing the air. The man with the vest.
— Whores! Degenerates! Listen up!
He shoves the gun in his belt. Now he’s addressing the people on the dance floor. Maybe sixty of them. Men. Women. All of them frozen. As if blood and sweat are both coagulating. Some cowering, trying to make themselves smaller.
— You have filled this world with filth and sin! You have sent soldiers to Muslim countries, and killed Muslim men, and Muslim women, and Muslim children!
Beverly moves. Passes behind the man as he addresses the dance-floor people. She eases past a heavyset older man. A guest from the benefit. Heads for the crowd jammed against the doors. The doors open in, not out. Pushes into the crowd. Looks back at the stairs. Sees the enraged eyes of the gunman. His audience is not giving him what he has demanded: their attention. He’s talking but she hears no words. She’s shoved by the deejay, then turned sideways by a guy in a business suit. Smells sweat and perfume. Rush hour in hell. A chorus of shrieks. Jesus Christ: I could die here.
She takes a ballpoint pen from her pocket. Thinking: Not much of a weapon, but I could hurt somebody.
Beverly looks back. The young man on the stairs is holding a small object in his hand. A wire runs into the suicide vest. She knows what that is too. A detonator. Right out of 24. Out of fucking comic books.
— You have been offered Paradise, and refused it!
Beverly sees a long-haired blond guy vault over the banister of the staircase, fall hard on one leg, pause and grimace in pain, then limp forward. To join the pack at the doors. A blink.
— Allah has given you life and he will soon give you death!
The jam tighter now, all breathing hard, panting, cursing. Shouts of move, move and step back, let it fuckin’ open! The doors forced shut by the pressing weight of the panicky group. To Beverly’s right, a small young woman leaps onto the shoulders of a shouting man, trying to claw her way over people’s shoulders, heading to escape. Then slips. Falls facedown, wedged between a fat woman and a beefy man. Beverly blinks again. Record this. So if you get out… The goal for all of them is the twin vertical rectangles of the glass-paneled doors. And the snow falling beyond. She looks back. At the top of the stairs, her painting stands on its easel, abandoned, alone.
Thinking: I am about to die.
8:51 p.m. Sam Briscoe. Fourteenth Street.
Briscoe’s taxi turns into the street and suddenly stops. Twenty feet ahead of them, four police cars have skidded on the cobblestones, then braked, red domes now turning. Cops out. Some fumbling under overcoats for sidearms. Briscoe asks the driver to wait, and the driver says, No, no, police! Trouble! Briscoe hands him a twenty-dollar bill and gets out, slamming the door. In the distance, he sees a chaotic, panicky tide of women and men squeezing one at a time out of one of the doors of Aladdin’s Lamp. Then down the steps in a kind of stampede. Night of the locust. None are dressed for snow. No time for coats. He sees the right door open a bit wider. Hears the word “bomb.”
He hurries to them while some rush past him toward Ninth Avenue. A gray-haired hatless guy in a suit hauls his wife across cobblestones. The man glancing behind him. Fear in his eyes. The woman yelling: My coat, my coat!
All that Briscoe sees is happening at once. Women in filmy blouses, short skirts, high heels. Men in sweaters and shirts. A woman slips coming down the steps from the platform. Falls backward. A young man stomps on her to get by, and then he loses balance and pitches forward, facedown on the iced cobblestones, and another man stomps on his back and keeps going. One lone woman, about twenty, earrings large and bobbing, totters toward Briscoe, seeing nothing, weeping, holding a bleeding elbow. The others resemble terrified civilians after a bombardment. They slip, fall, pile up. Throats are stabbed by heels. A heavy boot lacerates a young man’s lips. Upper and lower.
Briscoe sees blood on others, torn flesh. Discarded women’s shoes on the wet stone street. A young woman grabs another’s blouse from behind, tears it away, and the woman begins bawling as she covers her breasts. Naked in a snowstorm. Then drops her hands to run. More piling up, nobody looking back. Dozens now. Screaming. Splayed, stomped, bleeding. One hopeless shriek. A bare-chested guy in Ali Baba trousers comes out the door, limping. Too thin to be a bouncer. Maybe a deejay? A waiter? Shaking both fists. In triumph? Or challenging the fallen. Photographers dart around, recording it all.
Helen, Briscoe thinks. Where are you, Helen?
Now four uniformed cops come running awkwardly from the police cars. No traction on the snowy cobblestones. Guns drawn. One goes up the steps to the doors, shoves the gun into his holster, raises one palm toward the people inside, ordering them to halt, to step back, to allow both doors to open. They don’t obey. Looking over their shoulders. Below the platform, another cop points to the far side of the street, gesturing east. Briscoe hears the first cop shout: Run. Run like hell!
Briscoe drapes his press card around his neck and finally sees Helen Loomis over to the left, on the platform rising from the sidewalk. Standing there. Rigid, dazed, as the panicky young tide flows past her. She fumbles with a cigarette, looking toward the High Line. Briscoe calls her name but she can’t hear him in the din. No way yet for him to get up the main stairs to her. Too many people coming down in terrified flight from whatever the hell is happening inside.
He goes to the left, trying to squeeze through the photographers, sees Fonseca making notes at the foot of the smoking shed, wiping with his coat sleeve at blood dripping from his nose. Briscoe calls his name. Fonseca hears nothing. And Briscoe can’t reach him through the wall of cops and photographers. Moving now, like a quarterback, left, then right, then forward. Looking for an opening. He waves at Helen, calls her name, but she doesn’t see or hear him. She is still staring toward the High Line. Washington Street. Briscoe thinks: She’s waiting for me. I told her Washington Street, didn’t I? The cabbie wouldn’t go that way. A woman wearing pearls comes down the main stairs and someone grabs at the pearls and the string snaps. The woman looks down, pain on her face, starts to bend, then chooses to run. Briscoe shouts once more. Nobody can hear.