“Let’s have lunch. My shooting will be finished at twelve.”
“I can’t today.” There was an aching in her stomach now. “I’m having lunch with Calvin Klein’s people.”
“Then we’ll go to Capote’s lunch together tomorrow.”
Laila felt as though someone had jammed a thick wad of wool into her mouth.
She nodded, but it was seconds before her larynx formed the words she wanted.
“Yes, Michael. We’ll go to Truman’s together.”
She came back to the bed and threw herself on top of him. Her mouth flayed at his, her twisting lips driving his back against his teeth until they hurt, her belt buckle, the heavy buttons of her blouse, driving into his bare flesh. Finally she slipped a hand around his neck, clasped the hair over his forehead, and slowly pulled his head back down onto the pillow.
For a moment, she lay there on top of him, staring down at his face with such intensity it frightened him. Then, like an awakening dreamer, she shook her head. She got up.
“Don’t move, darling. I’ll let myself out.”
He heard her voice calling to him through the shadows. “Goodbye, my love.” Then he heard the door slamming behind her and she was gone.
A police ambulance on emergency call hurtled through the orange haze of Columbus Circle, the heehaw bleat of its siren filling the empty square with a sound that was to many the background music of New York City.
Laila Dajani watched it go, then continued her march toward the Hampshire House. Just ahead of her, Sanitation Department workers hurled black plastic sacks of garbage into the maw of their truck, its clanging metallic jaws piercing the slumber of the apartment dwellers in the buildings above them. In the darkened park to her left, the sneakers of the earlymorning joggers were already crunching over the dry snow. From Brooklyn Heights to Forest Hills, in Harlem and the South Bronx, along Park Avenue and down to the Village, the lights were blinking on in the darkened facades as the seven million residents of the city she and her brothers meant to destroy prepared to face another day.
The proud, cantankerous, dangerous, dirty, awesome, difficult yet finally magnificent metropolis to which they all belonged was unique, the ultimate expression of man’s eternal vocation to gather himself in communities. New York was emphatically not just another city; it was the very essence of cityhood, the example of the best and the worst the urban experience had produced. From the marshes beyond Jamaica to the tenements of Queens, the developments of Staten Island and the ghettos of Harlem, New York was a microcosm of mankind, a Tower of Babel in which all the races, peoples and religions of the world had their representation. The city contained such an assembly of peoples its population statistics were a cliche, yet, like most cliches, accurate. There were more blacks in New York than there were in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria; more Jews than there were in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa combined; more Puerto Ricans than in San Juan, more Italians than in Palermo, more Irish than in Cork. Somewhere, in some corner of the five boroughs, there was a touch of almost everything the world had spawned: the smells of Shanghai, the clamor of Naples, the beer of Munich, the bossa-nova beat of Porto Allegro, the patois of Haiti.
Tibetans, Khmers, Basques, Galicians, Circassians, Kurds, every oppressed and dissident population on earth chose to voice its miseries here. Its crowded, often decaying neighborhoods housed 3,600 places of worship, at least one for every cult, sect and religion invented by man in his ceaseless search for God.
It was a city of contrasts and contradictions, of promises made and promises unfulfilled. New York was the heart of the capitalist society, a symbol of unsurpassed wealth; yet it was also so broke it could barely meet the interest payments on its debts. New York contained the finest medical facilities in the world; yet every day, people who couldn’t afford them died from lack of care, and the infant mortality rate in the South Bronx was higher than it was in the bustees of Calcutta.
New York possessed a city university whose student body was larger than the population of many cities, yet one person in eight in New York couldn’t speak English and her public-school system produced a regular flow of barely literate graduates.
As the pharaohs of Egypt, the Greeks of Antiquity, the Parisians of the Napoleonic era had set the architectural standards of their times, so the New Yorkers of the age of glass and steel had stamped the seal of their architectural genius on the urban skyline of the world. Yet a quarter of all the buildings in the city were substandard, and beyond the glittering magnificence of lower Manhattan, Park and Fifth Avenues loomed the wastelands of the South Bronx, Brownsville and Bedford-Stuyvesant.
No other metropolis in the world offered its inhabitants greater hope of material success or a wider variety of intellectual and cultural rewards.
Its museums, the Metropolitan, the Modern, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, housed more Impressionists than the Louvre, more Botticellis than Florence, more Rembrandts than Amsterdam. New York was the United States’s bank, its fashion model, designer and photographer; its publisher, advertiser, publicist, playwright and artist. The theaters, concert halls, ballets, jazz clubs of Broadway, off Broadway and off-off Broadway were the incubators in which a nation’s taste and thought were nurtured.
The people awakening this Monday morning on the island purchased by Peter Minuit in 1626 for twentyfour dollars could, if they had the resources, buy virtually anything in their city: the ridiculous gold Mickey Mouse watches at Cartier’s; the sublime, a Renoir at the Findlay Galleries; diamonds from black-frocked Hasidic Jews on Forty-seventh Street; stolen television sets in fence operations as elaborate as small department stores; chocolate-covered ants from Argentina, pola-bear steaks from Nepal, wildcat gizzards from Canton. Yet, in the midst of all that material affluence, an eighth of the population in New York lived on welfare. Half the nation’s drug addicts crowded her streets. Her police precincts recorded a theft every three minutes, a holdup every twelve, four rapes and two murders a day. More prostitutes circulated through her streets than in the avenues of Paris.
There were, in fact, three New Yorks: the oases of mid-and lower Manhattan, of corporate headquarters and highrise splendor; a glittering world of discotheques, penthouses, Carey Cadillacs and rented limousines, candlelit sit-down dinners high in the glass sheaths of the Olympic Towers, 800 Fifth Avenue, the United Nations Plaza. There were the declining working-class suburbs of Queens, the Bronx, those parts of Brooklyn where trees still grew and a dwindling population clung to memories of the Brighton Beach Express, Ebbets Field and Coney Island’s Steeplechase. There was the necropolis, the dying ghettos of Bronxvdle, Hispanic Harlem, Williamsburg, the South Bronx. And, in a sense, there was yet another New York, a transient city of 3.5 million people who daily crowded into the nine square miles south of Central Park. Space salesmen, television executives, lawyers, stockbrokers, doctors, odd-lot dealers, publishers, ad men, commodity brokers, bankers-they were the administrators of America’s Rome, controlling an empire from their glass-and-steel towers.
Wall Street’s name might be an epithet to the Marxists of the globe; it was still, seventy years after Lenin’s voyage to the Finland Station, the unchallenged financial center of the world. On this December morning, men in its board rooms would discuss loans to France’s railroads, Vienna’s waterworks, Oslo’s public transport, the governments of Ecuador, Malaysia and Kenya. Copper mines in Zaire, tin in Bolivia, phosphate in Jordan, sheep in New Zealand, rice in Thailand, hotels in Bali, shipping fleets in Ceylon would all be affected by the decisions made or postponed this Monday morning in two of the world’s largest banks, the First National City and the Chase Manhattan.