At Rockefeller Center, CBS’s “Black Rock” and the ABC Building, the United States’s three television networks ordered programs that set values, influenced behavior, affected social change in the remotest areas of the earth.
Two blocks away were the citadels of the Prophets of Consumerism, the ad men of Madison Avenue. They had forced a revolution on the world, the revolution of rising expectations. Spread to every corner of the earth by the communications they had so effectively mastered, its contagion had brought to millions the material benefits and spiritual dissatisfactions which were the malaise of the American Age.
Collectively, they were, those men and women, the most affluent, the most capable and the most influential people on earth.
They were also the ideal hostages for an austere zealot burning to reorder the world with the very technology and communications of which they were the proud inventors and masters.
The man who had the awesome and frustrating job of administering their city made an effort to scrunch down against the worn upholstery of his black Chrysler as it slipped through the early-Monday-morning rush-hour traffic already clogging the East River Drive. The gesture was understandable; no mayor of New York was anxious to be spotted by his constituents seventy-two hours after a major snowstorm had hit the city.
Abe Stern flailed at the pall of smoke filling his official limousine with a little pawlike hand. The Mayor was a diminutive fireplug of a man, barely five feet, two inches tall. He was completely bald and in three weeks he would be sixty-nine; yet vitality still snapped from his figure as static electricity sometimes snaps from light switches on a cold dry day. He turned to the source of the smoke, his three-hundred-pound detective bodyguard puffing an afterbreakfast Dutch Master while he read the Daily News sports pages in the front seat.
“Richy,” he growled. “I’m going to tell the Commissioner to give you a raise so you can buy yourself a decent cigar for a change.”
“Sorry, Mr. Mayor. Smoke bother you?”
Stern grunted and turned his attention to his press aide in the seat beside him. “So how many trucks did we finally put on the streets?”
“Three thousand one hundred and sixty-two,” Victor Ferrari replied.
“Son of a bitchl”
In barely two hours, Stern would have to face a snarling City Hall press corps, its members ready to savage him for his administration’s failure to clean the city’s streets quickly enough after Friday’s snowstorm. It was an experience to which he looked forward with a delight akin to that of a man going to his dentist for a root-canal treatment.
“Six thousand fucking trucks this city’s got and the Sanitation Department can barely get half of them out on the streets!”
Ferrari squirmed. “Well, you know how it is, Mr. Mayor. Most of them trucks is twenty years old.”
“Are, Victor, are. God,” Stern groaned, “I’ve got a bodyguard who wants to choke me to death, a Sanitation Commissioner who can’t get the snow off the streets and a press officer who can’t speak English.”
The press officer cleared his throat apprehensively. “There’s another thing, Mr. Mayor.”
“I don’t want to know about it.”
“Friedkin of the Sanitation Workers wants triple time for yesterday.”
Stern stared angrily out at the black surface of the East River, trying to think how he could skewer the union leader at his press conference. For all his protesting to the contrary, he delighted in the rough give-and-take of a press conference. “Feisty” was the adjective most commonly employed to describe Abe Stern, and the word was well chosen. He’d been born in a tenement on the Lower East Side, the son of a Polish-Jewish immigrant father, a pants presser in a tailor shop, and a Russian-born mother who stitched up cheap frocks in a nonunion sweatshop in the Garment District.
It had been a tough neighborhood, predominantly Jewish with satellites of Irish and Italian immigrants along its fringes, a neighborhood where a kid’s stature was measured by his skill with his fists. That had been fine with Abe Stern. He loved to fight. He dreamed of becoming a prizefighter like his idol, the light heavyweight champion Battling Levinsky. He could still recall drifting off to sleep in the tenement on the stifling summer nights, the murmur of conversation flowing through the open windows from the adults on the fire escape, while he dreamed of the triumphs his fists would win him one day.
A brutal physical reality had ended that dream of Abe Stern’s. At sixteen, he stopped growing. If God had not given Abe the body to fulfill his boyhood dream, however, He had given him something much more precious: a good mind. Abe trained it first at CCNY, then studying the law by night at NYU. By the time he passed his bar exams, he had a new idol, a different kind of fighter from the boxer he had idolized as a boy. It was the cripple in the White House whose patrician accent offered hope to a nation mired in depression. Abe had become a politician.
He’d begun in the 1934 Congressional campaign as a Tammany district captain in Sheepshead Bay, working door to door, getting out the vote, cementing the first of the friendships that would ultimately carry him to City Hall and what was often regarded as the second elective office in-the United States. There was no one who understood the complex chemistry of New York City and its governing structures better than the cocky little man in the back of his official limousine. Abe Stern had done it all in his long climb up the ladder. He’d worked the synagogues and the soda fountains, made the Wednesday-night smokers, the maudlin Irish wakes, the bingo games; sat attendant at saints’-day dinners honoring a procession of saints of a variety to bedazzle the most religious of minds. His stomach had been assaulted by enough blintzes, pizzas, chop suey, knishes, pretzels and foot-long red hots to ruin the digestive tracts of a battalion of Gaylord Hausers. His off-key tenor voice had sung the “Hatikvah” in Sheepshead Bay, “Wrap the Green Flag Round Me, Boys” in Queens, opera in Little Italy and Spanish love songs in Hispanic Harlem. Indeed, consciously or unconsciously, many of his electors had given him their vote because they saw in his tough little figure a mirror image of what they thought of as themselves. To them, Abe Stern was New York.
The car phone rang. Ferrari started to reach for it, but the Mayor’s little hand shot past his.
“Gimme that. This is the Mayor,” he barked. He grunted twice, said, “Thanks, darling,” then hung up. As he did, a beatific smile lit up his face.
“What’s up?” Ferrari asked.
“Would you believe it? The President wants to see me right away. White House just called the Mansion. They even got a plane waiting for me out at Marine Air Terminal.” Abe Stern leaned close to his press aide and his voice fell to a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s about the South Bronx redevelopment scheme. I got a hunch they’re finally going to come up with our two billion bucks.”
Laila Dajani, ravenous after her long night of lovemaking, blotted up the yellow remnants of her softboiled egg with a scrap of the slightly burned toast whose acrid aroma filled the kitchen of her Hampshire House suite.
She took a final nervous swallow of the Chinese tea she had brewed herself as soon as she returned to the hotel, piled her dishes into the sink and looked around the suite. Everything was ready.
“WINS, ten-ten on your dial. It’s seven-thirty and a chilly twenty-three degrees in mid-Manhattan,” a voice announced from the transistor on her coffee table. “The weather man has promised us another clear, cold one. And don’t forget, there are only twelve more shopping days left until Christmas …”
Laila snapped off the radio and picked up her Hermes address book. She ran a crimson fingernail down the entries under “C” until she found the one she was looking for-“Colombe.” She stepped to the phone and dialed the number written beside it, methodically adding as she did the number 2 to each of its seven digits.