“I see. Did she tell you where she was going?”
“The airport. She was flying out to LA on the earlybird flight.”
“Did she leave you a forwarding address?”
“No.”
“Do you suppose you could tell us something about Miss Nahar?”
Ten minutes later, the two agents were back in their car, smoking. The clerk had been singularly unhelpful.
“What do you think, Frank?”
“I think it’s probably a waste of time. Some woman who’s afraid of doctors.”
“So do I. Except she did decide to leave this morning, didn’t she?”
“Why don’t we get your informer and work over his contact?”
“That might be a little heavy. Rico deals with some bad people.” The agent looked at his watch. “Let’s check the flight lists and find out what plane she took. We’ll have somebody do a check on her when she gets out there.”
“There’s one major point we’ve all overlooked.” Authority flowed from Michael Bannion’s voice like sound waves from a pitching fork, and everyone in the room turned to him. “Are you going to apply the White House’s injunction to secrecy to the men running the investigation, Harv?”
“No, certainly not. How are we going to get them to pull out all the stops if we don’t tell them the truth?”
“Good Godl” Bannion shook his head in dismay. “Tell my men there’s a hydrogen bomb hidden on this island, that it’s going to go off in a few hours and wipe the city off the face of the earth? They’re human. They’ll panic. The first thing they’ll say to themselves is, ‘I gotta get the kids out of here. I gotta call the old lady. Tell her to get the kids outa school and head for her mother’s up in Troy.’ “
“You seem to have singularly little confidence in your men, Commissioner.”
Bannion’s blue eyes flashed as he looked down the table to the austere presence of Quentin Dewing, the assistant director of the FBI.
“My men, in whom I have the greatest confidence, Mr. Dewing, don’t come from Montana, South Dakota and Oregon like yours do. They come from Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens. They’ve got their wives, their kids, their mothers, their uncles, their aunts, their pals, their girl friends, their dogs, their cats, their canaries trapped in this goddamned city. They’re men, not supermen. You’d better find a cover story to give them. And let me tell you something else, Mr. Dewing, it had better be a goddamn good cover story, because if it isn’t, there’s going to be a panic on this island the likes of which neither you nor I nor anybody else has ever seen.”
Grace Knowland turned up her coat collar to deflect the wind that hit her as soon as she emerged from the BMT’s Chambers Street subway station. It was almost 8:45. Hurrying through City Hall Park, Grace almost fell on the ill-cleaned, half-sanded path. The Mayor, she thought tartly, can’t even keep his own sidewalk shoveled.
She smiled at the policeman manning the gate leading to the Mayor’s offices and stepped into the noisy bustle of the press room. Still clutching her coat about her, she pulled her mail from her pigeonhole, tossed a quarter into the paper cup by the coffee machine and poured herself a steaming cup of black coffee.
A stir at the doorway interrupted her. Vic Ferrari, a blue cornflower twisted into the lapel of his gray flannel suit, stepped into the room.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I have a brief announcement. His Honor is very sorry, but he won’t be able to keep his appointment with you this morning.”
Ferrari, unfazed, let the storm of jeers and catcalls which followed his words abate. Tolerating the ill-humor of the New York press was only one of the minor trials involved in being the press secretary of the Mayor of New York.
“The Mayor was invited to Washington earlier this morning by the President to discuss certain budgetary questions of concern to them both.”
The room erupted. New York’s chronic financial problems had been a running story for years, and the questions fiew at Ferrari.
“Victor,” Grace asked, “when do you expect the Mayor back?”
“Later on in the day. I’ll keep you posted.”
“By shuttle, as usual?”
“I suppose so.”
“Hey, Vic,” a television reporter yelled from the rear of the circle of newsmen around Ferrari, “would this have anything to do with the South Bronx?”
Just the faintest glimmer of acknowledgment crossed Ferrari’s face, a swift illumination akin to the look on a mediocre poker player’s face when he’s filled an inside straight. One journalist in the room caught it-and Grace Knowland was probably the only person there who didn’t play poker. “I said I didn’t want to speculate on the subject of their meeting,” Ferrari insisted.
As unobtrusively as she could, Grace slipped to her phone and dialed the Times city desk. “Bill,” she whispered to her editor, “something’s up on the South Bronx. Stern’s gone to Washington. I want to shuttle down and try to ride back with him.” Her editor agreed immediately. Before leaving, she decided to make a second call, this one to Angelo. His phone seemed to ring interminably.
Finally an unfamiliar voice replied. “He’s not here,” he said. “They’re all off at a meeting someplace.”
Funny, Grace thought, hanging up the phone, he told her he was going to catch up on his paperwork this morning.
As she edged, almost surreptitiously, toward the door, she heard a snarl rising from the circle in which the others still clustered around the press secretary. “All this is lovely, Vic,” a voice asked, “but we happen to have a real problem on our hands here. Just when does this city plan to finish getting the fucking snow out of Queens?”
The man the City Hall press corps was so anxious to question was at that moment entering the private office of the President of the United States.
“Mr. President, you’re looking terrific. Wonderful. Marvelous.” Abe Stern’s adjectives succeeded each other in little barks, like a string of exploding Chinese firecrackers. He seemed to bounce across the room to the man at the desk as though he was being propelled by springs concealed in the soles of his shoes. “Job must agree with you. You’ve never looked so good.”
The President, who was wan and haggard from lack of sleep, waved Abe Stern to an apricot sofa and waited while a steward poured coffee for them both.
In the background, barely audible, were the strains of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The President preferred the intimacy of this room to the imposing formality of the Oval Office next door with all its symbols and majestic trappings, constant reminders of the authority and burdens of the Presidency of the United States. He’d furnished it with the comfortable memorabilia of his past: his Air Force commission, an aerial photo of his ranch taken from a helicopter, a few souvenirs from his early non-political days. On his desk was the handcrafted Steuben crystal vase his wife had given him for his last birthday, the graceful vessel jammed with multicolored jelly beans.
“So,” the beaming Stern declared as the steward left the room, “we’re finally going to get together on the funding of the South Bronx, are we?”
The President set his coffee cup onto its saucer with a rattle. “I’m sorry, Abe, I had to practice a little deception to get you down here this morning. That’s not why I asked you here.”
The Mayor’s eyebrows twitched into peaks of incomprehension.
“We have a terrible crisis on our hands, Abe, and it involves New York City.”
Stern emitted a sound that was half a sigh, half a growl. “Well, it can’t be the end of the world, Mr. President. Crises come, crises go, New York City’s lived with them all.”
There was a sudden watery glimmer in the President’s eyes as he looked at the little man before him. “You’re wrong, Abe. This is one crisis New York City can’t live with.”