Paul Bacon (20 page)

CHAPTER 25

B
Y THE SUMMER OF 2004, 9/11 was starting to feel like history. American flags no longer flew from taxi antennas, the downtown
skyline stopped looking naked without the Twin Towers, and the original reason I joined the force seemed like a distant memory.
Then came the Republican National Convention.

For the first time ever, the GOP was coming to New York City, where Democrats outnumbered Republicans about five to one. A
quarter of a million demonstrators were expected to voice their protests at some point during the convention, near the site
at Madison Square Garden and at numerous other locations around the city. Some groups were pledging peaceful assemblies; others
were threatening to screw things up by any means necessary.

For months before the convention, Lower Manhattan was turned into a 24/7 panic zone. Ground Zero was an irresistibly theatrical
backdrop for the GOP, and their plan for appearances there brought the city’s terrorism fears to their highest level since
9/11. The result for the NYPD was a stunning new approach to looking busy. “Operation Critical Response Vehicle Surge” was
a mouthful, and an earful, sending long lines of patrol cars through the streets with flashing lights and blaring sirens—every
day for weeks on end.

Clarabel and I were scheduled to do our normal patrol duties in the Two-eight for the first two days of the convention, when
the largest protests were expected to take place downtown. Hundreds of thousands did come to march, but only a handful of
arrests were made. I, for one, was relieved, since I had sympathies with both the protestors and the police department. It
seemed that the greatest potential for violent conflict had passed.

On the third night, when we were scheduled to work downtown on the Republican detail, I was expecting an easy one. I walked
into our normally lonely locker room and was surprised to see two dozen cops noisily suiting up. My coworkers laughed and
punched each other, donned riot helmets, and body-slammed lockers. The depressing atmosphere of the basement was gone, replaced
by a spirit of joyful menace I might have found amusing during almost any other event.

Carlyle was holstering his backup gun as I walked in. When he saw me, he shouted down the aisle of lockers, “What are
you
doing here? You should be with all your liberal demonstrator friends outside the Garden. This is your big night.”

“I don’t have any friends,” I said. “All I have are you hard-ons.”

“Bacon, baby!” Carlyle squealed with delight. “Listen to him! He’s one of us now. You ready to crack some skulls, bro?”

I opened my locker and started taking off my street clothes. “What do you mean, ‘big night’? I thought the worst was over
already.”

“It’s just getting started,” Carlyle said. “To night’s A31.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“August thirty-first,” he said. “This is the night when all the agitators we were too pussy to lock up before are gonna make
us pay in blood.”

As Carlyle explained it, a surprise attack was reportedly being mounted at the convention site in a few hours. A legion of
protestor groups was joining for an unruly flash demonstration two or three times larger than the previous days’ events. It
sounded like a harrowing assignment, but by pure luck, our squad pulled a light security detail far from Madison Square Garden.
While others would be clashing with the forces of mayhem, we would be standing outside the Central Park Boat house, an upscale
restaurant where two convention-related events were scheduled: a dinner for a midwestern Republican congressman, and an after-hours
party for California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Central Park was off-limits to protests, though we did see a lot of people in the park with Bush-bashing signs and T-shirts.
Most of them wandered around aimlessly, their numbers too small to qualify as a demonstration. Thousands passed by us, yet
for some reason no one seemed the least bit curious about the fifty police officers and men in black guarding the Boathouse.

Apparently unknown to the protestors, they were only feet from an open-air restaurant filled with a conservative congressman’s
entourage. If they knew, Clarabel and I agreed, they’d be swarming the place, so when people asked us what was happening at
the Boat house, we said we had no idea.

It took an astonishing three hours for someone to pick up the scent, and they practically had to be led by the snout. Nudging
them along, perhaps inadvertently, were the Billionaires for Bush, a half-political, half-comic troupe of left-leaning activists
who dressed like pretentious rich people and praised all things Republican. The Billionaires just happened to come by the
Boat house while they too were wandering in the woods, but unlike the other protestors, they read the situation in an instant.

Slyly, the members of the group, costumed in mink stoles and silk ascots, began chatting up the out-of-towners as though they
were all at the same party. The diners seated along the footpath could not avoid being part of the spectacle, and they didn’t
seem to mind. The Billionaires’ act was so polished that they came across as free entertainment. Whether or not the diners
picked up the irony was anyone’s guess, but the Billionaires were so well behaved that we felt safe not doing anything about
them.

About ten minutes into the Billionaires’ act, an observant group of demonstrators began gathering behind them and settling
in, like crows on a fence. Cell phones were pulled out, foot messengers were dispatched back to the main walkway to recruit
more bodies, and the word began to spread.

Our well-kept secret was out. As a crowd started to gather, I stopped leaning against a tree, Clarabel put away her cell phone,
and Sergeant Ramirez began pacing along the metal barricades. Elsewhere, Secret Service agents started talking into their
cuff links, and a group of NYPD bosses in white shirts fell into a huddle. I looked at my watch. “Perfect,” I said to Clarabel.
“Eighteen hundred hours on the dot. Just in time for meal.”

Clarabel nodded, then grabbed a barricade with both hands and hurled herself over the top—a bouncing black ponytail and a
flash of boot soles. Before she got away, Sergeant Ramirez walked up behind her and bopped her on the head with a rolled-up
roster sheet.

“Not so fast, lady,” said the sergeant. “Wait until we see what these people do.”

By now, about fifty protestors had gathered along the veranda, dwarfing the original pack of Billionaires but showing no clear
direction. Lacking leadership, they milled around without bothering any of the diners. It looked as though they might never
get up a head of steam, and many started to leave.

“This looks like a nonstarter,” I said to the sergeant.

“Yeah,” she said. “You guys go catch some z’s. I don’t know how late we’re gonna be here. Just do it in shifts. These things
can change in a heartbeat.”

Clarabel and I walked to a lot next to the Boat house, where she’d parked her car. We’d driven to the detail in her old Honda
Civic because the Two-eight couldn’t spare a vehicle, and I didn’t own one. After letting me in the passenger side, Clarabel
got behind the wheel and lowered her seat to a horizontal position. She folded her arms across her chest and said with a yawn,
“Your turn to stay up, right?”

“No, but go ahead and crash,” I told her.

I could have used the shut-eye, but I was more tempted by the chance to watch her sleep. I laid my face on the headrest and
stared at her profile, soaking up her unusually quiet demeanor.

Without opening her eyes, she said, “Why are you looking at me?”

“I’m not looking at you,” I said.

“You are too. I can hear it.”

“That’s your imagination.”

“It better be,” she said, then drifted off to sleep—and eventually so did I.

Sergeant Ramirez woke me up by rapping on my window. “Get up, my little chickens,” she said, pointing back toward our post.
“Things are happening.”

Looking across the lot, I saw that the previously flagging group of protestors had grown to at least a hundred. I poked Clarabel
in the arm.

“Noooh,” she said irritably, “It’s only been five minutes.”

“It’s showtime,” I said.

“Is Arnold Schwarzenegger here?”

“Not yet.”

“Then go away. He’s the only show I wanna see to night.”

“It’s the demonstrators,” I said. “They’re back with a vengeance.”

“What?” she said, pulling herself up to look outside. “Oh, shit.”

While we jogged with the sergeant back to our post, I asked her, “What happened?”

“Some guy with a bongo drum just showed up like some kind of pied piper,” she said. “He brought fifty bodies with him, and
they keep coming and coming. I think this may be part of the A31.”

I felt a twinge as we approached the noisy crowd; the last time I’d been to a political demonstration, I was standing on the
other side of the barricades. It was George W. Bush’s first inauguration in 2001, when I’d gone down to Washington to get
within screaming distance of the new president’s motorcade.
Bush v. Gore
had been the first national election I’d watched from beginning to end, and being as how my side had lost, I took the whole
thing kind of personally. I wanted someone on the other side to feel as offended as I did, so I joined a five-thousand-strong
march aiming to shake up the parade route. Despite our amazing energy, we were stopped far short of our destination by Washington
police, and it all seemed like a flop. At the time, all I could say was what fascists the cops were for suppressing our free
speech, but now, standing in their shoes, I wondered how I had ever taken myself so seriously.

The demonstration continued to grow until nearly three hundred people were pressed up against each other, every one of them
making a different kind of loud noise—screaming and shouting and banging and pounding and honking and tooting. It would have
been a brilliant moment for free speech, except the people they were shouting at seemed completely unaware of their presence.
The tables along the edge of the veranda were all full, and the guests were chatting away as if they couldn’t even hear what
was happening ten feet away from them.

After letting the protestors go on like this for two hours, we received orders to disperse the crowd, and they left without
incident. They must have been all screamed out, I thought, and not a moment too soon, as it was almost time for Governor Schwarzenegger’s
party. At nine fifteen P.M., the Boat house was emptied of patrons, the surrounding wooded areas were cleared of stragglers,
and a massive shuffling of the deck took place.

In our new posting, Clarabel and I were shifted from the front of the Boat house to the Ramble, a dark, forested area in back
of the restaurant overlooking a famous lake, a fixture in cinematic love stories filmed in New York. Quiet and remote, with
a yellow moon rising above the city skyline, it was the kind of place I would have brought a girl to make out for the first
time in high school. There was even a big flat rock to stretch out on, and our entire post was in shadows, enabling us to
keep watch on the Boat house without anyone seeing us. As we sat down next to each other on the rock, I started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Clarabel asked.

“I was just thinking a bottle of wine would be nice about now,” I said.

“In your dreams,” she said, scooting her butt in the other direction. “I don’t do charity.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I shot back. “I’m not that interested.”

“Not
that
interested?” she said. “But you are interested, aren’t you?” “No more than you’re interested in me,” I said.

“Which is not at all, you understand? It’s just platonic.”

“I know,” I said.

“Good,” she said.

* * *

Despite how it sounded, our conversation struck me as an encouraging development. A subject I’d wanted to broach for many
months was now out in the open, and in a game of inches, there were no small victories.

I leaned back and gazed into the murky haze above. “Did you know,” I said to my partner, who’d been raised in Manhattan, “that
when the sun goes down in most places, there are thousands of points of light up in the sky? They’re called
stars
. I’d like to show them to you sometime.”

“I’ve seen stars,” said Clarabel. “I’ve been to the planetarium.”

We talked a little while longer, then sat quietly, enjoying our peaceful solitude, until the silence just seemed weird.

I turned to Clarabel and said, “Is your radio even on?”

“Yeah, right? What ever happened to that A31 shit?” she said, wiggling her volume knob. “Oops. Mine’s been off.”

I tested my radio and said, “Mine too.”

We turned up our radios to hear complete pandemonium on the airwaves.

“
No, Central!
” a cop shouted over a background of sirens. “
Not fifteen
under, FIFTY under. Five-oh bodies under arrest at my location. You
got that?
”

“
Ten-four
,” said the dispatcher, “
But WHICH unit is raising Central?
”

Clarabel said, “Sounds like a total cluster. We should call someone and find out what’s going on.”

She pulled out her cell phone and got in touch with a person who kept her very entertained in Spanish for about five minutes,
then hung up with a puzzled look.

“Who was that?” I said.

“You’re not gonna believe this,” she said. “There’ve been
six hundred
collars so far.”

“Where?”

“Around Union Square and the Garden.”

“So there really was an A31?”

“Sounds like it.”

* * *

At around ten thirty, a caravan of American-made vehicles—some very long, others very large—rolled up to the Boat house under
NYPD escort. A few minutes after that, we saw the perfectly coiffed head of Arnold Schwarzenegger through an open window in
the main dining room.

“He’s in the building!” Clarabel shouted, then hopped to her feet and started jogging back into the forest toward the restaurant.