The Fifth Horseman (29 page)

Is this guy for real? Eastman asked himself. He stared at Hannon, the square pink fingernails of his thumbs pressed tensely together, his heavy shoulders and upper body untidily enclosed in a gabardine suit. Doesn’t he realize he’s talking about people, Eastman thought, living flesh-and-blood people, not a chain of numbers spat out by a computer?

“What are the possibilities of survivors outside your first circle?” the President asked.

“We’ll begin having survivors,” Hannon answered, “inside the second circle, three to six miles from ground zero.” He mechanically ran his finger along the circle’s red circumference encompassing the rest of lower Manhattan, South Brooklyn, Jackson Heights, La Guardia Airport, Rikers Island, Secaucus and Jersey City, the guts of the most important metropolitan area in the world. “Fifty percent of the population in this area will be killed.

Forty percent will be injured. Ten percent will survive.”

“Only ten percent?” Abe Stern’s voice was a whisper. He looked at Hannon’s map, but he didn’t see those colored circles, the rigid crisscrossing pattern of streets and highways. He saw his city, the city he had walked and studied, loved and cursed through half a century of politics and campaigns. He saw the Jewish neighborhoods out around Sheepshead Bay where he had hiked through stairways redolent with the smell of gefilte fish in the thirties getting out the vote; the frightening vistas of the South Bronx he had come here to save; the boardwalk at Coney with the guys in the stands hawking frozen custard, Nathan’s Famous and foot-long franks; the barrios of Spanish Harlem and the crowded alleys of Chinatown smelling of salted fish, smoked duck and preserved egg; of Little Italy festooned in red and green for the saint whose gaudy statue was paraded through an exultant throng; of those endless neighborhoods of two-family row houses and tenements in Bensonhurst, Astoria and the Bronx; the homes of his people: the cabdrivers, waiters, barbers, clerks, electricians, firemen and cops who had spent a lifetime of struggle to get where they were, all of them now trapped because they lived inside a thin red line on a map.

“Do you mean to tell me only one New Yorker in ten in there is going to come out unscathed?” he asked. “Half of them are going to die?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What about the impact of this on your other areas?” the President queried.

“Most of Jersey City, upper Manhattan and Flatbush are just going to fall over. Low-rise buildings will collapse. Anything under ten stories will come down.”

“What are the chances of survivors inside the green circle?” Eastman asked, the sharp upward flaring of his voice revealing the depth of his personal concern. The campus of Columbia University lay inside its boundary.

“Out there,” Hannon answered, “glass is going to be flying. Interior partitions are going to go. Anybody who’s not in a cellar is going to risk being badly bruised or cut up by flying glass and debris. We reckon ten percent in that belt dead and forty to fifty percent injured.

“The black outer circle,” he continued, “defines the blast-damage limit.”

It went as far as JFK Airport and the southern border of Westchester County and enclosed a great swath of New Jersey’s wealthiest bedroom communities.

“Glass, light walls will go down there. Anybody outside will risk severe body burns.”

“How about the fallout?” the President queried.

“God forbid, sir, if there is an onshore wind blowing when this thing explodes to drive the fallout up into New York State and New England, it’ll contaminate a swath of land thousands of miles square. Right up into Vermont. Nobody will be able to live there for generations to come.”

“Look, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is.” Abe Stern had begun to recover his composure. “I’d like to know one thing from you. God forgive me for using the expression for something like this, but I want the bottom line. How many of my people are going to be killed if this thing goes off?”

“Yes, sir.” Hannon opened the pages of a stack of papers enclosed in a stiff black cover ostentatiously stamped “Top Secret.” That pile of paper was the indispensable crutch of the modern bureaucrat, a computer printout.

This one had been spewed out during the watches of the night by the computer in the National Warning Center. Everything that would happen to the Mayor’s city should Qaddafi’s bomb explode was on those pages. It was as if some computerized Cassandra had uttered an infallible prophecy recording in minute, macabre detail the instant future which awaited New York in that awful eventuality; what percentage of the buildings along Clinton Avenue in Brooklyn would remain standing (zero); the number of dead on Eighth Avenue, Manhattan, between Thirtyfourth and Thirty-sixth Streets (100 percent); the percentage of the population of Glen Cove, Long Island, that would die from exposure to radioactive fallout (10 percent); how many private dwellings in East Orange, New Jersey, would suffer severe damage (7.2 percent); the destiny of the people of Queens (57.2 percent would die from blast and fire, 5 percent from the fallout, 32.7 percent would be injured).

It was a multimillion dollar Baedeker to the unthinkable, right down to how many nurses, pediatricians, osteopaths, plumbers, hospital beds, airport runways, and, naturally, government tax records, would survive in each corner of the affected area. Hannon methodically toted up the horror encapsulated in those dark chains of numbers.

“The total dead, sir, for the conditions we’ve been given in the five boroughs and New Jersey would be 6.74 million.”

An interminable clutter of New York traffic loomed up before Angelo Rocchia’s four-year-old Chevrolet, blocking its route to the exit ramp.

Beside Rocchia, Jack Rand gave his watch an anxious glance. “Maybe we ought to check in.”

“Check in? What for, for Christ’s sake? To tell them we’re stuck on the Brooklyn Bridge?” This kid’s really got a bug up his ass, Angelo thought.

He plucked a peanut from the bag tucked into the pocket of his suit jacket.

“Here,” he said, “relax. Enjoy the sights. The good part’s coming up. The asshole of Brooklyn.”

Slowly, painfully, he funneled the car off the bridge ramp, sped along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and then the Gowanus Expressway, until he turned toward Second Avenue, Brooklyn, and his destination. The young agent gawked at the sight spreading along their route: a line of three-and four-story tenements, every other one of them, almost, a gutted shell. The walls, those that were still standing, were covered with obscene graffiti. Windows were broken everywhere. Those on the ground floor were barred. Doors were padlocked. Rubbish littered the sidewalks. The place stank of urine, of feces, of ashes.

On the street corners, men and kids warmed their hands over flickering fires of rubbish set in old trashcans or lit on a patch of the sidewalk.

Rand stared at them, blacks and Hispanics, an occasional flash of hatred for their passing car illuminating the otherwise expressionless faces of those for whom the American dream was a nightmare, a distant, unobtainable mirage quivering mockingly from across the narrow neck of water over which their car had just passed.

“Got anything like this in South Dakota?” Angelo asked. “You know what they get for murder one down here? Ten bucks. Ten bucks to kill a man.” He shook his head sadly. “Used to be a nice neighborhood, too. Italian. Few Irish.

Some of these people they got here now, they live worse than animals in the Bronx Zoo. Arabs be doing us a favor, they gas the place.”

The FBI radio on the seat between them crackled. There was no mistaking the speaker’s flat Midwestern accent. Angelo burst into laughter.

“You remember when they snatched Calvin Klein’s kid a couple of years ago?”

Rand didn’t.

“We had a bunch of you guys from South Dakota in on that one too. I’m riding in this thing monitoring your frequency plus the pigeon with a wire.

We’ve already sprung the kid got the perp, but the FBI, they wanted to stay out. Thought there might be more people. And suddenly I hear”-Angelo mimicked the accent—” `Foxtrot Four to Base. There are two suspicious-looking Negro males loitering on the corner of One Hundred Thirty-fifth and St. Nicholas Avenue.’” Angelo laughed again, a short, harsh burst of noise. “Shit! That’s all they got up there, for Christ’s sake, is suspicious-looking spades. Hanging around. Scoring dope. You could rupture every nose in South Dakota with the coke they sell up there.”

Rand looked at him. There was a taut, teeth-baring smile on Angelo’s face, but there was no smile in his eyes. Something, the young agent thought, is disturbing this man.

“Angelo, I live in Denver.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Considerable, in fact. Have you ever been out West?”

“Out West? Sure, I been out West.” Angelo gave the agent a regard that mixed pity with contempt. “I was up in Albany once.” He produced another mirthless laugh. “You know what they say, kid? Once you get past Yonkers, everything out there’s Bridgeport.”

He waved a hand past the sagging fagade of a Catholic church. “Over there,” he noted, with a certain pride in his voice, “is Joey Gallo’s old turf. His docks are down there.”

Rand followed his gesture toward the lowlying piers pushing into the gray sludge of the harbor. “Do the rackets still control the piers?”

What’s with this guy? Angelo thought. Next thing he’ll want to know is, is the Pope Catholic? “Of course. Profacci family. Anthony Scotto.”

“And you guys can’t break them?”

“Break them, you kidding? They own all the stevedore companies that lease the piers. And the union local on every pier is owned by the mob that owns the stevedore company. If a guy hasn’t got an uncle, a brother, a cousin inside the union to recommend him, forget it, he don’t work. What happens his first day down there, guy comes up to him, says, `Hey, we’re taking a collection for Tony Nazziato. Broke his leg over to Pier Six.’ He says, ‘Tony who?’ and he never works again. Because old Tony, he’s up there in the union hall, and he could run the hundred on that broken leg of his.

It’s an understanding. Like everything on the piers.”

Enough of this, Angelo thought. He gave the agent a quizzical regard. “They sent you all the way from Denver just for a crummy barrel of chlorine gas.”

Rand swallowed hastily. “I’d hardly call chlorine gas crummy. You heard what they said about how toxic it was.”

“Yeah, well, you know what I figure? At least two thousand of you guys been pulled in here, all for that little barrel.”

The New Yorker’s face, Rand noted, seemed relaxed, but the cold set of his gray eyes had not changed.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” the agent replied. He hesitated a moment.

“You must be getting close to retirement age, Angelo.”

Okay, Angelo said to himself, the kid wants to change the subject, we’ll change the subject. “Sure. I could retire. I got the years. But I like the job. Like the excitement. Nobody’s breaking my balls. What would I do, I retire? Sit out there on Long Island somewhere and listen to the grass grow?”

Just the thought of retirement reminded him that it was here, in this precinct, that he had walked his first beat. In 1947. He’d been so close to home he could drop in for coffee in the house where he’d been born, kiss Ma, talk with the old man in the tailor shop he had set up when he came over from Sicily after the first war, lounge in the back room where Angelo had pushed the needle himself on Saturday afternoons, listening to the Metropolitan Opera, to his old man belting out Rigoletto, Trovatore, Traviata. Knew them all, his old man. Where did they go, all those years, Angelo thought, where did they go?

“You been with the Bureau long?” he asked Rand.

“Three years. Since I got out of Tulane Law School.”

Figures, Angelo thought. I always get the veterans.

Angelo fell silent for a moment, looking again at the once familiar neighborhood, resembling now the blastedout villages he’d fought over north of Naples in the winter of ‘43. Those years in the service, the force. He’d done all right. For an Italian. The Police and Fire Departments in the city belonged to the Irish. The Italians had the Sanitation. Jews owned the teachers. They said New York was a melting pot, but its heat could thaw things out only so much.

“You married, kid?”

“Yes,” Rand replied. “We have two children. How about you?”

For the first time he noted a softening in the detective’s gray eyes. “I lost my wife to cancer some years ago. We had one child, a daughter.” The words were issued like pronunciamento, a definitive statement that permitted no further questions.

Angelo turned off the avenue and drew up to a gate. He flashed his detective’s shield at the guard inside, who waved them ahead. They rolled down a slight incline to a huge three-story fagade of yellowing cement opening before a dark cavern that looked a little like a covered railroad stand. Overhead, a walkway linked the building to a pair of massive warehouses. They were quintessential U.S. government functional: squat and tasteless, without any redeeming frill or folly. Four railroad tracks ran into the pier’s dim recesses. Painted overhead in black block letters were the words “PASSENGER TERMINAL.”

“The end of the line for the kid in Upper Seventeen,” Angelo mused.

“What?” the startled Rand asked.

“Shit. Forget it. It was an ad during the war. You weren’t even born then.”

He flicked a peanut into his mouth and shook his head as though in disbelief. “I shipped out of here in ‘forty-two.”

A bitter gust of wind tore off the bay, flinging up to their nostrils the putrid odor of the dirty sea water lapping the docks. Angelo headed toward a shacklike booth at the end of the pier, its windows coated with fly specks, grime and dust.

“Would you believe that?” he asked. “U.S. Customs Office. You could walk a circus elephant past those windows and the guy inside wouldn’t notice.”