The Fifth Horseman (35 page)

As the Basque country exports shepherds, Antwerp diamond cutters, so that Latin American nation exported coffee, emeralds, cocaine-and pickpockets.

There were in the miserable calles of Bogota, the Colombian capital, a whole series of Faginesque pickpocketing schools. Poor farm children were literally sold into servitude to the schools’ masters to learn the trade.

In the Plaza Bolivia, along the Avenue Santander, they were taught every trick of the art, how to slit a pocket with a razor, open unnoticed a handbag, pluck a Rolex watch from an unsuspecting wrist. As a graduation exercise they had to demonstrate fingers so skilled they could slip a wallet from a pocket to which was sewn a line of jingle bells without causing a single bell to ring.

Once trained, they assembled into teams of twos and threes, because a good dip never worked alone, and fanned out all over the world in search of the crowds, conventions, tourists and unsuspecting pockets from which they extracted well over a million dollars a year.

Putman had gone through almost fifty photos when suddenly he stopped and stared at the photo of a girl, dark rolls of hair falling to her shoulders, her breasts thrusting challengingly against a tightly drawn white silk blouse.

“Oh yes,” he said with a nervous half-chuckle, “I think I recognize this one. I think that’s the girl I nearly knocked down the other day at the foot of the stairway coming down the train platform.” The memory of the incident came flooding back. “Of course. It’s her all right. It was quite embarrassing. I ran right into her and she had to grab onto me to keep from falling.”

“Mr. Putman,” Angelo asked very quietly, “could the other day have been Friday?”

The importer hesitated, trying to reconstruct the moment in his mind. “My goodness,” he said, “you know, I think it was.”

The detective took the photograph back and studied the girl’s pretty face, her provocative breasts so defiantly exposed to the policeman’s. camera.

“You didn’t bump into her, Mr. Putman, she bumped into you. They love to work with girls with big tits. She jams those knockers into you while the dip boosts your wallet.”

He noticed a flush on the importer’s cheeks. “Don’t worry, Mr. Putman.

Everybody gets turned on by girls with big tits. Even guys like you from Oyster Bay.”

Abe Stern glanced angrily at Jeremy Oglethorpe. The evacuation expert was bustling around the Police Commissioner’s office, hanging flow charts, diagrams, maps with those damnable colored circles all over them onto walls and easels, displaying an energy so frenetic he might have been a Madison Avenue account executive about to make a presentation for a new toothpaste account.

The Mayor had elected to bring him here rather than to City Hall because the Police Commissioner’s office was more secure than his. They had come by helicopter right from the Marine Air Terminal to the pad on the roof.

“Well,” Oglethorpe announced, surveying his display with quiet pride, “I think I’m ready if your people are.”

The Police Commissioner turned to one of the two inspectors he had summoned to the meeting. “Where the hell is Walsh?” he growled.

“He’s on his way, sir.”

Walsh was Timothy Walsh, thirty-seven, a six-footthree-inch Brooklyn-born lieutenant who presided over the NYPD’s Office of Civil Preparedness. He was a shrewd, ambitious, empire-building Irishman who had been moved to Civil Preparedness from the Intelligence Bureau with orders to make it snap, and snap it did. Any kind of catastrophe that might strike the city was supposed to be in his bailiwick. Walsh, however, had a solid preference for those that were the high-media-exposure areas, the areas that could get you applause from the Commissioner’s office, beef up your budget, swell your staff; things like power failures, hurricanes, flooding, blizzards.

Evacuation and civil defense were at the bottom of the pile. The problem with civil defense, Timothy Walsh was fond of remarking, was, “People don’t want to know. It’s ‘Hey, look, don’t bother me with those fucking Russian bombs. I got a foot of snow in my driveway.”’

His own thoughts on the subject were succinctly summed up in a phrase he often repeated to his deputy: “Every so often I go down to Washington and genuflect on the altar of the thermonuclear holocaust so I can keep the federal money coming in for the things that really count in this city, like getting some more portable generators for our next power failure.”

Now, whistling cheerfully, Walsh nodded at the detective manning the electric gate leading to the Police Commissioner’s suite and found himself quickly ushered into his office. At the sight of all the heavies in the room, Walsh’s cheerfulness disappeared.

“Walsh, have we got a plan to evacuate this city in a crisis?” the Police Commissioner demanded.

Oh-oh, Walsh thought, why is he asking that? Better use a little soft-shoe routine here. Toss a few balls in the air and see which way the wind is blowing. Such a plan did, in fact, exist. It was called “The New York Target Support Area Operational Survival Plan, Volume I, Basic Plan.” Drawn up in 1972, it contained 202 pages and was generally acknowledged to be worthless. So worthless, Walsh had never bothered to read it; nor, as far as he knew, had anyone else in his department.

“Sir, the last time we looked at evacuation was a report we did in December 1977 for Commissioner Codd. Con Ed wanted to start running liquefied natural gas up the East River to their storage farm at Berrian’s Island and we were asked if we could clear the East Side in a helluva hurry if there was a spill.”

“And?”

“And the conclusion was it was an absolutely hopeless job. Better not to let the LNG up the river in the first place.”

The Police Commissioner grunted. “Well, sit down and listen to this man here. Between now and four o’clock this afternoon, you and he have got to come up with a plan to clear this city in the shortest possible time.”

Walsh folded his large frame onto the Police Commissioner’s blue sofa, a whole series of alarm bells ringing in his psyche as he did. He watched Oglethorpe moving to his charts. There was something vaguely familiar, it occurred to him, about the face of the man above the blue polkadot tie.

Oglethorpe took up a rubber-tipped pointer and began, a professor lecturing a class. “Fortunately, the problem of evacuating New York City is one that we have spent a great deal of time in studying. I don’t need to tell you it’s a staggering challenge. The shortest time we’ve been able to come up with for clearing the city in our crisisrelocation studies is three days.”

“Three days!” Abe Stern snapped. “That son of a bitch over in Tripoli is barely giving us three hoursl”

Oglethorpe grimaced his acknowledgment. Unfortunately, as he explained, all Civil Defense evacuation plans were built around what he called “a wartime scenario.” In it, the United States would have five to six days warning of a Soviet thermonuclear attack because of certain preparations the Russians would have to make which would be observed by U.S. satellites. This prospect was one they hadn’t thought a great deal about.

“To be safe,” Oglethorpe went on, “we’ve got to plan on evacuating Manhattan, the southern Bronx, most of Queens and Brooklyn and a strip of New Jersey river shore four miles deep.”

“How many people will that involve?” Abe Stern asked.

“Eleven million.”

The Mayor groaned softly. Walsh looked at him. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, he thought, what do you evacuate eleven million people for? Only one thing.

Oglethorpe turned back to his map. “One thing we do know, it’s going to be a ground burst. That means fallout, bad fallout. Looking at New York’s prevailing winds tells you that Queens and Long Island have the highest probability of getting heavy fallout. We’ve got the Weather Service monitoring the winds for us now and it looks like they’re going to get drenched if this goes. The best natural fallout shelter for those people is the cellar. In New York State you’ve got one of the highest cellar percentages in the country-seventy-three percent.” Oglethorpe was on familiar ground now, dealing with statistics, numbers, figures. “Unfortunately, that figure drops down to twenty-two percent out on Long Island because the island’s got a high water table. Those people are going to be in a lot of trouble out there if this thing explodes.”

“Shouldn’t we evacuate them too?” the Mayor queried.

“How?” Oglethorpe replied. “They can’t swim off that island, and if we pull them back toward the bridges we’ll be exposing them to more fallout and the possibility of burns.” Normally the mildmannered Oglethorpe wouldn’t have replied in so brutal a fashion, but New Yorkers, he firmly believed, liked tough, pragmatic speakers.

“The one thing we’ve got to avoid at all costs is moving people into fallout. So that means unless there’s a shift in the weather patterns our evacuation is going to have to go north up into Westchester and west into Jersey.

“The first thing I’d do is shut off all access to the city when we get our ‘go.’ Make all access one way-outbound. Now, here in Manhattan only twenty-one percent of your people have first cars. Very low figure compared to the national average. That means eighty percent of the people have got to get out by other means. We’ll want to mobilize ail the buss we can lay our hands on. Any large truck fleets we can get, too. Luckily, we’ve got the use of the subways, which were more or less denied to us in our wartime scenario. We’ll want to make large use of them.

Load them up, switch them into the express lanes and tell them to go like hell. Send as many as we can into the upper Bronx. Take people as far up there as you can, and tell them to get out and walk.”

“Jesus Christ!” It was the Police Commissioner contemplating the chaos Oglethorpe’s ideas were going to produce. “Can you imagine the field day the looters are going to have?”

Oglethorpe smiled. “Sure, there are going to be plenty of scavengers combing your luxury highrises,” he admitted. “But if they’re ready to run the risk of being incinerated for a color TV, well, so be it. You can hardly expect your police, whom you’re going to need for more important matters anyway, to run around booking them as though Manhattan was going to be here on Wednesday morning.”

“Where are you going to put all those people?” the Mayor asked. “You can’t just take them out and dump them in a street in the Bronx or over in the Jersey Flats in the middle of winter.”

“Well, sir.” Oglethorpe straightened up. “Crisis relocation is based on the concept of risk areas and host areas. We move population from overpopulated risk areas to underpopulated host areas. In our New York `wartime scenario’

“-he was looking at a map of New York State = `we contemplated moving people as far out as Syracuse and Rochester. Here we’ll want to work much closer in. Ask the authorities in Westchester to prepare to welcome these people in what we in Civil Defense call `congregate care facilities’-schools and hospitals.”

Terrific, Walsh thought, listening to him. This is beautiful. Can you imagine the look on the Police Chief’s face up there in Scarsdale when we call up and say, Hey, Chief, look, we’re sending you up half a million of our best Bedford-Stuyvesant blacks for the weekend? The guy’ll go fucking bananas.

Suddenly it occurred to Walsh where he’d seen Oglethrope before. It was in Washington at a briefing in the Pentagon on crisis relocation. He’d come away from it convinced the idea of even trying to evacuate New York was bullshit, The New York temperament, the unruliness of the population, the sheer staggering size of it, it was all too overwhelming; better not to even think about it.

“How about the old, the infirm, the people who just can’t get up and move like that?” the Mayor was asking.

Oglethorpe gave a hopeless shrug. “You’ll just have to tell them to go underground and pray.”

He turned back to his chart. It had all been so clear in their studies.

Why, they had gamed the evacuation of New York three times in Washington in March 1977 on the computer, gradually working the time down from three days eighteen hours to three days flat. Everything was beautifully laid out, indexed and tabulated. You knew you had 3.8 million housing units in your risk area, with an average occupancy of 3.0 persons, ranging from 3.8 in Suffolk County to 2.2 in Manhattan. You knew you had 75,000 persons, 21,400 occupied units and 19,600 first autos per zip code in Nassau County, 40,000 persons, 19,400 units and 4,300 first autos in Manhattan.

They were going to use, for example, 310 commercial aircraft flying out of eight risk-area airports, seventy-one flights an hour over three days to move 1.24 million people. They had said it couldn’t be done, but they had found out how, turnaround times, everything. The trains. They knew how they’d use the six rail routes in and out of the city, how they’d maximize traffic flow. They had even figured out how they’d use the freight cars in the Jersey yards, thirty box cars and three locomotives a train; 2,500

people, which gave you an average space allowance of six square feet per person.

They bad counted in the Staten Island ferries, reckoning that taking over the automobile space they could get five thousand people onto a ferry. Even New York’s 125 tugboats and 250 open barges were included in their plans.

They had spent weeks identifying nine special highway routes suitable for getting people out of the city. It was all so well thought outright down to the fact that there were a quarter of a million people on Manhattan Island with pets who’d drive you crazy if they couldn’t take them along and half a million people with no luggage. But it was all based on three days-three days of careful, organized effort, not one spastic surge for the bridges like they were being asked to look at here.

Oglethorpe shook his head, trying to root out the dismay this disorderly problem caused his orderly mind, and plowed ahead. “The highways and the subways will have to be our principal modes. Everybody inside the five-PSI circle”-that was the five-pounds-per-squareinch-over-pressure circle, the second ring the Mayor had seen in Washington-“has got to come out. Personally, I’m happy if we can evacuate down to two PSI. Do that and we’ll be in great shape.