City of Dreams (58 page)

She started walking north with scores of others, north through a cloud as thick as Long Island fog, north away from this hell.

Soon her cross-trainers, soaked when she ran over the flooding concourse, were caked with concrete mud from the snowfall of pulverized building that was now accumulating on Lower Manhattan.

At the corner of Chambers Street, she stopped to scrape it from her soles.

A man stood at a big stainless-steel lunch cart. He and the cart were covered in dust. He could have been made of plaster, except for his eyes. He said, “Water, lady? You need water.” And he held out a bottle.

She took it, rinsed her mouth, spat. Then she took a long drink. It revived her. It didn’t make her feel better. What could? But it refreshed dehydrated cells that were part of the simple physical system that knew nothing but its own chemistry. So the water gave her the strength to keep walking. She reached into her pocket for a few coins.

He put up his hand. “No. No paying today.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“Just do me favor,” he said.

“What?”

“Never forget and never forgive.”

She began walking, then turned. “You sound Russian. Are you Russian?”

“No more. American now. And this”—he brushed the dust off the roof of his cart—“this is nothing. And that”—he pointed at the remaining tower—“that is a wound. It will become a scar. But this is America, lady. This is New York. No quitting in us.”

“Right.” And she walked on through the gray landscape, with all the other gray people. She did not know where she was going.

She had reached Canal Street by the time the second building fell.

People screamed and cried again, to the sacred and the profane, to holy God and holy shit, to the highest aspiration and to the lowest leavings.

Jennifer Wilson did not turn around.

iii.

A week later, the woman who now called herself Sally Lawrence looked at a picture of Jennifer Wilson.

It was attached to the fence outside St. Paul’s Chapel, along with thousands of other pictures of people who had not come home, thousands of souls who had given their lives for no other reason but that they went to work and did their jobs. That alone made them American heroes. And so it was right that candles burned like votaries before those images, so lovingly printed on posters and taped to the fence of the chapel that had seen so much of the New York parade.

The wound was raw. The city seemed stunned, still in shock. The mountain of rubble now known as Ground Zero sent smoldering metal smoking into the sky and the stink of it settled everywhere downwind. But that coffee man was right. The wound would heal. It would scar. New Yorkers would rebuild. They would never quit.

Sally Lawrence had already decided that she would never quit. But she would change. She
had
changed. She had been reborn in that little graveyard.

She pulled a Mets hat low and looked closer at Jennifer Wilson.

Jennifer’s picture showed her smiling on the Battery on a bright March day with her brown hair blowing in the wind.

Sally had short hair. But she remembered that day, her first Sunday afternoon with Joshua, the day when she began to think that he might be “the one.”

Jennifer had a toothy smile.

Sally did not, but the space was healing. The gums were no longer tender. Some things healed more quickly than others.

Beneath the picture were the words: “If you see this woman, call Attorney Janet Sharp. . . .”

Her attorney
. So she had been right about Joshua after all. He wasn’t “the one.” He hadn’t even bothered to use his own phone number on the poster. Maybe he knew the truth, that once Jennifer Wilson was officially declared dead, Joshua would not get a cent.

And Jennifer Wilson
was
dead. She had been consumed in the collapse of the South Tower. She would not go to jail for insider trading and see her life’s work wiped out by legal fees, restitution, and fines. She would not be shot down by the henchmen of an avenging Russian investor. But she would never be seen again.

A good forensic accountant would figure out what portion of her Intermetro holdings she had dumped with inside information. Her executor, accountant Carl Evers, would insist that her lawyer make a quick deal with the government because Evers would not allow the estate to burn thousands of dollars in a losing battle. That was one reason that she was better off dead.

Evers would then liquidate everything. He would sell the condos on Abingdon Square, in Stowe, Vermont, and on Useppa Island in Florida. He would empty the stock portfolio and pay the debts.

And what remained would do some good. She had left a quarter of her estate to the Episcopal Charities of New York. She had been raised Episcopal, had been a congregant at St. George’s, and had been reborn in the graveyard of an Episcopal church. She had left a quarter to legal aid of New York. She had left 20 percent to her New York friends, four women—a lawyer, a house wife, a parishioner at St. George’s, and a financial reporter named Kathy Flynn, whom she had met one day in a shoe store. She would miss them. They would mourn her. But it was better this way.

She had left 10 percent to her cousins in California. She had not seen them in twenty years, but blood was blood.

And she had left 20 percent to the New York Animal Rescue League.

She had performed an animal rescue of her own that morning. It had been her first foray out of the flat that she had rented on Grand Street in the Lower East Side, a lonely brick tenement surrounded by parking lots a block from the Williamsburg Bridge. Rent in cash. No questions asked.

In a Salvation Army shelter, she had gotten clean clothes, including a single-breasted London Fog raincoat and the Mets hat. She had found a shopping cart parked against a chain-link fence just up the block. So she had put on the raincoat and hat and thrown a few paper bags into the cart, and she had started uptown. And she had realized as she went, that she was becoming a character, and to the people who passed, that character was invisible.

She had reached Madison Square Park at around quarter to eleven . . .

Fifteen minutes later, right on schedule, along came Marie MacCallan with three leashes in each hand, the big dogs on the right, the little dogs on the left.

Jennifer had paid Marie two months in advance, so she was still walking Georgie the terrier. But for some people, dog-sitting was a passion. For others, it was just a day job. Miss MacCallen told anyone who would listen that she was really an actress. So she put the dogs into the pen with a few others, sat on the park bench near the gate, and took out a copy of
Happy Days
by Samuel Beckett.

A little young to be playing Winnie, thought Sally.

But the girl’s inattention made it much easier for Sally to step inside the gate, pretend to be enjoying all the frisking dogs, crouch slowly, and whisper, “Georgie.”

The little dog looked up from inspecting the urine of a bigger dog.

Sally glanced at Marie—still reading—and said it again. “Georgie.”

She was sure that the little guy smiled, because dogs could smile. She believed that. Then he ran to her and jumped onto her lap.

The other two people inside the pen, a man and a woman, were conducting the oldest ritual of the urban doggy park: they were hitting on each other. So they were paying Sally even less attention than the dog-sitter was.

The raincoat had a huge inside pocket. She grabbed the dog, dropped him into it, and walked right past her twenty-something dog-sitter.

A block south, Georgie the terrier was riding in the shopping cart.

J
ENNIFER
W
ILSON HAD
also created another persona.

Her name was Erica Callow. She had a taste for nice clothes, Chanel no. 5, and expensive shoes. Her hair was a blond wig. Her New Jersey driver’s license was forged (thanks to the friend of a friend, who owed a friend a favor). Over a period of eighteen months, from the bursting of the high-tech bubble to 9/11, Erica had filled a safety deposit box at an East Side Chase Bank with stacks of hundreds, totaling a quarter million dollars.

The day after Sally rescued Georgie, Erica Callow visited the bank and took out
10,000 in a large purse. She figured that would get her through her first winter as another person . . . or people. Then she walked up Fifth Avenue to the Terence Cardinal Cook Health Care Center at 106th Street.

She chose midday visiting hours because it was likely to be quiet. With a bouquet in hand, she found her way to the room of Dr. Gary Smith. He had no other visitors, and the second bed was empty, so she didn’t have to pretend that she had stumbled into the wrong room.

She set the flowers on the window sill. Her movement blocked the sun pouring in the west-facing windows. The old man’s eyes fluttered open and he frowned, as if the warmth of the sun was his only comfort, and she had taken it from him.

She was shocked at the sight of him. He had lost twenty pounds since she’d last seen him.

“Who . . . who are you?” he asked.

“I’m a friend. I had to come and tell you that your grandson . . . he was a wonderful man. And he died bravely.” As she said it, she realized it was the truth.

“My grandson?”

“I worked with him.” She spoke carefully and smiled with her mouth closed, so as not to reveal the missing teeth.

“Oh . . .” The old man rolled his head on the pillow and his eyes rolled, too. He was drugged, perhaps. Or just dying. Broken hip or maybe, like a lot of New Yorkers, broken heart. His eyes drifted into the distance, out over the trees in Central Park.

She reached down and took his hand.

He rolled his head toward her again. His eyebrows rose, then furrowed down. Was it morphine dancing in his brain, or did he feel something in her touch, or did he see something that she could not?

She held his hand in both of hers. The need to hold that hand a final time had gotten her moving on that terrible day. Dr. Gary, in a way, had saved her life.

She said, “Smitty wanted me to tell you that he loved you. And Jennifer Wilson wanted me to tell you that you were like a father to her.”

“Jennifer.” He said the word with no sense of recognition. Then he said it again. “Jennifer.”

Then his eyes fluttered and closed. She stood there for a few minutes more, holding the hand, glancing occasionally at the hallway so that she was not discovered. Then she slipped her hand from his, leaned forward, kissed his forehead.

And from the bed she heard her name: “Jennifer.”

Did he know? Or was it simply another reflex in a sequence firing for the last time?

He rolled his head again and said with sudden clarity, “Read the ledger.”

“What?”

“The bond ledger. Two hundred bonds in one batch. J. P Morgan owned three of them. Where are the rest?”

She swallowed. She ran her tongue between the space in her teeth. She said, “I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Dr. Smith.” It pained her to stay in character, but she felt it was the best way.

He nodded as if to say, “Yes, you do.” And his eyes fluttered. Then they popped open, and he looked straight at her. “Do something good for America.” Then his eyes fluttered again as if he had used up the last energy in him.

She kissed him again, walked out, and walked south on Fifth Avenue.

SEVENTEEN

Thursday Afternoon

“I
LOVE THIS
G
OOGLE
E
ARTH
,” said Henry Baxter.

He and Evangeline hunched over the computer in the Marshall Room of the New York Society Library.

Evangeline ran her finger across the image, tracing a route: “We can go out the back and then into the little alley that leads to Madison Avenue, then over to Fifth.”

The phone rang, and Miss Nolan looked at the caller ID. “It’s the front desk.”

Henry went to the phone and inclined his head to listen with her.

Miss Nolan said, “No, Miss Carrington left some time ago.”

Henry gave Miss Nolan thumbs-up.

The person on the other end said something, and Henry shook his head again.