Manhattan 62 (20 page)

For a second, I felt almost sorry for him. Except for the business about Nancy, I had liked him. Now, he was running, on his own in a hostile country, thousands of miles away from his family, knowing if war came, he would never get home. If in some strange way I was a little sorry, I was also ready to hunt him down.

CHAPTER TWO

October 23, '62

SHIPS MUST STOP. BIG FORCE MASSES TO BLOCKADE CUBA.

W
HEN
I
PICKED UP
a paper Tuesday morning the headlines were bad, and men I saw on the street were reading as they walked.

That morning, the city was too quiet. Everything was normal, except for this heavy silence. On their way to school at St Luke's, children who would otherwise be running and yelling clutched their parents tight; a pair of young women, one blonde, one with short black hair, both in slacks and car-coats, wheeled their babies to the playground, no chatter, no small talk; an old woman, a green shawl around her, sat on a stoop, intent on her rosaries, and you could hear the beads, click click click.

Like film at the wrong speed, the city moved by me, second by second, as if suspended in glue. What always seemed a vast unknowable city, made of steel and stone, huge and solid, seemed tiny now, and vulnerable. If they hit America, they would hit New York; no one would survive.

I didn't know what waited for me at the station house—I had told the boss I was going out of town—but I needed information about the Pier 46 case, on Ostalsky and on the dead Cubans. The President's speech had changed everything, and I had to figure even Murphy would see that.

It was brisk that morning. I buttoned my tweed jacket. Murphy liked his detectives well dressed. I was wearing a good blue and gray silk rep tie.

On my way to the precinct, I got coffee, same place I always went.

“Pat, mornin',” called out one of the elderly men who sat on stools at the counter. I had known most of them for years.

“How ya doin', Whitey?”

“It's quiet like Pearl Harbor time, I ain't heard nothing so quiet since then,” said Whitey Clark, and bit into a jelly donut; purple jelly stuck to his gray mustache.

“It is that,” I said, took my carton of coffee from Selma, who had been behind the counter forever, and went to work. It was 8.30 in the morning.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, the embargo would go into effect. I knew how the military thought. I had been in the army. They reacted. They would react now. Action, they understood. Waiting was not their game. I was scared of the crazier generals who were always pushing Kennedy to invade, to nuke Cuba, nuke Moscow, go for a pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union. They leaned on JFK hard; there were congressional elections in two weeks and Republicans were saying the President was soft on Communism.

Tomorrow Americans were set to board Soviet vessels. The Soviets would resist. They only wanted an excuse to blast us to extinction. Already, they were slowing down traffic at the goddamn Berlin Wall. I remembered the airlift the year I finished high school. Last year they put up the wall, and for what? To fuck with people and keep them penned up like animals.

I tossed away the paper I had been reading. It was like the order of service for a funeral; and we were the dead.

“I was expecting you, Wynne,” said Murphy when I reached his office. I knew he had put somebody on my tail, and whoever it was had told Murphy I was coming.

“Listen to me, Wynne. I got enough trouble.” He gestured to the newspapers on his desk. “Nobody can get a call through any place, I got guys in the Reserves being called up. We're worried about riots. We don't have enough shelters, we got them in crazy places like the base of the Brooklyn Bridge. We're worried about a run on goods at the stores. In DC, they're buying up bottled water, even Seltzer and Coke. People are fucking buying appliances, like if they're going to die, they want a new washing machine, you believe that?

“Not to mention we got those Fair Play For Cuba idiots are out in front of the United Nations screaming and yelling. Not to mention if this thing heats up, how the hell do you think we can evacuate eight million people? We tell people it will be fine, orderly, it's horseshit, and you know, and I know. You can't move millions of people is the answer. We pretend we can take care of our own so people don't go nuts and panic and start exiting the city, jamming the bridges, the tunnels. You ever consider that? We would have to go into lockdown.

“Anyways, if we take a direct hit, you have any idea what the survival rate in downtown Manhattan? We're toast. So I'll be glad to put you back to work. I can put you on a Civil Defense detail right now. You can spend your days watching supermarkets in case of looting.”

“And you're in charge of all this personally?”

“Sarcasm won't do you any good, kid.” From his pocket he pulled a wallet, removed a snapshot of a young pilot in uniform. “My boy is in Key West. They're moving troops in fast. He says the whole town is military now. He's on the front line, man, he's a navy flier.”

“I didn't know.”

“Don't come here again, OK, Wynne. Don't keep calling up cops you got connections with, I know that's what you done last week after I told you to take some time. Get out of here. This is a crisis. People are busy, man, really busy. Nobody's going to take your damn calls.”

CHAPTER THREE

October 23, '62

I
T WAS A MISTAKE
sitting down with Max Ostalsky's friend, Bounine, and I knew it the minute I saw him. It had taken me an hour to drive up to Columbia. Traffic was bad, radios blasting from every car. It looked like people were fleeing the city, up the west side, over the George Washington, or maybe they were just going home early, sit in front of the TV with their families, hold hands, pray, listen for death coming in overhead.

All the way uptown, I watched the city on my right, the river on my left, New Jersey across the water. When I was in sight of the George Washington Bridge, I could imagine how it would blow apart like matchsticks.

The bombs would turn the subways into a fiery hell, incinerating men, women and children trapped underground. More nukes would hit us, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler, all the skyscrapers that pierced the New York sky, all that gleaming steel, concrete, marble, wiped off the face of the earth as if the buildings were sandcastles caught in a stiff breeze. People, too, the flesh turned to poisonous dust and blown away.

It was coming.

You could see it in the faces on the street, in the cars; you could hear it in the voice of the newscasters.

The Cold War, the threat of nukes, had been the air we breathed for so long that we didn't consciously think about it all that much. Not after Korea. What could be worse, I used to think when the nightmares got me out of bed shaking and sweating? What could be worse than that hellhole on the other side of the world?

Some stuff had really got, though. There was that picture,
On the Beach.
Started with, what the hell was it? Soviet nukes dragged in? I couldn't remember the details, but I remembered the last people on earth huddled in Australia waiting for the radiation cloud to drift down, with their suicide pills.

Two weeks ago I had picked up a
Saturday Evening Post;
it contained the first installment of a book called
Fail Safe,
the story of an accidental nuclear war. The second part had appeared the last Saturday, two days before the President's speech. How did they time it like that? How did they know?

After I had read it, I couldn't sleep, and when I did, my dreams were soaked in radiation. Radiation would cover the earth, and your skin, if you survived the initial blast, would fall off like it had been flayed, like a wet suit.

The war coming wasn't a novel now; it was real. Cops, firefighters, medics, had been sent to lectures on civil defense. I knew the sound of the warnings. I knew where to lead groups of people underground; how to maintain order; how to organize them in these subterranean cells behind iron doors, with their lead-lined water cans, and portable toilet packs. We were on the front lines, the chief said. We were to consider ourselves soldiers in the line of duty, if the time came.

All those years, the little kids ducking under their desks, watching Bert the Turtle tell them to duck and cover, and it would be OK, it was horseshit. I knew people with bomb shelters who discussed what you did if strangers tried to get in.

Did you welcome them? Push them out into the howling gale because you didn't have enough food? In the basement of my building was a makeshift room marked with a nuclear symbol. All pointless. They had ICBMs pointing at us. We had more.

Limited war. Percentages. Collateral damage. All the theories were horseshit. Deep down people knew that once it began, there would be no hope.

Outside Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, a few patients, still attached to their IVs, or in wheelchairs, were smoking and taking the air, shooting the breeze. Maybe they had nothing to worry about anymore. Figured they'd be dead before the bombs hit.

I stuck my police ID in the front window and went looking for Mike Bounine. I had never liked him. I couldn't put my finger on it exactly, but I had him figured for the man who was running Ostalsky, and that was enough.

“This is a pleasant surprise,” Bounine said when he saw me. “Can I help you, Pat?” he said, and shook my hand. He had a firm handshake, manly, and I didn't believe it for an instant. “I am glad for this visit, Pat. It's a difficult day for so many people, therefore so nice to see you, please, sit down, and welcome. Tell me how your aunt and uncle, Mr and Mrs Kelly are? They were so kind to show me their home, and their church.”

I ignored the niceties. The confidence was palpable. This Russian who called himself Mike, though I could never get used to it, seemed to wear his self-assurance like an impenetrable garment. He was not at all unnerved by the arrival of a New York cop.

In his starched white coat over a good suit, Bounine rose from his chair and suggested coffee.

“You must be catching plenty of flak what with the Cuban thing, your country shipping over missiles, and wanting to nuke us.”

“People are surprisingly tolerant,” he said. “They consider me a guest. You Americans are wonderfully friendly.”

The hospital corridors smelled of ammonia, and there was the squeak of rubber soles on linoleum as nurses hurried by with that air of self-importance, white caps perched on their hair like birds ready for flight. As they passed, they addressed him as Dr Bounine. He enjoyed the attention.

In the cafeteria, Bounine said, “Would you care for coffee, or would you enjoy tea? What can I help you with? What do you say to a slice of cake? I am a fan of coconut cake.”

What did he mean, what do you say? It was something Ostalsky often said, as if inquiring about my opinion. I knew it was only a verbal tick, something translated from the Russian, but it always unnerved me.

“No cake,” I said. “So you're getting on?”

“Oh, indeed yes, I like the people so much. I feel myself learning many things. I am enjoying my time at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and I hope I am imparting some useful knowledge as well. Coffee?” He asked again.

“Black, no sugar.”

At the cafeteria counter, Bounine got coffee for both of us, and cake for himself. He sat down again, long legs stretched out in an easy sprawl. A couple of younger doctors came by, but he stayed where he was and they were forced to lean down to speak to him. This was a man used to a certain status, comfortable in his own world.

He looked at his watch to let me know he was a busy man.

“You and Ostalsky, you told me how you traveled together from Moscow. But I don't remember if you said you had been friends back home? Colleagues? Ostalsky is an English teacher, you're a doctor, so I say to myself, how on earth could you be colleagues? But perhaps you were friends.”