Manhattan Lockdown (33 page)

Yvette Yang asked, “And how long did this relationship, as I would call it, go on?”

“For two years. Until last night. I don't think she has plans to see me again.”

“Did she,” Horace Clark asked, “tell you anything about her work?”

Tony, with a twist of his heavy, powerful hands, snapped open the sealed cap of the water bottle.

“Listen to me real careful now. We spent at least three nights a week together for two years. She had this thing about the city being vulnerable. What pissed her off even more was that the Feds, the Homeland
Insecurity
shitheads she called them, didn't understand New York. She said the mayor was a great guy but a garbagehead, a pill user; Xanax, Vicodin, that shit, and that he thought the Feds were idiots, too, but he was too busy with other stuff, particularly the
Masterpiece Theatre
girlfriend he had, to ask too many questions about the Feds' plans for protecting the city.

“So Gina put together her own plans. She had this huge budget. She told me the number once but it was so big it was like what we used to call a telephone book number and it didn't really mean nothing to me. She started telling me she was using chunks of the budget to hire guys, tough guys, who'd been in Afghanistan and Iraq to organize special groups that would know what to do if any part of the city got attacked.”

“Why,” Horace Clark asked, “did she tell you these things?”

“Ask her. Pillow talk, I guess. She had always loved for me to screw her. When I finished her off each time, she got tired. And she talked. I heard about the hit list. I heard about state-of-the-art secret prisons on piers that looked like they were crumbling into the East River. I heard about something she called Code Apache. When I asked her whether she had hired Tonto and the Lone Ranger for Code Apache, she thought that was funny and said no, it was her plan to lock down Manhattan if an attack happened here. She told me about a guy named Davidson, a real killer, someone we really could have used in the Gambino family.”

“Why,” Yvette Yang asked, “are you telling us all this? You have no immunity from prosecution, you have no lawyer, and you are saying extraordinary things about the commissioner of the New York City Police Department and even the mayor of the city.”

Refreshed by the water, Tony said, “Did you ever hear of revenge? Payback? I was at her baptism. I took care of getting her what she wanted—bat girl—when she was a kid. I was her lover when she got to be old enough to have lovers. We lived on the same street. Our uncles were in the same business. I drove Gina Carbone to the airport when she left for basic training. I screwed her the night before she left.”

Tony stared only at Yvette Yang, who was obviously afraid of him or had nothing but contempt for him. “We were
friends
. For life.
And then eight years ago she decided to work with a group of you people. They knew she knew me. They knew we were—what's the right word—dating? She taped everything I told her.

“And then she sat in this same room. She could have warned me off, given me a heads up. Like a
friend
would do. And then she testified at my trial.” Tony sipped more water. “Anything else you want to know, Ms. Yang. Or don't you have friends?”

Suddenly Clark said, “We could use a bathroom break. If you want to use the bathroom, Mr. Garafalo, we'll have to handcuff you as we walk through the hallways.”

Tony Garafalo waved a hand and stayed seated. “Go enjoy yourselves. I'm good.”

***

“Who is, or was, Raj Gandhi?”

“I read lots of newspapers. It got to be a habit in prison, where I read the fucking
New York Times
in that dirty newsprint that got all over my hands. Now I've even got a Kindle. I had no idea in prison that there was such a thing. I read the
Times
there.”

“And?”

“I started seeing the names of reporters I hadn't seen before. When I was on trial I hated the two reporters from the
Times
who were there all the time. They were supposed to be experts on the Mafia. They didn't know shit from Shinola about the families. Everything they knew was from the movies. Both Jews. They studied the
Godfather
movies. That, they thought, made them experts. When it came to my trial they were hanging reporters, just like in the old Western movies there were hanging judges.

“But when I came out of Supermax, where, believe it or not, I got to know the Unabomber, a pretty sweet guy actually, those
two reporters were gone. Retired, fired, dropped in the East River. Who the hell knows? Over the last two years on my gorgeous little Kindle I saw mainly new names of reporters.”

“And one of those was Raj Gandhi?” Yvette Yang asked.

“Very perceptive, Ms. Yang. I liked the name, I liked his articles. I looked him up on Google, another thing I never saw or heard of at Supermax. He was new to the city. I read his articles about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“So I started calling him. I wanted him to know about the hit list, the prison on the piers, Gina's secret army, what she thought about Homeland Security.”

“Did you tell him who you were?” Clark asked.

“Tony Bennett.” From somewhere in the room one of the agents laughed, briefly. “Come on, Horace, grow up. I gave him information. I wanted him to work. I'm a salesman, an actor. When you've got a guy from Queens in a Mercedes show room, you talk Queens. When you've got a twenty-five year-old kid from Harvard Business School and Goldman Sachs who wants a Mercedes convertible you talk his talk. I've got this God-given skill of imitating accents and voices. I know how to do these things. Remember, I'm a criminal.”

“So,” Yvette Yang asked, “why should we believe anything you say to us now?”

“That's your choice.”

Clark asked quietly, “Did you kill Raj Gandhi?”

“Of course not. Never saw him. I only talked to him. I used a wiseass Queens accent. Once he let the world know what I wanted him to know, I was happy I had picked out such a smart dothead. I had no use for him any longer. He did what I wanted. No need to hurt him.”

Yvette Yang said, “We have videotape of you entering and leaving his building.”

“I knew where he lived. It was right in the phone book. There's a gorgeous thirty-year-old in that building. She's one of my other girlfriends. Her name is Gloria Kopechne. She's something like the grandniece of that girl Teddy Kennedy killed on Martha's Vineyard in, what the hell was it? 1969? Take a look through all your videotapes. Go talk to her. There are probably thirty videotapes of me going into and out of that lobby. I was fucking her. She is kind of a rich kid. No job. I had an open invite to go there to screw her anytime I wanted. I was even in the elevator with her and Mr. Gandhi the day he did his blog-heard-round-the-world. He had no idea who I was. But I'll tell you this. He was a very polite little dothead.”

Tony drank more water. “Go ask the commissioner. My guess is she had one of her boys hit him. Gina always had a bad temper. She believes in revenge, payback, anything you want to call it, as much as I do.”

Tony had, in fact, been naked in Gloria Kopechne's bed ten minutes after his perfectly aimed shot had entered Raj Gandhi's forehead.

Clark removed his glasses. He looked at the far end of the table where the agents sat. “Take this gentleman to his cell. And two of you go visit Ms. Kopechne right now.”

C
AMERON
D
EWAR, AS
soon as he was unexpectedly and miraculously released from the conference room on the thirtieth floor of the new federal office building that overlooked the cluster of new and nineteenth-century courthouses on Foley Square in downtown Manhattan, walked the eight miles to the apartment on 82
^nd
Street. He knew that after this one last time he would never return to it even though it had been his beloved home for years, because when the two unknown agents had suddenly told him he was free to leave, they had already turned on a vivid, wall-mounted video screen that displayed, as it was happening, the burning of his lover and best friend in a cage on the windswept Hudson River. Cam threw up in a wastebasket. The anonymous agents in suits didn't flinch. One of them casually said, “That's the door. Get out. We don't need your sorry, worn-out ass anymore.”

And the other agent said, “And thanks for letting us know about the soup kitchen. It made it easy to find the Angel of Life.”

When he opened the oak door to the gorgeous old-world apartment, Cam was overwhelmed by the silence, the stillness, darkness. The wounded Oliver was in the hospital. Gabriel was dead. They had made this home vivid and vital. It was now only a collection of objects which he had selected and for which Gabriel had paid: the Chesterfield sofa, the vases, the wall sconces that suffused all their space with seductive light.

Literally uncertain how he would go about closing down this phase of his life, Cam stood in the kitchen and cried. This was grief, and he knew it. The sense of total loss and destruction. When he was a boy in the Deep South, his father, a Baptist minister who never forgave the fact that Cam was gay, often read that passage in the Gospels in which Peter, expressing his undying love for Jesus and that he would lay down his life for him, was told by Jesus that he would three times deny ever knowing him. And Peter did make that denial three times on the night Jesus was arrested. And Peter, too, had cried.

Cam saw on the rattan coffee table the pile of printed sheets with the e-mails Gabriel Hauser had exchanged with his Afghan lover. Cam saw from the way the papers were organized that Gabriel had taken time to read them all, one of the last acts of his life. As a doctor, Gabriel was a methodical man. He had separated the pages with meaningless e-mail chatter from those pages that suggested Gabriel's love and determination to bring Mohammad to the United States.

In one much smaller stack of papers, as Cam saw, Gabriel had assembled those e-mails that in any way referred to Mohammad's “cousin,” Silas Nasar, and his family. Some of those e-mails had grainy, black-and-white images of Silas, images in which the evidently handsome, bearded cousin had traces of a seahorse-shaped birthmark on the left side of his face.

Cam went to the kitchen and took out one of the big, black opaque garbage bags he used for trash. He stuffed the hundreds of pages containing all the e-mails into them and neatly tied the twisted neck of the bag when it was filled. Then, because he and Gabriel were frequent travelers, particularly to Paris, Cam went to the large closet where they stored their suitcases. He opened them on the bed with the elaborate quilt on which they had so frequently made passionate or tender love, depending on their moods or needs.

Cam carefully laid in the suitcases his own newly laundered shirts and pants, socks, and underwear. Although he still suffered through gusts of grief and fear, he made certain he took nothing that belonged to Gabriel.

Once the suitcases were packed, he carried them one flight down the bannistered wooden stairwell to the apartment where Gloria and Everett Jordan lived. They were married and in their mid-thirties. Neither of them worked and they made no secret of the fact that they were both trust fund babies who spent eight months of each year at apartments they owned in London and Rome. They were friendly, open and engaging. They liked Cam and Gabriel, and left the key and the codes to their security system with Cam so that he could water their plants, replace those that had died, and just generally watch over their small, beautifully decorated New York home.

At that moment Cam had only two specific plans in mind. One was to leave his luggage in their bedroom, and the other was to return for one last time to the apartment in which he and Oliver and Gabriel had so happily lived until less than a week ago and take the doctor's prescription pad that Gabriel kept for emergencies in a drawer in the kitchen. Cam precisely and carefully tore six prescription slips from the pad.

He left the apartment with the heavy plastic bag into which he had placed all the printed pages with the e-mails Gabriel and Mohammad and Silas Nasar had written. Even on elegant East 82
^nd
Street there were mountains of identical black plastic bags. He dropped his anonymous bag into the center of the mountain range of bags. Since most of the other bags contained a pervasive odor of the rotting of household stuff—food, diapers, all the other detritus of daily living that except for the lockdown would have been picked up virtually every day by the big white city garbage trucks—he was
certain no one would ever go near the bag filled only with pages of paper.

He knew that in the city's attempt to return even to the rudiments of normalcy that the century-old, quaint pharmacy at the corner of 90
^th
Street and Madison Avenue was open. After years of living with Gabriel he had developed, for no particular reason, a passable facsimile of his lover's handwriting, a kind of skill at draftsmanship that, when he was a little isolated boy living in the Deep South, gave him the dream of becoming an architect who would design antebellum mansions. Besides, imitating a doctor's script was not an art.

Cam prescribed thirty Vicodin. He dated the slip a week earlier. The pharmacist knew Gabriel and knew Cam, and Cam was concerned that the man might have seen or heard that Dr. Hauser had been put to death in a cage in a fire on the Hudson River just an hour earlier. The pharmacist, bald and bland and friendly, simply glanced at the script and said, “This'll take about ten minutes. You can come back or wait.”

“I'll wait,” Cam said. There was an old leather chair, its surface all cracked from years of use but still intact, near the front of the store. He sat in it, tremendously comforted by its all-encompassing softness and the view, through the window, of the beautiful intersection of Madison Avenue and 90
^th
Street. He had often walked Oliver here. And he knew he would never see it again.