The Watchman of Ephraim (Book Club Edition) (3 page)

“
Lisa!”

“
Cris, it’s me.”

“
Honey, are you okay?!”

“
Yeah, I’m okay. We’re not sure what just happened. I’m here at Cantor with Stacey. We think a bomb might have just gone off in the tower somewhere.”

De Niro’s heart sank. When the phone rang and he saw it was his wife, he hoped that she might have already gone to breakfast and wasn’t in the building. For the first time, he thought about what just happened. He remembered hearing the sound of a jet flying really low right before the whole world went crazy.

Is it possible? No reason to tell her a plane may have crashed into the building … or that I’m injured.

“
Honey, listen, can you and Stacey make it to a stairway?”

“
Hold on,” she replied. Then he heard his wife ask, “My husband wants to know if we can make it to the stairs?”

De Niro heard a number of voices in the background, including at least one male voice, but he couldn’t tell who they were. Finally, she answered, “No, Cris, we’re all huddled inside a conference room with the door closed. There was smoke coming in under it, so someone stuffed their jacket there to try and stop it, but I don’t think we can open that door.”

De Niro heard the sound of people coughing in the background as one of the male voices was saying something. Then Lisa continued, “Cris, the smoke is getting worse in here. A few of the men want to break the windows to let air in. We tried to call 9-11 but we can’t get through. No one knows what to do!”

De Niro heard the tension building in his wife’s voice. One of the things he loved about Lisa was how cool she was in pressure situations. Lisa came from a military family. Her granddad and dad both served with distinction, in the army and her brother was a Navy SEAL. One thing was for sure, as De Niro’s dad, a Marine, once put it, Lisa was no “candy-ass.” He knew that conditions had to be dire up there for her to sound that nervous.

De Niro felt determination run through his veins but he also felt something else, something he never felt before. His whole life, whenever he put his mind to achieving a goal, he accomplished it, without fear of failure or any doubt, no matter how difficult it might be. Looking up at the towering structure before him now, with smoke pouring out of it and his wife’s life at stake, for the first time in his life De Niro doubted himself … he was afraid.

“
Alright, listen, honey, I’m gonna try and make my way up to you. Just stay in that room!”

“
Make your way up to me … Cris, where are you?!”

“
I’m right in front of the building … After I dropped Richard off … I was going to surprise you …” De Niro had to hold back his own tears as he heard the sound of tears in his wife’s voice, “Oh Cris … is it safe enough for you to come up—“

De Niro waited a moment for his wife to continue but all he heard was silence.

“
Lisa, are you there?! Lisa … honey are you there?!”

He took the phone from his ear and examined it – there were no lights – it was dead. After popping the battery out and replacing it with no results, he threw the useless device to the ground in frustration. It shattered into pieces joining the rest of the debris scattered everywhere.

Making his way back towards the revolving front doors, De Niro surveyed the area as he went. It looked like a bomb went off in the lobby of Tower One. Virtually every window was blown out and there was wreckage littered and accumulating all over the street in front of the building. As bad as it was outside, inside was a horror scene!

As he staggered inside, De Niro heard screams coming from down the corridor. He stood in shock, in the same spot in which he and the oriental lady were standing just minutes before. There were bodies strewn everywhere, all of them scorched, some smoldering, others ablaze. The screams he heard came from a woman who looked like she was trying to run away from the fire coming from the back of her jacket and skirt. As she ran past him, De Niro wanted to help her but he knew he couldn’t catch up to her in his physical state. Besides, all he could think about now was getting to Lisa.

Realizing that the fireball came from the elevator shafts, De Niro entered the stairwell. He gazed up and took a deep breath.

Please Father, let her be alive!

Starting up the stairs in a panic, De Niro overruled the objections of pain that his brain was shouting to him, but after the first few flights it was slow going. As he made it to the 20
^th
floor, he began to see a regular stream of people heading down the stairs. Some were injured while others looked unharmed. He stepped in front of one man who appeared okay.

“
Hey, what floor are you coming from?”

The man was repulsed by the sight of De Niro, bloody and burned. He tried to push past him without answering, but even in his weakened state, De Niro’s resolve to get to Lisa gave him enough strength to block his way.

“
I asked you what floor you came from!”

“
The eightieth,” the man replied breaking down the stairs the moment De Niro let him pass.

De Niro bent over resting his hands on his thighs and took a few deep breaths. He was exhausted, his head was bleeding and he was shivering from his burns, but he felt new energy course through him.

If he was able to make it down the stairs from the 80
^th
floor, maybe Lisa and the others made their way out of that room and I’ll see her coming down the stairs soon, too!

By the time he made it to the 30
^th
floor, De Niro was climbing at a snail’s pace clinging to the staircase railings, leaving a trail of blood on them. It took him almost an hour just to reach floor thirty and he was already drenched in cold sweat that stung the burns on his face and back. People continued filing passed, heading down the stairwell, some warning him to turn around.

He heard one lady say, “Its hell up there!”

It was all becoming surreal to him. The people descending the stairs were so diverse; some were women, some men; some old, some young; and some injured while others didn’t have a scratch on them. It also occurred to him that everyone was relatively quiet. The fear and shock on their faces was obvious, but no one was panicking.

Resuming his ascent, De Niro felt a hand on his shoulder. Fireman Keith Tompkins, a tall dark-skinned African American man, wearing full gear with an oxygen tank strapped to his back was, like him, also drenched in sweat. The fireman was carrying a coiled fire hose and he looked as out-of-breath as De Niro was. Tompkins scanned De Niro and saw that he was badly injured.

“
Hey buddy, you can’t go up there. You need to get out of the building with the rest of these people.”

De Niro shook his head in defiance, pointing up the stairs.

“
My wife is up there!”

“
What floor is she on?” Tompkins asked.

De Niro hesitated, “She’s … she’s on the 104
^th
floor at Cantor Fitzgerald!”

For a moment, the two locked eyes, the fireman’s were filled with regret.

De Niro pulled from Tompkins’ grasp and took a few steps up when he heard a voice break through the static coming from the fireman’s walkie-talkie.

“
Command post in Tower One to all units, evacuate the building!”

The two men locked eyes again. Both men knew the evacuation order sealed the fates of everyone trapped upstairs. De Niro’s eyebrows clenched in anger and defiance. The fireman knew this husband would die trying to save his wife. Before he could turn away, Tompkins tried a different approach.

“
Do you have kids?!”

The question caught De Niro by surprise. Up until then, he was only thinking about Lisa. He felt his eyes swell with tears. People pushed past both of them as Tompkins stepped up close to him and repeated the question, “Do you have kids?”

De Niro’s throat tightened up so much he couldn’t speak. Tears fell from his eyes as the point of the fireman’s question pierced his heart; all he could do was nod.

“
What’s your name?”

“…
Cris.”

“
Cris, my name is Keith. Cris, it’s time you thought about your kids. What’s your wife’s name?”

De Niro couldn’t hold back his tears as his emotions overtook him, “… Lisa.”

Tompkins leaned over and spoke right into his ear, “What do you think Lisa would want you to do?”

De Niro turned and looked back up the stairs. Blood from the bruises on his head dripped into his eyes as tears fell from them. He bit his lower lip to try and stop it from quivering as he pictured Lisa in that moment, smiling as she always smiled at him, with glittering eyes and her dimpled cheek. Every moment they spent together from the first moment they met, all flashed through his brain. For an instant, everything went quiet and time stopped. He felt his heart beating, pounding … then breaking. As his wife’s image faded, he mouthed the words,
I love you!

De Niro knew he couldn’t make it all the way up to the 104
^th
floor in his condition, but he was content to die trying. That is, until he was reminded of Richard and Louis. He turned back to Tompkins, standing patiently a step below him and nodded in defeat. Understanding, Tompkins discarded the fire hose and put his arm around De Niro’s waist to aid him down the stairs.

Thoughts raced through De Niro’s mind, too fast for him to make any sense of them as he felt himself descending, mostly being carried by the fatigued fireman. By the twentieth floor, both men were worn out but they pressed on, and by the tenth they were stumbling down the stairs as the last of the people behind them pushed past them. It took them over twenty minutes to reach the lobby. When they finally did, the fireman let go of De Niro and both men collapsed to their knees.

De Niro noticed Tompkins look over to the far corner of the lobby as they both caught their breath. After a moment, the tall man shot to his feet with a look of grave concern on his face. It occurred to De Niro also that something was very wrong. There was no one in the lobby, not a single living soul and it looked like a dust storm had blown down the corridors since he was last there. Tompkins observed that even the temporary command center had been abandoned. He reached down and lifted De Niro from under his arm.

“
Come on, we got to get out of this building now!”

Using the last remnants of his will power, De Niro got to his feet and staggered after his rescuer. As they made it to the front doors of Tower One, it was apparent that something very bad must have happened while they were in the building. There was no way for them to know that the South Tower had already fallen.

De Niro didn’t know if his eyesight was blurry and causing everything to look ghostly, but the chalky taste in his mouth made him know it was all too real. It looked like a nuclear bomb was detonated outside! In the distance, people were wandering aimlessly like those who survive a plane crash sometimes do. You couldn’t tell the color of their skin because they were all covered with a thick white powder. As far as the eye could see … the ground, the cars, everything was coated in a dirty, pallid ash.

De Niro and Tompkins started to exit the building when a fireman standing across the street waved his hands and yelled, “GET BACK!”

The two men scrambled back into the revolving doors just in time to hear two loud, horrific thuds. Unsure of what caused them, they wandered out to investigate and realized the situation had turned gruesome. As if in a nightmare, they discovered they were standing amidst the mutilated, flattened corpses of men and women, who had either fallen or jumped to their deaths from high up. Their badly mangled bodies now lay contorted in shallow craters created by the impacts from their fall. De Niro felt sick. He could see that the ghastly site deeply affected Fireman Tompkins too; a man who witnessed his share of horrific things.

Every one of them was someone’s husband or wife, mom or dad, son or daughter, all who less than an hour ago were alive and well. Please let none of them be Lisa!

After taking in the total devastation and carnage, De Niro’s strength finally gave out. He couldn’t keep his eyes focused any longer from his head injury and his knees buckled underneath him from his blood loss and exhaustion. Sweat-soaked and near collapse himself, Tompkins strained to lift him up.