Tick Tock (6 page)

Berger was only joking. He actually liked Brickman. He’d sat on the board when they reviewed the businessman’s co-op application. He had the trifecta of impeccable creds, Jonathan did. Princeton, Harvard, Goldman Sachs. His financials were mind-boggling even for the Silk Stocking District.

Jonathan was a pleasant fellow, too. Amiable, self-deprecating, handsome, and crisp in his bespoke Savile Row pinstripe. The only thing the gentleman financier
had left to do was get a
Times
wedding announcement for his debutante daughter so he could die and go to heaven, or maybe Greenwich.

Berger even liked Brickman’s Anglophile Ralph Lauren yearnings. What wasn’t to like about Ralph Lauren’s
Great Gatsby
–like idealized aristocratic world, filled with beautiful homes and clothes and furnishings and people? Brickman was attempting to become brighter, happier, better. In a word, more. What could be more triumphant and life-affirming than that?

When Berger entered the bird’s-eye maple-paneled lobby, he saw the Sunday doorman packed down with Brickman’s Coach leather bags. His name was Tony. Or at least that was what he said it was. His real name was probably Artan or Besnik or Zug, he figured, given the Croatian twang in his voice.

Welcome to New York, Berger thought with a grin, where Albanians want to be Italians, Jews want to be WASPs, and the mayor wants to be emperor for life.

“Mr. Berger, yes, please,” Tony said. “If you give me a moment, I’ll press the elevator door button for you.”

He was actually serious. Literally lifting a finger was considered quite gauche by some of the building’s more obnoxious residents.

“I got this one, Tony,” Berger said, actually pressing the button himself to open it. “Call it an early Christmas tip.”

On the top floor, the mahogany-paneled elevator opened
onto a high coffered-ceiling hallway. The single door at the end of it led to Berger’s penthouse.

Brickman had actually made a discreet and quite handsome offer for it several years before. But some things, like seven thousand multilevel square feet overlooking Central Park, even a billionaire’s money couldn’t buy.

As he always did once inside the front door, Berger paused with reverence before the two items in the foyer. To the left on a built-in marble shelf sat a dark-lacquer jug of Vienna porcelain, a near flawless example of Louis XV–style chinoiserie. On the right was Salvador Dali’s devastating
Basket of Bread,
the masterpiece that he painted just before being expelled from Madrid’s Academia de San Fernando for truthfully telling the faculty that they lacked the authority to judge him.

Standing before them, Berger felt the beauty and sanctuary of his home descend upon him like a balm. Some would say the old, dark apartment could probably use a remod, but he wouldn’t touch a thing. The veneer of the paneled dusty hallways made him feel like he was living inside an Old Master’s painting.

This place had been built at a time when there was still a natural aristocracy, respect for rank and privilege and passion and talent. An urge to ascend. There were ghosts here. Ghosts of great men and women. Great ambitions. He felt them welcome him home.

He decided to draw himself a bath. And what a bath it was, he thought, entering his favorite room. Inside the
four-hundred-square-foot vault of Tyrolean marble sat a small swimming pool of a sunken tub. On its right stood a baronial fireplace big enough to roast an ox on a spit. On its left, a wall of French doors opened onto the highest of the sprawling apartment’s many balconies.

Berger particularly loved being in here in the wintertime. When there was snow on the balcony, he’d open the doors and have the fire roaring as he lay covered in bubbles, looking out at the lights.

He opened the doors before he disrobed and lowered himself slowly into the hot bath.

He floated on his back, resting while staring out at the city lights, yellow and white, across the dark sea of trees.

Tomorrow he would be “kickin’ it up to levels unknown,” to borrow the words of some obnoxious Food Network chef. This weekend was nothing compared with what people would wake up to tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow was going to be one hell of a day.

WAY PAST ALL OUR BEDTIMES and loving it, the kids and I were soaked to the skin and shivering around the bonfire. I heard Seamus clear his throat to tell one of his famous ghost stories.

I remembered them from when I was a kid. Run-of-the-mill ghost stories were for pansies. Seamus’s tales were H. P. Lovecraft–inspired yarns about fish creatures so horrifying, just the sight of them made people go insane. I mean, anyone can scare a little child. Few can introduce them to cosmic horror.

“Make it a PG tale, huh, Padre?” I said, taking him aside. “I don’t want the kids to have nightmares. Or me, either.”

“Fine, fine. I’ll water it down, ya party pooper,” Seamus grumbled.

“Mike?” Mary Catherine whispered to me. “Would you help me get some more soda?”

She didn’t even make a pretense of heading toward the house. We walked north along the dark beach parallel to the waterline. Mary Catherine was wearing a new white-cotton sheer summer dress I’d never seen before. Over the past two weeks, she’d become quite brown, which made her blue eyes pop even paler and prettier than usual. She turned those eyes on me and held them there as we walked, an adorably nervous look on her fine-boned face.

“Mike,” she said as I followed her on our mystical soda quest.

“Yes, Mary?”

“I have a confession to make,” she said, stopping by an empty lifeguard chair. “This party wasn’t the kids’ idea. It was mine.”

“I’ll forgive you on one condition,” I said, suddenly holding her shoulders.

There were no head butts this time or hesitating. We kissed.

“This is crazy. What the hell are we doing?” Mary Catherine said when we came up for air.

“Looking for soda?” I said.

Mary Catherine smiled and gave me a playful kick in the shin. Then we climbed up into the lifeguard chair and started kissing again.

We went at it for quite some time, holding each other, warm against the cold. I didn’t want to stop, even with the skeeters biting the crap out of my back, but after a while we climbed back down.

We headed back to the party, but everyone was gone and the fire was out.

“Oh, no. We’re so busted,” Mary Catherine said.

“Who knows? Maybe we’ll be lucky and Seamus’s fish monsters got them,” I tried.

I knew we were in trouble when I saw Shawna and Chrissy on the front porch.

“They’re coming. They’re coming. They’re not dead,” they chanted, running back into the house.

“Oh, yes, we are,” Mary Catherine said under her breath.

“Now, where could the two of you have been for the last eon?” Seamus said with a stupid all-too-knowing grin on his face.

“Yeah, Dad,” Jane said. “Where’d you go to get the soda? The Bronx?”

“There was, uh, none left, so I tried, I mean, we, uh, went to the store.”

“But it was closed, and we walked back,” Mary Catherine finished quickly.

“But there’s a case of Coke right here,” Eddie said from the kitchen.

“That can’t be. I must have missed it,” I said.

“In the fridge?” Eddie said.

“Enough questions,” I said. “I’m the cop here and the dad, in fact. One more question and it’s everyone straight to bed.”

I saw Seamus open his mouth.

“With spankings,” I added, pointing at him as everybody burst into giggles.

“Fine, no questions,” Seamus said. “How about a song? Ready, kids? Hit it.”

“Mike and Mary sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” they regaled us. Seamus was by far the loudest.

“First comes love, then comes marriage,” they said, making a circle and dancing around us like evil elves. “Then comes Mary with a baby carriage.”

“You’re all dead, you know that,” I said, red-faced and unable to contain my laughter. “As doornails.”

IT WAS ALREADY HOT at seven fifteen in the morning when Berger downshifted the massive Budget rental box truck with a roar and pulled over onto Lexington Avenue near 42nd Street. Even this early on Monday morning, people in office clothes were spilling out of Grand Central Terminal like rats from a burning ship.

He threw the massive truck into park and climbed out, leaving it running. He was wearing a Yankees cap backward, cutoff jeans, construction boots, and yellowish-green cheap CVS shades. A wifebeater and a gold chain with a massive head of Christ topped off his outer-borough truck-driver look.

He made a showy display of dropping the back gate and rattling up the steel shutter before wheeling out the hand truck. On it were three thick plastic-strapped bundles of
New York Times
newspapers. He rolled them to the truck’s hydraulic ramp and started it humming down.

Weaving around morning commuters on the sidewalk, he quickly navigated the hand truck into the massive train station. Inside, hundreds of people were crisscrossing through the cathedral-like space, running like kids playing musical chairs to get into place before the Stock Exchange’s golden opening bell.

A pudgy antiterror cop strapping an M16 yawned as Berger rolled right on past him. He dropped his bundles by a crowded stationery store called Latest Edition that adjoined the main waiting room. The short, mahogany-colored Asian guy behind the counter came out of the store with a puzzled look on his face as Berger spun the hand truck around with a squeal.

“More
Times
?” the little brown guy said. “This is a mistake. I already got my delivery.”

“Wha’?” Berger said, throwing up his arms. “You gotta be f——ing kiddin’ me. I should be finished my deliveries already. Central just called and said to drop these off. Let me call these jag-offs back. Left my cell phone in the truck. I’ll be back in a second.”

The Asian guy shook his head at the chest-high stack as Berger quickly rolled the hand truck away.

As Berger passed the antiterror cop on his way out, he went into his pocket and slid ballistic ear protectors into his ears. Then he turned into the long Lexington Avenue Corridor exit, took the cell phone from his pocket, and dialed the number for the trigger in the massive paper-wrapped bomb he’d just planted.

He winced as fifty pounds of plastic explosive detonated with an eardrum-splitting
ba-bam!
Ten feet from the exit door, a chunk of cream-colored marble the size of a pizza slid past him like a shuffleboard disk. A man’s briefcase followed. A cloud of dust and hot smoke followed him out the door into the street.

Outside on Lexington, cars had stopped. On the sidewalk, people were turned toward the station’s entrance, arrested in place like figures in a model-train display. The hand truck clattered over as Berger rolled it off the curb. Passing the rear of the truck he’d parked, he crossed the street and turned the corner of 43rd Street, walking quickly with his head down, the iPhone still in his hand.

When he was halfway up the block, he took a breath and dialed the other mobile phone trigger.

The one attached to the incendiary device in the cab of the truck.

Someone screamed. When he glanced over his shoulder, a pillar of thick black smoke was billowing up between the office towers.

Instead of creating just a distracting blazing truck, he’d seriously thought about filling the rear of the truck with diesel-soaked ammonium nitrate, like the Oklahoma City bomber did, but in the end he’d decided against it.

He chucked the hat and the glasses and the Christ head, feeling unsure for a moment, shaking his head.

All in due time, he thought.

He glanced back at the ink black pinwheeling mushroom
cloud sailing into the July morning sky as he hit Third Avenue and started walking uptown. The first sirens started in the distance.

He hadn’t crossed the line this time, Berger knew.

He’d just erased it.

I GOT UP EARLY THE NEXT MORNING. In the predawn gray, I threw on some flip-flops and biked over to a deli a couple of blocks north of our beach bungalow. After I bought a dozen and a half Kaiser rolls and two pounds of bacon, I sat with a cup of coffee on a beat-up picnic table in the deli’s still-dark parking lot, gazing out at the beach.

As the sun came up over the ocean, it reminded me of the summer I was seventeen. A buddy and I pulled a Jack Kerouac and hitchhiked down to the Jersey Shore to visit a girl that he knew. My friend cut out with the girl, and I ended up sleeping on the beach. Waking alone to the sound of gulls, I was depressed at first, but then I turned to the water and sat there, wide-eyed and frozen, overwhelmed for the first time by what a flat-out miracle this world could be.

I smiled as I remembered being with Mary Catherine last night. No wonder I was thinking about my teen years,
I thought, finishing the dregs of my Green Mountain French vanilla. After last night, I certainly felt like I was seventeen all over again. I was definitely acting like a kid. Not a bad thing, by any stretch in my book. I highly recommend it.

Seamus was on the porch waiting for me when I got back. I could tell by the bloodless look on his face that something was very wrong. He had my phone in his hand for some reason. I screeched to a stop and dropped the bike as I bolted up the stairs.

“No! What is it? One of the kids?”

Seamus shook his head.

“The kids are fine, Michael,” he said with a surreal calm.

Michael?

Shit, this was bad. The last time I remembered him using my Christian name was the morning I buried my wife.

I noticed that the radio was on in the house behind him. A lot of silence between the announcer’s halting words. Seamus handed me my vibrating phone. There were fourteen messages from my boss.

“Bennett,” I said into it as I watched Seamus close his eyes and bless himself.

“Oh, Mike,” my boss, Miriam, said. “You’re not going to believe this. A bomb just went off in Grand Central Terminal. Four people are dead. Dozens more wounded. A cop is dead, too, Mike.”

I looked up at the pink-and-blue-marbled sky, then at Seamus, then finally down at the sandy porch floorboards. My morning’s peaceful Deepak Chopra contemplation session was officially over. The big bad world had come back to get my attention like another chunk of cinder block right through my bay window.