Jesus wept, what a night. When day came, two were dead, gold and art were trading places and the world as we know it was about to end.
It began with a visit to Bellevue hospital, a private room. His daughter was sitting up in bed as he entered the room, tapping away on her iPhone, Snapchatting or WhatsApping or whatever the hell kids do these days.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘How you feeling?’
She looked up from her device. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
‘Show some respect, young lady,’ closing the door gently behind him, confirming that she wasn’t connected to any monitors or alarms, just the IV drip going into her arm. ‘And keep your voice down.’
‘Why the fuck should I, you dirty old bastard.’
‘Now wait a second, young lady. I don’t know what drugs you’re on, but -’
‘But shit. The only drug I’m on is clarity. Some lunatic drugs me in a club, kidnaps me, cuts me up. All I’m thinking is Daddy, come save me and then the drugs wear off and then I know. It was you. He was your friend. He came to our house one night when it was just you and me. And -’
‘You’re delusional, darling,’ he said, coldly.
She pulled the sheets up to her chin as thin tears streamed down her still-pale face.
‘Bastard. I’m going to tell.’
‘Oh? So did you tell the police? The agents?’
‘Not yet. But they’ll be back in the morning. They always come in the morning.’
I’m so sorry, daughter. But you won’t see the morning. You gave me some great press, but the kind of stories you’re talking about now won’t do me much good. Presidential incest? Nah.
With a finger, he pushed down a venetian blind and peeked up and down the hallway outside. Dead. The guards had been pulled immediately Rod was identified as her perp. Then he went to her.
‘Here honey, let me fix your pillows.’
He left the hospital, smiling. His police driver was waiting for him with the town car.
‘How is she, sir?’
‘She’s good, Danny. Really good. I think she’s going to pull through this.’
‘Did you tell her they got the guy?’
‘Hnnh? Oh. Yeah. Of course. She was delighted. She doesn’t have to worry any more. Listen Danny, you get home. I feel like a walk.’
‘You sure, sir?’
‘Yeah, go on. I’ll see you tomorrow. Lots of prepping to do. Looks like the President’s going to be paying us a visit.’
‘Wow. Okay. See you in the morning. Please be careful, sir.’
So he walked a block north of the hospital, then took a cab to his dealer’s turf, to the Upper East Side, where the old money and the models and the admen and the one percenters hung out. Heading north on FDR Drive, he called from the cab, on his second phone, used code.
‘Hey, any sign of that white bitch? Good. Okay. I’ll be there in, ah,’ he looked outside, saw the Queensboro Bridge looming, ‘ten minutes.’
He was buzzed through the main door and the secondary door and then whooshed up the elevator to the expensive apartment where he’d enjoyed many nights with Rod and cocaine and prostitutes and many more illegal pleasures.
‘Sorry to hear about Rod, mon,’ said the Jamaican, who was known as mailman. ‘Come in and rest yourself.’
‘Yeah. It was a shock for sure. I don’t know how he was so stupid to get caught in a police trap.’ Classical music played loud, Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries and the air conditioner hummed, scrubbing the air.
‘Bad shit. Here,’ he said, passing a joint.
The congressman inhaled deeply and felt a tingling in his legs, a sudden, heavy fatigue. The mailman went to an antique chest of drawers and found a metal box that looked like it was for expensive camera lenses. He opened it, lifted out a polyurethane foam tray which had some anonymous electronic objects inlaid, took two plastic bags from below.
‘This is all de good stuff. This is mine,’ he said, holding up a half-empty bag of white powder. ‘This is for you. Try it, you’ll see. Then you can taste mine. All de same.’
He poured some of the cocaine onto a small mirror on the Mexican style coffee table, then used an old-school razor blade to chop out the lumps and ease it into four thin lines, each about an inch long.
The congressman took out his wallet, got a fifty dollar bill, rolled it into a tube.
‘Hang on, boss. You want to stay up all night?’ The congressman nodded. ‘All right, mon. Go. Go on.’
The congressman snorted a line into each nostril, felt the burning, then the almost instant rush, starting in his sinuses, then into his eyes, his brain, every cell in his body. I just killed my daughter. He smiled as his pupils became black pinpricks and the mailman inhaled the other lines. The congressman closed his eyes and flew with the music, imagining himself piloting an attack helicopter south, through the geometric canyons of Manhattan. He passed the gaping holes where the Twin Towers once stood, saluted the fallen, then raced over Zucotti Park and down Broadway. Suits, suits everywhere. They gape up at him and he strafes them with machine gun fire. Wait! Can’t miss that! He pulls back on the cyclic control stick, stops his forward momentum, pushes down on the rudder pedal to swing the nose right. Quick rocket tally. All good. Two Hydra-70 Mark 66 rockets screamed from their pods and blew Trinity Church to smoking pieces. See you in hell, motherfuckers! Forward again on the cyclic, shuddering through the ETL. His stomach groans as he pulls a hard left onto Wall Street, then stops, hovering, at the corner of New Street. Fire! A rocket streaks towards the New York Stock Exchange. And another. He pushes the button on the steering column and tracer rounds tear into the stockbrokers and day traders on Wall Street. The rockets explode with a shower of beautiful noise and colour. The facade crumbles and falls onto the terrified fools below. His mouth is dry and there’s a taste of blood. He sends in another rocket for good measure. Charlie don’t surf! Then he pulls a tight left turn, up the three blocks to Liberty Street, where the Fed men are standing in the street, crying like babies, holding ingots of lead. I’ll put you out of your misery, motherfuckers! Rocket after rocket leaps from the chopper pounding the Fed bankers and their lead into a dull, silvery grey mincemeat. We’ve got Congress, the Senate and now the White House, you sorry plebs.
‘You okay there, mon?’ a hand gripping his shoulder.
His eyes pop open. ‘That is really good shit, mailman.’
‘Finest. Hey, you want me to call some bitches up? Party?’
He loved the idea of that. A night of drugs and sex and loud music and utter fucking madness, maybe take a quick trip to one of the clubs up the block that never closed, drink expensive Champagne, then take in the sunrise and snort some lines of cocaine from the skin of a beautiful belly. Stop giggling, it’s going into your pubes. I can’t snort that, I’ll have your hairs stuck in the back of my throat for days! She’s laughing harder now and it’s rolling, tumbling...
‘Yeah. No. No, I have to work. Maybe tomorrow night? Too much going on tonight. How much I owe you?’
‘Five hundred, mon. Let me get a couple of lines together for the road.’
As the mailman cut out the lines, that fine chopchopchopping noise, the congressman was captured by a feeling of black dread, of imminent chaos, of the end of things. He would leave this place and put the final elements of his plan into motion. Just a couple of unknowables there at the end, at meltdown. Listen to your gut.
And this whole thing, this entire adventure would end with his becoming Mr President, the most powerful man in the history of the world, the man who would finish what the Fuhrer had started. It would end with that or death. But either way, Manhattan would be changed forever.
To live or to die.
To be or not to be.
This is truly the edge of things, where I’m sitting now. These could be my last days on Earth. I might be remembered as the greatest hero this great nation has ever produced. Or the greatest mass murderer in human history.
What will people think?
A wide grin crept across his face as he attained a great freedom, the realisation that he just didn’t care.
He walked across Central Park to Vierte, passing the place where Rod died, not a sign of the event remaining. The drug had given him a superhuman confidence.
‘I am the Übermensch!’ he said. And he believed it.
He went through security and straight to Dr Heim’s inner sanctum. I hate hospitals. Heim was unconscious, his nurse sitting in the armchair, reading a trashy gossip magazine.
‘Is he drugged?’
‘Yes, sir. Morphine. He was in a lot of pain earlier. His lungs.’
‘Good. He won’t feel a thing.’ He glanced at the pillows. ‘Can you give me some morphine, please? A two hundred milligram syringe.’
The nurse stirred, began to sit up. ‘But that will kill him, sir.’
‘That’s the idea. Now, I need you to tell me how to switch off this damned beeping.’
She saw the congressman’s eyes then, saw the wild animal inside. She flinched. Froze.
‘Look, I’ll make it easy for you. When he’s dead, I’m the boss,’ he gestured to the room and beyond,’ the boss of all this. One trillion dollars plus in assets. In a month, I’ll be president. Now. You. Where are you from?’
‘Honduras, sir.’
‘Sorry for our history. We fucked your country up. Battalion 316? All that. So you’re here now, saving what you can, sending some money home to your extended family, yes?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘But your dream of saving up enough to go home and look after everyone. That’s not going to happen, is it?’
‘No, sir. The cost of living, it’s bad now.’
He had her. ‘So, what business were you hoping to start when you get back?’
‘A medical clinic, sir.’
‘Oh!’ he exclaimed, ‘That’s just perfect! I love it!’ He took her hands in his. Easy. ‘So here’s the deal. Do what I say and you can go home any time you want, tomorrow even, with one hundred thousand dollars.’
She stood and went to the medicine trolley. She found a suitable syringe and filled it with two hundred and twenty-five milligrams of morphine solution. She handed the syringe to the congressman, then went to the beeping monitor. The sound ended, the trace of the weak heartbeat silently meandering across the screen then.
She pointed to Heim’s forearm, where the taped-down catheter was stuck in his vein. The congressman went close, clenched the syringe tightly, aiming for the catheter’s connecting hub. He shook, couldn’t control his hands.
The nurse tutted, gently took the syringe and inserted it. She smoothly pushed the plunger home, removed the syringe and watched the trace.
Within seconds, the heartbeat slowed to once every five seconds. In half a minute, Dr Aribert Heim was dead, the only sign being the gentle deflation of his chest as his life force, his vril, dissipated.
‘Thank you,’ said the congressman. ‘I appreciate it.’
Isabela smiled. ‘I would have done it for free.’
The congressman grinned. ‘You can do what you need to do now, you have the protocol? Good. Then go home. Come see me here tomorrow. I’ll have your money.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘And can you gather all his bits and pieces? I’ll have a crate sent down. Leave the paintings, they’ll have to be brought up to the valuer.’
She went to the heart monitor and switched the audio back on. There was a low whine. She took Heim’s chart and made notes of the readings from the display.
I’m in charge. Now, two phonecalls, two fat lines of cocaine and one bottle of wonderful wine. I need to be suitably wasted when the news hits in the morning.
He fumbled in his jacket pocket, found his phone. He called Julia.
‘Julia, how are you? Good. Listen, I’m afraid I have some very bad news. It’s your grandfather. He’s passed on.’
The dining room was deserted, all staff long gone. He found the keys to the wine room and selected a bottle of burgundy, a Domaine Romanée-Conti from 1967, the Summer of Love. Then he uncorked it at a table by the window that looked out on the Park.
As the wine breathed, he made a call to Vierte’s director of security, again on his unlisted phone.
‘Phoenix here. I’m afraid the doctor has passed. Yes. Yes. Operational changes, effective immediately. Art to go downtown. All of it. And all the doctor’s personal effects. Yes. The feast will be held there. Production is to be stopped and all our heavy assets are to be moved uptown. Yes. I’m sure you can make effective use of our transport assets. I need everything in place by noon. Good night.’
He poured a glass of exquisite, ruby sunshine and put his feet up on the glass table. He inhaled deeply, the delicate scents of spring flowers, drank deeper, the flinty, earthy, plummy, seaside taste. As the flavours danced around his mouth, he used a credit card to clumsily chop out lines of cocaine on the table. He used a note to become superman again. No more sitting down, he walked the length of the window wall, glass in hand, gazing down at the little people, master of the universe, the one to rule them all.
Sophie slept, balled up on the couch. Jacob found a blanket to put over her. The food had done its job. It had comforted. She told Jacob everything, full of indignation. There were tears. What if I’m arrested? What if they try to frame me for what Rod did? He calmed her with mention of her congressman and a complete absence of evidence. Could Rod have set anything up?
‘They let you walk, Soph. Just like me. They have to be seen to go through the motions. That’s all.’
‘The filth of the place, and that was the police station!’
‘You’d be okay on Rikers Island, get a cushy job in the kitchen. I’m too pretty for prison.’
Jacob enjoyed listening to her, clearing the mountain of food, drinking a good Chilean red. But he was pleased when she yawned and chose to lay down with the remote and the old movies she loved.
Hitchcock’s Spellbound.
She lapped up Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck.
‘You know Dalí designed the dream sequence? Guy was a certifiable genius. Sophie?’
A gentle snore.
Jacob found his briefcase, opened his laptop and notebook and went hunting for valuations. He’d kept track of every item through the day, but his notes pointed out the need for some deeper digging.
At 3am, he hit a wall of fatigue, switched off the electronics and found the spare bed and blackness.
Eyes filled the room then and a vision of a man falling from a tall building. Jacob’s skin crawled when he saw the faceless man sitting on the end of the bed.
The faceless man smelled of jetfuel and was covered in a coating of fine, white dust.
‘Do you remember me, Jacob?’
‘How could I forget you?’
The faceless man laughed a dry, humourless croak.
‘Tell me.’
‘You were piloting the second plane. United 175. You delivered the death blow. It could’ve been an accident, just a damned accident, before you. A shocking, dramatic, horrible accident but the city could’ve cleaned up, shrugged its shoulders, said Meh, got on.’
‘Go on.’
‘I’d had a nightmare of a night, a complete and utter fuck-up. Sophie. We’d just started seeing each other, been out to dinner. Monday. She worked at a pretty cool place in the Village, but she was off that night. Go anywhere in the world on a Monday night and you’ll find chefs partying. So we went to a fancy restaurant uptown. I drank too much, tipped too little, laughed at her ugly shoes and her ugly little feet. I was a lot more of a prick in those days. A big scene in the middle of the fucking street. I hate you. I don’t want to see you again. All that kind of stuff. So I went home alone, completely done with Sophie. Forever. And I hit the bottle. The Jack Daniel’s bottle. I did a little bit of coke, flirted with a coronary, considered calling 911. But that faded, so I collapsed in a heap. I don’t know when.’
‘Go on.’
‘I can’t. I just can’t.’
The faceless man laughed again.
He woke with a start at 8:46am. A shudder had worked its way across Lower Manhattan and into Jacob’s sunny loft apartment. He was crucified, stuck to his wet sheets, arms out, a crown of thorns wrapped around his head. He opened his eyes. Dazzling beams of morning sunshine drove the thorns deeper, so he closed them again. Seagulls were nearby, squawking like devils.
A few minutes later, another shudder and a low, menacing boom. He woke again, thinking that his heart attack had come. It was 9:03am on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, and Jacob was less than half a mile from the World Trade Center. What the fuck was that? Earthquake? Has there ever been a quake here? (Yes. 1884.) Oh Christ, my head.
He found a pack of oxycodone and swallowed two with a bottle of Sanpellegrino still water. Then he took the last of the cocaine in two thin lines. He made a cafetiere of Green Mountain Nantucket blend, threw open the balcony doors and sat back on his reproduction Eames chair, naked, waiting for the drugs to kick in and the coffee to brew.
So he poured a big mug, added white powder, this time Sweet’n Low, and melted back into the chair. There was a nice bit of heat from the September sun, even that early, and its rays made the skin on his groin tingle. Sirens wailed nearby. More of them. And more of them. A couple of police helicopters whined by, heading west. There was a kind of haze, a fuzziness to the air. Then he smelled the burn.
A rolling thunder then, two fierce black shadows from Long Island, scratching through the sky like fighting cats. F-15s out of Otis had finally made it on scene. But late, too late. Fighter jets? What in God’s name?
It was 9:25am. The drugs had kicked in and Jacob felt fabulous. Got to see this. Whatever this is.
He showered quickly, the water like lovely needles, pricking his skin to life, glorious life. He towel-dried back by the window, the emergency vehicle sirens now forming a crazed orchestra. He dressed quickly, white shirt, Abercrombie jeans and a tan corduroy sport coat. He found his cellphone and his trusty Canon EOS camera. The goddess of the dawn.
Feeling good, he took the elevator down to the lobby and got onto the street. That’s when everything changed. People were running east, down Maiden Lane and towards the South Street Seaport. Jacob looked west and saw the two towers, standing like two terrible candles, so much smoke. Both of them? He couldn’t believe it. Oh my God, called the people racing by. The cocaine was coursing through his veins but this, this reality, made his heart pound like a 2 train coming in from Brooklyn. he took a couple of photos, not believing the what the viewfinder told him was happening. He carried on, towards Broadway, the awful scene filling the sky ahead. There was a dozen or so police cars at the junction of Broadway and Cortland Street. Cops were running back and forth, some putting up barriers, others on their phones, others just standing and gawping. Fire trucks converged on the junction and barriers were moved. Engine 9, Engine 28, Engine 33, all passed through, into the heart of darkness.
Jacob found a safe place by a street corner and took some more pictures. There, through the viewfinder, a shadow falling down the face of the south tower. A person. And another. He put down the camera. And just watched.
A couple of cops came and stood near him, one listening to his phone, eyes wide. They’ve just hit the Pentagon! And World War Goddamned Three.
Suddenly weary, Jacob slumped back against the wall and slid to the sidewalk.
The police officers came to him, took an elbow each. Sir, we’re going to need you to move. East. Get to the Brooklyn Bridge. Understand? On his feet, Jacob nodded. he took one last look at the end of everything and started back the way he’d come, joining the flow of the crying, the cursing, the bewildered and the broken. He turned his head back every few paces, stopping to take a picture, sometimes of the towers, mostly of people.
He passed through the William Street junction at 9:59am, just as a groan from hell shook Lower Manhattan. He turned to see the south tower collapse in a shock of dust. This is the end.
He ran then, as the ground rumbled, threatening to just drop the whole dumb island into the water and be done with it. As the tower, all one hundred and ten floors of it, returned to the earth like Icarus, the ground screamed in thanks. A dense cloud of ash and dust raced from the impact in every direction, as vicious as a sandstorm. Jacob saw the racing cloud and sensed death. Ashes to ashes.
Running faster, he spotted the red front of Brady’s, the Irish pub that had barred him from ever darkening its doors again. Kind of. A barman, white shirt, black tie, white face, stood inside the closed door. Jacob stopped and made a pleading gesture with his hands. The door opened. A hand grabbed his shoulder and the door shut behind him, just a second before a white feather was pushed against the glass and the whole world went black.
A few people were in there. Some early drinkers, but most had run in after the attack began, fearing for their lives, thinking One last drink before I go. The hush was eerie, just a very low rumbling outside, like the sound from a distant highway. The sun was gone, devoured. People used to think an eclipse was actually a dragon eating our star. It felt just like that.
‘What’ll ye have, Jacob?’ asked the barman, his Donegal accent calm and melodic.
‘Jameson, please. Straight up.’
So he drank a long whiskey and fixed his eyes on the TV, watching the live feed from the news choppers as the cloud of death engulfed Lower Manhattan, rushing past the door, just yards away.
It was 10:15am on the longest day.
Jacob gulped back the whiskey, burning his throat, the pain an immediate reminder of his life, his mortality. But he couldn’t shake the image of the faceless falling man.
He seemed to go into a spasm, opened his eyes to see the faceless man, his hands on Jacob’s shoulders, shaking, shaking, the blank face distorted, shifting, features slowly emerging.
She was shaking him then.
‘Sophie. God. What a dream.’
‘You okay? You’re pouring with sweat. And you were mumbling in your sleep like a little girl.’
‘Jesus. Christ.’ He smelled the coffee then. A cup and one of Sophie’s cigarettes helped ease the shakes. ‘I hope that dream didn’t mean anything. Because if it did, I’m fucked.’