I forced the thought away. I forced myself to think about Serena. I thought of her face as she was dragged out of my mother's house, as she shouted for me: "Daddy!" I thought of all the faces in the park and in the city and on TV and I loved them and I loved my country. And I thought: What right have you in the end to hold on to your decency when the life of the nation is at stake? What is your sanity compared to that or even your salvation? You can't let thousands of people die simply to preserve your own righteousness.
I held the hammer high another moment. Rashid fought wildly in my grip, shaking his head, No, no, no.
All right, then, I thought, I'll go to Hell.
And I brought the hammer down on him.
The New Coliseum
The lights outside the theater swept the night. I saw them crisscrossing over the towers and billboards of Times Square when I was still several blocks north. It was dark now, but whatever stars there were were dazzled to nothing by the radiance of Broadway. Spotlit images of half-naked women several stories high, soaring electrified soda cans and golden arches, twinkling ads for shoes and video cameras, gigantic heads talking on TV screens the size of houses: They washed the sky black; they washed the faces on the street below to a corpselike pallor. Thousands of faces, mobs of faces, hustling, pushing, flowing under the lights, chalk-skinned and dead-eyed. I shouldered through the crush of them as quickly as I could.
I had called 911 from the cab. I must've sounded crazy to the operator. I must've sounded almost as crazy as I felt. But I didn't care. I babbled it all out in response to her bored, drawling questions. A massive amount of explosives, I said. The New Coliseum, I said. The End of Civilization as We Know It, I said. There would be over three thousand people there. The secretary of state, the governor, the mayor. Not to mention the crowds in the street turning out to watch the celebrities. My voice was strained with exhaustion as I explained it. The olive-skinned driver in the seat in front of me watched me warily in his rearview mirror. I went on to tell the 911 operator what I had done to Rashid, how I had left him broken and unconscious on the floor of his office. I stared out the window. I thought: I must be completely out of my mind. I thought: My life is over.
The operator kept trying to pacify me. She kept telling me security on the scene was airtight. No one could get through, she said. No one could get explosives inside. I tried to explain that the explosives were already inside. Maintenance and security had all been compromised, infiltrated. It was a long-term plan. They had blueprints, C4, detonation cord to cut through steel, engineers with the skill to plant the stuff for maximum demolition. The operator kept changing the subject. She kept asking me about Rashid. She didn't seem all that interested in the rest of it. She didn't believe me.
The traffic grew steadily thicker as the cab neared Columbus Circle. By the time we were centrifuged out of the big rotary and fired off down Broadway, the flow of cars was congealing. A few blocks more and we had become one more irregular shape in a motionless patchwork of multicolored metal and taillights, stalled blue buses, shadowy heads behind panes of thick gray glass. The traffic lights strung above us went from green to red and back to green again, but nothing moved forward.
"You have to clear out the theater!" I croaked urgently into the phone.
The cabbie watched me anxiously in his mirror.
"What is your location right now, sir?" drawled the 911 woman.
Exasperated, I finally killed the connection. I slipped the phone into my pocket.
"There is an event up ahead," said the cabbie in what I think was a Turkish accent. "I can't go any farther." He wanted me out of his cab.
I took out my wallet. "I'll walk from here," I said.
He didn't try to disguise his relief.
I got out of the car and started jogging south along the sidewalk. There were couples all along the way, men and women arm in arm, dressed up for a night on the town. I dodged this way and that between them. The air was cold and damp on my cheeks, but there was still no mist, no rain. I could no longer see the roiling clouds in that blacked-out sky. Soon I was out of breath. I fell into a quick, striding walk. The crowd on the street grew thicker. I had to use my hands to get through like a man wading through the high reeds in a swamp. All the same, I was still traveling faster than the cars. Most of the cars had stopped dead. Only a few were jerking forward here and there, looking for half a foot's advantage. Horns blared. Exhaust gathered. The air was suffocating, rank.
Now the Broadway lights grew brighter up ahead. They rose higher and the sky was a deeper black. The crowd on the street swelled. As I twisted and wedged my way though the tide of bodies, I looked up-and it was then I saw Times Square, the boulevards intersecting and dividing, the great billboards lining them, and the towering lights-and I saw the kliegs of the New Coliseum, five of them, spearing the night and sweeping back and forth over the surface of it, crossing and uncrossing. I fought my way toward them through the crowd.
It seemed I would never reach the place. The square was packed with people, a heaving sludge of them making its slow way north and south. I edged into the southbound flow, but I couldn't break through it or get ahead of its inching, muddy pace. I felt trapped and smothered and small at the bottom of a canyon of lights, a canyon of enormous billboard bodies and enormous talking heads on their house-sized TVs. The nearness and solidity of all those other humans and the nearness and the stares and the corpselike pallor of so many faces pressing in around me and the crushing radiance of all the soaring, flashing, overhanging signs and screens made me claustrophobic and nauseous-or maybe it was the flashbacks that came into my mind now-now that I couldn't distract myself, couldn't run or shove or shout into a phone: images of Rashid rigid in agony, the sound his knee made when the hammer struck it, the sound of his frantic shrieks behind the gag-and me hanging over him with the hammer raised, and with the small, dark, secret hope hunkered in my consciousness like some bright-eyed gnome-the hope that the terrorist son of a bitch would refuse to answer me again…
Sick, I made my way in the human sludge, beneath the oppressive, towering Broadway lights.
The theater was off the center of the square, just west of the intersecting boulevards. I pushed into the side street and saw it. It rose spotlit above a dark mass of people crushed against the police barricades. It was elegant and vast, a swirl of pilasters and arched windows rising like a great stone wedding cake five stories high. The windows were bathed in golden light from the chandeliers above the lobby. You could see the guests rising on the spiraling marble stairways within: women of gliding elegance in sequined dresses and twinkling jewels, men of substance, confidence and wealth in suits as straight and black against the white steps as the sharp keys on a grand piano. And children-I was surprised to see so many children-the boys in ties and jackets, flumping about and clowning self-consciously, the girls in dresses, staring goggle-eyed and openmouthed, as if trying to remember everything forever. All in all, watching the glittering people on the spiral stairs through the window was like viewing a scene in a diorama or a snow globe, some faraway vision of yearning charm.
Out in front of the theater, off to one side between the theater and the crowd, the five big klieg lights swiveled on a couple of flatbed trailers, sending their beams into the night. Next to the trailers, there was an area all aglow with spectacular silver radiance. I couldn't see it over the massed people, but I guessed that that was where the red carpet was, where the movie stars and dignitaries were arriving in their limousines and sweeping their glorious way past the cameras and microphones of the gawkers and reporters to join those already on the spiral stairs inside.