“I need some room,” she said. “It can only make things worse if we see each other tonight.”
“Where are you going to be?”
“I’m not sure yet. I’ll call you later and let you know,” she said.
And hung up.
Click.
Gordian held the phone to his ear for almost a full minute after the line went dead, then finally slipped it back into his pocket.
He leaned back against the seat rest and rubbed his forehead, expelling a tired, resigned sigh.
No reason I need to hurry home now, he thought.
In front of him, the little dog with its face in the window had started barking and wagging its tail. Or looked like it was barking, anyway, since he couldn’t actually hear it through two panes of glass and the drone of several hundred idling motors.
Gordian held his hand up and waved and the dog swished its tail back and forth more rapidly.
“Happy New Year,” he said to the interior of his car.
FIFTEEN
On an upper story of a sleek steel-and-glass office tower at Forty-fourth Street and Broadway, a group of German executives from the international magazine empire Fuchs Inc. had gathered behind floor-to-ceiling windows to watch the proceedings below. Well in advance of their holiday visit, office space used by their American editorial staff had been converted into an observatory /banquet area that included plush lounge chairs, high-magnification telescopes, a wet bar, and gourmet hors d’oeuvres served by a white-glove waiter staff. Also prior to their arrival, a memo instructing employees to leave the building early on New Year’s Eve had circulated down through the corporate hierarchy. It was their express wish that the observation deck be inaccessible to Americans, regardless of their positions in the company. The spectacle taking place in Times Square, so oddly crass and colorful, was one the foreign management wanted to view — and comment upon — in secure, uninterrupted privacy.
While the hectic New Year’s Eve gathering might be an American tradition, the German businessmen, who had poured millions of dollars into glossing up the district, felt it was theirs alone to enjoy from on high.
A large outdoor parade stand had been erected on the concrete island occupying the middle of the square from Forty-second Street to roughly Forty-third Street, the military recruiting office and benches that normally stood in that area having been uprooted prior to the festivities by the mayor’s New Year’s 2000 Organizing Committee. It was here that the mayor and other public officials stood with their families, friends, political patrons, and a smattering of entertainers, making speeches, waving to the crowd, leading cheers of “I love New York!” smiling to camera lenses, and urging people to have a good time while please, please, please remaining considerate of the guy with his elbow in your ribs and his hand on your girlfriend’s fanny. Overlooking the street on the uptown side of One Times Square, the Panasonic Astrovision Giant Display Screen, which had replaced the Sony Jumbotron Screen in 1996, and been leased to the NBC television network shortly thereafter, flashed enormous images of everyone on the stand across 890 square feet of pixels, so that all in the crowd could bask in their charismatic nearness.
Seated beside his wife and daughter on the platform — where a famous, born-on-the-lower-east-side comedian had just begun snapping off one-liners at the mike — Police Commissioner Bill Harrison felt like a cold piece of meat on a makeshift smorgasbord. Any minute now somebody was going to flip the damn thing over on its side, and the starving rabble would feast.
He looked around skeptically, wishing he could be more confident of the precautions that had been taken for the safety of the big shots on exhibit, not to mention the safety of his wife and daughter, who had cheerfully (and against his protestations) insisted on accompanying him to this fiasco. Half the City Hall establishment, and enough stars to fill a week’s worth of Entertainment Tonight programs, were in attendance. Despite the transparent bulletproof shields protecting the speakers, despite the constellation of uniformed officers, plainclothes detectives, and private bodyguards surrounding the stand, despite the mounted cops, bomb-sniffing dogs, and rooftop surveillance teams sweeping the scene, despite the endless hashing over of Operation 2000’s details by its planners, there was still room for something nasty to slip through the net. With over a dozen crosstown streets and every major subway line in the city feeding into the neighborhood, how could it be otherwise?
As his eyes continued making their circuit of the immediate area, they fell briefly on the Emergency Services Unit’s One-Truck, parked in close proximity to the VIP stand on Forty-second Street. Besides being chock full of rescue and tactical equipment, the big, bulky vehicle was loaded with firepower ranging from Ruger Mini-14s to 12-gauge Ithaca shotguns to belt-fed Squad Automatic Weapons to M16s equipped with grenade tubes and multipurpose ammunition. Behind it on standby were two smaller Radio Emergency Patrol trucks, a surveillance van, a temporary headquarters vehicle, and a bomb truck.
Harrison took more than a little comfort in knowing that the elite ESU personnel were trained to respond to virtually any crisis; if something bad went down, they would be able to meet the challenge of coping with it head-on. But response wasn’t the same as prevention, and Oklahoma City loomed darkly over his thoughts tonight, reminding him that it only took a second for hundreds of innocent lives to be lost.
“Is that Dick Clark?” Rosetta said, pointing toward a sudden swirl of activity near the stand. “By those TV cameras over there?”
He sat forward, craning his head.
“Don’t think so,” he said. “That guy looks too old.”
“You never know, Bill. He’d have to be around seventy by now.”
“Dick Clark stopped aging at thirty,” he said. “Unlike your poor bedraggled husband, whose energies are on the wane as we speak, and who will be sleeping like a rock the moment his head hits the pillow tonight.”
“Is that so?”
“My days as a late-night party animal are behind me, sweetheart,” he said.
She put her hand on his thigh and let it rest there, a slanted little smile on her lips, her eyes glinting in the way that never failed to make his throat tighten and his heart skip a beat.
Tonight was no exception.
He looked at her with surprise, catching his breath.
“Like I said, old man, you never know,” she said.
“Yo, cuz, you got jelly donuts?”
The bearded vender lifted his eyes from his wristwatch and shook his head.
“How ’bout custard?”
“No more.”
Des Sanford looked over at his friend, Jamal. Jamal looked back at him and shrugged. Both teenagers were wearing hooded sweatshirts with knit caps underneath. Both also happened to be very confused by this white guy who you’d think would be interested in making a buck here tonight, but didn’t seem to have shit to sell. A minute ago they’d smoked a little ganja, caught themselves a buzz, and then zipped straight over to his stand, figuring something sweet would go down fine. Maybe a couple coffees to get the chill out of their bones.
Des rubbed his hands together for warmth. Why the fuck couldn’t New Year’s be in July?
“Don’t be tellin’ us there ain’t no chocolate sprinkle,” he said. “I mean, you gotta have chocolate sprinkle.”
“Sold out,” the vender told the teenagers, glancing at his watch.
Des poked a finger under his cap and scratched his forehead. He swore to God, if he lived to be a hundred, he’d never get these white dudes, didn’t matter if they came from the Bronx or had some kind of foreign accent like this one. Man has himself some prime turf, southeast corner of Forty-second Street, right under the building with the big screen, right where the ball gonna come drop-pin’ from the roof any minute now, and what’s he do but stand there concentrating on his watch like he had someplace better to be, telling people he’s out of this, that and the other thing.
Des leaned forward and read the name on his vender’s license.
“Julius, m’man, maybe you oughtta try tellin’ us what you do have. ”
The vender nodded vaguely toward the sparse row of plain and powdered donuts on the upper shelf of his cart.
Des blew air through his compressed lips, making a small sound of disgust. Not only did the donuts look stale, but he was positive they had come out of a box.
“Eats like that, you know, we coulda bought at the deli,” he said. “Sign on your stand be sayin’ fresh donuts. I mean, how you be cleaned out when it ain’t even midnight yet?”
The vender looked at Des, his blue eyes holding on him, seeming to stare right through him. Then he reached under the counter.
Des looked at Jamal again, puzzled, wondering if he’d gone too far razzing the guy, if this was some kind of crazy mutha had a problem with black people, maybe kept a piece tucked away under his apron just in case somebody mouthed off to him. Jamal was asking himself the same thing, and was about to suggest that they move on when the vender’s hand reappeared holding a brown paper bag.
“Here,” he said, stuffing the handful of donuts on display into the bag, then crunching the bag shut and holding it out to Des. “No charge.”
Des looked at him tentatively.
“You sure, man?”
The vender nodded and stretched his hand farther out over the counter, shoving the bag against Des’s chest.
“Take them,” he said. “Last chance.”
Des grabbed the donuts. He had a feeling that if he hadn’t, the dude would have just opened his hand and let the bag drop to the sidewalk.
“Uh, thanks,” he said, and glanced up at the Astrovision Screen. It showed a closeup of the mayor, who was giving his rap from that stand in the middle of the street, working up to his countdown, talking all kinds of shit about New York City being an example to the world, millions of people in Times Square, everybody having a good time, everybody getting along, peace, brotherhood, togetherness, and please don’t drink and drive. Not a word in his speech about donut guys that didn’t have any donuts, but what the hell, this was a party. Below his face, the time was being displayed in bright red numbers, 11:50 now, ten minutes and counting to the Big 21.
Des had to admit, he felt pumped.
“C’mon, let’s move back some. I wanna get a good look at the ball when it come down,” he said, turning to Jamal.
Jamal nodded. He looked at the vender, acknowledged the freebie he’d given them with a halfhearted little dip of his chin, then started walking off with his friend.
The vender watched them brush against a woman in a black leather coat and beret who was approaching the stand, pause to apologize while eyeing her up and down, then vanish into the crowd.
“Enjoy yourselves,” he muttered.