And so right now, Abe Stern thought, in the cold morning air in Darien and Greenwich, White Plains and Red Bank, New Jersey, people were gathering in bus stations and along train platforms, or lingering over a cup of coffee as they waited for the honk of a carpool driver. Soon they would be flooding into New York over the railroads and bridges he had wanted to cut, innocently heading for another day’s work and very possibly their deaths.
He pushed his eggs away, unable to eat. Should I have agreed? he asked himself again. How the hell can a man decide where his obligations lie in such a horrible dilemma?
His thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of his wife in the doorway, her gaunt figure wrapped in the faded rose satin dressing gown she had bought at Abraham and Strauss fifteen years before.
“Why are you up so early?” he asked.
Wordlessly, she moved to the sideboard, poured herself a glass of orange juice from the pitcher there, and sat down beside him. “What’s the matter?
You didn’t sleep last night.”
“Nothing’s the matter,” Stern rejoined irritably. “I couldn’t sleep, is all.”
His wife pointed a reproachful finger toward his plate. “How come you’re eating eggs for breakfast? You know Mort told you eggs were bad for your cholesterol.”
“So what? What is he anyway, some kind of genius because he went to Harvard?” Stern thrust his knife angrily at the butter dish, cut a thick slab and spread it defiantly on a piece of toast he had no appetite to eat. “I get a heart attack, it’s not going to be from eating eggs, believe me. What time’s your plane?”
Ruth was due to leave, as she did every year at this time, to spend the holidays in Miami with their daughter and son-in-law. She’d planned her departure two weeks ago, and the knowledge that she, at least, would be spared, not by any violation of his trust but by fate, had made Abe Stern’s anguish just a little easier to bear in the past few hours.
“I don’t know if I’m going.”
“What do you mean, not going?” There was an intimation of panic in the Mayor’s astonished reply. “You got to go.ţ
“Why are you in such a hurry I should leave town? You got a girl or something?”
“Ruth! Look at me! Thirty-two years we’ve been married. Have I ever done something like that to you? What girl would want me anyway? Get the plane.”
Ruth poured herself a cup of black coffee and sipped it thoughtfully. She was a year younger than Abe, her hair thin and white now, clinging to her head like sad wisps of angel’s beard left behind on an old Christmas tree abandoned in the back yard. “I was kidding, Abe. About the girl.” Her dark eyes gazed at her husband over the rim of the coffee cup she held before her lips. “But something’s wrong, Abe. You’ve got something on your mind.
Must be a big problem.”
Stern sighed. After so many years of marriage there were no secrets anymore. “Yeah,” he answered, “I got a problem all right. But I can’t tell you about it. Please, Ruth, get the plane. Go down to Miami-for me.”
His wife got up and moved behind him, letting her arms hang down until she could cradle Stern’s cheeks in her aged and arthritic fingers. “Don’t tell me, Abe. It’s all right. But, you got a problem, this is where I belong.
Not in Miami.”
Stern reached up and clasped her bony hands. Outside, through the dining-room windows, the first gleamings of dawn were reflected off the dark channel of Hell Gate, creeping across Ward’s Island and onto the tenements of Queens.
How lovely it all is, the Mayor of New York reflected, his hands tightening around those of his wife, how lovely it is.
At the underground command post where Abe Stern had spent most of his sleepless night, the whole thrust of the mammoth search effort had now taken on a new dimension. All the manpower available was now concentrated on the most extensive manhunt any American city had ever known, the pursuit of Whalid, Kamal and Laila Dajani.
Al Feldman had been up all night coordinating the NYPD’s contribution to the search. With three identified suspects in hand, the decision had been taken to throw the full resources of the 24,000-man police force into the search. The Dajanis were being described, to keep the secret of the bomb, as cop killers. Right now in every station house, in every precinct in the five boroughs, the patrolmen coming onto the day shift were being handed photos of the Dajanis, part of the thousands printed overnight. The men coming off the night shift were put into civilian clothes, given photos and held on duty. The headquarters switchboard was ordering the men and women of the four-to-twelve to report to their precincts at 10 A.M. so that by midday every police officer in New York City would be out looking for the three Palestinians. Forget everything, they were being ordered: burglars, traffic and parking violations, purse snatchers, junkies, whores, fighting drunks. Just find some trace of the neighborhood in which the three alleged cop killers had last been seen.
Feldman had laid down basic guidelines for the search pattern, based on the conviction that no matter how hard they had tried to avoid it, the Dajanis would have had to come into contact with certain aspects of New York life.
Every newsstand vendor, every druggist, every counterman, cashier and short-order cook at every hamburger joint, fast-food franchise, pancake house, soda fountain, pizza parlor and Hero sandwich shop in the city was to be shown the Dajanis’ photos. So, too, were the owners, clerks, salesmen and checkout-counter operators of every food store in town from the crummiest mom-and-pop store in Sheepshead Bay to the biggest Grand Union supermarket in Queens. Pushcart operators selling soft drinks and sandwiches off the sidewalks were to be queried, the attendants in all the big public lavatories, in the city’s Turkish baths.
The vice cops were all brought in and ordered to check the city’s countless prostitutes, massage parlors, “contact” centers, fieabag hotels to see if the Dajanis had patronized any of them. A similar effort against the city’s dope dealers was assigned to the Narcotics Squad.
Patrolmen were assigned to all the toll booths, inbound and outbound, at all the bridges and tunnels with orders to scrutinize the passengers of every car passing through them. The three thousand men of the Transit Police were fully mobilized and assigned to watch every turnstile and station entrance in the subway system. The muggers might have a field day in New York’s subways this Tuesday, December 15, but the Dajanis would have no better than a fifty-fifty chance of using them without getting caught.
The thousands of FBI agents freed from the pier and personnel searches were assigned to cover every hotel, roominghouse and car-rental agency in the city. Others were assigned New York’s real-estate agencies with orders to validate every lease that had been signed in the past six months, looking for the place where the bomb might be hidden. Still others were teamed with the crimeprevention specialists in each of the NYPD’s precincts, telephoning contacts and names on each precinct’s business index file for any indication from shopowners and small merchants of new, suspicious activities in their neighborhoods. FBI agents paired with NEST scientists with hand-held Geiger counters were instructed to comb methodically all the city’s abandoned buildings.