“Square one is back where that guy’s car was hit, right?”
Rand grunted his agreement as Angelo was getting to his feet.
“I’m going to ask Feldman to let us out of here for ten minutes. Let’s go back there and walk through this one more time.”
Kamal saw the flashing red lights first, just after they passed Irving Place, coming up to Union Square. “Slow down,” he ordered.
A fine, cold drizzle had begun to fall, half snow and half rain, and he leaned forward to peer through the blur of the windshield at the crowd in the square ahead. He could see half a dozen squad cars and two ladder trucks drawn up in a sort of crescent. The gray wooden barriers were out, and police and people were spilling into the square. Traffic police were waving cars away from Thirteenth Street and University Place, heading them onto Fourteenth.
“Stay well over to the right, so that no one gets a look at you,” he commanded his sister. “Maybe it’s a fire.” The choked-up traffic edged slowly west on Fourteenth Street toward Fifth Avenue. Near the corner, the crowds thickened. For a moment Kamal thought of lowering the window and asking what was happening. No, he told himself. With my accent, it’s too dangerous. Then, as they drew up to the intersection with Fifth, he understood. Two more fire trucks and a police car were drawn up in a line across Fifth from curb to curb, completely sealing off the avenue to traffic.
“They know where it is,” he said to Laila. His words came in that flat, mechanical manner of his, but inside the black unreasoning rage he had felt on the FDR Drive engulfed him once more. We have failed, he thought, we have failed again.
Laila inched the car along toward Sixth Avenue. It too was blocked off on the south side by police cars.
“It’s all over, Kamal,” she said. “We’ve got to get out. When they find Whalid they’ll know who we are. Then they’ll have police looking for us at every border crossing into Canada.”
Kamal said nothing. He was sitting rigidly upright, his back not even touching the seat of the car, staring straight ahead, tears of fury and frustration coursing down his cheeks.
Laila turned north on Sixth. Better get away from this traffic, she thought. She had driven two blocks when she felt Kamal’s hand squeeze her forearm so tightly she gave a little yelp of pain.
“Stop,” he said. “I’m getting out.”
“Kamal, you’re crazy!”
This time she screamed in pain at the pressure on her arm.
“Stop, I said. I’m going in on foot.”
He had opened the door before the car even came to a halt. “Go north,” he told her, “as fast as you can drive. At least one of us will get home.” He slid out, slammed the door shut and leaped to the sidewalk.
For a second, Laila was too stunned to react. She watched in the rearview mirror as he started back down the avenue in the rain, head low, the checkered cap pulled down, his collar turned up to conceal his face. He’ll never make it, she told herself. For an instant she considered putting the car in reverse, going back down the avenue after him, to urge him to flee with her. Instead she jammed the gear lever into drive. One simple thought bad overpowered her, like the rush of a powerful anesthetic. It was an almost demoniacal desire to get away, to survive, to get as far away from this city as fast as she could.
Barely fifteen blocks from Laila’s speeding car, Angelo bad once again stopped in front of the location at which the Proctor & Gamble salesman’s fender had been scraped. Unaware of the chlorine-gas threat or indifferent to it, the leather jackets prowled the sidewalk in search of their willing preys. Angelo looked at them scornfully, thinking with satisfaction for just an instant of the impact a bomb would have on this neighborhood. Then he turned his gaze back up the street.
If you were going into the Village with a truck, Christopher’s the way you’d go. A big, open street. You wanted to come into town lower down, you’d take Houston; farther uptown, Fourteenth.
“It’s simple, isn’t it, kid?” he said, ostensibly to Rand, in fact to himself.
“Maybe too simple.”
Angelo let the car begin to drift slowly up the street. The two men scrutinized the fagades along their way, looking for something, they were not sure what, searching for one flaw in their apparently faultless logic.
The man they were looking for was stalking through the rain up Seventh Avenue, sealed off from the bomb he wanted to detonate by the police lines on Fourteenth Street. Kamal had realized that the police were looking for someone. He’d walked down to a point across the street from their lines and seen the way they were checking everyone crossing their barricades. Was it him? Was it because of the one shot his brother had been able to get off before Kamal killed him?
He should never have left the garage. That was why we failed, he thought, we wanted too much to live. How could he get back in now? A disguise of some kind, but what kind? And where would he find it? Or should he just have the courage to pick a crowded street and take his chances?
Behind him, Kamal heard a siren’s wail. Instinctively, he drew away from the curb and pulled up his jacket collar. It was not a police car that swept by him, but an ambulance, the lights glowing in its van. As it reached the corner of Nineteenth, he could see its taillights flare bright red. The ambulance slowed, turned, then accelerated again, racing off into the rain and the dark.
Karnal watched it, frozen on the sidewalk. Then he broke into a run, his feet driving forward as fast as he could move them, racing for the corner, for the fading white form of the ambulance.
Angelo and Rand idled at the stop light at Christopher and Greenwich Streets, still scrutinizing in silence the street around them. Suddenly, Rand laid his hand on Angelo’s arm.
“Angelo,” he said. “Look.” His free hand waved excitedly toward the white arrow hanging from the stop light.
The older man glanced at him appreciatively. “Yeah,” Angelo mumbled. “One way. How about that?” He began talking to himself. “Suppose they weren’t going over toward the center of the Village. Suppose they turned east onto Christopher because they wanted to double back, get onto a westbound street like Charles. Or Barrow. And being real clever guys they hike all the way over there to Eighth to get their pizza pies to throw us off just in case somebody saw them. In that case, our mistake was beginning our search over there in the center of the Village instead of down here.”
He glanced at the bars on the street corners, the brick rear wall of Saint Luke’s School. The area, Angelo knew, hadn’t been searched yet. “Jesus Christ, kid,” he said, “you know you could just be right. That could just be it.” He shot the car through the intersection as the light changed. “We gotta get back there and convince them to flood a hundred guys down here to comb this place out.”
The sharp clap of Kamal’s running feet rang up from the pavement of Nineteenth Street. He ran fast, elbows digging, breathing through his mouth in steady gulps as he had been trained to do in the camps, his eyes, all his attention, concentrated on the white vehicle, a light blinking from its roof, on the other side of Eighth Avenue.
His hat flew off. He ignored it, ignored the stares of the people crossing Eighth Avenue. He’d take his chances on being recognized now. Success was too close not to be grasped in one final, furious lunge. He slowed down as he drew up to the ambulance. The rear doors were open and its stretcher was gone. Trotting by the brightly lit entrance hall of the tenement at 362 where the ambulance was parked, Kamal could see a gaggle of curious neighbors on the landing, peering from their doorways at the blue-coated figure of the ambulance driver easing the front end of the stretcher down the stairs.