The deaf man pulled the phone to him and dialed the first number on his list.
A woman answered the phone. “The Culver Theater,” she said. “Good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon,” the deaf man said pleasantly.
“There is a bomb in a shoe box somewhere in the orchestra of your theater,” and he hung up.
At 4:05P.M ., Chuck and Pop boarded the ferry to Majesta and spent the next ten minutes whispering together like school boys about the conspiracy they had just committed.
At 4:15P.M ., the first of the bombs exploded.
“EIGHTY-SEVENTH SQUAD,Detective Hernandez. What? What did you say?” He began scribbling on his pad. “Yes, sir. And the address, sir? When did you get this call, sir? Yes, sir, thank you. Yes, sir, right away, thank you.”
Hernandez slammed the phone back onto its cradle.
“Pete!” he yelled, and Byrnes came out of his office immediately. “Another one! What do we do?”
“A bomb?”
“Yes.”
“A real one, or just a threat?”
“A threat. But, Pete, that last movie theater…”
“Yes, yes.”
“That was just a threat, too. But, dammit, two bombs really went off in the balcony. What do we do?”
“Call the Bomb Squad.”
“I did on the last three calls we got.”
“Call them again! And contact Murchison. Tell him we want any more of these bomb threats to be transferred directly to the Bomb Squad. Tell him—”
“Pete, if we get many more of these, the Bomb Squad’ll be hamstrung. They’ll dump the squeals right back into our laps, anyway.”
“Maybe we won’t get any more. Maybe—”
The telephone rang. Hernandez picked it up instantly.
“Eighty-seventh Squad, Hernandez. Who? Where? Holy Je—Whatdid you say? Have you—yes, sir, I see. Have you—yes, sir, try to calm down, will you, sir? Have you called the fire department? All right, sir, we’ll get on it right away.”
He hung up. Byrnes was waiting.
“The ball park, Pete. Fires have broken out in the grandstands and bleachers. Hoses on all the extinguishers have been cut. People are running for the exits. Pete, there’s gonna be a goddam riot, I can smell it.”
And at that moment, just inside the entrance arch, as people rushed in panic from the fires raging through the stadium, a bomb exploded.
THE PEOPLE ONthe south side of the precinct did not know what the hell was happening. Their first guess was that the Russians were coming, and that these wholesale explosions and fires were simply acts of sabotage preceding an invasion. Some of the more exotic-minded citizens speculated upon an invasion from Mars, some said it was all that strontium 90 in the air which was causing spontaneous combustion, some said it was all just coincidence, but everyone was frightened and everyone was on the edge of panic.
Not one of them realized that percentages were being manipulated or that a city’s preventive forces, accustomed to dealing with the long run, were being pushed into dealing with the short run.
There were 186 patrolmen, 22 sergeants and 16 detectives attached to the 87th Precinct. A third of this force was off duty when the first of the bombs went off. In ten minutes’ time, every cop who could be reached by telephone was called and ordered to report to the precinct at once. In addition, calls were made to the adjoining 88th and 89th Precincts which commanded a total of 370 patrolmen, 54 sergeants and 42 detectives and the strength of this force was added to that of the 87th’s until a stream of men was pulled from every corner of the three precincts and rushed to the disaster-stricken south side. The ball park was causing the most trouble at the moment, because some forty thousand fans had erupted into a full-scale panic-ridden riot, and the attendant emergency police trucks, and the fire engines, and the patrol cars, and the mounted policemen, and the reporters and the sightseeing spectators made control a near-impossibility.
At the same time, a Bomb Squad which was used to handling a fistful of bomb threats daily was suddenly swamped with bomb reports from forty different areas in the 87th Precinct. Every available man was called into action and rushed to the various trouble spots, but there simply weren’t enough men to go around and they simply didn’t know which trouble spots were going to erupt or when. To their credit, they did catch one incendiary in an office building before it burst into flame, but at the same time a bomb exploded on the fourteenth floor of that same building, an unfortunate circumstance since the bomb had been set in the laboratory of a chemical research company, and the attendant fire swept through three floors of the building even before the fire alarm was pulled.
The Fire Department had its own headaches. The first unit called into action was Engine 31 and Ladder 46, a unit in the heart of the south side, a unit which reportedly handled more damn fires daily than any other unit in the entire city. They connected to a hydrant on Chament Avenue and South Fourth in an attempt to control the blaze that was sweeping through the open-air market on Chament Avenue. Within a few minutes, the fire had leaped across Chament Avenue and was threatening a line of warehouses along the river. Acting Lieutenant Carl Junius in charge of the engine had a brief consultation with Lieutenant Bob Fancher of Ladder 46, and they radioed to Acting Deputy Chief George D’Oraglio who immediately ordered an alarm transmitted with orders to the responding units to expect counterorders at a moment’s notice since he had already received word of a fire in a motion picture theater not twenty blocks from the market. Engine 81 and Ladder 33 arrived in a matter of minutes and were promptly redispatched to the motion picture theater, but by this time the hook and ladder company handling the ball park fire had called in for assistance, and Chief D’Oraglio suddenly realized he had his hands full and that he would need every available engine and hook and ladder company in the city to control was was shaping up as a major disaster.
The police emergency trucks with two-way radio numbered fifteen, and the emergency station wagons with two-way radio numbered ten, and all twenty-five of these were dispatched to the scenes of the fires and explosions which were disrupting traffic everywhere on the south side and which were causing all nine of the traffic precincts to throw extra men and equipment into the stricken area.
The north side of the precinct, the area between the new quarters of the Mercantile Trust Company and the waiting room of the Isola-Majesta ferry, was suddenly devoid of policemen.
Meyer Meyer and Bert Kling, cruising in an unmarked sedan, ready to prevent any crime which occurred against the harassed places of business on their list, received a sudden and urgent radio summons and were promptly off The Heckler Case. The radio dispatcher told them to proceed immediately to a subway station on Grady Road to investigate a bomb threat there.
By 4:30P.M ., six Civil Defense units were thrown into the melee, and the Police Commissioner made a hurried call to the Mayor in an attempt to summon the National Guard. The National Guardwould eventually be called into action because what started as a simple plot to rob a bank would grow into a threat to the very city itself, a threat to equal the Chicago fire or the San Francisco earthquake, a threat which—when all was said and done—totaled billions of dollars in loss and almost razed to the ground one of the finest ports in the United States. But the wheels of bureaucracy grind exceedingly slow, and the National Guard units would not be called in until 5:40P.M ., by which time the Mercantile Trust Company’s vault would be empty, by which time invasion reports had caused panic beyond anything imagined by the deaf man, by which time the river front to the south was a blazing wall of flame, by which time everyone involved knew they were in the center of utter chaos.