Remy fell back in his seat and smelled-
SMOKE WAFTED across forests of dusted steel. “Hey. You okay?” The guy in front of Remy lowered his ventilator. His cheeks were pink beneath the mask; above it, his eyes were banded with soot. He was wearing heavy coveralls and thick gloves, the kind a welder might wear, and holding out a yellow five-gallon bucket for Brian to take.
“Oh. Sorry.” Remy looked away from the cloud and took the bucket by the handle – light, this one, just a few twisted pieces of aluminum, maybe ductwork, gray and bent – and passed it back to the pair of hands behind him, connected to an ancient firefighter, struggling to keep up. The buckets kept coming, each one a game of name that piece. You watched the guy’s shoulders in front of you to see if he strained with the bucket before you grabbed for it; the ridge of Remy’s gloves were worn at the pads on his palms. He squeezed his blistered hands.
More heavy pails passed, and then the buckets stopped and Remy took a minute to look around. There were tents everywhere now; he wondered when they’d arrived, some new team every few minutes, search and rescue from Ohio, Missouri, Maine, new volunteers seemed to spring from the cracks and crevices, people asking if he wanted energy bars or bottled water or socks. There were so many socks. Had there been a call for socks? Did he need socks?
In line, the guys edged forward and peered around one another like kids waiting for recess, trying to see why the buckets had stopped. Their boots crackled on the surface of the debris, tiny shifts like the warm pack on a deep snowfall. Remy stepped around the snaking line of men to see what was ahead. And, as was happening to him more and more, even though he didn’t exactly remember, he knew: the buckets only stopped for one reason. As if on cue, in place of a bucket, a question slowly made its way back.
“Cops? Any cops? Any cops on this line?”
Remy stepped out of line and raised his hand. He made his way carefully over the shards, each step tentative and sharp, bent steel and aluminum giving beneath his feet. As he passed the others on line, they nodded or touched him on the back. It was hot. Remy’s breath buzzed in his mask. It was a strange feeling – humbling and horrifying – to be called forward. At the front, the line took a sharp turn upward and dropped into a steaming crevasse. Halfway down, a burly ironworker had made a ledge for himself on a blackened piece of steel. He removed his ventilator and held up a bucket for Remy to see. There was something gray in there, curled and flat, and at first Remy saw a snake in the process of swallowing a rat, but then he realized what he was looking at. It was a holster. A dust-covered belt and flashlight holster. A cop’s belt and holster.
“We haven’t found anything else yet,” the ironworker said. “But we thought… someone should… I don’t know… do you want to take it?”
Remy bent over the lip of the void and reached out for-
THE BOSS was wrapping up his daily meeting in a conference room at the Javits, getting everyone ready for the next round of press conferences. He was wearing slacks, a PD polo shirt, and a satin jacket, although he changed his outfit five or six times a day. Every morning the sub-bosses had their chiefs of staff check in with The Boss’s chief of staff to see what the succession of outfits would be. They all kept at least one dust-covered jacket handy; it magically inoculated them from any second-guessing.
The Boss anchored a U-shaped table covered with odd blue bunting – as if there had been a retirement party or an anniversary – and lined with the other bosses, he at the point of the table like the star on a spur. Sub-bosses flanked him, falling away in importance: his capo de capi, the blackguard police boss, then the droopy-eyed fire boss, sanitation and housing and emergency services, tourism and legal services, and a couple of bosses Remy had never even seen. Remy remembered meetings he’d attended as the police liaison to the city counsel’s office. Their role was to present numbers to The Boss every month, and for each meeting they made up the figures a few minutes beforehand, arbitrarily increasing the numbers The Boss liked to see bigger (attorney caseload) and subtracting from the ones he liked to see smaller (claims against the city). The Boss liked to have everyone in his field of vision in these meetings, so that he could look from one to another without moving his head.
Remy looked down. He was still covered in dust, wearing work boots and coveralls, and a few people wrinkled their noses and stared at him. He edged along the wall with the sub-bosses, the capos de regime and chiefs of staff, the outer ringlet of ringers, comers and clingers, made men, drivers and ass-sniffers who sat behind the commissioners and directors and handed them briefing sheets and hankies, took notes, covered for them, and occasionally turned away to talk on cell phones, to set up lunch with mistresses and cronies. Behind The Boss, at the head of the table, was a map of the city, covered with pins, and a more detailed map of The Zero. The ceiling was low and white and it flattened the room. TV lights were set up in the corners; the light coming from them seemed like a liquid, filling the squat room.
They were getting the daily roundup, the list of casualties, and the room was suitably quiet and tense as an aide read off, one by one, the names of those gone and those barely holding on: perishable retail down sixteen; nonperishable down forty-four; advance ticket sales down fifty-nine; door sales down eighty-one; restaurant and hotel down fifty-two. The Boss shook his head at the carnage: shops failing to make lease payments, some of his favorite restaurants threatened. He struck that look, concerned but resolute, and rubbed his temples throughout the recitation of numbers. “No,” he said. “No, no, no.” A film crew was capturing the meeting for posterity, or for something, and he was careful to give them time to set up the next shot before he continued.
“Listen,” he finally said. “This is what it’s about. This. These bastards hate our freedoms. Our way of life. They hate our tapas bars and our sashimi restaurants, our all-night pita joints… They hate our very… economic well-being. This is a war we fight with wallets and purses, by making dinner reservations and going to MOMA, by having drinks at the Plaza. And we will fight back. We will fight back even if it means that every American sits through Tony and Tina’s goddamn Wedding!”
Applause and nods and then The Boss sat back in his chair. Out came the briefing books with that day’s message, schedules, and a chart that showed everyone where to stand during the next presser. Someone dumped a box of hats in the middle of the table, and they all reached in. When they were done, there were still four Port Authority hats on the table, and while The Boss read a briefing sheet his chief of staff threw up his arms at the lowered eyes around the room: “Come on, people. Someone needs to trade a police hat for a PA hat.”
Hats were swapped and then someone mentioned that the Jets wanted to come down and The Boss snapped to attention. “All of them?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What, twenty-two guys?”
“Actually, that’s just the starters. There are, like, fifty on the team.”
They debated why a football team needed fifty players and whether it was fair for teams to put healthy players on Injured Reserve and then the discussion turned to whether they could get Jets jerseys for their kids, and whether they couldn’t just get the stars’ jerseys or if they had to get the whole team and who the Jets’ stars might be. Then a deputy assistant on the wall murmured that it might be logistically impossible to bring fifty players down to The Zero without disrupting the work.
“Impossible? Hell, if I decide I want to do it, I’ll get the Jets and the Sharks down there!” The Boss slammed his fist on the table again and the camera crew became agitated. “I don’t ever want to hear that word again. Do you understand me? What kind of message does that send? That it’s impossible to get a little football team where we need them to go? That it’s impossible to get a decent curry at two A.M.? The world is watching us and if someone tells me I can’t get the Jets to the scene of a national tragedy… then goddamn it, that’s all the justification I need.”