A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror (32 page)

“Lee Gate’s out that way,” Lou said, pointing to the left. Titus started to make the turn. “Hold it,” he said. “Pull out that way. Over there, beside that grandstand. Doubleday Stadium.”

Titus pulled into a parking lot beside the practice football field.

“What now?” Titus asked nervously.

“Give me the keys and come with me,” Lou said.

He dragged his bad leg as they moved slowly along the gravel walkway bordering the natural amphitheater that looked out onto the sweep of the Hudson as it narrowed and turned at Constitution Island. They slid between the cannons that lined the walk, drifting shadows in the midst of trees, invisible to anyone further than fifty or so feet away. Lou sat on the lowest step at the base of Trophy Point with Titus at his side and looked out and above the spectator stands at the edge of the plain to the hills on the dark horizon.

“Don’t seem like a place a guy oughta smoke,” Titus said, finally. “Names in stone. Cannons and chains. Ghosts out walking.”

“I just want to sit here awhile,” Lou breathed.

“You been here a lot?” Titus asked, staring straight ahead. He hadn’t once looked at Lou’s face. “None of my business.”

“I was here way back. Hardly anybody knows that. Except you, now.”

“Is that trouble?” Titus asked.

“You’re not the only one who knows. But
they
didn’t. They knew everything, but not that,” Lou said. He stood and hobbled out to the street, and then looked back and up to the top of the tall, circular obelisk. He moved around the base of it, and then sat again with Titus looking out at the faint moonlight on the Hudson.

“I knew there had to be a place where everything was all very clear. Right is right; wrong is wrong. No lying, no cheating, no quibbling, no nothing.” He watched as Titus, beside him, pulled his hands into the sleeves of his jacket. “I’d like to get back to that,” Lou went on. “To where the only thing gray is the uniform. I had it here. Endured people screaming in my face, pushups, pull ups, Integral Calculus six times a week. Church services at dawn, right down there, with sun coming over the hills and the river rolling on forever. It was beautiful. It was perfect. I had it. Then I quit.”

Titus stood and moved ten feet away onto the gravel path. Then he came back to sit beside Lou again.

“I don’t want to hear it, man, if it means that somewhere down the line, it’s gonna be: ‘You know too much.’”

“You stand at the blackboard six times a week and work the math. You work at your board with your chalk and you don’t look right, you don’t look left, where someone else is working the same problem,” Lou said, staring straight ahead down the river.

“Somebody, I still don’t know who, said he saw me copying his board. I don’t blame him. Not reporting a violation was as bad as the violation itself. I don’t deny I thought about doing it, but I never did. The Honor Committee agreed with me. Only, I could see the difference from then on. I could see that nobody, not even my roommates, would look me straight in the eyes anymore.”

Lou stood and hobbled down the path toward Flirtation Walk. Titus followed. When Lou stopped, Titus came up beside him.

“Up there on the high road, ain’t ya?” Titus said, quietly. “I can see it’s important to a man like you.”

“It was,” Lou said.

“Losing respect is hard.” A pause, then: “Getting it, man; that’s even harder.”

“Let’s go, Titus.”

Lou turned and looked back at Titus staring straight ahead in the darkness. He limped to the car with Titus at his side and then climbed into the back seat. Titus pulled away from Trophy Point, headed for Lee Gate at the north end of the post.

“When we get to the gate, go slow and roll down the window, but keep moving and act like you’ve done this a million times before. With any luck...” Lou twisted and looked out the back window where five thousand young men and women kept the shallow sleep that comes just before dawn. Soon these barracks would come alive with the bugles and drums of reveille. Soon his own young men, Pete and Oliver, would wake to a picture of their father that he wished he could burn.

“Mind if I smoke?” Titus asked.

“Be my guest,” Lou said. He turned to face the front. Survival was no longer enough. In the end, he had to bring them—Buck, Stanfield, Copeland, and the rest—down with him.

They crept through Lee Gate without incident, the MP merely waving them through, and they turned left onto Route 293. They snaked past the gold depository, the ski run, and the West Point golf course. The highway wound back and forth, climbing the side of the Crow’s Nest. The lights of the river and the towns alongside disappeared behind them. He allowed a deep breath.

“Any more roadblocks?” he asked.

“We went around the only two I know about.”

“Good, just keep driving.”

“You’re the guy, ain’t ya?”

“Which?”

“The cops came through all the trailers, night before last. Said there was a woman.”

“A woman? Well, then it isn’t me they’re talking about, is it?”

“Whatever you say.”

He fought to stay alert. There could be more roadblocks, but that likelihood diminished with the number of miles they put between them and the Bear Mountain Bridge.

“If we hit a road block, we go back to the original plan. You better be a good bluffer. Let me have one of your cigarettes.”

Titus flipped the pack into the back seat. “You got a light?” he asked.

“Yeah, a light I got.”

A narrow, twisting road wound around the edge of the mountain. There was a three-foot stone wall to keep cars from tumbling over a five hundred foot drop to the river below. They met no cars coming from the other direction. Titus negotiated all of the curves like the expert he was.

“You drive this road a lot?”

“I work in Cornwall up here. There’s a little military school.”

“No more roadblocks. I sure as hell hope you’re right, Titus. You know what I mean?”

“I know,” Titus said.

They went through Cornwall and kept climbing up and into Newburgh. They got across the river without having to stop at so much as a red light. On the other side, he directed Titus to take Route 84 to the Taconic Parkway and south toward the city. Once on the parkway, he knew it would be a long drive to Manhattan. He sat back in the corner of the car, propped his swollen thigh across the seat, and looked out the window.

He dared to breathe deeply. He was free of the whole area around the bridge and all the danger of being trapped. Now he was going to get into the city where it would be next to impossible for the authorities to find him among all those people. Once there, he’d be able to think about his next move. There would be food and water; maybe even a room where he could catch some real sleep.

Through the windshield, road signs seemed to loom slowly at the side of the highway up ahead, float steadily toward the car, and grow progressively whiter and clearer until they darted past and disappeared in darkness. The headlights illuminated the center stripe, but it was total blackness ahead. Past a certain distance, beyond the beams, it could be the end of the world.

“What’s your speed, Titus?” he asked.

“Fifty-five.”

They picked up the Saw Mill River Parkway at White Plains, then upper Broadway, right by the Cross Bronx Expressway. They were in the middle of the city. No other cars on the road. Dawn was almost upon them. They tooled south on Broadway between the low shop fronts on either side of the street. The traffic lights were with them as they continued down toward lower Manhattan, cutting by the corner of Central Park West, and then slicing diagonally on the island through Times Square to 34th Street.

“Pull over to the side. Right here.” Lou said.

There wasn’t another car or person on the street. In the center of the biggest city in the country, it was absolutely quiet. Ghostly plumes of vapor rose from the sewer grates all the way down 34th. For a long while, Lou sat there without saying anything. Titus, too, was quiet, looking straight out the windshield.

“This is where we part company, Titus. I’ve got just one problem.”

“For chrissake don’t shoot me. I done everything you said. I wouldn’t know you if I met you on the street this afternoon. Besides, I’m going right back home as soon as you get out.”

“What am I going to do with this weapon, Titus?”

“You’re going to look kind of funny jivin’ around town with a rifle under your arm.”

“That’s what I was thinking. I can’t leave it with you.”

“I got a brown paper sack back there on the floor somewhere with my grease rags in it. You could break it down and carry it around in the bag.”

“That’s it. Perfect.”

“You leavin’ now?”

“I want you to do one more thing, Titus. I want you keep your eyes straight to the front and don’t look back. I’m going to get out and walk away from here. If you do what I say, there won’t be any trouble. Don’t blow it now.”

He opened the back door and stepped to the ground on his bad leg, sending a shot of pain clear to his ankle. He hesitated there until it subsided. “I’m leaving you a couple of bucks back here. That’s for gas and grub. So long.”

* * *

WASHINGTON—The moment of truth is at hand for a beleaguered president today as the nation goes to the voting booth. Every major opinion poll of the last two weeks has forecast a sure defeat for Mr. Bliss, despite an almost frenzied series of statements and speeches promising massive crackdowns on crime, increased military expenditures, and emphasis on domestic law-and-order themes. Only a dramatic personal appearance by the president at the site of the terrorist bombing at Bear Mountain Bridge in New York, and his presence at the “anti-crime command post” ever since, appear as bright spots for the president in this election campaign.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Lou backed away from the car and watched it dissolve into the vapor plumes down 34th Street toward the East River. His thigh was badly swollen; muscle tissue strained against the drum-tight skin from his butt to his knee. Even though the pants were baggy and riding high above the shoe, his skin was on fire.

He struggled down 34th, projecting purpose on a sidewalk devoid of people. The sky was light gray now. The city shadows were sucked into the subway stairwell that loomed black half a block ahead. If there was any line he knew in all of New York, it was the Seventh Avenue IRT. Straight downtown.

The token booth operator yawned long and loud. Lou shoved two dollars through the opening in the glass; a token and three quarters slid back and nested in the sculpted tray. He pushed his way through the turnstile and hobbled to the edge of the platform. He saw no one else on his side of the tracks all the way down to the end.

A cat-sized rat scuttled under the third rail and through the newspapers and coffee cups littering the space between the tracks. On the other side of the station, a cluster of women—gabbing in Spanish and wearing the garb of the cleaning trade—waited for the train to Central Park South. A low rumble from a long way down the tunnel reverberated in the tiled arch of the station; then the gleam of headlights came dancing on the rails. The #1 train wrenched to a stop. The right door socked his shoulder as he limped into the car. The door operator leaned out of his window, watched him for a moment, but said nothing.

The train made all the stops—28th Street, 23rd, 18th, 14th, Christopher, Houston, Canal, Franklin, Chambers, and Cortlandt—passing a gallery of new and old ceramic tile mosaic signs at each station. Lou hip-hopped out the door at Rector. It was a hard pull to get up the stairs. Outside in the air again, he took a deep breath and looked around. He was nearly directly across the street from Trinity Churchyard. It was right there that he’d stopped after coming out of Buck’s office, when the whole thing had started. Sitting there on a bench, he’d told himself that nothing bad could happen.

A MacDonald’s blazed bright on his side of the street. He ordered eggs and coffee. The woman at the cash register couldn’t tear herself from her
Village Voice
, even as she seized his money. He made it to a table. A young man in a paper hat and apron pushed a long-handled broom, gathering the mess from the night customers. The sweeper nudged the foot of a bearded derelict sleeping at a table, who rose without arguing and stumbled out the door.