Graveland: A Novel (25 page)

When she finally calls him, she does it standing at the window, looking out onto Ninety-third Street.

“Frank? It’s Ellen.”

“Hi. Er … just a second.” She hears some sounds in the background, muffled voices, shuffling. Then he’s on again. “Sorry. Thanks for getting back to me.” He pauses. “I … I didn’t see you anywhere last night, after we got here, I—”

“They wouldn’t let me through,” she says. “I guess you got swept up into it all, but I was held back at the first barrier. And I didn’t have your number. I tried to get a message to you, but … the general atmosphere was pretty crazy. I stayed most of the night, but eventually I just came home.”

“Right.” There’s a pause here as he considers this. “Okay.”

With that settled, sort of, he goes on to tell her about the upcoming Victoria Hannahoe interview and Lloyd Hackler’s involvement and how fucked up it all is. There’s an occasional crack in his voice as he speaks, but there’s a steely quality to it as well.

“So look,” he says in conclusion, “I could use some help. In return, you get exclusive access. Your phrase.”

This time it’s Ellen’s turn to pause and consider.

She’d given up on the story, and with good reason, but it’s funny how things can change in the space of a few hours. Because this is no longer
news
. That part of the process is over, almost. Now it’s morphing into something different, something that needs to be colored in and dissected and explained before it’s filed away in the public consciousness, archived as the Story of the Wall Street Killers, or the Siege of Orchard Street. With exclusive access to Frank Bishop—and, all going well, to Lizzie—there could be a substantial long-form piece in this.

Pretty much Ellen’s métier.

And it’d be perfect for the next issue of
Parallax
.

“Yes,” she says, “of course. Give and take.
Your
phrase.”

The second she’s off with Frank here, she’ll call Max.

“Good. Thanks.” He pauses. “Where are you now?”

She tells him and says that she can be down there in twenty minutes, half an hour.

He tells her that he’ll arrange for an NYPD detective named Lenny Byron to let her through the security barriers. That she should ask for him.

Ten minutes later, chewing on a last bite of stale bagel, she’s out on Columbus Avenue hailing a cab.

*   *   *

When the phone rings, Lizzie’s heart lurches sideways and she stands up at once from the table. Julian shifts slightly on the floor in the corner and groans, as if the sound of the phone is disturbing his sleep, but not enough to wake him up. On the couch, Alex turns his head. That’s all. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t say, “You getting that?”

Doesn’t need to.

Because she’s
getting
it.

Picking it up, clearing her throat.

Loudly.

She has no script this time, no list, and a lot less adrenaline than she had the last time. The truth is, the waiting has been awful and has effectively drained the life out of her. She knows it’s probably been a deliberate strategy to undermine morale in here, and boy has it worked, but little do they know how fragile morale was to begin with.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Lizzie. It’s Tom.”

Tom
.

This pretense of friendship is annoying. It’s patronizing. Standing at the table, next to the chair she’s been sitting in for hours, she sways from side to side.

She actually has nothing to say.

“Lizzie?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Have you reinstated Glass-Steagall yet?”

“Er…”

She closes her eyes. Shit, that was stupid. It was flippant. She wasn’t going for flippant. She’s tired. Tired isn’t even the word for it. She opens her eyes. Alex is looking up at her. She shrugs and turns away.

“Well?”

She’s not backtracking now.

“Lizzie, let’s take it one step at a time, okay? But I
do
have movement on something you asked about earlier, the communications situation?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, we’d like to get your TV back on. There’s something we’d like you to watch.”

Oh fuck
.

“What?”

“You’ll find out in a—”

“
Jesus
, Tom—”

“Look, bear with me, Lizzie, okay?”

He pauses.

She can picture him, Special Agent Tom, huddled over his equipment. What she imagines his equipment to be. She doesn’t know, headphones, recording panels, displays with dials and gauges. He’d love to move in for the kill here. She can hear it in his voice. She’s not stupid. A little bit of veiled flirting, some white empathetic noise, and then
bam—

Lizzie, we know we can count on you, and we know you’re under pressure in there, we do, so tell us, quick, the explosives
 …

She exhales loudly down the phone.

“It’s an interview,” he says, almost whispering. “I think you’ll respond to it. You will.” Before she can say anything, he adds, “Turn the TV on in about two minutes, okay? Fox News.”

And then he hangs up.

There is silence, and stillness, for probably most of the two minutes. Then Lizzie puts the phone down on the table. She walks around to the front of the couch and looks for the TV remote.

“What?” Alex says, looking up, as though he’s stoned, but making an effort.

And then, shit … holy
shit
—it occurs to her—these motherfuckers
are
stoned, on pills, sedatives, diaza-, diazap-, benzoap …

Whatever the fuck those things are called.

She’s seen them in Julian’s medicine cabinet.

What else would explain—

“What?”
Alex repeats, shifting a little on the couch.

Lizzie rolls her eyes. This has been going on for nearly a whole day, a whole twenty-four hours, but she feels like she has aged ten years in that time, more—aged and changed and moved on, shed personas, past lives, complete versions of herself … grown, expanded,
aged,
calcified, atrophied.

In a quiet voice, she says, “They want us to turn on the TV. There’s something they want us to watch.”

Alex shifts again on the couch, wriggles for a moment, and reveals that he has been sitting on the remote.

There is another lurching movement from the corner, as Julian rolls over to face the room for the first time in many hours.

Oh, what? The promise of a little TV is enough to cut through the chemical molasses here? To raise these bozos from their self-administered inertia?

“Turn it
on,
” she says.

Alex picks up the remote and flicks it.

“What channel?”

Lizzie looks at him. “Fox.”

“Of course.”

The screen pops into life with a commercial for some anti-aging cream. Alex flicks forward through basketball, a sitcom, and a couple of soaps before getting to the cable news channels. He stops at Fox.

It’s
America Unbound with Victoria Hannahoe
.

“What
is
this shit?” Julian says.

Lizzie watches as he drags himself over to the couch, crawls onto it, and sits beside his brother.

There’s an item about Iran on at the moment, a filmed report. It seems to be coming to an end.

“Why are we watching this?” Alex says.

“I don’t know. Just … wait.”

They wait.

Then it cuts back to the studio. It takes Lizzie a moment to focus and to realize that the background graphic, which has the word
siege
emblazoned across it in jagged red letters, is a treated, filtered image of Orchard Street.

In the foreground sits glamorous Victoria Hannahoe, with her extravagant red hair and striking blue eyes.

“We return now to our top story,” she says, “the ongoing siege of a downtown New York City apartment in which three radical students believed to be in possession of bomb-making equipment and a quantity of explosives are caught up in a now nearly
twenty-four-hour
standoff with the New York City Police Department, the FBI, and members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.”

Lizzie can barely process this. It seems unreal.

“The three radicals—students of Atherton College in upstate New York—have issued a wide-ranging series of demands, which, if carried out, would amount to an effective restructuring of our entire financial system.”

“Yesss.”

“Two of the three—brothers Julian and Alex Coady—are also believed to be responsible for the recent murders of two Wall Street bankers, Jeff Gale and Bob Holland, and for the attempted murder of another, Scott Lebrecht. However, it is now emerging that the leader of the group, and the ideological driving force behind it, may well be the third student holed up in the Orchard Street apartment, one Elizabeth Bishop.”

“What the
fuck
—”

Julian struggles to turn around on the couch.

Alex remains completely still.

Lizzie stares at the TV screen in disbelief.

“Elizabeth—or Lizzie—Bishop is the one who issued the demands and is also, according to police sources, understood to be the most in-control and proactive member of the group.”

Julian throws his arms up.
“This is
 …
this is BULLSHIT!”

“In an attempt to further our understanding of these events—events that are unfolding before the eyes of the world—we are now going to speak exclusively to the mother and stepfather of Lizzie Bishop, Deborah Bishop-Hackler and Lloyd Hackler—”

“Oh Jesus, oh no.”

Lizzie staggers back toward the wall as the camera pans right to reveal … her
mother
? And Lloyd fucking
Hackler
? Sitting together like teenagers, looking all attentive and concerned? This is horrendous, and where’s … where’s
Frank
?

Lloyd isn’t her fucking
father
 …

“… and let me ask you as well…”

Wh-what was that? Lizzie didn’t hear the first part of the question. She’s finding it impossible to concentrate.

“… as a child, growing up…”

“
Fuck
this,” Julian says, and starts getting up off the couch. Alex turns and looks at Lizzie, the weirdest expression on his face—this pale, sickly, confused stare—and then he lurches to the side and throws up, a liquid hurl of vomit landing in a splat on the floorboards next to the couch.

“You
bitch
,” Julian says, one eye on Alex as he comes around the end of the couch, and then directly toward her, “I should have fucking—”

“… what you might call
emotional
intelligence…”

But he stops … just as—or just after—Lizzie hears a dry
phwutt
sound. Julian’s eyes roll upward, he stumbles to the left, and the red mark on the side of his head bubbles and spurts into a sudden and rapid trickle down his cheek.

Lizzie tries to scream, but nothing happens. Her throat is dry, and her chest seizes up in pain. When Julian falls to the floor, she notices a tiny cracked hole in the window behind him. In the next moment she hears a second
phwutt
sound, and an identical hole appears beside the first one. By the time she turns and looks down at Alex, whose head is now resting on the edge of the couch, the trickle of blood on
his
cheek has already started mingling with the vomity mucus around his mouth.

Directly ahead of Lizzie, her mother is on the screen, leaning toward the camera, words coming from her mouth, only some of them getting through, only some of them comprehensible.

“… a mother’s perspective.… here now to implore my little…”

Lizzie leans against the wall behind her, stretching her arms out, pushing back hard, tears in her eyes. She looks to the right, at the window, at the two holes, waiting …

But it doesn’t come.

Then she slides quickly to the floor, out of the sightline of the window, facing the table and the back of the couch.

She feels like throwing up herself now, but manages to hold it in.

She’s no longer able to see the TV, but her mother’s voice continues to fill the room.

“… and for that reason, and that reason only, I know that Lloyd and I—”

Then it stops abruptly and is replaced by a low hum.

The connection cut.

The sudden stillness is terrifying. A few feet to her right is Julian’s crumpled body. To her left, on the floor next to the couch, she can see the glistening, lumpy peninsula stain of vomit—Alex himself unseen, but so close, slumped on the couch in front of her.

Dead.

Poor, sweet Alex.

In her worst imaginings this ended with handcuffs and a televised perp walk and orange jumpsuits and a vague, inexact, drawn-out
process,
including lots of photographers and clips gone viral and trendings and …

She’s ashamed now to think how little she thought it all through, and angry at how stupid she’s been—or
was
. Because she could have done something. She could have gone along with the guy on the phone, for instance. She could have found
some
way to neutralize the situation, to wind it down peacefully.

She wipes her eyes and nose with her sleeve.

So now what?

Is the phone going to ring? Will there be a gentle rap on the door?

Seconds pass, each one unbearable, each one hijacked by images and thoughts and emotions she has no way of resisting or fighting off. She thinks of her mom on the TV, a tracker scout calling back at her from the hostile, oxygen-thin media landscape. She thinks of her dad; she’d earlier imagined seeing him through the more intimate medium of the apartment-door peephole. When she got back from her long walk yesterday afternoon and plugged in her phone to charge it, she saw that he’d left voice messages and texts, so many of them—which had made her smile. She should have called him then.

If she had, all of this might be different.

She thinks of her brother, John. She should have—

Jesus.

What?

Is that all she’s got left? A fucking catalog of
should haves
 …