Downtown

Lexington was empty to Thirty-Fourth, and below Thirty-Fourth it was not.

It happened in a block. At Thirty-Fifth he was doing fifty down an avenue with nothing on it but a bus stopped at a stop with its doors open and nobody getting on or off, and at Thirty-Third there was a wall of cars from kerb to kerb, all of them stopped, all of them facing south, and their brake lights on, and their drivers out of them, standing in the road beside their open doors, looking east.

He put the siren on harder. It made no difference. There was nowhere for them to go.

“East,” said Teresa. “Costello said the east side.”

He went east on Thirty-Third, on the wrong side of the road, with the siren going and the lights going round, past the stopped cars, and the drivers standing beside them turned their heads to watch the white car with the City’s crest on it go by on the wrong side of the road, and their faces were all the same face, and none of them moved out of the way, because none of them could, and none of them shouted, because there was nothing to shout.

Second Avenue was moving. Just. A lane of it, the left lane, where somebody from the City’s police in shirtsleeves was standing at the corner of Thirtieth with his arms out holding the other lanes, waving the emergency vehicles through, an ambulance, a fire appliance, another ambulance, all going south, and when he saw Car Six he waved it through too without looking at who was in it.

He went south behind the ambulance. Twenty-Third. Fourteenth. The ambulance went through the lights at Fourteenth and turned east, towards the river, and the tunnel, and Queens, and the airport, and he did not follow it. He went on south.

Below Fourteenth the island had stopped.

---

He had never seen it like that and he did not think anybody had. The avenue was full, solid, the cars and the vans and the buses and the cabs all stopped in it, nose to tail, in every lane, and the pavements were full of people, and the people on the pavements were not walking anywhere. They were standing. Thousands of them, along both sides of Second Avenue, outside the shops and the bars and the laundromats and the churches, standing on the pavement and in the doorways and on the steps, holding up their telephones and looking at them and looking up from them at each other, and looking east, and looking north, towards midtown, where the smoke was, a long grey smear up there over the towers in the sun, which you could see from here. He had not known you could see it from here.

He went down the middle of the avenue, between the lanes, on the white lines, with the siren. Inches. The mirrors on the stopped cars folded back as he went past them, one after another, flat, with a small sound.

“The radio,” said Teresa.

“The radio doesn’t work.”

“Not that one.” She reached across and turned the knob on the ordinary radio, the car radio, the one in the dashboard that the City put in every car and that was supposed to be for the traffic and that every officer in the City’s police used for the hockey. It came on in the middle of a song. She turned the dial. Static. A man selling a car. Static.

The voice.

“…the time is twelve-oh-four. We are still in New Westminster, and we are staying here.”

It was the man on the national service. The same voice, very level, very clear, as if from the next room. Car Six’s ordinary radio, which cost the City nineteen pounds and was supposed to be for the traffic, worked perfectly. It worked better than anything they had had on their shoulders all morning.

Teresa looked at it.

“Nineteen pounds,” she said. “From the shop on Canal Street. And the RAC’s got radios that don’t talk to anybody.”

---

At Houston he went right, across to the Bowery, and down it, on the wrong side again, past the restaurant supply shops with their steel sinks and their stacked chairs out on the pavement, and the people standing among the chairs, and at Chatham Square, at the bottom of the Bowery, where the road went to pieces in a star of streets, it stopped entirely.

He sat in it. In front of him the back of a bus, a long one, with an advertisement on it for a film, a man and a woman on a beach. Behind him, close, a van with FLOWERS on its side. On either side, the stopped cars, with nobody in them; their drivers were on the pavement, with the others, standing. The siren went on and on and nobody moved, because there was nowhere, and after a minute he turned it off, because it was only noise, and the lights went on going round on their own, on the roof, throwing blue on the back of the bus.

He looked at his watch. It was eight minutes past twelve.

“We walk,” said Teresa.

“It’s a mile.”

“Then we run.” But she did not move. She sat with her hand on the door and looked at the radio, and the radio said, in its level voice, that the bridges and tunnels were being managed, and that the airport was closed, and that people should not use the telephone unless they had to, and she listened to it say all of that, and did not open the door.

He looked at her.

She was waiting for something. He did not know what it was. He thought she knew what it was and had not let herself know it, the way you do not let yourself know a thing you have been afraid of for an hour in case knowing it makes it happen.

“Teresa.”

“One more,” she said. “One more minute. I want to hear the boats.”

---

It came at twelve minutes past.

The music stopped. There had been music, low, for a minute, something with an organ in it, the way the national service played music when there was nothing to say. It stopped in the middle of a bar.

“There has been a third explosion.”

Teresa did not move. Her hand was on the door.

“It was at the Whitehall Terminal at the Battery,” said the man on the national service, “at about ten minutes past twelve, and what we are told is that it was in a boarding hall at what is the busiest crossing hour of the day.”

He heard her breathe out. It was a very small sound. It was the only sound she made.

“Grand Central at twenty-three minutes to eleven. Kennedy at about a quarter to twelve. Whitehall at about ten past. Three explosions, three places, one morning. I am still not going to join them together for you and I am aware of how that sounds by now.”

She opened the door.

She did not say anything. She did not look at him. She got out of Car Six in the middle of Chatham Square with the lights going round on the roof and the radio still talking, and she left the door open, and she went between the stopped cars to the pavement, and through the people on the pavement, who moved for her uniform and her dust, and he was out of the car before he knew it and after her, and he left his door open too, and Car Six stood there in the middle of the avenue with both its front doors open and its lights going round and the man on the national service saying, to nobody, in the empty car, Anna Kowalski is still at the cordon at Grand Central.

---

They ran.

She went right, onto Park Row, without looking to see which street it was, because she knew, and she ran down it, south, in the middle of the road, between the stopped cars, because the pavements were too full, and he ran beside her. He could not remember the last time he had run like that. Not on the job; you did not run on the job, you walked fast and looked as though you were not hurrying. At the academy, perhaps, on the track, in the first weeks. On the beams, once, at twenty, when a gust came and a man shouted and everybody ran along a girder towards the column, forty storeys up, and got to it, and held it, and laughed.

She ran well. She was forty and she ran like a girl, with her head down and her arms going and her hat gone, she had lost it somewhere on Vanderbilt Avenue, and the dust coming off her as she ran in a little cloud, like smoke off a fire.

He did not say anything to her. He did not say Eddie. He did not say he’ll be all right or he was on the water or they’ll have been out in the harbour or any of the things there were to say, because none of them were things he knew, and because she did not want them, and because there was no breath for them.

The people on the pavements were looking south now, all of them, towards the harbour, where there was another smoke, smaller, lower, nearer, white, going up into the blue over the bottom of the island, and they could see it ahead of them over the roofs as they ran.

---

And the march was in the way.

He saw the banners first. Over the heads of the people on the pavements, over the roofs of the stopped cars, a long way ahead down Park Row, where the road opened out towards the park and the bridge came down onto it from the east on its great stone ramp: banners. Dozens of them. Coming down the ramp from the bridge in a long slow line, in the sun, one after another, each on its two poles, red and green and blue and gold, bellying in the wind off the river, swaying with the steps of the people holding them up, and the people under them, a river of people, thousands, coming down off the bridge from Brooklyn in their work jackets and their caps, slowly, at a walk, the way a march walks, and music coming from somewhere among them, a band, drums, very faint.

The Brooklyn column. The building trades. Coming off the bridge.

He saw it and he thought: the march. The bloody march.

That was all he thought. He thought it the way you think it when you are late and the road is closed. He did not think anything else about it. He thought that it was between them and the Battery, a wall of people a quarter of a mile thick coming down off the bridge across Park Row, and that they would have to get through it, or round it, and that it would cost them minutes, and that the stewards would want to know why, and he thought, running, we’ll get through at the junction. They’ll be holding a gap at the junction to let the other column in. We’ll go through the gap.

He did not think of it as anything but in the way. Nobody did. There was no reason on earth to.

They ran down Park Row towards it. The people on the pavements here were not looking at their telephones. They were looking at the march. Some of them were cheering, still. Some of them had not heard. A man on the steps of a building with a beer in his hand raised it at the banners coming down the ramp and shouted something, and the marchers under the nearest banner shouted something back, and laughed.

Teresa was ahead of him. She was going for the place where the ramp came down onto Park Row and met the street coming down from the north, the junction, where the column from Brooklyn coming off the bridge met the column from Queens coming down from the north and the two became one and turned south together for the Battery and the speeches, and where the stewards would be holding the gaps. He could see it now. A big open place where four streets met at the corner of the park, with the trees of the park beyond it in their thin bright green, and the column from Queens coming into it from the north, from the right, under blue banners with wheels on them and the names of the bus depots and the subway lines, and the column from Brooklyn coming into it from the left, off the foot of the ramp, and the two of them meeting in the middle in a slow crowd, with the stewards in their armbands at the edges with their arms out, keeping the gaps, letting one section of one column through and then one section of the other, the way you feed two ropes into a knot.

The Brooklyn column was held. A section of it, at the foot of the ramp, just short of the junction, was standing still, letting the Queens column through.

Over the section that was standing still, on two poles, held up by two men in work jackets, dark red, with a gold fringe that had lost half its gold, an old banner.

The faded painted man on his beam against the sky. The rivet gun. The city under him. The Latin.

And in front of it, at the front of the section, between the banner and the junction, with his back to Tom and his arms out wide on either side of him, holding the line, a young man in a work jacket with the local’s crest on the back and a white armband on his sleeve.

He knew the back. He would have known it anywhere. He had stood beside it at a sink every Sunday since he was ten.

Teresa had reached the steward line. She was at the end of it, at the pavement, saying something to a steward with his arms out, pointing south, at the smoke over the harbour. The steward was shaking his head, pointing at the Queens column going through the junction in front of them, saying wait, wait, thirty seconds, they’re coming through.

Tom came up to the line beside the young man in the armband.

The young man in the armband turned his head.

It was a quarter past twelve, less a minute.