The lights outside the theater swept the night. I saw them crisscrossing over the towers and billboards of Times Square when I was still several blocks north. It was dark now, but whatever stars there were were dazzled to nothing by the radiance of Broadway. Spotlit images of half-naked women several stories high, soaring electrified soda cans and golden arches, twinkling ads for shoes and video cameras, gigantic heads talking on TV screens the size of houses: They washed the sky black; they washed the faces on the street below to a corpselike pallor. Thousands of faces, mobs of faces, hustling, pushing, flowing under the lights, chalk-skinned and dead-eyed. I shouldered through the crush of them as quickly as I could.
I had called 911 from the cab. I must've sounded crazy to the operator. I must've sounded almost as crazy as I felt. But I didn't care. I babbled it all out in response to her bored, drawling questions. A massive amount of explosives, I said. The New Coliseum, I said. The End of Civilization as We Know It, I said. There would be over three thousand people there. The secretary of state, the governor, the mayor. Not to mention the crowds in the street turning out to watch the celebrities. My voice was strained with exhaustion as I explained it. The olive-skinned driver in the seat in front of me watched me warily in his rearview mirror. I went on to tell the 911 operator what I had done to Rashid, how I had left him broken and unconscious on the floor of his office. I stared out the window. I thought: I must be completely out of my mind. I thought: My life is over.
The operator kept trying to pacify me. She kept telling me security on the scene was airtight. No one could get through, she said. No one could get explosives inside. I tried to explain that the explosives were already inside. Maintenance and security had all been compromised, infiltrated. It was a long-term plan. They had blueprints, C4, detonation cord to cut through steel, engineers with the skill to plant the stuff for maximum demolition. The operator kept changing the subject. She kept asking me about Rashid. She didn't seem all that interested in the rest of it. She didn't believe me.
The traffic grew steadily thicker as the cab neared Columbus Circle. By the time we were centrifuged out of the big rotary and fired off down Broadway, the flow of cars was congealing. A few blocks more and we had become one more irregular shape in a motionless patchwork of multicolored metal and taillights, stalled blue buses, shadowy heads behind panes of thick gray glass. The traffic lights strung above us went from green to red and back to green again, but nothing moved forward.
"You have to clear out the theater!" I croaked urgently into the phone.
The cabbie watched me anxiously in his mirror.
"What is your location right now, sir?" drawled the 911 woman.
Exasperated, I finally killed the connection. I slipped the phone into my pocket.
"There is an event up ahead," said the cabbie in what I think was a Turkish accent. "I can't go any farther." He wanted me out of his cab.
I took out my wallet. "I'll walk from here," I said.
He didn't try to disguise his relief.
I got out of the car and started jogging south along the sidewalk. There were couples all along the way, men and women arm in arm, dressed up for a night on the town. I dodged this way and that between them. The air was cold and damp on my cheeks, but there was still no mist, no rain. I could no longer see the roiling clouds in that blacked-out sky. Soon I was out of breath. I fell into a quick, striding walk. The crowd on the street grew thicker. I had to use my hands to get through like a man wading through the high reeds in a swamp. All the same, I was still traveling faster than the cars. Most of the cars had stopped dead. Only a few were jerking forward here and there, looking for half a foot's advantage. Horns blared. Exhaust gathered. The air was suffocating, rank.
Now the Broadway lights grew brighter up ahead. They rose higher and the sky was a deeper black. The crowd on the street swelled. As I twisted and wedged my way though the tide of bodies, I looked up-and it was then I saw Times Square, the boulevards intersecting and dividing, the great billboards lining them, and the towering lights-and I saw the kliegs of the New Coliseum, five of them, spearing the night and sweeping back and forth over the surface of it, crossing and uncrossing. I fought my way toward them through the crowd.
It seemed I would never reach the place. The square was packed with people, a heaving sludge of them making its slow way north and south. I edged into the southbound flow, but I couldn't break through it or get ahead of its inching, muddy pace. I felt trapped and smothered and small at the bottom of a canyon of lights, a canyon of enormous billboard bodies and enormous talking heads on their house-sized TVs. The nearness and solidity of all those other humans and the nearness and the stares and the corpselike pallor of so many faces pressing in around me and the crushing radiance of all the soaring, flashing, overhanging signs and screens made me claustrophobic and nauseous-or maybe it was the flashbacks that came into my mind now-now that I couldn't distract myself, couldn't run or shove or shout into a phone: images of Rashid rigid in agony, the sound his knee made when the hammer struck it, the sound of his frantic shrieks behind the gag-and me hanging over him with the hammer raised, and with the small, dark, secret hope hunkered in my consciousness like some bright-eyed gnome-the hope that the terrorist son of a bitch would refuse to answer me again…
Sick, I made my way in the human sludge, beneath the oppressive, towering Broadway lights.
The theater was off the center of the square, just west of the intersecting boulevards. I pushed into the side street and saw it. It rose spotlit above a dark mass of people crushed against the police barricades. It was elegant and vast, a swirl of pilasters and arched windows rising like a great stone wedding cake five stories high. The windows were bathed in golden light from the chandeliers above the lobby. You could see the guests rising on the spiraling marble stairways within: women of gliding elegance in sequined dresses and twinkling jewels, men of substance, confidence and wealth in suits as straight and black against the white steps as the sharp keys on a grand piano. And children-I was surprised to see so many children-the boys in ties and jackets, flumping about and clowning self-consciously, the girls in dresses, staring goggle-eyed and openmouthed, as if trying to remember everything forever. All in all, watching the glittering people on the spiral stairs through the window was like viewing a scene in a diorama or a snow globe, some faraway vision of yearning charm.
Out in front of the theater, off to one side between the theater and the crowd, the five big klieg lights swiveled on a couple of flatbed trailers, sending their beams into the night. Next to the trailers, there was an area all aglow with spectacular silver radiance. I couldn't see it over the massed people, but I guessed that that was where the red carpet was, where the movie stars and dignitaries were arriving in their limousines and sweeping their glorious way past the cameras and microphones of the gawkers and reporters to join those already on the spiral stairs inside.
I approached the edges of the crowd. Jammed and throbbing with humanity as it was, the scene was more-or-less orderly. The police had closed the street to all traffic except the limousines coming from the west, and were allowing pedestrians to enter only from the east. As a result, the onlookers swarmed steadily in from Broadway while police calmly directed the limos swinging in off Eighth Avenue. I caught glimpses of the big cars approaching one after another, vanishing behind the throng to where, judging by the shouts and camera flashes, the celebrities disembarked. It was all very well organized. The sabotaged theater was filling up quickly.
I wedged my way into the crowd and started pushing toward the front. "Excuse me. Excuse me," I grunted again and again. There were so many people. Thousands inside, thousands more out here. They were packed together so densely, they formed a nearly solid mass. I had to shoulder and elbow and shove my way through-"Excuse me. Excuse me."-nauseated by the smothering flesh all around me, squeezing past body after body toward the barricades.
At last, clammy with sweat, I broke through to the front of the crowd and emerged into the magnificent silver light around the red carpet. It was a wonderful light, like none I'd ever seen. It turned the world the color of the moon. Emanating from a series of standing lamps arrayed around the edges of the mob, it poured down on the carpet and splashed up over the New Coliseum's pristine white facade. The black limos pulling up into the glow seemed to take on a startling added dimension. You know those books for kids, those pop-up books where 3-D objects leap up off the page at you? That's how the cars seemed suddenly to leap out of reality as they entered the light. One was arriving even as I reached the barricade. I staggered, blinking, out of the darkness of the multitude, and there it was. A doorman in a blinding livery of scarlet and gold opened the back door. Out, then, into that extra fullness of existence stepped a man I recognized from movie posters, one of the popular comedians of the last few years, and with him, his starlet wife.
There followed several swift, disorienting moments of machinelike efficiency, a human clockwork engineered to allow the glamorous couple an assigned interval of the crowd's admiration before they were ushered toward a fifteen-second interview under the theater awning, and finally swept inside as the next limousine pulled up behind them. Through all this they were accompanied by a chittering, insectile swarm of paparazzi nibbling at the edges of their silver space and by graceful television cameras that swooped around them, dancing attendance in the outer shadows. It was a strange thing to see. It had a strange effect on me. I found myself frozen there, staring, fascinated, my desperation almost forgotten, as if I'd suddenly been rendered nothing more here than an observer, as if I were at home, in fact, watching the whole thing on TV. The passage of the arriving stars from limo to interviewer to theater became everything, a sequence distinct from its surroundings. The chaos around me, the terror inside me, seemed to become dim and peripheral. The police working to keep the crowd at bay, the sound equipment on its trucks, the klieg lights, the photographers, and the chaotic depths of the mob itself, became a blurred frame to the central progression, a border of living irrelevance to the fullness of the comedian's celebrated life. All the force of reality seemed to me to be not with myself but with the couple on the red carpet, with the white teeth in the comic's tanned face, the sparkling sequins on his wife's black dress. The truth of their being, the being of their being, the dimness of my own somehow-lesser presence on the border of the great glow, seemed to grow more intense with every precisely organized second until the sheer force of their actuality climaxed as they stepped up to the interviewer at the theater entrance and I recognized her-her blonde curls, her avid eyes, her bee-stung lips-it was Sally Sterling-and the shock of her familiar appearance rendered the scene on the red carpet so entirely there somehow that I felt, in contrast, I had all but vanished.
It was, as I say, strange; disorienting: the quickness of it, and the brightness of it and my own unimportance on the edges of it practically paralyzed me at first, paralyzed my mind. I just stood there-just stood there, staring. And even when I started to think again, I couldn't think clearly, I couldn't think of anything to do. How could I get closer to the theater? How could I get inside? How could I warn the people-so many people-that they were all about to die?
There were uniformed police patrolling the barricades at every point. There were many more plainclothes security people standing guard watchfully within the protected circle. I thought of grabbing one of them, screaming at him, warning them all of the danger. But they would've arrested me on the spot. I knew they would have. They would have called headquarters and found out who I was: a murder suspect trying to distract an investigation with unfounded terrorist scares. They would have carted me away and it all would've gone on without me. I could already see it in my mind's eye-the chaos-the rubble-the death.
So I stood there-that's all-stood there and stared, watching the scene with a swiftly growing sense of panic and helplessness and confusion. Another limousine pulled up and-great God-there was the secretary of state, tall and sleek in a shiny tuxedo. He stepped smoothly from the car. Took his moment in the moony glow, smiling, waving. And I stood there, watching him, fairly panting in my powerlessness, and thinking, Him, too. They will kill him, too. And looking at the crowds, the thousands all around, and thinking: They will kill everyone for their unforgiving god.
The thought brought me back to myself, back to my senses. As the secretary of state was swept along to his moment before Sally's microphone, I began to take stock. My eyes started moving, searching the scene here and there, looking for anything, any weakness in the defenses, any possible point of entry.
I found one.
The theater stretched over much of the block. On this side of it, near the corner, there was a kind of narrow courtyard, formed by the theater's wall and the rear of a massive hotel on Times Square. A short way into the courtyard, I could make out a door-a stage door or maybe an entrance for technicians-I couldn't tell which from where I was. The entrance to the courtyard was roped off. There were two patrolmen guarding the rope. Two more patrolmen stood on the other side of the courtyard, facing away toward the next street over. I thought: If I could create a diversion, if I could draw the attention of these two cops at the rope, maybe I could rush past them, down the courtyard to the door. Of course the door might be locked. And the two cops at the far end might spot me. And if I did get in, there'd be sure to be more cops inside. But it was the only thing I could think of, the only chance I had.
I began to try to think of ways to create the diversion I needed. Nothing came to me. My thoughts spun like tires in the mud. If I started shouting-"Fire!"-"Bomb!"-the cops would come right for me. I'd be the first one they carried off. Even if I managed to start a panic, I'd be trampled in the rush.
I stood there-stood there-the time passing, my heart beating, my thoughts going round and round.
Then-what happened next-well, it was simply unbelievable.
No one ever reported it-not in context, anyway-not as a relevant part of the events of that night. The TV news never mentioned it. Neither did any of the major papers. I think it was just as Patrick Piersall said, just as he had told me in the Ale House. What happened next didn't fit the story. It was too ridiculous, too undignified, completely out of keeping with the general tone of the terror and tragedy that followed.
But it's the truth. So I tell it here.
The theater was now nearly full, the show about ready to begin. There were only two more limousines yet to arrive. These-the most important limousines of all-had been saved for last.
As I stood there-racking my brains, helpless, fearful, expecting the explosion at every minute-the first of the cars pulled into the heightened silver reality at the head of the red carpet in front of me. The gold-and-scarlet doorman plucked open the back door. Out into the light stepped Juliette Lovesey.
She leapt instantly into vital relief, radiating presence and charisma. Even I-even at that desperate moment-started and stared at her, struck to have her appear in person right there in front of me like that. She was much smaller than she looked on screen, just a little slip of a thing, really, but as perfectly proportioned as a doll. The swell of her breasts, the line of her short white dress, the liquid curves of her tan legs all had the added charm of a thing in miniature. So, too, the aching fragility and vulnerability of her face, framed in the cascades of shining brown hair, were all the more powerful when you could see for yourself what a tiny and delicate creature in fact she was.
As she stepped gracefully out of the car onto the carpet, there was a collective surging sigh from the crowd. It was an amazing sound, deep, heartfelt, passionate beyond anything I could describe: a collective moan of admiration and affection and sympathy. They loved her. You could feel it in the very air: They loved her as if she were their own.
I understood the phenomenon at once. They had all seen the interview. That interview Juliette had done with Sally last night. The announcement she had made: that she was carrying Todd Bingham's baby, that she was going to keep the child even though Bingham had left her for Angelica Eden. Everyone here had seen it, just as I had. In the moment that one tear had fallen from Juliette's lashes onto her cheek, she had changed in the public mind. She had gone from being a spoiled, wealthy, irresponsible narcissist to a wronged woman, ill used and left behind. She had become, that is to say, something the women in the crowd could understand, could identify with, something the men could sympathize with and yearn to protect. She had become a sparkling version of themselves. And with that, she had won them over. They loved her. Loved her.
Juliette felt this. I could see she did. She seemed to grow in stature where she stood, transported into a golden awareness of her own nobility. She responded to the people with a shy, sweet wave, a gesture both patient and courageous. Then she walked with modestly mincing steps down the carpeted path to where Sally waited to receive her.
There followed a quick coda to their TV interview. Sally wore the same girlfriend expression of tender concern. "How are you feeling, Juliette?" she asked. The words were freighted with meaning.
Juliette smiled brightly, bravely. "I'm doing great, Sally. It's great to be here and I'm really looking forward to enjoying this great
… great moment in the history of movies."
The volcanic roar erupted from the heart of the crowd. They cheered. They whooped and applauded. They loved her: her courage; her dignity. She was perfect. She waved to them again. Sally reached out and gave the actress's hand a gentle, encouraging squeeze: Never surrender. Then an usher guided Juliette to the theater doors-and she was gone, the crowd still applauding.
I stood watching after her, frantic, wanting to cry out, wanting to warn her, warn everyone, trying to think, think, think of what I could do to stop the coming massacre.
Then the last limousine drew into the glow around the red carpet.
It was Angelica, of course-Angelica Eden with her new lover, Todd Bingham. I read later in one of the celebrity blogs that the two of them had been watching Juliette's arrival on a TV in the car. They had seen what had happened, the outpouring of love and support from the audience. According to the blog-and I guess they'd interviewed the limo's driver-Angelica let out a snarling blue streak of curses. "That bitch! That fucking bitch! That fucking shit-faced bitch!" Because, of course, if the crowd loved Juliette, if they sympathized with her as the wronged woman, they were going to hate Angelica as the vixen who'd stolen her man, who'd left her child fatherless and caused that crystal tear to go spilling down her cheek on TV last night. There was no telling how many charity appearances Angelica would have to make, how many African orphans she'd have to adopt to win back the sympathy of the moviegoing audience. According to the blog, Angelica started hissing at Todd as if she were a snake. She said she would obliterate Juliette from the people's minds. She would eradicate the news coverage of her triumphant arrival.
"What are you doing? What are you doing?" Todd is said to have squealed at her.
"If nothing else," Angelica Eden announced to him, "I'm not gonna let that fucking bitch upstage me!"
The car pulled to a stop before the carpet. The liveried doorman opened the door. Todd fairly leapt out into the silver incandescence-eager, maybe, to get away from his lover's tantrum. Like Juliette, he was also smaller in real life than he looked on television, even more delicate and insubstantial, though his blond, handsome head was large, almost weirdly oversized, which apparently made it look good on film. He smoothed down the front of his jacket with one hand, waved to the crowd with the other.
Then Angelica began to emerge from within the limousine-and the scene around me became a riot, descending almost instantly into a kind of mass madness.
The door handle in his hand, the doorman was standing off to one side to allow Angelica to exit. The car was wide open to the dozens of crouching paparazzi who lapped like surf just below its threshold. Angelica was wearing a very short dress, a dress as black as Juliette's dress was white. She had to turn her lower body forward to slide over the seat toward the door as the photographers snapped their pictures and the TV cameras moved in behind them to take video over their heads. Then Angelica had to step down from the car onto the carpet in front of them and then rise up off the limousine's low seat. As hard as she may have tried, it would've been very difficult for her to keep her knees together throughout the entire process. In any case, she didn't manage it.
And suddenly, the photographers' eagerness was transformed into a mindless, rabid, eye-rolling frenzy.
There were gasps from the crowd. Grunts and little cries. I heard a woman say in a strangled voice, "No panties! No panties!" I heard a man growl through his teeth like an animal, "Up-skirt!" Everybody-onlookers, reporters, technicians, security men, police-everyone within view of Angelica's suddenly exposed pudendum-even those only within earshot of the rumors of its exposure-swung in its direction with questing eyes, a single heaving movement like the ocean reaching for the moon.
As I say, it never made the news. And yes, it wasn't a very dignified or serious moment. It was ridiculous and completely out of keeping with the tone of what finally happened, with what was about to happen to those thousands of people, all those people. But it's the truth. And for myself, thinking back on it-I don't know-maybe it was apt, even emblematic in some way. I mean, if God Creating Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel represents our culture at its beginning, maybe a paparazzi upskirt of a starlet's quim is the central image of that culture now.
In any case, it gave me-so to speak-the opening I needed.
The incident lasted a second-one second. During that second, the rapid-fire buzz and snap of the cameras melded into a single chittering hum. A chorus of shocked murmurs rose to a cacophony of ecstatic shouts and cries. All eyes turned in one direction. My eyes turned. And, as they turned, they passed over the police officers who had been guarding the rope at the entrance to the narrow courtyard.
I saw them in motion. I saw them each take a step-then another-away from their posts-toward the red carpet, toward the black car, each extending his neck, each poking out his head, each seeking to steal a look between Angelica Eden's legs.
For one instant, the rope behind them stood unguarded, the path into the courtyard, the path to the theater's back door, was unmanned.
Some part of my brain was still pulling my eyes toward the limo, toward Angelica, but I fought against it. I knew I had only an instant. I started moving. I squirmed between two barricades. As the policemen craned their necks to get a look through the limousine door, I strode boldly, quickly behind them. I ducked under the rope. I ducked out of the wonderful silver light and entered the shadows of the narrow courtyard. I stood straight and started running hell-for-leather toward the door.
Three seconds. Three seconds of pulse and motion, every moment exposed. The cops at the courtyard's far end had their backs turned, but could glance over their shoulders and spot me at any time. The cops behind me were sure to return to their posts in the next instant. And wouldn't one of the people in the crowd have seen me break out? Wouldn't one of them point his finger and alert the law? Three seconds, my feet slapping the bricks, my breath in my ears, my heart hammering. Then my hand was on the cold door handle, my thumb was on the latch, my heart was turning to ice as I thought: Don't let it be locked, don't let it be locked!
It was not locked. I pressed the latch and pushed. There was a snap-I felt it jolting through me. I felt the latch give beneath my thumb. The door swung open. I tumbled through it.
I was inside the New Coliseum.