MICAH GALLO HESITATED OUTSIDE THE main entrance of Bellevue Hospital like a man on the edge of a bad dream knowing that if he moves forward something terrible will happen. And yet he is unable to turn and walk away, aware that the nightmare was of his own making, and therefore he had to confront what waited beyond the doors or it would haunt him the rest of his life.
He hadn’t intended to go to the hospital. After leaving Monroe at the Jay Street Bar, he’d headed for his apartment, intending to numb his concerns about what had just happened to Rose Lubinsky with marijuana and beer. Monroe said he’d had nothing to do with the bomb, and that the skinheads were probably to blame. He wanted to believe it. But with doubt roiling around in the pit of his stomach like a restless snake, he’d suddenly flipped around and taken the exit back over the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan.
Heading north on FDR Drive, he berated himself for lacking the courage to approach Lubinsky at the book signing to apologize. And now it might be too late, he thought, and pounded the wheel. He wondered if deep inside something in him had wanted to warn her that she was pushing powerful people toward desperate measures.
Yeah, the trouble with that is you knew it days ago, and again tonight before the bomb even went off, said one voice in his head.
It doesn’t prove anything, said its counterpart. It might not have been the same guy.
You’re trying, Micah, but you’re not fooling yourself, came the reply. Think about it.
Pulling into the Bellevue parking lot, Gallo knew what the voice was talking about. It began several nights earlier when Monroe asked him to go with him to the Kings County District Attorney’s Office on Jay Street. “Our friend District Attorney Olivia Stone has some ideas about how to stop this charter school bill.” They were met at a side door by an overweight, balding security guard who’d been told to watch for them. The guard seemed to know Monroe and let them in without comment as though it was nothing out of the ordinary.
They took the elevator and then walked into the reception area through an unlocked glass door. Monroe led the way across the room to another wooden door and knocked. There was the sound of scrambling and voices from behind the door. Monroe gave him an odd look and shrugged.
A woman’s voice then shouted for them to enter. Monroe opened the door and looked in. The same woman snapped, “You’re early.” She sounded peeved.
“Traffic was light,” Monroe answered. He then glanced over his shoulder at Gallo, who’d hung back. “Take a seat out here for a few minutes. I’ll come get you.”
Monroe walked into the room, but before he closed the door, Gallo caught a glimpse of another man in the room. It was just for an instant, yet one he would never forget. The stranger was a black man and appeared to have some sort of disfigurement on one side of his face, as though he’d been burned or had a skin disease that had caused his dark skin to turn white.
A few minutes later, Monroe opened the door again and motioned for him to come in. The black man was nowhere to be seen inside the room. Micah noted a side door and presumed he’d gone out that way and thought it odd that they were obviously trying to keep him from being seen. But at the time he’d thought no more about it and soon had other issues to deal with as Monroe pointed to a couch for him to sit and sat down next to him.
They were seated across a glass-and-steel table from Olivia Stone, an attractive woman in her late forties with short blond hair, green eyes, and the figure of a woman who spent a lot of time in the gym. Gallo had seen her before and she’d always been immaculately coiffed to the point of rigidity; however, that night she appeared to have forgotten to fix her hair, and her lipstick looked like it had been applied hurriedly.
I wonder if the black guy had anything to do with that, Gallo mused as he glanced around the room. He seemed to get an answer when he looked back at Stone, who was regarding him with a slight, knowing smile on her face as if she’d guessed what he was thinking . . . and found it amusing to let him know it was true.
However, the conversation had quickly turned to the charter school bill. Gallo was aware that in large part she owed her position to the financial and voter support of the teachers union. As well as the property on Long Island, Miami, and the Caribbean that Monroe’s told me about, he thought. So he wasn’t surprised when it turned out that she was willing to resort to illegal measures to make sure that the status quo was maintained for Monroe and the teachers union.
Stone smiled again, not coyly this time but wolfishly. “So, Micah, what have we—I mean, you—got on Rose Lubinsky that we can use?”
A chill ran down Gallo’s spine. “What do you mean?” he said, though he knew exactly what she was talking about because he’d lived through it.
“Any bad habits? Maybe an affair? Anything from her past that she might not want made public,” Monroe said.
“Maybe she takes school equipment home with her,” Stone added with a grin.
Stone’s pointed comment felt like a slap to his face. He wanted to get up and walk out. He knew where this conversation was heading and wanted no part of it. But instead he sat there, his face burning and his pride nowhere to be found.
Monroe shot Stone a “back off” look, but she ignored him. “Come on, Micah, quit acting like you don’t know how this game is played. What do you got on the bitch?”
Gallo shook his head. “Nothing.”
“What?” Stone said. “I don’t think I heard you correctly.”
“I don’t have anything,” Gallo replied. “She’s about the cleanest, most blameless person I’ve ever known.”
“Come on,” Stone said, rolling her eyes. “Nobody’s perfect. You worked with her. Ate dinner with her. You were friends. Surely there’s something, even if it was completely innocent, that we can find a way to use.”
“What do you want me to fucking say?” Gallo shot back, finally finding some measure of courage. “Her family was wiped out in the Holocaust; she lived because they gave her to a Christian couple to raise. At some point she was anti-Semitic because of her upbringing, but she wrote a book about it so she’s already ‘outed’ herself. Other than that she’s dedicated to her husband, who is just as faithful to her. She doesn’t smoke. She doesn’t drink. She doesn’t do drugs. And even if she ever borrowed a pencil from the school, after what you did to me, she’s doubly careful.”
Gallo turned to look at Monroe. “The kids in these schools mean everything to her. I think it’s her way of paying back what she thinks she owes the past. I don’t know if you ever felt that way about our students, Tommy. I know I did once, but somewhere along the line we sold out. But she hasn’t.”
Monroe scowled. “The union’s done a lot for the kids and the teachers.”
“Maybe, but ‘done’ is the operative word,” Gallo said. “It’s still not too late. We can work something out with the charter schools. I’ll talk to Rose. Maybe she’d back off on going through the books—call it water under the bridge.”
“You saw how she reacted to my offer,” Monroe pointed out.
Anything else Gallo was going to say was interrupted by a derisive laugh from Stone, who got up, walked around the table, and then sat on the edge of the couch next to Gallo. “That’s all very sweet about the kids and losing your way, worthy of a Tony Award if you ask me. But the time for negotiating and compromising is over. Like Tommy said, she’s not reasonable.”
Stone leaned closer to Gallo, pressing one of her legs up against his. “If you care for this woman, you need to help us find a way to stop her,” she said, leaning toward him as if Monroe wasn’t even in the room. “I’m not about to let some old crusader ruin my plans, and I’ve got big plans, pretty boy.”
Gallo moved his leg away from hers. “Even if I could come up with some piece-of-crap offense like you used against me, she’s tougher than I am. I know her; she’d die before she backed down or let herself be bought off by you.”
Stone and Monroe had given each other a look when he said that, which at the time he took to be one of anger or frustration. But as he got out of his car to walk over to the hospital, he wasn’t so sure. It was definitely a case of 20/20 hindsight and conjecture, but now he thought the look was between two people who had reached some sort of decision.
He realized what that was outside of Il Buon Pane that night. Leaving Stone’s office, the black man’s disfigurement was the only thing that had stood out to Gallo. However, at the bakery another memory lurched back into his conscious mind. He recalled that in the moment Monroe swung the door shut, he’d noticed the man’s shoes. Cherry red high-tops. And he remembered that because he’d seen that face and those shoes in the crowd of counterdemonstrators across the street from the Nazis. It was only a glimpse before the man disappeared in the crowd, and at the moment he had not associated it with Stone and Monroe and the look they’d shared. Not until he was sitting in the Jay Street Bar with Monroe, staring in disbelief up at a television screen.
You don’t know for sure, he warned himself as he stood in front of the hospital, watching as what seemed to be a flood of injured, sick, and mentally ill humanity limped, staggered, and were carried in and out of the doors. He looked up at the tall, gray, square box of a hospital and thought about Rose Lubinsky lying in one of the rooms in pain, possibly dying. Yet she would have cared more for every one of these people than for herself, he thought.
He took a step toward the doors before Monroe’s voice echoed down the corridors of his mind. “Who butters your bread, Micah?” Nausea threatened to overcome him as he also recalled his answer. “You do, Tommy.” And if they go down, you go down, said the voice of self-interest.
Gallo started to turn back toward his car and almost bumped into a family rushing toward the entrance. A young man carried an obviously pregnant young woman in his arms, struggling as she cried out in labor. Straggling along behind him were two children—a girl of about five or six, crying as she held the hand of an uncooperative toddler. The young man turned back and spoke to them urgently. “Date prisa, los niños!”
Hurry up, children, Gallo translated. He held out his hands to the children as he spoke to the young man. “I’ll help you with them.”
The young man looked troubled about leaving his children to be brought along by a stranger. But then his wife screamed and he turned without saying another word and hurried toward the entrance.
Gallo walked more slowly behind with the trusting children holding his hands. By the time they reached the lobby of the hospital, a swarm of nurses had the pregnant woman in a wheelchair and were taking her away. The young man turned to Gallo and smiled. “Gracias, amigo.”
“De nada. Tenga cuidado de sus hijos y buena suerte con el nuevo bebé.”
“Thank you, I will,” the young man said, taking his hand. “You are a good man to help a stranger and his children.”
Gallo didn’t know what to say as his eyes filled with tears, so he just shook the other man’s hand and turned to walk up to the information desk. “I’m here to see Rose Lubinsky,” he said to the large black woman behind the desk.
The woman typed the name into her computer and then frowned. “She’s in the Intensive Care unit,” she said. “No one but immediate family are allowed to see her.”
“I’m her son,” Gallo said.
The woman frowned again. “I don’t see a son listed, only a husband.”
“That would be my dad, Simon Lubinsky. They must have been in a hurry and forgot to include me.”
The woman gave him a suspicious glance. “I’ll see if I can get ahold of someone on ICU. It might take a few minutes, so go have a seat in the waiting room, and I’ll come get you.”
Gallo did as he was told, sitting in the only seat available, next to a man holding a bloody rag against his stomach as he moaned and spoke what sounded like Russian. Across from them a woman shivered and sweated, crying out in delirium as her anxious boyfriend or husband patted her shoulder and looked around desperately. He stood up and walked around the corner and peeked out at the woman behind the information desk. She was arguing with a police officer who was holding on to a handcuffed man as he vomited on the floor.
Gallo turned and made his way across the room to the double swinging doors that he’d seen patients and doctors going in and out of and walked through. He found himself walking rapidly along a crowded, bustling hallway filled with doctors, gurneys, nurses, paramedics, and patients. He approached a man in green surgeon’s scrubs who stood looking down at a clipboard.
“Which way to Intensive Care?” he asked.
Without looking up from the clipboard, the doctor pointed to a sign on a wall that read “ICU” in big bold letters and had an arrow pointing down another hallway. By following arrows, he found an elevator that carried him to a floor that had another ICU sign pointing to the left. He turned a corner and realized he had reached his destination, not because of the sign hanging above more swinging doors but the people who stood and sat outside them.
Standing in the center of them was Alejandro Garcia, dressed in a hospital gown with his hands bandaged. The stocky young man saw him coming and moved to get in his way. “Second time tonight . . . what the fuck you doing here, pendejo,” he swore.
It had been a long, trying night. Gallo’s anger finally boiled to the surface as he came chest to chest with his former rival. “Call me that one more time and . . .”
“. . . and what?” Garcia spat. “You got no business here. These people are Rose’s friends, people who love her. They stick by her, thick and thin. That doesn’t include you.”
The situation was about to get out of hand when Simon Lubinsky pushed through the doors from the Intensive Care unit. He looked sad and worn out, then confused when he saw Gallo. But then he nodded. “Let him by, Alejandro . . .”
Garcia frowned. “But . . .”
Lubinsky held up his hand. “Please, now is not the time for this, Rose wants to see him.”
“But how does she know he’s here?” Garcia asked.
“I don’t know,” Lubinsky replied, “but somehow she knew he would come. So let him pass.”
Garcia glared at Gallo one more time but then stepped aside. As he approached the old man, Gallo said, “Simon, I’m so . . .”
“I know, Micah, I know, but there’s no time to waste. You must hurry.”
Simon escorted him back past the nurses’ station to a room and told him to go in. “I’ll wait out here,” he said.
Gallo entered the dark room and waited for a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. As they did, he saw Rose lying in the bed, covered nearly head to foot in bandages. Only one arm and hand that had somehow escaped the flames lay on top of the sheet.
“Rose?” he said as he approached her bedside.
Rose Lubinsky responded by raising her unbandaged hand for him to hold. He grabbed it tenderly and bent over to kiss her fingers, but she pulled him closer and whispered. “You know.”
“I don’t understand, Rose. Know what?” he replied.
“Who did this?” She turned her head slightly so that she could look at him with the one eye not covered by gauze.
“The Nazis.”
The eye glittered. “You know better than that.”
“I don’t . . . not for sure.”
“Micah, my son, for your sake,” she said, her breath laboring from the pain, “don’t try to live with the guilt. It will eat you.”
“Oh, Rose,” he cried out quietly. “I’m not brave like you. I’m as bad as they are.”
“No,” she said. “You are lost, but you are good. They must be stopped . . . for the children. Promise me . . .”
Gallo wanted to stand up and turn away from her. “Who butters your bread, Micah?” But instead he nodded. “I’ll try.”
Rose Lubinsky seemed to relax and squeezed his fingers. “Goodbye, Micah. I have always loved you. Now, please, send Simon . . . then wait for him.”
Tears streaming from his eyes, Gallo left the room and saw Simon standing across the hallway. “She wants you,” he said.
Simon nodded and then walked slowly back to the room where his wife waited as though by his pace he could delay the inevitable. Gallo watched him enter the room and close the door, then left the ICU. He didn’t join the others and avoided looking at them.
A few minutes later, whether five or twenty-five Gallo in his grief didn’t know, Simon Lubinsky returned carrying a manila envelope. “She . . . she . . . ,” he tried to say, but choked on the words. “My love is gone.” He seemed to stumble a bit then and Garcia rushed up to support him.
After a moment, Simon patted the young man on his broad shoulders and straightened up and looked at Gallo. He held out the manila envelope. “She asked me to give this to you,” he said. “She said you would know what to do with it.”
Gallo took the envelope, opened it, and pulled out a document. He read it briefly, his brow furrowing. “I don’t understand. When did she give this to you?”
“There are many things in God’s world that we aren’t meant to understand,” Lubinsky said. “But she gave it to me earlier tonight, after the book signing. She said she saw you come in and leave, and had hoped to speak to you.” He shook his head. “Rose was always intuitive, but even I had no idea what she meant when she said that if anything happened to her, I should give you this.”
Gallo bowed his head as a sob escaped his lips. The old man reached out and stroked his hair. Then with a sigh, the young man raised his head and turned toward Garcia.
“You have no reason to trust me,” he said. “But I could use your help.”
“What are you planning to do?” Garcia asked, his eyes wet but his face grim.
“Get even.”
“Then let’s ride, hombre.”