Michael Walsh - Early Warning

Pullman, Washington, was just across the state line from Moscow, Idaho, and for a time as a kid Raymond had fantasized about running away from home by “defecting,” as he thought of it, to Idaho. Eastern Washington State was a pretty dreary place, apple farms where there was water and alkaline deserts was there was not, and in his youthful imagination Idaho was a land of green mountains and secret communists. Then he got uprooted and transplanted, and that was the end of that notion, although he kept his lifelong fascination with the Soviets, the heroic protectors of the Third World and of people of color everywhere. There weren’t many people of color, except for the odd Mexican migrant worker, in Pullman, Washington, and so in the absence of people at whom to direct his compassion, Raymond’s sense of injustice burned even fiercer.

And so Raymond left home without telling anybody, not the ’rents or the parole officer or anybody. He hitched his way down to Frisco, and that had pretty much been the extent of the plan except that he never actually made it to Frisco. Instead, he wound up across the bay, in Oakland, where his money ran out, and he decided to find a place to crash in the Oakland flats. Everybody told him the Oakland flats were no place for a white boy like him, but by chance he had wandered into a little bakeshop not far from the Berkeley border, a Black Muslim bakeshop, the kind of place that attracted big black tough guys and those hot little white girls and Asian tramps from the UC campus, the ones that liked to walk on the wild side and pretend they were fucking for social justice when in fact they were just fucking.

The place was called the Malik Shabazz, Jr., Bakery and Book Store, and it was a place where you could bum a halfway decent, if halfway eaten croissant if you promised to help with the washing-up, and there was always plenty to read. That’s where Raymond encountered the Holy Koran, which at first he found hard to understand until one of the Brothers explained some of the more interesting suras to him. It was one of those moments he had wished for all his life, when a flash of knowledge, of revelation, comes and all at once he could see exactly what he had to do and how to do it.

The Brothers saw the flash of light in his eyes and knew they had found a soul mate. Instruction had begun immediately. Raymond was an apt pupil.

And now here he was. He glanced around at the cityscape, a 360 maneuver that rotated him from the top of the park to the residential towers of Central Park West, south to the wall of 59th Street and then back around again, east, across Fifth Avenue.

His cell phone rang. It was one of the Brothers, telling him that all his dreams were about to come true.

Even though he knew everything was A-OK, Raymond checked the backpack that had been stashed for him, as promised, in a trash can behind the National Academy. All the tools were there, everything he had trained with. He’d never be readier. He slung the backpack over his shoulder and stepped across Fifth Avenue. If he had any regrets for what he was about to do, it was that, despite what the Brothers had preached, he personally had nothing against the Jews.

Janice Gottlieb left her office at the 92nd Street Y to nip around the corner for a quick coffee with a cultural critic for the New York Times. Ms. Gottlieb had been at the Y for almost five years, having landed a plum job as assistant director of public relations for the Y’s ongoing series of concerts and speakers. Out-of-towners were always amazed when she told them that she worked at the Y, helping to put on concerts. For most of them, gentiles, “the Y” conjured up visions of indoor swimming pools and basketball courts, but she always patiently explained that this was a Jewish Y, the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association, one of New York’s foremost cultural institutions since its founding in 1874.

One of the best things about her job, thought Janice as she stepped onto Lexington Avenue and headed for a little Greek coffee shop, was that it made her parents so proud. Unlike most of the Jewish women who worked at the Y, Janice hailed from Omaha; New York was more than a thousand miles away, a fabled land that stood as a living monument to Jewish achievement in America.

Her head was still full of these thoughts as she left the building. The fresh air felt good. It was hot today, but not as hot as it was going to get. Janice had already been through a few New York Augusts, when the steam rose off the pavements and the garbage reeked and the city’s denizens stripped down to the bare minimum of clothing that decency, or what was left of it, and New York City’s public lewdness laws allowed. Which was almost nothing.

She didn’t mind. It was something you didn’t see back home in Omaha.

There was a young man trying to cross the street, from the look of him obviously not a New Yorker. Instinctively, Janice recognized a kindred spirit, a fellow midwesterner, baffled by the city and intimidated by the traffic. Against the light, he’d gotten halfway across, then chickened out and dashed back to the safety of the curb on the west side of the street. That was how she could tell: a real New Yorker, once committed to jaywalking, would proudly continue carrying out the crime.

“Come on, you can make it!” she shouted at him. The lights on Lex were synched, and even though the crossing showed red, he had plenty of time before the taxis came flying down from Spanish Harlem.

The man looked at her and smiled. Definitely a non-New Yorker. New Yorkers, even transplants, just didn’t look like him, or dress like him, or give off that vibe. In fact, as he approached, Janice thought he seemed a little weird, and was briefly sorry she had encouraged him. Out-of-towners had strange ideas about New York and New Yorkers. Instead of waiting to greet him, she turned away.

“Hey, miss!” he shouted and now she really was sorry. And ashamed of the-what was it? Could it be called bigotry?-what she felt. It wasn’t danger, probably, it was just difference. Diversity. Yes, that was it. Diversity.

The man was pointing at the Y, smiling. “Is that the 92nd Street Young Men’s Hebrew Association?” he asked and then she knew. But it was too late. She had already nodded and words had already tumbled out of her mouth-

“Yes. I work there.”

Raymond was still smiling when he produced a machine pistol and shot her in the chest and in the head, just the way the Brothers had taught him. One Jew down, so many more to go.

He sprinted into the Y, firing as he went. The guards, the metal detectors-nothing was stopping him. It was so easy to squeeze the trigger, and they all went down so fast.

“You okay, Sid?” From a distance, Sheinberg could hear Lannie’s voice calling to him. “ Sidney, talk to me!” There was a terrible pressure on his chest, which was one of the things that was hindering his reply. Sid took a deep breath and winced at the pain.

“What happened?” He tried to focus his eyes, then realized he was upside down, still strapped into his seat and dangling in midair.

“Some kind of bomb. While they blinded us.”

“Eyeless in Gaza,” muttered Sid, although why that particular expression came to him at this moment he could not know. But he knew he was right.

“Come on.”

Sid could feel Lannie’s fumbling with the seat belt clasp. In the distance he could hear explosions, maybe gunfire. Aside from training, he had never used his weapon; in the parlance of the squad room, he was a virgin. “A virgin Hebe,” some of the guys called him, in honor of the character in Q &A, which was every detective’s favorite movie, but he didn’t care: the virgin Hebe had been the guy who, at the end, took down Nick Nolte’s rogue Irish cop.