Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

— What’s your problem, man? Wheeler says, turning to face Fonseca. Making a sliver of his mouth.

— You, Fonseca says. And the evil crap you print each day, all of it wrong.

— I’m a reporter.

He lifts Fonseca’s blue press card with thumb and forefinger. Tugs it. Face full of contempt.

— And this? This tells the world you are a fucking loser, kid. You and Briscoe and all the other—

Then Fonseca clocks him. Wheeler goes down on his back, his eyes blinking, his jaw moving.

— Get up, you asshole!

Fonseca’s over him.

And then the black bouncer is there.

— Hey, hey, none of that shit now, he yells.

He shoves Fonseca toward the smoking deck. Flashes from cameras. Shouts. And here comes the upstairs bouncer. The fat white guy. He lifts Wheeler, swings him in a half circle, and hurls him into the crowd of camera people. Hitting bodies and heads. Umbrellas go airborne. Shouts of protest and shock. The black bouncer tries to intervene, but the white bouncer moves around him, shoves Fonseca, then grabs him by collar and ass and heaves him toward the smoking shed. Fonseca slams into Helen Loomis and she falls. The ashtray goes over too, spilling butts and sand across the deck. The snow is almost horizontal.

8:51 p.m. Malik Shahid. Fourteenth Street.

Now . He runs, slipping on the cobblestones, but not falling. A wave of photographers surges left to photograph the white dude in the crowd in the street. Still down. Trying to get up through the mass of legs. Off on the side of the platform another white guy, younger, stunned and rubbery.

Nobody pays attention to Malik.

End run, he thinks. Go.

He is up the steps, feeling stronger now than he has ever been before. He rips away the velvet rope, toppling the minaret poles, and he reaches the doors. The right door is ajar about a foot. Leading to the dark sinful rooms. From the snowy distance, the muffled sound of a siren.

Then Malik is into the devil’s workshop, into the whoring crowd, stopping, drawing the pistol from his trouser belt. Turns behind him. Kicks the door shut.

— Stop! Every fuckin’ one of you! he shouts.

Malik’s right arm is straight out. He rotates the.38 with a circular wrist movement, left, to the dance floor, right to the bar, then up the stairs. People at the top. Fancy clothes. Wide eyes. Turns behind him again. Seven or eight people at the doors. None of them move. All eyes on the gun. The room suddenly resembles a still photograph.

— You move, I shoot you!

He starts up the stairs. Three steps. Four. Then he opens his jacket.

In small awkward motions, he starts to unbutton his coat with his free hand, pistol still in his right. Now people are moving again. On the main floor, a tall blonde woman breaks from the frozen pack of dancers, starts across the floor, buckles, and falls hard on her hip. A shriek, cutting through the hip-hop soundtrack. Malik’s coat is open.

And now they see the vest.

Taut across Malik’s chest. The six red slabs of Semtex resembling soldiers at attention. The hip-hop rant keeps pounding. Punctuated by groans and weeping and another woman’s shriek.

Malik thinks: I have them now. They must look at me. They must listen. I’m the last man they will hear in their filthy lives.

8:51 p.m. Beverly Starr. The balcony of Aladdin’s Lamp.

She has her coat on, leaving with others, gloveless. Five steps down the stairs. Hears the screams. Looks down. Blinks. Sees a young black man waving a gun. Words lost in the pounding music. Turning. Gesturing. His eyes wide with rage and doom. Jesus Christ. She eases down the stairs, gripping the banister on her left. Freezes as he waves the pistol at her. Sees a jam at the door.

The young man turns so all can see what he’s wearing under the coat.

Now she sees the vest across his chest. Familiar to all of them from bad television shows. A suicide vest.

The music scrapes into silence. The deejay tearing off his costume. One voice is piercing the air. The man with the vest.

— Whores! Degenerates! Listen up!

He shoves the gun in his belt. Now he’s addressing the people on the dance floor. Maybe sixty of them. Men. Women. All of them frozen. As if blood and sweat are both coagulating. Some cowering, trying to make themselves smaller.

— You have filled this world with filth and sin! You have sent soldiers to Muslim countries, and killed Muslim men, and Muslim women, and Muslim children!

Beverly moves. Passes behind the man as he addresses the dance-floor people. She eases past a heavyset older man. A guest from the benefit. Heads for the crowd jammed against the doors. The doors open in, not out. Pushes into the crowd. Looks back at the stairs. Sees the enraged eyes of the gunman. His audience is not giving him what he has demanded: their attention. He’s talking but she hears no words. She’s shoved by the deejay, then turned sideways by a guy in a business suit. Smells sweat and perfume. Rush hour in hell. A chorus of shrieks. Jesus Christ: I could die here.

She takes a ballpoint pen from her pocket. Thinking: Not much of a weapon, but I could hurt somebody.

Beverly looks back. The young man on the stairs is holding a small object in his hand. A wire runs into the suicide vest. She knows what that is too. A detonator. Right out of 24. Out of fucking comic books.

— You have been offered Paradise, and refused it!

Beverly sees a long-haired blond guy vault over the banister of the staircase, fall hard on one leg, pause and grimace in pain, then limp forward. To join the pack at the doors. A blink.

— Allah has given you life and he will soon give you death!

The jam tighter now, all breathing hard, panting, cursing. Shouts of move, move and step back, let it fuckin’ open! The doors forced shut by the pressing weight of the panicky group. To Beverly’s right, a small young woman leaps onto the shoulders of a shouting man, trying to claw her way over people’s shoulders, heading to escape. Then slips. Falls facedown, wedged between a fat woman and a beefy man. Beverly blinks again. Record this. So if you get out… The goal for all of them is the twin vertical rectangles of the glass-paneled doors. And the snow falling beyond. She looks back. At the top of the stairs, her painting stands on its easel, abandoned, alone.

Thinking: I am about to die.

8:51 p.m. Sam Briscoe. Fourteenth Street.

Briscoe’s taxi turns into the street and suddenly stops. Twenty feet ahead of them, four police cars have skidded on the cobblestones, then braked, red domes now turning. Cops out. Some fumbling under overcoats for sidearms. Briscoe asks the driver to wait, and the driver says, No, no, police! Trouble! Briscoe hands him a twenty-dollar bill and gets out, slamming the door. In the distance, he sees a chaotic, panicky tide of women and men squeezing one at a time out of one of the doors of Aladdin’s Lamp. Then down the steps in a kind of stampede. Night of the locust. None are dressed for snow. No time for coats. He sees the right door open a bit wider. Hears the word “bomb.”

He hurries to them while some rush past him toward Ninth Avenue. A gray-haired hatless guy in a suit hauls his wife across cobblestones. The man glancing behind him. Fear in his eyes. The woman yelling: My coat, my coat!

All that Briscoe sees is happening at once. Women in filmy blouses, short skirts, high heels. Men in sweaters and shirts. A woman slips coming down the steps from the platform. Falls backward. A young man stomps on her to get by, and then he loses balance and pitches forward, facedown on the iced cobblestones, and another man stomps on his back and keeps going. One lone woman, about twenty, earrings large and bobbing, totters toward Briscoe, seeing nothing, weeping, holding a bleeding elbow. The others resemble terrified civilians after a bombardment. They slip, fall, pile up. Throats are stabbed by heels. A heavy boot lacerates a young man’s lips. Upper and lower.