It was getting to Buckram. He couldn’t think about anything else. The way he was these days, he damn well needed those Friday nights, and he no longer cared what she did to him. She could draw blood, she could tap a vein and drink from it. Anything, just so she got him out of his self for a couple of hours.
Phone calls piled up. He hadn’t returned any in weeks, and now he’d changed the outgoing message on his machine:
Or any other season.
The Carpenter was enjoying the summer. Cooling his heels, biding his time. Getting ready for something that would make his Chelsea firebombing spree look like a Boy Scout campfire.
What was he waiting for?
It would be on a Wednesday. Last year the date had fallen on a Tuesday, he remembered that much, everybody in the city remembered that much. There was a line in a Gershwin song about Tuesday maybe being a good news day. Well, that Tuesday had been a bad news day, the ultimate bad news day.
This year, September 11 would fall on a Wednesday.
There was no way to know that was what the Carpenter was waiting for, and yet he knew it with an unyielding certainty, knew it without knowing how he knew it. That was the day that changed his life, wasn’t it? Well, his and everybody else’s, but the Carpenter took it personally, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Lost his whole family, lost every piece of furniture in the room of life. And turned overnight from a harmless old coot with a penchant for New York City history into a maniac who seemed set on finishing what the fucking terrorists had started.
God damn them anyway, the sons of bitches.
If he could just do something about them...
But he couldn’t, of course, and neither could anyone else. They were safely dead, gone to spend eternity with seventy virgins, and maybe that was punishment enough. He tried to imagine a Catholic equivalent, where St. Peter handed good little boys the keys to a Carmelite nunnery. Here you are, sonny boy. Enjoy yourself. Just be careful they don’t smack you with a ruler.
On the morning of Wednesday, September 11, there would perhaps inevitably be a ceremony at Ground Zero. The new mayor would be there, along with the old one, and the governor, and every local politician who could shoehorn his way in. And, the White House had just announced, the president of the United States would be there as well. He’d speak at Ground Zero in the morning, and during the afternoon he would address a session of the General Assembly of the United Nations.
Somewhere in the city, Buckram was certain, the Carpenter was thinking about September 11, last year’s and this year’s. So, he suspected, were half the terrorists and bona fide nut jobs on the planet. If there was a more obvious target, a stronger magnet for terror, he couldn’t think what it might be. The Prez himself, standing right where it all happened, on the anniversary of the day it happened.
And what could he do about it?
Nothing, he thought. He couldn’t do zip, but then again, neither in all likelihood could the Carpenter. There’d be security up the wazoo, cops and Secret Service agents a mile deep. No question the Air Force would resume overflights, and God help any pilot who wandered off course that morning. Nobody was going to get anywhere near either site, Ground Zero or the UN.
But the Carpenter might try, and he might get lucky. The damnedest rank amateurs managed to turn up at the right place at the right time, and before you could say Squeaky Fromm or Sirhan Sirhan or John Hinckley or Leon Czolgosz or Charles Guiteau, well, there was the shit and there was the fan, and who’d have thought they’d have wound up so close together?
Or just possibly (because, after all, you didn’t want to lose sight of the fact that he was nuttier than a whole pecan orchard) the Carpenter wasn’t all that interested in Ground Zero or the United Nations. Maybe he’d figured out a way to squirt nerve gas into the ventilation system at the Chrysler Building, or bring down a bridge, or float a barge full of plastique onto Liberty Island. Or maybe he’d find some other place to go crazy with Molotov cocktails. Yankee Stadium, say, or a rock concert, or, hell, anyplace full of people.
