The Driver Read online

  NYPD Ambush Point 3—After Brooklyn Bridge/Center Median @ Merge

  I coasted right, around the gentle turn underneath the bridge, the deep roar of dozens of cars overhead—the bridge, Manhattan itself, speaking to me with anger at my passing. The third ambush point was clear.

  If clear, stay left and accelerate on Straightaway 2

  The hot wind blasted against my ear.

  86

  It would be impossible to hear the V1. I’d have to—

  92

  —take my eyes off the road but—

  102

  —that would be too dangerous.

  111

  One hundred and eleven miles per hour.

  In New York City.

  114

  On Manhattan Island.

  116

  I never thought it possible—

  118

  —to hold it this long.

  119

  The Manhattan Bridge lay approximately 1,000 feet away.

  120

  A siren wailed to my left, echoing somewhere within the residential projects. I wished the anonymous victim luck.

  121

  I raced under the Manhattan Bridge. At this speed even the roar of the cars running perpendicular overhead was a mere sideshow.

  129

  I love New York.

  Breathe

  90

  I approached the complex Thirty-fourth Street exit—an idiotically designed simultaneous on/off merge running from Twenty-fifth to Twenty-eighth Street—an intersection so dangerous (even at legal speeds) I couldn’t believe litigious Manhattanites hadn’t forced the Department of Transportation to close it.

  Thuthump

  Keep left

  Yes.

  The road grew even worse on the leftward ramp up and over Thirty-second Street—the surface resembling the wreckage left by Vietnam-era cluster bombs meant to impede the passage of critical supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  The first of the NYS DMV’s terrific rules was that, for anyone who was a New York State driver’s license holder, moving violations occurring outside New York State did not appear on one’s driver history, and such points do not accrue against one’s driver’s license. Since virtually every rally and illegal race I’d enter in the future would occur outside New York, this was a great relief.

  The countervailing bad rule was that violations within New York State did generate points on one’s license, and an automatic suspension occured if one earned eleven points within a rolling eighteen-month period. Preparation demanded careful study of the DMV point system.

  I knew before my first practice that my potential violation point total would be in the hundreds, but I was comforted by the second-best NYS DMV rule:

  Points accrued for any given violation are subtracted from the running total every eighteen months.

  This meant that no matter how many points I accrued, I’d have my license back eighteen months after the final run—unless a perceptive traffic court judge figured out exactly what I’d been trying to do, in which case I might never be able to drive again.

  Once in court, if a judge converted one or more reckless driving violations into criminal felony charges, I’d be sentenced to between thirty days and six months in jail. A judge would have every right to call my actions reckless, just as I’d know in my heart that I’d taken every precaution, through reconnaissance and practice, to mitigate the possibility of endangering bystanders. If I hadn’t thought it was safe (or even possible) to attempt the lap, I wouldn’t have tried.

  Since I was guilty, and since I couldn’t possibly explain why without the court making an example of and/or institutionalizing me, I’d plead guilty, accept my civic responsibility, and do the time without complaint.

  Six months in jail and the permanent loss of my license in New York State?

  This would never deter people like me.

  The likely punishment—an eighteen-month license suspension—might have seemed like a long time, but New York City had an excellent mass transit system, and most Americans, myself included, needed more exercise.

  The Most Dangerous Turn in New York City occurred at the intersection of the Harlem River Drive North and the George Washington Bridge access road—a high-speed left exit ramp ascending several stories before banking ninety degrees left. A right-hand merge lay at the end of the turn—at the precise point at which one had to bear right for the Second Most Dangerous Turn in New York City—the upcoming right exit toward the Henry Hudson Parkway South.

  If a cop merged right behind me…Police officers waited their whole careers for traffic stops like this.

  144

  I passed the 167th Street on-ramp, braked—no cop.

  136

  Brake more.

  —bore left toward—

  Harder.

  114

  Harder!

  81

  —made the turn—

  Yes

  —and safely navigated the Most Dangerous Turn in New York City.

  YES!

  I accelerated West over 179th Street and bore right toward the Henry Hudson Parkway South exit. And made it. I passed the halfway mark.

  I moved past fear, past philosophy, past the recognition of landmarks and their meaning, past internal debate, past rationalizations, and defaulted to something I’d never been very good at except when it mattered, and this was the first time it really mattered.

  In theory, I had so far committed the following:

  51 Moving Violations, including

  24 Speeding Violations

  14 Reckless Driving Violations

  13 Improper Lane Changes

  This brought my theoretical total moving violation projection to: 354 points

  Enough to have my license suspended thirty-two times.

  The final stretch ran four and a half miles from Fifty-ninth Street—where a series of red lights had to be run on the next and final attempt—to the finish line. I reasoned that stopping at the reds on the practice runs might in fact be a fantastic psychological exercise—on the final run my desperate urge to accelerate through the reds would probably be unstoppable.

  I rolled past the World Trade Center at 2:54 A.M. I’d left at 2:26. I lapped Manhattan in twenty-seven minutes. I beat my target by three minutes. I’d committed 109 moving violations. I’d spotted two police cars. I’d earned a theoretical 731 points against my license, sufficient for sixty-six license suspensions.

  And I’d never felt better. Ever.

  I felt something I hadn’t felt since losing my virginity—a surreptitious, revelatory sense of awakening born of accomplishment—but this, unlike that, had been completed alone, and with skill.

  I thought I might have grasped a piece of Lelouch’s why.

  I’d made vicious, violent, terrible, irresponsible love to this city—my city. And I’d done it alone.

  And I was going to do it again.

  Faster.

  “So,” said Nine, “where’s the car now?”

  “Parked near my office, ready for one last practice run.”

  “When?” said Nine.

  “Sunday,” I said, “or the week after. Weather depending.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “The final run,” I said, “will be one week after that.”

  Everything was a go—Jon, the car, the fake construction workers, everything.

  It was Monday afternoon.

  And tomorrow, well, tomorrow was Tuesday. Primary Day. September 11, 2001.

  CHAPTER 4

  Crossing the Rubicon

  SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

  I suspected something was wrong when I tuned in Howard Stern—even through soap-clogged ears I heard his typical cadence replaced by intermittent remarks and dead air. I grabbed a towel, ran out onto the fire escape, and saw the black shape of the second plane across the North Tower’s face.

  It was just after nine o’clock in the morning.

  The South Tower exploded nor
thward. I, who’d long considered myself an intelligent person capable of logical jumps, didn’t even guess what had happened.

  My father was extraordinarily protective of his sons, but I couldn’t remember him speaking more then a few words to me until I turned ten. “Stop complaining,” he’d say before I did, or “Come sit,” a euphemism for keeping him company while I did homework. His wisdom was revealed on fragmentary tablets, and only at twelve did I first realize the difference in having a father one generation older than those of my friends. Sometimes he inexplicably stopped midstory, then continued another from weeks or months earlier, and the stories would converge in an uncomfortable moment whose meaning remained unclear to me for years. Only in my twenties did I grasp that their conclusions were withheld until I’d reached the age at which he’d lived them.

  “You’re such a complainer,” was his answer to my request for a new G.I. Joe action figure. “You’ve no idea how lucky you are. The Luftwaffe bombed our house when I was your age, in Brussels. Everyone panicked. My best friend Jojo’s parents said everyone should go to the station to get a train to Paris, but Tata said that was suicide. You remember your grandfather Tata, don’t you? Jojo wanted to stay with us and he cried when they dragged him away. We didn’t own a car and Tata couldn’t drive, but my brother Jack—he’d just turned seventeen—suggested we break into the Citroën dealer and steal a car. Jack read all the car magazines. Jack said the newer ones had easier clutches and he could figure it out. When we got there all the windows were smashed. All the new models had been stolen. We heard the explosions getting closer. The Junkers were flying over the city. In the back we found an older-model Citroën with a hand crank, and your Tata and I got on our knees and cranked and cranked until it started. We sat in the front and your aunt Janette and Mama got in the back, and we picked up an older couple Tata knew and—”

  My father told me this story more than once, always pausing in the same place.

  “—and…Jack…he struggled to keep the car going. There were people everywhere, and the engine stalled every time he stopped to avoid hitting someone. And people were trying to climb into the car. And they were on top. And Jack—”

  At this point he always stopped, eyes slightly out of focus, and just barely stopped himself from crying before continuing.

  “My poor brother, my poor Jack. He fought with the transmission and got the engine started again. He always got it started.”

  Jack was killed five years later. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, rapidly completed navigator and flight engineer training, and was shot down over Munich in the closing days of the war.

  “What,” I asked the first time my father told this story, “happened to Jojo?”

  “What do you think? The Nazis strafed the train and killed them all.”

  “What about your house?”

  “It’s still there. So is the building where Tata had his matchbook factory.”

  I didn’t know what to make of this.

  “Tata had to start over again, in Paris. But he never complained. Then the Nazis took Paris, and we fled to Toulouse and he started over again. And Tata never complained. Then they came to Toulouse and we fled to Spain. He had many friends in shipping. He wanted to take us to New York, but some of the boats full of refugees to America were turned back, so Tata found a boat to Canada. And he started over again. And still he never complained.”

  All this precipitated because of the new swivel-arm G.I. Joe available for $11.99 at the Lamston’s across the street, or $8.99 with the coupon I was poised to show him before he began.

  “You listen to me with this toy you want. Don’t be a complainer. Do your best with what you have. Never give up. And don’t panic.”

  “But all I wanted was—”

  “Enough.”

  Don’t panic.

  And I didn’t, standing in the shower that Tuesday morning. My staff would just be arriving at the Europe By Car office on William Street, three blocks east of the World Trade Center. Europe By Car was the last family-owned independent European car rental agency in the United States. We were the last fish in a sea of larger sharks. I was responsible not only for my brother and mother, but for this legacy my father left me, and that meant looking after our employees, a second family that had been part of my life ever since I’d been a secretary there during high school summers.

  I had to turn the staff around, send them home, get them out of the black smoke and away from whatever was happening. The rest of the staff would still be on the subway, heading south toward the disaster. They would emerge on Broadway, one block east of the Trade Center, the worst possible place to be in case the buildings fell. My knowledge of structural engineering failures was based on a boyhood visit to Pisa, and a domino-style toppling toward the east would crush the seven-story building in which we worked.

  I’d still have to go down there myself and wait for them. It was my responsibility.

  I called Alfred, but all cell circuits were busy.

  I ran south on West Broadway, the streets strangely devoid of rush-hour traffic, people clustered around stationary cars with their windows down, radios blaring local news. I ran down the center of the road as far as Canal Street, almost halfway to my office, stopped to catch my breath, and was nearly run over by a convoy of fire trucks and unmarked police cars heading in the same direction. I chased after them until, just a few blocks north of the Trade Center, a police officer stopped me from going any farther.

  I called the office. All circuits were still busy.

  I ran east and south, passing a group of gawkers silently surrounding an aircraft engine smoldering in the middle of the street. I made it as far as Broadway and Liberty, one block east of the Trade Center, and looked up.

  The South Tower loomed above, paper and debris drifting down and collecting at the feet of the crowd around me. Tiny specks fell from the top. People were jumping.

  I didn’t quite believe or understand how or why, but the building’s top began to shake, the tower’s grand vertical lines blurring in what had to be some entirely explicable optical effect of the heat and thickening smoke, when suddenly the tower’s length began to compress, enormous pieces cascading onto the fire trucks and police cars visible below. The crowd began screaming above the rumble of the great structure’s fall.

  Then I remembered more paternal advice born of the war—advice so obvious that I didn’t need to recall the story ending with it.

  Don’t stick around burning buildings—

  But it was too late. The crowd began to turn and flee toward me. I hesitated to help a woman who’d fallen over her own high heels. I tried to hand her one of her shoes, but she grabbed my wrist and pulled me east toward Nassau Street. I took one last look over my shoulder, but the tower was gone, engulfed in a cloud half the building’s former height. A ten-story-tall tidal wave of gray smoke and debris headed straight toward us.

  I ran after her, passing Nassau Street, hopping over abandoned briefcases and shoes and glasses. I couldn’t know how much time I had before I was overwhelmed by this seemingly fatal wall. William Street was less than a block away. If I could just make it there, I might find safety in the lobby of the Chase Bank—certainly the sturdiest building within range.

  The bank’s entrance was filled with people trying to get inside.

  Seconds remained.

  I spied a dump truck, but the space beneath it was full of people.

  That left only the Mobile Fried Chicken van, the one place I’d sought to avoid since moving the office downtown a year and a half earlier. I sprinted, crouching behind whatever safety the large yellow van might offer, hoping its inventory of frozen chicken would offer some protection. It didn’t occur to me that I might get boiled in a rain of cooking oil, grease, and crispy wings.

  “Do you believe in God?” I once asked my father.

  I’d never been a religious person. My mother, who grew up in East Germany and never met her handsome, literary father, a Panzergren
adier officer killed in the siege of Sebastopol in 1944, had, despite everything, remained an innocent soul with faith in the ultimate goodness of people. My father was an atheist who’d renounced even the secular Judaism of his parents, the only unit of his extended family to escape the concentration camps. He believed in basic tenets of goodness common to all religions, and, he hoped, other atheists—honesty, hard work, and loyalty. What he saw when his U.S. Army unit liberated Buchenwald turned out the light upon whatever faith he had remaining.

  “Please,” he said, pursing his lips.

  The rumble grew closer. I fell into a fetal position and pulled my messenger bag over my head.

  It was time to pull out whatever prayers I knew, except that I didn’t know any.

  “Here it comes!” someone yelled.

  I prayed that whatever God was listening would grant me this one reprieve and forgive my minor sins. I couldn’t remember any major ones, and I wondered how many minor ones equaled…but by then it was too late to equivocate or lie to the creator(s).

  If I make it, I’ll be good, or at least better, and live, really LIVE—

  The cloud washed over me.

  It was empty, a cloud of dust so thick that I inhaled what tasted like bits of wet paper. I could possibly hold my breath for sixty seconds, then I would be in trouble. I opened my eyes. I could barely see my own hands. It was as dark as an undersea cave where mutated fish navigate by their own luminescence.

  Silence. Then sirens. Screams. Finished.

  With both hands I reached down and pulled up a damp clump of debris. I squeezed, confused, and dropped something with the size and weight of a baseball. Whatever was accumulating was thick enough to suffocate me if I didn’t get inside and find air.

  I crawled along the edge of the van, feeling my way to its rear bumper. Heat rises, firemen say. Stay low. But there was no fire, and staying low meant kicking up more of the debris and dust that passed through the shirt I’d pulled over my nose and mouth.