The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx (31 page)

“No,” Paul said.

The man lifted him to his feet and spun him around so they were face to face.

“I can stomp you to death right this moment and make it look like one of the five unsolved murders that occur every week in New York. Or,” he paused, “I can let you crawl back up to your shithole on the top floor of 98 South Bond Street and you can live out the few days you have left in peace.”

“Look, those sneakers have radioactive matter in them,” Paul appealed. “They have to be cut down or this city—”

We
will take care of those sneakers from here on. You “have nothing to worry about. We’re not going to let anything happen to them.”

“Why don’t you just let me take them down?”

“We need them up there right now, you have to trust us.”

“What do you plan to do with them?”

“We just have to make a point, then we’ll remove them.”

“Who are you?” Paul asked, squinting his eyes again at the squat man.

The guy shoved Paul back to the ground and kicked him hard in the side. “Quit looking at me. Just get up and go home.”

Paul slowly rose to his feet. Without turning around, he limped painfully down the block and back up to his apartment. He cleaned his bloodied knees, put some ice on his bruised face, and wondered what to do. He had created an elegantly simple system of bombs that someone else had stumbled upon and was protecting. Who? Why? In his ninth decade, arthritis wracked his knees and bent his fingers. He was encased in pain. Worse, he was steadily losing his focus. His mind was wandering more freely each day. He pondered calling the police, notifying them of the dire situation, and then killing himself, hoping that since he was dead,
they
might leave his daughter alone. But there were no guarantees and he couldn’t put Bea in jeopardy.

“Being of sound mind and body, do you consent to continue your mission and—”

“I do.”

“You’re not going to remember this, which is why we’re taping it, but I just want you to know for the record that none of this was planned. New York, the Mkultra—it was all an accident. But I don’t need to tell you that, do I?”

When the patches were briefly removed from his eyes, he glimpsed a woman with two black eyes. Root Ginseng?

51

O
ne afternoon that March, while sitting at the Midtown library studying microfilm detailing some of the complex legislation his brother had written under Governor Al Smith, Paul glanced over at a young fellow reading the
Daily News
. The headline proclaimed,
Bomb Factory Blows Up!

Paul panicked, nearly pissing his pants. He feared the headline referred to his unaborted endeavor.

But wait, nothing could have actually blown up. I didn’t use any explosives
. He politely asked the man if he could scan the headline story.

“Why don’t you buy your own paper, bub?”

“Here’s a quarter, pal, just let me read the cover story, please.”

The guy thrust the paper at him angrily. Paul quickly read the article. A bomb had gone off in the basement of some rich family’s brownstone in Greenwich Village. On 11th Street, a bunch of hippies had been seen running from the blast. Relieved, Paul handed the paper back and tried returning to the old legislation he was researching, but felt too jittery. He soon left the library, and while walking along 42nd he spotted a pair of sneakers just where he had tossed them. He could still see the small bright white stripe along the inside of one shoe, indicating that the little panel was closed. All was still secure. He wondered how long the laces would hold before they’d fall on their own volition.

He calmly took the RR train down to the Whitehall station. At the top of the stairs, he paused and looked over at Sneakers #1, the pair closest to his house. A steady wind was gently swaying the shoes in a slow circle. He stood staring intently for a minute but couldn’t quite confirm the little white stripe was intact. He blamed his poor eyesight and ambled home, proceeding up the four flights that seemed to have gotten longer with each year. When he reached the top landing, he noticed that his door was slightly ajar. Entering, he discovered that the wooden frame was splintered.

Someone must’ve kicked the door in.
He had a roll of ten-dollar bills in the top shelf of his cabinet. He immediately checked and found that the cash was still there. After several more minutes of searching through the apartment, he happened to glance over to the window where he had snipped the trigger wires. Someone had manually pulled the cut wires back, releasing the pitchblende! The shock of it hit him in the gut. Someone had activated the bombs!

He grabbed the phone and called the police.

“First Precinct,” answered a desk sergeant.

“I’m calling to report that you had better remove all sneakers hanging from intersections throughout Manhattan or—”

The sergeant hung on him. Paul dialed again, but before anyone answered, he remembered the suffering Leon had undergone after being exposed to the granules.

“I gotta get the hell out of here!” Paul said aloud, feeling a strong wave of panic. He started tossing clothes, cash, ID, and a few other items into a shopping bag. Seven minutes later he was downstairs. Fortunately, the wind was blowing from the east that day. Paul realized it would be safest to head up Water Street. He made his way circuitously over to the Brooklyn Bridge and hurried out onto the walkway over the East River. Twenty extremely anxious minutes later, moving as fast as he possibly could, he reached Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn Heights. He stopped at the post office to catch his breath and found a pay phone in the hallway. From the operator, he got the number for the New York Office of the FBI. He dialed, sweating profusely, trying to think of what he would say.

“FBI. Officer Sarkisian speaking,” Uli heard, recognizing his own voice.

“And what did Paul Moses say?”

“I don’t know. I only know what I heard.”

“Okay, I do remember an older male voice rambling on nonsensically about radioactive material that had been released throughout Manhattan, via a series of sneakers.”

“And then what?”

He had no idea who was speaking. He had bandages or a blindfold over his eyes.

“—on the phone as long as I could as we tried tracing the call, but it was evident that I was talking to an elderly male who may have been senile. When I asked him if he knew the date or year, he thought that Impellitteri was mayor. Then he said something about the Cross Bronx Expressway and Robert Moses. We could only determine that he was calling from Brooklyn before he hung up.”

“What did you do then?” Uli didn’t recognize the voice.

“This was the same day that the Weather Underground had blown up a brownstone in Greenwich Village, and we had been getting prank calls all day. Hell, we had gotten calls like this for months after the George Metesky bombings. We had no perceived threats. The Russians didn’t work like that. No one did.”

“So what happened next?”

“It was a solid week before a physician at Roosevelt Hospital made the first reports: Myron Cohen, a seventy- two-year-old newsstand vendor at City Hall, had suffered third-degree flesh burns. The fallout must’ve dropped right on his head. Over the next three weeks there were burns, bleedings gums, fevers, a sudden spiking of leukemia cases before someone at the EPA finally went out with a Geiger counter—”