Chapter Twenty-six

I’VE BEEN TO many sacred places, but none so strange as the sixteen acres of Ground Zero. It was a construction site.

In the time which had elapsed between the attack on the Twin Towers and Eleanor’s murder, the whole area had been turned into a massive pit with almost two million tons of rubble being removed to prepare it for rebuilding.

Eventually new towers would rise from the scar and on them would be plaques carrying the names of the dead until, in less time than most of us would credit, people would hurry past, barely remembering they were on hallowed ground.

But on this quiet Sunday the sight of that raw expanse was one of the most moving things I had ever seen: the very desolation of the place was a more eloquent statement of what had been lost than any grand memorial. Staring out at it from the viewing platform, I realized that the attack was imprinted so deeply on our minds that the building site formed a blank canvas, an empty screen on which we projected our own worst memories.

With breaking heart I saw the brilliant blue sky again and the burning buildings, I watched people wave from jagged windows for help that would never come, I saw the wounded run down dust-filled streets, I heard the crashing thunder of the collapsing buildings and I saw rescue workers write their names on their arms in case they were pulled dead from the rubble. I smelt it and lived it and tried to say some quiet words to the twenty-seven hundred souls that would never leave that place. Twenty-seven hundred people – over a thousand of whose bodies were never found.

It was a wonder that any were recovered. At fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, human bone turns to ash in three hours. Fires in the World Trade Center reached two thousand degrees and weren’t extinguished for a hundred days.

It says in the Qur’an that the taking of a single life destroys a universe, and there was the evidence in front of me – twenty-seven hundred universes shattered in a few moments. Universes of family, of children, of friends.

With the rising sun bringing light but little warmth, I left the platform and started to walk. I didn’t know what I was looking for – inspiration probably – but I had no doubt that the killer had started her journey to the Eastside Inn from very close to the path I was following.

There was no other way to get to the hotel – just after the first plane hit, the Port Authority closed all bridges and tunnels into Manhattan; buses, subways and roads across the island either stopped running or were gridlocked; a hundred minutes later the mayor ordered the evacuation of the entire area south of Canal Street. To make it to the hotel, she must have already been inside the exclusion zone.

As I walked, I tried to imagine what she was doing in this part of town at what I figured was around 9 a. m. on a Tuesday morning – work perhaps, a tourist heading for the observation deck on top of the South Tower, a delivery-truck driver, a criminal with a meeting at one of the law firms? Why was she here? I kept asking. If I found the answer, I knew I would be halfway home.

And while it was true I had no idea what I was looking for, I certainly wasn’t prepared for what I found.

Lost in speculation about her movements on that day, it took me a minute to notice the small shrines which had appeared on either side of the pathway. For the thousands of people who had never had the bodies of their loved ones returned, Ground Zero seemed to stand in lieu of a cemetery. In the weeks following the attack they had come and stood in silence – to think, to remember, to try to understand. But as the months rolled by and they visited on anniversaries and birthdays, Thanksgiving and other holidays, it was only natural that they left flowers, cards and small mementos. Those shrines were now dotted along the fences and pathways.

Almost beside me were several soft toys left by three young kids for their dead father. Pinned on the wire was a photo of them, and I stopped and looked – the eldest must have been about seven. In the picture they were letting go of balloons so that, according to their hand-penned note, their dad could catch them in heaven.

I walked on and saw several shrines created by elderly parents for their lost children, I read poems from men whose hearts were breaking and looked at photo-collages assembled by women who could barely contain their anger.

Strangely, though, in the midst of so much sorrow, I wasn’t depressed. Maybe I was wrong, but it seemed to me that something else was shining through – the triumph of the human spirit. All around I saw that shattered families were making a promise to endure, I read about men and women who had risked their lives to save unknown strangers and I saw more photos of dead firefighters than I cared to count.

I stopped at the epicentre, alone among so many home-made memorials, and bowed my head. I wasn’t praying – I’m not a religious man, a person of The Book, as they say – nor was I particularly affected by so much death. I’ve been to Auschwitz and Natzweiler-Struthof and the ossuary at the Battle of Verdun, and death on an industrial scale had long ago ceased to amaze me. But I was humbled by so much raw courage – probably because I am so doubtful of my own.

Pain and suffering were imprinted on me very young – you see, as a kid, I was inside the apartment when my mother was killed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not particularly afraid of dying, but all I have ever asked for was that, when the time came, it was fast and clean. I’ve always had a great fear of being hurt like my mother, of not being able to stop the pain – that was the secret terror which waited for me where the street lights end.

With the bravery of ordinary people memorialized all around me, and reminded once again that when it comes to courage I’m a flawed man, I turned for home. That was when I saw it – a white board hanging on the wire, half hidden by a curve in the path, easily overlooked except for the accident of the rising sun glinting off its surface. There was a larger than usual pile of bouquets lying at its foot, and that was what drew me towards it.

Written on the board, rendered in a careful hand, were the names of eight men and women, all with photos. A caption said that they had been brought out alive from the collapsing North Tower by one man – a New York cop. A teenage girl whose mother was one of those rescued had created the shrine, and it was a loving tribute to the courage of a single man. The girl’s narrative listed the people the cop had saved and they included: a lawyer in her power suit, a bond trader with a picture-perfect family who looked like a real player, a man in a wheelchair …

‘A man in a what? ’ I said to myself. My eyes flew down the board and found a photo of the cop who had been responsible for getting them all out. Of course I recognized him – Ben Bradley. As I said, it was the last thing I had expected to find.

When Ben had told me in Paris that he was trapped in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, I had assumed he had been inside the building on business, but I was wrong. The teenager had the real story. She said he was on Fulton Street when he saw the plane hit and a huge section of the tower blossom into the sky like a massive exit wound.

With debris raining down and everyone starting to flee, he pinned his shield on his shirt collar, dumped his jacket and sprinted for the tower. Like New York City itself, it was Bradley’s darkest moment and his finest hour.

Five times he made his way in and out of the building, each time climbing an emergency stairway against the sea of people coming down – trying to see how he could help, who he could save. At one stage, standing on an elevator landing on the thirtieth floor – with the first of two hundred jumpers hurtling down the faç ade – Bradley had to wrap his shirt around his mouth so that he could breathe. In the process he lost his shield, his only form of identity.

Expecting the worst for himself, he plunged into a deserted office and found a marker pen to scribble his name and Marcie’s phone number on his arm. He looked out the window and couldn’t believe it – a hundred and twenty feet away the South Tower was collapsing. Until then, he hadn’t even known it had been hit.

He ran for safety to Emergency Stairway A and it was then someone told him that there was a guy in a wheelchair way up above, waiting for help. Thanks to the teenager’s account, I learned that Bradley was the middle-aged guy who had called for volunteers, led the other three men up to find the crippled man and carried his evacuation chair down the sixty-seven floors.

The teenager wrote that the team found their way to the mezzanine and somehow got the evacuation chair and its occupant outside. Terrified that the tower would collapse, they ran for safety. One of the rescuers – a big guy, a young insurance salesman – realized the other members of the team were running on empty, dropped his corner of the chair and threw the crippled guy over his shoulder. He yelled at Bradley and the other two – a security guard and a foreign exchange dealer – to beat it.

Two minutes later the world caved in – the North Tower collapsed from the top down as if it were being peeled. Everything in those minutes was random, including death – the insurance salesman and the crippled guy took cover in a doorway that offered no protection and escaped the falling debris unharmed. Ten feet away the security guard sustained a direct hit from a blast of rubble and died instantly. Bradley and the forex dealer threw themselves under a fire truck that got buried by a mountain of concrete.

Trapped in an air-pocket, it was the forex dealer – thirty-two and a millionaire – who Bradley held tight and whose dying message he memorized to give to the guy’s family.

Five hours later a fire crew with a sniffer dog hauled Bradley out, saw the details on his arm, called Marcie and told her to get to Emergency as fast as possible.

I stood for a long time in silence. It was one of the most remarkable stories of courage I had ever encountered, and I knew that the following day I would offer Bradley the only thing of value I could give. I would tell him I would invent one last legend and talk at his damn seminar.

I turned away and started to think about what I would say to a gathering of the world’s top investigators. I figured I would claim to be Peter Campbell, a former doctor turned hedge-fund manager. I would tell them that I had first met Jude Garrett back in my medical days when he consulted me on a murder he was investigating. We became friends and there was hardly a case or investigative technique he had pioneered which he didn’t discuss with me. I would reveal it had been me who had found the manuscript of the book after he died and that I was the one who had prepared it for publication. I would lead them to believe, as Bradley had suggested, that I was Dr Watson to his Sherlock.

It wasn’t perfect, but it would do. Mostly, I was confident because I knew Campbell’s academic credentials and a host of other details I would need to invent would survive almost any scrutiny. I could rely on Battleboi for that.

Sure, I could establish Peter Campbell’s legitimacy, but what would I actually say when I addressed them? I wondered if it would be possible to take such elite investigators into an unsolved case, to lead them through the strange details of a brilliant crime – in other words, could I throw open for discussion the murder at the Eastside Inn?

It certainly had all the right elements for a good case study: a woman who changed her appearance every day, a hotel room washed down with industrial antiseptic, a body whose teeth had been pulled and the killer’s use of Jude Garrett’s own book, the one that had caused such a stir among the attendees, as a step-by-step manual.

But they were just facts, and the audience wouldn’t be satisfied with that. ‘Give us a theory, ’ they would say. ‘Where’s the narrative? Why September eleventh? Isn’t that the first thing a brilliant man like Jude Garrett would ask? ’

And they were right, of course – of all the days, why that one? I thought that if I was Garrett – which, fortunately, I was – I would tell them—

A startling thought swept into my head. Pressured by my imaginary performance, I had an idea of why, when everyone else was running, she was looking for a place to stay.

Say there was somebody she wanted to murder but she had never known how to do it without being caught. Just assume she worked in one of the Twin Towers and was running late that morning. Say she wasn’t at her desk but was standing outside and saw the buildings burn and fall. If all her work colleagues were dead, who would know she had survived?

She could just vanish. All she needed was a place to stay, and to make certain that nobody ever recognized her. Then she could commit the murder whenever it suited her.

I mean, there’s no better alibi than being dead, is there?