The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx (30 page)

Late that night, as rats scurried around the old yard, he remembered all the good times he’d had up in the Bronx when Bea was first born and he and Lucretia were deeply in love. He also remembered all the nights spent pitching back beers with Leon while watching the Brooklyn Dodgers. Around 4:30 in the morning, he loaded all 103 sealed cylinders of pitchblende into a blanket-lined metal milk crate. He abandoned the tools and shovel in the yard and wheeled the loaded hand truck over to the elevated 5 train, where he hauled it up the station’s steps, lifting with his waist, until, bathed in sweat, he had made it to the top. The train arrived forty-five minutes later. The lonely ride downtown took almost an hour. He got out at City Hall and paid some kid a buck to help him carry the hand truck up to street level. He then wheeled it over to his apartment on South Bond Street and spent the morning carrying ten cylinders at a time up the long flights of stairs.

The following day, after recovering from this extraordinary effort, he went out and purchased a soldering iron. Carefully, he welded a tiny wire to the spring panel of the cylinder, so that when it clicked open the pitchblende would be exposed to the unsuspecting world. Paul then removed the laces from a large pair of ratty old Converse sneakers he had found in a trash can and was able to slip the cylinders inside and secure the detonator switch to one of the worn soles. When he was done, he laced the sneaker back up—it looked just like any other shoe. Using tweezers and a small knife, he cut along one side of the sneaker so that all the pitchblende would be able to spill out onto the ground.

On the night of March 29, 1968, Paul finished his first prototype. Other than the detonator switch, for which he’d spent a thousand dollars, the rest of the shoe bomb had cost him less than fifteen dollars. In the future, though, he’d also have to pay for sneakers since he was unlikely to find many discarded pairs.

Since first moving in with Millie, Paul had been saving as much money as possible, buying cheap food in Chinatown and used clothing from thrift shops. All the while, he still received a steady trickle of income from the little his mother had left him, the disability checks from Social Security, and a tidy sum from the Board of Ed for his early discharge. Despite all this, however, he had only managed to save a little over five thousand dollars.

It had been weeks since he had called the number Vladimir had written on the side of the dollar bill. The line was busy this time. When he tried it again an hour later, it was still busy. He continued calling it frequently for the next few days. Eventually, someone picked up, but they didn’t say a word.

“Hello?” Paul finally spoke.

“Harry?” said a female voice.

“No, I spoke to some guy a few weeks ago. He sold me a gizmo that could be used as a detonator.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry. No refunds.”

“I want to buy the other ones.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Twenty thousand bucks.”

“We agreed on four thousand,” he lied.

“That guy’s not with us anymore. You want the rest, they’ll cost you twenty thousand smackers.”

“I only have nine grand,” said Uli, pulling the figure from thin air.

“Fuck it. Nine grand then. You know how we want our bills, small and old.”

“I’ll make them small for you, but it’s going to be too much to stuff in a paper bag this time.”

“And the numbers on the bills can’t be sequential. Just drop off the cash at midnight at the same place you did last time.”

“Midnight when?” Paul asked.

“Tonight.”

“I won’t be in town for at least three days,” Paul lied again.

“In exactly one week then,” the young woman replied, and hung up.

Paul immediately emptied his bank account—a little over four thousand dollars, which he converted into old five- and ten-dollar bills. He spent the next two days cutting up scrap paper into strips the dimension of dollar bills, wrinkling them, straightening them out again, and bundling them together with real bills on top and bottom to make the full amount look like nine thousand dollars.

At midnight on the designated night, Paul dropped a black plastic garbage bag with four thousand fattened-up dollars into an empty garbage can at the corner of Washington Square East and 4th Street, then dashed like a mad man to the corner of Broadway. This time the phone was not ringing. He dug through the same wire-mesh trash can where he had found the original detonator, but it only held garbage.

Shit,
he thought,
they’re counting the cash
. After five minutes of waiting, he knew they were on to him. He had taken three steps back toward the park when he heard the phone ringing.

He picked up the receiver and heard, “They’re in a garbage bag on the other corner.”

Paul looked across the street and spotted a pile of four garbage bags. He hurried over and patted along the sides of them, discovering that one seemed to contain a group of hard cubic items. He tore the bag open and there they all were, nearly fifty more than he needed.

Ambling down Broadway back to his apartment, all he could think was,
Damn, I probably could’ve stiffed them the full amount.

As the VW sped across the barren landscape, Uli kept one eye open, once again searching for the phantom Armenian woman. He knew she wasn’t real, yet he feared she was somehow trapped, doomed to wander this desert forever. Eventually, he saw a distant clump of buildings looming ahead of them—the sinful City of Las Vegas.

50

I
f the people who sold Paul the detonator switches wanted revenge for being shortchanged, he never knew it. After extensive bargain hunting, Paul found that the best and cheapest sneakers to suit his needs were a crappy Hong Kong brand that would probably fall apart after walking a single mile. He purchased 101 pairs, all in size fourteen, at the bulk rate of $150. He also bought several two-pound cones of heavy-duty string. He cut them into four-foot pieces and looped them through the pairs of sneakers so that the laces were extra long for throwing. When lacing the shoes, he poked holes on the far right and left sides of the canvas so that they would hang at an angle that allowed for maximum dispersal of the pitchblende when the side panel clicked open.

He decided to keep two cylinders to use as triggers for the whle project. It took three weeks of painstaking work to match 101 pairs of sneakers with the remaining cylinders and then solder the small wires to the spring switches of the 101 detonators. He also painted a bright white stripe along each of the little spring-shut panels. With careful positioning of the cylinder in the shoe, he would be able to spot this white stripe from thirty feet feet below; since no explosives would be used, this visual aide would be the only way to detect if the sneaker-bomb had been detonated.

Finally, he had to decide where to place his little bombs. Once he tossed the sneakers up, there would be no getting them back. He guessed that the sneakers couldn’t be spread more than two blocks apart, otherwise the level of radioactivity might be too low to trigger the next bomb.

Taping a street map of Manhattan to his wall, Paul used red thumbtacks to designate targets and white tacks for bombs bridging between them. He identified major business, political, and cultural institutions: City Hall, the Stock Market, New York University, Madison Square Garden, Rockefeller Center, the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, the Empire State Building, and so on. Over the ensuing weeks, he modified his tack diagrams repeatedly.

After finishing his map, at the age of eighty-one, Paul walked the route, pausing at the 101 intersections, assessing the poles he might toss sneakers over.

In the early morning hours of March 21, 1969, the first day of spring, Paul launched his little municipal odyssey. On the first day, he was only able to sling three pairs up before heading home exhausted. The next night, he took cabs instead of walking and was able to sling sneakers around five more targets. Weather permitting, that became his daily goal. Hitting different sections of nocturnal Manhattan, he’d heave with his back, sometimes tossing a single pair of sneakers as many as ten times before looping the long laces around the arching metal poles that had to be at least fifteen feet high. Only one sneaker of the pair contained the toxic cylinder—the other was simply a counterweight.

Paul wanted a pair of sneakers dangling as close as he could manage to nearly every major target. He positioned three pairs around his brother’s new Madison Square Garden. Conversely, he deliberately circumvented Grand Central Station and—despite the fact that his brother had had a hand in it—the United Nations. He also wanted to hit Columbia University—that bastion of privilege—but he didn’t have the bombing capability to stretch that far uptown.

At 5:30 on the morning of August 3, 1969, seven months into Richard M. Nixon’s presidency, Paul Moses hurled the last of his 101 bombs.

When he got home that night, imagining that both Millie and Lucretia were forever by his side, he tiredly announced, “Well, ladies, I’ve avenged you.”

He had two remaining cylinders at the house that he’d use to trigger all the others. It was simply a matter of opening the side panels and dumping the pitchblende out his window—then it was over. He didn’t know how quickly the dust would travel, or how sensitive the sensors would turn out to be, but he felt confident that he had done everything he could to honor the lives of all those nameless citizens whose well-being had been destroyed by his brother and the city that empowered him.

Paul spent the next several days constructing a small wooden frame to hold the two cylinders outside his apartment window. He soldered little wires to their panel doors and twined them together to attach to a single lever. Somehow, creating a formal trigger mechanism to set off the devices made this unthinkable task a little easier.

He established his own private D-day as Labor Day 1969, but the day came and went. So he established a new D-day, Halloween. At that point, some of the sneakers had been hanging for as long as six months, so he used the intervening time to check around the city and make sure they were still in place. He was pleasantly surprised to find all bombs were where they should be, so he anxiously awaited the day on which he would give the city the greatest Trick or Treat in history. But hard as he tried to detonate the trigger cylinders when October 31 arrived, he just couldn’t do it. Thanksgiving would be better: No children would be out on the streets; people would be away for the holidays. Again he held the switch, but he still couldn’t pull it. Christmas and New Years both came and went.

It was 1970.
How much longer will I be alive?

Despite a lifetime of pain and failure, Paul was being inadvertently forced to consider the true ramifications of what he had engineered. Although he planned to notify the authorities once the first bomb was detonated—in order to avoid human injuries—the poor would inevitably be impacted much worse than the rich.

Furthermore, newspaper reports indicated that his brother’s ties to power were being slowly clipped away. Rockefeller was finally forcing Mr. Robert out of his Triborough Bridge Authority spiderweb, which was being absorbed into the MTA.

It wasn’t until the second week in January 1970 that Paul figured out what he had to do: go back across the city at night and carefully cut down all the sneakers.

With a sigh of relief, he clipped the wires to each of the two trigger cylinders, but left them hanging out of his window until he could find a suitable place to dispose of them. It then took several days to design and construct a twenty-foot pole made from three segments of light aluminum piping. He bought a flag holder’s belt that came with a leather pouch to fit the pole into. On the other end he installed a large pair of spring-coiled scissors with a piece of thick string that dangled down to the bottom. He would first try to hook the sneakers to remove them, and if that didn’t work, he’d pull the string and shear the laces, allowing the shoes to drop harmlessly into a heavily upholstered cardboard box that he’d place directly below. If this approach worked, the entire operation would take about ten minutes—multiplied by 101 pairs of sneakers. He planned to do it between 2 and 4 in the morning to minimize human contact. He even swiped an orange cone from a construction site, which he planned to use to block street lanes as he worked. He also bought a red vest to look modestly official.

The first night, though something felt off, he headed out. He waited until 3 in the morning, carefully screwing his three aluminum pipes together, running the string from the shears to the bottom, then heaved the contraption up. No cars were in sight in either direction so he walked into the intersection directly below what he referred to as
Sneakers #1.
He struggled to hook the rod under the long lacing. It was much heavier and more unwieldy than he had anticipated. Just as he finally caught the lace, a fist from nowhere slammed into his face, knocking him and the pole to the ground.

When Paul came to moments later, a squat, middle-aged man was standing there next to him. Paul squinted and momentarily thought that he looked familiar, but he quickly turned his attention to the fact that the guy had dismantled the pole and had already snapped two of the three pipes in half. The stranger began whacking the scis-sored end of the top pipe against the cobblestone until it broke as well.

Run!
Paul thought as he pulled himself up to his feet. He immediately felt himself thrown forward, landing hard on the broken pavement. Jumping upon Paul’s back, the man shoved a small photograph in front of his face.

“Recognize her?” The man’s voice was shrill and unsteady.

It was a school photo of his daughter Bea. He hadn’t seen her at all over the past year or so, since he had begun his sneaker odyssey.

“We know where she lives, and if you try doing anything to a single one of those fucking sneakers, if you even
think
about calling the police, I will fuck her while strangling her with my own bare hands.”

Paul didn’t make a sound.

“Think I’m kidding?”