Chapter 37

In the packed streets, men and women hailed each other, shaking hands, exchanging hugs, laughing and dancing jigs to their own music. Some held Graggers – noise sticks not unlike soccer rattles – which they shook in time with their laughter, adding to the general air of festivity. Many wore fancy dress, while others were happier with their everyday garb, predominantly black, but joining in the celebratory joy just the same.

It made sense.

The Purim Feast is an important public holiday in the Jewish calendar, marked by the exchange of gifts, feasting and general wine-induced merriment, a time for people to let their hair down and enjoy themselves. Traditionally celebrated in the Hebrew month of Adar, it was a feast to mark the liberation of the Jews from their Persian overlords, when Esther outwitted the wicked Haman and led the Jews to victory over their persecutors.

It was the ideal time for Hicks to cause havoc and add validity to his statement to the government, more so when this year the fifteenth of Adar corresponded with today. Added to that he had found the ideal location. Lincoln Square between West Sixty-Sixth and Seventy-Seventh Streets on Amsterdam Avenue gave him everything he required. Here were the West End and Lincoln Square Synagogues, the Chabad of the West Sixties, all destinations of the Jewish community during this festive time. Nearby were schools, both Juilliard and La Guardia, which could only cause even more terror and confusion.

He thought of Kristallnacht, and how he’d planned his own night of broken glass, and decided that his original plan of detonating a bomb in Times Square would have held nowhere near the significance it would here in the heart of the Jewish community. Here and now was more befitting his character and his message. Forget Crystal Night, this would be his Day of Broken Spirits.

Feeling that there was no time like the present, he thumbed the button on his cell phone. A corresponding cell began to ring in a parked vehicle at the intersection of Sixty-Eighth and Amsterdam, but no one could hear it over the simultaneous percussive roar of flame and debris blossoming between the buildings. Carried on the super-heated wind was Hicks’ statement to the world.