First Tragedy, Then Chicanery

[question everything]

The Wall Street Journal

BOOKS

First Tragedy, Then Chicanery
By KYLE SMITH
September 8, 2006; Page W6

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"The Zero" lacks any ritual sense of piety or sentimental tribute to the usual 9/11 truisms. Indeed, it recasts many of those involved in the cleanup effort -- from the street cops and FDNY "smokers" to the brass -- as cynical opportunists who brag that they've never bedded so many women and fight about which celebrities they get to escort around Ground Zero. The story also metaphorically paints U.S. attempts to crack terror networks as blundering at best, morally dubious at worst. But the book's brilliant ironies, its deadpan truths, its insider smarts and its everyguy hero may lead even skeptical readers to forgive the irreverent point of view. "The Zero" could end up as the "Catch-22" of 9/11.

Mr. Walter earned his backstage pass to the post-9/11 scramble earlier in 2001, when he was hired to ghostwrite the best-selling memoir of then-hero, now-rascal Bernard Kerik, the New York Police Department commissioner who turned out to be a character from "Guys and Dolls." It misses no opportunity to pluck a Kerik-like peacock known only as "the Boss," who says at one point that our freedom depends on the alacrity with which the New York Jets are taken on a tour of the destruction. On another occasion the Boss opens, with a dramatic flourish, a folder that contains only a blank sheet of paper, and on still another he puts cops on the lookout while he entertains a prostitute. Who turns out to be a guy.

Ground Zero (in cop talk, "the Zero") is seen through the watery eyes of detective Brian Remy. A drunk with an estranged wife and teen son, Remy is assigned to a secret detail that investigates sensitive documents blown out of the World Trade Center. As the book opens, he discovers that he has accidentally shot himself in the head during a bender. The only clue to why he did this is a note he left. It reads, in its entirety, "Etc..." In a fog of confusion, he takes up the case of a suspicious woman named March who worked in the World Trade Center. Although she is presumed dead, recovered documents suggest that she may have instead fled the building just before the attacks -- and that her ex-boyfriend, a Saudi, was the one who tipped her. "If she is, in fact, dead," Remy is told in one of many morbidly funny lines, "well, then everything is copacetic."

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Many writers published obituaries for irony in 2001; in reality, it merely took a 20-minute coffee break. Mr. Walter is among the first to diagram the tragedy-into-kitsch machine that many of us have stumbled across ourselves. It was only weeks after the attacks that Manhattan sidewalk vendors began selling watercolor paintings of Ground Zero decorated with crosses and American flags -- this century's Elvis on black velvet. My own experience was typical: A friend from Los Angeles stopped by my New York office on a whirlwind weekend with her boyfriend. "First we're going to Ground Zero," she told me, "then we're going to see Chicago!" Even today, tourists stand before the World Trade Center site -- ground supposedly hallowed by the deaths of thousands -- and smile for each other's snapshots as if they were visiting Rockefeller Center. On the furiously funny TV series "Rescue Me," a drunken firefighter who lost friends in the attacks responds to the sidewalk vendors by urinating on their trinkets. His blurry rage seems a more fitting response to the carnage than lighting candles.

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Mr. Smith is the author of "Love Monkey," a novel.
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