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Demmerle.
    Still, they decided to go ahead. Jane typed up the communiqué in advance, mailing it to the newspapers. On Monday they built the bombs. That night they left them at their targets: the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, the General Motors Building at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, and the headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank. Everything went smoothly. By midnight everyone had returned to the apartment. Then they phoned in their warnings and waited.
    The bombs began detonating at 1:00 a.m. The first exploded on the empty sixteenth floor of the Chase Manhattan building just as police, reacting to the warning call, finished a fruitless search; the blast ripped through an elevator shaft, sending debris cascading all the way to the street. The bomb on the twentieth floor of the RCA Building detonated in a vacant office suite, panicking dozens of guests in the Rainbow Room restaurant, forty-five floors above; men in tuxedos and women in gowns scurried down a freight elevator and stairwells to the street. The office suite was demolished; dozens of windows were blown out. The bomb at the General Motors Building accomplished much the same.
    Once again the sound of sirens echoed through the streets of Manhattan. Alpert and the others were thrilled. For the police, however, the bombings represented an escalation they could not ignore. This was simply unprecedented, three bombings in one night; the city had never seen anything like it. The next morning the NYPD’s cigar-chomping chief of detectives, Albert Seedman, tromped through the wreckage, shaking his head and muttering under his breath. His men had been investigating the bombings since the first one, at United Fruit, and had made no headway whatsoever. He decided to form a special squad of twenty-five handpicked detectives to find the perpetrators.
    Seedman considered calling the FBI, who he suspected knew more than he did; after the Federal Building bombing, the head of the Bureau’s New York office, a square-jawed veteran named John Malone, had called to say they were working an informant in the case. That morning, as Seedman was establishing his command center at the RCA Building, Malone called again. “It took a while,” Malone said, “but the informant finally gave up our man.”
    “Who is it?” Seedman asked.
    “His name is Sam Melville.”
     • • • 
    The three explosions ignited a new kind of civic tumult that would become all but commonplace in New York and other cities in the next decade: a rash of bombings followed by a wave of copycat threats, followed by the mass evacuations of skyscraper after skyscraper, leaving thousands of office workers milling about on sidewalks, wondering what had happened. That Tuesday the NYPD was obliged to check out three hundred separate bomb threats. The next day, November 12, the Associated Press counted thirty just between the hours of 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. A dozen buildings had to be emptied, including the Pan Am Building, on Forty-fifth Street, the Columbia Broadcasting building, on Fifty-first Street, and a library in Queens. Afterward the Times editorialized that “periodic evacuation of buildings [may become] a new life style for the New York office worker.” The columnist Sidney Zion, noting how powerless the city appeared during a string of bombings now entering its fourth month, said New York “was rapidly becoming Scare City.” 2
    Even as Melville and his friends rejoiced that Tuesday, teams of undercover FBI and NYPD men began filtering into their neighborhood. The next day Albert Seedman heard from the FBI’s John Malone. “Our informant says Melville is ready to do another job tonight,” Malone said. “This time they plan to place bombs in U.S. Army trucks parked outside a National Guard armory. The trucks will be driven inside late at night, and the bombs will go off a few hours later.”
    “Which armory?”
    “He didn’t say.”
    There were three: two in Manhattan, one in Queens.