Man of the Hour (27 page)

Instead, she went home alone to her tiny $1,200-a-month East 50th Street studio to eat two-day-old salad, drink cheap chardonnay, and watch
Seinfeld
reruns until she started to fall asleep on her couch. But just before consciousness slipped away, the phone rang and her beeper went off. She picked up the receiver and Nazi’s sloshed, frantic voice yowled into her eardrum.

“They’re after us, love! It’s your bloody bomber story!”

“Why, what’s the matter?” She sat up and looked at the clock. It was after 11:30, and the early edition was already hitting the streets. She panicked, knowing that if she had gotten anything wrong it was too late to take it back.

“Nothing’s the matter!” Nazi shouted. “You’ve got them all chasing you.
Now what have you got to follow it?
”

All of a sudden, word of her story had scattered around town like broken glass. The
Times
was trying to match her piece about David Fitzgerald. So were the
Post
and the
News
and all the major television stations. She’d managed to beat them all, for the moment. She was running hard, leading the pack. This was the place she’d always wanted to be in her career. But already the moment was passing. Dozens of reporters and producers were working the phones and combing the streets, trying to overtake her. Now she had to start worrying about staying ahead. And she hadn’t even gotten to sleep yet.

30

THE KNOCK ON THE
door came just before midnight.

Leaving the chain on, David opened it and saw an unassuming-looking bald man with an egg-shaped head and light-colored eyebrows standing in the hallway. Six young Visigoths in blue vinyl jackets were behind him.

“David Fitzgerald?” The unassuming man held out an FBI badge and a thick document with a federal seal on it. “I’m Special Agent Donald Sippes. We have a warrant to search your apartment.”

David took the chain off the door and looked at the papers. “But this isn’t right,” he said. “I haven’t had a chance to call my lawyer.”

In fact, he didn’t even have a criminal lawyer yet. His divorce lawyer, Beth Nussbaum, was supposed to be helping him find one as quickly as possible.

“Sir,
we have a warrant
,” Sippes said carefully, like he was addressing a mildly retarded child.

Then he stepped into the apartment and held the door open for his six colleagues.

Within seconds, they were tearing the place apart, bagging and cataloging the most private and intimate parts of David’s life. They took personal letters from his students, shirts Renee bought him when they were first in love, old Marvel comic books he’d been saving for Arthur, pages of his great unpublished novel,
The Firebug
. They grabbed photographs, divorce papers, floppy disks, old newspapers, Tupperware, old Delaney books, lesson plans, a papier-mâché solar system that Arthur had made as a school project. The sheer scope of the violation was nauseating, and the agents were utterly indifferent to David’s response. It was like having a high school football team hold a scrimmage in his house.

They threw the mattress off his bed and confiscated the sheets. They dusted Arthur’s Lego castle in the corner for fingerprints and took away his Playmobil pirate ship. They rifled his file cabinets, chipped paint off his unfinished walls, collected fibers from the carpet in his living room, carted away his old Schwinn bicycle. David felt as though his very identity was being deconstructed piece by piece and he was powerless to prevent it.

“Listen, I don’t think you guys should be doing this,” he protested. “Isn’t there some matter of due process you’re skipping?”

“Sir, you’re not under arrest,” Donald Sippes politely countered. “We have probable cause to search your apartment. I’m sorry, but we’ve already had one bombing. We’re not going to wait around for another.”

In the meantime, the phone kept ringing and David’s answering machine kept taking messages from reporters. Apparently, Judy Mandel’s story had just come out in the newspaper’s early edition, setting off a Monster Rally Demolition Derby of new frenzied media interest.

David found himself getting enraged. How could this be happening? He was an innocent man in America. A teacher. He’d heard stories from his students about the police destroying their homes because they’d hit the wrong house in a drug raid, but he’d never imagined it could possibly happen to him.

He went to the phone and tried to call his divorce lawyer again, but her machine was on now, leaving him terrifyingly abandoned.

He turned and saw an agent with a mustache and a head shaped like a pumpkin go into his closet and pick up the Cal Ripkin Spalding baseball mitt he’d been saving for Arthur’s next birthday in November.

“You don’t have to take that,” David said angrily. “It’s for my kid.”

“It’s evidence.” The pumpkin-head shrugged, dropping the glove into a large Ziploc bag and sliding his finger along the seal. “The judge says what’s yours is ours. From here on in, you might as well get used to that.”

31

MR. FITZGERALD’S FOURTH-PERIOD
class was canceled the next morning and with three consecutive free periods ahead of her, Elizabeth decided to go home early to have lunch and put her thoughts in order. News about the FBI raiding her teacher’s house had left her confused and edgy. She went into the kitchen to make herself a tuna fish sandwich but lost her appetite after one bite. Should she feel relieved or disturbed about Mr. Fitzgerald being named as a suspect? She didn’t know. After all, now she could be sure her brother had nothing to do with the bombing. But the idea that Mr. Fitzgerald could have done it had no immediate resonance in her mind; had he done or said something she’d missed? She was going to have to consider this carefully.

From upstairs, she heard a footfall in her room. Someone was in there. She raced up the stairs and found Nasser sitting on her bed, with her books and papers strewn all over the floor.

“What are you doing?” she said.

Her closet door was open and her chest of drawers had been ransacked. Nasser looked up from reading her diary.

“What does this mean, what you’ve written here?” he demanded, holding it up by its paisley cover: “‘Things are building up inside of me. I have to tell Mr. Fitzgerald.’ Are you talking about the sex?”

“Give it to me!” She lunged at him and grabbed the book away.

“He is putting these things in your mind, this bad man!” He jumped up and came after her. “He wants to seduce you. You have to control yourself!”

“Control myself? I have to control myself?! You slapped my teacher. You’re in my room!” She hugged the diary to her chest.

“I am trying to help you. You have an obligation.”

“I don’t have any obligation to you.”

“Yes, you do! Yes, you do! You have an obligation to the family honor.”

“Family honor? You have no right to come in here and talk to me about family honor.” She turned on him with her hair flying wildly in her face.

“Yes, I do! Yes, I do! Because I am the only one who cares! I’m the only one who remembers how it was back home!” He took the rusty key on the chain from around his neck and brandished it at her like a weapon. “You see? You see?!”

“What?” Her body sagged in weary disgust. “You think you can run my life just because you have some stupid key?”

“Stupid key? You call this a stupid key?” Nasser looked mortally wounded. “This is the key to Mother’s home. How can you talk this way?”

“Nasser, have you ever looked at it closely?” Elizabeth shouted. “Have you? Have you even noticed it says ‘Yale’ on the key?”

“What are you saying?” Cautiously, Nasser took the key from his chest and studied it in his palm.

“I’m asking you how many old locks there are in Palestine made by an American company. Didn’t you ever wonder about that?
It’s not the real key!
Okay? It probably opens a door on Fourth Avenue somewhere.”

He slowly raised his eyes from the key and looked at her, fearful and stunned, as if he’d just realized the floor was about to give way. “This is not true,” he said defensively. “It’s this teacher who’s making you question things.”

“Nasser, look at the key yourself if you don’t believe me,” she said, shaking her diary at him in exasperation.

But instead of looking, he put the chain back around his neck and dropped the key down the front of his shirt again. “No, it’s not right,” he said tightly. “It’s the teacher making you blind to what you should believe. He’s not a teacher, he’s a poisoner. He’s trying to break up our family.”

“He’s not.” Elizabeth hugged the diary tighter, trying to maintain some control.

“Yes, of course, he is.” Nasser came toward her. “He wants to make you into his whore. I can see this! It’s in the book you wrote yourself! Why don’t
you
look at the truth?”

He reached for the diary again, but she punched him in the shoulder. “Get away from me! Get out of my room!”

He drew back, startled and furious, looking at the place where she’d hit him.

“What’s happening to you?” he said, staring as if she’d just spoken in a strange language. “I love you. Don’t you see what he’s doing to us?”

“Just get out of here. I’m starting to hate you.”

“What did you say to me?” He reared back a step.

“I said, get out. I hate you.”

Then all at once, he came at her and pushed her down on the bed, still trying to wrestle the diary away. She kicked and scratched at his face, screaming, “Get out of here, you’re sick!” They’d rough-housed for fun a few years back, but the feeling between their bodies was different now. The sinews and muscles stretched and pulled in other directions. The two of them were bigger and the house was smaller. He was trying to subdue something within her. She reached for the helmet he’d bought her and started banging him over the head with it.

“For the love of God!”

They both looked up at the same time and saw their stepmother, Anne, in the doorway, holding a basket of laundry.

“What the hell d’you think you’re doing?” she asked Nasser.

Everything stopped. Elizabeth struggled out from under her brother, and Nasser got up slowly, breathing hard and tucking his shirt into his pants. The static charge between them was still in the air.

“You can’t understand.” He looked around the room, like someone else was to blame for the shambles. “I’m trying to save my sister. This wouldn’t make sense to you. You are not a good Muslim woman. You’re not part of this family.”

“I understand. I’ll not have you living in my home anymore.”

“Elizabeth, tell her how I was trying to help you.”

But his sister was already busying herself, picking up her room and putting her diary away. “It’s time for you to go, Nasser.”

32

THE LITTLE BITS OF
David Fitzgerald that had been raining all over the world had finally landed and now he had no idea how to put them back together again.

Larry Simonetti had called the first thing in the morning and told him not to report to school. “I’ve already talked it over with the union,” he said. “You can still get your salary, but it might be better if you stayed home for a while.”

Meanwhile, federal agents had raided his mother’s house on Long Island, seizing his father’s old rifles and souvenir grenades from the garage, as if they were evidence of a connection with some sort of right-wing terrorist militia. David had to call his mother in Florida to calm her down and reassure her before returning to the business of talking to the steady stream of criminal lawyers interested in representing him. It was hard getting used to the idea that from here on in his life was going to be in a constant state of emergency.

“Looks like these guys did a full Rudy on you,” said his latest visitor, an attorney named Ralph Marcovicci, who was surveying the heap of shredded bedclothes, silverware, and dismantled fixtures in the middle of the living room. “Imagine if they didn’t like you. How’s your landlord feeling these days, anyway?”

“Testy,” said David, bringing in a cup of coffee he’d poured through a strainer, since the agents had broken his coffeemaker. “It’s Columbia University. I worked a fiddle with somebody in their real estate department, so I could be near my kid. I’m only supposed to hold on to the apartment until I finish my doctorate.”

“Well, now you got a good excuse,” said Marcovicci, a bell-shaped, pink-cheeked man who wore his hair like a ’70s classic rock guitarist and weighed at least three hundred pounds.

He was accompanied by another lawyer, named Judah Rosenbloom, who wore a graying ponytail and horn-rimmed glasses and was so skinny he looked as if he let Ralph eat off his plate at every meal.

“So I know Bern recommended you,” said David, jittery and trying to get his bearings. “But you guys look very familiar to me. Where do I know you from?”

“I’ve handled a lotta high-profile cases the last few years.” Ralph took the coffee from David and sat down, almost breaking the one good chair left in the living room. “Remember the Larchmont Lolita? That was one of mine.”

“Oh.”

“And the Boom-Boom Killer? The stripper who shot two customers at the club where she worked? That was another one of mine. Also, the Centerfold Cop. I’ve been on Howard Stern a lot.”

“Really,” said David.

“Yeah, Howard’s a good friend of mine. I’m supposed to go over to his house for a barbecue.”

David was already shaking his head no. He knew he was in desperate trouble, but he wasn’t that desperate. “Well, I …”

But now Judah Rosenbloom, tugging furiously at his glasses, spoke up. “David, I want you to know I’ve been a passionate advocate for the poor and the dispossessed for many years now and I’ve never hesitated to take on unpopular clients. In fact, I believe that’s my mission as a lawyer.” He spoke swiftly and insistently, as if he expected to get thrown out of the room. “I believe that people of good conscience should not only challenge the apparatus of government but dismantle its institutions when the cause of justice is not being served …”