Man of the Hour (47 page)

“We wait ten minutes before we go in to get the material,” said Dr. Ahmed, reading the top half of a folded-up newspaper. “Make sure no one’s watching us.”

“Blessings of Allah,” said Youssef, eating a powdered sugar donut beside him. “I know we will have success.”

“
Insh’allah
, if God is willing.” The doctor straightened the paper three times in rapid succession and flashed an angry look in Nasser’s rearview mirror.

The feeling between them had been coarse and volatile since Nasser sneaked out to see the professor the night before last. Dr. Ahmed had instantly accused him of being a
khan al-’ahad
—a sell-out—and going to see the police, to alert them of the bombing plans. He’d demanded that Nasser show them exactly where he’d driven and tell them everything he’d discussed with Ibrahim. “
Yin an a bouk,”
he’d said. “I’ll kill your whole family if I find out you’ve betrayed us.”

And what made it worse was that inside his heart Nasser knew the doctor was half right about him. Doubts had been eating away at him since his conversation with Professor Bin-Khaled. Was the doctor pushing the suicide bombing plan to compete with his old friend Mehdi? Was it something other than a sacrifice for God? And now that he’d had time to think about it, what made it worse was finding out that Ahmed was in fact not a medical doctor or a doctor of chemistry, but a doctor of psychology. Someone perhaps capable of manipulating a young man’s mind.

Nasser looked down at his door handle and was seized by the urge to pull it back, throw the door open, and go fleeing into traffic down Tenth Avenue. Away from Dr. Ahmed and Youssef. Away from the imam with his vague pronouncements. He didn’t want to be a martyr. Forget the past, the wars, the bombs, the dead bus driver, the intimations of everlasting glory. He wanted to start all over again. Change his name. Reinvent himself. People in America did it all the time.

“Here, look at this.” Dr. Ahmed thrust the newspaper at Youssef. “It’s a good thing we go soon. We’re running out of time.”

“What is it?” Nasser checked them in the rearview.

Youssef wiped his beard and studied the paper intently while the doctor glanced once over his shoulder and then suddenly craned his neck to look out the back window.

“Your teacher is not in trouble anymore.” Youssef adjusted his aviator glasses as he read. “They say he’s no longer a suspect. He’s a cooperator. What this means, I don’t know. How could he cooperate if he doesn’t know nothing?”

“Maybe he knows something.” Dr. Ahmed turned back around and faced front.

For once, he wasn’t fidgeting, blowing his nose, pulling on his beard, or doing any of his other rapid movements. He’d become rigid with tension.

“What’s the matter, sheik?” asked Nasser. “You seem nervous.”

The doctor’s tongue slid around under his lips. “They are watching us,” he said quietly.

“Who?”

“The ones in the van behind us. Don’t turn around too quickly.”

Without even looking in the mirror, Nasser knew which vehicle he was talking about. A white Dodge van with blackout windows, New Jersey license plates, and a bumper sticker, just added for today, that read
DON’T LAUGH, YOUR DAUGHTER MAY BE IN HERE
. He’d noticed the van before when they’d first driven up the block and thought it looked familiar. Now he was almost positive when he’d seen it before: yesterday afternoon, when they were buying twelve gallons of diesel fuel for the
haddutas
on Foster Avenue in Brooklyn.

“You think this is the police?” he asked Dr. Ahmed.

There was a long stomach-churning beat of silence.

“By the Prophet, we have to get out of here,” said Youssef. “Drive, my friend. Drive.” He grimaced and bent forward slightly in his seat, as if he was having a heart attack.

“Don’t panic,” Dr. Ahmed said evenly. “Just start the car and circle the block. See if they follow us.”

Nasser turned the key in the ignition, stepped on the gas, and pulled out cautiously as a strong wind blew dirt into the street and moved clouds in front of the sun.

In the rearview mirror, the white van started to pull out after them and then stopped, as if someone had just given an order. Nasser could almost feel the eyes behind the blacked-out glass, watching them, waiting for them to act.

“Maybe it’s okay, sheik.” Youssef stuck his head out and looked back. “They don’t seem to be following us.”

“Come around the corner again. We’ll see.”

Nasser drove slowly around the block, feeling veins constrict in the side of his neck. In the rearview, he saw Dr. Ahmed whispering in the Great Bear’s ear and then leaning forward to pull something out of his own waistband. A gun. He remembered the doctor was holding the one gun they had with them. A .38-caliber revolver that Youssef had bought from a Dominican drug dealer over the summer.

“T’awa kaf,”
said the doctor, as they approached West Side Storage again. “Pull over.”

They parked on the opposite side of the street this time. The UPS truck was gone. Yellow cabs and motorcycles whipped by, like an urban hurricane, all senseless noise and fury. But the white van was still there, pulled up a little closer to the West Side Storage entrance.

“For sure, this is them,” said Dr. Ahmed.

His hands were where Nasser couldn’t see them. But his shoulders were jerking slightly, as if he was busy with some fine-motor control task, like tying his shoe or loading the gun.

Nasser found he was afraid to drop his eyes away from the mirror and turn around.

“Who would have told them we were going to be here?” asked Youssef, wheezing and swallowing another pill. “I don’t understand.”

“Why don’t we ask our driver?” The doctor gritted his teeth, performing some last complicated bit of business. “He’s the one who’s been out and around.”

Nasser stared at the lock on his door. A little black button pushed all the way down. Why had he let the moment pass when he could have run away? Why had he let so many moments pass? It was this indecisiveness that had cost him everything. If he’d still had that hard core of inner resolution, he could have just acted without thinking. He could either have run away or gone ahead with this plan to blow himself up and been done with it. But instead he was just trapped in between again.

“Sheik, I didn’t talk to nobody except my friend,” he said, turning around to face Dr. Ahmed and Youssef. “And I didn’t tell him anything.”

“That’s what you said before.” The doctor had the gun in plain sight now, lying sideways in his lap. Any passerby looking in the window would have seen it.

“I don’t betray anybody,” Nasser protested. “My heart is true! I cut my own hand off first! You know, I was tortured …”

He was going to die now, he knew it. Either the doctor would shoot him right here or they’d all be killed in a gunfight with the police in the white van.

“How else would they know to find us here?” asked Youssef.

His old friend, the Great Bear. The father figure turning his back on him once more.

“I don’t know,” said Nasser, pleading with his eyes, feeling his heart beat wildly. “Maybe they followed us from somewhere.”

“No one followed us.” The doctor put his hand over the gun. “They were waiting when we came here.”

“Hold on.” Youssef raised his chin. “Your sister is the one who rents the room for us. Right?”

To Nasser, it seemed the sky had just darkened. “You asked me to have her do this,” he said. “My sister would not call the police.”

“Then how else would they know?” The doctor breathed on the back of his neck. “There’s no other way they’d have the information. Either she told someone or you did. Which is it?”

Nasser, speechless, looked out the passenger side window at the white van.
DON’T LAUGH, YOUR DAUGHTER MAY BE IN HERE
, said the sticker on its side. In his mind, the words were transformed into: Don’t Laugh, Your Sister May Be In Here. Could Elizabeth have told anyone? It didn’t seem possible, but there had always been a part of her that seemed remote and foreign to him. Had something wild grown there?

“Who would she tell?” he managed to choke out.

“Maybe this teacher they say is cooperating in the newspaper.” Youssef rolled up the
Tribune
and held it like a baton. “
You said
you were worried he was getting too close to her.”

“Exactly,” said the doctor. “Maybe he is having the sex with her and it’s made her weak in the mind.”

Nasser felt as if he’d just been plunged under water. He was looking up at the surface, not hearing the words anymore. Something was rippling between him and the world.

“This is not possible,” he said.

“It’s you or her.” Dr. Ahmed shrugged in the rearview mirror, fussing with the gun. “And if it’s her, that means she’s dishonored her family and she should die.”

“It’s not her,” said Nasser numbly.

His emotions were bundled up like barbed wire inside of him: he was afraid to try to pull them apart. The idea of his sister having sex with Mr. Fitzgerald was too much to take in. He tried to shut himself down.

“If it’s not her, then it’s you.” The doctor kept pressing. “And then you should die like a dog and burn in hell forever. And shame should be brought on your family. They should die like dogs too.”

“It’s not me,” said Nasser.

“Then prove it!” the doctor yelled. “Let’s go right now! Drive. To the school. No more waiting.”

“What about the material inside there?” Youssef gestured lamely out the window, toward West Side Storage. “We’ve spent almost three thousand dollars.”

“Leave it.” The doctor sat back and gave a little annoyed wave with the gun. “We have no time to make the fuel bombs. But we have enough dynamite left over at the apartment for one time. We can rig up a toggle switch in a couple of hours and be ready to go. Let’s not waste any more time here.”

“But sheik,” Youssef protested. “I never said I wanted to be a
shaheen
. I have a wife and children.”

“It’s the will of Allah!” The doctor shouted at him. “He alone guides us. Whatever will be is already determined. Are you great enough to question him? Is this what you’re telling me?”

“No,” said the Great Bear meekly.

Hearing this, Nasser began to panic. He realized there would be no way for him to get Elizabeth out of the school before he brought the bomb in. But if he protested or tried to create another delay, the doctor would surely shoot him on the spot and then perhaps do away with her anyway. Elizabeth. He tried to remember the way she’d looked at Mr. Fitzgerald before he’d driven up in the school parking lot that day. All he could recall, though, was how her face and body were turned to him. As if she were a flower, opening to the sun.

If she’d let him in, probably she deserved to die.

“Drive the car,” said Dr. Ahmed. “Uptown, downtown, but not too fast. We want to lose the van. But don’t break any laws so we get stopped. We’ve come too far now to make another stupid mistake.”

“What about God protecting us?” said Nasser, trying to reconcile himself to this fate. “What if it’s His will that we get stopped?”

“Just drive the car,” said the doctor.

62

DAVID CAME BY THE
West 98th Street apartment early that morning intending to drop off the weekly $400 support check and walk Arthur to school, if possible. On the subway downtown, he’d noticed people were no longer moving away from him or leaving the car when he entered. Either he’d been redeemed by the story in the morning newspaper, or they’d just forgotten about him. Above ground, the air seemed cleaner, finer, more full of possibilities.

But inside the apartment, the atmosphere was dimmed. Renee was still in her bathrobe, and a stack of cardboard boxes sat by the front door. The living room curtains were half-drawn, draining most of the color from the room. Big-band music played on the kitchen radio.

“What’s going on?” David asked. “Somebody die?”

“The world is lit by lightning,” Renee answered in a distant voice. “I am more faithful than I intended to be.”

“What?”

“Nowadays the world is lit by lightning.” She sat down under Margot Fonteyn. “It’s time to blow your candles out.”

“Glass Menagerie,”
said David, drawing closer as he recognized the speech. “Except isn’t it the son who says that, not one of the women in the play?”

“What does it matter?” Renee touched a finger to her lips. “Words are words.”

David looked around, noticing all the furniture had been moved back into place, but something still seemed wrong. There wasn’t enough clutter in the living room. There was too much open space. The rug looked too vacuumed. It was as if she’d cleaned the apartment from top to bottom in one manic burst and then collapsed, not trusting herself to do any more. He spotted two small canvas suitcases next to the boxes by the front door.

“Going somewhere?” he said, the thought flashing in his mind that she might be about to leave town with Arthur.

“Not me,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Renee, what’s the matter?” David sat down beside her. “Today should be a great day for us. Didn’t you read the newspaper? It’s all over. I’m not a suspect anymore.”

“Congratulations,” she said, without looking at him. “I should be happy for you.”

“In theory, you should.”

“Reporters have been calling all morning, wanting to ask about you,” she said, drawing her fingers away from and toward her lips as if she were sewing her mouth shut. “A couple of them wanted to know if I was really retracting what I said before, about the way you were with me and Arthur.”

“And what’d you say?”

“I said it had all been a terrible mistake.” She rubbed her leg and took a pack of cigarettes out of her robe pocket. “And I wished I’d never spoken.”

“That was kind of you.”

“I’m not kind.” She stood up and lit one of the cigarettes, folding one arm across her chest. “I’m not cruel either. I just can’t help myself.”

Not an apology. Just a statement of fact.

He looked around, noticing a smell like dead roses under the smoke. Maybe it was just him, he decided. He hadn’t relaxed into joining the rest of the human race yet. He didn’t trust the relief. He still had the metabolism of a man expecting to get hit by lightning.