by Steven Gould
I went swimming in the box canyon oasis for ten minutes, then came back and continued working on the wall until sunset.
At night, I raided the lumberyard in Yonkers again, this time taking prehung, double-paned windows and frames, a prehung exterior door with a cut-glass window, framing timbers, and tan paint. I also took more mortar, a wood-burning stove, a stovepipe, and appropriate hardware.
After jumping these materials to the ledge—the stove was barely liftable—I spent some time at the cashier’s desk working an adding machine. I left the tape from my calculations and twelve hundred dollars on the counter, weighted down by a coffee cup.
I may be a bank robber, but I’m not a common thief.
“We missed you at lunch yesterday, Davy.”
“I was walking, Mrs. Barton. I guess I walked too far.”
She smiled. “Well, it’s probably good for you to get some exercise. I’m glad to see your appetite is picking up.”
I stared at the fork in my hand. I hadn’t been thinking about food, I’d been puzzling over the window frames and air-conditioning for my hidden fortress, my “fortress of solitude.” Now that I saw the egg on my fork, the food in my stomach seemed to solidify in a lump, heavy and uncomfortable.
Mrs. Barton wandered on down the room. I dropped the fork and pushed the plate away from me.
Before going out to the ledge, I jumped to New York and checked the PO box, appearing first in the alleyway before walking around the corner to Broadway to the Bowling Green post office.
There was a letter from Leo Silverstein asking me to call him. I jumped to the Pine Bluffs airport and used the pay phone.
“Mr. Silverstein, this is David Rice.”
“Ah. Did you get my letter?”
“Yes.”
“So, you’re back in New York.”
“No.” I saw no reason to lie. “At the moment I’m in Pine Bluffs.”
“Oh? Well, I have some business to transact. As you know, you figure in your mother’s will.”
I swallowed. “I don’t want anything.”
The image flashed in front of my eyes. The explosion, the broken-doll posture of her body, the blood and the smoke.
I can’t stand to sit at the window or in the middle.
Silverstein coughed. “Well, you really should come down and hear the terms at least.”
“At your office? I don’t know. Have the police been looking for me still?”
“I don’t know. They searched around pretty thoroughly for a couple of days, but there’s a limit to how long Sheriff Thatcher is going to hunt someone whose only crime is a fake driver’s license.”
“I’ll be right there.”
I walked around the airport for a moment and watched a small single-engine plane take off. Then I jumped to the stairway leading up to Silverstein’s office. There was someone on the stairs, but, luckily, he was walking down the stairs, facing away from me.
I held my breath until he’d left the building, then walked upstairs. Mr. Silverstein was standing in the reception area, looking out the window onto the square. He looked over his shoulder when I came in.
“Forget something, Joe—oh, Davy! I didn’t see you on the sidewalk. How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
He shifted from foot to foot, uncomfortable. “Come on in.”
Once in his office, he handed me a bundle of papers labeled, “Last Will and Testament of Mary Agnus Niles.”
I looked at it and the pain surfaced, sharp and ragged. I found myself yawning, getting sleepy, my mind numbing.
Shit! I thought I was past this.
I put it down on the desk. “What does it say?”
“Essentially, with the exception of ten thousand dollars in bequests and gifts, it leaves you the balance of her estate, approximately sixty-five thousand dollars in CDs and savings, and a town house in California.”
I blinked. “I guess she made good money as a travel agent.”
Silverstein shook his head. “Not particularly. Your grandfather left her a good sum, especially with the sale of the house.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t have to comment on this, and, to be perfectly honest, I’d rather you didn’t, but I have the feeling that your present source of income wouldn’t stand rigorous scrutiny.”
He looked at me to see if I understood. I could feel my ears getting hot. He went on.
“Anyway, this inheritance would at least give you a legitimate source of income. It’s a chance to get out of the gray area where you are.”
I nodded slowly, reluctantly. “What will I have to do?”
“Well, the first thing you need to do is get that birth certificate. I’ll handle that if you like. Then we’ll apply for a social security number and a real driver’s license, and I’ll see about filing income tax for the time since you left your father. I don’t suppose you know whether he claimed you as a dependent or not after you left?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him. Uh, I don’t drive, Mr. Silverstein, so the license...”
“Oh, well, there’s nondriver’s identification. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“What about the New York police?”
“Ah, well, funny about that. After you left the reception, Sheriff Thatcher was not inclined to pursue the matter without some sort of official request from the NYPD. Sergeant Washburn was furious, but, as of this morning when I talked to Sheriff Thatcher, there hasn’t been any such request.” He paused and looked out the window, stretching his arms. “I suspect, from what you told me and from Sergeant Baker’s reactions, that Sergeant Washburn exceeded his authorization somewhat in coming down to Florida.”
I exhaled. “Well, that’s a relief.”
“So,” said Silverstein, “I take it you’d like to do this? Get the birth certificate and everything?”
I nodded emphatically. “Oh, yes. And do you think I could get a passport?”
He blinked. “I don’t see why not. Why? Are you thinking of leaving the country?”
I looked out the window but my eyes didn’t see the town square. Instead I was seeing the explosion that killed my mother, looped endlessly over and over and over. There was a feeling of anticipation, of things not yet realized. I shook the vision from my eyes and looked back’ at Silverstein.
“I want to go to Algeria,” I said.
PART V:
SEARCHING
Chapter 13
“The first thing I want to make clear is that this violence, this terrorism, is not cultural. It isn’t integral either to Arab or Muslim culture. I’ve done too many briefings for senators and congressmen who think that all ‘towelheads’ carry a pistol and a grenade. If you can’t see beyond this stereotype, then we might as well stop now.”
I felt my ears getting red. I hadn’t really thought about it, but I must have been feeling something akin to this. It made me feel bad. Dad was the one that characterized people by the color of their skin.
“I don’t believe that,” I said. “I do have some hostility, though, I know that, but I’ll be careful not to generalize.”
He nodded. He was seated behind a wooden desk in a small office. The padded shoulders of his tweed jacket humped strangely when he leaned his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. One of his hands smoothed the red, fuzzy knit tie he wore with his gray shirt.
I’d taken the early Amtrak train from Penn Station in New York, down to Union Station in D.C. Mr. Anderson, from the State Department, had arranged the briefing. The man in the fuzzy tie was Dr. Perston-Smythe, an associate professor in Arab Studies at Georgetown University, and we were talking in his office.
“I can understand the hostility. However, you won’t understand the Arab or the terrorism picture until you can get these stereotypes out of your head.”
I nodded. “I understand.”
“Consider this—there were over forty thousand Lebanese killed in the period between nineteen eighty and nineteen eight-seven. Over a million
have died in the Iran-Iraq war. Less than five hundred Americans have died in the same period in the Middle East from terrorist actions, if you count the truck bombing of the Marines in Beirut, which I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“One of the problems with American public policy on terrorism is that our government insists on blurring the line between armed insurgence against military forces and installations and attacks on uninvolved civilians. Now, obviously attacking unarmed civilians who have no involvement with a particular political issue is terrorism. But an attack on an armed military force occupying one’s homeland? That’s not terrorism. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, I’m just saying that if you call that terrorism then the U.S. is also involved in financing terrorists in Afghanistan and Central America. See what I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that the proportion of American dead from terrorism is way out of proportion to the response it generates. We did nothing to stop the Iraq-Iran war because we perceived it in our interests that damage be done to both of those countries. Personally I think that’s inexcusable, but I’m not in the position to make government policy. Certainly both leaders were crazy with a long-standing personal grudge, but their people paid a horrible price.”
“I wasn’t aware that there was a personal grudge.”
“Hell, yes. In nineteen seventy-five; when Hussein settled the dispute over the eastern bank of Shatt-al-Arab with the Shah of Iran, one of the unwritten conditions was that Hussein get Khomeini to stop his political activity.”
“How could he expect Hussein to do that?”
Perston-Smythe looked at me like I was an idiot. “Khomeini was in Iraq. When he was exiled from Iran he went to the Shiite holy city of An Najaf. Anyway, Hussein told Khomeini to stop and Khomeini refused, so Hussein bounced him out of the country to Kuwait which promptly bounced him out of the country to France. Over a fifteen-year period, seven hundred thousand Shiites were thrown out of Iraq. There’s a lot of bad feeling there. More now of course, since the war.”
I blinked. “I know you’re trying to give me the big picture, but what about these particular terrorists?”
“We’re getting there. It’s a roundabout way, but all the better for the journey. What do you know about Sunni versus Shiite beliefs?”
I’d been doing some reading, evenings, after working on the cliff dwelling at El Solitario. “Sunnis make up about ninety percent of Muslims. They believe that the succession of caliphs was proper after Mohammed died. The Shiites believe that the rightful successors descended from Ali, Mohammed’s cousin, not his best friend, Abu Bakr. They believe that the rightful descendants have been assassinated and discriminated against ever since.
“Sunnis tend to be more conservative and they don’t believe in a clergy or a liturgy. The only countries with Shiite majorities are Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Bahrain.”
“That’s right,” said Perston-Smythe. He seemed surprised at my knowledge after my earlier ignorance. “Even among Shiites, terrorism is abhorrent. One of Mohammed’s strictures calls for the protection of women, children, and the aged. One of the ninety-nine names of Allah is ‘The All Merciful.’ “
“All right. I accept that most Muslims wouldn’t practice terrorism. I’ll keep that in mind. But I want to know about the men who do practice it. I want to know about the men who killed my mother.”
He leaned back. “All right.” He opened a file in front of him. “Indications are that the hijackers of flight 932 were Shiite extremists belonging to Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group associated with Hesballah, the ‘Party of God.’ While we don’t know who two of the hijackers were, we suspect that the leader was Rashid Matar, a Lebanese Shiite who is know to have worked with Mohammed Abbas, the organizer of the hijacking of the Achille Lauro. Oddly enough, the reason we believe it’s Matar is his choice of your mother as his victim. With the exception of random bombings, woman hostages are usually the first to be released in airline terrorist situations.
“In nineteen eighty-seven, Matar was implicated in the beatings of several Italian prostitutes in Verona. He left the country just ahead of the police, but automatic weapons and technical manuals on various types of aircraft were found in the apartment he was forced to abandon. In early eighty-nine he was forced to leave Cairo after the beating death of a female Swedish tourist.
“Matar was also caught on an Athens Airport security camera the day before the hijacking. This is too large a coincidence.” Perston-Smythe handed me an eight-by-ten photograph.
It was a blown-up shot of a newspaper photo which, in turn, seemed to be taken from a passport photo. The newspaper caption was in Italian, I thought, with only the name Rashid Matar understandable. The dots of the printing process were visible and I had to hold the picture out at arm’s length to smooth out the lines of his face. He was younger than I expected, despite the reading I’d been doing. He was clean-shaven and had dark, bushy eyebrows. Though dark-complexioned, he didn’t fit my image of the Arab. His nose was ordinary and his jaw somewhat weak. His face was thin and long and his ears were very flat against his head. His eyes were dark and remote.
“The fact that the terrorists not only didn’t release the women, and also chose a woman to kill, strongly points to Matar, an obvious misogynist.”
I waved the picture. “Can I get a copy of this?”
“That’s a duplicate, you can keep it.”
“Where is he now?”
“We don’t know. I have some ideas, but I’m not sure.”
I ground my teeth together and waited.
He shrugged. “This is purely speculation, you realize?”
“It’s informed speculation,” I said.
“Well, yes.” He leaned forward suddenly, fingers linked together. “An executive jet left Algeria almost immediately after the hijacking and flew to Damascus in Syria. While no comment was made about its passengers, the press in Algiers was allowed to watch it leave. The implication is that, A, the Algerian authorities promised free passage to the hijackers if they released the hostages, and B, that they were flown to Syria. This is exactly what happened after the nineteen eighty-eight hijacking of the Kuwaiti airliner.”
“So you’re saying that they’re in Syria?”
“In the case of the Kuwaiti Airways hijacking, the hijackers traveled from Damascus back to Lebanon, overland. There they took refuge in the Baka Valley, which is the stronghold of Hesballah.”
“So you’re saying that they’re in Lebanon.”
“That’s what we’re supposed to think. I don’t think they ever left Algeria. I have a friend with Reuters and he said that there was an area that the Darak al Watani were carefully screening at the same time the reporters were allowed to watch the jet depart. My friend has a suspicious nature. Whenever an official points one direction, my friend looks the other way. This is why he saw three unshaven men in badly fitting army uniforms climb into a truck which was driven out of the airport under police escort. He thinks that one of those men was Matar, but he didn’t get a good look.
“I should think it extremely likely that they are still in Algeria.”
I showed up at her door, walking from around the corner. My stomach was upset, I was nervous, and I was having trouble catching my breath, as if I’d run a long way or been jabbed hard in the stomach. My hand shook badly when I tried to ring the doorbell, and I finally dropped my hand to see if the shaking would stop. I was steeling myself to try again when Millie opened the door.
“Hi,” she said quickly. Then, more slowly, she said, “It looked like you might change your mind. Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
“Well, it’s been two weeks.” Two weeks since my last note.
“I was glad you called, but you didn’t sound very sure.”
I shrugged. “No. Just... just, well... I was scared.” I made no move to touch her, no move to get closer. I was still scared.
She gestured toward the open door
. “You want to come in while I get my coat?”
“I’ll wait here. Honest. I won’t leave.”
She smiled uncertainly. “Okay.” In a minute she was back, shrugging into a long gray coat. “Where do you want to go?” She dug in her purse for the car keys.
I wasn’t hungry at all. “I don’t know. Anywhere you’d like to go.”
She stared at me. “Anywhere?”
“Anywhere we can get to.”
She looked down at the sidewalk for a moment, then looked up at me, head raised partway, peering through her bangs. She dropped the keys back in her purse. “I want to eat at the Waverly Inn.”
It was my turn to stare. The Waverly Inn was in the West Village, in Manhattan. I looked at my watch. It was six, it would be seven in New York. I didn’t have a jump site for the Waverly Inn, but I could jump within ten minutes’ walk.
“I’ll have to pick you up,” I said.
She blinked, sucked on her upper lip for a second, then said, “Okay. What should I do?”
“Just stand there.”
I walked behind her and put my arms around her waist. Her hair, her scent was in my face. I stood there for a moment, until I could feel her fidget. Then I lifted her and jumped to Washington Square, by the arch. I let go of her, then grabbed her again as her knees gave way.
“You okay?” I helped her to a bench a few yards away.
“Sorry,” she said. Her eyes were wide and she kept swiveling her head around to look from the arch to the buildings to the street. “I knew that you could do it, but I didn’t know it, if you know what I mean.”
“Theoretical knowledge versus certainty. Believe me, I know. Just as I know that you’ll doubt it happened later, even though you experienced it now.”
It was colder here than in Stillwater, probably below freezing, and the few people who were in the park walked briskly. Still, it was Friday night in the Village and things were lively. Millie stood slowly and asked, “Which way?”
I led the way down the edge of the park. On the way Millie asked about the funeral and I said it was okay. I complained about the pastor and told her about Mom’s friends. Then I told her what I’d done to Dad when he showed up at the service.