He had asked his dispatcher how he should introduce himself to an American woman. Did the fact she wore a police uniform make a difference? The dispatcher laughed and said if he knew the answer to such questions, would he be dispatching gypsy taxi drivers like him who could barely speak English? No, he’d be a Don Juan, or at least a well-paid therapist.
“What is this, therapist?” Elias wondered.
A television in the dispatcher’s office showed three young men with black hair playing guitars and singing. Ignoring Elias, he pointed to it, calling it rock and roll.
“Now there’s an idea. Learn to play a guitar and grow your hair long. That’ll attract her.”
Elias had only seen one or two television sets before he left for America, usually in a large official government facility. He wasn’t accustomed to watching television, but lively characters amused him, such as the crazy woman named Lucy, or the fat funny guy named Jackie.
Then there was that show with all the people wearing big wide-brimmed hats riding horses. At first, Elias couldn’t understand why the shows depicted Americans riding horses when he saw no one riding horses anywhere in the Chicago area.
After a few weeks in America, he grew lonely for books in his native language. Mind-music only lasted so long. He sent word back to his family to please put as many books in a box as they could and send to him.
When they arrived, by way of Father Moody, he was surprised the box was opened, but figured the post office in this country was like the post office back home. Everything was inspected. When he carted his books to the room at the rooming house, he looked through them and found a magazine with some works of a poet he had come to admire. The poet’s name was Ali Ahmad Sa’id.
His father had encouraged him to read this poet because he was breaking all the rules. He said this poet recited a poem to the president of Syria and was able to attend school on scholarship, something his father hoped for Elias.
His brother once said the best way to seduce a girl was through poetry, and to make sure he wasn’t lying to get him in trouble, he validated this idea with his cousin, Suleima. It seemed like many years ago.
He selected some of his favorite lines and committed them to memory. He practiced reciting them in front of the mirror in the medicine cabinet door above his bathroom sink.
Two weeks later, Paula strode into World’s Fair Donuts to find the man once again seated in a booth in the back. She had thought about him from time to time. Even though she was used to being stared at, she could not remember when anyone had done so for so long, so inappropriately. If it was adoration, she could get used to that.
This time he did not stare at her. He walked directly toward her while she waited at the counter.
“Please, please, to sit with you. To sit with me?”
He brought his arms and palms to his chest cross-wise as if patting himself, a gesture of a hug.
“Sorry, my squad car’s getting cold.”
“For moment only.”
Paula looked at Irv, scrunched up her face, as if to ask, is this guy for real? But she found his modesty appealing, something unassuming in his accent, the way he approached her, the way he asked, with sincere intent, persuasive, not coercive. Rarely did a fella have the guts to talk to her when she was in uniform, unless it had to do with police business.
She sat down opposite him in the booth.
“Moment,” he said. He straightened up as if he was on stage and recited a passage from one of Sa’id’s poems.
She remained expressionless, hiding her thoughts. She had never heard anything like this. It wasn’t a language she recognized. Some of her relatives, her grandmother, still spoke Polish and she could identify Spanish, Italian, and she’d hear some Greek, but what this man was saying was like nothing in her experience. It sounded like someone chanting, like something ancient and sacred.
Then he translated from the Arabic.
When he finished, she was speechless. She tried to look through to the inside of him, an attempt to discern something.
“Where are you from?” she asked, puzzled.
“Syria.”
“Where’s that?”
He didn’t know how to answer. “Nearby to Turkey?”
“Oh, that tells me something,” she said sarcastically.
They both paused to take in the aroma of fresh baking donuts. Paula couldn’t sit idle with the seconds ticking by. She needed to do something, anything. She reached into the bag and pulled a donut out, bit into it. She kept her eyes on him as if he might try to escape.
“What is your name?”
“Elias. Haddad.”
She had heard the name Elias before, maybe from a movie or a book or something. But not Haddad.
She didn’t know what else to do so she thrust her arm across the table. “Good to meet with you. Officer Paula Kabalevsky.”
After she left, it didn’t occur to her to run through her usual mental police sketch about how old this Elias was, what he was doing here, where he lived, how he was clothed. Instead she skipped to questions like, what in the name of God would her family think, especially her brothers, if she brought this guy home? What would her partner think, the other officers in the precinct? She’d dated some, but most men ran the other way after they learned she was a cop.
His complete devotion to her the next time they ran into each other at World’s Fair kept her strangely riveted to that booth. Irv beamed from the kitchen, like he had something to do with getting them together. Paula’s partner was more direct, after she described Elias to her.
“That’s it. You two are getting hitched. I can tell.”
Elias followed her around like a puppy dog. He said little, and what little he did say was in his fractured English. His thick, evening beard was one of the many shades of dark in his complexion. He had a roasted look, like ground coffee, to his face, his eyebrows, his eyes. She wanted to peel back the darkness whisker by whisker, discover what was underneath.
Elias was the first man she’d encountered who desperately wanted to treat her like a woman. She’d be more than happy to treat him like a man.
Irv called it a World’s Fair courtship. Paula’s partner joked about it, once sticking her éclair into the hole of Paula’s glazed donut.
Elias promised to read poetry in Arabic to her every night of their lives.
The wait became unbearable. She cursed herself for still living at home with her mother. She tried unsuccessfully to scheme up a way to use her brother’s apartment.
A few weeks later, a rare break in the weather pushed the thermometer passed fifty degrees. That evening, she and Elias drove in her squad car to the end of a poorly lit warehouse parking lot tucked in behind a patch of woods off of the highway. He read more poetry to her while she stripped off her uniform, all of the official stuff that hung off of it. She freed him from his clothes. With the car’s heat turned up too high for what would come next, neither of them willing to disrupt the moment to reach up to the dashboard to dial it back, he pushed his heart and his soul into her, evacuating the months of loneliness and uncertainty that he had felt ever since he had been cut loose from Father Moody’s daily care.
Minutes of physical clarity ensued. They couldn’t see out of the windows when they collapsed into each other. They didn’t need to. They stared at each other, gasping and sharing what oxygen was left.
But what was staring at Paula from the mirror a month later was a policewoman with a gun attached to her waist and the beginnings of a child in her womb.
36
September, 2011
Stuart hadn’t been able to locate a single person who knew any more about these clandestine programs than what Sugarman included in the report. And that was based on the recollections of several agency veterans. No paper trail existed. It was worse than an archeological dig. In essence, Stuart had one tooth, but the rest of the skeleton remained buried. Lost.
Sometimes programs were discredited or found to have gone too far. Agencies disavowed al
l knowledge. In some cases, programs ran until a tenacious journalist outed the effort through Freedom of Information Requests. A media frenzy would coalesce around the discovery, then die out. The program would change names, shift agencies, burrow deeper into the bureaucracy, or terminate.
No sooner had he gone down one wormhole than he ended up in a completely different universe, a different program, different rationale, different paper trail. But he noticed one name that kept popping up. Vernon Meracle. A Syrian. Supposedly a priest. He’d apparently gone by the name “Father Moody” for years. And he’d been on and off the payroll since 1959.
He placed a call to a colleague at One-Eye and his friend answered his personal cell phone after several rings.
“Hey, Stuart. What can I do for you.”
“I need your help. I would like to interview one of your guys in the field. A Vernon Meracle. And I need this to be arranged with the utmost secrecy. It’s nothing official, so keep it between us two. No questions asked. Call in the favor whenever and wherever.”
After several weeks of waiting, his friend finally delivered, and using a discretionary, innocuous budgetary line authority, Stuart paid for plane tickets to be delivered to this Vernon Meracle. He pre-paid his hotel room near Dulles Airport. Through contacts at the One-Eye Intelligence Fusion center in Illinois, Stuart instructed Meracle to take his meals at the hotel. He would meet him there at 10:00 a.m. Sunday morning.
Vernon Meracle thought about the day he’d figured it out. He’d been watching the address in Saluki for almost a year. That meant driving by the property to see if anything had changed, documenting changes with photography, recording notes on any activity that took place in the vicinity, and tailing people entering and exiting. Only when the Islamic Information Center sign went up in the window, did he understand why the place was under surveillance.
It took longer to figure out the identity of the woman who approached him on the park bench back in December. He’d been trained to rely at least as much on out of the ordinary features and quirks, such as unusual facial marks, extrapolations of physical features. The way the woman reached to her ear and outlined the perimeter of it with her index finger triggered a faint memory. Elias Haddad, he realized later. Elias Haddad tracing the outline of his daughter’s ear, a playful gesture of endearment between a father and his daughter.
He’d scolded himself for being so lame. He shouldn’t have been so fooled by the dyed blonde hair. He had spotted her once as an adult in Chicago when he was assigned the nascent AAAI office, and one of his protégés had become a member to get information from the inside.
He’d been under strict orders to report anything which could jeopardize his cover in Saluki. Nothing, in fact, was more critical. If he’d informed the field office a Saluki resident could possibly recognize him, it would create all sorts of unwanted complications. He was too old for that. What was the NSA going to do? Fire him? He could have retired years ago, but retirement was as unappealing as death. He had nothing else he could or wanted to do. Spying on the lives of others was his life.
Now he sized up the man across the table. Young, mid-fifties, physically fit, not an extra pound, flat stomach, black thick hair, no gray, probably dyed, maybe partly filled in with plugs, neither slender nor stocky, sized to play guard in basketball. He seemed to tilt comfortably between confidence and arrogance.
“My name’s Stuart Eisenstat. I’m a contractor with CSIA; we’re about as close to DHS as you can get without actually being DHS.”
Meracle stared at him with disinterest. He wanted none of the man’s chitchat.
“So?”
“I’m going to ask you a few questions, and I need some straight answers.”
“You know as well as anyone there’s very little I can share with you.”
The area around the two men vibrated with the nervous movement of Meracle’s legs.
“There’s probably less I can share with you.”
“This looks to be a short conversation.”
“Let’s hope,” Stuart said.” Meracle’s torso above the table barely twitched. “Look, Vernon, if that’s your name for our purposes, it’s pretty simple, really. First, I need to confirm you are the person we’ve identified as Father Moody, who worked for the FBI beginning in the early 1960s, based in Chicago.”
“You seem to already know this.”
“As I said, I need confirmation.”
“There are records to show this. I am sure you have them. I am not, however, at liberty to discuss the projects I was involved with.”
“I’m not interested in reliving your fascinating career. Were you acquainted with a man from your home country by the name of Elias Haddad?”
“I did favor for his father. At his request, I helped bring his son to this country.”
Stuart was impressed with Meracle’s look of sheer innocence. “What I am most interested in, Vernon, are the circumstances by which Elias Haddad left the country, not how he entered.”
“That, I do not know.”
“That, I do not believe. You attended backyard barbecues with the Haddads.” Meracle flinched at the mention of the barbecues. “He was in your charge. You met with him regularly. And yet you know nothing about how or why he decided to leave?”
“His father was ill, gravely. So, he wanted to return to see him before he passed. This is the last I heard of him.”
“You have no knowledge of what happened to him after that?”
“I do not.”
“That I do not believe, either. But, assuming you are telling the truth, were you not even the least bit curious? You spent time at his house. Knew his wife and daughter. He was the son of a friend of yours from the old country.”
“It was a country I was only too happy to leave and never see again. Such a shithole.”
Stuart took note of the epithet. “Understandable, given the political chaos of the time, but these are friends, family acquaintances we’re talking about. Surely you had friends at home?”
Meracle sneered. “It was not a place to so easily separate your friends from your enemies. My job was to obtain information. That is still my job today. I do my job. I’m good at it.”
“My job is to analyze information. I also do my job.”
“I deliver my information, and I don’t ask what is done with it. When you are a position on the assembly line, you don’t wonder who bought what rolls off the other end.” The man looked up at the ceiling, then out the window, as if he were looking for an escape route.
“Wouldn’t you be a tad curious if the machine blew up and killed someone because of a defective part, or your defective workmanship?”
“Others deal in quality control.”
Stuart marveled at the man’s detachment. He lifted a photo out of his briefcase and slid it across the table. “Is this the man you knew as Elias Haddad?”
Meracle glanced at the photo and remembered the day Elias passed his drivers’s test. “Yes.”
“And it doesn’t concern you that he left his wife and child and never returned?”
Meracle pushed the photo back toward Stuart without taking a second look. Prior to him being assigned to tail her and others in the Chicago AAAI chapter, he had wondered many times what had happened to the little girl who always seemed to dislike it whenever he showed up. Suddenly, he could taste the Haddad baklava. It was the strangest of all coincidences that he had been assigned to watch the Islamic Information Center in Saluki and that he would run across her in the same town so many decades later.
“I am sorry for them. But they were not my responsibility. Life has many twists and turns.”
“Had you ever communicated with Elias’s family back in Syria after he disappeared?”
Meracle’s voice rose in pitch, mismatched to the square thickness of the body it emanated from. “Of course not. This was impossible. The new regime wiped out their enemies, anyone who was part of a group who did not support the Assads. I would not be surprised if this
was the original motivation for getting the son out of the country.”
“Would it surprise you to learn Elias Haddad will be returning to this country soon?”
Meracle’s face remained as blank as the décor around them. “I did nothing illegal. I was and still am under oath to the same government you serve. I assisted Elias in returning to see his sick father. That is all. What happened after that was not my concern.”
“Can you at least confirm he did, in fact, arrive in Syria?
Meracle stared through Stuart and began to fidget. He looked away and took a sip from his cup of coffee. Stuart waited. Meracle leaned back and rubbed his hands against his belly. “Yes. He landed in Damascus. He disembarked and made his way to Customs. In Syria, my father always said that to get anything done, you had to know the right person on the inside. There was no other way. I have often known the right person.”
He glanced down at the photo of Elias and tapped it with a tobacco-stained finger. “It seems Mr. Haddad’s daughter finally found the right person on the inside here in America.”
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Meracle. I hope your current project to establish Islamic Information Centers around the Midwest as One-Eye listening posts is a success.”
Stuart knew he shouldn’t have said it, but Stuart wanted to see what reaction he would get from Vernon Meracle. There was none.
Interlude
Ya abi.
The entries in here have become few and far between. Know you are with me always, when I sit at the piano, when I walk in the woods, when I visit Penndel and we spend time at Joe. But the words—my words—have become more and more difficult to formulate.
The days are compressed, the cycle of time distorts. I think of the men who have come and gone in my life. I can’t allow myself to feel them, even when I wanted their touch, their caress, when I needed their strength, friendship. I do not understand them because I lost you. I think they will leave me because you left me.
Each man came into my life with the imperfection of impermanence through no fault of his own. Their best intentions bring out the worst in me. I understand men. I can handle men. I just don’t trust the authenticity of a man. If there is such a thing.
The Moment Before Page 27