“So what’s it for, anyway?” she asked, as they rounded the block on their way back toward the West Side Highway.
“What?”
“The locker. What do you need it for?”
“Equipment. Business equipment. Compressors. I want to go into the refrigeration business. I’m trying to be—how do you say it?—independent.”
He fell silent as they turned south onto the West Side Highway. Lower Manhattan glowed as if it were radioactive, and the blue Caprice directly in front of them had a bumper sticker that said: “My Karma Ran Over My Dogma.” Elizabeth was eerily still in the seat next to him. Something was swelling between the two of them, but he didn’t have the language to name it.
“So why’d you need me to rent it for you?” she asked finally. “Why couldn’t you do it yourself?”
“They need the driver’s license for the I.D.” He lowered his eyes from the harsh glare of oncoming headlights from the other side of the road. “And I have a little problem with my license.”
“Then why are you still driving?”
It was only a small lie, but she’d seen through it instantly. He’d never been good at fooling her. She understood him too well; the same tuning fork vibrated in both of them. He wondered how he would bring up the subject of getting her story straight in case this Detective Galloway came to interrogate her.
“You ask too many questions,” he said, turning his head toward her as high beams flashed over the car’s interior.
There was more of a family resemblance than he used to see, but it was subtle. A certain curve to her cheekbones, a softness of skin, the color of her eyes. He wondered how he would keep her safe when he brought the hadduta into the school this time.
“Hey, what do you do to your hair?” he asked. “What’s the matter with it?”
The passing light had picked out a few purple-red streaks from her mass of dark strands.
“I dyed it. What’s the big deal?”
“This is totally haram,” he said, stepping on the brake quickly to avoid plowing into the back of the Caprice. “It’s against the tradition.”
“I doubt the Koran says anything about the use of hair color.”
“It makes you look like an American. It’s adulteration.”
“I am American.” She put a sneakered foot up against the dashboard. “I’m from Brooklyn.”
“You are still listening to this teacher too much,” he said, rocking slightly in his seat. “Your mother was an Arab and your father is still an Arab.”
“Yeah, but now I’m thinking. I’ve never been back there, so I don’t know what it has to do with me.”
“One day, you will come,” he said. “You will see. You will go to the sheep market in Bethlehem on a Saturday morning and you’ll see the Bedouins come in from the desert with the white Oriental sheep and the goats and you’ll see the farmers from Moab bring in the wheat and the barley and the corn. And the wheat, it’s so fine and thin and crisp, it’s like nothing they have in this country. Everything is just as it was one thousand, five hundred years ago.”
“So will you take me there?”
He said nothing and kept driving.
This was when she felt closest to him. When he talked about things back home. The things she’d always felt but never actually seen. They were like scenes from a half-remembered dream. Reminders that there was a void in her, a sense that she’d never felt truly at home. Yes, she was an American, but sometimes she felt herself reaching out for something else, something less corporeal, another world, another time. Sometimes her father would read the Koran out loud to her and the words would sound like music, even when she didn’t understand them. But throwing on a veil and a head scarf wasn’t the answer either; she rebelled against the very thought of binding herself up in all that black cloth. No, the truth for her was somewhere in between these two places, the New World and the Old World. She wondered if Nasser felt the same pull of opposing forces after all this time in America. Maybe that’s why she felt such a connection to him sometimes. They were both the same, both in-between people. Stuck in the middle of the river.
But tonight the currents were pulling her in a different direction.
“Nasser,” she said. “There’s something I have to talk to you about. That’s why I finally returned your call.”
He turned up the radio, trying to drown her out. “I carry a jimmy hat everywhere I go / I can do it like a man, so don’t call me your ho,” rapped a woman over what sounded like a syncopated car wreck.
“See, she says the women are as good as the men,” Nasser said, shaking his head. “But it’s not enough to say you are a man. You have to be a man.”
“Nasser.” Elizabeth turned the radio down. “I need to ask you something.”
He stole a glance at her. “So what is it?”
“A policeman named Calloway came by the house today. He wanted to talk about you.”
He accidentally hit the horn. “Yes, I know,” he said, straightening up. “I talked to him. Everything’s perfectly okay.”
“It’s not okay.” She turned to him, staring hard at his profile. “He wanted to know where you were when the bomb went off.”
“So you told him I was with you.” A bead of sweat slid down his cheek. “No problem. Okay? I was buying you the helmet.”
“Nasser, that’s not true.” Her sharp tone made him flinch. “I was waiting for you when I saw smoke down at the beach. You were late to pick me up.”
“Did you tell him this?”
He suddenly veered onto the shoulder of the road and parked over by the piers. He sat in silence at the wheel for a moment, in the shadow of an old decommissioned battleship.
“Nasser, look at me,” she said.
He turned his eyes to her and then turned them away, as if he was scared.
“I said, look at me.”
“I looked.” His voice squeaked. “Do I have to keep looking all the time?”
“Did you have anything to do with what happened to that bus outside school?”
“This was your teacher, who did this.” He flexed his fingers on the wheel. “They said it on the radio and the television.”
“But now I’m asking you. I know you don’t like to lie to me. I know the Koran is against lying. So I’m asking: was that your bomb?”
He put on his emergency flashers and the signal made a steady pleasant tick-tock sound on the dashboard.
Several minutes passed before he spoke again.
“Well, whoever does this—you don’t know—they have the reasons. They have terrible pressure. Terrible choices. Not like where they go to college or what clothes to wear. Like the Americans. You can’t understand these terrible choices. This is something different from what you know. This is an experience from a different world.”
He stopped talking and she listened to the continuing tick-tock of the blinker, her pulse falling into its rhythm. She felt as if all the air had been sucked out of her lungs.
“So you did it,” she said quietly.
“I don’t say nothing about anything.”
“But how could you do it? You killed Sam. You could’ve killed all of them. It’s against the Koran.”
He bowed his head for a second and then suddenly began to pound and scream at the steering wheel. She’d never seen him like this. At first, it seemed like an animal eruption, but then she realized he was more like a small frightened boy losing control. He pulled at the steering wheel this way and that with both hands, trying to yank it out of its column, and then beat the dashboard with his fists.
“All right!” he said. “You want to be a man? Be a man then! You want to be a Muslim? Be a good Muslim! Be a soldier! Don’t be a coward, like your father, building houses for the Jews and taking their money. Do your duty. Fight like a man. Be a soldier for God. You say it’s against the Holy Book. But this is a war, not a book.”
Somehow, she sensed his argument was not really with her; he was trying to talk himself into so
mething.
“I don’t think our father is a coward,” she said softly. “He survived the refugee camp and managed to make a new life here. To me, that makes him a hero.”
“And he left his family behind.” Nasser grimaced. “What kind of a hero does that?”
He turned off the blinker, took the car out of park and started down the West Side Highway again. “For you, it’s a new life,” he muttered.
Her mind was empty, her mouth was empty. What were the words he used before? Terrible choices. That’s what he’d just given her. Terrible choices.
He stepped on the gas and all the downtown buildings seemed to come rushing at her. A red neon umbrella glowing on the side of an office tower.
“So,” he said, “did you tell him you were with me when the bomb goes off?”
“I did.” She sank down in her seat, feeling caught up in thorns. “What else could I do? You’re my brother.”
“Exactly, right.” He pulled himself up at the wheel. “This is for the family.”
52
“YOUR STUDENTS REFER TO you as an eccentric,” said the talk show host. “Are you?”
Not if you use John Wilkes Booth and the Unabomber as your standards, bucko, thought David. No, scratch that. You’re on television. Never practice irony in an underdeveloped country.
“I use any means necessary to get my students to use the equipment in their heads.” David sat up straight and faced the camera, realizing it probably didn’t help to quote Malcolm X now either. “If that makes me an eccentric, fine.”
“Did you bomb the school bus?” asked the host, Lindsay Paul, a formerly dashing young newsman in the twilight of his good looks, undergoing a certain Fred Flintstone-ishness of the features.
“No, I did not.”
David was back on the air, live and going national on America’s second most popular cable news network. He’d sworn he wouldn’t do this again, but circumstances had conspired. He had no choice, he told himself. None of his other frantic efforts—working the phones, talking to the kids, and trying a second time without success to read students’ disciplinary files—were yielding any results.
“Then why have you become a suspect in this case?” asked Lindsay, gray-suited, dark-haired, and earnest in a two-dimensional way. “Come on, you must have done something.”
“Well, then, somebody should step up and tell me what it is,” said David. “I don’t have a clue otherwise.”
Behind the camera, Ralph Marcovicci was giving him an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Piece of cake, Ralph kept telling him before the show began. Piece of fuckin’ cake. Lindsay was one of Ralph’s oldest and dearest, as Donna would say. “He’ll throw you one friggin’ softball after another right down the middle of the plate,” Ralph assured him.
“So the obvious question is”—Lindsay leaned forward, Flintstone brow knit in concern—“if you didn’t do it, who did?”
“That’s the point of my coming on tonight,” said David. “My lawyers and I believe that someone out there knows something. And they haven’t come forward.” He thought of O. J. Simpson on the golf course.
“Why not?” Lindsay tucked in his drooping chin, trying to remind viewers he’d once been a serious journalist. “Why hasn’t the FBI found them?”
“I don’t know.” David shifted in his chair, and tried to avoid looking at himself in the monitor, lest it turn him to stone like Medusa’s severed head. “Maybe they’re scared or just don’t want to get involved. But I’m hoping they’ll hear me speaking tonight, look into their hearts, and decide to do the right thing.”
He looked over and saw Ralph next to a cameraman, silently applauding. Judah Rosenbloom was elsewhere in the studio, manning the phone lines in case a useful tip came in.
“And as far as everyone else goes, I just want people to see that I’m human, and not a monster after all.”
“Fair enough, David Fitzgerald!” boomed Lindsay.
The cameraman moved forward a little and the host looked up, giving his rugged-integrity face.
In a million years, I’ll never be able to do that. David glanced over at the studio clock, seeing he had another ten minutes to go in his segment. After this many appearances, he thought he’d start to relax and become more natural on television. But he still felt awkward and too aware of himself. And it was different now, appearing as the accused man fighting back, instead of being the hero justly celebrated. Before he’d been puffed up, full of himself; now he felt clenched and defiant, painfully aware of how every word counted.
“Let’s throw open our phone lines and take some calls on the air,” Lindsay said suddenly.
David stiffened. Calls on the air? Had he heard right? Off-camera, Ralph Marcovicci was flushing red and furiously giving Lindsay the finger. There’d been no mention of taking phone calls on the air. In fact, David’s understanding was that Lindsay and Ralph had specifically agreed not to have them. But a new hum was coming over the studio speakers. The deal was off, the calls were starting. Storming off the show would only make him look guilty.
David stayed in his seat, remaining very still. By this point, he understood that any tightening of the jaw or shiftiness in the eyes would be multiplied a hundred times by the camera. Of course, the deal was off. He wasn’t a real celebrity they were going to need again. They could afford to break their word to him. He should have expected it.
“We have Kevin, from Brooklyn,” said Lindsay, checking an overhead monitor.
“Yo, Brownsville’s in the house!” A voice falling off a cliff.
The line went dead and another caller came on.
“Yes, Emma Brown from Springfield Gardens, Queens!” said Lindsay, looking up at the new name in green letters on the monitor. “You’re on the air!”
David’s nostrils quivered and he realized the host sitting two feet away in a swivel chair had just passed gas.
“Good evening, Lindsay.” A stately, older African-American woman’s voice. A voice out of the church. “I am the younger sister of Mr. Sam Hall.”
A little pistol shot of panic rang out in David’s mind as he remembered the stories in the newspaper about her threatening a lawsuit. This was not going to be good.
“I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am,” Lindsay intoned. “He was a great man. I was a tremendous fan of his music.”
“I just want to know how this man can sit here, asking people to help him, when my family couldn’t even afford a proper burial for my brother until the mayor stepped in.”
What do I say? What do I say? David rifled through his mental files of homilies and platitudes, searching for some appropriately diverting bit of wisdom,
“Well, ma’am, that is a separate issue, really,” Lindsay cut in, with just a pinch of common sense.
But Ms. Brown was on a roll. She was ready to testify. “That’s what you say! But my brother is dead and I want to know when the man responsible is going to be punished for this. Where’s the justice for my brother? He was murdered for absolutely no reason. And this man’s sitting there, talking to you on television, Lindsay. I just cannot understand.”
The emotion in her voice easily overcame the lack of logic in her words. David knew that counted against him. People watching at home would only hear the emotion, the anger. The medium didn’t encourage dispassionate analysis. It demanded unconditional empathy. He could either get crushed by the moment, or find a way to ride it.
He took a deep breath and tried the latter. “Emma,” he said, as if he’d met her before. “I completely agree with everything you just said. Your brother was a good man, and I want to help find his killer and bring him to justice as quickly as possible. I’m more anxious than anyone to find out what really happened. My life’s on the line too.”
Off-camera, Ralph was silently urging him on, rotating his arms, mouthing, “Give me more.”
“But you—” She started to come back at him.
“And once this matter is cleared up, I will probably be joining you in a civil
suit against the city and the state,” David improvised. “So that may be something we’re better off discussing off the air. I wouldn’t want to do or say anything to compromise our case.”
It was all just blowing smoke at smoke, since there’d been no such discussions with Ralph and Judah, but Emma seemed to lose focus anyway.
“I … well …”
“And I believe my lawyers are developing information that may become very useful to you in the near future,” David went on, seizing the momentum away from her. “We could help each other. I didn’t do this.”
Perhaps after all this time, he was getting the hang of presenting himself. And who knew, maybe his lawyers would discover something to help Sam’s family.
“Emma, is there anything else you want to say?” asked Lindsay.
“Uh. Well. I guess I’d like to speak with my lawyers first.”
“Thank you.” Lindsay turned, giving the cameraman another angle on his face, as he checked the monitor. “Sioux City, Iowa. Glen. You’re on the air.”
“Yes.” A slow young white man’s drawl came over the speakers. “I’m a former student of Mr. Fitzgerald.”
“Okay.” Lindsay sat up and smiled, sincere and telegenic.
David tensed up again, having another moment of rollercoaster vertigo. Every time he thought he’d survived one of these treacherous drops, here came an even steeper and scarier hump.
“I just would like to say this man is a pervert.” Even the boy’s voice made David think of ascending the Cyclone. “He bought me beer when I was a sophomore. Then he got me drunk and took me down to the boys’ locker-room, where he … attempted to touch me in an improper manner.”
So here they were again, at the top of the ride. There was a pause and Glen exhaled on his end, as if he’d been keeping this in for a long time. His calm matter-of-fact tone made the call seem both surreal and utterly authentic at the same time. Ralph Marcovicci had his hands over his head as if he was about to get hit by an incoming Scud missile.
This was worse than disaster. It was annihilation. What if the judge was watching? David felt like he was suspended in mid-air. How do I get down without crashing?
Man of the Hour Page 32