God’s will. My brother. A hand over my heart. The bullet in his head had afflicted him in unpredictable ways since he came out of the coma just before Thanksgiving. Words could float around in his head for a few minutes before he’d find the right order for them.
But the part about her sense of sadness kept coming back to him. His own life hadn’t been easy these last few months. He’d lost part of the use of his right arm and needed a cane to walk. And even worse, the blinding headaches made him a liability as a teacher. The two visits he’d made to the school since starting therapy in December were grotesque humiliations. He wanted people to remember him as strong, incisive, an educator. Not an oversized cripple slurring his words. Everyone acted glad to see him—Larry Simonetti shook his good hand and Michelle the secretary gave him a discreet peck on the cheek—but David could tell they were also a little afraid of him. It wasn’t just the limp or the bullet hole in his face, a small light-colored scar under his left eye. It was what he made them think of: disruption, violence, and death. They wanted him to go away, but they didn’t want to admit it. And they resented him for making them so confused.
On the upside, he had a more-than-decent settlement from the city and he was seeing Donna. But Renee had continued her disintegration. She was in and out of hospitals and had been on and off a half dozen medications since the year started. So Arthur’s child care had to be patched together on a day-to-day basis. David lived for the time he spent with the boy—the days at the museum, the nights at the apartment—but something still haunted him when he went to sleep at night, listening for the sound of his son snoring in his sleeping bag next to his bed.
That same sense of sadness Elizabeth wrote to him about. He’d had a hand over his own heart these last few months. He decided he needed to see her again, if only to thank her and let her know that what happened wasn’t her fault. He needed one last connection.
He began plotting to find her again as he went through therapy sessions bouncing rubber balls and walking on balance beams. It wasn’t going to be easy. He hadn’t seen her since that last day in the cafeteria. She and her family had been put in the FBI’s witness protection program immediately. He’d tried writing to her through the Bureau, to let her know he was okay and to ask what she was going to do with her life. But her reply had left him confused and unsatisfied.
God’s will. How would he make contact again? She said she might be in Brooklyn for the holidays, but he didn’t understand why she’d be coming back for Easter. A week after reading her letter at the therapist’s office, though, he heard a news story on the radio that said there would be a festival celebrating the Muslim holiday Id al-Adha, “the feast of the sacrifice,” on the Coney Island boardwalk next week and thousands of Muslim-Americans from all over the city were expected to attend.
God’s will. Maybe it was a signal that she would be there. But it was up to him, having the guts to go look for her. He hesitated, and not just out of the obvious fear of running into one or two militant friends of the men who’d been arrested among the thousands of devout, law-abiding Muslims. He was afraid of what the trip down to Brooklyn would reveal about himself, about his own limitations.
Just getting on the subway alone would require a kind of courage. What if he got lost and disoriented? What if he fell down in the middle of a car and found he couldn’t stand up? On the other hand, if he could make it all the way out to Coney Island on his own to find Elizabeth, it might mean he had the guts he needed to get on with his life.
So, early on a crisp Tuesday afternoon, he put on an old tweed jacket, found his cane, and started the long complex transfer of trains required to get him from the Upper West Side to the last stop in Brooklyn.
At the Stillwell Avenue station, he came down from the elevated platform slowly, already hearing the booming voice of the muezzin coming from loudspeakers near Steeplechase Pier.
“Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”
He approached what looked like a scene from someone else’s dream. Thousands of shoeless Muslim men knelt on prayer mats with the rotting old Parachute Drop at their backs and the Atlantic Ocean rolling and pitching, sunlight in front of them.
Some small cowardly part of David shrank back, remembering it was a Muslim who’d shot him in the face and crippled him for life. But then again, it was a Muslim who’d saved him. Was he going to spend his life hiding behind prejudices and hopping off trains every time he saw someone with a head scarf?
The prayers ended and he followed the throng going into the Astroland amusement park nearby. There were enough people going in to fill a small stadium: old women in veils who looked like they’d just come off the road to Damascus, young men in ties ready for Wall Street, family men with heavy, tired faces, peppery little girls in head scarves. Apparently the group had rented out the park for the day and there were no angry militants in sight. Traditional Arab music wailed from the public address system, replacing the usual cavalcade of ’70s and ’80s disco hits. Workers had covered up the pictures of naked women adorning the Dante’s Inferno haunted house. The Muslims dispersed onto the rides. Women in veils smashed into each other with bumper cars. Children shrieked with delight on the Cyclone roller coaster. Swarthy bearded men in keffiyehs rode carousel horses and spun around on the Break Dancer ride. Just ordinary people taking a day off and having fun.
David saw no sign of Elizabeth, but he sensed her presence nearby. A kind of springish radiance in the air. He stumbled through the crowd, slowly feeling himself becoming part of a surging life force again. He was determined to find her. It was a matter of honor not to give up looking, since he’d come this far. He had to connect with her just one last time and let her know everything was all right.
After twenty minutes of searching, he finally spotted a girl who looked like her waiting in line for the Wonder Wheel. But she was thirty yards away, and with his blurry vision he couldn’t be sure. She was wearing a dark sack-like skirt and a white hijab. And she was in a separate line for girls. David called out to her, but she didn’t hear him through the milling crowd and ride noises. He was feeling dizzy and weak from the warmth of the day and the crowd closing in on him. He tried to maneuver through with his cane, but his progress was slow and painful. He hoped he wouldn’t collapse.
He made his way past a souvenir stand and saw the girl smooth down the back of her hijab, leaving a little handprint. Was it Elizabeth or wasn’t it? He stopped and called out to her, and then suddenly realized that if it was her she might have changed radically these past few months. The hijab and the sack of a skirt. The separate line for girls. It dawned on him that she might be doing penance for everything that had gone wrong.
He wanted to tell her it was all right, that she shouldn’t blame herself. But maybe he couldn’t reach her anymore. Religion had come into her life. Something else was pushing her forward. The Wonder Wheel stopped and the line of girls waiting to get on it moved.
And then without warning, she turned and looked right at him. As if she’d known he was there all along. Slowly, a smile spread across her face and he knew he didn’t have to come any closer. She was seeing him from across the river and it was okay. This was something more than penance. The hand over her heart had lifted. And now he knew he could go home too.
He started to wave to her, but she had already turned back and started to climb into one of the gondolas for the Wonder Wheel.
And so he just stood there by the ticket booth and watched her go up on the turning wheel, a smudged white dove rising above the hot dog stands, mattress stores, and housing projects, into the fierce brightness of a Coney Island afternoon.
A Biography of Peter Blauner
Although Peter Blauner (b. 1959) grew up on Manhattan’s East Side and attended the prestigious Collegiate School for Boys, he has always been drawn to the dark side of city life. “Being a kid during the fiscal-crisis seventies, I saw how things could change and you could go from the high to the low very quickly. Which is a very good lesson in hu
mility and an even better one for writing crime fiction.”
Influenced equally by the films of Sidney Lumet and Martin Scorsese, the burgeoning punk rock scene, and the split-lip school of American pulp fiction, Blauner began writing short stories in high school and while still in college got a summer job assisting legendary newspaper columnist and author Pete Hamill. “He gave me a master class on what it means to be an urban writer. He taught me to always get your notes on paper right away, always ask the hardest question you can think of, and always listen carefully to the last thing somebody says to you.”
After graduating from Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1982, Blauner returned to the city and began working at New York magazine, where he apprenticed with Nicholas Pileggi, author of Wise Guy and screenwriter of the film Goodfellas. Over the next few years, Blauner developed his byline for the magazine, writing about crime, politics, and other forms of antisocial behavior. But, he says, “My real goal was to train myself to become an urban novelist. I wanted to write stories that were suspenseful and compelling, but that also tried to capture what’s funny, surrealistic, and occasionally beautiful about city life.”
He decided on an approach of full-immersion research, which he has continued throughout his writing career. In 1988, he took a leave from the magazine and became a volunteer at the New York Department of Probation, so he could write about the criminal culture of the era from the front lines. The result was his debut novel, Slow Motion Riot, which was published in 1991. It went on to win the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best first novel and was named one of the “International Books of the Year” in the Times Literary Supplement by Patricia Highsmith, who called it “unforgettable.”
Soon after, Blauner turned his attention to fiction writing fulltime, and his next novel, Casino Moon, was a kind of update of the classic noir pulp genre, set in the Atlantic City boxing world and published in 1994. After his time in Atlantic City researching Casino Moon, he returned to New York and spent a year working at a homeless shelter to research The Intruder, which was published in 1996 and became a New York Times bestseller. For his next novel, Man of the Hour, published in 1999, he anticipated the reality of 9/11 by writing about misguided notions of heroism and Middle Eastern terrorism in America. Four years later, he shifted gears and wrote The Last Good Day, about a murder in a quiet Hudson River town and the resulting social fissures among the people who live there.
Blauner’s most recent novel, Slipping Into Darkness (2006), found him back on the city streets creating a modern urban mystery. It tells the story of Julian Vega, a bright young immigrant’s son, locked up in the early eighties for killing a female doctor on New York’s Upper East Side. Twenty years later, Julian is released from prison and another female doctor is killed under strikingly similar circumstances. Only this time, the evidence doesn’t point to Julian at all—it points to the woman he allegedly murdered two decades before. And the detective who arrested him in the first place, Francis X. Loughlin, is left to wrestle with the possibility that he ruined the life of an innocent man. The book earned the strongest reviews of Blauner’s career, with everyone from Stephen King to the New York Times ringing in, and introduced him to a new audience.
More recently, Blauner has branched out into television work, writing scripts for the Law & Order franchise, and also into short fiction. His short stories have been anthologized in the Best American Mystery collection and on NPR’s Selected Shorts from Symphony Space. He continues to live in Brooklyn with his wife, Peg Tyre, author of the bestselling nonfiction book The Trouble With Boys, and their two sons, Mac and Mose.
Blauner grew up in the New York City of the 1970s and started writing fiction while a student at the Collegiate School for Boys. “I became a writer right before Mother’s Day when I was fifteen: I saw a little girl at Gimbel’s Department Store trying to pull her dress down, and heard her nanny say, ‘Stop that, you’re as bad as your mother.’”
For his first novel, Slow Motion Riot, Blauner immersed himself in research, spending six months as a volunteer at the New York Department of Probation.
For his fourth novel, Man of the Hour, Blauner traveled Jerusalem and the West Bank to get a sense of his characters’ background stories. This photograph was taken by a shepherd at the sheep market outside of Bethlehem.
Since 1989, Blauner has been married to bestselling author Peg Tyre (The Trouble with Boys, The Good School). They have two sons.
In recent years, Blauner has been working in television, as a writer and producer for the Law & Order franchise.
Acknowledgments
THIS IS A WORK of fiction. As most New Yorkers know, there is no Coney Island High School.
I would like to acknowledge the following books as invaluable research sources: Thomas W. Lippman’s Understanding Islam, second revised edition (Meridian, New York, 1995); Two Seconds Under the World by Jim Dwyer, David Kocieniewski, Diedre Murphy, and Peg Tyre (Crown, New York, 1994); Cry Palestine: Inside the West Bank by Said K. Aburish (Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1993). I’m also deeply indebted to Izzat al-Ghazzawi, head of the Palestinian Writers Union, who generously gave of his time and insights during my stay in the Middle East; Jennifer Goldberg from Edward R. Murrow High School; and of course, my uncle Arthur. Any errors in fact or interpretation are the author’s original creations.
In addition, I’d like to thank the following people: Marcie Ruderman, Sandra Abrams, Don Roth, Jim Murphy, June Feder, Midge Herz Kosner, Ken Wasserman, Hubert Selby, Jr., Lenore Braverman, Nasser Ahmed, Jeffrey Goldberg, Alyson Lurie, Kim Bonheim, Gail Reisin, Jarek Ali, David Ignatius, Dan Ingram, Dr. Charles Stone, Bart Gellman, Dr. Bernard Sabella, Carol Storey, Daniel Max, Doug Pooley, Eric Pooley, Sonny Mehta, Alice Farkouh, Larry Joseph, Allen Leibowitz, Joe Gallagher, Fatima Shama, Guy Renzi, Donald Sadowy, J. J. Goldberg, Jim Yardley, Joyce London, Sarah Piel, Lori Andiman, Mel Glenn, Ari Mientkovich, Chiara Coletti, Michael Siegel, Larry Schoenbach, Naomi Shore, Caroline Upcher, Joanne Gruber, Claire Zion, Susanna Einstein.
And finally, I want to thank my friend and agent, Richard Pine, and my editor, Michael Pietsch, for first helping me write this book and then making me write a better one.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1999 by Peter Blauner
cover design by Karen Horton
ISBN: 978-1-4532-1522-7
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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