“When did he return, Mr. Van Wormer?”
“September the thirteenth. He said he was kicked out of his rented room because he is an Arab. Sadly, that may be true. In any case, I’m sure he feels safer here. He’s ready to talk with you, too.”
“That surprises me somewhat, grateful as I am for it. Why—if he’s nervous about having the spotlight on him—is he ready to talk with the press now?”
“He’s still not very comfortable about this, but he knows another man of Middle Eastern background is implicated in Mrs. Johansson’s disappearance. Al says he fled from my house when he heard on the news that a Middle Easterner might have had something to do with her troubles. Now that that man has been identified, he’s willing to tell you what he knows.”
As Jan Van Wormer finished speaking, a timid figure slunk into the room. Lingering in the shadows near a grand piano, he spoke up.
“That’s r-right,” he said. “Mr. V-V-Vee? Would you p-p-please stay with me?”
“Sure, Al,” the piano man said, motioning for Al to be seated on a worn settee while he and Liz took chairs facing him. Saving Al the struggle of spitting out his entire story, Jan Van Wormer told Liz, “Al here has told me he was falsely accused of some lewd behavior regarding Ellen Johansson, back when he was a student at the Wharton School out in Wellesley. Of course, Mrs. Johansson was just a girl then.” Looking at Al, he said, gently, “That right, Al?”
“Y-yes, Mr. Vee,” Al managed to say, while he brought his knees up to his chest and visibly struggled not to hug them to himself.
“It’s all right, Al,” Liz said encouragingly. “I’m here to tell the truth, not to get you in trouble for something you didn’t do. I already know Dr. Mayhew doubted you had done anything wrong.”
Al unfolded his knees and set his feet on the floor again. “He d-d-did? Hamdu-lillah!”
“Yes, Al. Mr. Buxton, your music teacher, told me he thought you were scared because Mr. Swenson was so angry. Dr. Mayhew said the board members at the Wharton School wouldn’t give you a chance to tell the whole story. Now you can tell us everything, Al.”
“I d-d-d-didn’t do it,” Al said.
“But you saw something that shocked you, is that right? Something that made you say ‘Rah, rah. Shock-rah, shock-rah.’”
“How do you know that?” Al managed to spit out.
“Dr. Mayhew remembered you said that.”
“I was d-disgusted.”
“Not shocked? Then why did you keep saying ‘Shock rah’?”
“Shaqra,” he said. “It means ‘yellow hair’.”
“Blonde? The word ‘shaqra’ means ‘blonde’?”
Al nodded. “I was d-d-disgusted, and sad, too. I was sorry for the shaqra. I was sorry for what Ellen maybe saw.”
“What did Ellen see, Al?”
“It is d-d-difficult for me to tell this to a lady,” he said, drawing his knees up and wrapping his arms around them this time.
“You saw a man behaving badly, didn’t you, Al?” Jan Van Wormer said in a low tone. “The man was masturbating, wasn’t he, Al? It’s all right to tell the truth,” he said, reaching across and placing his gnarled hand on Al’s wrist.
“Allah help me, it is the truth. M-M-Mister Swenson. He was d-d-doing this thing.”
“Did Ellen see what he was doing, Al?”
Al nodded and then shook his head in a contradictory motion. He seemed unable to speak.
“Al told me he was not sure how much Ellen saw,” Jan Van Wormer said. “She ran to her father and then fled towards the house where she lived. Then Mr. Swenson began to shout at Al.”
“F-F-F . . . ,” Al began.
“Al told me Mr. Swenson was mumbling the word ‘flicka.’ I think it’s a Swedish endearment. But that was earlier, while the man was masturbating.”
Tongue-tied, Al nodded exaggeratedly, then he moved his hand in a rolling motion as if performing a charade to indicate moving ahead.
“When he became angry, Ali,” Liz pressed, using his boyhood name, “did he say ‘fuck’ then?”
Al shook his head violently. ‘F-F-F-FORGET ME NOT!’” he bellowed, and then fled from the room.
Liz had every intention of confronting Olga Swenson with her knowledge as she drove out to Wellesley from South Boston. Fatigue, hunger, and finally traffic gave her pause, however. Unwilling to face Olga on an empty stomach, she stopped at a lunch place in Newton Lower Falls and purchased a take-out container of clam chowder, a tuna sandwich, and potato chips. The September skies, whose beauty was so remarkable on the day of the terrorist attacks, remained as blue as any on a picture postcard. And, as Liz took her sandwich outdoors to a picnic table overlooking a fast-flowing stream that she knew was the Charles River, nearby trees with leaves just beginning to change color looked like harbingers of autumn.
It was nine months since Ellen had gone missing. Observing water splashing over a dam as brightly as if Ellen’s disappearance or the pain of terrorists’ victims had never occurred, Liz felt keenly alone with her thoughts. What did this new piece of the puzzle augur? Could one assume Ellen had called to mind her father’s words at last—perhaps reminded by the name of the broken teacup’s china pattern? If so, would that have given her relief from her flashbacks, or only endowed her with more pain?
If the shakily written words “FORGET ME NOT” on the blackboard were any indication, she was certainly agitated. But surely, Liz hoped, Ellen must have realized she now had the upper hand over the flashbacks. Even if it was painful to know her father had behaved appallingly, a woman like Ellen, a woman who knew how to turn to books for information about her worries, must have known she could get help overcoming this painful knowledge. She must have experienced some sense of relief as she wrote those words on her blackboard.
Why then, did she go missing? Tilting her head to look up at the gloriously blue sky, Liz thought again about Nadia’s account of Ellen’s strange cab ride and the events at the World Trade Center. The night before the attacks, Nadia, who was herself an intelligence operative, had not seen anything significant in the cabdriver’s radio talk. The terrorist attacks put everything in a different light. What would Nadia think now? Had Ellen overheard something she shouldn’t in the two-way radio conversation?
Finishing her sandwich, Liz returned to her car and phoned Faisal al-Turkait. He sounded far more reserved than he had been during their earlier encounter. But he consented to meet her later that day in his shop. Unsure what she wanted to say to Olga at this stage, Ellen nearly turned her car eastward towards Boston. What point was there in dredging up the ugly fact of her husband’s behavior, except to see if Olga was aware of it? But, even so, on impulse she turned west and drove to the Swenson house.
If Olga was perplexed to see Liz, she hardly showed it. Instead, she seemed relieved to have company and to share her thoughts about the terrorist attacks.
“It personalizes things, doesn’t it, when you have a loved one who has been on the scene where a tragedy later occurs? Only months earlier, Ellen was having such a memorable meeting with her pen pal on the top floor of one of those towers,” Olga said as she poured hot water into a china teapot.
“Yes,” Liz said. “It makes the unimaginable all too imaginable, unfortunately.”
“Shall we take the tea outside and enjoy the weather?”
“Good idea. Let me help.”
Liz welcomed the chance to be occupied with the tea things, since she remained uncertain about sharing Ali’s revelation. The walk through the house, down the stairs, and through the mudroom bought her a few minutes to think. In the mudroom, Liz noticed Olga’s aluminum vases were filled with fresh-cut flowers, and an incomplete flower arrangement stood on the potting table.
“Did I interrupt you in your arranging?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t matter. Ju
st as I felt strange taking up old hobbies although my daughter remains missing, I now find myself feeling odd about arranging flowers while the world is in such a state. It feels rather like fiddling while Rome burns.” Olga seemed to shake herself as she stood poised to exit the mudroom.
Meanwhile, Liz took a scarf from her purse. “I seem to have picked this up accidentally during an earlier visit. Shall I hang it here?” she asked.
Olga nodded. As Liz tried to drape the scarf on an overloaded coat hook, she knocked a coat to the floor. Picking it up, she tucked the scarf into its pocket and hung the coat on the hook again by the little chain sewn to its collar.
Burdened with the tea tray, Olga signaled Liz to make haste into the fresh air. “That is one of Ellen’s favorite old scarves,” she said, her eyes brightening with tears. Thrusting the door open with her shoulder, she added, “It’s stuffy in here, don’t you think?”
“I’d call it ‘close,’ thanks to the mixed fragrances of the flowers.”
Liz contented herself with making small talk, until she realized it was time to head for her appointment with Faisal al-Turkait in Cambridge.
“Was there a particular reason for your visit, Liz?” Olga asked.
“I thought I’d let you know, ‘shaqra’ means ‘blonde’ in Arabic.”
“‘Shock-rah!’ Then that Al Leigh was not so tongue-tied!” Olga said, her eyes widening. “It’s dreadful, don’t you think, the assumptions we make about foreigners? No wonder they hate us! What will become of us, Liz?”
Faisal al-Turkait greeted Liz with polite formality at the door of Turkoman Books. Moving a stack of volumes off his sofa, he invited her to take a seat and join him in drinking coffee.
“This time I was expecting you, you see,” he said as he poured. “I hope you will understand if I am reticent in other regards, though,” he said. “At this time, I would not like to have my name in the paper or even to discuss much of anything over the phone.”
Liz was shocked. “Do you think you are under some kind of surveillance?”
“Certainly. This country is under attack by enemies of Middle Eastern extraction. As an American citizen, I applaud this vigilance.”
“As a person of Middle Eastern extraction, surely you feel uncomfortable about it as well?”
“I understand it.”
“I can only express my admiration! I’m not so sure I would feel similarly understanding if the nation were under attack by women with auburn hair and I was hounded as a result.”
“When I walk down a city street at night and a woman is the only other pedestrian, should I blame her if she crosses the street to ensure her safety from a male stranger? I am no assailant, yet I am not offended to see a woman exercise such caution. The same is true now. In the interests of our nation’s security, I am not offended to see our government scrutinize me. But let us talk of other matters. You have some more words for me to translate, I assume?”
“Actually, it is the same list of words that concerns me,” Liz said, taking out the grocery list. “Do any of these words have double meanings? I mean, could they refer to some sort of terrorist activity, meeting, delivery, or anything of that sort?”
“No, I think not. These are the most ordinary of words. Truly, they look like a simple grocery list of fruits.”
“I guess I’m searching for significance in Ellen’s interaction with the cabdriver, even trying to connect it to the terrorist attacks. That’s a pretty big leap, though, isn’t it?”
“That’s understandable, particularly after the events of September eleventh. Didn’t you show me, last time you were here, a photo of a book she had that was written for intelligence experts?”
“Yes, and I still don’t know where she acquired that. I plan to see if they have any record of selling it to her at the Brattle Book Shop in Boston, where, I understand, she purchased something in order to prepare to meet her pen pal.”
“I know the owner there and I know he now records his book sales on the computer. Most book dealers do, these days, because so many of us also sell on-line. We need to keep track of individual volumes. He might be reluctant to tell you who bought the book, but if I ask him for the book, as though I wish to acquire it, he might tell me if and when it was sold.”
Putting through a call to the store, the book dealer discovered the book in question had been sold there on October 13, 2000. There was no credit card or check information, since the purchase had been made in cash. But the Brattle’s owner did let on he’d thought the customer was surprising. Most of the time, he told his colleague, he sold odd books like that to professors or students. This customer looked like a suburban housewife.
The likelihood of Ellen serving as an intelligence operative seemed unlikely now. Surely, if Ellen were a spy, she would be supplied with such books, not reduced to finding one in a used-book shop. Liz returned to the question of the cabbie’s grocery list.
“Are any of these words also used euphemistically, as sexual slang, I mean?”
“This is not easy for me to discuss with a lady,” the book dealer said, echoing a similar statement by Ali. “But the answer is yes. Teena, the word for fig, can also be used—man-to-man only, of course—to refer to a woman.” He blushed.
“What about the other fruits? Here in America a man might say of a woman, ‘Look at them apples,’ for instance,” Liz said.
Faisal’s complexion reddened further. “No, I wouldn’t say the other words on this grocery list would be used in that way. More coffee?” he said, ducking into the kitchen.
“I ask because we know that the cabdriver who drove Ellen Johansson in New York, and who also visited her house on the day she disappeared, made her uncomfortable by using that word in a sleazy tone in a two-way radio conversation with another male. She wondered if the cabbie was talking graphically about her, and then, when she heard him continue to use the word, she relaxed a little, thinking he was talking in sexual terms about a woman called Tina.”
Returning to the room, Faisal underlined Nadia’s view. “I think she was correct in feeling uncomfortable. I think perhaps the driver was talking in a most improper manner about his passenger.”
Chapter 26
After leaving the book dealer, Liz drove the Tracer to the Banner parking lot and stopped in at the city desk, only to learn that she’d been put on another mall story. This time the assignment was to interview store managers about the drop in customer numbers in response to terrorist-inspired fears of gathering in public spaces. Liz drove to the closest mall she could think of, the CambridgeSide Galleria, a snazzy shopping complex in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston.
Inside the mall she met Banner photographer Jim Collins, who shot photos of the unpopulated place from the top of an escalator. This turned out to be a good spot to get comments from a sampling of the few who had decided to shop, terrorist threat or not.
“I’m getting married next week,” one young woman told Liz defiantly. “I’m not letting al-Qaeda prevent me from buying my bridesmaids their gifts!”
“Let ’em try to shoot me!” a belligerent older man wearing a Veterans of Foreign Wars baseball cap declared. “They’ll regret it!”
Despite the small number of shoppers, excellent quotes were easy to get. With time to spare, Liz and Jim decided to cover two more shopping venues, Boston’s upscale Newbury Street and then more humble Washington Street, also known as “Downtown Crossing.” Thanks to the dearth of shoppers, it was unusually easy to find parking spaces on Newbury Street. They decided to walk a block over to Boylston Street, where the very posh toy emporium FAO Schwarz seemed a great choice to represent this shopping district. What did well-heeled parents think about spending big bucks on playthings now?
“You can’t buy security, I know,” one mother said, “but you can buy together time. I’m purchasing this horribl
y complicated Taj Mahal model to show my son the beauty of another culture’s architecture and to give our family something to do together. I’m uneasy about taking my kids to public places at the moment, so I figure we’ll be spending more time together at home.”
With answers like this, Liz knew she had the makings of a sidebar, if hard news about the terrorist attack aftermath didn’t grab all the space in the paper. Thinking ahead, she got contact information from the woman for a possible family page piece about family time as an antidote to terror. The toy store interviews were so productive and time-consuming that Jim Collins had to leave her so he could cover another story. Outside the store, feeding the parking meter, Liz realized she did not have enough time to walk to Downtown Crossing after all, a pedestrian mall where parking was nonexistent.
Instead, she returned to Newbury Street and strolled along it for several blocks. Rejecting a ladies’ hat shop, several beauty salons, and some art galleries that were all too posh to provide contrast with FAO Schwarz, she made her way on foot back to Boylston Street. Running parallel to Newbury Street, this thoroughfare offered a mix of shopping, from the posh toy shop and elegant Shops at Prudential Center mall to discount pharmacies. Scanning the stores, she made her way to a place bearing the sign “Puttin’ on the Ritz: Off-Price Remainders.” The customers here were all female, and the well-heeled matrons and homeless women seeking warmth in the chill of the autumn afternoon represented two extreme ends of the economic scale. None of them seemed eager to talk with Liz, so she killed fifteen minutes by pushing designer leather jackets around on their rack, while trying to overhear shoppers’ chatter about what was on their minds. The effort was fruitless for the purposes of Liz’s article, since the bargain hunters were mostly shopping solo and those who spoke to one another seemed absorbed in talking about the fact that the shop stamped the word “Ritz” in hot pink on the trendy designer labels, but she did get a great buy on a leather jacket.
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