Amriika (42 page)

They worked for Ronald Reagan, demonstrated against Carter; collected signatures at subways, exhibited photos of Iranian torture victims in shopping malls. After Reagan was elected president, the hostages were released, and those in the Movement knew that the long haul had now begun and counter-revolution would not come easily. That was when the cells tightened; the situation was grim, with a lot of waiting and no instructions. There would be small meetings — five to six people exchanging information. And then instructions began coming again, directed and regular.

He attended one military training camp, in Arizona, after which, under intense pressure from his family, he withdrew from the Movement.

The training was in weapons, yes. Handguns, grenades, machine guns. Workshops on explosives, which only a few were allowed to attend.

“Were you one of the select few?” Darcy asked, eyeing Michel intently.

“No.” Straight, without a change in tone.

“Good. At least that simplifies matters.”

At that, Michel coloured a bit and looked away, met Ramji’s eyes. But by this time Ramji himself was feeling distinctly uneasy about Darcy. The man had been disruptive, and even flippant, with his lengthy digressions; he had taken time to recite poetry. He seemed utterly detached from the purpose of the meeting, at least as Ramji had envisioned it.

“Let’s pause here,” Darcy said, looking at the other two, “and discuss procedure for a moment.”

It was agreed that Ramji would produce a written account of Michel’s story, with the latter supplying the details as required.

“Details about that training camp in Arizona might be of interest,” Darcy told Michel. “For example, were any Americans ever present there?”

“We saw them once.”

“Where?”

In the log cabin that was the headquarters. A jeep and a sedan had come to the camp late one evening, and there followed a lengthy meeting in that cabin. This was just after the Carter debacle, and it was believed that volunteers would be dropped into Iran. So at night he and some fellow trainees walked towards the cabin in the dark, stopped some yards before a clearing, and watched. That was a U.S. army jeep. For sure.

Darcy nodded abstractedly, then he looked impatiently around, and outside at the street — they had been sitting at the same spot for a couple of hours — and announced, “And I’m all for a change of scenery now. Let’s go to the restaurant across the street and have a bite to eat.”

Ramji had come expecting to hear Michel’s entire story that day, including his version of what had transpired in Ashfield. And Ramji had anticipated that soon, perhaps the next day, they would arrive at some sort of resolution concerning Michel and his story. And so he stared in utter disbelief as Darcy ordered a scotch with his sandwich; and when the man took his first relished sip, Ramji had no doubt that the day’s proceedings were effectively over. What was wrong? Had he so completely misread the significance of Michel’s arrival, the urgency of his circumstance — that he could be named a suspect any time in the bookstore bombing, and that he had come here to give a version of that event? Meanwhile here was Darcy holding forth on the Iranian situation before and after the revolution; asking questions, interested in everything about Michel’s family background; taking delight in an account of Michel’s experience at the Movement’s training camp. (A balaclava-clad Robin had addressed the recruits, in the company of a miniskirted woman in boots, who reputedly took one recruit to bed every night she spent at the camp.) One thing Darcy did not seem intent on pursuing was the last part of Michel’s story.

Finally, Michel took a bathroom break, and Ramji had his chance. He turned to Darcy, saying, “We have to hear the full story as soon as possible. I think we have to decide upon a course of action.”

“Don’t worry,” Darcy said. “There’s time for it tomorrow. We can guess roughly what it’s going to be, can’t we? I’m sorry for the way I’ve been acting — but I’m tired now. I need time to think. We don’t want to rush into anything. We have to know what this young man is about. I’m going to be making some inquiries.” He looked pointedly at Ramji and asked, “But why did you take him home instead of asking him to stay at a hotel?”

Ramji explained why.

“No need to take unnecessary risks,” Darcy said.

Ramji, to his own surprise, replied, “But he’s not charged with anything.”

“The question is, how did he end up in such a lunatic situation, involved with a book-burning rally.”

Michel, having observed them in conversation, had strolled off outside. When he returned, they all agreed that the meeting would continue in Ramji’s apartment the next morning.

Ramji drove home with Michel, as anxious as when he had first got up that morning. Perhaps, he thought, Darcy was right in taking things easy. Nevertheless, this was not the Darcy he had come such a long way to work with, someone who would have been delighted to see his story about the Pork Riots vindicated, someone who would normally have been alert as a hound to the prospect of an unofficial and perhaps darkly secret version of the events in Ashfield.

“What did you think of Mr. Darcy?” Ramji asked Michel. “Was he quite what you had expected him to be?”

“He’s quite a cool customer,” Michel said. “It’s hard to say what he’s thinking.”

“You’re right.”

Did the magazine
Inqalab
have much impact on the Community in Ashfield, Ramji asked.

Only some people seemed aware of it, Michel said, he and his friends, and they used to discuss its contents.

He wanted to know more about Zayd and Basu, and Ramji told
him that they had founded the magazine as a cultural newspaper, with a very different name, when they were both in Queens, New York, in the eighties. Michel had been quite taken by their views on the Phantom, which he and his friends in the community had seen in
Inqalab
.

“Have you actually read the Phantom’s book?” Ramji asked.

“No, but I’ve heard portions. They were read out to us at the rally.”

“They can’t have been too offensive if they were read aloud.”

“They were,” Michel said forcefully. “Have you read the book?”

Ramji took a long moment to reply. At length, he said, “Yes.”

“And?”

“I can see how it could offend, but I didn’t find anything that offended me.” Some of the opinions expressed even seemed familiar to me, he might have added, but he didn’t.

That night after dinner Michel helped Rumina with the dishes, and the two of them struck up a lively, intense conversation. He liked her, Ramji observed with a pang of jealousy, very much. Even when she told him to go inside and sit with Ramji, he insisted on staying to help her.

A ladies’ man, as I suspected: What does she tell him about me?

She was beaming as she came in; he followed right behind her.

“Yes, I’d love to,” she told Michel as she sat down on the love seat, across from Ramji, and Michel disappeared. “His girlfriend,” she said archly.

Michel returned holding a small framed picture.

The two of them were standing side by side; Ramji was startled to see that she was a white American. She was slim and of medium height, with a scarf round her head and wearing a large red T-shirt, and she was leaning slightly towards Michel, her brown skirt reaching a little below the knees. Wisps of blonde hair showed from under the scarf, her blue eyes gazed intently at the camera, lips curled in a smile.

“What’s her name?” Ramji asked.

“Shirin,” he said, then added, “We met last year.”

“She’s very beautiful,” Rumina said. “How did you meet — or are you not telling?” she asked playfully.

“You won’t believe it — how I met her. It was through a personal ad.”

That stopped Rumina in her tracks, her mouth gaped open in amazement. She turned to Ramji.

“Not the
Inqalab
,” said Ramji; though the idea of having personal ads had been tossed about.

“No, a Muslim paper,” Michel said.

“You put in the ad?”

“No, she did.”

“What did she say?” Rumina asked. “I’m being nosey, aren’t I?” She eyed him for a moment. “You don’t have to tell us. Let me guess: Beautiful American Muslim — that’s a
BAM
.”

She laughed, and Michel said, “No. This is how it went, listen —” he closed his eyes, to recall, then recited, “— ‘Muslimah, blue-eyed, slim, age thirty, looking for a good-looking Muslim man in thirties for possible marriage.…’ So I applied and we exchanged photographs and so on.”

“Have you called her? Why don’t you give her a call from here?”

“Maybe tomorrow. It’s a little late now, there.”

Ramji breathed out a sigh, watched Michel look gratefully at Rumina.

He had come to them like a spectre out of nowhere, or from
TV
-land, or the imagination. And his presence among them had grown. He was now a man with a past, and a photograph of someone he loved. He was one of them. It was not going to be easy to be rid of him.

I
t was the middle of the night. Ramji sat up in bed. After a moment’s hesitation, he slipped out and stepped quietly towards the bedroom door. He turned to glance behind him at Rumina; she had not stirred, was lying on her belly, one arm above her and over her pillow. Ramji went to the living room, turned on the light beside the couch, then from the bookshelf picked out a slim paperback book. It was K. Ali’s
101 Letters
— its front and back covers a matte black, with no illustration, only bold white and red type, its spine green with black type. This little book, an argument in theology, history, and cultural freedom, had gone up like a missile and landed on a random target, the town of Ashfield, Michigan, causing disruption, taking three lives.

When news of the Phantom’s book broke a few weeks ago, by the time Ramji arrived at Hooked on Print on Third Street to buy a copy it was sold out. There had not been many copies to begin with, Sam the manager told him. But — he put a hand under the counter, gave a shadow of a smile — he had saved “you guys” a copy. There was always a calm but knowing look on his face when dealing with people from the Company. A former radical perhaps.

Ramji had flipped through the book once, soon after acquiring it; he had been aware of some of its contents even before that, through Zayd’s discussions at the office regarding the Phantom’s letters. In his mind Ramji had always dismissed the author as some academic crank who had garnered undeserved attention. And yet Ramji had found himself in silent agreement with some of the opinions expressed. He would not have denied, though, that there were things said in the book that could offend some people. Rumina for one — she had been sitting with him when he first browsed through the book — had been offended by one passage in particular. Ramji turned the pages and found it, the Phantom’s Letter 23 …

“Why don’t you quote it?” Will asks.

Will Jones, the friendly federal inquisitor, who arrived one day with photographs of the bombed bookstore and said, “Tell me, how did the likes of
you
get involved in such an event?” and then became a regular visitor, presumably to record for his agency how a person like me — haunted by the ghosts of faraway places — ticks in its alien manner.

Thus he breaks into my narrative, barges in. But why deny him access, simply for the sake of narrative form? He’s always been at hand — a gravitational force influencing my trajectory, though I’ve tried to keep a steady hand as I write my story. But now I’ve entered his own territory — the bookstore bombing and its aftermath, and the
seeming coincidence
(his term) of my involvement with a protagonist of this attack and with that of another twenty-five years ago.

Why my unwillingness to quote from the Phantom’s book? It’s a free country, as Will reminds me, you can say anything you want
to here. I don’t quite buy this; nowhere is free from those who, let us say, have strong feelings. But also, to be fair, if governments can put their scissors to compromising exposés, or lock up secrets for years — and they do, you know that, Will — then why not accept censorship from the guardians of the faith? If security of the state is a crucial consideration, then why not also security of the faith?