Man of the Hour (36 page)

It was strange about the Great Bear. Once he’d appeared so masculine and dominating to Nasser. But now he was just another follower. Nasser realized the weakness must have been there all along—with the hamburgers and the American videos and the muscle magazines. Despite his size, Youssef was ready to go wherever a strong wind pushed him.

Nasser and the doctor both ordered plain toast, and the waitress, a tired busty blond, took their menus and headed back to the kitchen.

“So!” The imam smiled, switching back to Arabic and flashing the mischievous grin that had captivated Nasser at their last meeting. “What are my brothers up to?”

Dr. Ahmed leaned across the Sweet’n Low packets conspiratorially, being a little too obvious, Nasser thought. “We have three questions we’ve been discussing among ourselves, sheik.”

“Good!”

Nasser looked around, trying to make sure no one was eavesdropping. From sharing an apartment with the doctor, he’d begun to notice the little man was swinging back and forth between fits of unfounded paranoia and moments of troubling heedlessness.

“I want to ask about the schools they have in this country.” The doctor coughed and cleared his throat. “What do you think of the way the children are taught here?”

“This is surely an affront to God.” The imam folded his hands and looked thoughtful.

“Good. Then it would not be
haram
for someone to attack such a place again, right?”

The doctor coughed again and Nasser was reminded he’d smelled burning tobacco through the bathroom door last night. Did Ahmed have a secret vice?

The imam looked ill at ease. “Well, I would rather not say exactly—”

“It’s all right, I understand.” Dr. Ahmed cut him off and looked around. “There may be other ears here.”

“Exactly,” said the imam, receiving a cup of coffee from the passing waitress.

Nasser felt the vinyl seat cushion move under him as Dr. Ahmed fidgeted to his right. Was this all they needed? Had the imam really sanctioned bombing the school again, or had he just evaded the subject entirely?

Dr. Ahmed was undeterred. “There’s something else I have to ask you,” he said, lowering his voice so the imam had to lean across the table to hear him. “Even more serious.”

“Go ahead.” The imam’s eyes twinkled.

Okay, so now he’s going to ask about the other targets. Nasser picked up a glass of water and then put it down quickly, worried his shaking hands would betray his mood.

But the doctor suddenly veered in another direction. “The other day, there was a
shaheen
—a martyr—in Jerusalem,” he said quietly. “One who blows himself up and kills these so-called innocents. We need to know if such a thing is against
sharia
, the laws of Islam.”

The question stunned Nasser. Nothing had been said about a suicide bombing.

The imam’s smile fell away. “Well, this is very serious indeed,” he said, with raised eyebrows and a turned-down mouth. “The Holy Book is very specific that such things are strictly
haram
. Suicides are condemned, and so are ones who would kill innocent women and children.”

“Oh?” Dr. Ahmed shot Youssef a questioning glance to the side of the imam.

“However.” The imam paused and sipped his coffee. “There
is
a long, honorable tradition of martyrs. And remember: we are living through a time of Holy War. And in a war, it is not always possible to live exactly by the Book.”

Oh my God. Nasser pitched his head forward into his hands. “Why are we even talking this way?” he asked the others. “No one has talked of doing such a thing here.”

Silence fell over the table as the waitress brought the imam’s pancakes, Youssef’s scrambled eggs, and plain toast for Nasser and Dr. Ahmed. “There you go, guys,” she said, heading back to the kitchen. “Give a whistle if you need anything else.”

“Of course we’re not talking about such things,” Youssef hissed across the table at Nasser. “
Inte mej noon.
Are you crazy? We’re just trying to find the limits we have to work within.”

The limits? Nasser was completely confused now, but afraid to say anything, lest he appear weak-willed in front of the imam and lose his newfound status. He had thought they were supposed to be getting the blessing to bomb the school and the other locations. What was the point of going into all these abstractions if they weren’t going to put them into action?

“We have one last question,” said Dr. Ahmed. “It also has to do with limitations. We are limited by money. We have three operations we want to do and we’re running low on funds. This is a terrible thing about living in this society. One always needs more. So we were hoping you could help us. For the sake of
jihad
.”

“How much do you need?” The imam spread a small lake of syrup across his plate, dipped a chunk of pancake, and stuck it in the corner of his mouth.

The doctor checked with Youssef, eyeball-conferencing and leaving Nasser out of it. “Maybe five, six hundred dollars?”

The imam raised his chin and rested his hands on the table, chewing thoroughly. “
That
is a considerable commitment,” he said after a minute. “Are you sure the time is right?”

The question seemed to shrink Dr. Ahmed a little. “I know it in my heart, sheik,” he said quickly, as if he sensed his request was about to refused.

The imam turned to Nasser and smiled. “You hear this?” he said. “He knows it in his heart. This is splendid, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

Nasser realized this entire meeting had been a waste. They were going to leave this diner without getting any money or even a sanction to bomb the school. The idea of going forward without a blessing left him feeling profoundly unsettled, as did the question about the suicide bombing. He kept seeing the image of the martyr lying there on television, half-destroyed in front of the jewelry store. Why did the others ask about this?

“So if it is meant to be, and you work righteously and pray, God will make it easy for you,” the imam told the three of them. “Now let’s have breakfast.”

46

THE NIGHT BEFORE HE
returned to school and began the arduous task of reinventing himself and getting back his good name, David had reread
The Great Gatsby
.

Again, he was struck by the scene at the end where Gatsby’s father pulls out a faded old book with his son’s boyhood schedule and “General Resolves” for making himself into a better person printed on the inside.

Exactly, thought David. He needed his own list of resolves:

1. Most important. Reestablish contact with your students. One of them may have seen something or heard something about the bombing.

2. Get people around the neighborhood to talk to you and find out what they might have seen.

3. Fight back. Have the lawyers issue more vigorous denials of the stories that have appeared so far in the press. And think about making an appearance yourself. People may need to see you to believe you’re not a monster.

4. Publicly demand the FBI put up or shut up about arresting you.

5. Assume if the first four steps don’t work, you were probably destined to be screwed anyway.

But as soon as he arrived at school the next morning, he realized he hadn’t done enough to prepare himself. Just as Larry had predicted, some of the parents went nuts, showing up with with placards and bullhorns, protesting that an alleged wife-beating, child-abusing terrorist was being allowed back in the building,
WHAT ABOUT OUR CHILDREN’S RIGHTS
! said one sign in electric-purple letters. Naturally, the press corps was out in force to record the debacle with their dense packs of microphones and cameras. David bulled past them as best he could, pausing to notice that same little black kid with the homemade press pass hanging around on the fringes.

Inside the building, the reception wasn’t any warmer. Larry had assigned him to a dank, smallish basement office next to the cafeteria—actually a converted storage closet—jammed with video equipment, shelves of books, workmen’s tools, and rolls of toilet paper. Squeezing himself in among the clutter, David felt like a character in a nineteenth-century novel, forced to dwell beneath the surface of respectable society.

For most of the morning, he sat idle, quietly burning, waiting for students to come see him, wishing he could do more to seek them out. But he knew if he was too aggressive and obvious about pushing his cause and asking questions, he’d give Larry an excuse to have him removed. Better to play it cool, at least initially.

Slowly they began to trickle in. Kevin Hardison came first. Instead of one of his alternating outfits with the Dollar Bill cap, he had on a brand-new, pressed, green-and-white-striped Oxford-style shirt with a silver stickpin in the collar and stylish khaki slacks.

“Hey, how you like my Gatsby look?” he said, slapping the novel down on David’s desk defiantly.

“You read it?”

“I read it.”

“And where’d you get the threads?” David took his feet out of the drawer, where they’d been resting.

“Don’t ask,” Kevin said darkly. “I got a new job for after school.”

Probably grilling hot dogs at Nathan’s, thought David. But still, how about that? The kid might not get into an Ivy League college, but he’d gotten something out of the book. It might have even inspired him to get a job. More than you could say for most readers.

“Here, I wanna give you something.” Kevin dropped a wrinkled, coffee-stained business card into David’s lap.

“What’s this?”

David picked up the card and saw it had the name and phone number of a Court Street lawyer in the Heights.

“Myron Newman, attorney-at-law.” Kevin touched his stickpin, which on closer inspection looked like something you’d win at an amusement park by throwing a ball at a clown’s head. “He helped my cousin out last year, off a drug arrest. Got him probation when he was carrying like a gram of coke. I figure you could use a hand.”

David fingered the ragged edge of the card, secretly touched not just by the boy’s concern, but by his efforts to spiff himself up.

“Thank you, Kevin.” He shook the boy’s hand and decided not to mention that he already had lawyers.

“Now do I still have to write that paper for you?” Kevin leaned against the edge of the desk, flashing his monogrammed gold smile, looking to take advantage of the moment.

“Hell yeah,” said David. “You’re still in school, aren’t you? Besides, you’re gonna have to show them you can write if you want to get into CUNY.”

He took a sample application out of a folder and gave it to Kevin, knowing he had to make at least a token effort to do the job he’d agreed to do.

“Yeah, i-ight.” Kevin took the paper and pushed himself off the desk, accepting that he wasn’t going to get over this time.

“Hey, Kevin, let me ask you something.” David gave Myron Newman’s card another look and then put it in his pocket. “You hear anything?”

“’Bout what?”

“You know.” David glanced out the door, checking for eavesdroppers. “About my case. About who really might have done the bombing.”

“You didn’t do it?” Kevin seemed genuinely surprised, his voice cracking a little and his gangly arms swinging.

“You thought I did?”

“Well, I didn’t know. You were arrested before. I seen it in the paper.”

“And you were going to help me anyway?” David wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or alarmed.

“Hey, man. Half my family been locked up. It’s rough out there.” He studied the back of his hand, as if figuring out the moral algebra of growing up in a bad neighborhood. “Besides, you did that shit stealing cars when you were young and you grew up and got to be a teacher anyway. That’s all right, man.”

David shook his head. If he’d known students would take it so well, he would’ve owned up to being arrested years ago.

“Do me a favor, Kevin. Let me know if you hear anything.”

The rest of the day didn’t go as well.

“I will not serve this man.”

Rosalyn, the cafeteria lady with the suave Clark Gable mustache, was glaring at him over a pot of soup and a vat of meatloaf mat looked like a little buffalo squatting in a muddy swamp.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“I have a seven-year-old grandchild,” she said. “And I won’t serve you. I don’t give a damn what they do to me neither. They can fire my ass, far as I’m concerned. But they can’t make me serve a man who’d do something
like that
to a child.”

David reached across the counter and took the ladle to pour his own soup. The other teachers in line in front of him moved along, murmuring to one another, not acknowledging the awkwardness. Before—when he’d just been “the mad bomber”—people had a lurid interest in him, peeking out when they thought he wasn’t looking. Now there was only outright revulsion.

He picked up his tray and took his ocean-sediment coffee and experimental-looking soup to an empty table in the green faculty lunchroom. Why would anyone join him? He’d been branded the worst man in the world. Given the choice, I’d stay away from me, he thought

“Hey, how’s the Underground Man?” Donna Vitale suddenly appeared across the table, sitting down and focusing her good eye on the left side of his face. She had an extra plate of meatloaf on her tray.

“Brooding and plotting. Larry send you over to make sure I’m not making another bomb or something?”

“No, I just wanted to make sure you were getting enough to eat.” She slid the extra meatloaf across the table to him. “How’s it going anyway?”

“Great. I’ve had two kids come to see me since eight-fifteen. And I caught one of them plagiarizing
The Gulag Archipelago
in his essay.”

She laughed and her wild eye glimmered. “Well, that’s original, at least.”

“Not really. It was Yuri Ehrlich. He’s from Moscow. They may do it all the time over there. The sad thing is, he’s a bright kid. He just has this weird compulsion to get over on people.”

“So what’d he say when you called him on it?”

David tried his coffee, but it was gritty and cold. “He said, ‘Oh, who cares what you say? You are terrorist and child molester. No one will believe you.’”