Man of the Hour (40 page)

He watched little droplets of wax fall and harden on the table’s surface. He started to scratch them away, but then thought better of it. Let them be.

“And what happened to your friends?” asked Donna.

“Ah, they both thought they were tough guys and never owned up to doing anything. So the judge gave both of them a little jail time. Hard-core, right? I think it kind of messed both of them up for life, you know. Petey never really hooked up with the Mafia. He just became a junkie and eventually killed himself. And Dickie went all the way over to the dark side. He became a telemarketer.” He rapped his knuckles on the tabletop. “I guess, it was just this big parting for us. They went their way and I went mine. So maybe that cop was right, in a sense. What happened that night probably
did
determine the rest of my life. Only not the way he thought.”

He sat back, tired and dry-mouthed, feeling like he’d been talking for eight periods in a row. “So I suppose the point of this whole thing,” he said, “is if I can just hang in there and keep my head straight, basically everything will be okay again. I hope.”

“I hope so too.” She reached across the table and squeezed his hand.

He looked down at her fingers. “Now can I ask you something?”

“Go for it, dude.”

“What makes you so sure I’m not the bad guy anyway?”

“I don’t know.” Her good eye scanned his face, as if trying to see the edges of a mask. “You seem too … I don’t know,
invested
. Is that the right word?”

“I’m not sure. Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“I mean, you seem too present with the kids. I hear you on the phone sometimes, in the office, when you’re talking to your son. And I know I shouldn’t be listening but”—she leaned forward and looked up at him, the glow from inside her stronger than the candlelight—“I just get a good feeling about you. About the kind of man you are when no one else is watching. Besides, I’ve seen how you are at the coffee machine. You couldn’t make a bomb if your life depended on it.”

He waited a beat and then lifted his empty glass to her. “Why did it take me the better part of a year to have dinner with you?”

“Ha!”

She clinked empty glasses with him. In its subtle way, tonight was a sort of turning point for him. It was the first time since he got married that he’d been potentially serious about another woman, and the idea that he was ending one part of his life and starting another made him feel both melancholy and elated.

“Look, I really ought to get out of here.” He checked his watch. “I don’t know if I mentioned this, but they’ve probably been watching your place all night.”

“I figured as much. It seemed kind of exciting.”

She got up and started to clear the dishes. He liked talking to her, he realized. She didn’t make him feel light-headed and full of false promise. She made him feel real. This was a woman who took no shit and gave none without warrant. He wondered how Arthur would like her.

“Next time, I buy you dinner and we talk about
you
,” he said, going to get his jacket. “Instead of me blathering on. Maybe by then, they won’t be following me.”

“That would be nice.” She came over and fussed with his collar.

He put his fingers under her chin and kissed her softly on the lips. She let his arms encircle her and then gently pulled back after a few seconds. “Hey, you’re doing eighty in a fifty-five. Slow down a little.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I know what I want and I know when I want it. And I just don’t happen to want that right now. We’ll talk about later,
later
, big guy.”

“Good deal.”

He touched her shoulder lightly and started for the door.

“Something else I wanted to ask you,” she said.

“Go ahead.” He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “I owe you.”

“‘God keep me from completing anything’?” She put her arms out as if to say, What gives?

“Oh yeah, everybody’s asking me about that lately.”

“So why don’t you want to complete anything?”

His hand dropped off the knob. This was slightly different from what Dr. Ferry, the psychiatrist, had been asking. “I don’t know. I guess I used to think that if I didn’t complete something, I’d always have a chance to start over and do it better. And then there’d never be a finished
thing
for people to judge.”

“I hate to tell you, but it didn’t work.” She helped him button his jacket. “The not-getting-judged part.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

51

AT HALF PAST NINE
that night, Elizabeth Hamdy came out of West Side Storage on Tenth Avenue, looked around at the meat trucks and off-duty post office workers passing by, and ran across the street to join Nasser, who sat waiting in his Lincoln Town Car.

“You know, I’m still furious at you,” she said, after she got in.

“I know. I’m sorry for the bad things I did.”

She stared out the windshield at the slow-moving Lincoln Tunnel traffic up ahead, lightning bugs inching their way under the dark river.

“A week and a half we haven’t spoken and you only call because you need a favor.” She folded her arms and looked somber. “You missed my birthday dinner at the Moroccan Star. Nice.”

“I am sorry. I have been so busy. And I felt shy because we fought.”

“I shouldn’t even talk to you anymore,” she said. “I should have just torn up all your messages and forgotten about them.”

“I know. I don’t know why I act this way. I lost control.” He nodded sadly and then waited a beat. “So did you do it?” he asked.

“Yes, I did it,” she sighed. “I rented your storage locker for you. Two hundred dollars a month for a twelve-by-twelve room. Are you happy now?”

Headlights flickered across his eyes. “Yes, I am very happy. I appreciate you doing this for me. This favor.”

She untied her hair and let it fall around her shoulders. “I don’t even know why I bother. You’re not even that nice to me. It’s not like I need your approval or anything.”

“I understand. You are too nice.” He glanced up at his rearview mirror, making sure no police were in the area. “So okay. I’ll take you home.”

He turned the key in the ignition and felt his guts rev. It was a bad thing to get Elizabeth involved in this operation, he’d told Youssef and Dr. Ahmed, even in such a small way. But they’d insisted. The Americans they were dealing with were getting too wary of all these Arab men buying the material for the
haddutas
. It would be better to have a girl—especially a non-Arab-looking girl—rent a storage locker where they could keep the materials overnight and have the compressors delivered without raising suspicions. Leaving everything in the unsecured garage when they weren’t there was out of the question; the neighbors were nosy enough as it was and Dr. Ahmed was getting worried that the junkies on the block would try stealing the chemicals.

“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.