Man of the Hour (42 page)

He sat back and took a deep breath, not at all sure he’d made his point. Lindsay Paul wasn’t offering any acknowledgment. He was too busy grinning at the camera as his director stepped in front of Ralph and made the cut sign.

53

FOR THE LAST
twenty-four hours, Nasser had been on a tear: getting his sister to rent the storage locker on the West Side, going back to the garage in Sunset Park to mix chemicals in the middle of the night, returning to his job at six in the morning to work a double shift, and then coming back to the little apartment behind the cab stand to get some rest.

Youssef and Dr. Ahmed were waiting for him when he walked in, exhausted, his vision blurring.

“What’s the matter?” said Youssef. “My wife gave me a message that you needed to speak to me.”

“Yes, sheik, I called.” Nasser flopped down on the moth-eaten mattress he’d laid out on the lumpy floor next to the kitchen.

God, how he hated living in this wretched little space with the doctor. The narrow thin-walled rooms, the blue paint peeling, the mice scurrying in the oven, the constant noise outside, the tobacco in the air, and the salsa pounding from upstairs. It was not much better than living in Deheisha. Why didn’t more Americans revolt?

“A police officer came to see me the other day,” he told the two older men. “And then he questioned my sister about what she was doing the day of the
hadduta
under the school bus.”

The doctor hissed and began pulling on his beard again.
“Ya habela!”
he said loudly. “Why didn’t you tell us this before?!
Yin an a bouk!
Do you want us all to go to jail?”

“No, sheik.” Nasser tried to hold his hand up, but he was too tired. “I wanted to tell you before, but I couldn’t reach you. So instead I just kept working. I felt time was running short.”

Youssef leaned against the oven, trying to remain calm and magisterial. “So what did you tell him? What did your sister tell him?”

“We didn’t tell him nothing.” Nasser began to untie his boots and then gave up. “She said she was with me and I said I was with her. So there’s no problem. But I thought you should know.”

Youssef and the doctor glared at each other in silence. From behind the front wall, Nasser could hear the taxi dispatcher taking calls and sending out transmissions. Circuits of the city connecting and firing.

“I think we have to make a change in our plan,” Dr. Ahmed said quickly and quietly, starting to limp in a circle around the mattress.

Nasser followed him with his eyes, noticing the doctor had begun to do things not just twice as fast, but three times as fast as necessary, as if he was completely out of patience with the world.

“This is something I’ve been thinking all along,” the doctor said, cracking his knuckles and rubbing his nose with his handkerchief. “Because what this is about is
jihad, jiHAD, JIHAD, JIHAD!
Okay?!”

His voice reached a crescendo and then he abruptly stopped in front of Nasser, staring down through him with burning eyes.

“Okay,” said Nasser, vaguely aware he was about to be taken on some kind of journey.

“It’s not enough to say you are for
jihad
in your heart.” The doctor began circling him again, weaving the words together with his hands. “
Jihad
is something that must be implemented. You must take a step for
jihad
, for the love of Allah, blessed be his name. He doesn’t care about your prayers. He doesn’t care about the
haj
. These are the lowest levels of faith. Allah respects actions. You have to take risks for God, to show that you truly believe.”

“Allahu akbar!”
Youssef sagged against the stove and slipped a nitroglycerin pill under his tongue. He’d been looking sluggish and unhealthy since their last meeting with the imam, Nasser noticed, with dark circles under his eyes.

But Dr. Ahmed was just getting warmed up. “Should I tell you when I felt closest to God?” He stopped again and bent down in front of Nasser, pointing in his face. “It was when I was in the Holy War in Afghanistan, riding on the back of a donkey with my leg half blown off by a land mine. Yes!” He rolled up his pant leg, showing Nasser a hideous red scar from his ankle to his knee. “Every time we hit a ditch and the pain was like teeth sinking into my heart, I thanked Allah the giver and taker of life for sparing me.”

“Insh’allah.”
Youssef touched his own heart scar.

Dr. Ahmed leaned closer to Nasser. “The Holy Book teaches us to doubt the existence of miracles. You know this, right?”

“Of course,” said Nasser, knowing he was being maneuvered but powerless to stop it.

“We learn that God’s will is not made manifest by magic tricks like turning water into wine, but by the sun and the moon and the cows in the fields and the birds singing in the trees.” The doctor took him by the shoulders, only looking past him for a moment. “The child laughing in the nursery. These are the signs of Allah’s grace.”

“Allahu akbar,”
Youssef called out, but his voice sounded faint, as if he were in another country.

It was all the doctor now. On one knee in front of Nasser, no longer looking past him or through him but staring deeply into his eyes, reaching into his skull with carefully chosen words. “But death is a sign of God’s power, also,” he said. “I learned this in the war. All the things I studied at the University of Cairo, my doctorate in psychology, all the protests I made against the shah in Tehran, they were as nothing compared with the first time I saw a man killed. I stood over him and I shot him through the heart and I watched his life go away. He was a Russian soldier, you know. And I spoke with him. I asked him how many children he had and then I watched him go from being a living thing to a nonliving thing. And you know what? As the life left his body and he became gray, I truly felt the power of God. Because only God could take so much away. This was a sign of His grace as much as the birds, or the cows, or the babies. If it was not so, He wouldn’t allow it. Do you understand this?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

Nasser found himself swaying back and forth on the mattress, shaking, remembering his mother with her hands folded. He didn’t know if it was the fatigue or the tension of the last few days, but he felt like he was being hollowed out and filled up by the doctor’s words.

“This is why we make the change in our plans.” The doctor stood up slowly and steadied himself with a broken metal chair. “The targets will stay the same. You’ll still go back to your school with the
hadduta
. But you’ll use dynamite instead of the fuel bombs we’re going to use for the other larger
haddutas
. And there won’t be any timer.”

“I don’t understand.”

All at once, the room went quiet, the taxi dispatcher ceased his transmissions, the air around them became heavy. Youssef coughed into his fist and Dr. Ahmed looked away. This was the last stop on the journey. In his heart, Nasser had always known this time would come.

“We’re going to have a martyr, my friend,” said the doctor. He touched his beard, eyes, nose, and ears. “You’re the one.”

Youssef came over and knelt beside Nasser, putting a hand on his back and whispering in his ear. “This is a great opportunity, my friend. You will be rewarded in heaven with seventy virgin brides and you will be a hero back home. They will hold a great funeral for you in your village with thousands of people coming and they’ll distribute pictures of you to the children, so they’ll always know of your heroism.”

“Allahu akbar!”
the doctor said, leaning in so close he was practically nose-to-nose with Nasser. “And everyone will chant in your memory: ‘
With our blood! With our souls! We will redeem you!’
You will be
shaheen.
Because this is what will frighten the infidels the most. Even more than a bridge or a tunnel blowing up. The idea that there are suicide bombers in this country. Men who are willing to blow themselves up and die and take hundreds of others with them. This they cannot stop, no matter how hard they try. It will steal their peace of mind.”

They were on either side of him, closing in. The doctor leaning down and Youssef still kneeling, still whispering insistently into his ear. “You will make your family proud. In heaven, your mother will smile on you forever.”

The back of Nasser’s throat cracked and he felt himself slump forward, worn down and overpowered by what they’d evoked. Yes, Mother would be proud. Always, she was saying, a man must be ready to submit to God’s will, to die for what he believes, or else he is nothing.
The life of this world is but a sport and a pastime.
All earthly riches are transitory. Hadn’t he seen her crying and tearing at her clothes at the funerals of martyrs? Hadn’t she chosen to end her own life? Hadn’t his friend Hamid made just as great a sacrifice at Ashkelon prison?

“This is a special duty you’ve been chosen for,” Youssef was saying. “No one else has ever done this here. You’ll be the first. I truly envy you …”

Yes, Nasser realized, he’d been set up for this all along. Youssef and the doctor knew exactly what to say to him, what pictures to put in his mind. But at the same time, Nasser understood it was useless to resist. This was his destiny, this was what he was made for. Everything had converged and forced him toward this point: the rusty key, the bag over his face, his mother, his father, the fact that never in his life had he experienced a single moment’s pleasure without the shadow of misery falling over it.

One hour on the battlefield is worth a hundred years of prayer.

“You’re not afraid, are you?” asked the doctor.

“No, of course not.”

But in fact, he was afraid. A part of him didn’t want this at all. He couldn’t truly imagine the seventy virgin brides or the rivers running under the Garden. It didn’t seem real. The city seemed real. The women, the cars, the red numbers, the bright lights and easy sentimentality, the throbbing music and endless grid of the streets.

Perhaps this was all a final test to see if he was worthy, to see if he could be a true hero, a
shaheen
, a martyr for God. Maybe the fact that he didn’t want to die was what made this a true sacrifice.
Insh’allah.
These mysteries were beyond him and he could only pretend to understand. All he could do was act.

“So,” he said, slowly rising and clutching his mother’s key, still hanging from the chain around his neck. “What do I do now?”

54

DAVID TOOK THE NEXT
morning off from school for the lie detector test and then went immediately to his lawyers’ office on lower Broadway to discuss the results. When he came out at eleven o’clock, Judy Mandel was waiting for him on the sidewalk, notebook in hand, her mouth slightly open.

“Oh, um, hi, David.” Her voice was young and tentative, as if she might be selling church raffle tickets. “Remember me?”

His mind split off in two different directions. Mandel, as a name, was eye poison. Mandel was the byline that had unraveled his life, equaling accusations of bomb planting, murder, wife-beating, and child abuse. But here once again he was faced with this winsome black-haired girl in brown lipstick. She looked like a student.

“You know, it’s a funny thing,” he said with a weary sigh. “Every time I see you I forget what you look like right afterwards. Why is that, I wonder?”

“I don’t know.” Her lower lip came up as if he’d hurt her feelings. “Maybe you’re distracted.”

“You put all those things Renee told you in the newspaper.”

“Well, then you know I didn’t make any of it up myself.”

His chest heaved with mighty impatience. “My wife is sick. Anybody who talks to her for five minutes could figure that out.” He stood before her, looking down, with his chin as hard as a fist. “You took advantage of her. So I don’t think I have anything else to say to you. Go ruin somebody else’s life.”

He started to turn away, trying to remember where the nearest stop for the D train was.

“But I had one more question!” From the corner of his eye, he saw her actually raise her hand, as if they were in a classroom.

“What?”

Against his better judgment, he came back to her.

“I heard you failed your polygraph this morning.”

He tried not to flinch. The official results were “inconclusive.”
Squeeze your asshole
, Ralph Marcovicci kept telling him on the way in.
The machine measures stress, so if you squeeze your asshole on every question, it’ll look like you’re being consistent.
“I can’t get my arms around you, Ralph,” David had said. That was probably the last joke he’d be making for a while.

“I’m not going to have any comment on that,” David told Judy Mandel.

How had she found out about it so quickly? Ralph and Judah had warned him that the feds would be leaking stories like crazy, trying to pressure him into making a deal, but this was ridiculous. The electrodes came off his fingers less than two hours ago. It was probably the examiner himself, a tubby, ruined-looking ex-cop called Cardio, who’d leaked the results.

“So there’s a rumor the FBI is finally going to arrest you in the next day or two,” she said.

He spread out his arms. “Then let them come and get me. I’m not going anywhere.”

But inside, panic was eating him up like a raging infection. He knew he couldn’t let this girl see it, though. He had to
take it
.

He hitched up his belt and tried to keep up the brave face. “So,” he said, “I guess I’m supposed to fall on my knees and admit everything to you. Is that it?”

“No.” She exhaled, twitched her shoulders a little. “I just want to get it right.”

“Whatever that means.”

People kept walking by, each locked in their own self-justifying interior monologues.

“Let me ask you something,” David said. “Doesn’t it bother you that everything you’ve done is completely speculative?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve made this cottage industry of writing about me and you don’t even know me. What if you’re wrong? I mean, I try to teach my students the value of critical thinking when they write their papers. I tell them: flip it around, consider the alternative, try it the other way. So did that ever occur to you? Have you considered the alternative?
What if he didn’t do it?
Your whole world would collapse, wouldn’t it?”