Man of the Hour (45 page)

Besides
, said self-preservation,
other people’s lives are at stake here.
This wasn’t just selfish thinking.
Yeah, sure
, said self-disgust.
And here’s a little stomach acid for your trouble.

David grimaced. “So do you want me to pass on the information to my lawyers and see what they can work out?”

“I don’t know, maybe. I’m not sure.” Elizabeth raised her chin. “Yes. I guess that’s what I need to do.”

Another train pulled in.
A hero one day a week and a bum the other six
, said David’s self-disgust. You never were worth anything anyway.
Kiss my ass
, said self-preservation.
I’m going to Disneyland.

58

EVER SINCE THE DECISION
had been made about the suicide bombing, Youssef and Dr. Ahmed had put Nasser under almost constant watch. They mixed chemicals for both dynamite and the fuel bombs with him at the garage, with nitric acid scorching his hands and burning his clothes as he tried to funnel it into little cardboard boxes. They took him to various mosques and prayed with him five times a day, making sure he did at least three full
rakas
on each occasion. They ate all his meals with him, they went with him to move the car, slept in the same room with him and, most important, they forbade him to have any further contact with his family.

Of course, this was to be expected. He’d always heard that the leaders cut the suicide bombers off from their friends and family in the days just before they were “activated.” This was as it should be, he’d thought. Isolation was the best way to maintain the purity of purpose, especially so close to the end, when one’s faith could wobble. But now he felt overwhelmed by terrifying loneliness and uncertainty. He longed to reach out to someone, anyone. About once every two minutes, he found himself wavering in his decision. It complicated everything. At meals, he couldn’t choose between meat and vegetables; when walking into rooms, he couldn’t make up his mind whether to go left or right.

Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. He waited until Dr. Ahmed collapsed from exhaustion and fell asleep early on Tuesday night and then sneaked out of their little behind-the-cab-stand hovel, seeking solace.

The time had come to see his old cell mate Professor Bin-Khaled. He’d carefully checked the City University class schedules again, and at ten o’clock, just as a gray drizzle began to fall on the city, he pulled up outside the building on West 42nd Street again and waited in his Lincoln Town Car. After a few minutes, the professor came out, talking to several students. Again, it struck Nasser how much Ibrahim had aged since the last time they’d talked.

“
Asalam allakem,
brother,” Nasser called out the window. “You need a ride?”

Ibrahim approached cautiously, but his face broke into a hard-earned smile as he recognized Nasser. “Many years, little brother.” He climbed into the car and they briefly embraced. “Many years.”

The professor smelled of old tobacco and Turkish coffee. Nothing of the old prison stink remained with him. It was funny. When they shared a cell, they’d only been allowed one shower a week, and for years after his release, Nasser made a point of bathing twice a day. He sometimes thought he saw people wrinkling their noses as if they could still smell the jail on him.

“So can I take you somewhere?”

The professor used the moment to look at Nasser. His deep brown eyes refracted the light, as if he were measuring some distance between them. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, that would be good. I am staying with a professor from Columbia.”

He gave Nasser an address on the Upper West Side.

“Do you like to sit in the back, like a real passenger?” Nasser turned to make sure he hadn’t left any newspapers or rags lying in the backseat.

“No, my friend. I am fine being in front with you.”

Nasser studied the side of the older man’s face as he got into the car. Seven years had brought new lines and crags and for a moment, Nasser felt a surge of gladness that he would never have a son of his own to lose, and therefore would never know such deep sorrow.

“So, my little brother,” said the professor as they started up Sixth Avenue. “You have been in the city all this time, and you’ve never come to see me. Why is this?”

“I’m sorry, sheik. I’ve been busy, very, very busy.”

“Sheik?” The professor looked bemused as they approached the diamond district. “I am not a sheik. I’m just a teacher. What have you been up to, my friend?”

“I am studying more the religion these days. I’m trying to understand God.”

“Oh yes?” The professor looked through the briefcase on his lap, making sure he had all the papers he needed. “This is good, to study the Koran. This can be a great comfort in life. And what else have you been doing?”

“Politics.” This was the euphemism Nasser had settled on when he tried to imagine this conversation several hours before. “I’ve been getting more involved in the politics.”

“Oh, yes, the politics.” The professor sighed, as they passed Radio City Music Hall. “I am afraid I don’t have much time for politics anymore.”

“Yes, there have been so many lies and disappointments.” Nasser gripped the wheel, noticing once again it seemed loose since his conversation with his sister the other night. “Sometimes I think maybe the time for talking with the Jews is over. There is no point to this anymore. Now is the time for action.”

“Actually, I don’t have time for any of the politicians anymore.” The professor wearily pulled on his seat belt and buckled it. “Not the Jews or the Arabs. Not since Abu died.”

“Yes, I was sad to hear about this.” The hum and pitch of traffic noise rose in Nasser’s ears as he made a left on Central Park South. “I should have written to you.”

Abu was the professor’s firstborn son. Nasser remembered him coming to visit at the jail once or twice. A big-eyed boy with a haystack of black hair and an infectious laugh. Even the Israeli guards were nice to him, letting him wear their hats and not getting too upset when he asked to hold their guns. The circumstances of his death were still vague to Nasser. There’d been a stone-throwing incident between some local children and the Jewish settlers in Hebron, and then a confrontation in a schoolyard, and in the gunfire that followed, Abu was killed protecting a friend. He was sixteen years old. The age Nasser was when he first met the professor in prison.

“They should all die, the ones that did this,” said Nasser, stopping at a red light near Columbus Circle. “When I think about the way these things happen, I think a bomb should come and blow all of them up. And there should be no remorse about this.”

The professor grimaced. “I don’t think this is the answer, the violence,” he said quietly.

“But how can you say this?” Nasser was indignant “After they put you in prison and killed your son? How can you not want them all dead?”

The professor raised a wry eyebrow. “Nasser, did I ever tell you the story of how they first tortured me?”

“No. I’m not sure. I don’t know.”

After all these years, the torture stories had begun to flow together and meld in his mind, mixed in with lies and exaggerations from the younger prisoners.

“Well,” said the professor. “You know they jailed me for this ridiculous reason, for ‘resisting the occupation’ and suspicion of being a terrorist. There was nothing to it, but anyway, they were trying to get me to confess before I went to trial. So every day for a month, they would take me to see this same man, Avi, to answer the same questions over and over in his office, until one day, he said, ‘I’m sorry, you’re not giving us what we want. And now we’re going to have to get physical with you.’ So they handcuffed me behind my back, laid me down on the floor face-up, put a chair between my legs, and then this man, this Avi, reached down and squeezed my balls as hard as he could.”

“Oh.” Nasser stepped too hard on the gas and the car shot out into the busy intersection, near that monstrous Trump hotel, a black-and-gold whore of a building. He had to swerve to avoid getting hit by a truck. “This must have been agony.”

“It was,” said the professor. “It was terrible. The most pain I’ve ever felt in my life, physically. And there was only one way I could get through it.”

“You became numb,” said Nasser, remembering the stinking bag over his face.

“No,” said the professor. “While he was squeezing me, I started telling myself,
He is getting weaker and I am getting stronger.
And then I looked up and I said to him, ‘Didn’t you tell me you got a degree in developmental psychiatry in the United States?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ So I said, ‘And now you are squeezing my balls?’”

“So what happened?”

“He let go and never tortured me again.” The professor allowed himself just a brief chuckle.

Nasser looked out over the dashboard, and the patterns of traffic didn’t make sense to him for a few seconds. They were just red lights flashing and blinking in the night.

“I don’t understand,” he said, heading up Broadway. “How can you not want to hurt such people the way they’ve hurt you?”

The professor took some cigarette rolling papers and a tobacco pouch out of his briefcase. “Nasser, I don’t think I ever mentioned it to you, but before I went to prison I was in favor of the peace process.”

“No, you never said this.”

“Well, probably it never seemed appropriate, after what happened with Hamid and all of us getting thrown in solitary confinement and kept away from our families. I mean, to be angry about such things is only human. I don’t claim the Israelis are any friends to me. But to give in to the violence?” He raised his hands, as if considering the idea, and then dropped them. “This doesn’t do anything. This doesn’t help anyone, except the people who make the violence and can’t imagine any other life for themselves. Violence can’t make a state by itself. Violence can only make more violence. It’s like a law of physics.”

“So you are still for making peace?” Nasser looked over at the sideview mirror, trying to conceal his disgust. “After what they’ve done to you? After they killed your son?”

The car hit a pothole and was jolted, but the professor remained steady and focused on the task of laying tobacco onto the flattened rolling paper on the dashboard.

“I have to be bigger than that,” he said. “The Jews have suffered too, at least as much. They lost six million. And I still have five more children. How does it help them to make a war so they can be killed? I don’t want them to live like slaves, it’s true. But every day when I go home in Hebron, I drive past the schoolyard where Abu was killed, and every night I look out my window and I see where the settlers live. I have to find a way to live like this. I cannot go around poisoned by hate forever. I have lost too much already. Life will never have the same taste again, the same joy. You understand? I cannot stand to lose any more.”

For the next few minutes, Nasser was silent. He’d hoped that seeing the professor tonight would strengthen his resolve and give him a sense of clarity about his mission. He’d wanted to fuel himself with the older man’s righteous anger, remember the dead, and rededicate himself to the cause. But instead he just felt more confused than ever.

They stopped in front of a sand-colored prewar apartment building on West 106th Street. A stiff wind made a play of shivering tree shadows and streetlights across Nasser’s hood. The professor offered to roll him a cigarette, but he turned it down.

“You are good, my friend?”

“I am good.” Nasser rested his chin on top of the wheel.

“I’m glad you came to see me tonight.” The professor touched his shoulder. “It makes me think of the old days. When my son was still alive. I wonder if he would have turned out like you.”

Nasser started to reply, wanting to say it was a tragedy, everything was a tragedy, but his throat was too parched and the words wouldn’t come out.

In the meantime, the professor lowered his window and lit the cigarette he’d rolled for himself. “You know, it’s a funny thing,” he said wistfully. “I used to have a little private moment for myself, before I went to sleep most nights. A little daydream of something I hoped for. It would give me a little thrill of delight, just to think about it. A house I’d like to build for my mother. A college I’d want my son to go to. A rich and decent husband for my daughters. But then after Abu died, the dreams stopped. And I keep waiting for them to come back. Every night, I ask myself, ‘What will I dream about tonight?’ Sometimes I wonder if I can still dream.”

“What’s the answer?” Nasser asked.

“I don’t know.” The older man blew a long white line of smoke into the air and then watched it curl and dissipate as he opened the passenger-side door. “So, do you still dream, Nasser?”

59

“LET’S SET SOME
ground rules here,” said Jim Lefferts, the FBI’s assistant director for the New York office. “Immunity is not on the table.”

“Then we’re not
at
the table.” Ralph Marcovicci tapped David on the shoulder, rose slowly to his full six feet and three hundred pounds and began to amble toward the door of the conference room. “Come on, you guys, let’s go get some whitefish at Greengrass.”

His co-counsel, Judah Rosenbloom, hastily put his papers back into his battered overstuffed briefcase and scrambled after Ralph. David just sat there, stunned that his chance for redemption could be slipping away so easily.

“Really, boys, let’s not go getting our panties in a twist.” Lefferts, an ex-football player with a desk covered with Marine Corps mementos, smiled tolerantly. “We both have interests to protect here. Nobody wants any more shit splattered on their shoes.”

David looked up and smiled encouragingly at his lawyers, like an overanxious parent trying to get the kids to play nice in the sandbox. But Ralph remained by the door and Judah stood stiffly with his jaw grinding and his ponytail swaying.

“As far as I can tell, Agent Lefferts, our client is the only one whose shoes have been splattered,” Judah said with well-practiced indignation. “But now that David’s attempting to bring forward information that could lead to a successful conclusion to this investigation, you’re trying to splatter him some more. I think it’s just outrageous!”