The Terrorist (4 page)

“Stand clear of the windows, Miss Williams,” said the policeman gently.

“Why?”

“We don’t know the purpose of Billy’s death. Maybe it’s your family the bombers want.”

“My
family?
” Laura thought suddenly of her father, ending the income of a hundred workers. Maybe they couldn’t reach Daddy because Daddy wasn’t all right either!
Maybe there had been two bombs.

She tried to tell the policeman this, but she couldn’t stick the words in order. She couldn’t get the syllables lined up right. A queer jumble fell out of her mouth, as if she were attempting a foreign language.

Terrorism had worked.

She was terrified.

T
HOMAS WILLIAMS ENJOYED STANDING
in the queue. He liked the word “queue,” with its vowels lined up. It amused him that he, Thomas Williams, had learned to get in line like a good little boy and wait his turn, even if it meant standing outside in the rain.

He had all the family’s passports with him.

Originally they had had one passport for the four of them, but Billy objected to this, insisting he needed his own. Billy loved his passport: the small dark blue folder with the golden eagle and the photograph of himself: the proof for all the world that he, William Wardlaw Williams, was born in the USA.

Laura had reacted like a teenage girl, appalled by her picture, afraid the customs officials might actually think that hideous girl with the bad hair was her.

Thomas grinned, thinking of family. Nicole, Laura, and Billy were all he had to smile about these days.

Thomas Williams was desperate to take a break from England and the nightmare of his job.

Such a tiny country. Literally a drive-through. He needed to stretch. He was just too close to everything here; there was no escape. In this miniature country, everything was in your own backyard. His wife, Nicole, wanted to go back to the States for Christmas vacation (this was how the English referred to America—“the States”; whereas Americans never thought of their country as “the States,” which made it sound like fifty places, they thought of it as one—America), but Thomas knew if they went home now, when work was so awful, he could never force himself to return.

So he was at the Russian Embassy, getting visas for a Christmas trip to Russia. He had never cared about travel, but London changed this. Now he was enthralled by the world. He couldn’t wait to take Billy to St. Petersburg and Moscow. The thing with a son like Billy—although you could never take your eyes off the kid, because Billy was neither sensible nor careful—was that he was so rewarding. Billy was so much fun to take anywhere.

Christmas in Russia. Billy would love it.

Laura would want to know why they couldn’t stay in London like civilized people.

Nicole would giggle and clap. Thomas loved a woman who was forty and still said, “Ooooo, cool, neat, when do we leave?”

It had taken all afternoon to get the visas. Thomas was delighted with the surprise of it: handing out the passports at dinner and asking everybody what they found inside.

He could hardly wait till Billy figured out that his passport now contained the official stamp from the Russian Embassy. Billy would go wild.
Russia!
he’d yell.
Way to go, Dad!

So Thomas Williams was laughing to himself as he began the long, slow drive through London traffic. No matter how bad London traffic was, and no matter that he still felt the occasional jolt of worry driving on the left, it was never half so bad as Boston, where tourists were regularly found trembling by the side of the road, no longer caring where Paul Revere’s house was, wanting only to leave Boston behind forever, preferably with somebody else driving.

Behind him, a tiny police car signaled him to pull over. How do grown men fold up small enough to fit behind the wheel of that miniature car? Thomas wondered.

He was unable to think of a traffic rule he had broken. Running his mind over his driving, he rolled down his window. “Hi there,” he said to the policeman.

The young officer, who leaned down to the car window, was very grim. “Mr. Thomas Williams?”

How could he know my name? Thomas thought, surprised, and then, in the carefully controlled expression on that young face, he saw something. He felt the stab in his heart that all parents feel when something goes wrong fast. He couldn’t speak. He fumbled, his hand trying to speak for him, plucking at the officer’s jacket.
My children?

“My children?” he whispered.

The police wanted to question Chris and Georgie, who had been on the tube train with Billy.

But they couldn’t talk to Chris. His father was with the American Embassy. The moment Chris’s dad found out what had happened, he was at the school like a shot, collecting Chris and putting him on the next plane to his aunt in Denver.

Chris was airborne before Mr. Williams even knew that Billy was dead. Chris didn’t have time to pack anything but clothes. Not his skateboard, not his baseball mitt, not his personal stereo with which he loved to contravene the bye laws.

“You could have waited till we interviewed Chris,” said the police to Chris’s father.

Chris’s father shook his head. “He didn’t see a thing. He was out of the station by the time it happened. All that matters to me is Chris being safe. If somebody is after the kids at London International Academy, he’s not going to find my kid.”

Billy’s collections were extensive.

Flattened candy wrappers from new and different English candy bars.

Free Australian magazines.

Dozens of train and travel tickets jammed down into a big glass jar.

Beer coasters his father had saved from pubs.

Newspapers in foreign languages: Arabic and Finnish and German and Italian.

The police took the newspapers seriously: what had this little American boy been doing with Arab newspapers?

There were several piles of Irish newspapers, with heavy coverage of freedom fighters. Mr. Evans called them terrorists.

“We’re part Irish,” said Laura. “Billy felt he was collecting his history.”

“Tell me about that,” said Mr. Evans.

“It doesn’t mean anything. We just are.” Laura thought of herself as American, and had to dredge up the knowledge that way back there in her family were the original countries. She didn’t like Mr. Evans’s concern with the Irish newspapers. It was just a collection. Before she moved here, Laura would have said the English and Irish were cousins, but these cousins, it turned out, had fought on and off for generations in Northern Ireland. Just when you thought there would be peace, somebody shot somebody again, and there wasn’t.

“The escaped terrorists,” said Mr. Evans, “were Irish. But I have just learned that they have been picked up. Nowhere near London. It seems quite impossible they could have had anything to do with Billy. But I still wonder why he collected these newspapers.”

Laura shrugged. Some people were collectors and some people were not. She thought of the escaped terrorists.
Picked up.
How had that happened? How did you spot a terrorist and pick him up?

“Laura, I need you to tell me everything, from A to Zed.”

Zed.

Billy, of course, had adopted every possible British phrase. He, too, closed the alphabet with zed, not zee. He used the loo, not the bathroom. He would never have permitted a turnip to enter his mouth, but he always wanted his mother to buy some so he could claim to have eaten swedes for dinner. He wrote with a Biro instead of a Bic, and eagerly put plasters on his cuts instead of Band-Aids.

Once he heard a London mother refer to her little boy’s sneakers as “plimsolls.” He loved this word, and often used his British-est voice to say, “I’ll just plimsoll on down to the corner and buy myself some Polos.”

“You can’t plimsoll,” his mother said. “It’s not a verb.”

“It is now,” Billy said. “I’ve Americanized it.”

Laura stood in the stranger-jammed flat as if she were all alone. As if she had lost everything in life that mattered. Her brother, Billy, was never going to plimsoll anywhere again.

His wife had known about Billy for six hours before Thomas knew. Thomas could not imagine what those six hours had been for Nicole. Why didn’t I have the car phone with me? he thought. Why didn’t I call in?

He wanted to hold Nicole, and to be held, but she was asleep, having been given a tranquilizer from a doctor.

What doctor? thought Thomas.

The Williamses didn’t have doctors. Nobody in their family ever got sick. Billy was never sick. How could Billy be dead when he had never even had the flu?

Thomas wanted to hold Laura, but holding her was strange and terrible. She was his only living child. She was all the children he had now. There was no Billy to hold. Billy, who would still, on special and rare occasions, allow his father to cuddle him.

Thomas could think of nothing to say to Laura.
(It’s okay. Everything will be all right. We’ll fix it.)

No. It wasn’t okay.

It would not be all right.

He could not fix it.

He tried to say things to his daughter
(Laura, are you okay, honey? I’m sorry I wasn’t here. I love you, Laura),
but the only name he could manage was Billy’s.

And the police said, “We need to ask some questions, Mr. Williams.”

The questions were hard to hear, hard to decipher, as if they were really questions for somebody else, a test somebody else had studied for. “This morning,” he said thickly, “I finished shutting down the factory at Darlington.” Horrible. The city of Darlington desperately needed the jobs his company provided. But the company was losing too much money. Staying open was not possible.

“Did the workers get ugly?” asked the policeman.

Thomas didn’t want to talk about it. Of course it had been ugly. Losing your income was an ugly thing.

“How would they know I had any family,” he said wearily, “let alone decide to stalk my son and kill him? I cannot believe they would think of such a thing. Anyway, it’s too quick. They couldn’t even make the drive to London, let alone plan a bombing.” His head throbbed hideously. Surely this could not be his fault. It could not be related to his work. Please, God, don’t let my son be dead because of my actions.

He wanted Nicole to wake up.

Then he thought: what if she thinks this, too? What if my wife thinks our son is dead because I ended people’s jobs?

“Tell us about the other places you shut down,” said the police.

Thomas wanted to defend himself, and discuss the economy, and point out how his company had no choices, and how it wasn’t his choice, anyway, merely his assignment.

But perhaps he had no defense. “Well, there was Northern Ireland,” he said, and everybody looked up.

Northern Ireland. Where the harshest group of freedom fighters (their view) or murdering terrorists (the London view) was the IRA. A group not afraid to kill the unknown or the innocent. A group that dealt in bombs. A group whose expenses were often paid by Irish Americans—Boston Irish Americans. Both the escapees had been members of the IRA.

The Williamses were part Irish and came from Boston?

“Tell us,” said the police, “about the Irish.”

The phone rang constantly.

The police answered it.

Laura and Billy, who loved phone calls, would vault over furniture and throw stuff at each other to cut the other one’s speed, trying to be first to answer.

There was no need to rush now.

Laura’s friends called.

Con. Eddie. Tiffany. Mohammed. Bethany. Andrew.

Laura talked to Con, but it was too hard. She didn’t talk to any of the others. What was there to say?

She thought about them, though. Their lives had gone on. Today, they had had class. Taken notes. Changed in the locker room for gym. How could that be? How could Billy be dead and other people’s lives didn’t stop, too?

Her father went to lie down with Mom. He didn’t sleep; he just couldn’t be without her any longer. And Laura sat alone among the strangers, wondering how it had felt to Billy. Had he known what he held in his hand? How long had he known? A split second, or an eternity? Had it hurt? How long had it hurt?

Laura was wrong about school.

It was completely different that day.

By midmorning, most of the student body had been taken home.

Fathers and mothers rushed to L.I.A. from work, frantic with nerves, trying to decide how to react.

Terrorism did not seem to be the sort of thing to which you could overreact.

There was not one parent at L.I.A. for whom the risk was worth it. A dead kid? Never. Not mine, they thought.

For the Americans, if this was the beginning of violent anti-Americanism, then it was time to roll. Billy’s death was a lesson the parents would learn. Even if they loved London, and thought it was the best posting they’d ever had, they were considering arrangements to send kids to family in Missouri or Vermont.

Anti-Americanism.

Most people didn’t believe that could be the reason.

The English were irked by having so many Americans and so much American stuff cluttering up their country, but would they put a bomb in a little boy’s hand because they didn’t like having McDonald’s on the corner? Because they preferred old-fashioned British fish-and-chips there instead? No.

Of course, London was packed with people who were not English; angry separated people whose countries really did hate America. Whose countries considered America to be Satan. Would
they
put a bomb in a little boy’s hand?

Somebody had.

As for the L.I.A. parents who weren’t American, their fear went far deeper, and had far more history.

L.I.A. was a school filled with possible targets.

Kids whose fathers had supported the wrong dictator or the wrong general.

Kids whose fathers had left town with other people’s millions.

Kids whose parents had not moved their money in diamonds or in oil, but in heroin.

Kids whose fathers sold arms and weapons and information, and had enemies everywhere, and in everything.

But why Billy Williams?