Amsterdam 2012 (10 page)

We sat in the living room.
 
The agents asked for water, probably trying to get my mother to leave the room.
 
She stayed, handing them bottled water from Dad’s wet bar.
 

“You may have guessed this has to do with your friend Peter
Abulhassen
,” said one agent to me.

“Yeah,” I said, “I figured that much.”

“If you don’t mind, we’d like to ask a few questions about him and about your trip to Europe.”

“Okay, I guess.”

“How long have you known Peter?”

“Almost three years.
 
I met him my freshman year at Canterbury College.”

“Do you know any of his friends?”

“If you’ve raided his room at Canterbury and looked at his computer, I’m sure you know who his friends are.”
   

“We don’t know which of his friends you knew,” the taller agent said calmly.
 

It felt like a betrayal, but I couldn’t say I didn’t know his friends.
 
I gave them the names of Peter’s three closest friends.
 
Neither agent wrote them down, so they already knew them.
 
I suspected they were also being interrogated by the FBI.

“How long has Peter been a radical Muslim?” asked the short
agent.

I smiled and shook my head—the question was like out of some television cop show.
 
“Peter was not raised Muslim.
 
His parents are not religious.
 
I never saw Peter go to a mosque or pray.
 
We dated on Fridays, the Muslim holy day.
 
He drank.
 
He ate pork.
 
He made jokes about Muhammad.
 
Peter is not a Muslim.”

“He studied Islam.”

“Sure.
 
He wanted to figure out why Islam was taking hold of the world.
 
He was fascinated as to how ideas—religious ideas—affect politics.”

“Is he a Christian?”

“As I said, he is interested in intellectual history.
 
He considers all religions to be political mythology.”

“Political mythology?”

“Yeah.
 
Ideas used by men who want power to dominate everybody else.”
 

“I see.
 
He believed that?”

“Don’t you?”

“What religion are you, Miss
Aulis
?”

“I’m a pagan.
 
The Greco-Roman gods are so much sexier, don’t you think?
 
Venus, Mars, Apollo.”

 
“Is that the religion you were raised with?”
 
The agent smirked.

“My parents aren’t religious, although I thought I was saint material when I was twelve.”

“So you were raised a Catholic?”

“No.
 
I just told you I wasn’t raised in any faith.”

The telephone rang and my mother got up and went into the next room.
 
The two agents glanced at each other.
 
I knew I was in trouble.

“Did Peter ever talk about what he planned to do after college?”

“I think he said he wanted to work for the FBI.”

“This is not a joke, Miss
Aulis
.
 
We found a footprint that matches Peter’s shoe in Amsterdam at the scene of the
Jenever
Theater murders.
 
Did you know these people?”

My bravura left me.
 
If they had a shoe print, they probably had fibers and DNA.
 
I wondered if they had tortured information out of Peter.
 
“We had just met them.”

“Did Peter plan to meet them in Amsterdam?”

“No.
 
Like I said, we just stumbled into them.
 
Near
Vondelpark
.
 
It was completely spontaneous.”

“Why did the two of you go to Amsterdam?”

“It was my idea.
 
I wanted to see the tulips at the
Keukenhof
Gardens.”

The agents looked at one another.
 
“Did you know your new friends were members of a political group called the
White Rose
?” the thin one asked.

“You mean like the protest group in Nazi Germany?”
 
I recalled from history class the White Rose was a handful of students at the University of Munich who published a leaflet in 1942 decrying the evils of the Nazi regime and calling for a revolt.
 
They were nearly the only internal opposition to Hitler.
 
In February 1943 they were all tried for treason, convicted, and executed by guillotine.
 

“Yes.
 
This current White Rose group is against what they call Islamic fascism.”

“All they told us was they were in an acting group.
 
They didn’t go into it.”

“What did you talk about?”

“The usual.
 
Pop music.
 
Things we had to see in Amsterdam.”

“What things?”

“Tourist things.
 
The Rijksmuseum, the
Nieuwe
Kerk
, the Hermitage, the Red Light District.
 
Nothing political.
 
We had dinner,
then
we went to bed.”

“What happened the next morning?”

“We went inside the house for breakfast and found the bodies.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

“We didn’t want to be hauled off by the CIA and interrogated in Afghanistan.”
 
They didn’t return my smile, blinking blandly, waiting for me to get scared enough to tell the truth.
 
I was getting there.
 
“Look, we were in a foreign country with bad Muslim-Dutch relations.
 
Peter is half
Arab.
 
The murders didn’t have anything to do with us.
 
We were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
 
We didn’t see anything.
 
We didn’t hear anything.
 
There was nothing we could have told the police that would have helped them find the killers.
 
And—” I added, although it was just now occurring to me “—if we reported it to the police, we thought the killers might come after us.”

“Do you remember if Peter made any calls when you when you arrived in Europe?”

“No.”

“E-mails?”

“Not when we arrived.”

“Later?”

I sat on my hands, furious, trying hard not to scream.
 
“We went to an Internet café in London to check our e-mails.
 
I don’t know who he e-mailed.”

“What Internet café?

“I don’t know,” I said testily.
 
“It was in Piccadilly Circus.”

“Was Peter in bed with you all night on the night of the murders?”

“Yes, of course.
 
Look, he was as surprised as I was.
 
He didn’t have anything to do with the murders.
 
Didn’t they already arrest the cell that did it?
 
From Berlin or something?
 
Why are you trying to involve Peter?”

The agents finally got up and went to the door.
 
“We may have more questions for you, Miss
Aulis
, at a later time.”

“When are you going to let Peter go?”

“That’s not up to us.
 
That’s up to the U.S. military.
 
Take care, Miss
Aulis
.
 
You might want to choose your friends more carefully.”

#

My father scolded me that evening when he heard about the FBI visit.
 
“Jesus, Ann, what were you thinking?
 
Agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force?
 
You should have called me immediately.
 
Don’t ever talk to anyone like that without calling me first.”

I hadn’t called him because I still hadn’t told him about what went down in Amsterdam.
 
I don’t know why I didn’t tell him.
 
I used to tell him everything.
 
I guess I didn’t want to be treated like a child, scolded for how badly I had handled things.
 
Maybe I didn’t want to disappoint him.
 
But not telling him made me feel dishonest and guilty—it was only a matter of time before he found out about it anyhow.

I was just about to confess, when he changed the subject and told me what Baron Fairchild had reported that afternoon.
 

The military claimed that Peter was involved in the preparation for acts of international terrorism, that he had links to Al Qaeda, that he had intelligence in regard to future terrorist attacks, and that he was a “continuing threat” to American security.
 
Yet they refused to press charges.
 
Peter’s lawyers filed protest in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals with no success.
 
Even after years of various court challenges, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allowed the government to designate terror suspects as “enemy combatants” without charges and with disregard to habeas corpus, was still in full effect.
 
Not good news for Peter.
 
He could remain in custody indefinitely, without any further legal recourse.

“In order to detain him, don’t they have to have some proof?” I asked my father.

“Apparently not if he’s held as an enemy combatant.
 
But don’t worry, honey.
 
We have a good team working on it.
 
Peter is in good hands.”

The next day, less than three weeks after his arrest, the military, without informing his lawyers, transferred Peter to a naval base in Cuba.

Guantánamo
Bay prison.

Yes, it still existed.

Chapter Five

That night I lay sleepless in bed trying to imagine what it must be like.
 
Guantánamo
Bay Prison.
 
Was Peter handcuffed, blindfolded,
masked
?
 
Clamped into leg irons on a trolley to be wheeled into an interrogation hut?
 
I imagined his cell, a cubical five feet wide and ten feet long.
 
I wondered what he did with the
Quran
and the prayer mat each prisoner was supposedly given.
 
Two buckets—one for defecation, one for washing.
 
I imagined him lying on a cot, a thin blanket over him, staring up at the corrugated steel ceiling.
 
I imagined his despair and his fury.
 
Did he think he would be released soon, or that he was there for the rest of his life?
 

Did he think of me?

I remembered looking up at the ceiling above where Anne Frank’s makeshift bed had been, and imagined her spending hours there forced to be quiet, gazing at the rough boards, her body itching to run and play, letting her mind run and play instead.
 
She must’ve known every crack, every cobweb,
every
knot.
 
She probably imagined faces and pictures in the wood grain as if clouds in the sky.
 
She probably made up stories about the pictures.
 
She probably talked to the faces, confiding her dreams.
 
Her imagination kept her sane.

I imagined the cold anxiety I now felt in my stomach must be like what she felt—the threat of violence, hunger sharpening her senses, claustrophobia and inactivity deepening her fear.
 
The longing I felt must be like hers—the desire to embrace my lover, to walk hand-in-hand under the warm sun.
 
The bitter taste of guilt in my mouth must be like hers—alive and safe while her friends were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.
 

Like Anne, I was powerless to help.

I thought maybe if I lay still and looked up at the ceiling, as I imagined Peter must be doing in his cell, I could communicate with him in some way, that he would know I lay as he lay, feeling as trapped and frightened as he.
 
Perhaps he would sense how much I loved him and be comforted.

I tried to recall how he looked, the exact color of his skin, the width of his hips, his lips, his eyes, the hair that curled on the back of his neck.
 
I saw him with different expressions, flickering in the dark like faces around a campfire.
 
I tried to recall the sound of his voice, his laughter.
 
But each day it became harder, and I wondered if it was becoming harder for him to remember the world outside of prison.