Amsterdam 2012 (15 page)

I pressed my fingers over my eyelids, trying to block out the images, to turn off the truth.
 
Stop!
 
I didn’t want to know.

Peter studied terrorism in college—was it possible he had more than an academic interest?
 
Was the FBI right in questioning him?
 
Did he know where to get help?

Thoughts of Amsterdam flooded my brain, questions and doubts.
 
Why had Peter been so ambivalent about having dinner with
Marjon
?
 
Had he known something about the White Rose group beforehand?
 
Did he know she was a member?
 
Who were those men he was looking at in the art gallery?
 
Why was he so composed when we discovered the murders?
 
As if he half expected it.
 
Who had he e-mailed so angrily when he was in London?
 
Were his Muslim friends at Canterbury College somehow involved?

In truth it
was
strange
Marjon
and Nicholas had been so friendly.
 
Yet it was Peter who had insisted on stopping at the herring cart when there were a million other places to get food.
 
It was Peter who chose to walk south toward
Vondelpark
and who glanced repeatedly at his wristwatch, which was not typical of him.
 
Had he planned to meet
Marjon
?
 

I had known Peter for three years, yet I realized I didn’t really know him.
 
He had always seemed so much older than the rest of us students.
 
I often felt as if he were marking time with us, with me, like a young Henry IV wiling away his days with strumpets and beer, waiting to be called to serve.
 
I never asked him a lot of questions about his past or his ambitions.
 
I wanted him to be mysterious and unknowable.
   

Oddly the thought that Peter might possibly have been part of a terrorist cell, or had now fled to one as his only recourse, made me
want
him more.
 
An adolescent love for the renegade outlaw.
 
I admired his idealism, his willingness to fight for a cause, his warrior spirit.
 
I knew I could never be like that.
 
I was lazy and self-indulgent, a compromiser, a conciliator.
 
It was foreign to me, erotic.
  

I suddenly understood why jihad was burning up the map, why youth from Morocco to Iraq to Bangladesh to the Bronx joined terrorist cells.

Jihad was sexy.

Chapter Seven

I didn’t think Peter would run home, but he’d at least call his mother.
 
Wouldn’t he?
 
I had to know.

I liked Gloria.
 
Free-spirited and warm, she enjoyed chaos and spontaneity, something that often irked Peter’s sense of propriety.
 
I loved her round figure and hand-dyed tent dresses and bangles—her laughter.
 
She was easy to talk to.
 

I hadn’t called her since I had gotten back from Amsterdam.
 
Second to being spoiled, I suppose my next worst character trait is cowardice.
 
I was afraid she would turn into a quivering simpering puddle, and I would lose the carefree image of her I found preferable to my own parents.
 
I didn’t want to share my grief.
 
I didn’t want to expose how much I loved Peter.
 
All of these reasons were completely selfish.
 
I should have called her immediately.

Better late than never.
 
I knew she spent her mornings in her studio painting and didn’t like to be interrupted.
 
Late afternoon, I picked up the phone.

“Hello, sweetheart.
 
I haven’t heard from you since Christmas,” she said cheerfully.
 
“I was just thinking about you.
 
I was reading about this wonderful young set designer in
The New Yorker
—she did the sets for the new Peter
Gynt
production—just marvelous with papier-mâché puppets and masks.
 
It made me think of something you might do.
 
So colorful and original.
 
So how are you, dear?”

I had no idea how I could remind her of anyone creative or original—I didn’t have an artistic bone in my body—but I took her compliment, as with all of her compliments, as an expression of her irrepressible exuberance.
 
I wasn’t nearly so gracious.
 
“Have you heard from Peter?”

“No,” she said, her voice dropping, turning gravely.
 
“The FBI calls me and asks the same thing.
 
I don’t know why they bother.
 
They would know as soon as I did.”

“You mean they tap your phone?”

“Good afternoon, boys,” she sang into the phone.
 
“Still haven’t heard from Peter.”
 
She changed pitch again.
 
“A couple months ago, one of the nice ones asked if I had any new variations on cherry pie for July Fourth—I had given a friend a new recipe over the phone a few hours before.
 
Nice of him to let me know they listen in, don’t you think?
 
I get a weird echo sometimes.”

“Aren’t you worried about Peter?”

“Now he’s out of
Guantánamo
, I don’t worry.
 
He’ll be fine.
 
We raised him to be independent.”

“You have no idea where he is?”

“No.
 
I’m sure he won’t tell us either.”

I didn’t know if Gloria was saying this for me or for the FBI.
 
“Would he go to a relative?
 
A cousin or someone?”

“No.
 
He won’t involve the family.
 
He wouldn’t want to endanger us in any way.
 
He’s like that.
 
He won’t ask for help until he no longer needs it.”

I wondered how much was an act or if she really did feel comfortable giving her son so much freedom.
 
My mother became mildly hysterical if I was out of reach for a half day.
 
Gloria’s words had a flat brittleness—I could tell how much she hurt.
 
I felt like a jerk for not calling her earlier.
 
She was so brave.
 
“Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked.

“I don’t want you to worry, honey.
 
Peter is resourceful and smart.
 
You’ll have to trust he’ll be fine.”
  

I started to choke up.
 
I told her to take care and that I’d call again soon.

#

I got an e-mail response to a message I sent to Greg Sewell, Peter’s roommate at Canterbury College.
 
He gave me a telephone number and told me to call from a pay phone.
 
He would call me back ten minutes later from another pay phone.

It seemed like a lot of hocus-pocus.
 
I used a phone at the Santa Monica Library.
 
When he called back, he said he would rather talk in person.
 
Could I come up to San Francisco?
 
I said sure.

I wasn’t crazy about spending a few hundred dollars on gas, but the fact Greg was unwilling to talk over the phone made me think the trip might be worthwhile.
 
Greg was spending the summer working in San Francisco as a law clerk even though he wasn’t in law school yet.
 
The men in his family had been lawyers for four generations and he had connections.
 
At twenty-one, he could easily have passed the California Bar.

We agreed to meet at a coffee shop in North Beach.
 
I told my mother I was going to visit a friend in Santa Barbara and would spend the night.
 
I’m not sure why I lied—it felt safer somehow.

I started out early thinking I needed to beat the rush hour, but the traffic was light, even as I neared San Jose.
 
The gas stations I passed advertised regular for $6.67 per gallon.
 
I had never known what a pleasure it could be to drive in California.
 
The sun was warm, the air clear,
the
hills violet and crisp in the distance.
 
No pollution.
 

I arrived in North Beach before noon.
 
I even found parking.

“Sorry to make you do the drive,” Greg said, as I took a seat in the cafe.
 

“That’s okay.
 
I understand.”

“I don’t think you do, Ann,” he said, jabbing a straw into his
Frappuccino
.
 
Greg was a very serious guy who tended to gather spittle at the corners of his mouth.
 
He looked especially grim.
 
“You wouldn’t believe what’s gone down at Canterbury.
 
The FBI took Peter’s computer, my computer, and the computers of a half dozen of our friends.
 
They took all of his papers and research.
 
There was this huge fight with the library—the FBI wanted to know what books he’d taken out.
 
The college president got involved and the library finally gave in.
 
They talked to all of his teachers.
 
They turned the Islamic Studies Program inside out.”

“His mother says her phone is tapped.”

“I’m not surprised.
 
They’ve gone after some of his Muslim friends.
 
They revoked their student visas and got them deported.”

“He’s out of
Guantánamo
.
 
He disappeared when he got to Washington.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“Has he contacted you?”

“No.
 
He won’t either.”

“That’s what his mom said.
 
Any idea where he is?”

“Why do you want to find him?”

“I just want to know if he’s all right.”

“He’s all right.”

“How do you know?
 
You said he hadn’t contacted you.”

Greg rattled the ice in the bottom of his drink,
then
slurped hard to get the last of his caffeine fix.
 
“I don’t know if you knew how deep he was into his research.
 
It wasn’t Islamic radicalism that fascinated him so much, it was the anthropological aspect—how terrorist cells worked, how they spread, how ideas spread, what motivated them.
 
He talked to them.”

“Online?”

“Yeah, and in person.
 
Two I know of in Philadelphia.
 
He
cruised
the websites.
 
There’s like five thousand
jihadist
websites.
 
Some of them are
blogs
and you can comment on them.
 
Some of them are humorous.
 
He showed me one out of Berlin that was hysterical—full of scathing political satire.”
 
Greg wrote down the domain name on a napkin and pushed it over to me.
 
“He’d write comments and show me.
 
He signed his name as
The Stinking Rose
, because of the White Rose anti-Islamic group
.
”

I gasped.

“Yeah,” he said.
 
“The kids who were murdered in Amsterdam.”

“Peter knew about the White Rose?”

“Sure.
 
They’re huge in Europe.
 
They’re not anti-Islamic really—just against fascism—both Islamic and the neo-Nazi reaction to it.
 
Anyhow, Peter wrote a comment on that website a few days ago and signed it The Stinking Rose.”

“It could be someone else using his nom de plume.”

“Nah, it was him.
 
His sense of humor.”

“Did he say anything about where he was or anything?”

“Of course not.
 
He commented on a political cartoon, that’s all.
 
But it means he’s all right.”

“Could I log on and respond to a comment made by The Stinking Rose?”

“I’d be careful.
 
You know the FBI is all over these sites.
 
Do it from a library or cafe.”

“Do you think he could’ve become one of them?”

“Peter is an atheist.
 
For a Muslim, an atheist is the worst of all
kifur
, the worst infidel of all.
 
That’s why they hate communists.
 
Could he be with them now?
 
I don’t know.
 
He wanted to get deep inside.
 
He wanted to feel the heartbeat of jihad.
 
Who knows what
Guantánamo
could’ve done to
him.
 
If I were you, I’d keep my distance.”