Jihadi (11 page)

Far more calm and confident than she had anticipated, Fatima answered the phone. Murad Murad’s voice greeted her. There was an interrogation emergency. She was to report to work immediately. Not without some relief, she stood, apologized to her mother and sister for breaking off the discussion, put on her gold headscarf – the same one she had worn earlier that day – and called a cab. It was nine fifteen by the time she made it to the BII compound, which was windowless and made of concrete.

A policeman came and produced silver handcuffs. They were meant for Thelonius.

‘Arms in front, okay?’

The policeman’s partner watched as Thelonius extended both wrists, his fingers trembling. There was no struggle. Limping Thelonius followed them out of the shelter and up the stairs to the street. The air was cold and grey.

One of the officers, the one who had cuffed him and led him by the arm, said something about Thelonius’s leg and asked if he was okay. Thelonius said he wasn’t sure.

He stood on the sidewalk near the cruiser, glad to be in a new space, and so obedient that the officer holding his arm said he probably just needed a change of scenery. Thelonius agreed and nodded. He waited for the rear door of the squad car to open, then got in. He did not believe, at first, that he had had a nervous breakdown at the Salem Abandoned Animals Facility. Then he figured maybe he had. Then he decided that he didn’t know. He watched the scenery change from the back of the police car.

He wondered how long he would go on like this.

He wondered whether he would always have a beast inside of him, whether he would always be running to escape it.

He wondered whether Mike Mazzoni, that marine who took a leak on the Koran and then chucked it into the dumpster, wondered about such things.

He wondered whether he would ever file a report about Mike Mazzoni. He looked out the window, then leaned his head on it.

He felt bad about leaving the Republic before he could get Mike Mazzoni thrown out of the Marine Corps. He felt bad about having
married the wrong person. For having been the wrong person someone married. He felt bad about lying to Becky about the Plum. He felt bad about letting everyone down. He felt bad for that little girl and her dad.

He started weeping again, but made no sound this time.

In the back seat of the cruiser, headed toward a bridge, Thelonius got his bearings. That bridge led over the Danvers River. It was called the Veterans Memorial Bridge, and it took you out of Salem. Which meant they were taking him not to the jail, but in the opposite direction.

Thelonius leaned forward as far as he could. Through the thick bulletproof glass, he asked the glum police officer who was driving whether he, Thelonius, was going to the station. No answer. Then he asked whether he would be able to phone someone when he got to the station. Nothing came back then, either. He asked the police officer’s partner, the one who had cuffed him, the same questions, but he had stopped talking, too.

At least the car was moving. At least he could hear the motor whine. At least they were approaching the bridge.

Just Get Started.

Thelonius twisted his hands, reached into the front pocket of his jeans, extracted his phone. From memory, he tapped in Ryan Firestone’s speed-dial code, hit the green ‘phone’ button, put the call on speaker.

As though surrounded by bees, Dad said from a great distance: ‘T?’

‘I’m divorcing her,’ T shouted toward the phone. ‘I don’t want any part of this anymore.’

They were on Veterans Memorial Bridge now.

Thelonius hung up, tried to edge the phone back into his pocket. Failed. Then the car hit a seam where some new bridge asphalt began, and the phone flew out of his hands and dropped to the floor. If either policeman noticed what he had done, neither was admitting it. The car was over the bridge. They were out of Salem.

‘Am I under arrest?’ Thelonius asked, way loud enough, but neither policeman turned his head.

‘Am I under arrest?’ he asked again.

From his cell, the dead guy telling this story says ‘Hi’ to Becky, recalls her reciting
The Tempest
to him and stroking his hair in front of their window of night stars, peers at that memory before this chapter ends. Space enough have I in such a prison.

‘AMERICA UNDER ARREST NOW,’ one of the Islamic City police officers shouted in Thelonius’s ear, slamming the side of his face into the hood of someone’s Lincoln Town Car, snapping off the little cross-but-not-a-cross ornament. The rectangled lower-case T skittered onto the pavement, into the pool of spreading blood.

That stylized four-pointed star, just a few seconds earlier, had projected wealth, power, prestige, thoughtful engineering and, just perhaps, the desire of the Ford Motor Company’s design team to allude to the NATO seal’s compass rose. A few seconds earlier, the four-pointed star of the Lincoln Town Car spoke to stability, to certainty, to safety and to Freedom in the north, south, east and west, to the possibility of a direction home. Now the metal emblem, shiny in a puddle of mingled blood, projected nothing but failure.

Intelligence failure. Design failure. Mission failure. Execution failure. Every imaginable variety of failure.

The little girl’s opened head released a raw, mottled mushroom, streaked with crimson. Her hand lay near the ornament.

She had not wanted to leave her father.

‘UNDER ARREST,’ the policeman shouted again, pulling Thelonius’s right hand behind his back. The handcuff snapped into place around his wrist.

From the hood of the Town Car, Thelonius took in the scene at an angle – the cool sideways-slanting daytime light of late afternoon, the upended city aligning itself along the black street, the shops open and active, their gravity-defying customers still and curious and cautious at the windows. A group of covered, chittering women scurried toward a misplaced horizon. Away from him. He closed his eyes. The metal of the Lincoln was cold. The officer pulled Thelonius’s left hand smartly into place and handcuffed that wrist too.

Alone with Fatima in his first-floor office, Murad Murad began his ‘private briefing’. A high-value American had been detained that afternoon.

He had shot a father and daughter on a busy street, in front of dozens of witnesses, within a few hundred yards of the lamp-lit street scene now visible to Fatima through Murad Murad’s window. Both the father and daughter had died. The Justice Ministry had assumed authority over the case. The father’s suitcase had contained nothing untoward, despite the American’s fixation upon it.

Before them were the American’s possessions. Fatima, seated in a high-backed chair that had, for some unfathomable reason, been bolted to the floor, looked at the crowded surface of Murad Murad’s large desk. On the desk were the following items:

A backpack, emptied.

A Glock handgun.

Bullets for same.

An infrared light.

A portable telescope.

A U.S. passport, held open with a plastic clip.

ID cards – a driver’s licence, an employee pass – at odds with each other and with the passport.

A wallet.

Currency in large denominations, presumably extracted from the wallet.

A small camera. Murad Murad assured her it contained pictures of prohibited areas, installations along the border. This appeared to
be precisely the kind of surveillance that regional enemies of the Republic might conduct.

A comic book,
SERGEANT USA #109
. Its purchase price was listed as twelve cents. Pristine condition, secured within a transparent plastic sleeve. Fatima picked this up, extracted the issue, made a brief examination of its fragile pages. She closed it, surveyed the troubled, resigned rear-cover visage of Norman Rockwell (‘We’re looking for people who like to draw’), and slipped it with care back into its sleeve, face-up.

At the time of his arrest, Murad went on, this individual had been attempting to steal the suitcase found near his two victims. Why? What did he believe it contained? How had he come to make obtaining it a priority worth two lives and possibly his own? Certain prominent persons had taken a deep interest in the case. Certain figures, certain military figures (here he paused to let the words sink in) had demanded the postponement of the diplomatic discussions the American embassy was now pressing. It was, some felt, long past time to let the Americans know they did not have a free hand in this Republic.

Trails such as these tended to grow cold with alarming speed. He had been instructed to take aggressive action, to use his own best judgement. They were to learn, ideally tonight, what they were dealing with. Who the man was, to whom he reported within the American intelligence network, what potential threats to national security he had uncovered and so forth. The Americans were always busy concealing a great deal. Any marriage incorporates certain evasions.

The prisoner’s photography had been reviewed closely by people at the very highest levels of the government. Certain long-standing assumptions about their relationship with the Americans now appeared less reliable than before. It had been concluded, within the hour, that this man would not leave the country at the present time.

No other translator had been available for the interrogation. He was glad of that, though. He knew he could count upon Fatima. She
would of course be compensated at double her pro-rated hourly rate. This was a significant career opportunity for her, and he wanted to be sure she understood that.

Fatima understood.

The prisoner was now being processed. There was a certain strategic advantage in allowing him to ponder his situation. Questioning was scheduled to commence thirty minutes from now. Her security clearance had been upgraded, yet another opportunity for her. Could he count on her discretion once the interrogation began?

Fatima would be discreet.

Murad Murad smiled that indigestion smile of his.

He was proud of her now. Confident she would help him to do the right thing for the country. He felt a certain protective instinct toward her, hard to describe, but perhaps she would respect it. While they waited, might she allow him to view her hair, as a father views his daughter’s hair?

Fatima’s jaw clenched.

He assured her that they were alone, that the door was closed, that no one would know and that it was all he would request of her on a personal level this evening.

Fatima stared at the plump little man in the uniform. Whispering, she informed Murad that she wished him to understand two things. First, there was a witness to his actions, and that witness was Allah. Second, she was capable of screaming quite loudly. She would do so the moment he attempted to prevent her from exiting the room and taking up quarters in the employee lounge. She preferred to wait there until the interrogation began. That would be all.

She stood and made her way out of the office.

Becky’s mom died on May 2, 1972.

She succumbed to wounds she received on a trip she and her family had made to Venezuela back in 1968. Some Communists killed her.

Becky’s mom’s real name was Prudence. Of course, Becky never called her that. Becky called her Mother. So that’s what the dead guy telling this story will call her.

The Communists threw a bomb into a beach cottage Mother and her family had rented. Mother had been reading A.C. Bradley’s
Shakespearean Tragedy
. She was lying on her side, re-engaging with one of the passages on Desdemona, when the explosion went off beneath her bed. It shredded the iron frame of her bed into fragments, lodged shrapnel at the base of her nose, destroyed both her eyes and disabled certain important parts of her brain. The attack left the set of Mother’s mouth off, too. For nearly four years, though capable of intermittent speech, she usually looked half-aware, determined to sleep her way through a special kind of hangover.

The Communists hadn’t meant to kill Mother – or, to put it more accurately, they hadn’t cared much about whether they killed her or not. The Communists had meant to kill Becky’s father, Ryan Firestone, known familiarly to those who reported to him as ‘Dad’.

Dad had been out golfing at the time the bomb detonated. Becky had been golfing with him. Her long hours of practice were paying off. She was beating Dad fair and square for the very first time, though it was still quite early in the round. They were beginning the fifth hole. Becky was leading, but furious.

Dad was, in the adult Becky’s words, a ‘control freak’. She insisted that, after the third hole, Dad had broken his promise of not trying to lose to her. He couldn’t handle losing to her fair and square.

Dad had indeed broken any number of promises.

A running man emerged, agitated, from the distant pro shop. Something had happened at the cottage. Becky and Dad never finished that fifth hole.

Prudence Firestone, née Sharp, aka Mother (1931–1972) grew up in the same Salem, Massachusetts foursquare that she later shared with Ryan Firestone, and that Becky would later share with Thelonius. Too late, and only in hindsight, long after he left that house, Thelonius came to see Becky’s insistence on living in this particular
home and no other, ever, under any circumstances, as a signal of something being not quite right within the family.

‘You are a guest of the Islamic Republic,’ said a teenaged girl, wearing a white robe and a gold headscarf, who appeared to be staring at Heaven. ‘Please permit me to apologize in advance for any discomfort or inconvenience.’ Her voice awoke Thelonius as from a dream.