Salvation Boulevard (9 page)

“Your Honor,” DeStefano said.

“Yes?”

“This was a terrorist act.”

“Ohhh.” Something between a moan and a sob escaped from Ahmad.

Watkins looked at him as if he were seeing him for the first time.

“What's that on his face? Is there something wrong with his eyes?”

“Your Honor,” DeStefano began.

“Why is this man in chains? In my courtroom?”

“He's a dangerous terrorist, Your Honor,” DeStefano said. The armed deputies stood straighter, looked more alert, and held their rifles as if they were ready to spring into action.

“He's crying,” Watkins said.

“It's a trick. They train them to do that.”

“Unshackle this man. And take that thing off his eyes.”

“He's dangerous,” DeStefano said.

“This is a criminal court,” Watkins said. “We have dangerous people here all the time. That's what we do. But are we afraid? No, we are not. Unshackle this man. And take the thing off his face. And you people with the guns”—the judge waved the backs of both his hands at them, brushing them away—“back, back. Let's all be able to breathe.”

“Thank you,” Ahmad said, his head turning as he tried to figure out which direction the judge had spoken from. “Thank you, sir. Thank you.”

“Don't call me ‘sir,'” the judge said. “Call me ‘Your Honor.'”

“Yes, Your Honor, sir.”

“And get those things off his face.”

One of the deputies moved to follow the judge's order, and in the first moment, as the goggles came off, you could see how disoriented Ahmad had been beneath them. The enforced blindness had edged him over so that he stood on the border where ordered life blurs into chaos.

As soon as sight returned and he was able to place himself in the geography of the room—to find the judge, find Manny, find me, to
see who his guards were and the familiar furniture and arrangements of a courtroom—his posture changed, and his attitude changed. Even his face took on more definition, and he became more himself.

The deputy who had removed the goggles handed them off, then knelt down and unlocked the chains from around the boy's ankles. Normally the prisoner, whoever it is, takes some amount of pleasure from the brief reversal, at least of physical positions, with law enforcement servile at their feet. But not Ahmad. He was polite and grateful. He knew that if he said it with words, he might break down, so expressed his thanks with a nod.

“You're not going to go berserk and attack the court, are you son?”

“No sir,” he said, looking at the judge, doing his best to keep control.

“Your . . . ”

“I mean, Your Honor, sir, no.”

“You hear that, Mr. DeStefano?”

As Ahmad's hands came free, he reached up to wipe his nose. One of the guards got upset at seeing him wipe his snot with the back of his hand and with the annoyed look of a parent took out a handkerchief. For a moment, it looked as if he were going to wipe Ahmad's nose for him, but then he realized that the boy's hands were now free, and he simply gave it to him. Ahmad was so overwhelmed by the kindness that he looked like he was going to kiss the guard's hand. It occurred to me that this was the key to interrogations. Not the beatings or torture but the moments of kindness. If they had the sense to build on this, and Nazami was actually a terrorist, this guy with the handkerchief could pull everything out of him he could possibly know. But that much gratitude was more than the guard could stand, and he said, “Suck it up, kid. Suck it up.”

Watkins turned to the defendant. “Now, Mr. Nazami, are you alright? Good,” he continued, not waiting for the answer. “Let's take a look at the charge against you.”

“Your Honor,” DeStefano said, “we wish to release the defendant into federal custody.”

“You wish to drop these charges? You have a murder here.” Then he added, almost as an aside, “Mr. Nazami, you're charged with murder in the second degree.”

“He's an enemy combatant.”

“Objection,” Manny said.

“Really,” Watkins said to DeStefano. “You picked him up in Adwar Province, did you?”

“No, he committed his crime here.”

“We've been invaded?”

“Yes, we have, Your Honor. I think Your Honor remembers 9/11, for one.”

“Was he involved in that?” the judge asked with genuine interest.

“No, Your Honor.”

“What did he do?”

“He shot a philosophy professor at the university.”

“Surely that didn't terrorize anyone.”

“He did it because he didn't like the professor's beliefs, because he's an Islamo-Fascist who believes apostates must die!”

Manny said, “Objection.”

DeStefano said, “We have a confession. He confessed to that.”

“Objection,” Manny said. “The confession is not in evidence. The confession was obtained through coercion. The confession . . . ”

“Spare me,” the judge said. “This is a simple arraignment. Do you want to dismiss the charges, Mr. DeStefano? If so, I'll release the defendant.”

“I object,” Manny said.

“The defense objects?”

“Yes.”

“To the charges being dropped?”

“To a remand to federal custody. This is a state crime. If the defendant is charged in a state court, he will be tried with all the normal protections that a citizen is entitled to under the Constitution. If you release him, he will be taken away. He will not be able to
have the attorney of his choice. He will not be able to confront his accusers. His testimony can be coerced.”

“Objection,” DeStefano said. “This is an enemy combatant.”

“Mr. DeStefano, you are giving me a headache. If I have this right, the defense is begging me to try the defendant for murder, and the DA's office wants me to dismiss the charges.”

“Not dismiss. Just remand. But the charges remain.”

“This is a simple arraignment court,” Watkins said, giving up. “How does your client plead, Mr. Goldfarb.”

“Not guilty, Your Honor.”

“Fine,” the judge said. “Let's set a date for trial.”

 

Dinner that night was strange.

When I came home, our daughter, Angie, was full of excitement. “Daddy, Daddy, you're on TV.”

She had Tivoed the news, and sure enough, there was the Mercedes being pelted with eggs, fruit, and stones. Then, there I was. I helped Manny climb up on the hood, stood there in front of him like I was his bodyguard, then helped him down and walked into the courthouse with him.

Gwen didn't say much about it. I didn't say anything about seeing her in the crowd. It was as if Angie's happiness had lifted us past our differences. That family well-being and Angie's joy were more important than a political issue, which, after all, was outside, something far away.

The next evening Angie came home distraught. There was also a call from the school. She'd been in a fight. Her first ever. Our first ever bad call from school. It was over me. Kids were saying I was helping terrorists, that I was a traitor, that I was working against the United States and against God. She had finally gotten angry, and there had been a physical confrontation. For one of the very few times in our marriage, Gwen took an ‘I told you so' position. Worse, she did it silently.

It was both one of the sweetest and one of the saddest things I've ever seen. I caught up with Manny at the end of the day at Julian Irvine Elementary School auditorium.

“Sorry,” he whispered when I sat down next to him. “These things always run late.”

A seven-year-old boy was on stage with a drum set. Recorded music was playing, and he was banging away along with it. He was good. He had perfect timing and could play several complicated riffs. A teacher was standing by him, and Manny's wife, Susan, was over by the podium. She's a special ed teacher.

Like I said, the kid was good, but when the recorded music stopped, he didn't. He went on banging away with just as much fervor and concentration. The woman who was there with him touched him gently to get him to stop, but he didn't until she slid the sticks out of his hands. Then she led him over to Susan, who announced his name and said he was getting the award for best musician in his class and gave him a little statuette with a trumpeter on it.

The other kids and the parents in the room all applauded. Some of the kids had to be directed how to applaud, others not to do it too much, and others when to stop. Each of them had something wrong, was blind, retarded, autistic, in a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis. And all the people in that room—except me, who was just passing
through—were shouldering their burdens and helping to prepare these kids for lives of indignity, humiliation, and pain.

Manny leaned over and said to me, “I couldn't find a little drummer. Best I could do.”

“He seems happy with it.”

“Come on. We can talk in the hall. Nobody'll miss me.”

We left as quietly as we could. When the doors closed behind me, I said, “So you get the trophies for them?”

“Yeah, yeah. The way you work with special ed kids is with a lot of rewards. For every little bit of progress, a reward. Susan makes some great progress. I couldn't do it. I don't have the patience. Or the love. She does, and I try to support her. Whadda we got?”

“There's only three mosques in the area, plus one at the university. I went to them all. Ahmad went to one, the one down in Wolvern. It's mostly Pakistanis and Bengalis there, starting to push out the Mexicans.

“I spoke to the imam. He said Ahmad was only there a few times. Far from being a fanatical jihadist, our boy was regarded as dangerously liberal. He said something about white raisins, Ahmad did, to the imam, who was furious about it. I tried to get him to explain, but he kept going ballistic.”

“Ah, the white raisins,” Manny said.

“You know them? What are they, Iraqi rappers?”

“You want me to explain it?”

“Yes, please. He wouldn't. Or couldn't.”

“Muslims believe that God had the archangel Gabriel speak to Mohammed. Then, because he was ‘the perfect man,' he got it perfectly right, and he went home and recited what he'd heard to his followers, who remembered it perfectly, then recited it to the scribes, who wrote it down, perfectly. God, Gabriel, Mohammed, immediate followers, secretaries, Koran. That's why you study Arabic to study the Koran, so that you don't pick up mistakes with translations, 'cause you have it there, perfectly in the original. The problem is, it's almost certainly not true.”

“Of course it's not true. The Bible is the word of God,” I said.

Manny gave me a look.

“Yeah, well, it is,” I said.

“You want to hear this?”

“Sure.”

“There's a second problem. In Mohammed's day, there were only seventeen letters in written Arabic, all for consonants, and some had to do double duty, and none for vowels. Imagine it in English. If you wanted to write ‘cat,' all you could write would be ‘c' and ‘t' and readers would have to figure out from the context if it was actually cat, cut, cot, coat, cite, or city. Later on, more letters were added to the language and then to the Koran. Still, it is regarded as the direct word, God to Gabriel to Mohammed to the Koran.

“This is so serious that it is forbidden in Islam to study the Koran in an external way, to question when it was actually written or by whom or to test it against other historical information and say that the original letters, a few of which have multiple uses, with different vowels could have different meanings.”

“What you mean, it's forbidden?”

“I mean you can be sentenced to death for it.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. And you know that the Islamic suicide bombers believe that by being martyrs, they will automatically go to heaven.”

“And they'll be met by a dozen virgins,” I said.

“Seventy-two,” Manny corrected me.

“That's a lot of virgins.”

“Well, you have eternity to get through them,” Manny said. “Anyway, one Arabic scholar said that the original text didn't mean ‘virgins.' If you change the vowels, which aren't in the text, you get ‘white raisins,' and, he said, that's what was really intended.”

“White raisins?”

“Arabia was desert country. Their idea of paradise was a garden, with water and fruit trees. White raisins were a great delicacy.”

“Not as much as virgins.”

The doors opened, and the kids started coming out with their parents and teachers. Each of them was holding some kind of trophy or an award or wearing a big medal around their neck. They were showing them off, holding them up, examining them.

“This is good, very good,” Manny said to me. “It shows that Ahmad was challenging Islam himself, the exact reason that he had supposedly killed MacLeod.”

“Actually, this imam—it's the Capital City Islamic Center by the way—the imam said something about Ahmad having an evil professor who put him up to asking evil questions. He was really pissed about it.”

“Excellent. Can we get him to testify?”

“Sure, I don't think it's a problem.”

“By the way, I've got a check for you,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “Keep us current on your bills.”

“That's fast,” I said.

Susan came out, and we both stood up. She took my hand, said my name, and kissed me on the cheek. If she weren't Manny's wife and I weren't Gwen's husband, I would have melted on the spot.