The Ninth Step

by Gabriel Cohen

  He considered emerging back up into the sunlight. His cell phone battery had died and he needed to go up and find a pay phone, to assure Malik and Aarif and others that he was still totally committed to the plan—after all their preparation together, it would be terrible if they moved on it and left him out. But he thought of the police roaming around, and the men who had shot at him, and the effort it took to run, and he sank back onto the damp, smelly sand, drifting toward the hope of sleep. As usual, before he reached that oblivion, memories of his imprisonment arose, a salty, suffocating tide.

  AFTER WHAT MIGHT HAVE been ten days in detention, or perhaps two weeks, during what might have been midday or the middle of the night, the door of his cell swung open and someone came in. He had pretended to be asleep on his bunk, but the intruder was not fooled; he dragged Nadim onto the floor, pushed him facedown, yanked his arms back, cuffed his wrists, and put on the ankle restraints. It was the guard they called Barshak.

  The man stepped out and returned with a chair, which he placed in the middle of the cell. “Guess what, Hajji? You got a new visitor today. Now, you’re gonna behave, or I’m gonna come back in here and play some football with your testicles.”

  Nadim lay limp. He had been forced to surrender all power over his own life, and this loss had taken its toll: he was lethargic and sad all the time, and he was fast losing weight inside his prison garb.

  Now Barshak lifted him up by the armpits and slung him back onto his bunk. After the guard swaggered out, a new man entered the little cell, sat down, and placed something on the floor.

  Nadim blinked, trying to see him clearly under the bright lights, but his vision had been suffering under the constant barrage of white. The stranger was surrounded by a golden nimbus.

  As if reading his mind, the man began to speak. “Hello, Nadim. You may be wondering who I am. I’m going to tell you: I’m an angel.” The man’s voice had a flatness, a calm, even tone that might—under other circumstances—have felt reassuring. But Nadim just shivered; he had woken a number of times trembling with fever, and he wondered if he might be dreaming now.

  “I’m an interesting angel,” the man continued, “because you get to choose what kind I am. I can be your angel of mercy. I know you have a wife and a little daughter. I bet you’d like to see them again, and soon. I have the power to make that happen. You have the power to make it happen. You work with me, and I’ll get you out of here.

  “But if you don’t do your part”—as the man shifted closer, the scraping of his chair on the floor set Nadim’s teeth on edge—“I’ll be the angel of your worst nightmare. Do you understand?” The man wore eyeglasses; they glinted in the harsh light.

  Nadim nodded dully. He was starting to get a headache. Since the second day here, he had been interrogated several times a week, in the room with the doctor’s examining table, with several men present, and a video camera. He hoped this might be the man who finally believed his story.

  “There is a man in the other house,” he said. “An old man. He does not like me. He has a dog. One time—”

  The bright light overhead disappeared from the visitor’s eyeglasses as he bent down to pick up the thing he had put on the floor: a manila folder. He lifted a paper out, held it up, and shook his head. “I’ve heard this silly story, Nadim. You keep this up and you’re going to stay inside here for the rest of your life. Am I making myself clear?”

  “I know America,” Nadim ventured. “There is laws. I would like a lawyer.”

  The visitor stared at him. “Times changed a few weeks ago. You people changed them, with what you did downtown. So I’m making the laws now, and if you don’t tell me who you’re working with, I’m going to bury you alive. You’ll never see your wife and daughter again.”

  Nadim was on the verge of tears. “I tell the truth. I tell you everything.”

  The man contemplated him for a moment. “I’m going to give you one last chance. Who are the other men in your group?”

  Nadim remained silent.

  The man bent down and carefully placed the paper back in his file. He stood up, brushed his hands together, then moved to the door. He called out, then came back and sat again.

  Barshak and one of his fellow bullies crowded into the cell. The other man carried a big black canvas bag. They shut the door behind them. Barshak knelt down and unzipped the bag.

  “Now, Nadim,” his angel said, “we’re going to make you wish you had never been born.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  THE NEXT DAY JACK called Ray Hillhouse again; he wanted to add a few more details about the Hasni case, and he gave the FBI man the rest of the lowdown as he drove south toward the shore with Richie Powker.

  He hung up as he parked on Surf Avenue. Next to the aquarium, the old Cyclone roller-coaster was sending its cars full of screaming thrill seekers ripping and roaring around its bends. The wooden structure rattled as if at any second it might fly apart. Jack remembered riding it once with Michelle; she had talked him into it, his only time since he was a kid. He recalled that first hill, which made you think, Gee, this isn’t so high—and then all of a sudden you were in absolute freefall, terrified for your life.

  He glanced up and down the avenue, which even this early in the season was packed with couples and families strolling along, eating cotton candy and hot dogs, enjoying the weather. One block over ran the boardwalk, and then the Coney Island beach. What would the ocean breezes do to radiation particles, he found himself wondering, chilled by the thought: Sweep them out to sea or blow them back along the crowded shore?

  “Two adults?” said the girl behind the ticket window, a nervous-looking kid with straggly blond hair and braces on her teeth. “That’ll be, um, twenty-six dollars?”

  Jack flashed his badge. “We’re with the NYPD.”

  The girl looked confused. “Okay, but … um … I think I’m still supposed to charge you?”

  Richie stepped forward impatiently. “Listen, sugar, we’re on a case.”

  “It’s my first week,” the girl said. “I think I better call my supervisor?”

  Jack imagined a terrorist meeting wrapping up inside while he and his partner haggled over admission fees. Maybe the plotters were arranging the next attempt on his own life. He pulled out his wallet and paid the money.

  They strode past the first big coral-filled tank, where a trio of silvery fish as flat as dinner plates slid past the glass, and then a big manta ray winged by. The aquarium was not heavy on security. Around the bend, looking for someone to talk to, the detectives came upon a squat little Hispanic woman in a janitor’s blue dress. Jack pulled out his photo of Nadim Hasni. “Excuse me, ma’am, do you recognize this person?”

  “No speak English,” the woman said. Jack tried again in his limited Spanish, but the woman just shrugged.

  They found a bona fide security guard, a lanky, bored-looking young guy, at the doorway to the aquarium’s central courtyard.

  The guard shrugged too. “We get hundreds of people through here every day. I only look at ’em if they’re bangin’ on the glass or throwing popcorn at the penguins.”

  The detectives stepped out into the courtyard and strode past the outdoor seal tank, the walrus tank, and the penguin tank, stopping to question every employee they saw. No results, until they went down a flight of stairs into the dark below-surface viewing rooms, where they found a stocky young security guard who looked like she took her job very seriously. “Lemme see that,” she said, snatching up the photo and holding it up under a dim spotlight. She tapped the picture. “Yup. I think I seen this one. He comes in now and then.”

  Jack could feel his heartbeat picking up.

  “Was he with some other guys?” Richie said. “Pakistanis, maybe? Or Arabs?”

  The guard shook her head. “Nope. He’s a loner.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “You know what? I think he was in earlier.”

  “Today?”

  She nod
ded.

  Jack and Richie exchanged an excited glance.

  “Where did you see him?”

  “Across the way, in the jellyfish rooms. He’ll spend an hour in there, easy. That’s why I recognized him.”

  “Could he be in there now?”

  The woman shrugged. “It’s possible. I been workin’ in here for the last hour.”

  Instinctively, Jack patted his service revolver. “Where is it?”

  The woman pointed. “Go up, then straight across the courtyard.”

  Jack started to move, but then he turned back. “Was he carrying anything? A bag or a knapsack?” He had no idea how big a dirty bomb might be, but he knew that the Madrid subway bombers had carried their explosives in knapsacks.

  The guard frowned, trying to remember. “I think he had a knapsack.” She nodded. “Yeah, definitely.”

  Grim-faced, Jack and Richie took the stairs up two at a time and jogged across the outdoor space, trying not to draw attention as they wove through knots of visitors who were eating snacks from the café or showing their kids the dolphin and shark toys they’d just purchased in the gift shop.

  They burst into the building across the way, pulling out their pistols as they tried to adjust their eyes to the darkness. But there was no one remotely Pakistani or Arab-looking anywhere in the galleries. Nor in the rest of the aquarium, as the detectives rushed on, through the shark exhibits and back past the fish and the rays.

  And then they were out on the Coney boardwalk, scratching their heads and wondering where their suspect might have gone.

  NADIM HASNI WAS JUST two hundred yards away, beneath the boardwalk’s gray planks.

  He sat in that dim alley and listened to people above screaming as they rode the rides, and he began to tremble. He lay back, dug his fingertips into the cool, densely packed sand, and tried in vain to push another screaming out of his head.

  After the first few weeks in detention, totally cut off from the outside world, Nadim had finally been told that he would be allowed one phone call to an attorney per week. They gave him a list of lawyers, and he waited eagerly for his chance. At last, they led him to a phone and he called the first number on the list. It was out of service. He tried to explain, but they just led him back to his cell. “Next week, Hajji, next week.”

  A week later, he found a lawyer who agreed to come for a visit, but the man seemed cowed by Nadim’s captors. He listened to Nadim’s complaints about his mistreatment, then asked for proof. And what could Nadim say? He had no lasting bruises—none on the outside, at any rate. The lawyer promised to see what he could do, but three months later Nadim was still inside, and beginning to lose all hope. He had been able to receive several visits from Ghizala, but they hardly helped: all the damned woman could talk about was the bills they owed and the rent they needed to pay; she spoke with a tone of annoyance that suggested that he had gotten himself incarcerated just to inconvenience her. It got to a point where he could only tolerate her visits because she brought him news of Enny. (They had agreed that it would be wrong to bring the child here, for her to see her father like this; instead, they made up a story about him going back to Pakistan to help an ailing relative.)

  And then, one time, he had heard things from the cell across the way. It had probably been late at night. (He could never be sure, with the endless summer inside the S.H.U. But there were few staff around, so Nadim figured the others had gone home for the day.) All he knew was that this was the time when Barshak and the older man, the interrogator who held the guard’s leash, liked to do their dirty work. He could hear their voices through the slot in his door: the interrogator’s eerily calm tone; Barshak’s ugly snarl. And he could hear Mahmood, his fellow Pakistani, begging and pleading as they did bad things to him.

  Mahmood’s voice rose to a scream; Nadim huddled on his bunk and covered his ears, but it didn’t help. He got up, walked to the door, and listened, praying for his neighbor in this godforsaken place. Mahmood screamed again, then fell silent. After a pause, Nadim heard the interrogator’s voice, more urgent than usual. Then Barshak’s voice, less confident. Nadim pressed his ear against the cool metal of his door. A muffled sound of something heavy being moved around …

  A couple of minutes later, Nadim heard the door across the way opening and closing. He was just turning to go back to his bunk when he heard a key turning in his own lock. He scrambled back into bed, but it was too late. The interrogator came in, followed by Barshak, who closed the door and then stood in front of it, arms limp at his sides, looking oddly subdued and pale.

  The interrogator seemed shaken too. He looked at Nadim, then stepped forward with a strange tentativeness. He did something he had never done before; he sat on the edge of Nadim’s bunk, which made Nadim want to press himself into the far corner.

  “You want to get out of here, right, Nadim? You want to see your wife and daughter?”

  Nadim nodded, scared and unsure of where this might be going.

  “I want you to know that I believe you. I believe your story about the dog and the neighbor, and I believe you’re innocent. I’m going to help you get out of here. It may take a while, but I can make it happen.”

  The interrogator leaned into the shadow under the bunk. “Listen to me very carefully, Nadim. I’m going to help you, but you have to help me. There’s been an accident. Now, very soon some people are going to come in here and ask you if you’ve heard anything. And you’re going to tell them that you didn’t, that you were sound asleep. This is very important. Do you understand?”

  Nadim just stared.

  The interrogator scowled. “We don’t have much time. Let me put this more clearly. You can say you were sleeping, and I’ll get you out of here. Or you can talk about what you might have heard tonight, in which case you will never see the light of day again. We’ll transfer you to someplace much worse than this, and your wife and daughter will never hear from you again. Tell me that you understand.”

  Nadim finally spoke, the words coming rusty out of his mouth. “I … I understand. I am sleeping. I hear nothing.”

  The interrogator reached out to pat his shoulder and Nadim had to struggle not to flinch. “Good boy. Now just hold tight. It might take me a little while, but I promise I’ll get you out of here.” He stood up and then he and Barshak walked out.

  Half an hour later, out in the hallway, a guard making his nightly rounds shouted for assistance.

  An hour later, two official, very worried-looking strangers came to Nadim’s cell to question him. It seemed that a prisoner across the way had somehow managed to hang himself.

  “I hear nothing,” Nadim told them. “I am sleeping.”

  For a while after, he lived in two states of mind: guilt, over the way he had helped cover up the killing, but also hope, that he would soon see his Enny again.

  And then, shortly thereafter, he saw his wife in the visiting room, and her face immediately told him that something was terribly wrong. After he managed to get the story out of her, the story of how his daughter had died, he shouted for the guards to take her away.

  He couldn’t remember the next week at all. He fell into a dark pit. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t sleep. They strapped him to his bunk because he kept banging his own head into the wall.

  He emerged out of that dark place into a strange, lightheaded mind of disbelief. He was still here. He could feel the breath in his lungs, the metal of his bed, cool to his touch. So Enny must still be out there, still alive. She would go to college and he would take her picture as she threw her graduation cap up in the air, just like he’d seen in American movies. There was a whole future that they were supposed to live together. She would have children of her own, and then he would grow old and pass away, leaving her, grieving, behind. He yearned to be in her presence again, to talk with her about any silly little thing. It seemed impossible, a profound violation of the fundamental laws of physics: there was no way that life could move forward, that everyone could still go about th
eir business, while his daughter suddenly disappeared, leaving a girl-sized hole in the world. His wife must be mistaken. Perhaps she had gone mad.

  A month later, Nadim got his release from detention. He never knew if the interrogator had arranged it or if the others had simply gotten tired of listening to his story about the neighbor and the dog.

  He visited Enny’s grave, and the reality sank in. He recited the Salat al-Janazah, and then he managed to find a new place to live, on his own, in Brooklyn, because he couldn’t stand to see his wife’s face. He would never forgive her. Never. As he would never forgive the men who had kept him imprisoned while his daughter was dying.

  He moved into his new basement apartment and found another car-service job. Occasionally he thought of trying to report what had happened inside the detention center, but he was afraid that no one would believe him or that the interrogator would make good on his ominous threats. So he kept the man’s secret, and went about his daily business, but he was like the walking dead.

  By 2004 he had begun to recover, but then the news came out about what had happened in the prison at Abu Ghraib, and the terrible photographs, and Nadim began to suffer nightmares again and sweats and shakes.

  And then, one morning last week, he had rounded a corner in a little local deli and saw the big man who had roared with laughter as he slammed Nadim into walls.

  Now he rolled over and moaned at what he had done.

  But it was not too late. He could still move on with his life—and with the plan. He needed to go out right now and find a phone booth, and call the others to reassure them that he was still just as committed as ever. He snatched up his knapsack, rose to his feet, and headed for a gap in the chain-link fence.

  “YOU WANNA GO BACK to the Seven-oh house?” asked Richie Powker.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. After the big adrenaline rush of thinking they were right on top of their suspect in the aquarium, he felt deflated and tired.