Salvation Boulevard

by Larry Beinhart

  “Why should I?”

  “I know you’re a member of Plowright’s cathedral, and he’s been on a tear about it, and sometimes people get funny around religion and God.”

  “Manny, Sunday I give to God, Saturday I give to my wife, five days a week, I belong to Mr. Green.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear,” he said.

  “Is what I hear in the news true?” I asked him.

  “Is what you hear in the news ever true? Come on, it’s been wakeup time for ten years now. Whaddaya mean ‘is what I hear in the news true?’”

  “I mean I hear it’s a slam dunk for the prosecution. That the suspect confessed. I also hear that he’s a foreign kid, no money, some kind of Islamist, that it’s a terrorist thing, won’t even happen in court, national security and all that, he’s going to be whisked away to one of those tribunals.”

  Manny slammed his fist down on the desk. He was wearing a shirt that cost $300, $350. A $150 tie, wide and straight, pimp my neck. The jacket of his $2,400 suit hung over the back of his chair. The view out his window made it the priciest real estate in the city. Manny loved money, and Manny made money. But here he was, slamming his fist down on the desk so hard his coffee mug took a little hop and clack. “Not if I can fuckin’ help it.”

  The way he looked at me, I was afraid that he was going to ask me to cut my rate or even work for nothing. Grantham, Glume, Wattly, and Goldfarb was one of the places that I always walked into happy because it was one of the few law firms where, pardon the expression, they never tried to Jew me down. “This isn’t some pro bono thing?” I asked. The problem was that if Manny asked me to cut my rate or throw him a freebie, I would. He was a good client, and you have to do extras for a good client, like your favorite breakfast place gives you free refills. But on top of that, because we were friends.

  “You know what, Carl, it wouldn’t hurt you to work for the good once in a while. Wouldn’t hurt me either. It wouldn’t hurt at all.”

  “Pro bono, Manny?” I asked in disbelief.

  He turned his back on me and gimped over to the window. He tries to cover it up with his clothes and a lift in one shoe, but his left leg is crooked, skinny, scarred, and shorter than the right. He looked out on the river and the city that had grown along its banks, every year growing richer and growing faster.

  Whatever he saw there, he said, “You gotta believe in something.”

  “Yes,” I said neutrally. Maybe he was going to spin some argument about giving back. About tithing, in a secular way.

  “A man has a right to confront his accusers.” He said it fiercely, like a losing lawyer in front of a hanging judge. “He has a right to see the evidence on which he is charged. He has a right to a trial. A right to a defense.”

  “He’s a terrorist,” I said, shrugging it off. “A Muslim terrorist. He blew a guy away.”

  “Get the fuck out of here!” he snapped.

  “Fine,” I said, rising.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “What’s going on, Manny?”

  “You always think it can’t happen here, right? Alright, maybe they do it in Afghanistan, Iraq: there’s a sweep, they pick up Ali and Abdul, and they throw ’em in Abu Ghraib. Or grab some guy, funny name and mustache at the border, and put him on a plane to Syria.

  “The kid’s an American. As American as my parents were, damn it. His parents sent him over here nine, ten years ago, escaping the ayatollahs and the Pasdaran. He’s over here on his own, trying hard. Learned to speak English like he was born here. Applied for citizenship and just got it a few months ago. He’s at the university on a hardship scholarship. Plus, he works. He’s an okay student. So what are we doing here? Tribunals? Secret trials? Come on, Carl, is there anything you believe in?”

  “Yes, Manny, there are things I believe in. I believe in God Almighty, that Jesus Christ is my personal savior, and in truth, justice, and the American way. But you’re not being real clear about what you’re doing and what you want, which is unlike you. You’re a lawyer, Mr. Goldfarb, one of the best, and usually you’re very, very good at saying exactly what you mean.”

  “Alright, Carl, here’s what I’m saying. First of all, there’s money.”

  “All you had to do was say so.”

  “Second of all,” he said, holding up his hand, telling me to wait, “there’s pressure. You’re right, they want to take this kid away and disappear him. Take him to Guantánamo or rendition him or something. There’s big pressure. So, I gotta ask you, are you prepared to stand up to it?” He pointed an accusing finger at me and said in quotes, “‘Working to free terrorists!’ ‘Working against America!’—whatever the hell they’re going to say. They’ll even say ‘traitor!’”

  “As long as they don’t call me a Liberal,” I said, trying to lighten this up.

  “Well, they might,” Manny said. “They might do more.”

  “You don’t make it sound real attractive.”

  “I promise you this at least: if you get charged with anything, this firm will defend you. At no cost to you. You have my word on it.”

  “Now you’re scaring me. Maybe I should take a pass.”

  “Carl, wait.”

  “What?”

  “Meet the kid. Talk to him. Tell me what you think. Will you do that?”

  “Sure, alright. When?”

  “Now. Come out to the prison with me.”

  I nodded.

  He took the fancy suit jacket off the back of his chair and slipped it on. It was a beautiful piece of tailoring.

  “I got a question for you,” I said. A capital crime, a slam dunk, an Arab killing an American—before it was done this would be a sevenfigure defense bill. “Who’s putting up the big bucks for his defense?”

  “You know what, Carl,” he said, charging past me with his funny swinging gait and leading the way out to the long, carpeted hall, “we’re gonna have fun with this one. They’re gonna throw everything they have at it. It’ll be a dog fight—there’ll be press conferences, demonstrations, and death threats. It’s gonna be a blast.”

  4

  So, there we were, up at the state penitentiary. I got Ahmad settled down enough to speak coherently so Manny could interview him. “Yes, yes, of course, I knew Professor MacLeod. I took a class from him,” Ahmad said. “Nate was a good guy.”

  “Nate? You were on a first name basis?”

  “Yes, I am, we are, we all are, with most of the professors, except maybe in the large lecture classes.”

  “So, how close were you with him?”

  “He was a professor,” Ahmad said, trying hard to be normal about it. “He was the kind who liked to talk to his students. He was accessible.”

  “You ever talk with him privately?”

  “I don’t know, maybe, maybe once or twice. In his office.”

  “About what?”

  “Course material. Stuff from his classes.”

  “What was he teaching?”

  “Philosophy and Religion 342.”

  “Did the things he said upset you?”

  “I didn’t kill him. I didn’t, I didn’t,” he started to cry again. Not the kind of crying you can carry on a conversation through, taste the salt of your own tears as they roll down from your eyes to your mouth, that sometimes you break free of to laugh. These were tears of despair, of a nightmare that had neither cause nor hope.

  “Of course not,” I said, taking over the questioning from Manny, who looked relieved. Then I repeated, “Of course not,” with even more reassurance.

  “You believe me?” the boy said. He didn’t have that air of trying out a story, then slyly watching his listeners as if they were a focus group, like some defendants do. His question was about me and whether he dared to hope.

  I have a stock answer, which is that it doesn’t matter if I believe or not. I’m a professional, and I’ll do my best either way. Saves me from having to worry about troublesome things like guilt or innocence. Nobody wants to free a guilty
man or fry an innocent one. Saves me from lying, from making a judgment that I will later discover to be wrong. Besides, they’re hardly ever innocent. I have a stock answer, but this time I didn’t use it. This time I said, “I believe you.” I didn’t know if I did or I didn’t, but it seemed I had to say so if we were going to get anywhere.

  “I didn’t do it,” he said.

  “I know,” I said, digging myself in deeper, “I know. But you know what we have to talk about, your confession.”

  “I had to. They made me.”

  “How? How’d they make you?”

  “They said . . . they said, they were going to send me to Egypt, and no one would know where I was. I would never see my family, I would never come back, and they would tor . . . tor . . . torture me.”

  “Egypt? Why Egypt?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not Egyptian. I’m not even Arab; I’m Persian.”

  “Iranian, I thought.”

  “Iran, Persia, yes, the same place. My family likes to say Persia. They are proud to be Persians. They’re not sure about Iran.”

  “Who? Who made you do this?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know their names.”

  “Their faces, would you recognize them?”

  “No,” he said.

  Lee said, “Hey,” like knocking to ask permission to enter hearing range. He had a paper cup of something for the kid to drink. I said, “Yeah, thanks, Lee, bring it over.” The two suits were hovering in the background, in the shadows.

  Ahmad shrank back as the CO approached. “It’s alright,” I said. “He’s just got something for you to drink.” Then I said to Lee, “I’ll take it,” holding my hand out, and Lee gave me the cup. It was dark, Coke, Pepsi, some kind of cola. I passed it to Ahmad. His chains only let his hands move about six inches from his waist, so I had to hand it to him low. To drink it, he had to hunch over and double himself up.

  Manny stood up and thanked Lee with deep sincerity, offering his hand to shake. Lee took it, and money passed from Manny’s hand to his. “I don’t want any more shit to happen to him.”

  “Not on my watch,” Lee said. And maybe it wouldn’t. But the silent half of his answer was that he couldn’t answer for the other sixteen hours in the day. Or the fifteen minutes he was on a coffee break.

  It was almost impossible for Ahmad to drink with his shackles on. The angles don’t work. No matter how you hold the cup on the tips of your fingers, fold yourself double and bend your neck like a goose, your face is down, and you can’t pour up. “Let me help you,” I said and took the cup from him. He nodded with gratitude and straightened in his chair. I held it to his lips and let him sip.

  “What’s going on here?” Manny asked Lee.

  “He’s a dangerous man,” Lee said. “A terrorist.” And he turned away and left us alone.

  “So, tell me the story, from the beginning,” I said to Ahmad.

  5

  Sometime between midnight and dawn—maybe it was three, four in the morning—he wasn’t sure—they came for him. Ahmad rented a room in a private house, off campus. He was in a deep sleep.

  Someone slapped his head. He opened his eyes, and a flashlight was shining in his face. It seemed very bright, so bright he blinked and tried to turn away. When he turned, he saw a gun. Ahmad tried to raise his hands. “Put ’em behind you, put ’em behind you.” He was blinded by the light and couldn’t see the man speaking behind the gun.

  He didn’t understand and said, “What? What? Huh?”

  “Your hands, put your fuckin’ hands behind you.”

  The other man—maybe there were just two, maybe more, but at least two—hit him on the forearm with the gun. A short, sharp stroke, and it hurt like hell. He still had the bruise. Manny took a picture of it with his cell phone.

  “Put your fuckin’ hands behind you.” It wasn’t loud, half a whisper, but it was commanding, demanding, certain.

  So he did. He pushed himself up into a sitting position and put his hands behind his back.

  “Turn around. Stand up and turn around. Keep your hands behind you.”

  The light stayed in his face while he rose. He wanted to shield his face with his hand, but he didn’t dare. As soon as he was up and his back was turned, someone grabbed his hands and put PlastiCuffs on his wrists. Then he heard a tearing sound and a moment later realized it was duct tape, and it was slapped across his mouth, and he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to breathe, and he began to panic and tried to struggle, but he was rapped with something hard on the back of his head, and it hurt so much that he fell forward onto the bed. Two of them grabbed him. They grabbed him and yanked him up, and when he was up, one of them let go, and the other put a bag over his head and everything went dark. Even cuffed and with his mouth taped, he hadn’t felt so helpless, totally helpless, as he did then, after he’d been hooded.

  Ahmad slept in his underwear—a pair of boxer shorts and a tank top. That was all he had on when they marched him out. Nobody said a word as they went. They just shoved him along, and he had no choice but to comply, not knowing what he might step on or bang into in his blindness. He was more than just being coerced by them. In his need to be guided, he was dependent on them.

  A car was waiting, a full-sized SUV, judging from the height of it when they shoved him in. Nobody said a word the whole time.

  Then they drove. He didn’t know how long—a half-hour, forty-five minutes, a hundred hours. He tried to calm the panic every time it rose up, to make himself breathe through his nose every time the fear got so great it felt like he would choke on it. Not a word was said by them—except when he tried, through the tape, to make some kind of noise. Then he’d get a slap and a command to shut up.

  They put him, he claimed, on a plane.

  They told him to get out of the car. They walked him across greasy blacktop—he could feel it with bare feet—and walked him up a narrow set of metal steps. They put him in an airplane seat and even fastened his seat belt for him, his hands still lashed behind his back, chafing, his shoulders starting to hurt from the position. The seat felt cold and plasticlike.

  Then he heard the noise of the jets coming on and felt the plane begin to taxi. It stopped, vibrating in place. Then it began to accelerate, which he could feel, and it rose up into the air, tilting him back into his seat, making him feel more bewildered and terrified by the minute.

  When they leveled off, rough hands came and tried to pull his underwear off. Why would anyone want to do that? To do sexual things to him? What was going on? He tried to struggle. To keep them on. Someone slapped him on the head. Then someone punched him, hard, in the stomach. He was completely unprepared, and the fist sank deep. There was pain and shock. He thought he was going to vomit.

  The punch stopped him from struggling, and he allowed the hands to take his underwear off. Then he felt someone touching his genitals. Such a thing had never happened to him before, an unseen stranger touching his penis and testicles. He was sure it was a man. This was not a time or place for women. Ahmad was not some sheepherding Afghani who would be distraught to have a woman see him naked—he was an American, comfortable with himself, his body, with regular sex and everybody doing the humpity-hump on BET. But for a man to be doing this to him was a special invasion, a humiliation.

  But they didn’t want sex, whoever it was doing this. No. He felt something cold and hard touch him, pinch him down there. Little clips.

  Then the pain came.

  Huge, bizarre, tearing pain, right from his own penis, sending spasms and explosions of agony.

  Once. Twice. Three times.

  Then there was a respite. Someone reached up under the hood, grabbed the tape, and ripped it off his mouth. He gulped in air, sobbing for it, but that sucked the hood into his mouth. He spit it out. “Why? Why? Why? What are you doing?”

  The answer came back, “Why did you kill him?”

  “Who? Who? I didn’t kill anyone.”

  They connected t
he wire, and the pain came back.

  Sobbing, catching his breath, writhing when it stopped, he asked, “Why? Why? Please, please stop.”

  The answer came back, “Why? Why? Tell us why you killed him.”

  He denied doing it. He asked them, pleaded with them, to tell him what they were talking about. As soon as he did that, the pain came.

  It went back and forth like that, but eventually they began letting him know the answers they wanted, that he had killed Nathaniel MacLeod, professor of philosophy and religion.

  Why? Why would he kill him?

  They began to feed him the answers to that too, and he began to agree, bit by bit—anything to stop the electrical shock coming up his penis. At some point, he urinated all over his seat. He realized that the seat had a plastic cover on it. Memory is a funny thing. It’s not a filing cabinet with facts slipped in as they arrive. A memory is created every time we remember. So the moments blur and get shuffled around. Maybe he realized that later, maybe at the moment he pissed, when it puddled beneath him, hot and wet, and stayed there, cooling off, stinking and itching. He didn’t know.

  “Alright, alright, you want me to say I killed him. I will say it. Okay. I killed him. I killed him . . . Why? Tell me again, why?”

  “He was a fuckin’ atheist, that’s why.”

  “Okay, I killed him because . . . ”

  “No, you dumb fuck,” a different voice said. “Apostate, he was an apostate.”

  “Apostate, atheist, who gives a fuck.”

  “It’s different.”

  “Okay, because he was an atheist apostate,” the first interrogator said, annoyed at being corrected. “Alright?”

  “Yeah, that’s fine.”

  “That’s why, sure,” Ahmad said. “Please stop.”

  “Fine,” the interrogator said. “You’re going to have to write it down and sign it.”

  “But it’s not true.”

  “Listen to me.” The second guy, the one who said it was “apostate,” not “atheist,” was speaking, sounding friendly, even kind, playing the good cop. “Listen to me, Ahmad. We’re flying east. We can keep on going, and we’ll bring you to Egypt. Turn you over to the Egyptian secret service. Compared to them, we’re sweethearts. We’re like your mother and father. You understand? Once we give you to them, you’ll disappear. Your mother and father, they’ll never hear from you, never know where you went. Write it down, sign it, the plane turns around and brings you home. Home, Ahmad. Just write and sign.”