The Terrorist Next Door

by Sheldon Siegel

“Karim Fayyad is a grad student from Baghdad. He’s house-sitting for a visiting professor who’s out of town. The prof lives at 54th and Drexel.”

  It was a block from Al-Shahid’s mosque and two blocks from the Armory. “What else?” Gold asked.

  “His parents were killed by a U.S. bomb. The Army said it was an accident.”

  It matched Raheem’s story. “Terrorist connections?”

  “Our sources in Baghdad said he contacted an organization that provides justice for people who’ve lost family members.”

  “I take it that’s the current euphemism for revenge?”

  “Yes. The cops got wind of it and detained him for a couple of days. He wasn’t charged. His uncle is a professor at the University of Baghdad.”

  “He arranged to send him here?”

  “Correct. Our people interviewed Fayyadh and his uncle before Fayyadh’s visa was granted. Both denied any involvement with any terrorist organizations in Iraq.”

  “What did you expect them to say?”

  “Homeland Security wouldn’t have let Fayyadh into the country if he was a security risk. Besides, he was sponsored by an American citizen: Professor Raheem.”

  “A lot of people think he’s a terrorist sympathizer.”

  “We’ve been monitoring him for years. We’ve never found any connections. This is Fayyadh’s first visit to the U.S. He’s been here for less than five days. He speaks limited English. It would have been difficult to plant a series of bombs in such a short time.”

  Unless he had help or he set it up from Baghdad. “Are you watching him now?”

  “Yes. We’re also keeping an eye on Raheem. My people have coordinated with yours. We’re monitoring their phones, texts, and e-mails.”

  “That’s great—unless they’re using stolen phones and fake e-mail accounts in Bulgaria. We understand Fayyadh had some communications with Al-Shahid.”

  “They exchanged e-mails. Nothing out of the ordinary—mostly information about housing.”

  “Where do we stand on turning off every cell phone in the Chicago area?”

  “The mayor is getting pushback from the business community.”

  “He’ll get even more if another bomb goes off.”

  “True.” Fong cleared his throat. “The first bomb went off eleven hours ago, Detective. It took us fifty-three hours to catch the guy who tried to blow up the SUV in Times Square.”

  “This guy is a lot smarter. Have you gotten anything more from your profiler?”

  “She still thinks the operation is being run by one guy or a very small group. He isn’t using the Al-Qaeda playbook. He’s meticulous. He isn’t a suicide bomber.”

  “What about the possibility of a copycat?”

  “The construction of the bombs indicates that it’s unlikely—so far. It’s probably only a matter of time before somebody else starts doing it, too.”

  Gold asked about chatter on the terror channels.

  “The usual suspects are talking to each other, but nobody is taking credit for the bombings. Seems they’re trying to figure out who he is, too.”

  You have no clue. “We’re dealing with a freelancer?”

  “We call them ‘Lone Wolves.’ It makes him even more unpredictable.”

  * * *

  Assistant State’s Attorney Laura Silver pulled her Honda Civic into the garage beneath the living room of her brownstone townhouse near the corner of 52nd and University. She turned off the engine, then she checked her BlackBerry. It had been almost a full minute since she’d last looked. She felt a modicum of relief that the ever-demanding red light wasn’t blinking.

  She rechecked her rear-view mirror. Nothing. She looked again to check the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes.

  Could be worse.

  She pulled her keys from the ignition, then she grabbed her laptop. She looked in the mirror again. The old-fashioned street lamps in Hyde Park provided little illumination. The lights were on in the living room of the building across the street. Her neighbors had locked up and hunkered down. Her heart beat faster as she saw a shadow in the bushes next to her driveway.

  Or she thought she did.

  She pressed the button on her remote and closed the garage door. Then she pulled out her BlackBerry and punched in 9-1-1, but she didn’t press Send. She took a breath and reconsidered.

  It could have been a cat. Or the wind. Or her imagination.

  She grabbed the can of mace from her purse. She made a fist and inserted her keys between her fingers the way her self-defense instructor had taught her. It was a rudimentary weapon, but a quick jab to the face might stop an attacker.

  Finally, she got out of the car, squeezed past Jenny’s bike, and opened the door leading into her laundry room. She stepped inside, made sure the door was locked behind her, and headed up the stairs, where she found her babysitter watching the late news on the nineteen-inch flat screen in the kitchen.

  “Everything okay?” she asked Silver. Vanessa Turner was an intense African American woman working on her master’s in child development at the U. of C.

  “Just fine. Is Jenny asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” Silver hesitated. “Did you hear anything outside?”

  “No.” The perceptive grad student eyed her. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then why are you sweating?”

  Chapter 17

  THE “HEART OF SOUTH CHICAGO”

  Gold pressed the Disconnect button on his BlackBerry and pushed out a sigh.

  “Katie Liszewski?” Battle asked. They were driving past the Jackson Park golf course at eight-forty on Monday night.

  Gold nodded. He didn’t want to talk about it.

  “You talk to her a lot.”

  “At least twice a day. I go over there a couple of times a week.”

  “Must be hard.”

  “It is.” Gold shrugged. “What else can I do?”

  Battle had no answer. He shot a glance at Gold, then his eyes returned to the empty road. “Mind if I ask you something?”

  What now? “Ask away.”

  “How long have you and Assistant State’s Attorney Silver been seeing each other?”

  The question caught Gold off guard. “What are you talking about?”

  “Are you going to make me do this the hard way?”

  No. “How could you tell?”

  “By the way you looked at each other.”

  Gold was beginning to appreciate Battle’s powers of observation. “On and off for about six months,” he said. “Mostly on. I’ve known her since we were in law school.”

  “You went to law school?”

  “For one miserable year.”

  “You don’t strike me as a law school guy.”

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “So you decided to become a cop in South Chicago?”

  “It’s what I wanted to do.”

  “And she married somebody else.”

  “The biggest asshole in our class. He does antitrust litigation for a big firm downtown. She finally walked out after she caught him in bed with his secretary—not an earth-shatteringly original scenario.”

  “Nope. Maybe she’ll have a chance to fix her mistake.”

  “We’re taking it slowly. It’s complicated.”

  Battle grinned. “Is she a Cubs fan?”

  “My wife was a Cubs fan.”

  “Then what’s the big deal?”

  How much time do you have? “Lori’s divorce was just finalized. She has a six-year-old daughter, and her mother has Alzheimer’s. I live with my father, who has health issues, too.” Gold left out the real reason: he was still dealing with the death of his wife and unborn daughter.

  “Maybe it is complicated,” Battle said. “I hope you can work things out.”

  “So do I.” Gold hesitated. “Does anybody else know about this?”

  “Not as far as I know.” Battle smiled. “I’ll keep
it to myself.”

  They drove in silence for a moment. “Mind if I ask you something?” Gold said.

  “Ask away.”

  “Why did you go to bat for me with the chief?”

  Battle’s expression suggested that he hadn’t expected the question. “This case seemed important to you.”

  “It is.”

  “Then it’s important to me. And Christina Ramirez was my neighbor, too.”

  Gold lowered the passenger-side window of the Crown Vic and inhaled the warm evening air. The thunderstorms had passed, and the setting sun was blocked by the mid-rise apartment buildings on the west side of South Shore Drive. It was like a snow day in the middle of the summer. There wasn’t a single car on the road or pedestrian on the sidewalk as they drove through the once-fashionable area known as Jackson Park Highlands. To their left were the manicured fairways of the South Shore Cultural Center, the public golf course along the lakefront opened in 1906 as the South Shore Country Club. It was sold to the Park District when the Country Club disbanded in the seventies.

  “You ever play over here?” Gold asked.

  Battle shook his head. “I’m not a golfer. The founders of the Country Club would be doing cartwheels in their graves if they saw me strolling down their fairways.”

  “They didn’t let Jews in either. After they sold out to the Park District, my dad played golf for the only time in his life with three other teachers from Bowen: another Jewish guy, an African American, and a Mexican. I think he shot a hundred and twenty-seven. He had a great time.”

  Battle smiled. “I’m going to like your dad. Michelle and Barack had their wedding reception in the ballroom. Michelle grew up a few blocks from here. I knew her father.”

  “Times change.”

  They continued along South Shore Drive past the rundown apartment buildings overlooking Rainbow Beach, the site of a near riot in 1961 when a handful of African American families staged a “wade in” to integrate the only strip of open coastline between the Country Club and the old steel mills. They passed Saint Michael the Archangel, the magnificent Catholic church built in the Gothic Revival style in 1907 as the seat of Paul Rhode, the first American bishop of Polish descent. Its steeple was still the tallest on the South Side.

  The houses and two-flats became more neglected as they drove into the working-class area known as the Bush. The Irish, German, Swedish, Polish, Croatian, Slavic, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants who had found their way to Chicago’s Southeast Side in the late nineteenth century had built communities with names such as Irondale, Slag Valley, the East Side, South Deering, and Hegewisch. They worked grueling hours in the mills at the mouth of the Calumet River, the largest of which was the U.S. Steel South Works, a self-contained city on six hundred acres of prime lakefront property. They saved their pennies and went to church or synagogue every week. If they were a little flush on Saturday night, they’d treat themselves to a show at one of South Chicago’s numerous theaters, and have a couple of pops at one of its countless saloons. Their kids were told to keep their mouths shut except to say “please,” “thank you,” “yes sir,” and “no sir.

  They crossed the Metra tracks and made their way to Commercial Avenue, where limp green banners on the lampposts bravely proclaimed that they were driving through the “Heart of South Chicago.” Despite the efforts of an idealistic community organizer named Barack Obama, the shopping boulevard that once housed dozens of thriving stores, auto dealerships, banks, theaters, hotels, and restaurants was now home to a ragtag lineup of liquor stores, currency exchanges, burrito stands, cut-rate groceries, burnt-out buildings, and empty lots. Most of the descendants of the original immigrant families had fled to the suburbs in the sixties and seventies, giving way to a second influx of newcomers—mainly Mexican and African American. By the time U.S. Steel finally shuttered the South Works in 1992, South Chicago had become a crime-ridden, impoverished, and forgotten shadow of its proud past. The South Works site became a ghostly expanse of toxic-laden emptiness. The huge smokestacks were a fading memory, and the sky no longer glowed reddish orange when they tapped the massive furnaces at midnight.

  Gold pointed at a nondescript building housing a Dollar Store on the corner of 87th and Commercial, where the hand-lettered signs were in Spanish. It was down the street from Hyman’s Ace Hardware and Auto Supply, whose founder had been the best man at the wedding of Gold’s grandfather. “That’s where my great-grandfather had his store.”

  “In that building?” Battle said.

  “No. They tore it down when I was a kid.”

  Battle saw the neighborhood as it was. Gold could still envision how it had been.

  “How old was your great-grandfather when he moved here?” Battle asked.

  “Nineteen. He came over in steerage on a cargo ship with four thousand people.”

  Battle listened attentively as Gold laid out an abbreviated family history. In 1894, his great-grandfather had found his way from a shtetl in a backward corner of what was now Belarus. The man born as Chaim Garber was re-christened as Harry Gold by an immigration clerk at Ellis Island. Harry opened a dry goods store at 87th and Commercial. When he died in 1919, his only son, Marvin, took over the business. He and his wife, Miriam, bought a traditional bungalow on 89th, between Muskegon and Escanaba, a block from Bowen High. During the Depression, Marvin had to choose between shutting the store or losing the family home. He kept the house, and he spent the next three decades selling men’s suits at the Goldblatt’s department store that anchored the corner of 91st and Commercial for eight decades. The site was now a strip mall with a currency exchange, a burrito shop, and a coin-op laundry.

  Gold’s father, also named Harry, was a radio operator during the Korean War. After his discharge, he took advantage of the GI Bill and graduated from the U. of I. in 1955. He moved back to South Chicago and spent the next forty-seven years teaching science at Bowen. Harry and his wife, Lil, raised their two sons in the house that Harry inherited from his parents.

  Gold glanced up at the imposing black brick steeple of Immaculate Conception, the Polish Catholic church where many of his great-grandfather’s customers had been baptized. They turned left at 89th, then made a right onto Houston. A half-block south, Gold pointed at an unpretentious yellow brick structure with two Moorish copper spires and ornamental red brick trim wedged between a couple of crumbling two-flats. A flickering neon sign announced that it was the Christ Life Church. A closer look revealed the silhouette of Hebrew letters above the arched doorway. “Ever been inside?” Gold asked.

  “Many times,” Battle said. “I’ve known Pastor Adesanya since the church was on 79th.”

  Gold also knew Pastor Emmanuel Adesanya, who was a civil engineer for the city when he wasn’t saving souls. In 1998, the native of Nigeria and his wife had opened a ministry in a storefront in Chatham. In 2004, they raised enough cash for a down payment on the old synagogue in South Chicago. “Do you know Rabbi Funnye?”

  Battled nodded. “Everybody knows Rabbi Funnye.”

  Rabbi Capers C. Funnye, Jr. was born in South Carolina in 1952. His family moved to Chicago’s South Side when he was in grammar school, and he was raised in an African Methodist Episcopalian church. He discovered Judaism while studying at Howard University, and he converted a few years later. He was ordained in 1985, and eventually became the first African American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis.

  Rabbi Funnye’s first pulpit was Congregation Bikur Cholim, the little synagogue on Houston Street that boasted more than 500 members when Gold’s great-grandfather was its president in the early 1900s. From the late twenties until the mid-fifties, it had been the home of the legendary Rabbi Hirsh Harrison. After the Jews fled to the suburbs in the sixties, Bikur Cholim had to share its building with a Baptist Church to make ends meet. The charismatic Rabbi Funnye declared the block surrounding his temple a gang-free zone, and he built his predominantly African American congregation by the force of his personality. When his expandin
g flock outgrew its modest quarters, he orchestrated a merger with another African American synagogue. Eventually, they sold the building on Houston Street to Pastor Adesanya’s church, and Rabbi Funnye’s congregation bought a larger building at 66th and Kedzie that once housed the Lawn Manor Synagogue. Nowadays, Rabbi Funnye was the Senior Rabbi of Beth Shalom B’Nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation, one of the largest African American synagogues in the U.S. He also happened to be Michelle Obama’s first cousin.

  “What does Bikur Cholim mean?” Battle asked.

  “Visiting the sick. Chartered in 1888. My great-grandfather was the president when they put up this building in 1902. My father was still on the board when they finally sold it. It was the oldest continuously operating synagogue in Chicago.”

  “You guys really were here first.”

  They continued down Houston and turned onto 91st. They drove past the refurbished South Chicago branch library where Lil Gold had taught generations of South Chicago children about the joys of reading. Across the street was the South Chicago Y, where Gold and Paulie had played countless hours of basketball. It looked the same as it did when Gold’s grandfather had attended its dedication in 1926.

  Battle found a parking space near the corner of 91st and Brandon across the street from the brick façade of Our Lady of Guadalupe. “I know this is going to be difficult,” he said, “but we need to keep it short.”

  * * *

  The red dot stopped at the corner of 91st and Brandon. The young man had guessed right. Gold and Battle had made the pilgrimage to South Chicago to visit the mother of the victim at the Art Institute.

  Impressive.

  He fingered the cell phone inside his pocket. His instructors had told him to be respectful of the dead. He would give Gold and Battle a few minutes.

  Then he would resume his mission.

  Chapter 18

  “WE WON’T MISS NEXT TIME”

  Gold took a seat next to Christina Ramirez’s mother in the worn front pew of the musty church in Chicago’s oldest Mexican parish. “I’m so terribly sorry,” he whispered.

  Theresa Ramirez clasped her hands tightly as she fought back tears. “Thank you, David.”