by Amy Waldman
As she picked her way toward the exit, steering clear of theater equipment and set pieces, she realized Alyssa Spier was with her. Claire quickened her pace, only to be followed down halls, around corners, out of the building, and into the parking lot. She could hear the footsteps behind her, the panting—the reporter’s legs were short—the endless questions: “Mrs. Burwell, what’s his name? Is it a him? What’s the jury going to do? What’s your response to the anger in that auditorium? Mrs. Burwell! Mrs. Burwell!”
Near her car Claire increased her pace, tucked her hand in her purse to locate her keys, pressed the unlock button, twisted into the driver’s seat, and slammed the door, praying it didn’t catch the reporter’s fingers. Spier shouted questions through the window, and when Claire pulled away, Spier was in the rearview mirror, still shouting, although by then she could no longer be heard.
Claire drove up Manhattan in the dark. The wind roughed facets into the black river, its foreboding look coloring Claire’s thoughts.
The radio was replaying Governor Bitman’s remarks. Now Claire understood why the crowd had been so riled up. But what was Bitman, whose campaigns Cal, then Claire, had donated to, suggesting? She was supposed to rubber-stamp whatever the jury did, or so the jury had been told. Claire saw that, inside and outside the jury, she was fighting alone.
It was after ten when she made it back to Chappaqua. As she walked to the front door from her car, she spotted what looked like a homeless man’s encampment beneath the copper beech. Moving closer, she saw, in the milky light cast by house and moon, a box of Raisin Bran (“Daddy’s favorite,” she had told the children, although she was no longer sure that Cal had loved Raisin Bran, only that saying so got William and Penelope to eat it); a pile of books pillaged from Cal’s study; a stray tennis racket; his $2,000 wedding tuxedo—all of it arranged around the cairn. A child’s necromancy: William believing he could coax the stones to life, or his father home.
“For all we know some one-eyed, bearded killer wearing pajamas came up with this—that’s what’s scary,” Alyssa had told Lou Sarge on his radio program that morning.
Said killer was now before her, about to reveal his identity to waiting reporters, and he didn’t look the part. He had a beard, but it was tastefully trimmed. His suit looked expensive, and his bearing, unlike the grasping, too-eager-to-please Indians in her neighborhood, was haughty. Next to him sat a dark-haired, foreign-looking woman in a cardinal-red suit that suggested she was not only comfortable with attention but craved it. Men, some of them in Islamic costumes, and a few women in headscarves, stood stiffly against the wall behind them, looking like a police lineup of terrorism suspects. Alyssa gnawed her cuticles until she tasted metal. Blood.
She was in the offices of the Muslim American Coordinating Council, an organization she had never heard of until that morning. The entire New York press corps seemed to be crammed in with her. Together, the reporters endured the introduction of all twelve members of the council, who then took their seats.
The main attraction waited for the rustling to die down before holding up the Post with the picture of the ski-mask-clad face. “My name is Mohammad Khan, and I believe this is meant to be me.” Flashbulbs popped, cameras clicked—for a moment, the only sounds in the room.
“I am an architect and an American,” he said. “I also happen to be a Muslim. I was born in Virginia and have lived most of my adult life in New York. In Manhattan. I entered the memorial competition because I believed my idea would provide a way for the families, the nation to mourn and to remember all that was lost that day, and also to heal. Apparently the jury agreed: everyone knows by now they chose my design.” He gestured at illustrations of a garden, placed on an easel to his right. “It seems they just have a problem with the designer.”
Alyssa scribbled fast, not wanting to miss a word, although her tape recorder was running and she knew his words would be replayed dozens of times on television. It was an exercise in redundancy: there had to be fifty reporters and cameras in here, all itching to report the same news, the same words.
After a pause, Khan continued: “I have been asked to withdraw from the competition, or to remain anonymous rather than have my name associated with the design, or to partner with someone else who could submit under their name. But I will not withdraw, and I will not make any of these accommodations. To do so would be to betray not only myself but this country’s credo that merit matters, not name or religion or origins. The jury wanted this design; the designer comes with it. And if now you don’t want the design—”
His voice had risen—the tone of impending harangue. “He’s looking for a fight,” someone near Alyssa whispered. But the woman next to Khan leaned into the microphone with a look at him and said, “The process needs to move forward as it is supposed to, as is spelled out in the guidelines for the memorial selection.”
“Who are you?” someone called out.
“My attorney, Laila Fathi,” Khan said, calm now. He spent some time discussing his design—some sort of garden, with the names of the dead scrolled on the surrounding walls. The note-taking slowed, the room deflated, the reporters pranced in place. No one cared about the design, Alyssa thought. Didn’t he get that?
“Any additional questions can be directed to Ms. Fathi,” he said, gesturing at her before rising and heading toward a side door. The order in the room collapsed. A thud in her back jolted Alyssa forward; a fat cameraman shoved by. “Move!” he shouted. Before she could reply she was hit again and again by waves of men gunning for Khan, trampling anyone in the way.
“Fuck!”
“He’s over there!”
“Get him!”
“You’re in my shot!”
“Motherfucker! That’s my bad leg! Motherfucker!”
He was gone. In the stampede the easel had been knocked over, sending the illustrations to the floor. One of them bore the brown imprint of a pixilated rubber sole. “Get a shot of that,” Alyssa ordered her photographer. More dramatic than the drawings on the easel—his dream trod upon. Serves him right, she thought, except she wasn’t sure if it was her thought at all or her imagination of what her readers thought.
Her hands full with notebook and tape recorder, Alyssa wiped her forearm across her face, trying to stanch the sweat stinging her eyes. It was always the same in these media mosh pits—the close, hot air; the chafing bodies.
“Guess you got scooped by your own subject,” Jeannie Sciorfello, a Daily News reporter, said, and it was all Alyssa could do not to punch her.
Back at the office, she filled a bag with ice and tried to drape it across her bruised back. She wished she could ice her ego. Nameless, Khan had been hers. Now he was everyone’s. Clearly he thought he could seize the initiative by unveiling himself. Alyssa chuckled at the phrase, then realized it would make great cover type: “Muslim Unveiled.” They could run the ski-mask photo and Khan’s side by side. She sent a quick e-mail to her editor, hoping the cleverness would hide her lack of an exclusive.
After filing her story, she began investigating Khan. The paper had already dispatched reporters to the architecture firm where he worked and to his home, so she turned to the computer, Googled his name, and got 134,000 hits. “Mohammad Khan”: the “John Smith” of the Muslim world. The glowing mentions of the correct Mohammad Khan’s architecture would make for mealy copy at best. The rest of the entries referred to rulers and doctors named Mohammad Khan, businessmen and villagers, heroes and war criminals, a global community in name only. She skimmed past intriguing tales (“Taxi driver Mohammad Khan listened to his conscience when he decided to return a bag containing gold ornaments to its owner”) and seductive scraps (“Mohammad Khan, a son of Firoz, devoted all his time to pleasures”). There was an order to the order, a hidden hierarchy, but only Google or its algorithms knew it.
She began a public records search. Criminal databases yielded nothing, but business records turned up a K/K Architects, registered by a Mohammad Khan and a Thomas Kroll
. Kroll, she found through a quick Web search, worked at ROI, too, which meant this must be her Khan. Relief surged through her—it was something—then panic that other reporters were on the same trail. Unable to reach Kroll at ROI, she found his home listing: a Brooklyn address that matched the one given for K/K Architects. She picked up the phone to dial, then thought better of it. If he hung up, she was out of luck. Heart thumping hard, she took the subway out, praying that no one would get there before her.
Thomas Kroll lived in a dowager of a building, stately at birth, shabby with age, on Eastern Parkway. The lobby was dim; the doorman, Indian or something, was resolute: “No, no, madam, you cannot go up without announcement.”
“He’s expecting me,” she said, then, “It’s a surprise.” She considered slipping him a twenty but worried it could backfire. As he picked up the phone to call Kroll, she read the doorman’s ledger upside down and saw the apartment, 8D. She headed for the elevator at a fast walk; as she had hoped, he put the phone down to follow her. “Madam, excuse me, you cannot just go, madam, ex—” The elevator doors clipped his words.
By the time she reached the apartment, a woman—the wife, she guessed—was waiting in the doorway, arms folded.
“Who are you?” The voice was angry, the look distraught. No, disputatious. Her hair teetered in a lopsided bun, and her right hand gripped a red toy car like a weapon.
“Alyssa Spier, New York Post.” Uttered with the authority of the Internal Revenue Service, as if they had no right to refuse her.
“Great, Thomas, it’s already started,” the woman called back into the apartment. “The tabloids are here. At our house.” She turned back to Alyssa with a venomous stare.
A man with brown hair flopping in defeated eyes came to the door. “You’d better go,” he said. “We’ve got no part in this.”
“I found a business listing with your name on it, and Mohammad Khan’s,” she said, flipping through her notepad: “K/K Architects.”
His milky skin paled further. “You’re not going to print that, are you?”
“Why?” she asked, innocently. “Boss doesn’t know?”
“Shit,” Thomas said to his wife, and they made way for her.
The living room, down a long, claustrophobic hall, was strewn with toys: trains, blocks, Legos. Children, three of them, seemed to be break-dancing off the crayoned walls. Alyssa had assumed that architects, being professionals like doctors and lawyers, made a lot of money; the cramped, careworn feel of the place surprised her. Did Khan live like this, too? Probably not, since, her research showed, he was unmarried, as was she. But with his style, he probably didn’t live like her, either.
The little girl grinned at her, revealing a row of missing front teeth. Alyssa fake-smiled while looking for a clear space to sit.
“Alice,” Thomas said, “maybe you could take the children in the back?”
A baleful look, then the posse was rounded up.
“She’s upset,” Thomas said quietly, and unnecessarily, once they were gone. “Worried it could put the kids in danger.”
Alyssa fumbled for soothing words. She wasn’t going to help matters by putting him in the paper, which reminded her that she needed a photographer. After sending a quick text, she accepted the water he offered in a smudged glass.
“About the business registration,” Thomas began. “I’d rather you not mention it.”
“No need,” she said, noting his immediate gratitude, “if I have better stuff for my story.”
He nodded. But when she tried to ask about Khan’s decision to enter, or whether Thomas had helped with the design, words abandoned him. He just kept looking at her, his eyes like blue snaps. And suddenly she knew. “He didn’t tell you anything, did he?” she said. “He didn’t warn you this was coming.”
Bull’s-eye. Kroll looked down. The bald spot lurking within the full hair reminded her of the blank spot in Manhattan, its aerial view, and a fleeting urge to reach out and touch his head came over her.
“This must be difficult,” she said, with a compassion that surprised her.
“He’s my friend,” he said finally, his voice hoarse. “Not just my partner. My best friend.”
Alyssa couldn’t tell whether he said this to emphasize the depth of the betrayal or to warn her that he would remain loyal despite it. She did a mental dog paddle, trying to think how to proceed. It wouldn’t count as news to her editor that Khan had screwed his partner, but it told her quite a bit about Khan. He was selfish, a pronouncement she made not in judgment but in recognition. He was as ambitious, as competitive as she was.
“Well,” she said, “why don’t you tell me a little about that friendship.” He looked warily at her. “Help us understand who this man is.”
“Right now I don’t entirely understand that myself,” he said, and she reached for her notebook. Could she use that? She would.
“Mo’s got a strong personality,” he said.
“Mo?”
“That’s what everyone calls him.”
Everyone but her. Mo didn’t have the ring—theological, historical, hysterical—of Mohammad.
“Look, I’m not pleased he didn’t bother to fill me in on this whole thing.” A good sound bite. “But as far as I can see, he won the competition fair and square.” Not so good. “There’s no argument for taking it away from him.”
“Is he religious?”
“Mo? Hardly.” Thomas chuckled at the thought. “He’s way more decadent than I am.” She underlined “decadent.”
“Decadent in what way?” she asked, as if they were sharing a joke.
“Normal,” he said, cocking his head to examine her from a different angle. “That’s the better word. Normal.”
“Like with girls? Drugs? Alcohol?”
“My point was, he isn’t religious,” Thomas said, the eyes now mistrustful slits. “He isn’t some crazy Muslim. And he’s fucking talented—make sure you print that.”
Somehow she was prompting Kroll to rally to Khan’s defense. She wanted his disappointment, Khan’s backstabbing, his compromising of a friendship and this all-American family. She wanted the wife, who she guessed would be happy to plumb those depths with her.
“So he never told you he was entering? Isn’t that a little odd—I mean, you’re planning to start a firm together, such good friends, right?” There was shrieking from the bedroom; she let it play out. “I would guess you collaborate on everything.”
Thomas reddened a bit and began to slide his wedding ring on and off. The masculine ego—one had to handle it with tongs. She couldn’t go too far in the interview with the humiliating aspect of this, the best friend who was duped by his buddy. “I mean, I’m sure he had his reasons,” she said, “but what do you think they were?”
“I don’t know,” he said, wearily. “I’d like to ask him that myself.”
The phone had begun ringing during their talk. Alice ignored it, and Thomas finally rose to answer. “How many?” Alyssa heard him say. “I see. No, no—don’t let them up.”
The competition had arrived. The interview was over. Alyssa coached Thomas on how to fend off the other reporters, suggesting he talk to their co-op board about hiring temporary extra security and training the doorman to be more vigilant, as if her presence were his fault. “The two words ‘No comment’ are your best friends,” she instructed. “You have every right to use them, and nothing to gain from talking. To anyone else, I mean.”
She said goodbye, patting the head of the little boy, the eldest, who had come out from the back. He twisted away and looked at her with suspicion. Those clear blue eyes, their seraphic reproach. She never had been good with children.
In the lobby reporters were pestering the doorman, who had grown so flustered he was mixing up his “sirs” and “madams” and threatening to call the police. They recognized her and hurried over. “What apartment? What apartment?” She shrugged as if she didn’t know, then said, “Don’t bother, there’s nothing, it’s a dry sponge
.” She emerged from the dark lobby. The sunlight made her blink. Across the street she saw green—Prospect Park, Brooklyn’s lungs. She breathed air into her own.
10
At Mr. Chowdhury’s fish-and-grocery store, Asma loaded up on wheat flour, rice, tomatoes, milk, cooking oil, four kinds of vegetables, and the Bengali-language papers. There seemed to be a new paper for Bangladeshis every week, which made her proud of how literate her people were, unless she was in a dark mood, in which case it only reflected their divisiveness. She paid for her papers along with her groceries, pleased not to be one of those cheapies who stood at the checkout counter reading the papers for free like it was a library, although she had to confess that until her windfall, she had done just that.
Much of the news the papers carried was about Bangladesh, and most of it was worrying: the political fights, this one and that one accused of corruption or jailed, the violence, the two lady leaders and rivals poking each other in the eye at every chance. Floods washed over the land; people sought higher ground, saw their homes swept away, rebuilt. Ferries sank like stones. A strike crippled a city until it shook loose from whatever cause had grabbed its leg. Amazing how chaotic and impossible things could seem when they were concentrated into a few pages of black-and-white print, instead of diluted into long days of red chilies drying in the sun, light dancing on the water, tales of marriages arranged and awry, the tunes of Runa Laila, her niece’s sweet laugh, her mother’s spicy fish, her father’s comic stories of waking the sleeping guards at his rice mill, the swaddled peace of daydreams. The worst things then had their balance, could be put in their place.
The papers’ local news, like local life, tended to be blander. Changes in immigration rules. New Bangladeshi businesses or local associations in the New York area. Bangladeshis victimized by crimes or, in smaller type, arrested for them. Felicitations from local politicians for holidays and festivals. For a while after the attack, of course, the content had included stories about new immigration difficulties, threats to mosques, the detention of Muslims. But over the last year that sort of news had started to fall off, as if little by little everything might be returning to normal.
