Man of the Hour

by Peter Blauner

  Meanwhile, Larry Simonetti was leaning closer and closer to David as Sara Kidreaux tried to interview them. After all the bad publicity of recent months, he was clinging to his famous teacher like a life raft.

  “Because that’s what it’s all about, Sara,” he was saying. “Education. And the kids. Making sure they get what they need.”

  “Absolutely.” David took the occasion to move up right behind Larry and put a hand on his shoulder. “And that’s why I was so glad to hear about the new books and special programs we’re getting in next year’s budget.”

  Larry’s waxy complexion turned even paler and his eyebrows shot up toward his hairline.

  “Riiight.” A saliva bubble formed at the end of his tongue. “David, don’t you have a class you have to teach now?”

  Ninth period, David’s last class of the day, was pandemonium. Not only were three camera crews set up at the back of the room to watch him teach, there were twice as many kids as usual. At least seventy of them sucking up the oxygen, sharing desks, turning around and hoping some part of their faces or bodies would wind up on the evening news. A few were even crouching at his feet to fit into the classroom, as if he were some aging rock star or spiritual leader of the moment giving a college lecture.

  “He was a legitimate hero,” David read aloud from A Farewell to Arms, “who bored everyone he met …”

  “Hold it, hold it!”

  Sara Kidreaux suddenly rose from the back of the class and made her way toward him between the tightly packed seats, a vision in red with sculpted blond hair.

  “What’s the matter?” David looked down at her.

  “I’m sorry.” She smiled, embarrassed, and looked back at one of her technical people, an enormously fat young man sniffling in overalls. “My sound man has a sinus infection and that last part you said isn’t going to come out on the track. Could I ask you to do it over again?”

  “Well, I, uh … hate to interrupt the flow of the class.”

  “Please.” She stood on her tiptoes again, looking eager and adorably hapless. “It would really make our lives easier.”

  “Well …”

  “Yeah, go ahead, chief!” The kids were into it, easily sliding into the roles of patient movie extras.

  “Yeah, we don’t mind!” a girl called out.

  “Do what you gotta do, man.” A macho go-along-get-along kid’s voice that David didn’t recognize.

  He shrugged, wanting to please everyone. “All right, I guess I could do it again.”

  Sara Kidreaux gave a little shiver of delight. “Oh, one more thing.”

  She lightly licked her fingertips and smoothed back a lock of his hair.

  “Aa-wooo-woo!” The kids loved it, supplying an overlay of sexual tension that David wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Sara Kidreaux blushed and wiggled just slightly as she returned to her seat.

  “Anyway.” David clapped his hands and moved back to the blackboard. “I think what Hemingway is saying is that a hero becomes a bore unless we can …”

  “I’m sorry, again,” Sara Kidreaux called out from behind her tremendous sound man. “That time you had your back to the camera. Can we try it just once more?”

  David started to protest and say he felt like a performing bear, but something stopped him. On the one hand, television and the rest of the electronic media were everything he’d been fighting against. They shortened his students’ attention spans, rotted their brains. His own son was affected. “Daddy, when can I get Playstation?” Arthur had asked the other day. “Who’s stronger, Batman or Superman?”

  On the other hand, it was irresistible. A part of him cried out for all this attention and acclaim. The same part that had sat longing to be noticed in the lifeguard chair, back in Atlantic Beach all those years ago. Or had stood in the outfield, waiting for someone to hit him the ball. Now here was the ball.

  “Just one more, for me?” Sara Kidreaux begged with long lashes fluttering.

  “Go ’head, chief!” the kids cheered him on.

  “Yeah, well, I guess, all right.” He took a deep breath and began again. “A hero is a bore …”

  He stepped out into the hall afterward, feeling half elated and half abashed. How could he have given in so easily? But then again, how could he have held out? He might not have done much actual teaching today, but for once he had everyone listening, even the unreachables.

  Michelle Richardson brushed past him, saying he had a message from Noonan, the police detective. The words barely sank in. Three kids were waiting to talk to him by the library entrance across the hallway. He knew what two of them wanted. Scott Cunningham, a lanky science-obsessed senior whose mother and father had both died of AIDS, needed help filling out a college financial aid application. Next to him, Roberto Suarez, an aspiring artist from sixth period, wanted David to help him persuade his father to let him finish school, instead of making him go to work in the family fish store.

  But Elizabeth Hamdy was standing a little bit behind the two boys, and David still didn’t know what she was after. She looked as though she was lost in a private conversation with herself, as she stared down at the floor, contemplating her skates lying there.

  “I’m sorry about before.” He started to approach her first. “We really do have to talk. Your brother came by the other day.”

  “I know.” She threw back her head and the sides of her scarf flapped like wings. “That’s part of what I want to talk to you about.”

  They started to meet in the center of the corridor. But then Larry Simonetti suddenly came high-stepping down the hall, his wing tips making a busy slap-slap on the floor.

  “Hey, David, you’re not going to believe this,” he said sotto voce as he moved between them. “We’ve got CNN and Dan Rather downstairs.”

  “Okay, but I’ve got to talk to Elizabeth and then Scottie and then Roberto.” He threw the boys encouraging glances, letting them know he hadn’t forgotten them.

  Larry gripped his arm. “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time. We’ve got CNN and Dan Rather.”

  “Jesus, Larry.” David shook him loose. “You sound like one of my kids.”

  But Elizabeth was already starting to withdraw, while Scott and Roberto peeled off in the other direction.

  “Hey, where are you guys going?” David called after them.

  “You’re still busy,” Elizabeth muttered as she faded down the hall, turned the corner, and disappeared.

  A muted sense of having betrayed someone lingered with David for a few seconds. He’d always prided himself on being available to the kids, even giving out his home phone to the worst of the knuckleheads and telling them to call any time something was bothering them. But today he’d let them down. Despite all his intentions, he’d allowed himself to get glossed, glamorized, and artificially sweetened by the media.

  “Okay, let’s move.” Larry was pulling him over to the stairwell. “We don’t want to lose these guys.”

  Though he was a full five inches taller, David allowed himself to be dragged along. It was useless to resist. A part of him was already out there, being beamed up and carried aloft on the airwaves, rising above the boardwalk and Mermaid Avenue, over the skyscraper canyons and tenements of Manhattan, out past the farms of New Jersey and Pennsylvania and into the Great American heartland. Montana cattle looked up to see him passing and Pacific volcanoes yawned below. By nightfall, people in Budapest and Beijing would know his name.

  “Hey, Larry, am I at least going to get some extra books for the kids out of this?”

  “We’ll talk about it later, smartass. Unless you want to go to your girlfriends in the media first.”

  David followed him down the stairs, glimpsing a patch of sky through a smudged window. It was happening.

  Little bits of him were raining all over the world.

  16

  THE NEXT MORNING, Judy Mandel from the Trib burst into the public information office on the thirteenth floor of One Police Plaza with her skirt riding
high and the top three buttons of her blouse undone.

  “Goddamn it! Goddamn it! How come no one in this office has a tampon?”

  John LeVecque, the former Post reporter who’d recently been named deputy commissioner for public information, looked up, startled and flustered.

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you on that count,” he said, reddening slightly.

  “Why don’t they have tampon dispensers in the ladies’ room in this building? Don’t you think they should?”

  She’d decided to throw him off balance by treating him the way cops had treated her for the last eighteen months. Like a rube. Except instead of talking about great blow jobs from strippers or bending a bit at the waist and farting for the amusement of everyone else present, she decided to stick her womanhood right in his face. It was no good being shy around these characters. You had to show you were tougher man them, that nothing they could do would shock you. In fact, you were better off trying to shock them first.

  “So?” she said, helping herself to a seat before his desk. “When are you guys going to announce it was a bomb?”

  LeVecque leaned back from the desk and made a big show of putting down the five-dollar cigar he’d been smoking, obviously recognizing there was a kind of territorial imperative at stake here.

  “It’s Murphy, right?”

  “Mandel.”

  “Why am I talking to you, instead of Lippman?”

  Ernie Lippman was the paper’s regular police reporter, working out of the shack on the second floor. A burnout who was more interested in fly-fishing and dating dead cops’ wives than in doing his job. It had been easier than she’d expected to get her editor to wire around him once she’d convinced Nazi she was the girl for the job.

  “Lippman’s chasing rainbows and bluefish.” She crossed her legs and swung an ankle. “So should I repeat my question?”

  “Yeah, why don’t you?”

  She flopped her notebook down into her lap as the fax machine in the corner beeped. “Everyone knows there was a bomb on the school bus. Why are you guys ass-dragging on announcing it?”

  “You know, that’s very naive. You don’t know how naive that sounds. I never would have asked a question like that. We can’t just pull results out of a hat. It takes days for the lab tests to come back.”

  She tensed her eyelids for just a second. Oh look at him, sitting there with his thinning blond hair, his little cigar, and his puffy I-gotta-start-playing-racquetball-again tummy protruding. An aging preppy thinking he’s such a tough guy. She’d heard about this LeVecque already, that he’d been a complete buff and badge-sniffer when he was a reporter, ready to go into the tank for the police on any story. Word was, he rode around town with a police scanner and a cherry-top in his Volvo. The kind of middle-class guy who’d always wanted to be a cop, but his parents wouldn’t let him.

  She had to strategize here, to get around him. Think like a boxer, Bill Ryan once told her. Use what you have. Even if it’s your body instead of gloves. Bob and weave. Feint and jab. Don’t be afraid to get down and dirty. Manipulate the manipulators. God knows, the people you’re writing about won’t hesitate to do the same to you.

  “So I heard a rumor that it was actually a fairly small explosive charge that happened to catch the fuel tank,” she said, leaning forward and showing just a little cleavage.

  “Could be.” LeVecque lowered his eyes for a second and then raised them.

  Brian Wallace, one of the sergeants who took calls in the outer office, walked in and dropped a file on LeVecque’s desk. A big, tall guy with a walrus mustache and his tie askew, he didn’t offer LeVecque so much as a nod, but he gave Judy a long once-over twice, which she tried to accept as her natural due.

  For the briefest of seconds, she felt sorry for LeVecque. Quitting his newspaper job and going to work for the cops had left him a man without a country. Reporters certainly didn’t trust him, but there was no way cops would ever fully accept him either. It didn’t matter that the public information job had always been filled by civilians; he hadn’t come up through the ranks.

  “So do you have any suspects?” she asked after the sergeant left.

  LeVecque put his brown loafers up on his desk, trying to reassert control. “How can there be suspects if we aren’t saying it’s a bomb?”

  “Well, are you looking at anybody?”

  “We’re not prepared to say at this time.”

  Clearly he had no idea. She was going to have to try to embarrass him into finding out what was going on. When she’d approached that weird-looking Detective Noonan on the scene, he’d just given her that dead-eyed stare and the public information office phone number. She was stuck with LeVecque as her conduit, for the moment.

  “So when will you know?” she asked.

  “When will I know what?” He affected distraction, looking at the bank of televisions along the office wall.

  “Whether it was a bomb or not? Whether this is going to be a criminal investigation.”

  “Oh.”

  She was going to have to keep sparring with him, and that was all there was to it. He had the weight of a huge institution behind him and she just had her imperfect little body and a notebook. She felt like she was facing a thirty-foot-high brick wall. She was either going to have to scale it or try to crash right through it. Otherwise, she was going to have to go back to the office and face Nazi and the Death of Hope empty-handed. And then it would be back to Lotto mania. Somehow she had to get this LeVecque to like her.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said, sitting up straight in his chair. “Why don’t you check back with me in a couple of days?”

  “You mean, over the weekend?”

  “Whatever.” He let his voice trail off. “I don’t care.”

  To his right, the TV screens were showing that one image of the burnt bus in front of the high school over and over, as if it were on a tape loop.

  “Just tell me this,” she said. “Are you looking at terrorist groups?”

  “We’re looking at everyone,” he sighed, turning back to her. “Give it enough time, we’ll be looking at you. Reporters are behind everything.”

  She smiled, more at the concept of the joke than at the joke itself. “So you’re not going to give this to the Post or the News before you give it to me, are you?”

  “Everyone’s going to find out at the same time. We don’t play any favorites here.”

  Though even a small child could easily discern that was not true, and, in fact, had never been true of the office. There were always favorites, reporters who got the stories first, because they’d written positively about the department in the past. His own career was proof of that.

  “Well, don’t lose my number,” she said, rising and smoothing her skirt.

  “Oh, I won’t. And by the way …” He mustered up his nerve. “What about your, uh, tampon?”

  “I don’t think I need it anymore.” She paused in the doorway, the convulsive racket of the outer office going on behind her. “By the way, how is it that the teacher knew enough to keep the kids off the bus for the extra thirty seconds or whatever it was until the thing went off?”

  “How should I know?” He lowered his eyes and tried to look busy moving pens and paper clips around his desk top. “Dumb luck. Isn’t that always the answer?”

  “Is it?”

  17

  “CAN I OFFER YOU gentlemen some coffee?” Elizabeth Hamdy said.

  “It’s half-past four, but what the hell,” said Detective Noonan. “We got a few more hours’ work ahead of us. Might as well be awake for it.”

  “It’s Turkish coffee, it’s sweet,” said Elizabeth, heading for the kitchen. “We put cardamom in it. I hope you don’t mind. My father and I are always arguing about the best way to make it. Whether it’s better to let it foam up once or twice.”

  Noonan shrugged at his newest partner, Tom Kelly. They’d just stepped into the living room of the house on Avenue Z. A regular working-family home, No
onan noted. A beige slip-covered Jennifer Convertible couch, an Oriental rug, an oak china cabinet, pictures of old relatives on the wall. In the corner, two little girls were playing a Nintendo video game on the big TV. The only unusual things were the plate-sized plaque with Arabic writing on it above the kitchen doorway and the picture of the mosque above the couch.

  Even with twelve other detectives running around interviewing former and current students, teachers from the school, and witnesses from Surf Avenue, Noonan was still the primary on the case. It was just a matter of time, though, until the feds came barging in, trying to elbow him out of the way.

  The girl came back with two espresso-sized cups and saucers and set them down for the detectives on the coffee table, next to a diary with a paisley cover. She was lovely, Noonan thought to himself. Not just her bright smile and her long, flowing hair. She had a lovely way about her. Reminded him of his daughter, sixteen, at home, and doing God knows what with boys up in her room. She didn’t seem Arab at all to him, but what did he know? Anybody could be anything.

  “Thanks for making the time for us,” he began. “I know you weren’t at school Tuesday, but like I said on the phone, we’re talking to everybody from your class, gathering all the information we can get so we can figure out what happened out there. Okay?”

  “Of course.” She gave just a small smile, but somehow it changed the rest of the room, made it seem bigger. “Anything I can do to help. I really liked Sam.”

  “Terrific. I was wondering if you might have heard anybody say anything unusual at school in the days before this thing went off.”

  The smile retreated and her face turned somber, still lovely but taking the light a different way. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “I mean, was anybody acting strange, or angry. You know? Boys fighting over girls. Girls fighting over boys. Disputes about money. Did you hear anybody say they were going to get somebody else?”

  She looked down at her diary and then at her feet, resting in thick white tube socks under the glass coffee table. “There are fights and arguments all the time, but nobody said they were going to do anything like this.”