Man of the Hour

by Peter Blauner

“May I be excused?” Elizabeth pushed her chair back from the table. “I want to work on my college essay.”

  She had no stomach for this tonight. The last twenty-four hours had pushed and pulled her in too many directions.

  “And this is another thing.” Nasser turned to his father. “We have been discussing this. You’re going to allow her to go away to college, a young girl? You should be making a good marriage for her with someone back home.”

  “Well, it’s not for you to decide, buster, is it?” said his stepmother, giving him a look as black as the end of a gun’s barrel.

  “You see? You see?” Nasser held out his hand to Father at the head of the table, waiting for him to adjudicate. “This too? Are you going to let her get away with this too?”

  Elizabeth threw down her napkin in disgust. “Oh, why don’t you just stop it?”

  Father pressed his fingers against the creases of his brow. “Insh’allah, give me peace,” he muttered.

  His daughter looked at him pityingly. These fights were beginning to take a toll on him, now that he was older and diagnosed with diabetes. There were times when he got along with Nasser—after all, they had religion in common these days. But then there were other times when she could have sworn Nasser was trying to destroy the old man.

  There was so much residual bitterness between them. Nasser had never stopped blaming the old man for coming to America and leaving the rest of them behind in the refugee camp for a year while he tried to make enough money in New York to send for them. Of course, Elizabeth had been too young to remember any of that, but Nasser had gone back to Bethlehem to live for ten years, so he’d had more than enough time to grow into his sacred outrage.

  “You don’t understand,” Father said to Nasser. “Sometimes you have to be like the olive tree and bend a little.”

  “Mother never bent.”

  “Yes, exactly—Mother never bent.” Father’s features receded as if someone had put a hand over his face. “But this is because she wouldn’t let go of things, even the ones she didn’t remember that well. Do you know she was four when she left her village? Insh’allah. But still she acted like she remembered everything and her whole life was there! This is what killed her.”

  “No! Askat! That’s not what killed her! You are what killed her! Kha’in! Kha al-’ahad!” He took the rusty key from around his neck and slammed it down on the table. “And this is what killed her!”

  Silence fell over them again like a veil. Traffic breathed on the parkway nearby and the only sound in the house was Anne picking up her silverware to start eating again.

  “Some policemen came by earlier,” Elizabeth said. “They wanted to talk about the explosion.”

  The nature of the silence changed. Anne put down her fork and Nasser dabbed at his lips with a cloth napkin, keeping it there a beat or two longer than was necessary. Their father was still looking at the rusty key in the middle of the table.

  “Whatever for?” said Anne. “You weren’t there, were you? How would you know about it?”

  Elizabeth made a show of nonchalantly rolling her tongue around her teeth as she went back to her food. “I don’t know. I guess they’re talking to everybody.”

  Father brought his fist down on the table. “I tell you. When they find whoever put this bomb there, they should kill him immediately. He is a bastard.”

  “Akhra!” Nasser hissed. “What do you know?”

  “I know all about these men, the fanatics,” said Father. “My father arrested some of them when he was a policeman under the British mandate in Hebron. They are shit, these people. All they want to do is make war with the Jews. They don’t want the peace because then they know no one would pay attention to them.”

  Nasser looked at his sister quickly and then pretended to study the quotation from the Koran above the kitchen doorway. “So did they say this was a bomb?” he asked.

  Elizabeth stared back at her brother, wondering. There was so much she didn’t understand about him, so many more things she wanted him to explain.

  But then again, there were things you were better off not knowing, things you didn’t want to think about. She looked at her brother, with his brown eyes turned just a little bit away from her, but still not missing a move she made, and she thought about how late he’d been to take her shopping on Tuesday.

  “No,” she said. “They didn’t really tell me anything.”

  “So okay.” He picked the key up and put it back around his neck. “Nobody knows nothing. I’m going.”

  He stood and walked out of the room, without saying good-bye to any of them.

  Elizabeth stared at the spot on the table where it had been lying, the key to the family home in the Monastery of Branches. She’d thought it would have been a skeleton key hammered by the village blacksmith. But the afterimage in her mind was unmistakable: the word Yale had been etched on one side.

  20

  AS HE SAT AT the back of the Command Center, an enormous high-ceilinged room on the eighth floor of One Police Plaza, Detective Noonan watched the mayor metamorphose into a pair of gigantic lips attaching themselves to the governor’s buttocks.

  The transformation was subtle at first. Just a slight swelling around the mouth and a profusion of words.

  “… and of course, we all want to express our gratitude to our friends in Albany for making so many resources available to us on such short notice. And for the governor to come down and take time off from his busy schedule to talk is just … just unprecedented …”

  Give me a break, thought Noonan. He was probably upstate, squeezing campaign funds out of a bunch of rich Republican farmers. Where else is the governor supposed to be when there’s a major bombing two days before his appearance in the city? At an ice-carving festival in Idaho?

  It was supposed to be a Friday-morning “strategy meeting” for the one hundred or so top law enforcement officials involved in the school bus investigation. “Coordination” was the buzzword everyone kept using now that the police were officially announcing it was a bomb. But Noonan took one look at the dais, saw Jim Lefferts, the big bohunk who ran the FBI office in New York, sitting up there and thought, Katie, bar the door. Everyone knew this Lefferts used to play football in Wisconsin, and he looked like he was about to jump up, tackle the bug-eyed ruddy-cheeked mayor, and wrestle the case right away from him.

  Two seats down from Lefferts, Roy Miller from ATF rubbed his eyes and tugged on his ear. Next to him, Paul Schecter, the aging Manhattan DA, was scowling up at the mayor, who’d defeated him two elections back. This was a real gang bang, Noonan thought. The feds, the state, and the local cops all wanted a piece of this case. And with all these powerful agencies coming together and combining their resources, it would be a miracle if anyone could locate a bar of soap in the bathroom.

  What they knew so far was this: The bomb was a fairly low-tech affair, made with ammonium nitrate, nitroglycerin, and a little bit of collodion cotton. Homemade dynamite hooked up to an ordinary Westclox alarm clock. Any idiot with a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook or a recipe off the Internet could have made it. The bomb had actually malfunctioned at the scene, because of some dampness on the materials. However, the small blast it did manage was enough to trigger the subsequent, more impressive explosions from the fuel line and gas tank, which effectively destroyed the front of the bus and made it impossible to determine the exact location the bomb had been in. That left exactly no real leads. Most of the elements of the bomb could have been found at any major shopping mall or high school chemistry class in America and the serial number had been filed off the alarm clock, which in one piece of bizarre sophistication had had all its metal screws replaced by plastic ones.

  The mayor managed to reduce the level of suction long enough to introduce the governor, who rose from the dais and moved quickly toward the podium as if drawn by magnetic force. He was taller than he looked on television, Noonan noticed, with eyebrows so bushy you could see them when his back was turned. But he
gave a good law-and-order speech, had a stand on abortion that liberals could live with, and his last poll had said he was trailing the President by only ten points, with more than a year to catch up.

  “I just want to shift gears for a moment and remind everyone here how important it is to solve this case expeditiously,” he began. “We need to send a loud and strong message that political terrorism will not be tolerated in this country.”

  Who’d said anything about political terrorists? Noonan wondered. Of course, that was in the back of everyone’s mind. But they had yet to receive a believable call, fax, letter, or e-mail from anyone claiming credit. Yes, the kooks had come out of the woodwork. People who said they were with the Right-to-Lifers, the IRA, the IRS, the JDL, the Bosnian rebels, the Shiite Muslims, the Weathermen, the FALN, the tree-huggers, the bunny-huggers, the Kurds, the Friends of the Unabomber, the Colombian drug lords, the Chinese militants, the Black Liberation Front, the UFT, and the Shining Path. Who did that leave? The La Leche League?

  The one thing Noonan kept coming back to, in his own mind, was the school. It had to have some connection with people inside the school. So far, there was nothing solid connecting Seniqua Rollins’s boyfriend, the jailed gang leader, to the explosion, which left the other kids, and more immediately, the teacher, David Fitzgerald. And there was something that bothered him about Fitzgerald. How the hell did he know to keep those kids off the bus? And why did he keep harping on this hero thing with his students? And giving interviews? Did he want to be a hero himself? Even weirder: why didn’t Fitzgerald mention the book bag he’d left on the bus until he’d been asked about it?

  The thought fell into memories of the Herman Solloway case, that alleged kidnapping Noonan had caught in Holliswood twelve years ago. Solloway, who happened to be a schoolteacher too, said he’d left his wife waiting in the car while he’d run in to buy some Tylenol from an all-night Revco drugstore and that was the last he’d seen of her. Then he went on the local news shows, all teary and red-eyed as a basset hound, pleading for her safe return and saying he’d pay any ransom. Naturally, Noonan and the other detectives had found her buried under the kids’ plastic wading pool in the backyard a week later, stabbed fifty-five times by her husband.

  Up on the podium, the governor was finally beginning to round the corner. “In closing, I want to make two points,” he said. “The first is that I think we would do well to crack down on any leaks to the press about this investigation. The wrong kind of information can only be detrimental in the long term …”

  Right, so why blab to a roomful of a hundred potential leakers? Noonan asked himself. Over the last two days, he’d personally had a half-dozen conversations with various detectives about what kind of money they could possibly make from book and movie deals if they happened to be the one who solved this case. Ah, but then that was obvious. The point of this meeting wasn’t really coordination. It was to show that the governor was doing something. That one image, repeated five hundred thousand times on television, of the burning bus in front of the school with the teacher’s face imposed next to it was starting to make everyone crazy.

  “And number two,” said the governor, folding his speech with a flourish and putting it in his inside jacket pocket, “once this perpetrator is brought to justice, let us prosecute him to the full extent of the law, up to and including the death penalty. Let’s be clear: you take a life, you pay with a life.”

  Right, off with his head and fuck the Constitution, Noonan thought. Oh well, what the hell. As the police commissioner liked to say, you’re either on the bus or you’re under it.

  The governor finished his remarks to a round of not entirely satisfying applause and stepped down from the podium with a frown. The meeting broke up and Noonan headed past the steam tables and the door, anxious to get back to the squad, but then someone came running up behind him and grabbed his elbow. It was LeVecque, the chubby little blond guy who was running the press office these days.

  “So am I going to see you this weekend? Weather’s supposed to be nice.”

  Noonan stared at him blankly, as if LeVecque had just asked him for a date. But men he remembered the guy had left a couple of messages at me squad, inviting both him and his partner, Kelly, to his house on Long Island for a barbecue on Saturday.

  “Yeah, we might stop by,” Noonan replied in a surly voice.

  Some matter of political expediency stopped him from saying no outright. He’d heard a rumor that this LeVecque had gotten close to the commissioner lately and therefore had to be handled with care. Besides, Kelly would want to be there for the free beer.

  “Great,” said LeVecque with a strained smile. “You can get me up to speed on the case.”

  “Yeah, right,” mumbled Noonan, turning away from him, “you and every other square badge in the state.”

  21

  AT FOUR-THIRTY on Friday afternoon, David and his son were surveying knights’ armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One way or another, he’d been determined to get here. The explosion wasn’t going to alter the course of his life.

  “Check this guy out, Arthur.” David hoisted the boy up in his arms, giving him a better view of a mannequin with a stainless-steel sword and a red tunic with a white cross on it. “He’s a Crusader. He’s one of the guys who fought with Richard the Lion-Hearted to try to take Jerusalem back from the Moors.”

  “Cool!” Arthur jiggled, catching his father’s enthusiasm. “And then they came back and helped Robin Hood. Right?”

  “Wellll …” David did a U-turn with his voice. “Not exactly. Some people aren’t sure Robin Hood actually existed. But the part about Richard the Lion-Hearted is true. He fought Saladin to a standstill after the Moors ripped the golden cross down off the Dome of the Rock …”

  Oh listen to me, being a teacher with my own son. But David couldn’t help it. He wanted to pass his love of these legends down to the boy. Arthur would get an almost spooky, enraptured look while listening.

  “You know, I used to come here all the time when I was your age.” David set the boy down and took his hand. “I’d make my mother take me practically every other week, all the way in from Atlantic Beach. I’d walk around for hours, pretending to be one of the Knights of the Round Table or St. George fighting the dragon.”

  “I wish you could take me that much.” Arthur pulled on David’s fingers, leading him to a German knight and his horse, both in etched armor.

  “I know, buddy.” David winced.

  These little expeditions and adventures had been too few and far between since the separation. David worried the boy’s childhood was being tainted and corrupted by all the tension around him. Three days a week wasn’t enough time to spend together.

  “So did Grandpa ever take you here?” Arthur asked.

  David looked down, surprised. His father had died three and a half years ago and he wasn’t sure how much of the old bastard Arthur remembered. “No, buddy. It was usually Grandma who took me.”

  “But he was a soldier!”

  “Yes, he certainly was.”

  “Didn’t he want to go with you and see the weapons?” Arthur peered up, eager for confirmation that David had some meaningful contact with his old man, the war hero.

  “No.” David half-smiled. “I think maybe he’d had enough of that.”

  The truth was, his father almost never talked about the war. To David growing up, Patrick Fitzgerald just seemed like an ordinary man living in the suburbs, working for the gas company, and drinking himself stuporous in front of the TV every night. Other than the old rifles and uniforms in the garage, there was no evidence of the eighteen-year-old boy who’d gone charging up a hill to kill half a dozen Japanese soldiers, some of whom were probably old enough to be his father. Tell me how you did it, David always wanted to ask him. Tell me how you could be so brave when you were so fucking scared.

  But his father never told him much of anything, never really taught him anything. The closest he came to imparting any wis
dom about life or war was one night when David was home from college and they went to see Apocalypse Now together. In the middle of the psychedelic bridge scene—with fireworks streaking the night, soldiers painting their faces, and no one knowing who was shooting at whom—his father had grabbed his arm, pointed at the screen, and gasped: “That’s it! That’s what it was like! Nothing happens and then everything happens! All you can do is just keep going.”

  David hoped he was offering his own son more sustenance than that, but he wasn’t sure. The separation had drawn a curtain around parts of the boy’s life.

  “So how you getting along with Anton?” he said, following Arthur over to a display of samurai warriors.

  “He’s a dickhead.”

  David stopped in his tracks, an alarm clock ringing between his ears. “Who taught you that word?”

  “Anton did.” The boy pressed his nose against the glass, making a pig face to the samurais.

  “Well, I don’t like it. And take your face off the glass. They’ll throw us out of here.” David took the boy’s shoulder and turned him a little. “So why don’t you like Anton?”

  “I just don’t.”

  “Why?”

  Arthur wriggled away from his father and went to sit on a bench. “He said you didn’t save the bus driver.”

  “Hmm,” said David, thinking: screw him. What did Anton ever do? “So did Mommy tell you what happened the other day?”

  “Sort of. And we talked about it at school.”

  David sat down and watched Arthur swinging his leg, the toes of his sneakers barely brushing the stone floor. The boy was a bit scrawny for his age, which made David feel fiercely protective of him, especially in light of his own size. What made it almost unbearably poignant was that Arthur went to the playground every day chin up, shoulders back, imagining himself a tough little soldier, but inevitably came home wheezing and tearstained after some bully stole his tank.

  “Well, I probably should have told you more when I came over the other night, but I didn’t want to worry you,” David said, looming over the boy. “I guess you heard the bus blew up and I had to help get one of the girls off it.”