Man of the Hour

by Peter Blauner

  From across the parking lot, Nasser was watching them. He’d been there for twenty minutes in the Lincoln Town Car, waiting for his sister to come out the back entrance.

  He’d been worried about her, ever since she’d mentioned the police stopping by the house the other night. He wanted to know more of what she’d told them, what kinds of questions they’d been asking. Would she tell them he’d been late to take her shopping? After his own cold interrogation by Dr. Ahmed, he wasn’t sure how his little sister would stand up to such scrutiny.

  But he didn’t want her to think he was just spying on her, pressuring her, so he’d bought her a present today. A beautiful new purple hijab made from lighter cloth with studs and glitter on the fringes. The scarf cost him fifteen dollars from the Fertile Crescent clothing store, on Atlantic Avenue, but it would be worth it to see the look on her face. He wanted to show her that he understood her needs and concerns. Obviously, she didn’t want to wear the old-style hijab because it made her look old and unattractive. This would be much more to her liking, he was sure, something stylish and modern, but not too modern.

  He wondered if his mother would approve. In the wavering heat of the parking lot, he imagined he could see her again. Walking through the streets of the Deheisha camp. The sad, soul-eroding place. Old oil drums standing in the middle of the street, weeds growing over a crumbling concrete box of a house, women in hijabs lining up behind a truck full of rotted watermelons, old men in Bedouin headdress smoking filtered cigarettes, iron rods sticking out of bombed-out walls, cypress trees sagging, an empty cracked leather barber’s chair baking in the sun, and Herod’s Mountain with its Roman amphitheater baking above the hills the distance. Children wandering the streets, rolling bike tires, playing war games with toy guns fashioned out of loose pieces of barbed wire.

  Nasser remembered the Israeli soldiers coming to the house in the middle of the night, searching for a neighbor’s boy. They were like shadow figures, monsters from a nightmare, waking the baby Elizabeth and pulling his mother out of bed half dressed. Laughing at him when he pissed in his underwear because he was so scared. This was a broken-pride place. This was not a place to hold your head up. This was a place to bring your head down.

  And then all at once, he was back in Coney Island. Looking across the parking lot as his former teacher Mr. Fitzgerald stood by the school’s back entrance, touching his sister.

  Rage exploded in his head. An angry white sunspot glared on the hood of his car. As he stepped on the gas and steered toward them, the white spot moved up onto his windshield, blinding him.

  David nearly jumped as a horn blared and a Lincoln Town Car pulled up alongside them.

  Nasser jumped out of the car, snarled something in Arabic at Elizabeth, and then walked up to David, stopping less than six inches away, about eye level to his chin. He cursed viciously under his breath, and with a look of childish bewilderment and fury he slapped his former teacher hard across the face.

  David staggered back a step or two, more from the shock than from the force of the blow.

  Nasser reeled back too, as if he’d been the one struck. “Before I said I was disappointed in you, now I am very disappointed!” he shouted, blinking over and over.

  “Oh my God, Nasser! What are you doing?” Elizabeth grabbed her brother’s arm before he could swing it again.

  “I saw him touching you!” Nasser yelled hoarsely in her face. “This is totally haram! This is against God!”

  He turned away from her and took a step toward David, standing on his toes, straining to go chest-to-chest with the teacher.

  David, still seeing the flash of white from the slap, tried to resist the instinctual urge to fight back. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” he said, raising his arms in the international “hands-off” sign. “What’s going on here? I’m just trying to help your sister.”

  “This is how you help?!” Nasser’s voice squeaked. “By the touching? This is adulterating!” He poked David in the chest with his finger.

  “Adulterating?” David didn’t think Nasser knew any English words that long. He gently pushed the finger away, though a part of him was dying to take it and bend it back until it snapped.

  A crowd of students had stopped to stare. They’d missed the slap, but they were picking up on its afterburn. Richie Wong and Obstreperous Q were at the front of the pack, rotating their fists and barking, “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!”

  “You guys get out of here.” David turned on them. “You’re not helping anybody.”

  “I’m sorry.” Elizabeth was already dragging her brother back to his car. “This is all my fault. I shouldn’t have said anything to you.”

  A few of the kids stayed, but most started to disperse into the warm afternoon.

  “Look, Nasser,” David said loudly, striving to keep a cool head. “You’ve got this all wrong. This is not the way we handle problems here.”

  “You don’t tell me nothing!” The boy shook loose from his sister. “I know what you are! You are a bad man! A very bad man! If I see you touch my sister again, I will kill you.”

  Before the force of the words could set in, Elizabeth grabbed her brother around the waist and pulled him back into the car. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she called out to David. “I shouldn’t have let this happen.”

  He wanted to tell her not to worry, that he understood what she was up against now, but there was no time. Brother and sister got back into the car. The doors slammed and the Lincoln started with a sudden jerk. David watched it fishtail out of the parking lot and turn left past the Fascination arcade. A beat-up livery cab carrying off two thousand years of tradition.

  David touched the side of his face, still feeling the sting of Nasser’s slap and the place where fingernails had scratched his cheek a little. It was, he realized, the first real connection he’d ever made with the kid.

  26

  “YOU ARE SICK,” said Elizabeth as the car raced down Surf Avenue, narrowly missing a school bus turning on West 8th Street.

  Nasser was clutching the purple hijab to the wheel and fighting back tears of outrage. “In another country, they would take this man and they would cut off his hands.”

  “He’s my teacher.”

  “He doesn’t look at you like a teacher should!” Nasser shouted, shaking the scarf at her. “You should be home anyway.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” she said.

  He dabbed at his eyes with the scarf and stepped on the gas. “You should be praying and starting to make dinner.”

  “That’s it. Stop the car.”

  She had the door open before he’d even moved his foot to the brake.

  “What are you doing?” The car slowed in front of the New York Aquarium.

  She jumped out by the boardwalk entrance and began walking back toward the subway. “I’m not talking to you anymore. I’ve had it. I have to get away from you.”

  He began to panic, watching her go. For some reason, he flashed on the image of his mother standing with him by the Circle Line railing. How he feared there’d come a day she’d fall over and he’d lose her to the river.

  “Elizabeth, you are making craziness!” He put the car in park and jumped out after her, still holding the new hijab. “How will you get home?” he yelled out. “I have to drive you!”

  “Leave me alone,” she called over her shoulder. “I don’t want to be with you!”

  With his car stopped in the middle of the street, traffic was starting to pile up behind him. Drivers honked their horns and leaned out their windows to curse him: “Hey, get back in the car, you moron!”

  Tears running down his cheeks, Nasser shook a fist at them and cried out for his sister again. “Eeeeeeeleezabetttt!!!”

  “C’mon, she don’t want your sorry limp dick no more!” An abbed in an orange Datsun right behind him called out, taunting him. “Yo, get back in your car and find yourself another shorty, man. There’s plenty of fish in the sea.”

  Wounded a
nd freshly enraged, Nasser ran up and kicked the man’s bumper. But Elizabeth was already disappearing on the horizon, probably going to join the throng of kids leaving school.

  He threw the hijab into the street in disgust and then realized he still wanted it. Before he could reach it, though, a stiff ocean breeze took it and blew it down the gutter—thin, glimmering, and purple—just out of his reach among the white plastic bags and discarded Burger King napkins.

  27

  JOHN LEVECQUE AND JUDY MANDEL stood on the corner of Mott and Canal in Chinatown, watching a funeral procession pass with nine Cadillac hearses, three horn players, and a car carrying the deceased’s picture garlanded in flowers.

  “Probably the head of one of the tongs,” said LeVecque.

  “He ran one of the local trade organizations,” Judy corrected him. “Totally legit. We had a story about him this morning.” She touched his sleeve and watched him get a little stirred. “But hey, you never know.”

  Gotcha. She’d done it again, played him perfectly. Slammed him and lubed him simultaneously. It was the strategy she’d mapped out to keep him off balance. Beat him with her brain, make him ogle her breasts, never let him forget he’s dealing with a real woman. Make him feel he has something to prove.

  They’d just had an early lunch at a restaurant called Wong Kee and were wending their way back to their respective offices at One Police Plaza, past disoriented men in vinyl jackets and women dressed in layers of clothes, looking like they’d been suddenly transported here from the distant Chinese provinces.

  “Ow, my thighs are killing me,” said Judy as they got pushed together maneuvering past a crowded fruit stand.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “You know how it feels when you’ve been up all night having sex and … oh, never mind.”

  He blushed and looked away. She was beginning to get to him. She could tell. He was letting things slip. Over lunch, he’d mentioned that the chief of detectives and the first dep were at each other’s throats, and talked about how his wife didn’t like his new hours. Obviously, there were problems at home, but she didn’t push him on it.

  They stopped for a streetlight on the corner and she turned and straightened his tie.

  “Now you’re perfect,” she said.

  Would she get away with this? Yes. He stiffened and beamed a little at her touch. Her flirty little bad-girl act had never really flown at the office, but clearly it was spinning LeVecque’s propeller. The thing was to not go too far too fast. Like any other kind of electricity, you could short it out.

  “So what’s going on with the bomb investigation?” she asked, brushing his arm with her fingertips. “Are you going to make an arrest?”

  “I thought we weren’t going to talk about that.”

  She realized she’d been a little too blatant here. He was pulling back from her, sensing how she was trying to play him. She was going to have to change tack quickly.

  “Hey, I know your legs are hurting but can we pick up the pace?” He checked his watch. “We need to get back to the office. The commissioner has a press conference at two.”

  “My thighs,” she said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “It’s my thighs that are hurting.”

  “Right.”

  She looked up to see six headless chicken bodies perched on a third floor tenement windowsill, like men getting ready to jump to their deaths.

  “Hey,” she said, seizing the inspiration. “Have you ever played the chicken?”

  “The what? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The chicken at the arcade,” she said. “You know, the one that plays tic-tac-toe?”

  “Come on, they’re about to get rid of him. This is your last chance. We’re late.”

  “You mean in all the years you’ve worked down here, you’ve never played tic-tac-toe with the chicken?”

  Before he could argue, she’d grabbed his hand and led him past an open fish stall and into a small storefront at the end of Mott Street. A sign out front advertised CHINESE MUSEUM—VIDEO GAMES—LIVE CHICKEN. Inside, wire-thin boys pumped quarters into noisy games called Sink and Aggressor and Virtual Fight II.

  “Listen, I don’t know if I’m supposed to be in here …,” he began. “What if this place is mobbed-up …”

  She took him by the shoulder and quickly turned him, so that he was face-to-face with Bird Brain. A fat white rooster sitting behind a pane of glass in a yellow booth, like an old derelict in a flophouse. To the right, there was an electronic tic-tac-toe board, and a sign above him challenging all corners: HE’S NOT CHICKEN, ARE YOU? BEAT BIRD BRAIN AND WIN A LARGE BAG OF FORTUNE COOKIES! Small letters below the window advised “Bird Brain Has Appeared on The Joel Siegel Show and That’s Incredible.” This chicken had good press.

  “You’re not serious,” said John LeVecque.

  She had already inserted a quarter into the machine. The wire mesh turned into an electrified grid and the chicken stood up and looked at LeVecque as if in great consternation. Then it took a quick, deliberate step to the left and a large O appeared in the center block of the tic-tac-toe board.

  “Your turn,” she said.

  “Christ.” The back of LeVecque’s neck turned red and he loosened his tie. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

  He pushed a button and an X appeared in the upper left-hand corner.

  “So,” she said. “When is there going to be an arrest?”

  He didn’t dare take his eyes off the bird. “We’re not going to talk about that.”

  The chicken took a step backward and another O appeared, this time in the lower right-hand corner. LeVecque scratched the back of his head, looking irritated and preoccupied.

  “Are you telling me that after all this time you guys still don’t have any leads?” Judy asked.

  “I didn’t say anything of the kind.”

  He was beginning to sweat. Impulsively, he placed an X in the middle top square and stepped back from the booth. The chicken quickly moved to the upper right-hand square, blocking him and setting up two possible wins. LeVecque could only block one.

  “Oh my God.” His voice cracked. “I’m going to lose to a chicken. What have you done to me?” He placed his X in the middle right square.

  Bob and weave. Stick and move. Sometimes she wished she could be more like Bill Ryan and just ask a straight-up question. But then again, she told herself, she didn’t make the world full of horny, confused bureaucrats.

  LeVecque stared at the floor in abject humiliation as Bird Brain completed the diagonal line of Os, winning the game.

  Judy hummed to herself.

  “My mother was a hummer,” LeVecque said, without looking at her.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “She always used to hum when she was about to do something bad, like drop a pot of boiling water or drive the wrong way down a one-way street.” He turned to face her, the two beers from lunch suddenly hitting him and turning his eyes slightly pink and watery. “Can we go now?”

  “Certainly.”

  She took his arm as they left the arcade and led him down a trim alley called Mosco Street, taking him back to One Police Plaza the long way.

  “So you’re not in the loop,” she said. “Is that it?”

  “What?” His voice cracked again.

  “I’m just figuring the people actually investigating this case are keeping you out of the loop and not telling you what’s going on.”

  “I know what’s going on.”

  They were walking through the small public park behind the criminal court building. LeVecque stared at a basketball lying on the asphalt nearby, obviously wanting to pick it up and throw it through the hoop just to show her what he was capable of.

  “Out of the loop, my ass,” he sputtered.

  “Is that so?”

  “We have a couple of suspects we’ve been looking at all along,” he said.

  There, that was supposed to show her. She wondered if she should act impressed
by his manly certainty, but decided it was too soon.

  “So why haven’t you picked them up?” she asked, leaning against him just a little.

  “You can’t just go barging in there, lousing things up. We have to gather evidence. We don’t want to alert anyone before there’s a grand jury.”

  She turned on him. “So is that why they postponed the awards ceremony with the teacher?”

  He froze, realizing he’d said too much. “I don’t know.”

  Her eyes bored in on him. “Is he one of the people you’re looking at?”

  “I’m not confirming anything.” He shoved his hands deep into his pockets and slowed his stride.

  “Off-the-record.”

  “No, not off-the-record.”

  “Just for background. Not for attribution.”

  “No fucking way.”

  “Oh, you don’t know anything.” She strode on ahead of him, twitching her butt in her tight little skirt.

  All of a sudden, he was a boy chasing after her, bursting with a secret.

  “Where’d you get it was the teacher?” he said, catching up.

  “Everybody knows.”

  In fact, it was only an educated guess. Bill had taught her the value of counterintuitive thinking. If the kids are dead, look at the mother. If the wife is dead, look at the husband. If a school bus blows up, look at the driver. And if the driver’s dead, look at the teacher. Besides, why the hell else would they postpone the awards ceremony indefinitely?

  “All right.” LeVecque drew a deep breath. “But you didn’t get it from me.”

  “You’re only confirming it.”

  “Right.” He looked around anxiously, thrusting his hands deeper into his pockets so his pants got tight. “You could’ve got it from a hundred other places.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s typical, you know. A typical situation. He wants everyone to think he’s a big man.”

  “He is a big man.”

  “I mean, he creates a situation where he looks like a hero. Haven’t you seen the way he’s been running around giving interviews to everybody?”

  Now it was okay to act impressed, she decided. She parted her lips and smiled.