“It was,” said the professor. “It was terrible. The most pain I’ve ever felt in my life, physically. And there was only one way I could get through it.”
“You became numb,” said Nasser, remembering the stinking bag over his face.
“No,” said the professor. “While he was squeezing me, I started telling myself, He is getting weaker and I am getting stronger. And then I looked up and I said to him, ‘Didn’t you tell me you got a degree in developmental psychiatry in the United States?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ So I said, ‘And now you are squeezing my balls?’”
“So what happened?”
“He let go and never tortured me again.” The professor allowed himself just a brief chuckle.
Nasser looked out over the dashboard, and the patterns of traffic didn’t make sense to him for a few seconds. They were just red lights flashing and blinking in the night.
“I don’t understand,” he said, heading up Broadway. “How can you not want to hurt such people the way they’ve hurt you?”
The professor took some cigarette rolling papers and a tobacco pouch out of his briefcase. “Nasser, I don’t think I ever mentioned it to you, but before I went to prison I was in favor of the peace process.”
“No, you never said this.”
“Well, probably it never seemed appropriate, after what happened with Hamid and all of us getting thrown in solitary confinement and kept away from our families. I mean, to be angry about such things is only human. I don’t claim the Israelis are any friends to me. But to give in to the violence?” He raised his hands, as if considering the idea, and then dropped them. “This doesn’t do anything. This doesn’t help anyone, except the people who make the violence and can’t imagine any other life for themselves. Violence can’t make a state by itself. Violence can only make more violence. It’s like a law of physics.”
“So you are still for making peace?” Nasser looked over at the sideview mirror, trying to conceal his disgust. “After what they’ve done to you? After they killed your son?”
The car hit a pothole and was jolted, but the professor remained steady and focused on the task of laying tobacco onto the flattened rolling paper on the dashboard.
“I have to be bigger than that,” he said. “The Jews have suffered too, at least as much. They lost six million. And I still have five more children. How does it help them to make a war so they can be killed? I don’t want them to live like slaves, it’s true. But every day when I go home in Hebron, I drive past the schoolyard where Abu was killed, and every night I look out my window and I see where the settlers live. I have to find a way to live like this. I cannot go around poisoned by hate forever. I have lost too much already. Life will never have the same taste again, the same joy. You understand? I cannot stand to lose any more.”
For the next few minutes, Nasser was silent. He’d hoped that seeing the professor tonight would strengthen his resolve and give him a sense of clarity about his mission. He’d wanted to fuel himself with the older man’s righteous anger, remember the dead, and rededicate himself to the cause. But instead he just felt more confused than ever.
They stopped in front of a sand-colored prewar apartment building on West 106th Street. A stiff wind made a play of shivering tree shadows and streetlights across Nasser’s hood. The professor offered to roll him a cigarette, but he turned it down.
“You are good, my friend?”
“I am good.” Nasser rested his chin on top of the wheel.
“I’m glad you came to see me tonight.” The professor touched his shoulder. “It makes me think of the old days. When my son was still alive. I wonder if he would have turned out like you.”
Nasser started to reply, wanting to say it was a tragedy, everything was a tragedy, but his throat was too parched and the words wouldn’t come out.
In the meantime, the professor lowered his window and lit the cigarette he’d rolled for himself. “You know, it’s a funny thing,” he said wistfully. “I used to have a little private moment for myself, before I went to sleep most nights. A little daydream of something I hoped for. It would give me a little thrill of delight, just to think about it. A house I’d like to build for my mother. A college I’d want my son to go to. A rich and decent husband for my daughters. But then after Abu died, the dreams stopped. And I keep waiting for them to come back. Every night, I ask myself, ‘What will I dream about tonight?’ Sometimes I wonder if I can still dream.”
“What’s the answer?” Nasser asked.
“I don’t know.” The older man blew a long white line of smoke into the air and then watched it curl and dissipate as he opened the passenger-side door. “So, do you still dream, Nasser?”
59
“LET’S SET SOME ground rules here,” said Jim Lefferts, the FBI’s assistant director for the New York office. “Immunity is not on the table.”
“Then we’re not at the table.” Ralph Marcovicci tapped David on the shoulder, rose slowly to his full six feet and three hundred pounds and began to amble toward the door of the conference room. “Come on, you guys, let’s go get some whitefish at Greengrass.”
His co-counsel, Judah Rosenbloom, hastily put his papers back into his battered overstuffed briefcase and scrambled after Ralph. David just sat there, stunned that his chance for redemption could be slipping away so easily.
“Really, boys, let’s not go getting our panties in a twist.” Lefferts, an ex-football player with a desk covered with Marine Corps mementos, smiled tolerantly. “We both have interests to protect here. Nobody wants any more shit splattered on their shoes.”
David looked up and smiled encouragingly at his lawyers, like an overanxious parent trying to get the kids to play nice in the sandbox. But Ralph remained by the door and Judah stood stiffly with his jaw grinding and his ponytail swaying.
“As far as I can tell, Agent Lefferts, our client is the only one whose shoes have been splattered,” Judah said with well-practiced indignation. “But now that David’s attempting to bring forward information that could lead to a successful conclusion to this investigation, you’re trying to splatter him some more. I think it’s just outrageous!”
Lefferts’s eyelids drooped, as if he was already bored with this little playlet. “I’m just saying, it’s still not clear to me how we know your client is not an accomplice in this bombing. It seems awfully suspicious, the way he came into possession of this information. How do we know he’s not a co-conspirator with these Arab gentlemen?”
“Oh come on, Jim, he’s not a fuckin’ co-conspirator.” Ralph came back and sat down again, his chair giving a loud, alarming squeak. “He’s a fuckin’ schoolteacher. The bomber’s the brother of one of the girls in his class. The girl likes him and gives up the brother, who she’s got some problems with. What’s so hard to believe about that?”
“Well, I’m still not entirely comfortable.” Lefferts pushed his chair back from the table and winced as if suffering from an old football injury. “How’s it going to look if the Bureau gets bitten in the ass again because your guy did it with somebody else and then decided to rat them out? We don’t need another public relations disaster.”
David started to open his mouth and protest, but Judah put a firm hand on his shoulder.
“A public relations disaster?” Ralph smiled and hunched over the table, like a poker player finally getting a run of cards he liked. “What do you call Waco? What do you call Ruby Ridge? What about all the other terrorist bombings where you never caught the guys?”
Lefferts winced again. “Well, I don’t see the specific analogy.”
Even Judah Rosenbloom started laughing.
“Gimme a fuckin’ break, Jim.” Ralph put his hands behind his head. “We’re giving you the names of the bombers and the location where they have the explosives stored. We’ll even bring the girl in to talk to you once we have an agreement. You want us to make the arrest and call the press conference too?”
Lefferts’s face turned red. “Who said anyt
hing about a press conference?”
“Come on, Jim, get real. Our guy is giving the case to you on a platter. The least you can do is put out a release clearing his name and apologizing.”
Lefferts looked at David, as if he was reality-checking, and then he barked at Ralph: “That’s ridiculous.”
“Let’s go, David.” Judah turned and swung his briefcase toward the door, clearly expecting David to follow. “I don’t think we have anything else to discuss here.”
Ralph flashed Lefferts a “hey-what-can-I-do-I’m-working-with-a-lunatic?” look, as if he was suddenly the reasonable one, and started to stand again.
“Now, now, now.” Lefferts patted the air like a minister settling the congregation. “Let’s just take a mental minute here and come to our senses. If we end up arresting somebody else for this crime, doesn’t it stand to reason that the public will know your client is innocent?”
“Not good enough.” Ralph remained in an awkward half crouch above his chair. “We want vindication.”
“Well, the Bureau is not going to hold a press conference announcing that a man who was never arrested is not a suspect. You can just forget that, right now. This isn’t one of your Larchmont Lolita circuses. As far as I’m concerned, our agents didn’t do anything wrong. We had a lead and we investigated it. End of story. We don’t apologize to everyone we investigate. And it wasn’t us who damaged your client’s precious ‘reputation’ anyway. If you’ve got a problem with that, take it up with the newspapers and the television stations.”
“Then we have nothing else to talk about.” Ralph stood up all the way. “The girl doesn’t come in. David, come on.”
David started to rise, feeling sick and unstable. Lefferts looked at him irritably.
“David, sit down,” he said.
They were playing with him. Or rather they were playing with each other, and he just happened to be in the middle.
Without waiting for any further signal from his lawyers, he stood up with hands on the edge of the conference table as if he was about to overturn it.
“Just shut up,” he said, feeling the blood rush to his face. “Okay? Can everyone just shut up a minute?”
The three of them were looking up at him as though he was a great building on the verge of collapse. But he stared down at a little paperweight shaped like the soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima. My father’s war.
“I’ve had it with all the strategies and counterstrategies,” he said quietly. “I’m fed up with all the surveillance and scrutiny. My students think I’ve betrayed them. My son has heard his father called a murderer. And my wife is ready for Bellevue. All I want is for this to be over. Now. I want you guys out of my life. Is that clear to you?”
Lefferts and the two lawyers looked at one another slightly aghast, as if to say, What’s his problem? But David no longer cared about their good opinion. He just wanted to be made whole again.
“Ball’s in your court, Jim.” Ralph smiled, nervously watching David from the corner of his eye. “You need our client to bring the girl in, because your agents failed to find the real bombers. You need her to testify. And my client’s the only one who can deliver her. Otherwise, she doesn’t cooperate.”
“Yes, well.” Lefferts cleared his throat and looked at Ralph sideways. “Is that something you want publicized too? Him deserving credit?”
A part of David wanted to say yes. The same part that sat in the lifeguard chair, looking for someone to save, and stood in the outfield, waiting for a fly ball to come his way.
But all he said was: “Over. That’s what I want.”
Jim Lefferts shook his head, half sad and half amused, as if somehow he knew this would all end in tears. “Well, all right,” he said. “You want your precious name back, you can have it back. But no official press conference apology. Word leaked out once, I guess it can happen again the same way.”
60
JUDY MANDEL WAS HUMMING again. That low ominous sound from just under the breastbone.
“When you do that, it reminds me of ‘This has been a test of the Emergency Broadcast System,’” said John LeVecque. “‘Had this been a real emergency you would have been asked to report to a fallout shelter …’”
“Do I make you that nervous?”
They were sitting in a brown-paneled restaurant near City Hall called Spaghetti Western. Ceiling fans turned slowly, doing nothing to the air. A young lawyer in a double-breasted Italian suit was standing at the bar near the front, bragging to friends about how much money he’d just won in a civil case. “Three point seven mil! That judge loves my ass!”
In the booth opposite LeVecque and Judy, a middle-aged white woman with the face of a time-ravaged Botticelli model sat stirring her drink and staring into space, as though still trying to come to terms with a broken date from years before.
“So what’s doing with the Fitzgerald case?” Judy said.
“Is that why you asked me out?” LeVecque played the mopey teenager, rearranging rolls in the bread basket.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, is that the only basis we have for a relationship? You ask me about this case and I try to avoid answering you?”
“John!”
A waitress walked by. “Can I get a Bass ale and a shot of tequila?” he asked.
“I didn’t know you drank like that,” said Judy.
“I’ve changed. A lot of things have changed these last few weeks. Things haven’t been … all that great at home.”
“Oh?”
“Well, how would you know anyway? You never really ask me about myself. It’s just work, work, work with you.”
She smiled uncomfortably. She’d had a vague sense he’d been leading up to this the last couple of times they’d had lunch, but she’d ignored the signals.
“I’m crazy about you,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”
The waitress brought him the beer and the shot. Outside it was getting dark and the neon signs in the window bled their light into the street. A gate roared down in front of a discount shoe store across the way.
Off-balance and tongue-tied, Judy tried to change the subject. “So I heard they were about to arrest somebody else for the bombing.”
But LeVecque kept after her. “You know I’ve thought about leaving my wife for you and I’ve never even kissed you. Isn’t that crazy?”
Judy felt her insides gather into a tight ball. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t meant to happen at all. They’d been sparring partners. Didn’t he know flirting was just part of the game? This was a man with a family. Another responsibility she didn’t want.
“Did you hear what I said?”
He leaned hard on the table and it began to tip over. She caught it just in time.
“John, I’m feeling very awkward about this. Could we talk about something else for a minute? I need to get my thoughts in order.”
“Sure, sure, of course. I know I’m putting you on the spot.” He reached out to cover her hand with his, but she moved it slightly, without being obvious.
She started humming again. “So. David Fitzgerald.”
“What about him?” LeVecque asked glumly.
“So he wasn’t the bomber, after all. His lawyers are saying he’s about to be cleared.”
“You were the one who wrote he was the guy in the first place.” He pulled his lips back from his teeth.
“You were the one who told me that.”
“That was supposed to be off-the-record.” He paused and emotions whirled across his face; it was like watching a carousel turn. “You pulled it out of me. You betrayed me. I don’t even know why I’m so attracted to you.” He finished both the shot and the beer and ordered another round. “There must be something wrong with me.”
Judy looked down into her wine glass. Come on. Get through it. Get what you need to write this story. Don’t make this too personal. Don’t let him suck you in.
“So now they know who did it?” she asked.
“And is an arrest going to be made?”
“Yes. Maybe. Soon. Very soon.” More spins of the carousel. “Look, I don’t want to get into all this,” he said. “I’m not going to let you do this to me again.”
“Just confirm one last thing for me. Okay? The lawyers say he’s cooperating?”
“Yeah, all right. I heard that too.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.” LeVecque’s thin blond hair was standing up a little. He patted it and looked distracted. “It means he’s not giving anybody a problem.”
“So he’s helping with the investigation. Can I say that?”
Having taken a sledgehammer to the teacher these past couple of weeks, Judy was anxious to redeem herself and get it right. She was finding it difficult to sleep at night, thinking of some of the things she’d written about David Fitzgerald. So if she gave him a little too much credit in the process, then that was all right with her.
“Say whatever you want.” LeVecque took his new drinks from the waitress. Judy noticed his hands were shaking. “I don’t know anything about anything anymore, Judy. You got me hanging upside down. I probably shouldn’t tell you anything. I probably shouldn’t even talk to you anymore, because you’ll just betray me. But I can’t help myself. I know I’m drunk, but I have to try for the Hail Mary pass. Can you understand that?”
“No.”
“Well I don’t give a damn. I’m diving into the sidewalk anyway.”
He gulped the shot and started on his beer. In the brooding silence, she could hear the bartender stacking glasses.
“I’m crazy about you,” LeVecque said, putting the glass down, unaware of his foam mustache.
“I know, John,” she said quietly. “But don’t do this.”
He didn’t seem to hear her. “I mean, I know you look at me and you see I’m this middle-aged white guy working for the city and losing his hair. But there’s more to me than that. I’m still alive inside. Inside I’m still soaring.” He stopped to catch his breath. “So I guess what I’m saying is if you’d give me the chance, Judy, I could soar with you. I could still be better than what I am.”
Man of the Hour Page 36
