Man of the Hour Read online

  “I got a work order.” The little man took a yellow slip out of his back pocket, looked at it, and then put it back without bothering to show it to the detectives.

  “We’re using this room,” said Gomez, displaying his shield. “Beat it.”

  The little man shrugged, unplugged his drill, and left. A few seconds later, the drilling sound started up again from the room next door and the drill bit began poking through the wall in front of David.

  “So why didn’t you tell us about that before?” said Noonan. “The twenty minutes.”

  “It didn’t seem relevant.”

  David was struggling to get back into that cool place within himself, but they kept dragging him away from it. Forcing him out into the light. Panic closed in on him. Objects on the other side of the room—a globe and glass beakers—suddenly loomed much larger and he began to feel dizzy.

  “Anybody see what you were doing in there?”

  “I wouldn’t think so.”

  “You sure?”

  “I was in a stall.” David tried to remember which stall he’d used and what the graffiti was on the walls, in case the detective tried to trip him up by asking about it.

  “See, that’s a problem.”

  Noonan moved his chair, and the scrape of its legs on the floor made David’s heart jump.

  “Yeah, it’s a problem.” Gomez tugged on his earring.

  “’Cause you disappeared for twenty minutes, and people are going to say that was enough time for you to set the timer on a bomb and put it in your book bag.” Noonan dipped his head and looked up at David from an angle. “See what I’m saying?”

  “There wasn’t any bomb.” His heart began to pound harder. His collar was getting completely soaked and he became aware that he was about to start getting facial tics.

  “Hey, David.” Noonan moved closer to him, ready to share an intimacy. “How come you never told us you been in trouble before?”

  “What are you talking about?” David looked away, focusing on a chemical table chart on the wall.

  “The little problem you had on the island before. I got a call from a retired detective name of McNally. He saw you on the news and remembered you.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” David snapped back at him. “It was nothing. I was a juvenile. I took a car from a beach club where I was working. I’m not even supposed to have a record for that anymore.”

  Though he dreaded the idea of this part of his past becoming public. Somewhere in a file cabinet, there might still be a mug shot of him as a long-haired, dopey-looking teenager.

  Having scored a point, Noonan put a hand on David’s shoulder, keeping him in his place. “And let me ask you something else,” he said. “How come you didn’t say your old man was an explosives expert in the war? And he probably taught you all about dynamite.”

  “I thought I did, but …” David was scrambling to remember everything he’d said these last few days. “He … what?”

  “Because you did it, right?” Noonan was smiling, a crooked half-moon hey-we’re-a-couple-of-Irish-guys-in-a-pub kind of smile.

  “I did what? What did I do?”

  “You put it in your bag. It was your bag that blew up with dynamite in it.”

  “No, it wasn’t.” David felt like he’d just caught a flat hand in the middle of his face.

  “Yes it was.” Noonan gave a sidelong glance to Gomez. “We have witnesses who saw you playing with the timer.”

  For a brief moment, the unreality of the situation overtook David and he realized he was no longer in control. He was back in the Atlantic Beach police station, a terrified kid listening to the detective tell him that this night would determine the course of the rest of his life.

  These men were trying to scare him just as badly now. They wanted to hurt him, to take his freedom away, to keep him from his son. More than twenty years had passed, but nothing had changed. He still had to find a way to hold on to himself.

  “If anybody says they saw me with a timer, they’re lying,” he said slowly and deliberately, looking from cop to cop.

  “No, you’re the one who’s lying. Because you did it. Right?” Noonan’s voice had changed. He sounded flip and disgusted, as if he’d just noticed vermin in the room. He got out of his chair and walked across the room. “You didn’t mean for anybody to get hurt. You just wanted to save the day.”

  “You’re making a mistake.” David found one scuffed-up piece of black-and-white floor tile and just stared at it, telling himself this was the anchor that would keep him in his place in the world.

  “Come on.” Noonan stopped at a desk covered with books and test tubes. “It’s gonna be a lot easier on you if you open up about this now. If you just admit it, the judge will understand you didn’t want for anybody to get hurt. You were just trying to be the hero. Like you talked about in class.”

  “That’s not right.”

  “You did it!” Noonan pounded the desk and the test tubes rattled. “Goddamn it! I wanna hear you say you did it!”

  “I’m not comfortable with where this interview is going,” said David, still hanging tough, staring at the floor tile.

  “Hey asshole, this isn’t one of your kiss-ass celebrity interviews!” Noonan shouted. “You don’t get to say where this is going.”

  David stood up abruptly. “Then I’m not answering any more questions.”

  He couldn’t go back any further. It was the same point he’d reached in the police station all those years ago. The point where he said to himself: “Fuck you. I’m Pat Fitzgerald’s son. My father is a fucking hero and you cannot treat me this way.”

  “Sit down, Mr. Fitzgerald.” Noonan’s vein throbbed in the side of his head.

  “Yeah, sit the fuck down,” Gomez chimed in.

  “I’m going,” David said, surprised by the strength in his own voice. “And if you have anything else to say to me, you can say it in front of a lawyer.”

  It was okay. He’d been here, done this before. He was not going to be intimidated. Somehow his father must have transmitted some notion of stolidity and stoicism after all. Just keep going. David found himself pulsing with anger and the conviction mat one way or another he would get through this.

  “Now you’re the one making a mistake,” said Gomez, moving to physically block the door.

  “Yeah, this isn’t over.” Noonan stood next to him and rolled up his sleeves.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen.” David threw back his shoulders and stepped around them. “I believe I have some work to do.”

  On returning to his squad some thirty-five minutes later, Detective Noonan was duly informed that this was now a federal investigation and he would be expected to turn over all his notes to FBI agents. He calmly walked to his phone and called John LeVecque.

  “Hey asshole,” he said. “You may have fucked me, but my ex-partner fucked your wife.”

  29

  SO THIS WAS WHAT it felt like to be a success.

  Judy Mandel filed her story at six o’clock and then stuck around for three hours to answer editors’ queries and make phone calls to double-check facts. By the time she was finished, Bill Ryan had gone home to be with his invalid wife and the only ones left for her to go out and have a celebratory drink with were the Death of Hope and the paper’s editor-in-chief, Robert “Nazi” Cranbury, who everyone knew was a notorious whoremonger and grossly sentimental when inebriated.

  Instead, she went home alone to her tiny $1,200-a-month East 50th Street studio to eat two-day-old salad, drink cheap chardonnay, and watch Seinfeld reruns until she started to fall asleep on her couch. But just before consciousness slipped away, the phone rang and her beeper went off. She picked up the receiver and Nazi’s sloshed, frantic voice yowled into her eardrum.

  “They’re after us, love! It’s your bloody bomber story!”

  “Why, what’s the matter?” She sat up and looked at the clock. It was after 11:30, and the early edition was already hitting the streets. She
panicked, knowing that if she had gotten anything wrong it was too late to take it back.

  “Nothing’s the matter!” Nazi shouted. “You’ve got them all chasing you. Now what have you got to follow it?”

  All of a sudden, word of her story had scattered around town like broken glass. The Times was trying to match her piece about David Fitzgerald. So were the Post and the News and all the major television stations. She’d managed to beat them all, for the moment. She was running hard, leading the pack. This was the place she’d always wanted to be in her career. But already the moment was passing. Dozens of reporters and producers were working the phones and combing the streets, trying to overtake her. Now she had to start worrying about staying ahead. And she hadn’t even gotten to sleep yet.

  30

  THE KNOCK ON THE door came just before midnight.

  Leaving the chain on, David opened it and saw an unassuming-looking bald man with an egg-shaped head and light-colored eyebrows standing in the hallway. Six young Visigoths in blue vinyl jackets were behind him.

  “David Fitzgerald?” The unassuming man held out an FBI badge and a thick document with a federal seal on it. “I’m Special Agent Donald Sippes. We have a warrant to search your apartment.”

  David took the chain off the door and looked at the papers. “But this isn’t right,” he said. “I haven’t had a chance to call my lawyer.”

  In fact, he didn’t even have a criminal lawyer yet. His divorce lawyer, Beth Nussbaum, was supposed to be helping him find one as quickly as possible.

  “Sir, we have a warrant,” Sippes said carefully, like he was addressing a mildly retarded child.

  Then he stepped into the apartment and held the door open for his six colleagues.

  Within seconds, they were tearing the place apart, bagging and cataloging the most private and intimate parts of David’s life. They took personal letters from his students, shirts Renee bought him when they were first in love, old Marvel comic books he’d been saving for Arthur, pages of his great unpublished novel, The Firebug. They grabbed photographs, divorce papers, floppy disks, old newspapers, Tupperware, old Delaney books, lesson plans, a papier-mâché solar system that Arthur had made as a school project. The sheer scope of the violation was nauseating, and the agents were utterly indifferent to David’s response. It was like having a high school football team hold a scrimmage in his house.

  They threw the mattress off his bed and confiscated the sheets. They dusted Arthur’s Lego castle in the corner for fingerprints and took away his Playmobil pirate ship. They rifled his file cabinets, chipped paint off his unfinished walls, collected fibers from the carpet in his living room, carted away his old Schwinn bicycle. David felt as though his very identity was being deconstructed piece by piece and he was powerless to prevent it.

  “Listen, I don’t think you guys should be doing this,” he protested. “Isn’t there some matter of due process you’re skipping?”

  “Sir, you’re not under arrest,” Donald Sippes politely countered. “We have probable cause to search your apartment. I’m sorry, but we’ve already had one bombing. We’re not going to wait around for another.”

  In the meantime, the phone kept ringing and David’s answering machine kept taking messages from reporters. Apparently, Judy Mandel’s story had just come out in the newspaper’s early edition, setting off a Monster Rally Demolition Derby of new frenzied media interest.

  David found himself getting enraged. How could this be happening? He was an innocent man in America. A teacher. He’d heard stories from his students about the police destroying their homes because they’d hit the wrong house in a drug raid, but he’d never imagined it could possibly happen to him.

  He went to the phone and tried to call his divorce lawyer again, but her machine was on now, leaving him terrifyingly abandoned.

  He turned and saw an agent with a mustache and a head shaped like a pumpkin go into his closet and pick up the Cal Ripkin Spalding baseball mitt he’d been saving for Arthur’s next birthday in November.

  “You don’t have to take that,” David said angrily. “It’s for my kid.”

  “It’s evidence.” The pumpkin-head shrugged, dropping the glove into a large Ziploc bag and sliding his finger along the seal. “The judge says what’s yours is ours. From here on in, you might as well get used to that.”

  31

  MR. FITZGERALD’S FOURTH-PERIOD class was canceled the next morning and with three consecutive free periods ahead of her, Elizabeth decided to go home early to have lunch and put her thoughts in order. News about the FBI raiding her teacher’s house had left her confused and edgy. She went into the kitchen to make herself a tuna fish sandwich but lost her appetite after one bite. Should she feel relieved or disturbed about Mr. Fitzgerald being named as a suspect? She didn’t know. After all, now she could be sure her brother had nothing to do with the bombing. But the idea that Mr. Fitzgerald could have done it had no immediate resonance in her mind; had he done or said something she’d missed? She was going to have to consider this carefully.

  From upstairs, she heard a footfall in her room. Someone was in there. She raced up the stairs and found Nasser sitting on her bed, with her books and papers strewn all over the floor.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  Her closet door was open and her chest of drawers had been ransacked. Nasser looked up from reading her diary.

  “What does this mean, what you’ve written here?” he demanded, holding it up by its paisley cover: “‘Things are building up inside of me. I have to tell Mr. Fitzgerald.’ Are you talking about the sex?”

  “Give it to me!” She lunged at him and grabbed the book away.

  “He is putting these things in your mind, this bad man!” He jumped up and came after her. “He wants to seduce you. You have to control yourself!”

  “Control myself? I have to control myself?! You slapped my teacher. You’re in my room!” She hugged the diary to her chest.

  “I am trying to help you. You have an obligation.”

  “I don’t have any obligation to you.”

  “Yes, you do! Yes, you do! You have an obligation to the family honor.”

  “Family honor? You have no right to come in here and talk to me about family honor.” She turned on him with her hair flying wildly in her face.

  “Yes, I do! Yes, I do! Because I am the only one who cares! I’m the only one who remembers how it was back home!” He took the rusty key on the chain from around his neck and brandished it at her like a weapon. “You see? You see?!”

  “What?” Her body sagged in weary disgust. “You think you can run my life just because you have some stupid key?”

  “Stupid key? You call this a stupid key?” Nasser looked mortally wounded. “This is the key to Mother’s home. How can you talk this way?”

  “Nasser, have you ever looked at it closely?” Elizabeth shouted. “Have you? Have you even noticed it says ‘Yale’ on the key?”

  “What are you saying?” Cautiously, Nasser took the key from his chest and studied it in his palm.

  “I’m asking you how many old locks there are in Palestine made by an American company. Didn’t you ever wonder about that? It’s not the real key! Okay? It probably opens a door on Fourth Avenue somewhere.”

  He slowly raised his eyes from the key and looked at her, fearful and stunned, as if he’d just realized the floor was about to give way. “This is not true,” he said defensively. “It’s this teacher who’s making you question things.”

  “Nasser, look at the key yourself if you don’t believe me,” she said, shaking her diary at him in exasperation.

  But instead of looking, he put the chain back around his neck and dropped the key down the front of his shirt again. “No, it’s not right,” he said tightly. “It’s the teacher making you blind to what you should believe. He’s not a teacher, he’s a poisoner. He’s trying to break up our family.”

  “He’s not.” Elizabeth hugged the diary tighter, tryi
ng to maintain some control.

  “Yes, of course, he is.” Nasser came toward her. “He wants to make you into his whore. I can see this! It’s in the book you wrote yourself! Why don’t you look at the truth?”

  He reached for the diary again, but she punched him in the shoulder. “Get away from me! Get out of my room!”

  He drew back, startled and furious, looking at the place where she’d hit him.

  “What’s happening to you?” he said, staring as if she’d just spoken in a strange language. “I love you. Don’t you see what he’s doing to us?”

  “Just get out of here. I’m starting to hate you.”

  “What did you say to me?” He reared back a step.

  “I said, get out. I hate you.”

  Then all at once, he came at her and pushed her down on the bed, still trying to wrestle the diary away. She kicked and scratched at his face, screaming, “Get out of here, you’re sick!” They’d rough-housed for fun a few years back, but the feeling between their bodies was different now. The sinews and muscles stretched and pulled in other directions. The two of them were bigger and the house was smaller. He was trying to subdue something within her. She reached for the helmet he’d bought her and started banging him over the head with it.

  “For the love of God!”

  They both looked up at the same time and saw their stepmother, Anne, in the doorway, holding a basket of laundry.

  “What the hell d’you think you’re doing?” she asked Nasser.

  Everything stopped. Elizabeth struggled out from under her brother, and Nasser got up slowly, breathing hard and tucking his shirt into his pants. The static charge between them was still in the air.

  “You can’t understand.” He looked around the room, like someone else was to blame for the shambles. “I’m trying to save my sister. This wouldn’t make sense to you. You are not a good Muslim woman. You’re not part of this family.”

  “I understand. I’ll not have you living in my home anymore.”

  “Elizabeth, tell her how I was trying to help you.”

  But his sister was already busying herself, picking up her room and putting her diary away. “It’s time for you to go, Nasser.”