Man of the Hour Read online

  32

  THE LITTLE BITS OF David Fitzgerald that had been raining all over the world had finally landed and now he had no idea how to put them back together again.

  Larry Simonetti had called the first thing in the morning and told him not to report to school. “I’ve already talked it over with the union,” he said. “You can still get your salary, but it might be better if you stayed home for a while.”

  Meanwhile, federal agents had raided his mother’s house on Long Island, seizing his father’s old rifles and souvenir grenades from the garage, as if they were evidence of a connection with some sort of right-wing terrorist militia. David had to call his mother in Florida to calm her down and reassure her before returning to the business of talking to the steady stream of criminal lawyers interested in representing him. It was hard getting used to the idea that from here on in his life was going to be in a constant state of emergency.

  “Looks like these guys did a full Rudy on you,” said his latest visitor, an attorney named Ralph Marcovicci, who was surveying the heap of shredded bedclothes, silverware, and dismantled fixtures in the middle of the living room. “Imagine if they didn’t like you. How’s your landlord feeling these days, anyway?”

  “Testy,” said David, bringing in a cup of coffee he’d poured through a strainer, since the agents had broken his coffeemaker. “It’s Columbia University. I worked a fiddle with somebody in their real estate department, so I could be near my kid. I’m only supposed to hold on to the apartment until I finish my doctorate.”

  “Well, now you got a good excuse,” said Marcovicci, a bell-shaped, pink-cheeked man who wore his hair like a ’70s classic rock guitarist and weighed at least three hundred pounds.

  He was accompanied by another lawyer, named Judah Rosenbloom, who wore a graying ponytail and horn-rimmed glasses and was so skinny he looked as if he let Ralph eat off his plate at every meal.

  “So I know Bern recommended you,” said David, jittery and trying to get his bearings. “But you guys look very familiar to me. Where do I know you from?”

  “I’ve handled a lotta high-profile cases the last few years.” Ralph took the coffee from David and sat down, almost breaking the one good chair left in the living room. “Remember the Larchmont Lolita? That was one of mine.”

  “Oh.”

  “And the Boom-Boom Killer? The stripper who shot two customers at the club where she worked? That was another one of mine. Also, the Centerfold Cop. I’ve been on Howard Stern a lot.”

  “Really,” said David.

  “Yeah, Howard’s a good friend of mine. I’m supposed to go over to his house for a barbecue.”

  David was already shaking his head no. He knew he was in desperate trouble, but he wasn’t that desperate. “Well, I …”

  But now Judah Rosenbloom, tugging furiously at his glasses, spoke up. “David, I want you to know I’ve been a passionate advocate for the poor and the dispossessed for many years now and I’ve never hesitated to take on unpopular clients. In fact, I believe that’s my mission as a lawyer.” He spoke swiftly and insistently, as if he expected to get thrown out of the room. “I believe that people of good conscience should not only challenge the apparatus of government but dismantle its institutions when the cause of justice is not being served …”

  David suddenly remembered he’d seen Rosenbloom on television, representing various terrorists and local drug dealers.

  “Uh, listen, I don’t know if I want you guys to represent me.”

  “Can I ask if you’ve spoken to other lawyers?” asked Judah.

  “Well, I’ve seen a few already and I think the union’s talking to some others for me.” He felt his heart sinking as he remembered last night’s conversation with his chapter leader.

  “Come on, get real.” Marcovicci looked over at the smudged, empty spot in the corner where Arthur’s toys had been. “Some UFT lawyer’s going to help you with a homicide charge?”

  “I haven’t been charged with anything yet.” David stiffened. “As far as I know.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, pal. You’re already on trial. Have you taken a look outside lately?”

  Marcovicci got out of his chair and walked over to the window. He pulled up the blinds and pointed to the sixty or seventy media people lining West 112th Street with their cars and broadcast trucks.

  “You get it, don’t you? You’re on trial in the court of public opinion. You’re getting the thermonuclear screw.”

  “The what?”

  “The thermonuclear screw.” Marcovicci mimed turning a big tool, grinding it in. “Don’t you know what that is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s when the media starts bearing down on you and keeps boring in till there’s nothing left. They don’t have to put the cuffs on you. Your reputation is already on the block. Have you heard your mother’s neighbors and your students on the news? They can’t wait to bury you. ‘He seemed like a nice, quiet young man, I never would have suspected.’”

  With most of his furniture disassembled or confiscated, David found himself sitting on the bare carpet. “But that doesn’t matter in a court of law. Does it?”

  “Oh yeah, right.” Marcovicci chuckled as he sat down again. “Like a jury isn’t going to see any of that.”

  “But I’m innocent!” David said, balling up his fists in anger.

  “Sure you are.” Marcovicci smiled indulgently, facetiously. “Everyone I’ve ever represented was innocent.”

  “But I’m really innocent. I’m the one who kept the kids off the bus.”

  He found himself struggling to keep his composure. The wrongness, the sheer perversity of his situation, had literally knocked the breath out of him for the last twenty-four hours. And his lack of sleep was adding a blurry edge to the proceedings.

  “David, we feel it’s imperative we begin to fight back and start a counteroffensive immediately.” Judah Rosenbloom, who’d remained standing, took off his glasses and wiped them with a Kleenex. His eyes seemed younger than the rest of his face. “We have to define the terms of the dialogue.”

  “But when can I expect to get my name cleared? I can’t have this hanging over me. I’ve got a conference scheduled with the judge in my divorce case tomorrow.”

  “Well, the problem is, you haven’t been arrested.”

  “What? Why is that a problem?”

  “Because if you’d been arrested, then we could go to court and get you acquitted—or better yet, force them to drop the charges.” Rosenbloom nodded at Marcovicci. “But as things stand, there’s only innuendo and suspicion. It’s like shooting arrows at ghosts.”

  Again, David felt that momentary spasm of claustrophobia-tinged panic, that feeling that things would never be the same. All this time, he’d been thinking Hemingway and acting Henry James, but now his life was going Kafka on him.

  “So I’m just supposed to sit here while the roof caves in? What about my job? What about my custody case? You mean to tell me I’m going to lose my job and my son because there’s not enough evidence to charge me, so I can eventually be cleared? That could go on forever.”

  “Exactly.” Marcovicci tipped back his coffee cup. “That’s why you’ve got to fight this case on every front. With Judah, you got all the legal angles covered if it comes to that. And with me, you’ve got the most media-savvy lawyer in the tri-state region. I know every radio- and talk-show booker in the city. I could have you on Dateline by tomorrow night, proclaiming your innocence …”

  “Oh no.” David smacked the floor. “I’m not going through that again. The media’s probably what got me in trouble in the first place.” He stood up. “Listen, thanks for your time, guys. But I think I have to talk to some other lawyers.”

  “Are you sure about this, David?” Judah Rosenbloom raised his eyebrows in sincere concern. “With Ralph and me working together, you get the best of both worlds. Go to the library and look at the clips. I had sixteen years in solo practice before I hooked up with Ralphie, and I’
ll put my record up against any high-priced defense lawyer in town.”

  So this was a marriage of convenience. David took a business card from Judah.

  “I’m sure you guys are great,” he said. “I just don’t want to get caught up in the whole circus.”

  “Hey, guess what, pal.” Marcovicci stood up too; it was like a mountain rising. “The circus already hit town.”

  “I still think I’d like to take a more low-key approach.”

  “Suit yourself.” Marcovicci fixed his collar and threw back his hair. “You know, sometimes people say, ‘Ralphie, you’re a clown. You don’t know the law.’ And sometimes, I even say to myself I should have studied more at school, read more of the great books. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Aristotle. Truth and beauty. Perhaps I should have tried to be more of a scholar, a man like yourself or Judah here. But you know what? It’s not a scholarly age we live in.” He stuck out his hands to indicate jiggling breasts and wiggled his enormous butt. “It’s a BOOM-BOOM KILLER AGE! It’s a LARCHMONT LOLITA age! And every-fucking-body knows it. So if you just let it roll over you and crush you, you got no one to blame but yourself, pal.”

  The phone rang and David waited a beat before picking it up. He couldn’t deal with another reporter right now. “Yes. Who is it?”

  “David, it’s Renee.” She sounded skittish and far away, like she’d crawled out on a tree limb with the phone.

  “What’s up?”

  “You need to get over here. Right away. They’ve been here. And I cannot handle it.”

  “Oh shit.”

  “That’s what I say.” She hung up.

  David rubbed his knuckles on his beard. He couldn’t wait any longer. He had to make a decision and pick a lawyer. Judah and Ralph had started for the door, and he pictured a rescue barge pulling away, leaving him stranded on a tiny shrinking iceberg.

  “How much are you guys going to charge me?” he blurted out.

  The lawyers looked at each other and shrugged. “I guess we’re willing to take you on pro bono,” said Judah.

  “But of course, we get the usual percentage on the civil suit later,” Ralph cut him off. “You got a helluva case, provided you’re innocent.”

  Oh yes, provided you’re innocent. That little detail. David hesitated just a second or two before he told the lawyers they were hired. It wasn’t just the need to make a quick decision. There were larger forces at work. Ralph was right. It was a Boom-Boom Killer age, a Larchmont Lolita age. He couldn’t just get his good name back on legal technicalities and precedents; he had to change people’s perceptions out in the world.

  “So I guess I’d like you guys to represent me,” David said, almost swallowing his words.

  “Good man,” said Ralph, pumping his hand. “We’re going to have a lot of fun. Just remember, ‘Life is an adventure or nothing at all.’”

  “Who said that?” asked David.

  “Helen Keller.”

  33

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE FIGHT with his sister, Nasser packed his bags and moved out, with no particular destination in mind.

  First he stopped by the school, hoping to see Mr. Fitzgerald again. The one who’d started all his misery. He sat in the parking lot, listening to the radio and watching the school’s back entrance, not sure what he’d do when he saw the teacher. But then he heard the news stories saying Mr. Fitzgerald had become a suspect in the bombing, and he drove on.

  Confusion was clouding his mind. Everything was backward. First, the teacher tried to seduce his sister. Then Nasser had been thrown out of his own family’s home. Now the teacher was being blamed for the bomb Nasser had planted. It was hard to understand how this was all part of a Divine plan.

  He tried calling Youssef, but the Great Bear wasn’t in. So instead he took the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, thinking maybe he’d try to talk to Professor Bin-Khaled. He was at loose ends, directionless, like a marble falling through the universe. He needed a place to stop. He tried to call Youssef and Dr. Ahmed from a pay phone, but they were out. It was just as well he couldn’t get in touch with them; he wasn’t ready to get sucked into their plans for another hadduta just yet. He was too unsettled. The key was still dangling against his chest; he hadn’t dared to look at it closely since arguing with Elizabeth.

  From having checked the schedule before, he knew the professor was due to be giving a lecture today in one of the City University buildings on West 42nd Street. The halls inside were gray and careworn and reeked of ammonia. They reminded him of Bethlehem University back home, where he’d visited friends occasionally, but the feeling here was different. There was more of a hopeful, industrious bustle in these corridors. People here thought they had a future.

  He found Room 106 and went in. The room was packed; some three hundred seats were arranged in ascending rows, amphitheater-style. He took an empty chair at the back and sat down, feeling a wave of discomfiting nostalgia. Back in school again. But most of the students here looked at least a decade older than the ones at Coney Island High School. They were more like people you saw on their way to work on the subway. They were focused and purposeful in taking their notes, determined to avoid distractions. The curly-haired Hispanic guy on Nasser’s right was using a tape recorder so he wouldn’t miss anything. He wore a sports jacket and a tie as if he’d come to class straight from a job in a bank. The black woman on Nasser’s left wore starchy beige office clothes with a baby-picture button clipped on her denim book bag. She’d covered both sides of a notebook page with painstaking felt-tip writing. These weren’t spoiled American children caught up in television and frivolity. These were adults sacrificing something to be here, to learn. And Nasser felt itchy and out of place among them.

  Down by the blackboard at the bottom of the room, his old friend and cellmate, Ibrahim, Professor Bin-Khaled, was lecturing. At first, Nasser almost didn’t recognize him—the intervening years had dropped a heavy snowfall into Ibrahim’s hair and turned his mustache white as well.

  He couldn’t have been more than forty-five, Nasser calculated, but he looked like he was in his sixties. His movements were slow and gingerly, like something was still broken inside him after all this time. Insh’allah the man had suffered so much, getting tortured in prison and then losing a son in the struggle. Nasser felt a current of shame go through him, wishing he’d tried to make contact sooner.

  “In A Passage to India, we see the colonizing force confronting the Other and collapsing utterly in the face of it,” Ibrahim was saying as he drew a picture of a cave on the blackboard. “But what we have is not a polemic. Forster also gives us these impossible friendships, this sense of people straining to reach beyond boundaries …”

  It wasn’t what Nasser wanted to hear, right now. Impossible friendships. He wanted white-hot cleansing anger, words to direct him. He knew Ibrahim could give them to him, if only these other people weren’t around. The Hispanic man on his right flipped through his copy of A Passage to India, looking for references. The woman on his left gracefully folded one leg over the other and brought her face down close to her page. She reminded Nasser of that perfect-posture girl he used to see in the high school cafeteria, Aisha Watkins, another one he never got up the nerve to talk to. Except this girl next to him had grown up and moved on in her life, while Nasser felt exactly the same: tongue-tied, mystified, and locked into himself.

  Insh’allah. He couldn’t stand to wait for Ibrahim. Too much was burning him up inside. He walked out of the lecture room and drove downtown to pray at the Medina Mosque on 11th Street. He washed his eyes, ears, nose, and privates, then took off his shoes and offered up an ishkatar, a prayer for guidance. The storm was still raging in his head as he knelt and prostrated himself in the bare white-tiled room alongside a half-dozen other men. A side of him wished something magnificent and violent would happen to him, while another side kept thinking about women: his sister, the girl at the cafeteria, the woman in the classroom. What did God want him to do next? Why didn’t He make His wil
l manifest? Nasser began to blame himself; perhaps he wasn’t doing enough for the faith. The Prophet said when you saw a wrong action, you should try to change it first with your hands, then with your words, and finally with your heart. Maybe he needed to do more of each.

  He drove around for an hour or so, picking up fares and earning about $24, and then at five o’clock, he found himself outside a neon-lit club on Lower Broadway called the Pussycat Lounge. He’d never been inside, but he knew immoral things went on there. No, he wasn’t just going in because he’d never seen a woman in a state of undress before. To do it for that reason would be strictly haram. His reasons were righteous; he wanted to stop the wrongful actions without a bomb and spread the teachings of God. Perhaps he’d even find a convert in there.

  But as soon as he walked in carrying his tattered copy of the Koran, he felt himself diverted from his mission. The warm throb of the music went right down into the pit of his stomach, reminding him of the songs Elizabeth would play late at night in her room while he was trying to sleep in the basement. It would come through the ceiling, soothing him to sleep at night. A secret thing that he shared with her.

  But here he looked around in terror at the smoked-mirror walls and the chrome-topped bar. He saw bottles of liquor lined up behind the counter and had to fight the urge to smash them with his bare hands. Nearby there was a pool table and display cases full of dusty “I Luv NY” trinkets and souvenirs, but even Nasser understood their only purpose was to get around city regulations banning a club from devoting all of its floor space to “adult entertainment.”

  “Excuse me, sir, can I help you?” A bouncer, a bulky white refrigerator of a man in a black bow tie, was talking to him.

  “Yes … I …” What to say here, what to do? “I would like to talk to someone.”

  “Right this way, sir.”

  The bouncer guided him past the bar and into a grotto-like darkened room full of mostly empty tables and chairs. It took Nasser’s eyes a second to adjust to the purplish ultraviolet light before he saw a woman dancing on the stage, her movements undulating, serpentine. On the wall behind her, there was an electronic zipper sign, showing stock prices swimming by in red lights. To his right, he saw a man in a suit slumped back in a seat, as if drugged. A blond woman in a skimpy white bathing suit was presenting her rear end to him.