Man of the Hour Read online

  “Let me tell you something, hon.” He breathed ham and eggs in her face. “A man died in this bombing. Do you know what that means?”

  “Yes, of course.” She nodded vigorously. “It was Sam. He never hurt anybody …”

  He cut her off, not interested in the sentiment. “It means this is a homicide. It means whoever did this is going to get the death penalty. And believe me, we are going to find out who did this.”

  “Yes, I understand.” Her fingertips pressed into the seams of her pockets.

  “So if I find out that you and your brother had anything to do with this, you are going to get the death penalty. Capisce?” He pinched his fingers together and wagged them in her face. “The fact that you are a young girl will cut no ice at all. You are an Arab in America. It’s going to be an eye for an eye. So if you got something to tell me, say it now,” he barked. “Otherwise, I am not going to be able to do a damn thing for you.”

  She looked down, trying to process all the information that had been thrust at her. Nasser. The smoke from the beach. The Monastery of Branches. The key on the table. The slap in the parking lot. Her father. Her mother. It was too much and not enough. She needed time to sort through it all.

  “I had nothing to do with it,” she said, looking up at the detective and straggling to keep her voice steady. “I went shopping that day with my brother. He bought me pads and a helmet for when I go Rollerblading. It was close to my birthday.”

  “Prove it,” said Calloway, his pale mustache twitching.

  “Well, we were stuck in traffic for a while on the Belt,” she said, exaggerating the delay for both herself and him at the same time. “But I kept the sales receipt from later that day. I wasn’t sure the helmet fit right.”

  Calloway seemed to inflate and men deflate, hearing the news. Clearly, he’d been hoping to catch the break here that would solve his case.

  “All right, go get the slip,” he said. “I haven’t got all day.”

  50

  “I THINK SHE HAS a crush on you,” said Donna Vitale.

  “Who?” David finished the spaghetti on his plate and took another helping. Comfort food.

  “That little Arab girl I saw you talking to in the office today.”

  They were having dinner at Donna’s apartment on Carroll Street in Park Slope. A modest one-bedroom floor-through, with period details and garden access. A self-sufficient kind of place, with a tiny kitchen, a futon in the back, and a writing desk at the front bay windows, which no doubt let in drenching sunlight during the day.

  “You don’t like her, do you?” said David.

  “I don’t know her.” Donna helped herself to some salad and re-filled her glass of white wine. “I had her brother in my class a few years back, though. A world-class jerk. The one time he spoke up in class was to tell me he didn’t think it was right for there to be women teachers at the school. Also, I think he somehow got the impression I was Jewish, which didn’t sit too well with him either.”

  “Yes, he had some adjustment problems.”

  David found himself taking greedy gulps of food. Left to his own devices, he was a determined but awful cook—always putting in he-man amounts of spices and herbs to disastrous effect—so it had been ages since he’d had a good homemade meal.

  “Kids like that, I don’t know.” Candlelight played off Donna’s plain here-it-is hair and shone in the one eye staring off dreamily into the distance. “They can sap you, if you don’t watch it. Troublemakers. Did I tell you I had a couple of Russian girls in my class last year who were giving boys blow jobs for rides in their cars?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “On my mother’s.” Donna raised her hand, taking an oath. “Then you got your druggies, your gangster wannabes—white and black—and your kids whose parents are just too stupid to let them concentrate on school.”

  “Actually, those are sometimes my favorites.” David twirled a strand around his fork. “The ones who need a little extra.”

  “Well yeah!” Donna picked up her glass. “Me too. That’s not what I was talking about before. I was talking about the knuckleheads who don’t want to work. But the others, the ones who have to overcome something, who maybe have some little imperfection but keep trying anyway? They’ve got my heart.”

  Is that why you invited me over tonight? David wondered. Because I’m so fucking imperfect? Who cared? He was grateful to be anywhere people would have him.

  She smiled and went to the kitchen to get him a second beer.

  “So what are you going to do?” she asked when she came back.

  “About what?”

  “About your life. About the mess you’re in.” She twisted off the bottle cap and poured it into his glass mug for him.

  “Well.” He thanked her with a nod. “I could make up T-shirts. ‘I Bombed Coney Island High.’”

  “You could.”

  “Other than that, I’m just going full-tilt, three hundred miles an hour in no particular direction.” He stared at the fizzing head of his beer, trying to fight the abysmal feeling inside. “I’m talking to the kids, talking to the neighborhood people, talking to my lawyers. But nobody knows nothin’. The bomb got there and went off by itself.”

  She smiled sympathetically. “So do you throw up your hands now?”

  “No way. I can’t.” He gulped down half the beer and then remembered he needed to be more cautious with his drinking. “Did I tell you my lawyers want me to take a polygraph and do a live TV interview with this guy Lindsay Paul later this week?”

  “Think that’s smart?”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to do it,” he said firmly. “But then I was at the playground with my son the other day and I noticed that none of the other kids would play with him because their parents recognized me.” He winced, remembering Arthur’s bewildered expression. “And then I realized there was a team of three or four FBI agents watching us from outside the fence. While I’m at the playground. With my son. So I just lost it with them.” He closed his fist around the mug. “I went over and started screaming at the guy in charge, Donald Sippes. ‘Get the fuck away from me, you motherfucker. Are you trying to give my son an asthma attack?’ And then I turn around and Arthur’s behind me, and he’s screaming at the agents too. All red-faced and wheezing, going, ‘My daddy’s not a bad guy! He’s not! He’s not! He’s not!’”

  “And that killed you,” Donna said.

  “Yeah, it kind of tore me up a little,” he said quietly, trying to hold in his emotions. “So then I called back my lawyers and said, ‘Okay, let’s pull out all the stops. I’m not letting my son walk around with this anymore.’”

  He fell silent, listening to voices passing on the street and leaves rustling on the trees. He hadn’t seen the surveillance agents when he came up the street tonight, but he knew they were out there.

  “So can I ask you something?” Donna wiped her lips with her napkin.

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  She hesitated, seeming to take his measure for a moment. “Have you thought about what would happen if you got locked up?” she asked.

  “We’re still a long way from that,” he said, finishing his beer.

  She saw through his bravado right away. “Big man,” she said. “Think you could handle Rikers Island?”

  “Well, it wouldn’t exactly be my first time around.”

  “Oh?”

  He put his mug down hard, rattling their plates. “You knew I got arrested before, didn’t you? It was in the papers.”

  “I think I read something about it.” Her wandering eye wandered farther away from him.

  “I was a kid.” He turned the glass around, studying the way the light changed color in its contours. “I had this job being lifeguard at the Westbury Beach Club, and, you know, I was just a local kid working for the rich summer people. So anyway, I hooked up with a couple of idiots. Pete Spano and Dickie Bergman. Pete really, really wanted to be in the Mafia and Dickie was just insane—he had white h
air, like an albino, but not quite. It was like coming that close without achieving albino-ness drove him crazy.” He laughed, and then felt a tug of shame. “So what happened was, they got me into stealing cars from the club’s parking lot at night.”

  “Oh yeah?” She rested her chin on her palm.

  “Yeah.” He retreated into himself for a moment, the second beer hitting him as he wondered if he should continue. “I wasn’t so much into stealing as I was into just driving them around and bringing them back. Pete and Dickie went straight to the larceny. They actually took some of the cars out to Patchogue and sold them to wise guys.” He shook his head, knowing he’d gone too far in the story to stop. “I don’t know why I got involved. I was just this doofy kid, who was always reading war books and trying to get good grades and taking my grandmother to the market in her wheelchair every week. So I don’t know. I thought it would be cool and I’d get girls to pay attention to me if I showed up driving a bitchin’ Corvette.”

  “No wonder you get along with all the misfits.” She turned a little, focusing her good eye on him. “So what happened?”

  “I got caught.” He studied the dregs at the bottom of his mug. “I guess maybe that’s what I wanted all along, taking cars from the club where I was working. I took this beautiful red MG-BGT for a spin down Ocean Boulevard and I lost control of it and rode it up onto this guy’s lawn, smashed it right into his porch jockey. He comes out in his bathrobe, says, ‘Are you all right, son?’ I said, ‘Fuck you!’ and hauled out of there. But the police caught up to me by the time I made it back to the beach club. It turned out they’d sort of been looking at us for a while.”

  “So did you give your friends up?” Donna asked, cutting to the heart of the story as only a public schoolteacher could.

  “Nope.” He watched the candle guttering. “This cop took me into the stationhouse, told me he was going to tell my father what I did, and wasn’t I a terrible kid, and my whole future would be ruined if I didn’t make a clean slate of it and rat on my friends.”

  “And you said?”

  “And I said, take me to the judge. I’ll take what I’ve got coming.”

  “Bullshit,” she said.

  He shrugged. “It’s the truth. I spent the night in jail with the drunks, and then the next morning I went before the judge and said, ‘Your Honor, I’ll own up to anything I did and that’s as far as it goes. All I ask is you take into account everything that I’m about. Don’t just judge me for this one mistake. Add everything else into it before you make your decision.’”

  “You must’ve been a pretty ballsy kid,” she said, as she finished her wine.

  “Yeah, maybe. I don’t know.” He suddenly felt abashed, remembering how scared he was standing up in the rickety little Nassau County courtroom that day. “I just knew it was what my father would’ve wanted me to say. Not that he gave me instructions of any kind. I just had this feeling about it. That if I laid it all out and didn’t forget who I was, everything would basically be all right. And it was. The judge gave me probation and sealed the record, so I wouldn’t have a problem getting a job later on.”

  He watched little droplets of wax fall and harden on the table’s surface. He started to scratch them away, but then thought better of it. Let them be.

  “And what happened to your friends?” asked Donna.

  “Ah, they both thought they were tough guys and never owned up to doing anything. So the judge gave both of them a little jail time. Hard-core, right? I think it kind of messed both of them up for life, you know. Petey never really hooked up with the Mafia. He just became a junkie and eventually killed himself. And Dickie went all the way over to the dark side. He became a telemarketer.” He rapped his knuckles on the tabletop. “I guess, it was just this big parting for us. They went their way and I went mine. So maybe that cop was right, in a sense. What happened that night probably did determine the rest of my life. Only not the way he thought.”

  He sat back, tired and dry-mouthed, feeling like he’d been talking for eight periods in a row. “So I suppose the point of this whole thing,” he said, “is if I can just hang in there and keep my head straight, basically everything will be okay again. I hope.”

  “I hope so too.” She reached across the table and squeezed his hand.

  He looked down at her fingers. “Now can I ask you something?”

  “Go for it, dude.”

  “What makes you so sure I’m not the bad guy anyway?”

  “I don’t know.” Her good eye scanned his face, as if trying to see the edges of a mask. “You seem too … I don’t know, invested. Is that the right word?”

  “I’m not sure. Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “I mean, you seem too present with the kids. I hear you on the phone sometimes, in the office, when you’re talking to your son. And I know I shouldn’t be listening but”—she leaned forward and looked up at him, the glow from inside her stronger than the candlelight—“I just get a good feeling about you. About the kind of man you are when no one else is watching. Besides, I’ve seen how you are at the coffee machine. You couldn’t make a bomb if your life depended on it.”

  He waited a beat and then lifted his empty glass to her. “Why did it take me the better part of a year to have dinner with you?”

  “Ha!”

  She clinked empty glasses with him. In its subtle way, tonight was a sort of turning point for him. It was the first time since he got married that he’d been potentially serious about another woman, and the idea that he was ending one part of his life and starting another made him feel both melancholy and elated.

  “Look, I really ought to get out of here.” He checked his watch. “I don’t know if I mentioned this, but they’ve probably been watching your place all night.”

  “I figured as much. It seemed kind of exciting.”

  She got up and started to clear the dishes. He liked talking to her, he realized. She didn’t make him feel light-headed and full of false promise. She made him feel real. This was a woman who took no shit and gave none without warrant. He wondered how Arthur would like her.

  “Next time, I buy you dinner and we talk about you,” he said, going to get his jacket. “Instead of me blathering on. Maybe by then, they won’t be following me.”

  “That would be nice.” She came over and fussed with his collar.

  He put his fingers under her chin and kissed her softly on the lips. She let his arms encircle her and then gently pulled back after a few seconds. “Hey, you’re doing eighty in a fifty-five. Slow down a little.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I know what I want and I know when I want it. And I just don’t happen to want that right now. We’ll talk about later, later, big guy.”

  “Good deal.”

  He touched her shoulder lightly and started for the door.

  “Something else I wanted to ask you,” she said.

  “Go ahead.” He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “I owe you.”

  “‘God keep me from completing anything’?” She put her arms out as if to say, What gives?

  “Oh yeah, everybody’s asking me about that lately.”

  “So why don’t you want to complete anything?”

  His hand dropped off the knob. This was slightly different from what Dr. Ferry, the psychiatrist, had been asking. “I don’t know. I guess I used to think that if I didn’t complete something, I’d always have a chance to start over and do it better. And then there’d never be a finished thing for people to judge.”

  “I hate to tell you, but it didn’t work.” She helped him button his jacket. “The not-getting-judged part.”

  “Yeah, I noticed.”

  51

  AT HALF PAST NINE that night, Elizabeth Hamdy came out of West Side Storage on Tenth Avenue, looked around at the meat trucks and off-duty post office workers passing by, and ran across the street to join Nasser, who sat waiting in his Lincoln Town Car.

  “You k
now, I’m still furious at you,” she said, after she got in.

  “I know. I’m sorry for the bad things I did.”

  She stared out the windshield at the slow-moving Lincoln Tunnel traffic up ahead, lightning bugs inching their way under the dark river.

  “A week and a half we haven’t spoken and you only call because you need a favor.” She folded her arms and looked somber. “You missed my birthday dinner at the Moroccan Star. Nice.”

  “I am sorry. I have been so busy. And I felt shy because we fought.”

  “I shouldn’t even talk to you anymore,” she said. “I should have just torn up all your messages and forgotten about them.”

  “I know. I don’t know why I act this way. I lost control.” He nodded sadly and then waited a beat. “So did you do it?” he asked.

  “Yes, I did it,” she sighed. “I rented your storage locker for you. Two hundred dollars a month for a twelve-by-twelve room. Are you happy now?”

  Headlights flickered across his eyes. “Yes, I am very happy. I appreciate you doing this for me. This favor.”

  She untied her hair and let it fall around her shoulders. “I don’t even know why I bother. You’re not even that nice to me. It’s not like I need your approval or anything.”

  “I understand. You are too nice.” He glanced up at his rearview mirror, making sure no police were in the area. “So okay. I’ll take you home.”

  He turned the key in the ignition and felt his guts rev. It was a bad thing to get Elizabeth involved in this operation, he’d told Youssef and Dr. Ahmed, even in such a small way. But they’d insisted. The Americans they were dealing with were getting too wary of all these Arab men buying the material for the haddutas. It would be better to have a girl—especially a non-Arab-looking girl—rent a storage locker where they could keep the materials overnight and have the compressors delivered without raising suspicions. Leaving everything in the unsecured garage when they weren’t there was out of the question; the neighbors were nosy enough as it was and Dr. Ahmed was getting worried that the junkies on the block would try stealing the chemicals.