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The
others laughed and then they all assumed expressions of penitence. Twenty
seconds of silence to remember the unfortunate Carreno. The faces, suddenly
solemn, made Fate think of a masked ball. For a brief instant he couldn't
breathe, he saw his mother's empty apartment, he had a premonition of two people
making love in a miserable room, all at the same time, a moment defined by the
word
climacteric.
What are you, flacking for the Klan? Fate asked the
reporter who had told the story. Watch out, looks like we got ourselves another
touchy jig, said the reporter. Fate tried to lunge at him and get a punch in
(though a slap in the face would've been better), but he was blocked by the
reporters surrounding the man. He's just fucking around, he heard someone say.
We're all American here. There's nobody here from the Klan. At least I don't
think so. Then he heard more laughter. When he calmed down and went to sit by
himself in a corner of the bar, one of the reporters who'd been listening to
the story of Hercules Carreno came up to him and held out his hand.

"Chuck Campbell,
Sport Magazine,
Chicago
."

Fate
shook the reporter's hand and told him his name and the name of the magazine he
worked for.

"I heard your sports guy was killed," said
Campbell
.

"That's right," said Fate.

"Woman trouble, I bet," said
Campbell
.

"I don't know," said Fate.

"I
knew Jimmy Lowell," said
Campbell
,
"at least we saw each other
f
orty times or so, which is more than some men see a mistress, or
even a wife. He was a good person. He liked his beer and he liked his dinner. A
hardworking man, he used to say, has to eat, and the food has to be good.
Sometimes we flew together. I can't sleep on planes. Jimmy Lowell would sleep
through the whole flight, only time he'd wake up was to eat or tell some story.
The truth is, he didn't really give a shit about boxing, his sport was
baseball, but for you guys he covered everything, even tennis. He never had a
bad word for anybody. He respected people and people respected him. Wouldn't
you say?"

"I never met
Lowell
in my life," said Fate.

"Don't let yourself get upset by what you just heard,"
said
Campbell
.
"Sports is a boring beat and guys shoot off their mouths without thinking
about it, they make up stories just to have something different to talk about.
Sometimes we say stupid things without meaning to. The guy who told the story
about that Mexican fighter, he isn't a bad guy. Compared to the others, he's
pretty decent, has an open mind. It's just that every so often, to pass the
time, we act like assholes. But we don't mean anything by it," said
Campbell
.

"It's not a problem," said Fate.

"How many rounds you think it'll take Count Pickett to
win?"

"I don't know," said Fate, "I saw Merolino
Fernandez training at his place yesterday and he didn't look like a loser to
me."

"He'll go down before the third," said
Campbell
.

Another reporter asked where Fernandez was staying.

"Not far from the city," said Fate, "although I
don't actually know, I didn't go alone, some Mexicans took me."

When Fate checked his e-mail again, he found a reply from
his editor. There was no interest in the story he'd pitched, or no budget. His
editor suggested that Fate limit himself to completing the assignment from the
sports editor and then return immediately. Fate spoke to a clerk at the Sonora
Resort and asked to place a call to
New
York
.

While he waited he thought about other pitches the magazine had
turned down. The most recent had been about a political group in
Harlem
, the Mohammedan Brotherhood. He'd met them during
a pro-Palestine demonstration. The turnout was mixed, groups of Arabs,
New York
lefties, new
antiglobalization activists. But the Mohammedan Brotherhood caught his
attention because they were marching under a big poster of Osama bin Laden.
They were all black and they were all wearing black leather jackets and black
berets and sunglasses, which gave them a vague resemblance to the Panthers,
except that the Panthers had been teenagers and the ones who weren't teenagers
had a youthful look, an aura of youthfulness and tragedy, whereas the members
of the Mohammedan Brotherhood were grown men, broad shouldered with huge
biceps, people who spent hours and hours at the gym, lifting weights, people
born to be bodyguards, but whose bodyguards? true human tanks whose very
presence was intimidating, although there were no more than twenty at the
demonstration, possibly fewer, but somehow the poster of bin Laden had a
magnifying effect, first and foremost because it was less than six months since
the attack on the World Trade Center and walking around with bin Laden, even
just in effigy, was an extreme provocation. Of course, Fate wasn't the only one
who took notice of the small, defiant presence of the Brotherhood: the
television cameras followed them, their spokesman was interviewed, and the
photographers from several papers documented the attendance of the group, which
looked as if it was asking to be crushed.

Fate
observed them from a distance. He watched them talk to the television crews and
some local radio reporters, he watched them yell slogans, he watched them march
through the crowd, and he followed them. Before the demonstration began to
break up, the members of the Mohammedan Brotherhood exited in a planned
maneuver. A couple of vans were waiting for them on a corner. Only then did
Fate realize that there were no more than fifteen of them. They ran. He ran
after them. He explained that he wanted to interview them for his magazine.
They talked next to the vans, on a side street. The one who seemed to be the
leader, a tall, fat guy with a shaved head, asked him what magazine he worked
for. Fate told him and the man smirked.

"No
one reads that shit today," he said.

"It's
a magazine for brothers," said Fate.

"It's
a motherfucking sellout," said the man, still smiling. "It's
played."

"I don't think so," said Fate.

A
Chinese kitchen worker came out to leave some garbage bags. An Arab watched
them from the corner. Strange, remote faces, thought Fate, as the man who
seemed to be the leader gave him a time, a date, a place in the
Bronx
where they would see each other in a few days.

Fate kept the appointment. Three members of the Brotherhood
and a black van were waiting for him. They drove to a basement near Baychester.
The fat guy with the shaved head was waiting for them there. He said to call
him Khalil. The others didn't give their names. Khalil talked about the Holy
War. Explain what the hell you mean by Holy War, said Fate. The Holy War speaks
for us when our mouths are parched, said Khalil. The Holy War is the language
of the mute, of those who've lost the power of speech, of those who never knew
how to speak. Why do you march against
Israel
? asked Fate. The Jew is
keeping us down, said Khalil. You won't see a Jew in the Klan, said Fate.
That's what the Jews want us to think. In fact, the Klan is everywhere. In Tel
Aviv, in
London
, in
Washington
. Many leaders of the Klan are
Jews, said Khalil. It's always been that way.
Hollywood
is full of Klan leaders. Who? asked
Fate. Khalil warned him that what he was about to say was off the record.
"The Jew tycoons have good Jew lawyers," he said. Who? asked Fate.
Khalil named three movie directors and two actors. Then Fate had an
inspiration. He asked: is Woody Allen a member of the Klan? He is, said Khalil,
look at his movies, have you ever seen a black man in them? Not many, said
Fate. Not one, said Khalil. Why were you carrying a poster of bin Laden? asked
Fate. Because Osama bin Laden was the first to understand the nature of the
fight we face today. Then they talked about bin Laden's innocence and Pearl
Harbor and about how convenient the attack on the
Twin
Towers
had been for some people. Stockbrokers, said Khalil, people with incriminating
papers hidden in their offices, people who sell arms and needed something like
that to happen. According to you, said Fate, Mohamed Atta was an undercover
agent for the CIA or the FBI. What happened to Mohamed Atta's body? Khalil
asked. Who can be sure Mohamed Atta was on one of those planes? I'll tell you
what I think. I think Atta is dead. He died under torture, or he was shot in
the back of the head. Then I think they chopped him into little pieces and
ground his bones down until they looked like chicken bones. After that they put
the little bones and cutlets in a box, filled it with cement, and dropped it in
some
Florida
swamp. And they did the same thing to the men he was with.

So
who flew the planes? asked Fate. Klan lunatics, nameless inmates from mental
hospitals in the
Midwest
, volunteers
brainwashed to face
s
uicide. Thousands of people
disappear in this country every year and nobody tries to find them. Then they
talked about the Romans and the Roman circus and the first Christians who were
eaten by lions. But the lions will choke on our black flesh, he said.

The next day Fate met them at a Harlem club and there he
was introduced to Ibrahim, a man of average height with a scarred face, who set
about describing to him in great detail all the charitable work the Brotherhood
did in the neighborhood. They ate together at a diner next door to the club.
The diner was run by a woman. A boy helped her, and in the kitchen there was an
old man who never stopped singing. In the afternoon Khalil joined them and Fate
asked the two men where they'd met. In prison, they said. Prison is where black
brothers meet. They talked about the other Muslim groups in
Harlem
.
Ibrahim and Khalil didn't think very highly of them, but they tried to be fair
and maintain a dialogue with them. Sooner or later the good Muslims would end
up finding their way to the Mohammedan Brotherhood.

Before
he left, Fate told them that they would probably never be forgiven for having
marched under the effigy of Osama bin Laden. Ibrahim and Khalil laughed. He
thought they looked like two black stones quaking with laughter.

"They'll
probably
never forget
it," said Ibrahim.

"Now
they know who they're dealing with," said Khalil.

His editor told him to forget writing a story about the
Brotherhood.

"Those
guys, how many of them are there?" he asked.

"Twenty,
more or less," said Fate.

"Twenty
niggers," said his editor. "At least five of them must be FBI."

"Maybe more," said Fate.

"What
makes them interesting to us?" asked his editor.

"Stupidity,"
said Fate. "The endless variety of ways we destroy ourselves."

"Have
you become a masochist, Oscar?" asked his editor.

"Could
be," said Fate.

"You
need to get more pussy," said the editor. "Get out more, listen to
music, make friends, talk to them."

"I've
thought about it," said Fate.

"Thought
about what?"

"About
getting more pussy," said Fate.

"That
isn't the kind of thing you think about, it's the kind of thing you do,"
said the editor.

"First you have to think about it," said Fate. Then he
added: "Can I do the story?"

The
editor shook his head.

"Forget about it," he said. "Sell it to a
philosophy quarterly or an urban anthropology journal, or write a fucking script
if you want and let Spike Lee shoot the motherfucker, but it's not going to run
in any magazine of mine."

"All
right," said Fate.

"Motherfuckers marched with a poster of bin Laden," said
his editor.

"It
takes balls," said Fate.

"Balls of steel, plus you have to be a complete goddamn
moron."

"You
know some undercover cop came up with it," said Fate.

"Makes no difference," said the editor, "whoever
came up with it, it's a sign."

"A sign of what?" asked Fate.

"That we're living on a planet of lunatics," said
the editor.

When his editor came to the phone, Fate explained what was
going on in Santa Teresa. He gave a synopsis of the story he wanted to write.
He talked about the women being killed, about the possibility that all the
crimes had been committed by one or two people, which made them the biggest
serial killings in history, he talked about drug trafficking and the border,
about police corruption and the city's boundless growth, he promised that all
he wanted was another week to get all the material needed and then he'd come
back to New York and in five days he'd file the story.