Jihadi (7 page)

A parking place.

Okay: Child.

The dead guy telling this story notes that Thelonius’s wife, Becky, had (and has) significant experience as both a therapist and an interrogator. She rose through the ranks with speed, not just because she had a famous last name and was ambitious, but also because she was committed with deep ferocity to the national interest.

Rebecca Firestone was able to combine her two worlds, the worlds of psychotherapy and interrogation, on behalf of the United States of America. She became, for a time, hot – in the professional sense – for doing that.

She instituted widely praised protocols for detecting the early signs of mental illness in field agents. After 9/11, on the strength of distinctive interviewing skills, she won a reputation as one of the Directorate’s most effective and sought-after inquisitors of captive terrorists. She produced leads that seemed promising.

Her record as an analyst of intelligence, and as a strategic thinker, was regarded as rather thin.

Becky built her career plan on huge aspirations, on ferocity and on the celebrated Firestone name, but all this was a precarious foundation. On one of his rare, awkward, seemingly purposeless visits to Salem, Dad said spontaneously, over a dense, garlicky ratatouille he himself had prepared, that, in order to get into the upper tier, she would probably need to develop either a more rigorous set of analytical tools, or a deeper mastery of the chess game of long-range planning. Having pronounced this opinion, Dad wouldn’t look Thelonius in the eye for the rest of the night.

She was incapable of developing either skill set. It became apparent, in the weeks that followed, that Dad had not only felt certain about this for some time, but had helped her competitors to figure it out.

The ferocity, the need to set the plan, remained.

That was the last family dinner at Salem. Over a third glass of wine, after Dad left, Becky swore that he would not be permitted to return until he ‘got on the team’, and that any failure on Dad’s part to get on the team would lead to ‘serious consequences’. These remarks Thelonius reported, via a secure line, the next day, per his agreement to share with Dad any extremes of emotion or provocative behaviour.

Dad sent her an email: ‘People must do what they’re good at doing.’

What Becky was good at, it turned out, was looking after you in a way that disguised the fact that she was actually interrogating you. She could also, when the need arose, administer compliance blows in an unexpected, psychologically disorienting way. But that, it turned out, was not enough to get her where she wanted to be. Where she wanted, devoutly, to be, was in leadership.

In bed, mapping out her revised career plan on a helpless, battered legal pad, she told Thelonius that she refused to spend thirty years interviewing people and making notes, even though she was very good at that.

She wanted to set the vision. She wanted to be in control of the planning.

A consensus arose within the Directorate that, despite her brilliance, despite her overseas experience, she was never going to be in her father’s league, either as a strategic thinker or as a builder of internal coalitions. Some of her ruder rivals claimed she couldn’t assess, or even accept the existence of, data that challenged her own assumptions.

Becky denied all of this too loudly and too often, which, her rivals suggested, only proved the point. Jealous of her name, wary of her ambitions, secure at last in the knowledge that Dad was not out to establish a genetic dynasty, they did their best to reinforce existing negative perceptions of her and added to their list of Troubling Things a growing concern about her own potential for personal imbalance.

Her career plateaued. She responded to Dad’s discreet efforts to find her work elsewhere in government with a series of startlingly obscene, unanswered emails, all of which she showed Thelonius. Whose star was rising.

She became the subject of many jokes, some cruel. Among these was the nickname ‘Cleopatra’, which started out somewhere in the upper regions of the Directorate and worked its way down to the support staff. One beaming, oblivious receptionist made the mistake of saying ‘Cleopatra’ to her face, while Becky was issuing instructions to a subordinate. The next morning, the receptionist had vanished. Thelonius thought he spotted her working at a LensCrafters.

That receptionist probably thought she was paying Becky a compliment. A lot of people thought that at first. But the people at the very top of the Directorate called Becky ‘Cleopatra’ not because she remained quite beautiful, but because they liked implying the phrase ‘Queen of Denial’ without actually coming out and saying it.

T said ‘Cleopatra’ in this context just once in conversation, during a particularly boring meeting that needed livening up. He felt instant shame at his enjoyment of that word, spoken loud and in
Becky’s absence, and deeper shame at the laughter it produced around the table.

Dick Unferth didn’t laugh.

She believed in herself. Should Thelonius mock that with the others?

Although he could not agree with the decision, he did respect her efforts to stay on at the Directorate, her resolving to ride out the storm, and he said so. One night, he suggested she begin exploring career opportunities with local or federal law enforcement. She snorted in disgust. Then, perhaps ten seconds later, made a brief
hmm
sound, as though she were considering the idea. She wrote something on that disintegrating yellow legal pad she always kept by the bed. Thelonius pretended to be asleep, that being one of the best ways to ensure that a point raised with Becky remained raised. The next morning, while she was in the shower, he read the top sheet on the pad.

It said, in huge letters: ‘CONTROL = RESPECT’.

The dead guy relating this story suggests that the imam – a man of intimidating calmness who looked to be in his late twenties but was approaching thirty-nine – sat on a cushion on the carpeted living-room floor in front of a small pot of tea set in the centre of a clean straw mat. The imam gave his salaams, received salaams in return, and gestured to the two women to take a seat before him. Each had been assigned a cushion. Fatima took the gold one, her opponent took the grey one.

On the wall was a piece of intricate calligraphy, inscribed:
Be useful in all things
.

Five rows of bookshelves, home to five well-ordered rows of scholarly volumes, lined one wall. A Koran sat open in its little wooden stand in the corner.

Other than that, the room was bare.

The imam’s wife, or perhaps his daughter, in any event a small young woman, veiled and light on her feet, floated in with a plate of small pastries. She set it down on the mat, next to the teapot, and floated away again. Nobody touched the tea or the pastries.

‘It is my understanding,’ the imam said in the native tongue, ‘that something unusual occurred beyond the range of vision of most protesters during yesterday’s gathering at the embassy, but not beyond
your range of vision. I should like very much to know what that was.’

Thelonius looked out the Siena’s window, toward the Salem Abandoned Animals Facility. He didn’t like the look of the place. From street level, you had to descend a staircase if you wanted to enter, and he wasn’t fond of basements anymore.

He peered down at his bad left leg. Near the accelerator pedal, in the corner, beneath his good right leg, lay a white Walgreen’s receipt he had not noticed. He leaned over, picked it up, and examined it.

Becky had bought a jug of antifreeze.

He crumpled the receipt, dropped it, and opened the door of the Siena.

In Fatima’s version of the event, the marine had urinated directly on something, perhaps the pavement, while his back was turned to the two women peering at him through the bars of the embassy gate. He had never shown any awareness that he was being observed. He had simply walked away, in an odd and highly aggressive manner, when finished.

The imam asked her whether she could recall seeing a Holy Koran. Fatima thought for a moment. She replied that she could not recall that.

In the heavyset woman’s version of the event, the American had entered the courtyard carrying a large Koran, flung the Koran to
the concrete, kicked it open, spat upon it, unhitched his trousers, turned, exposed his genitalia in a most shameful manner to the two young women, making a point to establish eye contact with each in turn as he did so, turned again, and urinated upon the holy book, all the while laughing at the nature of his despicable act.

He had then expectorated upon the Holy Koran a second time, and attempted to set it aflame with a personal lighter he had brought along, presumably for this express purpose. Failing in this, he had sinfully picked up the defiled book with both filthy hands, cursed it in the vilest terms imaginable, referring to it in vulgar phrases as the work of a devil who had written every word. Finally, he had heaved it into the dumpster. And if the young lady now seated to her right had not observed any of this, how did it happen that at the time, she had begged so eagerly that they not mention the matter to the imam, as was their clear duty?

The dark stairs leading down to the basement were tough to navigate, and Thelonius’s bad left leg throbbed its worst yet as he came to the bottom. He kept walking through the pain, a man in search of any face behind a desk, until the television show playing in the waiting area of the Salem Abandoned Animals Facility stopped him cold, right in the middle of the room. It was
One Life to Live
, a daytime drama that had been on the air since the summer of 1965.

One Life to Live
was about people who lived in Llanview, Pennsylvania. A lot had changed in Llanview since 1965, but a lot had stayed the same, too. Despite the opening theme’s musical promise of renewal and fresh beginnings, nothing much ever happened in Llanview, and it happened for days on end.

Thelonius’s mother Irene had watched the very first episode, and Thelonius, all of four years old, had watched it with her. Thelonius checked in on the show from time to time. He had watched
One Life to Live
for decades now. People in Llanview still had to deal with mysterious kidnappings, and they still had a lot of affairs. These days, the show was mostly about Victoria Lord, Llanview’s wealthy matriarch. Victoria had a problem with split personality disorder. Her husband Clint, an oil tycoon, had bloated a little since Thelonius had seen him last. Clint was confused and uncertain about whether Victoria had ever really loved him.

Victoria and Clint’s marriage had endured many challenges. This was a running theme of
One Life to Live
.

Thelonius shook himself free of
One Life to Live
, found a pair of eyes not trained on him and shouted ‘I need some help!’ at the prim, fiftyish, elfin-looking crossword-puzzle-peruser who was stationed behind a thick glass wall. That wall bothered him. It made the place look more like the reception area of a cramped mental institution than an animal shelter.

On the puzzle-peruser’s desk, beyond the green-tinted barrier, was a small television. Like the big television in the waiting room, it was tuned to
One Life to Live
.

‘I’m here for my cat,’ he said, louder still, having failed to rouse her. ‘Charcoal. Fluffy. Probably confused.’

The woman behind the glass, her grey hair wound tight, looked up from her puzzle, creased her page corner, and sized up Thelonius. She made a little, noiseless exhalation as she straightened in her seat, placed her magazine in the topmost desk drawer without the aid of
her eyes and stowed a well-sharpened pencil above her left ear. Then nothing happened.

Glass Woman seemed in no discernible hurry to do anything.

‘My wife,’ Thelonius explained, ‘brought him in here by mistake. She believed we did not want him in the house. In fact we do. The last name is Liddell, L-I-D-D-E-L-L. Could I ask you to look him up for me, please, and bring him out? I’m a little worried about him.’

Her nameplate read, ‘MELANIE DEL REY, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, SALEM ABANDONED ANIMALS FACILITY’. She leaned forward, toward a circular opening with a dark-green rim.

‘Did you just kill that cat?’

Thelonius’s heart stalled. Anyway something in his chest fluttered, and his mouth ran dry. Things were not going at all according to plan today.

Stress breath.

And again.

‘Would you mind repeating that?’

‘Your wife. Did she just call about the cat?’

‘Did my wife. Just call about…?’

‘A Becky Liddell called us about five minutes ago. Your wife, I am assuming? She didn’t state any family relationship.’

‘Yes. My wife.’

‘I see. So you would want Child?’

‘Yes, please.’

She sniffed, rubbed her nose.

‘I see. Not doing very well, I am afraid,’ she said, biting the side of her lower lip. ‘Is Becky aware of the Plum?’

It became difficult to breathe.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Has Becky shared the problem?’

‘The problem?’

Melanie Del Rey pursed her lips, knitted her fine dark eyebrows, and cast a sad gaze. ‘I see. May I ask a personal question?’

Thelonius had no response, which must have counted as a yes,
because Melanie Del Rey continued: ‘Is a domestic dispute currently under way within your home?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I see.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You and your wife were in the midst of a disagreement about Child, correct? I mean, there was a conflict, correct? Please don’t beg my pardon again.’

For a long moment, Thelonius stared at her through the glass from a broad expanse of bewilderment that pervaded space and time.

‘These are simple questions,’ she continued. ‘Let’s try a different one. Does? She? Want? You? Here?’

A deep silence. Within it, Thelonius gathered his resources, resolved to speak, and did. ‘You don’t have to try to make this difficult, and I hardly see what my wife has to do with this discussion. I had a feeling I needed to come here and get my cat. That’s all.’

‘I see. You had a feeling.’

She was not challenging him, merely repeating in an encouraging way, as though eager for him to continue.

No matter what he did, it seemed to be his turn to talk.

‘I did
not
want him brought here.’

She appeared unpersuaded.

‘And you two discussed that before sending him?’

‘No. I recently got back from overseas.’

‘I see.’

‘Why do you keep repeating that? It’s rude, you know.’

‘Back from overseas. I see,’ she mused, exactly as though the last remark had not been made. ‘Complicated world we live in. Are you by any chance … a religious person? Some are. Some aren’t.’

The dryness in his mouth reached the back of Thelonius’s throat, where it suggested that it might want to be an ache.

He looked down and scanned the office floor behind the thick pane of glass. She was, impossibly, barefoot. Black pumps stood
guard nearby. Her long, graceful toes, not unlike Becky’s, but not the Toes, calmed him a bit.

‘I don’t know,’ Thelonius said.

‘I see. Well. You should probably know this: We were just about to put him down.’

The throat went forward, on its own authority, to a complete ache, culminating in a little choke that Thelonius couldn’t quite contain, and the room began to spin. The counter was graspable, barely, and Thelonius was able to use it to slow the rotation down.