Man of the Hour (31 page)

37

THE DAY AFTER MEETING
with the Imam, Youssef, Dr. Ahmed, and Nasser got down to the serious business of preparing for the next
hadduta
.

They drove out to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and rented a garage for $1,200 a month on a quiet block, where they could mix the chemicals for their explosives in peace. Then they walked around the corner and rented a dirty little hovel of an apartment behind a taxi stand for $686 a month, so the doctor and Nasser could stop sleeping on the floor of the Great Bear’s living room and have a place of their own for a while.

Just before lunch, Dr. Ahmed gave Nasser a list of some of the ingredients they’d need, including two hundred pounds of the chemical fertilizer ammonium nitrate and five hundred gallons of diesel fuel, plus a half dozen fifty-five-gallon drums to mix them in. What he didn’t give him was enough money to pay for everything; after renting the apartment and the garage, there was little left over from the check store robbery.

“Buy what you can,” Dr. Ahmed said, pressing four crumpled twenties into Nasser’s hand. “We’ll raise the rest. And remember: don’t buy too much at any one store. Spread it around. You don’t want these bigots to wonder what an Arab boy is doing with all this material.”

Nasser took the money and drove out to a garden supply store in Borough Park. He frowned, seeing the Orthodox Jews on the street in their black silk robes, fur hats, and nineteenth-century-style stockings. He parked his car in front of a vegetable stand selling “Israeli tomatoes” for 79 cents each. Israeli tomatoes? He felt like picking one up and smashing it on the sidewalk. These were
Palestinian tomatoes
,
grown on land drenched in Arab blood. By God, these infidels deserved their punishment. It was getting easier to convince himself.

He went into the little store crammed with rakes and lawn mowers, wondering what they would finally select as a target. A synagogue? A great landmark like the United Nations? Some small part of him wished he could try again at the school. Every time he saw Ahmed, the doctor would remind him of his previous failure.

Nasser found two fifty-pound bags of the fertilizer back by the leaf blowers and checked to make sure the nitrogen content was at least 34 percent, as Dr. Ahmed had specified. Yes, it would be even better if he could go back to the school and find Mr. Fitzgerald there. This one who was trying to seduce Elizabeth. The idea of it filled Nasser with sickening rage. How could he stop this from happening? He felt ashamed and powerless. What would their mother have said about the loss of family honor?

He heaved the two sacks up onto the counter and the muscular kid in a Viva Puerto Rico shirt at the cash register did a double-take.

“Whooa, son,” he said. “How much a that shit you need?”

“I need a lot.” Nasser busied himself, digging into his pockets for the money.

The Puerto Rican kid looked at the instructions on the side of one bag. “Says here each of these bad boys covers fifteen thousand square feet. You sure you need that much?”

“I have a farm,” said Nasser.

Yes, he thought. Somewhere I have a farm. But the Jews stole it and I’ve never seen it.

“Twenty-seven dollah niney-nine cent each, plus tax.” The cashier patted the bag nonchalantly and started ringing it up on the register. “I hear this is good shit. People say it give your lawn a nice thick green color. Like the Emerald City. Right?”

“What?” Nasser carefully placed three twenties on the counter and looked around, sure he was missing something.

“You know, man. The Emerald City.
The Wizard of Oz
.”

“Oh, yes.” Nasser pursed his lips and drummed his fingers on the counter, waiting for his change.

He hated these little references Americans made to their own culture, as if they expected everyone else to be just as enthralled. They made him feel small, resentful, and stupid. Didn’t these people know there was an older world with more sacred traditions? Some things couldn’t be mocked, packaged, and turned into television shows.

“Hey, man, where’s your farm?” the cashier asked.

“Bethlehem,” Nasser blurted out, and instantly regretted it.

I am an idiot. A complete idiot. He was aware of other customers looking at him. Jews with hats, beards, and curls. Swarthy men with heavy arms and broad faces. And sallow beardless boys like himself, whose ethnicity he couldn’t trace. Wouldn’t one of them remember him if they were questioned later? Especially after he made such a foolish slip.

But God was looking out for him. “Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Right?” The cashier counted out his change for him.

“Exactly,” said Nasser, hesitating for a moment and then grinning in relief. “You have it exactly.”

“I thought that was steel country.”

“It is.” Nasser stuffed the change into his pockets and pulled down his bags, grateful to be getting out of there. “But there’s farmland too. Chickens, cows, everything just as God made it.”

Yes, this was surely a sign from God mat he was going in the right direction with his life and this plan. Otherwise, he would have been stopped and caught immediately.

“Hey, you need your receipt?” The cashier pulled the white tape out of the register.

Nasser started to say no, and then caught himself.
Trust in Allah, but tether your camel.
That’s what the imam had instructed. The less evidence around, the better. “Yes, thank you very much,” he said, taking the sales slip and men starting to lug the bags out to his car.

“All right, my brotha.” The cashier waved after him. “Follow the yellow brick road.”

38

“I DIDN’T DO IT,”
said David.

“What?”

The cute little Dominican girl at the corner bodega, who usually had a sweet smile and a kind word, wouldn’t look him in the eye.

“I didn’t do what you think I did.” The need to declare his innocence had come upon him like a fever.

But the girl put his change down on the counter, instead of in his hand. “I didn’t say anything.”

He left carrying two six-packs of Rolling Rock in a brown paper bag and started up Broadway. In these last thirty-six hours or so, a sense of paranoia and isolation had begun to creep over him. Old friends like Henry and his occasional jogging partner, Tony Marr, acted strange and distant when he called, as if the David Fitzgerald they’d known before was just a sham. People moved down the counter when he visited Tom’s Diner for a late breakfast. At the college bookstore, he picked up Conrad’s
Secret Agent
and then put it down quickly because its plot involved a bombing and he was worried the store’s clerk would tell someone he’d looked at it.

Outside his building, the camera crews, reporters, and various federal agents were maintaining an intimidating presence. There were at least thirty of them at all times, and various detachments would follow him on his jaunts to the grocery store and the dry cleaners, where the Korean men behind the counter would eye him with newfound suspicion.

“Hey, David, turn around!”

“David, just one picture please!”

“How are you holding up, David?”

He was turning into one of those horrible anti-celebrities, people famous for making a spectacular hash of their lives. He wished he could just turn it all off and ignore the racket, but his lawyers, Ralph Marcovicci and Judah Rosenbloom, had given him responsibility for clipping every newspaper article he could find about himself and recording as many radio and television stories as possible with rented equipment in preparation for a civil suit.

And God, the stories were relentless, humiliating beyond belief. He turned on the television when he got home with the beer and there was his old Little League coach, Murray Samuels, who’d always stood too close giving him tips in the batter’s box.

“He always was a funny kid, that David,” said Murray, who’d gone completely gray and had conspicuous hair growing out of his ears. “I remember whenever a simple fly ball would come to him in the outfield, he’d have to dive for it and make a big dramatic show of catching it and holding it up, so everyone could see what a big deal he was.”

David turned off the set in disgust, leaving the VCR to record the program. He switched on the radio and there was that awful woman again, the pop psychologist Patty Samson, referring to him as David Brian Fitzgerald (in all his life, he’d only heard his mother call him by all three names, and that was just when she was upset). She started off saying David fit the classic profile of the murderous “loner” and then began harping on his “obsession” with
The Catcher in the Rye
. “The same book Mark David Chapman was carrying when he shot John Lennon,” she noted cheerfully.

“We’re clearly talking about the kind of person who experiences an almost orgiastic excitement at creating a disaster and then watching everyone rush around to deal with it. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to guess what kind of sexual dysfunction might be behind that …”

He turned on the tape recorder and walked out of the room to call his lawyers.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, once he finally got Ralph on the line. “I can’t take this anymore. What if my kid hears what they’re saying about me?”

“Hey,” said Ralph. “I can have you on six syndicated shows tomorrow to deny the whole shebang if that’s what you want. My friend Lindsay Paul is dying to get you up in front of a live studio audience.”

“That’s not what I want, Ralph. Can’t we just sue them or something?”

“Heh, heh, David.” Ralph made a burbling sound. “It’s a free country, remember? Freedom of speech, our forefathers, all that crap. By the way, did you see me on
Live at Five
last night, defending your good name?”

“I’m afraid not.” David twisted off the top of a Rolling Rock bottle. “I just recorded it.”

“Well, short of you going on the air to deny everything yourself, that’s the best we can do for the moment. Judah’s working the law angle.”

David’s eyes fell on the pile of newspapers he’d been collecting. Most of the morning’s stories were meaningless rewrites of the previous day’s news, plus or minus the sinister detail about the twenty-minute gap in the bathroom and quotes from unnamed students and teachers intimating there’d always been something creepy about him (
so why didn’t they say so before?
). The only new development was that Sam Hall’s sister was blaming him for the bombing and threatening the school with a civil action. That was bad enough. But the photos were even more excruciating. They made him look stupid, sinister, angry, shameful, haunted, loaded, and most of all,
guilty
.

Enough already. He felt like his throat was closing. “Ralph, I’ll be talking to you. I gotta get out of here.”

He hung up and just sat there for a minute, finishing his beer. What to do now? He realized how much of his day-to-day life was tied up with the routines of teaching. Getting up early, preparing lesson plans, correcting papers, filling out forms, keeping class discussions on track, talking to parents, meeting with kids after school, writing college recommendations, talking to admissions officers. Without these little patterns, he literally didn’t know what to do with himself. How did other people get through the day?

He decided he needed to get out of town for a while, even though he had no money to travel anywhere. He wasn’t due to see Arthur for four days anyway. He remembered a camping trip he’d taken with his father to a state park in Westchester called Fahnestock. It was one of the few fond memories he had of spending time alone with the old man. He recalled the smell of firewood and the blue glow around the marshmallows on a stick.

It was too bad that later in the evening his father had frightened him with stories about bears and snakes in the woods and then refused to comfort him by keeping his sleeping bag close.

“It’s a man’s journey,” he’d said. “Get on with it.”

Judy Mandel was still way out in front on the story, but worried about falling back. The last thing she needed was to hang out with every other reporter and camera crew in the city outside David Fitzgerald’s apartment. She needed something fresh. Find the gravedigger, Bill Ryan used to say, quoting Jimmy Breslin. When they bury the President, talk to the gravedigger. That’s your fresh angle.

Instead of the gravedigger, she went looking for the wife. Other reporters had been trying. Channel 2 had a crew in front of the building on West 98th Street for half the night, but all they got was a lousy comment out of her lawyer, pig-face Randy Barrett. The rest of the time, the doorman was keeping the press away and helping Renee sneak in and out of the building. But high on adrenaline overdrive, Judy took the next step and got the address of the son’s school off the Internet.

That morning, she showed up outside the schoolyard, in her best soccer-mom get-up: sweatpants, old sneakers, oversized man’s shirt, and unwashed hair. Sure, she was a little young to pull it off completely, but at least she didn’t draw undue attention from the other parents dropping their kids off.

She spotted a nervous-looking redhead coming out of the school just after classes started at 8:30 and recognized Renee from the driver’s license photo she’d also pulled off the computer the night before. Definitely a caffeine addict: looking over her shoulder, picking at her lip, lighting up a cigarette before she was even down the limestone steps. Judy was glad she’d stopped by Starbucks and bought her subject an espresso before even attempting this interview. The woman needed something.

Like maybe a talk with an old friend. Judy pushed herself off the chain-link fence, affected a nonthreatening neighborhood slouch, and started waving in a reassuring familiar way before David Fitzgerald’s wife even got to the sidewalk.

“Renee! How are you?”

The representatives behind the counter at the Hertz car rental office on West 76th Street became giddy and excited when David showed them his driver’s license and then they disappeared into the back to whisper and peek out furtively at him. Even the guys from the garage kept coming into the office to gawk.