The Global War on Morris (25 page)

He looked in the rearview mirror, hoping he would see Hillel. Or Assistant Rabbi Kaplan. But all he could see was the frantic swirl of police lights growing closer.

Morris made this ride countless times, but never at seventy miles an hour in a chase scene right out of
The French Connection
. Storefront facades whizzed by: white-brick yogurt shops and bakeries, clothing stores and restaurants. All a blur through the car's windows. Morris Feldstein's past life in Great Neck, passing by at breakneck speed.

Then, he saw it. The weathered street sign that said
SOUNDVIEW AVENUE
.

“I'm coming, Rona!” he yelled, and aimed the car straight for the corner of his street. His foot pressed on the brake pedal as he began turning right. But, being unpracticed at such maneuvers, he felt the car veer out of control, tires on the left side seeming to lift off the pavement. Morris felt the steering wheel slip from his perspiring fingers. His body strained against the seat belt.

“Gottenyu!”
he cried. And just as the steering wheel turned
naturally back and the car balanced itself, just at the moment where Morris could see his house down the block and the
RONA FELDSTEIN CSW
sign on the lawn, Morris realized something.

In addition to the many traffic laws he had just broken between the Long Island Expressway and here, he had just violated a precious section of the Great Neck Village motor vehicle code.

He had just made a right on red. Just under the sign that said
NO RIGHT ON RED
.

He stopped. Sedans and panel trucks converged on him from all directions. Helicopters hovered so low that Morris's car shook and autumn leaves spun around him. Car doors swung open and Morris saw a wave of people rushing toward him, wearing windbreakers stenciled with acronyms. The windbreakers flapped like capes around the runners as they charged. Racing to be the first to reach Morris.

Thrusting elbows and arms and feet and legs. A forty-yard dash for the gold medal in the global War on Terror.

The wave of windbreakers broke around Morris's car. He sat still, almost paralyzed, hands resting on the steering wheel.

A face appeared at Morris's window.

“Get out of the car with your hands up!” Tom Fairbanks commanded.

Morris knew what to do. He had seen it in countless movies. He pushed open the door, raised his hands, and stepped out gingerly. Dozens of guns appeared, trained on him.

“It's all a case of mistaken identity. Like Cary Grant, in
North By Northwe
—”

Fairbanks grabbed Morris's arm, spun him around, and shoved him against the hood so hard that Morris grunted. Then there was a blow to his upper back. His face landed with a thud against the hood.
He felt a foot kicking between both of his own, forcing them apart. Hands worked over Morris's body. Yanking his arms so far behind him that pain streaked across his shoulders.

“I can explain. I met a woman. We went to lunch . . . .” But Morris's words were lost under the drone of the helicopters, the screams of sirens. And the shouting of police—at one another. Something about whether he was entitled to be read his Miranda rights or whether, as an “NEN—native enemy noncombatant,” he had involuntarily waived those rights.

Native enemy noncombatant!
Morris thought.
That's a far cry from second vice president at the Temple Beth Torah Men's Club!

As the constitutional debate raged, Morris's neighbors gathered on their lawns, pointing in disbelief at the quiet man who never bothered anyone, now surrounded at gunpoint by twenty-seven separate law enforcement agencies.

When the officials finally agreed that Morris had forfeited his Miranda rights, Tom Fairbanks grabbed him by the elbows and spun him around so they were face-to-face.

“You're under arrest, Mr. Feldstein! What do you have to say for yourself?”

Morris thought. But all he could come up with was this: “I'm sorry I cheated on my expense account.”

“H
ey, Dark Side, does this look funny to you?”

In a green room behind the stage at the University of Miami, President Bush gazed in a mirror, tugged the bottom of his jacket, and noticed the slight bulge in his shoulders. It was bad enough he had to go on stage in minutes to debate John Kerry. But the high-tech body armor the Secret Service asked him to wear looked like a prop from
Star Trek
; it scratched uncomfortably against his torso and bunched up under his suit.

Karl Rove rubbed his thumb under his chin. “It's for your own protection, Mr. President,” he answered.

“People are going to think it's some kind of device to cheat. Like you're transmitting answers to me during the debate or something.” The President chuckled.

I wish
, thought Rove. But he said, “No one will even notice, sir.”

Rove's cell phone rang. He walked to a corner of the room and cupped his hand over the phone.

“It's Scooter,” he heard. “I have an update on that, uhhhh, traffic infraction in New York.”

Rove thought,
Is that what we're calling it? Traffic infraction? Morris Feldstein committed treason against his country and it's considered a traffic infraction? Driving under the influence of terrorists?

Scooter Libby continued. “I just spoke to VPOTUS. He does not want the President mentioning today's arrest.”

In the background, Rove heard Bush rehearsing his lines: “September the eleventh changed how America must look at the world. . . . If you harbor a terrorist, you're equally as guilty as the terrorist. September the eleventh changed how America must look at the world. . . . If you harbor a terrorist, you're equally as guilty as the terrorist. . . .”

“Why not?” Rove snapped.

“Two reasons. Number one, the Bureau of Bleeding Hearts at DOJ is still concerned there's no case against our guy. Other than speeding, reckless endangerment, and making an illegal right on red, his record is ridiculously clean.”

“Which is exactly why the terrorists recruited him!” Rove replied, annoyed.

“I agree. But if somehow our bad guy turns out not so bad, VPOTUS doesn't want the President's fingerprints on it.”

He heard Bush repeat: “We've climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it's a valley of peace. . . . We've climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it's a valley of peace.”

“Okay,” Rove sighed. “What's the second reason?”

“The FBI thinks making this a high-visibility case is not in the
best interests of national security at this time.”

“Why not?”

“Well, if we are right, if our friend is one of the bad guys, we need to . . . uuuhhh, encourage him to cooperate. You know . . . uuuhhh, incentivize him to give us information. We need time and space for that. Without nosey lawyers, talk show producers, or ACLU rallies. So far the media has been cooperating and we've contained the story. For at least a few weeks, we need to keep our friend the best kept secret in town.”

So there it was. Morris Feldstein, whose lifelong goal was to be the best kept secret in town, now had a new and powerful ally in the pursuit of his goal. The United States government.

Who knew?

PART FIVE

FROM
WITH LOVE

SEPTEMBER 2004–SEPTEMBER 2008

I
n his first year of imprisonment, with little else to do with his time, Morris made a mental list of all the interesting places he had visited in his life.

There was the United Jewish Appeal mission to Israel; the family trips to Disneyworld, Lake George, and the Poconos; the two Caribbean cruises, the condo in Boca, of course; and that camping trip to the Catskills. “Look,” Rona had said of the latter, “you take the kids and I'll stay home. Sitting in the middle of nowhere covered in bug spray and eating
schmutz
from a campfire is not my idea of a vacation.”

And now Guantánamo. Does that count?

Morris spent the first year of imprisonment in a general state of confusion. Between the shock of what had happened to him and the surety that it would be corrected, by the government or by God.

He occupied a four-by-six cell with a metal cot, a tiny writing
desk, a toilet, and a video camera that peered at him from the ceiling. The only thing they let him hang on the whitewashed cinderblock walls was his Jewish calendar, with
COMPLIMENTS OF GUTTERMAN'S FUNERAL HOME
printed at the bottom of every month. At the end of each day, he scrawled a large red X.

Once a day, they would let him out for a walk around the grounds. It was scalding hot, although he enjoyed catching occasional glimpses of his fellow “guests”: all Middle Eastern looking, wearing the same white jumpsuit that he wore. But he kept his distance. How does the second vice president of the Temple Beth Torah Men's Club strike up a conversation with someone plucked from the battlefields of the global War on Terror?

He was losing weight. He didn't enjoy the food slid under his cell door on a tray. Pita, rice, curried eggs, spinach, lamb, more pita and more rice. You couldn't get a decent bagel and the fruit seemed ladled out of a can, thick and syrupy. He wasn't comfortable sitting in the communal television room with the other inmates because Arabic-language movies on the DVD player didn't particularly interest him. So he mostly sat in his cell, staring at the
COMPLIMENTS OF GUTTERMAN'S FUNERAL HOME
calendar, wondering how long before he could stop marking his days with a big red X.

They gave him some reading materials, and an occasional letter from home:

Dear Dad:

I miss you. They told me you are somewhere in
I'm doing okay. I've enrolled in a filmmaking course at
and maybe one day will do a documentary about what happened to
. The working title is
.

xoxoxox

Caryn.

And this letter from Rona:

Dear Morris:

I don't think it was your expense account. Anyway, I am doing
although my
has hurt bad since they
it. I am living in a
in
. Who knew
could be so
? My lawyer says that if I cooperate, I can probably go back home in
, but I don't know how I could show my face again in