The Submission (5 page)

“He wants to prove he doesn’t consider you a liability,” Thomas said. “Or, more cynically, maybe in this case he thinks you’re an asset.”

“What, with my special insight into the terrorist mind?”

After wondering whether he should tell Roi to fuck himself, Mo decided to take the assignment, mostly to escape smug Storm Trooper. But also because he wanted to see, up close, the kind of Muslim he had been treated as at LAX: the pious, primitive, violent kind. In asking, “Been to Afghanistan?” those agents had foretold his future.

Mo dozed off on the flight between Dubai and Kabul. He awoke to see a white woman across the aisle wriggling a long tunic over her fitted T-shirt and draping a scarf over her head. The massive brown drapes and folds of the Hindu Kush were below.

Kabul sat in a valley girdled by mountains, so the plane bounced down onto the runway like a basketball onto a court. Snow dusted
the peaks; dust choked the city. As Mo disembarked, the particles and dry air entered his lungs. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he saw American helicopters, American planes, and American soldiers bestriding the runway.

After the disarray of immigration protocols and baggage claim, where grizzled men demanded a few dollars “baksheesh” for his own bags, a car from his hotel collected him. They entered the viscous traffic. Kabul was a minotaur of a city—a vigorous, erect young man above, where billboards advertised Internet cafés and hideous office buildings of blue-and-green glass rose; old, flaccid, depleted below, where raw meat hung exposed in sagging wooden stalls and bent, haggard grandfathers lugged handcarts.

In the city center workers toiled on the construction of a giant mosque, the scaffolding around its dome a spiky bird’s nest. A wooden walkway extended from the dome into the air and then wrapped, in the form of a staircase, around the minaret. Tiny workers made their way up and down the stairs, and in the absence of a crane, of any visible mechanical equipment at all, it was like watching a mosque being built four hundred years in the past.

The Hotel Inter Continental seemed of more recent epoch: it struck Mo, who was checking in, as drably Soviet. The drafty lobby bustled with a mélange of turbans and ties, Westerners and Afghans, all bathed in natural light since, not for the first time that day, the power had gone.

On a hard bed, Mo fell into a deep sleep. He was awakened before dawn by the call to prayer. The plume of the muezzin’s voice drifted into his room and swelled within him.
Allah-hu akbar
, God is the greatest: the celebratory words, the strangely mournful tone. The call dipped into valleys before climbing mountains and higher than mountains. It trellised up some unseen lattice, twined over Mo, pinned him in place although it was meant to rouse him. Sinuous, cavernous, the voice scaled to the edge of breaking, then firmed. It was lonely. It was masterful. In the darkness men rose, washed, bent to prayer. Mo trailed them in his imagination before slipping back into sleep.

To get to the American embassy, Mo endured three pat-downs, four checks of his identification, and a long wait before he received clearance. Across the street from the main building, rows of white trailers—housing for the embassy staff—gleamed like bathroom tiles in the sun. The official who was briefing the architects from the twelve firms competing for the bid explained that the new embassy would dwarf the current structure. It would squat along both sides of the road, which would be forever closed to “outsiders,” as the Afghans were defined.

Before Mo left New York, Roi, on speakerphone from Paris, had bloviated about the glory days of embassy architecture, when great modernists—Saarinen, Gropius, Breuer (all immigrants, Mo had noted to himself)—were sought out to design buildings that embodied American values like democracy and openness. But those days were long gone, despite the pretense of inviting top architects to compete. The only design value that mattered now was security: making sure the embassy didn’t get blown up. Public diplomacy would be conducted from behind nine-foot blast walls. Architecture, once an ambassador, was now a DynCorp guard menacing anyone who came too close.

In place of glass walls or sculptural buildings—the gestures, or follies, of a more innocent time—there was Standard Embassy Design: a build-by-numbers box that came in small, medium, and large. Fortresses on the cheap. Hardly how ROI had earned its reputation, yet Mo knew he wasn’t here for the artistic challenge. More than a hundred embassies and consulates around the globe were to be replaced, mostly for security reasons. Even a small piece of that work would be lucrative for ROI.

But the firm, Mo quickly concluded, had no chance of winning the embassy commission. ROI specialized in highly insecure buildings known for their transparency (“hide nothing, show everything”). Its rivals for the commission specialized in the quick and generic. So he daydreamed through monotonous talk of “defensive perimeters” and “pre-engineered design solutions” and imagined defying the guidelines to submit an embassy design copied from a Crusader castle. The location
lacked height, but he could suggest building a hill, a promontory—a true “Design Against Terrorism” right in the middle of the city …

At the day’s end the architects were piled into a caravan of SUVs for a tour of Kabul, their “local context.” Along the way the driver pointed out the Russian Cultural Center, a decaying, pockmarked wreck that now sheltered refugees and drug addicts.

“The way of all empires,” Mo murmured. “That’s how our embassy’s going to end up.”

“How about a little team spirit?” asked the plump, middle-aged architect seated next to Mo. He looked like he’d been on a few too many of these driving tours.

“We’re not on the same team, remember?” Mo said.

After a while they entered a roundabout lined with the jagged dun-colored crusts of bombed-out buildings, visual rhymes to the seismograph of the mountains behind. The barren craters were the work of shells lobbed during the civil war in the 1990s, the driver was saying. To Mo the ruins had a timeless quality.

“The way of all fucked-up third world countries,” his seatmate said.

They were dropped off for dinner at a French restaurant hidden behind high earthen walls. There was a garden draped with grapevines, a small apple orchard, and a swimming pool full of Europeans and Americans dive-bombing one another. Chlorine and marjoram and marijuana and frying butter mingled in an unfamiliar, heady mix.

“Wonder what the Afghans think of this,” one of the architects said, waving his hand to take in the bikinied women and beery men.

“They’re not allowed in,” said Mo’s seatmate from the van. “Why do you think they checked our passports? It’s better if they don’t know what they’re missing.”

“Hot chicks and fruit trees: they’re missing their own paradise,” said someone else at the table—Mo hadn’t bothered to remember most of their names. “I’m surprised they’re not blowing themselves up to get in here.”

“Some of them don’t have to,” his seatmate from the van said, his eyes on Mo.

At Paul’s request, the security consultants had expanded their initial report on Mohammad Khan to include more detail about what Paul called his “identity.” A messenger delivered the revised report well after dark. Paul clutched the envelope and hurried from the foyer’s marble and mirrors into his voluptuously tweedy study, seated himself at his Louis XV desk, and began to read. Khan’s résumé, first: stellar, and thus unremarkable. He was thirty-seven years old, educated at the University of Virginia and the Yale School of Art and Architecture. Four years at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; six at ROI. Khan had been the project architect for a museum in Cleveland, a residential tower in Dallas, and a library in San Francisco that had won enough acclaim for Paul to have read about it. He had been featured, along with Emmanuel Roi, in some of the press clippings. Khan was on the ascent, and this made Paul remember the time in his own life when his appetite and ability to climb had seemed limitless. In retrospect the anticipation, that hunger, was almost as rewarding as the success it brought.

Khan, the report said, had been raised in Alexandria, Virginia. His parents had emigrated from India in 1966, which, Paul reckoned, would have been soon after the United States had lifted its quotas on Asian immigrants, a policy decision that, nearly four decades later, had translated into an Indian American, albeit a Hindu one, running
his old investment bank. Khan’s father, according to the report, was a senior engineer at Verizon, his mother an artist who taught at a local community college. They had bought their house in 1973 and owed $60,000 on their mortgage. Khan himself owned no property; he lived in Chinatown, which struck Paul, the uptowner, as an odd place for an Indian American. He had no criminal record, no lawsuits pending against him, no tax liens.

The website of a mosque in Arlington, Virginia, recorded two donations from Khan’s father, Salman, both made after the attack; this, along with inquiries to the mosque as well as the family’s neighbors and colleagues, had confirmed that the family was, indeed, Muslim.

The mosque, which had opened in 1970 and moved to its current building in 1995, had “no known radical ties,” although the cousin of the son of one former board member had gone to school with some Virginia youths recently accused of training for terror through paint-ball games (“I used to see them hanging out in the parking lot,” this cousin had told
The Washington Post
)
.
Sixteen, not six, degrees of separation.

On ROI’s behalf, Khan had made a trip to Afghanistan earlier in the year, but he had no known or identifiable link to any organization on the terrorist watch list. He had made no political contributions to fringe candidates or, for that matter, to mainstream ones. His only membership appeared to be in the American Institute of Architects. There was nothing to suggest he was an extremist. Anything but: he seemed all-American, even in his ambition.

Paul took out a yellow legal pad, his favorite reasoning tool, and set it on the desk before him. He drew a line down the middle and titled the columns “For Khan” and “Against Khan.” There were in life rarely, if ever, “right” decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances. It came down to weighing the predictable consequences of each choice, and trying to foresee the unpredictable—those remote contingencies.

In Khan’s favor he wrote:

From that last entry, he drew a line to the “Against” column and wrote “Fred,” who served to neutralize the reporter. Paul was grateful for the hierarchy of newspapers, even as he knew it was giving way to the democracy, or rather, anarchy, of blogs and the Internet. For now, at least, reporters still answered to editors who controlled their jobs.

But though he had dammed the leak, another could open, a threat that called for swift and decisive action. No gain in too much reflection. In the “Against” column, his pen scratched vigorously:

It was unlikely that the governor, whose national ambitions dangled like a watch chain, would take a stand for a Muslim now. He kept on. Opposite “statement of tolerance,” he wrote:

Under both columns, with the heading “Unpredictable,” he wrote:

From the legal pad, he took a visual tally. The arguments for Khan looked paltry, not just in number, as if the “For” column had been
written in paler ink. Perhaps “principle—he won!” should have ended the argument before it began, but Paul’s job was to get a memorial built, and he wouldn’t sacrifice that goal for a man named Mohammad.

So the decision was clear, the mechanism for killing Khan’s design less so. Their only choice was to pronounce Khan unsuitable, but on what grounds? Paul looked up “unsuitable” in the dictionary: “Not appropriate.” He looked up “appropriate”: “Suitable for a particular person, condition, occasion, or place; fitting.” He looked up “fitting”: “Being in keeping with a situation; appropriate.” This was why he was a banker, not a wordsmith. Could they say Khan was not “fitting”? As a jury behind closed doors they could say whatever they wanted, so the answer was to eliminate Khan as unsuitable before his name became public. There was the Claire problem, of course, but Paul suspected that she could be brought around by considering the outraged sentiments of the families she was meant to represent. Not that he shared those sentiments. For him, Khan was a problem to solve.

As required, the architect had provided a photograph with his entry. He appeared a handsome young man, his skin pale brown, his hair black, curly, and short, his brows dark and paintbrush thick over a wide, strong nose. His eyes, pale, greenish, were masked somewhat by the reflection in his glasses, which, unobtrusive and rimless, raised his estimation by Paul, who couldn’t stand the primary-colored rectangles so many prominent architects favored. Khan wasn’t smiling, but he didn’t look unhappy. Seeing the face made it plain how much Khan was about to lose, what Paul was about to take. He turned the page over on his desk.

“The
Post
, have you seen it?”

It was 6:00 a.m., and Paul had seen nothing beyond the blinking light of his cell phone. He struggled to place the voice. Lanny, the jury’s chief assistant.

“The
Post
?” Paul warbled.

“Yes, the
New York Post.
They’re saying a Muslim has won the memorial competition. You told me—”

“The
Post
?”

“You told me there wasn’t a winner yet, Paul.” He sounded wounded. “I told the whole press corps that. I look completely out of the loop.”

“How you look is fairly low on my list of priorities right now, Lanny. Let me call you back.”

How had the
Post
gotten it? he wondered as he threw an overcoat over his pajamas. Didn’t that reporter—Spier—work for the
News
? Someone else must have leaked, or the original leaker had gone to another paper … he was trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle on its back. Edith replied only with a drowsy grunt when asked if she had seen his glasses, his misplacing and her recovering of them a forty-year routine she was disinclined to enact at this hour. He gave up, pulled on his shoes, and speed-walked to the nearest newsstand, seeing Khan’s face before him. Halfway there it occurred to him he could have just switched on the computer. Old habits die hard, hardly die, but more than that: he needed to hold his calamity in his hands.

He reached the newsstand. There it was and going fast—the paper the
Post
, the author Alyssa Spier, and the photo of an unidentifiable man in a balaclava, scary as a terrorist. The headline:
mystery
MUSLIM MEMORIAL MESS.

As usual, the Pakistani news vendor at Mo’s corner was framed by the plush bosoms of a dozen white women and the buttocks of a few black women, all of them blooming from the fronts of glossy magazines. Today the vendor had his feather duster out and was sweeping the city grit from his candy rows. As Mo smiled, half in appreciation, half in amusement, his glance chanced on the stack of
New York Post
s below. His heart began hammering so audibly, or so he imagined, that he put his hand on his chest to muffle it. The vendor, thinking it a greeting, put his hand on his chest in return and said,
“Asalamu alaikum.”

“
Alaikum asalam
,” Mo replied, the words foreign and rubbery on his lips. He snatched up the paper. Inside, the words
adding islam to injury
? blared over a picture of the rubbled attack site. His trembling hand ransacked his pocket for change, then foisted a five-dollar bill on the vendor. Mo read as he walked, heedless of the sidewalk’s jostle and cuss. An outsider might have wondered what news of the day could be so smiting to render him blind, deaf, mute, and stupid enough to wander into a New York crosswalk, then pause to read, letting the crowd flow around him like water around a boulder.

A Muslim had won. But no one knew who—

A taxi’s blaring horn pitched him from crosswalk to sidewalk. He stood shaking with exhilaration. There were five thousand submissions. Other than a confirmation months back that his entry had been received, he hadn’t heard a word. But a Muslim had won. It had to be him.

He taped the
Post
cover to his bathroom mirror that night, only to find the man in the balaclava looking back at him with cold, hard eyes. Executioner’s eyes. Mo couldn’t find himself in that picture, which was the point. The next day he enlarged his submission photo and pasted it on top of the
Post
picture. With the ugliness covered, he could pretend it was gone.