The Twelfth Imam (6 page)

10

Philadelphia International Airport

David’s father lit up the moment he saw them.

David, on the other hand, instantly went dark.
What in the world are
they
doing here?
he privately groaned.

“Hey, over here,” Charlie Harper yelled from across the lounge area, waving them through the crowd that was waiting for the next flight.

Dr. Shirazi raced right over and gave his old friend a bear hug. “You really made it!”

“Are you kidding?” Charlie laughed, slapping his old friend on the back. “Marseille and I wouldn’t have missed this for the world!”

“Yes, thanks for inviting us, Dr. Shirazi,” added the young woman standing beside Charlie.

“Well, you’re very welcome, young lady,” Dr. Shirazi replied. “But I’m sorry—you can’t possibly be Charlie Harper’s little girl.”

She smiled.

“Look at you—you’re lovely. How could you be related to this guy?” Dr. Shirazi joshed, slapping Charlie on the back.

“Obviously I take after my mother,” she quipped.

Dr. Shirazi laughed from his belly as David winced with embarrassment.

“Well, that would explain it,” the doctor chuckled, giving her a hug. “How old are you now?”

“I just turned fifteen in June.”

Azad elbowed David in the ribs and raised his eyebrows. It wasn’t nearly discreet enough for David.

Then Saeed leaned over to his brothers and whispered, “Don’t get ideas, Bro. I saw her first.”

David felt the blood rush to his ears, his neck, and his face. The young woman before them was certainly attractive in her faded blue jeans, cream fisherman knit sweater, and worn tennis shoes, her brown hair pulled back in a black scrunchie. But she was an interloper on a guys-only fishing weekend, and now these two morons were angling for something other than walleye and northern pike.

Dr. Shirazi shook his head. “How long has it been since I’ve seen you all? Five or six years?”

“As a whole family, that’s probably true,” Charlie replied. “I think this one was still in grammar school when you last came for Thanksgiving.”

Dr. Shirazi sighed. “Please, please forgive me for letting so much time go by.”

“Oh, my friend, there’s no need,” Charlie insisted. “Life has been busy for all of us. Besides, you and I got to see each other—what?—a year ago maybe, at that conference in New York, right?”

“That’s right, that’s right; but you’re too kind, Charlie, really. I should be coming to visit you and thank you every year, and bringing my family along too. You and Claire saved us, Charlie. Nasreen and I will never forget it.”

David’s father, lost in another time, suddenly became aware of the group of men and boys observing this whole interaction with confusion.

“Oh, forgive me, guys,” he said. “I need to make some introductions. I’m getting old, my friends. But being the founder and organizer of our illustrious group, I’ve taken the liberty of this surprise. It is a great honor to introduce you to one of my dearest friends in all of the world, Charlie Harper—the man who rescued Nasreen and me out of Iran—and his daughter, Marseille.”

As everyone said hello, shook hands with the two of them, and introduced themselves, David shrank to the back of the huddle. Mortified, he watched Azad and Saeed and the other boys chatting up Marseille—trying to look harmless and friendly but skating dangerously close to shameless flirting. David, meanwhile, found himself battling varying degrees of embarrassment, anger, annoyance, and betrayal, to name just a few of the emotions colliding within him. He’d just been blindsided. This was supposed to be a
guys’
trip. It always had been. That’s the way it had always been billed to him. That’s what he had been so looking forward to. And now his father had gone and blown the whole thing.

11

Baghdad, Iraq

Najjar Malik heard the screeching tires and turned to look.

He was about to cross Al Rasheed Street in downtown Baghdad and fully expected to see a major car wreck. Instead, less than fifty yards away to his right, he saw a white Mercedes swerve and narrowly miss a delivery truck whose driver had just slammed on his brakes in the middle of rush-hour traffic for no apparent reason. Blocked from going forward, the driver of the Mercedes now tried to back up but suddenly found himself cut off by a green Citroën. Just then, a minivan screeched to a halt beside the Mercedes. The side door flew open. Three masked men armed with AK-47s jumped out and surrounded the car.

“Get out! Get out!”
one of the gunmen screamed at the terrified man in the driver’s seat.

Najjar knew he should run for cover, but for some reason he just stood there and stared. He could see a veiled woman in the passenger seat, presumably the driver’s wife. He could also see a small child in the backseat, shrieking with fear.

Two of the gunmen started pounding on their windows, still demanding they get out. Terrified, the family complied, their hands held high in the air, the young child—a little girl not more than four or five years old—crying all the louder. The gunmen forced the woman and the child to lie facedown on the pavement while their husband and father was smashed over the back of the head, bound quickly around his hands and feet, and thrown in the back of the minivan.

Then one of the masked men aimed his machine gun at the child and fired. The girl’s cries immediately ceased, but now the mother began screaming for her dead child. At that, the gunman shot her in the back of the head as well.

The street suddenly grew quiet.

As the gunmen turned to get back in the vehicles and make their escape with their new hostage, one of them glanced toward Najjar, and Najjar found himself staring into the kidnapper’s eyes. The two of them just stood there for a moment, seemingly frozen in time and space. Najjar wanted to bolt but couldn’t move a muscle.

The masked man raised his weapon and pointed it at Najjar’s chest. Najjar tried to scream but couldn’t make a sound. The man pulled the trigger. Najjar shut his eyes. But he heard nothing. He felt nothing.

He opened his eyes and realized the gun hadn’t gone off. The man cleared the chamber and pulled the trigger again. Again, Najjar involuntarily shut his eyes. But again he heard nothing, felt nothing.

When he opened his eyes the second time, he found the man desperately fiddling with the magazine, then raising the weapon over his head and pulling the trigger. This time the weapon fired perfectly. Now, he lowered the machine gun, aimed it at Najjar’s face, and pulled the trigger for the third time. Najjar instantly shut his eyes and held his breath.

Nothing happened.

His eyes still shut and still holding his breath, his lungs about to explode, Najjar heard the gunman cursing. He also heard the other terrorists shouting at him to get in the car and get moving. A moment later, he heard screeching tires, and when he finally opened his eyes, the gunmen were gone.

Najjar collapsed into some bushes and began to vomit uncontrollably. He had never been so scared in all his life.

He lay on the pavement, holding his head in his hands and losing all track of time. He didn’t hear the ambulance sirens approaching, didn’t see the flashing lights of the police cars. He didn’t remember being taken to the hospital and treated for shock. He barely remembered being interrogated at length, not just by the local police but by agents of the
Mukhabarat
, one of Saddam’s thirteen intelligence agencies, and certainly the most feared.
“Who were the gunmen?”
they demanded.
“Have you seen them before? Could you identify them? What kind of vehicles were they driving? What were the license plate numbers?”
The questions went on and on, but Najjar was of little help. He truly didn’t recall much, and later that afternoon, the police and doctors released him.

Exhausted and still somewhat disoriented, Najjar left the hospital and saw a row of taxicabs waiting out front. The first driver in the line rolled down his window and shouted, “Where are you going? Can I help you?”

Najjar stumbled down the front steps and got into the backseat of the cab, only to realize he had no wallet on him and thus no money. Worse, before Najjar could say anything, the driver pulled into traffic and Najjar realized he had no idea where he was going, either.

“You look like you’ve seen an evil spirit,” the driver said, staring at him in the rearview mirror.

“Just watch the road,” Najjar said, more gruffly than he had intended.

“Where to?”

Najjar couldn’t think. He felt foggy, drugged. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember where he lived—what street, what building. Where was his wallet? Had someone stolen it? Had he just left it at the hospital? It had his ID. It had his only picture of his mother and father. It had . . .

Without instruction, the driver began heading east, across the Tigris River toward Sadr City, a district of nearly a million Shia Muslims.

Where are we going?
Najjar wondered.
How does the driver know where to take me?

Ten minutes later, the driver pulled up in front of an apartment building that looked familiar. As did the neighborhood. As did the people.

“Najjar? Is that you?”

Najjar instantly recognized the voice of his aunt, calling to him from across a courtyard.

She ran up, pulled him out of the cab, and kissed him on both cheeks in greeting. Then she paid the driver and, sensing that Najjar was not well, led him up to their apartment.

“Are you okay, Najjar? Why did you take a cab home from the university? Why didn’t you take the bus as usual?”

As they stepped onto the elevator and his aunt pushed the button for their floor, Najjar was struck with the oddest thought.
How had that driver just gotten him home, when he himself had not remembered where he lived?

Najjar’s aunt tucked him into bed, and he slept for the entire afternoon.

12

U.S. Air Flight 3940

A storm was brewing at twenty-eight thousand feet over Lake Ontario.

“David, would you mind switching seats with me?”

Startled, David Shirazi opened his eyes and found himself staring into the face of Mr. Harper. Biting his lip to keep himself from saying something he shouldn’t, he peeled off his headphones.

“Say again?” he asked, trying to get his bearings.

“I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to disturb you,” the older man said with a genuineness that only annoyed David more. “It’s just that now that we’re at cruising altitude, I was wondering if I could sit with your father and catch up a little. Would you mind?”

Of course I would mind,
David thought.
You’re not even supposed to be here, and now you want my seat?

But David Shirazi loved his father far too much to say it. Indeed, he felt guilty for thinking it.

“Sure, Mr. Harper, no problem,” he mumbled.

Harper shook his head and chuckled as David unbuckled himself and stepped into the aisle. “You and your brothers are all taller than your father now, aren’t you?”

David nodded. He didn’t want to disrespect his father by being rude. But he certainly had no interest in small talk at the moment. He scanned the rear section of the Boeing 737, looking for somewhere else to sit and finding nothing. The flight was packed. The rain was picking up and through the windows he could see flashes of lightning crackling through the thick gray thunderheads all around them. Then the seat belt sign came on and the copilot warned them they were heading into some rough weather and should take their seats immediately.

“What seat were you in, Mr. Harper?” David finally asked as the man buckled up beside his father.

“Oh, right, sorry—23B,” Harper replied. “Right next to Marseille.”

Great.

David put his headphones on, hit Play, and made his way toward the rear of the packed jet, carefully gripping the seatbacks along the way as the turbulence picked up. He spotted Marseille. She was curled up against the window with a red airline blanket over her, wearing her own set of earphones. David was glad her eyes were closed. He wasn’t up for small talk with her, either. He quietly took the seat beside her and buckled himself in, careful not to make a sound that might wake her. It didn’t work. Marseille turned, rubbed her eyes, and smiled.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

She took off her headphones. “Sorry I didn’t say hi before,” she said. “I just got chatting with everyone else. Everyone’s been really nice.”

He shrugged. What was he supposed to say?

“First time?” she asked.

There was a long pause.

“What, in a plane?” he asked, incredulous.

“No, up to Quebec—on this whole fishing thing,” she replied.

He nodded.

“Me too,” she said, then added, “obviously.”

There was another awkward pause. Thunder clapped just outside their window, startling everyone.

“Quite a storm, huh?” she asked, her hands gripping the armrest.

“Yep.”

The two were quiet for a while, and David slowly began to relax. Then, out of nowhere, Marseille asked, “Hey, do you remember coming to our house for Thanksgiving, a long time ago?”

He actually did have some memories of the rainy weekend of board games and hide-and-seek at the Harpers’ small Cape Cod house in Spring Lake, along the Jersey Shore. He even remembered a picture of Mr. Harper and Marseille carving the turkey together, which he had seen in one of the dozens of photo albums his mother kept organized and labeled on a shelf in their living room in Syracuse. But he didn’t feel like admitting any of that now.

“Not really,” he said lamely.

Marseille got the message. “Six years is a long time, I guess,” she said quietly, then turned back to watch the lightning flashes out the window.

David watched her pull up the blanket and try to get comfortable. Then he felt a sudden pang of guilt. This poor girl was only trying to be nice, and he was acting like an idiot. For crying out loud, even the Mariano and Calveto brothers had been nicer to her. They’d had different motives, to be sure, but he’d been brought up better than this. It wasn’t Marseille’s fault she was here. David’s own father had invited them. The least he could do was be civil.

“Whatcha listening to?” he asked, putting his own music on pause and taking off his headphones.

She turned back, her eyebrows raised. “First you ignore me; now you’re suddenly interested in my music?”

“I’m just asking. Conversation. Small talk. They have that down in New Jersey, don’t they?”

Marseille studied him for a moment as if sizing up his sincerity or lack thereof. He took the moment to study her as well. She really was quite good-looking, a sort of girl-next-door beautiful, he decided. Her summer tan hadn’t yet faded. She wore no makeup or fingernail polish. She had a barely noticeable scar on her upper lip. But it was her eyes—big and warm and expressive—that really caught his attention.

“Okay, guess,” she said at last.

“Guess?”

“Sure,” she prodded. “You know, conjecture, consider, reckon, suppose—they know how to do that up there in central New York, don’t they?”

Caught off guard, David suddenly smiled a real smile. “Sometimes,” he conceded. “All right, let me see—Madonna?”

She shook her head.

“J. Lo?”

Marseille rolled her eyes.
“Pleeease.”

“Hmm,” David said, “so I’m thinking
Lady Marmalade
is out too?”

“Ugh,” she replied. “Do I look like I would listen to Christina Aguilera?”

“I don’t know,” David said. “It’s remotely possible, isn’t it?”

“No, it really isn’t.”

More thunder rumbled outside. As she turned away and began to pull the blanket over her again, her necklace shifted and glinted in the overhead light. A pair of drama masks, comedy and tragedy.
Aha.

“
Les Mis
,” he said just as Marseille was putting her headphones back on.

She stopped cold and turned back to him again.

“What did you say?”

“You know—France, revolutionaries, ‘One Day More’ . . .”

Marseille paused and stared at him for a moment.

“I’m right,” David said, seeing her surprise. “I got it, didn’t I?”

Marseille shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “But you’re shockingly close.”

Then, rather than turn away from him—back to her music, back to the storm, back to her dreams—she surprised him by putting her headphones over his ears and hitting Play.

Try to remember the kind of September

When life was slow and oh, so mellow.

David was startled. This was the sound track from
The Fantasticks
—the world’s longest-running musical . . . and his mother’s favorite.