Last out of the door came Ivan, a doctor who didn’t care about health insurance, charged what patients could afford for what he could do. Sometimes, like now, that meant walking a white-haired old lady to the van.
Sami parked behind the van, pulled on a black Detroit Tigers baseball cap to hide his face as he joined his Ameer and the old lady.
“Taxi,” said Sami.
Ivan kept the poise of an emergency room boss. “Here you go, Mrs. Callaghan.”
The white-haired old lady wrinkled her brow. “But… I didn’t order a cab.”
“You’ve got a voucher for today,” said her doctor. “Remember?”
“I do?”
“Yes.”
The white uniformed van driver took his cue from Doc Ivan. The stairs’ electric motor whined, the doors shut, and away drove the brown van.
Her doctor said, “Emma, did you drop your gloves in the elevator?”
The old lady looked at her trembling bird hands. “I must have.”
“I’ll wait with the cabbie. Take your time.”
She toddled back inside the building.
“Ameer, I must confess,” blurted Sami. He told him about breaking the rules to confront a worried Zlatko and replace the lost money.
“But why are you here now?”
“I fear that Zlatko’s vision of what is acceptable for our target and the vision you and I share… I fear a conflict of faith. I have seen this before.”
“In Beirut,” said the Ameer, “where holy martyrs blew up the Marines’ barracks and Ronald Reagan slunk away. There we learned Americans will back down. Then sex-crazy Clinton ran from one Black Hawk helicopter crash, missed Osama with missiles.”
The Ameer put a fatherly hand on Sami’s shoulder. “Sometimes it’s easiest for a soldier not to know all, so if his heart is challenged, his conscience is clear. Don’t worry about Zlatko. He will do what must be done. His part will not pain his soul. All else is sacrifice to contain this disease called America. Americans fear death. Their overreaction to us will force our misguided Muslim brothers to rally to our true path.”
“What of my part, Ameer? I have done so little.”
“You are whispered about online.” The doctor smiled, so Sami knew the legend birthed by the CIA still lived. “Praise Allah that I work in a building where if you make friends, keys are shared. With my colleagues at the medical imaging office. With two kuffars who repair computers that are probably stolen.”
Dozens of computers! Untraceable! That’s how he makes contacts!
“I dared not put you too close to the operation. If your fame attracted attention… But in two days, we will both be heroes on the run.”
The building’s glass doors showed Emma tottering toward them.
The Ameer told Sami what to do that night at the vaquera’s. Told Sami where to go tomorrow morning.
Emma wiggled her gloved hands. “They were in my pockets!” Sami drove her home, refused a tip of her few silver coins.
He drove to a pay phone. Called Harry, told him about the computers, the Ameer’s new orders. Argued for the cell to be rolled up. Got told, “We’re gonna let it ride.” Drove to 13th Street ’s hilltop panorama of Destiny City, parked on a block of row houses where a Latino grocery store flanked a green door.
He pushed the doorbell for the green door. Made a loud ring!
Invisible feet clunked down unseen stairs. The door’s glass peephole darkened as someone looked out. The green door opened. Star-streaked midnight hair curled to her blue sweater. She wore faded jeans. Had a clean jaw, high cheekbones with a puckered scar on her heart side from the punch she’d taken in junior high soccer. The scar gave her lips a perpetual sardonic smile. Those fleshy lips along with her desert tribe Jewish Sephardic tan skin and the Sinaloensa Mexican she’d perfected while surfing away the summer before law school fooled people into thinking Rose was gringo for Rosalita.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone,” said Rose.
Climbing those stairs behind her rounded blue jean hips, Sami smelled Christmas pine, spices like cumin and chili from the downstairs store, perhaps incense, her musk.
Her apartment’s main room held a computer, fax, photocopy machine. An eviction-salvaged sofa. Two chairs separated by a table where Sami had set his tea the morning he’d been officially waiting for a fax from the Taxi Commission but truly waiting for Zlatko to return for credit card applications the vaquera had promised him.
Sami’s eyes swept through the kitchen to the closed door for a room lined with law books, government manuals. The door to her bedroom-closed. He refused to fear the closed doors. Refused to wonder whether Harry had bugged all of Rose’s rooms.
She stood behind Sami. “Are you here for work?”
“Yes.”
Shadows filled the apartment. Her walls and fading-gray-light glass windows kept out sounds of the street. Muffled screams.
He lunged with his hands like a Muay Thai strike, caught her face in his prayer grasp, and pressed her against the wall as she met his kiss.
Night took the city.
They sat naked in her bed, propped on pillows, covers drawn up. A lamp glowed.
Rose lit a joint. “Do you think Harry figured this would happen?”
“He’s practical.”
“For your crew, I’m just an inferior woman you seduced to use, but Harry… Maybe he figures, ‘What the hell, let them get some happy.’”
“Maybe,” said Sami as he watched her take a hit.
Across town in her Virginia apartment, redheaded Lorna Dumas exhaled burnt tobacco, stared at the blue uniform on her bed, thought, I gotta quit smoking.
Upstairs from her green door, Rose asked Sami, “Do you still think of yourself as Muslim?”
“Feels like some God is chasing me.”
“Nice dodge.” Rose passed him the joint.
Sami took a hit.
She said, “Getting stoned puts you in solid with both your jihad and the FBI.”
“I always wanted to be popular. What about you?”
“My mother taught my girlfriends how to give a blow job,” said Rose. “Made me promise not to have sex until I knew what the hell I was doing.
“Who the hell ever knows what they’re doing? I fell for the wrong guy over and over again, became a kick-ass federal prosecutor who one day found a certain political slant to her job, spent two years as a public defender, realized that helping unconnected people work the system was the only way they were ever going to get a fair shake.
“So now, I’m the vaquera. Don’t speak enough English to fill out an immigration form without fucking yourself? Go to the vaquera. Work permits, car registration, insurance, your political asylum application with the photo of you minus your arm that got hacked off in Sierra Leone-hey, America is the fill-in-the-blank society.
“Then came Zlatko. Everybody lies, but he lied like an antiabortion murderer I interviewed when I was a prosecutor. Hard-core eyes. Plus no way was he Albanian. I can’t trust badges, but the tingles made me call my old pal Harry.”
She hit the joint, held it to him. “Zlatko found me through the people who snuck here with him from Mexico, right?”
Sami waved away another hit-
– fluttering wing vision vanished like smoke.
“Right,” said Rose. “I’m not supposed to know anything.”
“Be glad you’ve got no idea what it’s like out there.”
“I stipulate to a certain degree of unreality. But I’m no virgin.”
Sami said, “I knew this kid. His virgin mission, he gets handed killing three guys. Said he went ‘wild in his mind.’ That’s what it’s like out there. You live behind the world others see. All alone out there on a street full of invisible gunmen is you.”