“Hey, man, did you ever hear such bullshit?” It was, unmistakably, the voice with the Queens accent.
“What?”
“That bullshit.”
Always polite and formal, Raj said, “I am not sure what it is you’re referring to.”
“Our slick mayor.”
“Tell me, please,” Raj said, “what is it that I missed?”
“Come on.” He paused. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. You miss a lot.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Don’t apologize. Just do your job.”
Raj didn’t answer. More bantering with this strange man, he felt, was a waste. He had called for a reason, and Raj felt that if he said as little as possible this man would reach the point of his calling. The man was a talker.
“I keep on looking at the Times’ fucking website for the story I led you to. All of your other reporters are writing obvious stuff. Garbage on the streets, uneasy populations, scared-to-shit Upper East Siders. Like, this is news to me, right?”
“Do you want to tell me something?”
“That’s what I’ve been doing. And you’ve done diddly-squat with it. I gave you this big story. You know, Mr. Gandhi, I could’ve given it to somebody else. Somebody who’s more industrious. Like, more daring, one of those guys from the New York Post.”
“I drove up and down the FDR Drive. I saw all the abandoned piers below Houston Street.” Raj had only recently learned that the street was called Howston, not Hewston. He had been embarrassed when he pronounced the word to sound like the city in Texas. “And they were all just abandoned piers.”
“Sure they were, Raj, sure they were. That’s what they’re supposed to look like to ordinary pain-in-the-ass civilians driving on the FDR. But you needed to get out and walk around. Look what Woodward and Bernstein did: they used shoe leather, they walked around. That’s how they got that Watergate shit. Now all you great reporters do is sit on your asses and Google for info.”
Scorned and demeaned and repeatedly insulted as an overtly bright Indian teenager living in tough neighborhoods in Bombay, Raj had learned not to respond when someone provoked him. Patience, he thought, just listen.
“I’m willing to give you a second chance.”
“Thank you.” He used what he thought of as his Gunga Din voice. He intentionally sounded compliant, appreciative.
“Did you hear the Soldier of Fortune talk about all the dead guys in the apartment?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, they weren’t all dead. One got only a little boo-boo on his arm. They dressed the fucker in one of their uniforms after they had him clean himself up. He was such a brave martyr that he’d shit all over himself.”
Raj didn’t respond. He breathed slowly. This had the feel of extraordinary news or extravagant invention. The man laughed in that odd way, the loner’s laugh, not the kind of laughter people learned from laughing together. “Are you there, Mr. Gandhi-baby?”
“I’m here.”
“So they marched him out of the building, holding on to him like he was one of them but only a little shaken up. They put him in an ambulance. It was all playacting.”
Quietly Raj said, “How do you know this?”
“I don’t answer questions, Mr. Gandhi. I’m not in this to get famous.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m your friend. I’m trying here to give you insights into the war on terror.”
“Where is this man now?”
“Tell me this, Mr. Gandhi: Where you grew up, did they have little books with dots? The kind where you draw a line between the dots, and, before you know it, you have a picture of a duck, or a house, or a bridge or Jesus H. Christ?”
“Can you give me your e-mail address?”
“I’m not an e-mail kind of guy.”
“Who else knows about this?”
“You leave me in a constant state of worry, Mr. Gandhi. Who else do you think knows about this? Do you think the police commissioner might know? Do you think the Soldier of Fortune might know? Hey, try to find Tony Garafalo. He just got his brains fucked out by his girlfriend at their love nest at the Regency. She needed a break. War is a bitch on the nerves. Maybe the commissioner gave up this info when she was taking her break in what Sinatra called the afterglow of lovemaking.”
“I know you want me to believe you. And I want to believe you. But you make that hard to do sometimes.”
“Hey, I’m sorry if I offended you. It’s not a nice way to talk about our public servants, I know.”
“Where are you getting this information?”
“What did I tell you before? Remember? If I told you I’d have to kill you.”
Raj heard that loony loner’s laugh, and then the sound of the call ending. He tried to redial the number. It was blocked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
MOHAMMAD HUSSEIN WAS a slender man. From the very beginning, from the moment Gabriel Hauser first saw him enter the grim ward where amputees were briefly held before their flights to Germany and then on to a lifetime of permanent disability in the United States, Gabriel’s attention was arrested by Mohammad’s striking face, absolutely black hair. His eyes were not just brown, but virtually black, his nose straight and narrow, his lips full, and he had a cleft chin like Cary Grant. Gabriel was too accomplished as a doctor to stop the painful conversation he was having with a bitter soldier whose right arm below the elbow was severed, but he sensed the presence of the new male nurse in the ward.
Gabriel had not had a lover in the almost two years he spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once, for three days, he had taken a leave in Amsterdam and had so much sex that he was alarmed, even disturbed with the intensity. He had come of age long after the years of bathhouses, the gay clubs around Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, all of which had closed when AIDS became rampant, the modern Black Death, in the early to mid-1980s. He had in fact been put off by accounts he had read and stories he had heard from older gay men about the reckless, endless orgies of the late 1970s. He imagined that Jerome Fletcher had taken part in them in the era before AIDS, the era, as Gabriel sometimes thought, before Jerome made the transition from sex with multiple anonymous men to intercourse with boys. Gabriel still wanted to believe that Jerome had loved him, alone, during the three years their lives overlapped, but he knew that wasn’t so. The horrific trial of Dayvon Williams, the black prostitute who had strangled Jerome with an electrical cord before stabbing him repeatedly in the face at the now-closed motel in the South Bronx, had in three days of testimony disclosed Jerome’s long-standing insatiable taste for boys under the age of eighteen. Gabriel’s three crazy days in Amsterdam had evoked the question, Who am I really?
Gabriel found time and opportunity over the next two weeks to come into contact with Mohammad. Three days after they met, Mohammad accepted Gabriel’s invitation to have tea at a dusty, beaten up café not far from the cinder-block hospital in Kabul. Gabriel soon learned that Mohammad was married and had three children. On his iPhone there were pictures of his wife, their two daughters, and their son, a miniature version of Mohammad. In the vivid color pictures of her, Mohammad’s wife was smiling, ravishing. She looked like a model, not hooded and dour like the typical, silent women of Afghanistan.
Although Gabriel smiled at the sequence of family portraits, he was disappointed. He had hoped that Mohammad, gentle, intelligent, attentive, and so fundamentally different from the thousands of menacing and taciturn Iraqi and Afghan men Gabriel had encountered for two years, was attracted to him. But Mohammad’s marriage to a vibrant woman undermined Gabriel’s hopes, expectations, and desires.