“In comparison with the Mideast, you mean.”
“In comparison with life.”
“Life is an accumulation of details, isn’t it?” I asked him. “Police work is, I know.”
He bowed his head, though still amused, saying, “I am properly chastised. You’re right, the details must be attended to. Whether we are doing our laundry or changing the world, the point is that it must be done. But still, that is a script,” he added, pointing to Salute the Devil in my lap.
“Yes, it is.”
“And so it is in some way work, and must be done, and I must not keep you from it. I shall return to my own very engaging puzzle, which does not have to be done, which is its charm.”
He nodded to me, with his near smile, and as the plane at last lifted off the runway, he neatly filled in one more word of his puzzle. I opened Salute the Devil and read, but aware of a nagging uncertainty: Which of us, in that last exchange, had been put down?
21
Because this was a dinner flight we had the movie first, Hassan Tabari obediently lowering his window blinds at the stewardess’s request, but then switching on his reading light, having consumed The Atlantic by now and moved on to Scientific American, in which at last he showed some selectivity, not devouring it all, skipping over the article on insect larva. In the meantime I had finished both of Danny Silvermine’s scripts and had decided to show them to Anita while I was in New York, because maybe I was the wrong person to say whether or not they worked, whether or not the basic idea was a good one, whether or not Packard was still viable. The movie was a pretty poor comedy I’d already seen parts of on cassette, but I watched it anyway, feeling lazy and disoriented, needing distraction from my two problems. Danny’s scripts were problem number one, and, of course, Ross was problem number two. (The lawsuit responsible for this trip got hardly any of my attention at all.) It might have been easier to limit my fretting to Danny Silvermine if it hadn’t been for the presence of Hassan Tabari. Because of the part of the world he came from, and because of the pool company that called itself Barq, he couldn’t help but remind me of Ross, about whom I had done absolutely nothing of any use, with the single exception of getting Doreen away from him and his friends.
The movie, as all bad things do, came to an end. I removed the headset, and was trying to decide which of Tabari’s magazines I would ask to borrow when the man himself raised his window blinds, put down Scientific American, and said, “The person who performed the role of the doctor in that film is Lebanese, you know.”
“Oh, really?” I tried to remember the actor’s name; it had been a smallish part, about the size my friend Brett Burgess gets hired for. “I hadn’t known that,” I said. Nor had I been aware of Tabari at any time looking at the screen.
“His mother was French,” Tabari explained, “so he took her name when he became an actor. Westernizing, you see.”
“Ah.”
“So,” he said, shrugging, “we are not all bombers of defenseless sailors, hijackers of innocent tourists.”
“All Arabs, you mean.”
He considered the term, and rejected it. “All Moslems,” he decided. “After all, the Iranians are not Arabs, as they never tire of announcing. The dispute is religious rather than racial. In fact,” he said, suddenly voluble, shifting position so he could face me more comfortably.
“I sometimes think the internal Moslem struggle is infinitely more important than Arab versus Jew. That one is merely about territory, but the war within Islam is for the soul of the world.”
To have such an overblown hyperbole come from so restrained and self-controlled a man at first startled and then amused me, which must have shown in my face, because he cocked an eyebrow at me and said, “Do you think I overstate the case?”
“Slightly,” I said.
“Perhaps,” he agreed, and nodded, and said, “but only very slightly. We control the world’s energy for the next century. We shall decide whether or not the machines of western civilization turn. Don’t you think we will have some say as to what that civilization looks like?”
“It’s possible,” I admitted.
“The fundamentalist sects,” he said, “have captured Iran, taken control of Libya, assassinated Sadat, helped to destabilize Lebanon, performed terrorist acts against you of the West, and are creating great trouble and concern in every moderate Moslem nation. Even Saudi Arabia is not as proof against the virus as it appears.” This was far from any area of expertise I might claim. I said, “We can see the struggle’s going on, all right.”
“But who are these people in white nightdresses, eh, slaughtering one another?” The twist he then gave his mouth could not have been called a smile. “The Jewish lobby in this country makes no distinctions among Arabs,” he said, “and therefore America does not, and that is a very bad mistake.”
“I’m really not up on all this,” I said, wondering how to get back out of this conversation, deciding the thing to do was find a need to visit the lavatory.
Tabari leaned back, shaking his head at himself, as though aware he’d gone too far, made me nervous. “I’ll say only this,” he told me. “Our fundamentalists are to us a more violent form of what your fundamentalists are to you. The sort of people who a generation ago forced the famous Scopes monkey trial and still today try to keep evolution out of your schools. The kind of people who bomb abortion clinics. In America these people are merely an irritant, one point of view among many at the fringes of a strong center. In my part of the world there is no center, there are only the extremes. You would not like a world, Mr. Holt, that would please some of our imams.”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t.”
“I have no idea, of course, what your contacts with Arab Moslems have been—”
“Actually, none that I know of,” I said.
He affected surprise. “None at all? Are you sure? For instance, there’s a great deal of Arab money in your American film business now.” And he gestured at the script of Salute the Devil in my seat pocket.
Trying to imagine Danny Silvermine as a front for Arab money made me smile. “No,” I said. “So far as I know, this is the most extensive conversation I’ve ever had with an Arab.”
“Well, well,” he said, seeming to relax a bit, “what a heavy responsibility I bear, representing a quarter of the world to you in my one person. I’m afraid I’ve been a bit too intense to make a completely good impression.”
He had. “Not at all,” I told him.
“In my position,” he said, “you must understand, I have dealings with these fanatics from time to time; they tend to dwell in my mind.”
“I can understand that,” I said.
“I am Minister of Justice in Dharak,” he reminded me, “sworn to uphold our law. But these fanatics have no use for civilized law. They believe only in a cold and rigid law of their own devising, which they blame on God.”
“Hard to deal with.”
“They cannot be dealt with at all,” he said with great intensity. “They can only be guarded against, rooted out, isolated, defanged. Being a policeman in smalltown America is nothing like this, I assure you.”
“I believe it,” I said, and then was glad to be interrupted by the stewardess wanting to open our tray tables in preparation for dinner. It made for a distraction that permitted me to keep from letting Tabari see that he’d made a mistake.
Being a policeman in smalltown America. But that wasn’t PACKARD, a show, in any case, he claimed not to have seen. That could only be my own pre-acting job on the force in Mineola. This was not coincidence.