She fingered the tickets in her handbag. Tomorrow morning at 6 a.m., she and the kids were taking off for a long-overdue vacation to visit relatives in Mexico. Depending on what happened with Frankie, she might just stay there.
August 30, 2006
Jackson Heights, N.Y. — Roberta Guzman, an NYPD spokeswoman, revealed today that Francisco Hernandez, the police officer who was arrested last month on multiple counts of fraud and was to be prosecuted under the Federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations) statute for conspiring with al-Qaeda terrorists to resell stolen merchandise as part of a fundraising scheme, has committed suicide while in protective custody at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center. “Mr. Hernandez appears to have wound a bedsheet around the top bunk in his cell and used it to strangle himself,” Guzman reported at a press conference late yesterday afternoon.
Other members of the alleged fraud ring include Alba Terremoto, Pedro Volcan, and Mohammed al-Yakub, who is also suspected of having links to al-Qaeda and is charged with funneling profits from illegally sold merchandise into terrorist activities.
Jihad sucks; Or, the conversion of the jews
by Jillian Abbott
Richmond Hill
Ramzi Saleh wondered how this nation had become the most powerful in the world. The despicable little urchins who turned up to harass him at Richmond Hill High, where he taught math to ninth graders, were indifferent to his lessons. They cheated him of his time on earth.
It was with no little pleasure that he contemplated being an instrument of their demise, those cocksure boys and strutting girls. Now that winter had set in and the sidewalks were treacherous with ice, he was spared the exposed flesh that assaulted him every warm day. What sort of parents let their daughters out wearing less than what would pass for acceptable underwear at home? And the boys were little better. He found their lack of modesty and wayward attitudes blasphemous.
Ramzi pulled the collar of his overcoat tight against a biting wind. Above him, the 7 train rattled by, its brakes screeching as it pulled into the Roosevelt Avenue station. Beneath his feet the sidewalk trembled. Two levels underground, a subway train, maybe the E he’d just gotten off, was pulling up or leaving.
He knew no one here, at least not in person. He kept walking, and soon caught a whiff of fennel as he approached his destination: the paan seller on 74th Street. It seemed that Satan himself had a hand in his being here. How else could he explain the impulse that had propelled him to the E train? He told himself that he was going to pray, but when he got to Sutphin Boulevard, instead of leaving the station and making his way along Jamaica Avenue toward Azis’s mosque tucked away on 146th Street, he’d raced onto the E, which brought him straight here to Roosevelt Avenue, Jackson Heights.
This neighborhood meant peril. At how many points along the way could he have abandoned his quest and gone to Azis’s, or even home to Liberty Avenue? But now his destination was Little India. He stopped outside the paan shop. Why not? He’d resisted for as long as he could, but the first time he’d slid the paan inside his cheek to an explosion of flavor, he’d known he was lost.
He was supposed to avoid his countrymen and spend his time among the gora. Not that Richmond Hill was Infidel Central. But many of the Asians there were West Indians who had lived in the Caribbean for generations before coming to America. The neighborhood was mixed, not exclusive, and while the roti shops had few rivals, the paan could not compete. He should take it home. He should eat it unobserved in his recliner, but he couldn’t.
At times it seemed to Ramzi that America offered nothing but temptation. Could a man be wise, let alone moral, living among such sirens? Was his sophisticated Jackson Heights palate evidence that the Great Satan had corrupted him? Perhaps he should buy two paan? One for now, and one he could put in the fridge for after dinner.
As he pressed toward the paan seller, his worst fear was realized: He recognized a man ahead of him in the line. They had been at camp together in Afghanistan. The fellow licked his lips and inched closer to the booth as if mesmerized by the vendor’s red-gummed grin and nimble fingers as he smeared red kathha and chuna on a fresh betel leaf. The veins in Ramzi’s neck throbbed. Even if the fellow recognized him, they would not acknowledge each other.
His breath quickened. Their time at camp was long ago, and he wondered if this man was part of the same mission? He knew little about his task other than that he was to assimilate and wait. On that glorious day of victory, when, with the rest of the world, he’d watched the Twin Towers fall, he’d hoped his time among the infidels would end. But it was not to be.
The man from camp took his paan, looked around with the sly delight of a thief, and, using his thumb, thrust it inside his cheek and disappeared into the throng.
The paan seller remembered Ramzi. “Meetha paan, no coconut,” he said, his eyes bright with the pride of a man who knows his customers.
Despite his inward panic at being known, Ramzi smiled and nodded. “How do you do it?” he asked. “Every time, your paan is delicious.”
“It is all in the balance of chuna and kathha,” the paan seller said, rolling his head from side to side as he smeared a leaf with his special masala.
The proportion of betel nut to lime paste was crucial to a good paan, but Ramzi came to this fellow for his perfect masala — no one around mixed the spices and chutneys quite like he did. Now he behaved as if Ramzi was one of his regulars. Was that good or bad? To leave one or two footprints might be for the best. Ramzi imagined the Queens Chronicle story following his mission... They’d quote this man. A paan seller on 74th Street described Ramzi Saleh as a polite man, quiet and predictable. “He loved my meetha paan, but it was always, ‘Hold the coconut.’” Ramzi smiled to himself. Not a bad epitaph.
He stuffed the folded packet inside his cheek and turned toward the street to watch the bustle of rush-hour traffic nudge by. The heady smells of curry leaves, cardamom, and incense wafted from the many restaurants and swirled around him. In his time at Richmond Hill High, he had not met one child — well, there was one — who was grateful for the education his cover required him to provide. His teaching was scrupulously average, he knew. His biggest challenge: to remain invisible.
He had a talent for teaching. He had been plucked from the rubble of an earthquake, all his parents’ properties ruined, and had been educated by the charity of the Great Satan itself. But it had promised and not delivered. Before the earthquake his family had been among the wealthiest in the village; afterwards they had nothing. When the American aid workers left, he was no longer hungry and ignorant, he was hungry and educated.
When the mujahideen entered his village in western Pakistan as they fled the Russians, he had seen fear in the village elders’ eyes. He had vowed to teach all who wished to learn, so that no Pakistani would ever again know ignorance and hunger, but he was still hungry himself, as were all his pupils. He craved to be the cause of that fear he saw in his elders — he saw the respect it inspired. From the day he joined the jihad, he lost the knowledge of hunger. That was nearly twenty years ago.