Malik couldn’t tell anyone all that he felt about the old friendship. The endless nights of talk. The dissecting of the Quran. The discovery of the work of Sayyid Qutb. The sense of mission, and purpose, and fierce shared anger at all the corruption in America. He never had another talk as intense as the talks with Jamal. Not with anyone. Certainly not with Glorious Burress, that beautiful heathen puppy. Jamal was the one, the channel into truth. He did try to keep Jamal alive in his life. When he called Jamal, the infidel whore wife almost always answered and Malik always hung up. One Friday evening in the previous July, Malik even went to Jamal’s street, taking the R train, walking to their block. Looking casual as he passed their house. Hoping he would bump into Jamal as he took a morning walk. Watched for a long time from the doors of the abandoned garage up the street. Rehearsing words. After twenty minutes, he saw them placing bundles and suitcases and a folded stroller into the trunk of a BMW. The wife held the little girl by the hand, the two of them whorish in bare legs and flip-flops. Heard the wife calling to Jamaclass="underline" “Jerry! Jer-ry! We’re late!” Jamal now called Jerry. Malik turned and walked around the corner, out of sight into Third Avenue, thinking: Maybe they are picking up the imam to drive to the Hamptons.
Fatigue gnaws at him now. Eating the sore muscles in his arms and legs and hands. Reducing him to this boneless body flattened against the backseat. He thinks: I have nobody at all left to talk to. Nobody in the whole wide godless world. Unless Jamal talks. One last time. I will lie here, empty, until the sun comes over the ridge behind me and warms the morning and dries the rain. Then I will rise too, he thinks. To walk the short blocks to 6th Street. To look, to see, to go to Jamal and retrieve what I know is in his house. The stuff of cleansing.
He begins to pray.
Khalid al-Mihdhar.
Khalid al-Mihdhar.
Majed Moqed…
And sleeps.
5:25 a.m. Bobby Fonseca. Avenue B and 12th Street, Manhattan.
They lie together in the dark, spent, breathing deeply, Victoria’s breasts against Fonseca’s back, a down blanket pulled tightly to their necks. Gray street light seeps from the bottom of the window shades. The sound of rain has stopped. Both are awake.
— Thank you, she whispers.
— I promise I’ll get better.
— Not that, dummy. Thanks for taking me with you. For making me feel like a reporter, instead of a goddamned waitress. For three hours, at least.
He turns to face her, breaking into a smile. His black hair is spiky.
— I’m glad I did, he says. You kicked ass. Made me look good. I told them to give you a credit line.
— Now you tell me?
She sits up.
— I gotta tell my father!
— Not now, he says, leaning on his bent elbow, head in hand, as if addressing her right breast. We don’t know if they’ll give you the credit. I can’t order it, y’know.
— He’ll increase today’s circulation by at least ten papers, Fonseca.
Then she laughs and slides back beneath the covers. And is silent.
— I’ll be right back, Fonseca says. Where’s the, uh—?
She switches on a muted bedside lamp. In the yellow darkness, framed photographs cover a wall, with some front pages too. Times. Daily News. Post. HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR. A stove. A sink. One wall of books, CDs, DVDs. She points.
— Right there. The blue door.
Fonseca walks naked to the blue door, shivering in the cold. The wood floor is cold too when he steps past the rug. A small narrow john. Just a toilet, a roll of paper attached to the wall, the seat down. Like an airline toilet, without the sink. He lifts the seat. Staring at a framed browning photograph of a blonde woman. Eyes that miss nothing. From the thirties, maybe? Her grandmother, maybe? Finishes. The woman in the photograph seems to demand he wash his macho hands. No sink.
He steps out, closes the door behind him.
— The sink is beside the stove, she says, her head showing above the blankets. Shoulda warned you.
He washes his hands, uses a towel on a rod above the sink.
Then hurries back to the warmth, the aroma of Victoria Collins. Reaches past her back and holds one of her hands. Silence for a beat. Then:
— A question, he says.
— Yeah?
— The woman in the bathroom: who is she?
— My hero. Martha Gellhorn. She’s in the bathroom so I’ll see her every morning. And night.
A vague memory stirs in him. Professor Norman’s class at NYU…
— She was married to Hemingway, right? Fonseca says.
— Wrong. He was married to Martha Gellhorn. As a journalist, Hemingway wouldn’t make a pimple on her ass.
And laughs. So does Fonseca. She squeezes his hand. His flesh is warm now. They are quiet. Finally, she clears her throat.
— Did you read CelineWire tonight?
— Life is too short for that asshole. He’s a nasty little prick that Briscoe fired a couple of years ago. Why should I read his crap?
— He says the World is folding this weekend.
— He’s always saying that. He wants it to be true, even if it isn’t.
— Just thought you should know, she whispers.
They are silent again.
— Would Martha Gellhorn read CelineWire? he whispers.
She giggles.
— If it was about Hemingway, she would.
And pushes her butt against him.
DAY
8:10 a.m. Sam Briscoe. Third Avenue and East 53rd Street, Manhattan.
HE STANDS WITH HIS BACK to the Citibank Building, a steel and glass structure too big to fail. After three hours napping on the couch in his darkened office, a quick shave in the john, a fresh shirt, a glance at the papers, Briscoe is twenty minutes early for his appointment with the F.P. The Dominican driver from the car service explained that traffic is thinner now, with fewer limousines, not as many cars coming in from Brooklyn and Queens and New Jersey. Briscoe doesn’t mind being early on this bright cold morning after too much rain and too little sleep. He would not want to give the publisher an edge by being late. And he needs to get out of his solitude, to look at other people, to stop thinking for a little while about Cynthia Harding and Mary Lou Watson and the dark horror of the night.
Across the avenue, the publisher’s office is halfway up the more than thirty stories of the Lipstick Building, the gleaming tower where Bernie Madoff pulled off his immense robberies. Thus achieving tabloid immortality. Hell, even immortality in the Times and the Washington Post. Briscoe imagines the gullible rich arriving in a steady, discreet stream to be conned with a smile and a shoe shine. Except Madoff didn’t have the soul of Willy Loman. Madoff knew that his victims were rich by most standards, certainly by the standards of his own Far Rockaway childhood. And so they came to him during the boom, believing that Madoff would make them even richer. Acolytes of the religion of more. Obese capitalism. They knew from whispery chats that he had done it for some select friends. He had done it for universities. He had done it for Holocaust survivors and their children and even for Elie Wiesel. Why not ask him to turn their spare ten million bucks into sixteen? His reputation made them believers. And once again, Briscoe remembers Paul Sann’s ancient city room creed: “If you want it to be true, it usually isn’t.”