He could call the airline now. He could leave tomorrow. Leave the clerical duties to others. Let someone else execute the wishes of the dead. Or put the whole thing off for a month. Paris. Call Mary Blume and Alan Riding and the remaining veterans of the Brigade Rue de Berri of the Paris Herald. Sit together in the Deux Magots. Make remarks. Laugh. Paris. Yes. Then he remembers Nicole’s other words of advice. Go to a place where Cynthia Harding had not shared the bed. Caracas. Istanbul. Maybe—
The phone rings. He hopes it’s not Sandra Gordon. But knows instantly that it’s not. She would never call him at home, after dark. He picks up the phone. Static and word gaps.
— That you, Helen?
— Yeah.
— What’s up?
— I’m in a joint with, uh, some of the gang from the paper and I hate it, and uh, shit, I want to go home.
— So go home, Helen.
— I can’t… I mean, I tried. No cabs in this goddamned snow. Nothing over here… I’m way over near the High Line, Sam. Uh. On Fourteen’ Shtreet. If I try to walk home… I die in a snowdrift, Sam. Christ, I’m a year older than you are, Sam.
Her voice is blurred with drink, exhaustion, age. He can hear mocking laughter behind her. Drunks. The early shift. He can see the snow falling.
— Where are you?
— Fourteen’ Shtreet. Over near the High—
— No. You told me that. The name of the joint.
— The, uh, Ali Baba, something like that… No, no… the Aladdin Lamp. A pretty scary dump.
— They have a bouncer? he says.
— Uh, yeah, I guess.
— You know my rule, Helen. Never go in a joint that needs a bouncer.
He remembers doing a column about the mosque that once stood there. Thirty-odd years ago. When Muslims were a curiosity in New York.
— Can you, uh, come pick me up, Sam? Drop me home, uh, keep going to your house.
Briscoe pauses. He thinks: What the hell, the last act in an endless day. A kind of penance. And this is speciaclass="underline" across all the years, Helen Loomis never asked me for anything.
— Sure, Helen. What’s your cell number?
— I don’t have a cell, Sam. I left it somewhere. The paper, I think… This nice girl… Janice. She dialed you for me on her own cell.
— Let me talk to her.
A younger voice gets on.
— Hello? This is Janice.
Briscoe talks quickly.
— Okay, listen, Janice. I’m in SoHo and I’ll try to get a cab. Could you take Helen to the corner of Fourteenth Street and the High Line? Washington Street, I think it is… You know, where those wooden overhangs stick out? Give me fifteen, twenty minutes. I’ll come by cab and hold the cab until she’s in it.
— Uh, I—
— Please, Janice. She’s one of the best journalists this town ever had, and her paper folded today.
Janice says, with annoyed reluctance in her voice: Okay.
He scribbles her cell number and starts dressing. Thinking: Au revoir, Paris. Farewell, Istanbul. I’m heading into a blizzard, to a place with a bouncer.
8:40 p.m. Freddie Wheeler. Aladdin’s Lamp.
On the dance floor, Wheeler thinks, He made me… That kid reporter… That Fonseca. Across the room, past the dancers, past this blond jerk dancing with me like a Gulfport shitkicker… Fonseca… His press card hanging from his neck. The others too. That tall broad from the World. Helen Loomis. Fonseca says something to the guy next to him, turns behind him and talks to another guy… Looking this way… A fucking posse… Is there a back door to this place? I don’t think so… If there is, it’s locked… Keep the crashers out or the check beaters in… Hey, Fonseca, he thinks. I don’t want any trouble, man. I was just doing my job, man… Fuck with me, you end up in the can… Never get a job at the Times that way.
He turns his back on the dancing blond guy and goes left, under the stairs. Harder to see… Into a knot of necktie assholes… Nobody here I know or care about… Nobody… Just me.
8:45 p.m. Malik Shahid. Fourteenth Street.
He stands a bit apart from the homeless guys, hands jammed in the pockets of his coat, beret pulled low on his brow. The homeless guys are joking and laughing, all growls. Malik can’t hear their words. Just the hoarse laughter. Glimpses the sudden red glow of cigarettes. Turns his head. Malik is watching the door across the street. Up on the platform. Over the heads of the gawkers and the photographers. Past the ropes. Three weeks earlier, when he first saw this obscenity of a building on a morning bright with sun, Glorious was still alive. The infidel bitch was still slaving for her white mistress.
That day he wandered through Chinatown to Cooper Union to Washington Square, avoiding Patchin Place, wandered alone, still bearded, everything a jumble, looking for money, looking for a dropped wallet, an old fool counting his cash at an ATM, a woman with an open purse, any kind of money for Glorious, money for the coming of the baby, money for food. Heading west on 14th Street. Walking, planning, then seeing a Muslim on a prayer mat at five o’clock. Removing his own shoes. Kneeling beside him. On the bare concrete of the sidewalk. Praying. Speaking the words of the Quran. The man gave him ten dollars.
Then walking again.
Toward the river. A cheap market down there someplace. Buy more food for the money.
Until he saw this obscene place.
The next day in a library, he Googled “Aladdin’s Lamp.” Read that it was once a mosque. One of the first in New York! Now a corrupt temple of sins of the flesh! Faggots and whores. He stood for an hour before it, walked to the side, around the back, looking for access, trying to shape a plan. The next day, the plan forming, Allah’s plan, he went up the stairs to the High Line and saw the place from other angles, saw into it when some skinny Mexican was washing the upper windows. Malik tried looking like just another tourist. From Abu Dhabi, maybe. Or Nigeria. Thinking at the time: If I ever need a target, this is it. In other parts of the city, there were cops everywhere, and concrete barriers, and surveillance cameras, and men on high floors with field glasses. Men like his so-called father. Men who had found Islam, and then renounced the Prophet, renounced Allah. Fought jihad. Men who must die.
He looks carefully now through the falling snow at Aladdin’s Lamp. Imagine if a mosque in Kandahar had been transformed into a palace for whores! What would the Taliban do? Make it vanish, that’s what. The corrupted building is set back a good twenty feet from the curb, with a wide space that must have provided for eight or ten cars carrying faithful Muslims, and now serves by day as parking space for beer and drink trucks making deliveries. It’s filled on this night of destiny with photographers and drifters and those who have substituted celebrities for God. They have money. They have homes. They even have umbrellas. I have nothing. Not anymore. No woman, no son, no father, no mother, no friends. I have only my own body. To give you, Allah.
He thinks: I must get through them, and up the three stairs to the platform with the velvet rope held on poles with minarets at the top. Past the bouncer in his costume. Get through the door with my holy container, dash inside, fast. Surprise is everything. He knows from his daytime observations that there is a stairway inside, leading to an upper floor, secret rooms. I am God’s martyr. He thinks: It should be simple. Inshallah. The vest is ready. The detonator is hooked up and ready. I’m ready. He waits for the moment that says now.