A light rain began falling as they got out of the unmarked police sedan and began walking toward a yellow brick building that had once been a small supermarket on the corner of Lowell and Franks. Metal shutters were now in place where earlier there’d been plate glass display windows. Grafitti decorated the yellow brick and the green shutters. An ornately hand-lettered sign hung above the entrance doors, white on a black field, announcing the name of the mosque: Majid Hazrat-i-Shabazz. Men in flowing white garments and embroidered prayer caps, other men in dark business suits and pillbox hats milled about on the sidewalk with young men in team jackets, their baseball caps turned backward. Friday was the start of the Muslim sabbath, and now the faithful were being called to prayer.
On one side of the building, the detectives could see women entering through a separate door.
“My mother knows this Muslim lady up in Diamondback,” Brown said, “she goes to this mosque up there — lots of blacks are Muslims, you know...”
“I know,” Kling said.
“And where she goes to pray, they got no space for this separation stuff. So the men and women all pray together in the same open hall. But the women sit behind the men. So this fat ole sister gets there late one Friday, and the hall is already filled with men, and they tell her there’s no room for her. Man, she takes a fit! Starts yelling, ‘This is America, I’m as good a Muslim as any man here, so how come they’s only room for brothers to pray?’ Well, the imam — that’s the man in charge, he’s like the preacher — he quotes scripture and verse that says only men are required to come to Friday prayer, whereas women are not. So they have to let the men in first. It’s as simple as that. So she quotes right back at him that in Islam, women are spose to be highly respected and revered, so how come he’s dissing her this way? And she walked away from that mosque and never went back. From that time on, she prayed at home. That’s a true story,” Brown said.
“I believe it,” Kling said.
The imam’s address that Friday was about the dead cab driver. He spoke first in Arabic — which, of course, neither Kling nor Brown understood — and then he translated his words into English, perhaps for their benefit, perhaps in deference to the younger worshippers in the large drafty hall. The male worshippers knelt at the front of the hall. Behind a translucent, moveable screen, Brown and Kling could perceive a small number of veiled female worshippers.
The imam said he prayed that the strife in the Middle East was not now coming to this city that had known so much tragedy already. He said he prayed that an innocent and hard-working servant of Allah had not paid with his life for the acts of a faraway people bent only on destruction—
The detectives guessed he meant the Israelis.
— prayed that the signature star on the windshield of the murdered man’s taxi was not a promise of further violence to come.
“It is foolish to grieve for our losses,” he said, “since all is ordained by Allah. Only by working for the larger nation of Islam can we understand the true meaning of life.”
Men’s foreheads touched the cement floor.
Behind the screen, the women bowed their heads as well.
The imam’s name was Muhammad Adham Akbar.
“What we’re trying to find out,” Brown said, “is whether or not Mr. Aslam had any enemies that you know of.”
“Why do you even ask such a question?” Akbar said.
“He was a worshipper at your mosque,” Kling said. “We thought you might know.”
“Why would he have enemies here?”
“Men have enemies everywhere,” Brown said.
“Not in a house of prayer. If you want to know who Khalid’s enemy was, you need only look at his windshield.”
“Well, we have to investigate every possibility,” Kling said.
“The star on his windshield says it all,” Akbar said, and shrugged. “A Jew killed him. That would seem obvious to anyone.”
“Well, a Jew may have committed those murders,” Kling agreed. “But...”
“May,” the imam said, and nodded cynically.
“But until we catch him, we won’t know for sure, will we?” Kling said.
Akbar looked at him.
Then he said, “The slain man had no enemies that I know of.”
Just about when Carella and Meyer were each and separately waking up from eight hours of sleep, more or less, the city’s swarm of taxis rolled onto the streets for the four-to-midnight shift. And as the detectives sat down to late afternoon meals which for each of them were really hearty breakfasts, many of the city’s more privileged women were coming out into the streets to start looking for taxis to whisk them homeward. Here was a carefully coiffed woman who’d just enjoyed afternoon tea, chatting with another equally stylish woman as they strolled together out of a midtown hotel. And here was a woman who came out of a department store carrying a shopping bag in each hand, shifting one of the bags to the other hand, freeing it so she could hail a taxi. And here was a woman coming out of a Korean nail shop, wearing paper sandals to protect her freshly painted toenails. And another coming out of a deli, clutching a bag with baguettes showing, raising one hand to signal a cab. At a little before five, the streets were suddenly alive with the leisured women of this city, the most beautiful women in all the world, all of them ready to kill if another woman grabbed a taxi that had just been hailed.
This was a busy time for the city’s cabbies. Not ten minutes later, the office buildings would begin spilling out men and women who’d been working since nine this morning, coming out onto the pavements now and sucking in great breaths of welcome spring air. The rain had stopped, and the sidewalk and pavements glistened, and there was the strange aroma of freshness on the air. This had been one hell of a winter.
The hands went up again, typists’ hands, and file clerks’ hands, and the hands of lawyers and editors and agents and producers and exporters and thieves, yes, even thieves took taxis — though obvious criminal types were avoided by these cabbies steering their vehicles recklessly toward the curb in a relentless pursuit of passengers. These men had paid eighty-two dollars to lease their taxis. These men had paid fifteen, twenty bucks to gas their buggies and get them on the road. They were already a hundred bucks in the hole before they put foot to pedal. Time was money. And there were hungry mouths to feed. For the most part, these men were Muslims, these men were gentle strangers in a strange land.
But someone had killed one of them last night.
And he was not yet finished.
Salim Nazir and his widowed mother left Afghanistan in 1994, when it became apparent that the Taliban were about to take over the entire country. His father had been one of the mujahideen killed fighting the Russian occupation; Salim’s mother did not wish the wrath of “God’s Students” to fall upon their heads if and when a new regime came to power.
Salim was now twenty-seven years old, his mother fifty-five. Both had been American citizens for three years now, but neither approved of what America had done to their native land, the evil Taliban notwithstanding. For that matter they did not appreciate what America had done to Iraq in its search for imaginary weapons of mass destruction. (Salim called them “weapons of mass deception.”) In fact, Salim totally disapproved of the mess America had made in what once was his part of the world, but he rarely expressed these views out loud, except when he was among other Muslims who lived — as he and his mother did now — in a ghettolike section of Calm’s Point.