Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

The boy was like a nearly finished sculpture. Only a few deft chisel strokes were needed for it to become precisely the form the artist desired.

This boy was different from the young men he had recruited in Baltimore. There was nothing frivolous about him. He paid attention, he didn’t fidget, he didn’t get bored; he was focused , intensely focused. And he had no doubts about the boy’s faith. He had never been certain, but he had thought from the very beginning that the two from Baltimore had agreed to help him only because of the money he had promised them — and that was why he’d set the detonator to kill them as soon as they armed the bomb. But this boy was different. He reminded him very much of another boy, one in Indonesia whom he had trained, a boy who had walked onto a bus and praised God as he detonated the bomb strapped to his narrow chest.

Yes, he knew this boy’s heart. It was time to take the next step.

‘Come with me,’ he said, and they took a city bus to a used-car lot. He wanted a pickup truck. He could put things in the back of a truck: old furniture, boxes, maybe grass clippings and a lawn mower — things that would make it look as if he and the boy were just a couple of immigrants engaged in menial manual labor. But the trucks on the lot were either too big — he didn’t feel comfortable driving a large vehicle in the city — or too new and expensive. He said this to the salesman, a man whose teeth were so white he must have gargled with bleach.

‘I think I have just what you’re looking for,’ the salesman said, and showed them a type of automobile he’d never seen before. The front part of the vehicle looked like a sedan but the back was a truck. ‘It’s called an El Camino,’ the salesman said. ‘It’s made by Chevy. Ford used to make one just like it called the Ranchero. It rides like a car, looks classy, good horsepower, and you can haul stuff in it. This one’s an ’eighty-six and only has ninety thousand miles on it. I can let you have it for twenty-five hundred.’

El Camino. Silly name, he thought, but typical of foolish Americans and their obsession with automobiles. It was an odd color too — a pale green — but the price was acceptable and he liked that it had a low profile and wasn’t so big he’d feel uncomfortable driving it. He would have preferred one of the more conventional-looking trucks made by Toyota or Honda, but this — this El Camino — would do.

Then, for the first time, he and the boy made the 120-mile journey to a city that sat on the western edge of Lake Erie. He stopped the car on a hill and pointed. He pointed at the refinery — and at the tanks inside the refinery that contained the chemical.

Mahoney sat in his condo at the Watergate, staring out the window holding a glass filled with bourbon and crushed ice against his forehead. He had a headache, and the cool glass made his head feel better. It never occurred to him that the bourbon in the glass had made his head hurt in the first place.

Mary Pat had purchased the condo after his fifth term, maybe thinking that after having served in the House for ten years, her husband’s career in politics was secure enough to invest in a permanent D.C. residence. He liked the place mostly because it was a quick drive to his office and because of the view. From where he sat he could see the dome of the Capitol, all lit up at night, looking like a cathedral — a cathedral where the unholy gathered.

Naturally, living at the Watergate made him occasionally reflect on Richard Nixon. What had always amazed Mahoney most about Nixon was not the cover-up and all that stuff. What had amazed him was that the man hadn’t liked people. Mahoney couldn’t imagine being a politician and not liking people. Clinton, Kennedy, Truman, Bush — all of them had seemed to genuinely enjoy spending some time with the folks who had elected them. It was certainly that way with Mahoney; it wasn’t an act with him. He took real pleasure eatin’ barbecue with a bunch of blue-collar guys and their wives. But Nixon, that gloomy bastard, always came across as a man who preferred to hide in his office, the door bolted, having as little contact with the common folk as he possibly could. Hell, even an asshole like Broderick seemed to like people — or at least some of them.

Based on the mail Mahoney had been getting, a lot of folks back home favored Broderick’s thinking, which wasn’t all that surprising. Not only were people scared, but Mahoney’s district included Boston, a city where not that long ago a black man entering certain parts of the town was likely to get an Irish thrashing. There may have been a lot of liberal thinkers at Harvard and MIT, but in places like Southie and in suburbs like Revere and Chelsea, people tended not to be so cerebral.

But Broderick’s bill was just wrong . To Mahoney this wasn’t a matter of constitutional law, although the Supreme Court might have a problem with it. It was instead a matter of fairness. An American citizen had a right to be treated like all other Americans until he did something illegal, something that could be proven to violate the law. And there was something else. It was one thing to think of Muslims in the abstract, faceless strangers practicing their incomprehensible religion, but when you actually knew a good decent Muslim family the way Mahoney knew the Zarifs — well, it changed the way you thought about what Broderick was proposing.

The problem was that Broderick’s damn bill just kept gathering momentum. You couldn’t turn on a television set without seeing two people debating it, and the editorial pages of every newspaper in the country had been devoted to the topic for the last three months. Oprah, of course, had a show where she dressed in a burka and compared the Muslim registry proposal to the Holocaust and Japanese internment camps and lynchings in the South. God bless Oprah.

And lately, almost assuredly because of all the media attention on the subject, other things were starting to happen. Customs agents on the Canadian-Michigan border riddled a car with bullets and killed the driver — a turban-wearing Sikh, not a Muslim — when he attempted to flee a security checkpoint. It turned out the man had two pounds of hashish hidden in his spare tire. Subway cops in Chicago stopped three Muslim teenagers who ‘looked suspicious,’ and when the teenagers sassed the cops, one of them got thumped with a nightstick and was still in a coma. In Kansas City, an Arabic-looking kid was jumped by two college football players because they’d seen the kid shove a parcel into the courthouse mail slot and run away from the building, which in fact the kid had done. He worked for a law firm and was dropping off a transcript that the courthouse clerk had wanted back that night, and he was running to catch his bus. His neck was accidentally broken during the tussle. In Dallas, people stampeded out of a Wal-Mart, screaming their heads off, when a Muslim woman entered the store with a bulge under her coat. It turned out that the woman had not wrapped sticks of dynamite around her torso; she was pregnant.

Mahoney could understand that people were afraid. They were terrified that they or their loved ones might be the victim of the next suicide attack. He could also understand why the Japanese were put in the camps after Pearl Harbor and how McCarthy had been able to whip the country into a Commie-hunting frenzy in the years following World War II when ol’ Joe Stalin had the bomb. He didn’t like it, but he could understand it. And he also knew that if Broderick’s bill passed, people would one day regret what they had done just as they now regretted having interned the Japanese fifty years ago. But what really pissed him off were people like Bill Broderick, politicians who took advantage of a frightening situation and fanned the flames of hatred and bigotry to get their way.