Carlin Romano: Philadelphia Noir

“Because I need to hear, from your own mouth, why you helped the enemy in Tora Bora.”

Richard was parched. He was finding it difficult to breathe, let alone talk. The house seemed to be getting colder. Still, he wanted to tell him why, because in a perverse way, Richard needed to hear it from his own mouth too.

Richard ripped open his T-shirt, revealing the ugly scar on his chest. “I did it because of this,” he said.

Miller looked at him curiously.

“Fighting the battle at Tora Bora was like getting this scar all over again,” Richard said wistfully. “It was like reliving ethnic cleansing.”

Miller furrowed his brow. He was clearly confused.

“I’m Bosnian. I grew up in a mountain village where you could look out and see minarets from four-hundred-year-old mosques poking through the clouds. It was beautiful. It was peaceful. It was home. Then the war started.

“I was eleven years old when the Serbs came to our village. They stripped the men and paraded them in front of their wives before executing them. Then they raped the women. I was lucky, I guess. They just sliced my chest with a machete and left me to die.”

Richard looked up at Miller, who’d been struck dumb by the story. “I saw my mother and sister violated. I saw my father humiliated. I saw all of them murdered. And the only thing I had to remember them by was this scar. Even after I got adopted by a nice American diplomat and his wife, even after they changed my name from Mujo to Richard, even after I learned to love this country, I never forgot what happened to my people. I couldn’t, because I had this scar to remind me.

“I never thought when they trained me for Special Forces and put me in Delta Force that I’d end up fighting Muslims in those mountains in Tora Bora. But when I did, something snapped, and it was like I was that frightened, angry little boy back in Bosnia.”

“So you sent a radio transmission to make them think you’d been cut off from your unit,” Miller said matter-of-factly. “Then you went over a mountain pass and killed enough Afghan militia to let the mujahideen escape.”

The house was silent except for the sound of Richard’s increasingly labored breathing.

“Did you realize who you were helping?” Miller asked.

“I realized I was helping Muslims who had the ability to fight back. That was more than my family ever had.”

“But you knew that the man commanding those Muslim fighters in Tora Bora was Osama bin Laden. Didn’t you?”

Richard closed his eyes and smiled. It was a joyless gesture-one fraught with all the contradictions that had plagued him all his life. “Of course I knew. That’s why I kept going back to Afghanistan. I wanted to make up for it by doing my duty for America. But when I couldn’t atone for my sins, I wanted to forget I’d ever committed them. That roadside bomb that hit my Humvee was a blessing in disguise. It allowed me to come home and forget Afghanistan. It allowed me to come here and marry Corrine. At least for a little while, I had something beautiful again. But you and your men took that away too.”

“Actually, they didn’t.”

Richard’s eyes snapped open at the sound of that voice. It was velvety, feminine, and familiar. It was Corrine. As she walked into the room, Richard tried to make his mouth form the question, but it wouldn’t.

Perhaps he’d been struck dumb by the blood loss and the resultant dementia. Or maybe he was already dead, and Corrine was meeting him in paradise.

“You did a good job, Agent Miller,” she said to the squad leader who’d captured Richard. “We lost five men, but at least we got our subject, and we got him alive.”

“ Our subject ? What are you talking about?” asked Richard.

“The same thing you were talking about a few minutes ago,” Corrine said as she wiped the fake blood from her chest. “Doing my duty for my country.”

“But you can’t be real,” Richard said, laboring to breathe as he began to hyperventilate. “You can’t be one of them. You died back at the house. They killed you.”

“Funny what a little red paint and a lot of imagination can do, isn’t it?” Corrine replied with a wicked grin.

“But you said you loved me,” Richard said as his facial expression went from hurt to sadness to outright devastation. “You married me.”

“And you married me too, even though you knew the CIA could come after you one day for what you did. You valued your happiness more than you valued my safety, and you never trusted me enough to tell me what happened in Tora Bora, no matter how many times I asked you.”

“I kept that from you to protect you,” he said as a tear rolled down his cheek. “I kept it from you because I loved you. Not that it matters. This was all just another operation for you. The marriage, the house-everything.”

“Marrying you was the only way to get close enough to find the truth,” she said coldly. “We had to know if you were part of a larger cell or if you acted of your own volition. The fact is, I did it for the same reason you helped bin Laden escape in Tora Bora. I love my people, and I wasn’t about to watch you or anyone else hurt them.”

Richard leaped forward and grabbed Miller’s weapon from his hands, but before he could fire, Corrine pulled a gun from the small of her back and pumped three rounds into his chest.

The gun slipped from his fingers as blood bubbled up in his mouth. He looked at Corrine for the last time before closing his eyes and leaning back against the wall.

At that moment, everything went quiet and Richard was afraid. But it wasn’t the numbness in his body or the sensation of blood spilling down his chest that frightened him. It was the silence.

As Richard fought through the depths of unconsciousness to reach back toward life, it was the silence that enveloped him like a shroud, pulling him down into the tomb his life had become.

He was tempted to surrender-to lay his head upon the breast of silence and allow it to rock him to sleep, the way his mother had rocked him as a child. What, after all, did he have to live for? Who would shed tears if death folded him in its arms and held him there forever?

Richard was a scarred man in more ways than one. He wasn’t connected to a home, or to a family, or to a wife. Not anymore. He’d been severed from them all, like the silence was severing him from life. Even now he felt it, sliding up through his ears and into the recesses of his mind. He felt it pouring over his body, slow and thick and sweet, like syrup. It was silence, and as his eyes closed for the last time, Richard reached toward it with his very soul, hoping at last for peace.

West Philadelphia

Ilearned about the University City Swim Club around the same time things started disappearing from my room. First I noticed that I was missing some jewelry, and then the old plaid Swatch I’d been saving for a future Antiques Road-show . I didn’t say anything to my mother, because they say it’s dangerous to wake a sleepwalker. But then I felt like we were all sleepwalkers when Aja told me about the pool, hiding in plain sight right up on 47th Street in what looked like an alley between Spruce and Pine.

“You don’t know about the University City Swim Club?” she said, pretending shock. It was deep August and I sat on the steps of my mother’s house. Aja was frankly easier to take during the more temperate months, but since my summer job had ended and there were two and a half more weeks before eleventh grade, I often found myself in her company.

Aja Bell and I had been friends of a sort since first grade, when we’d been the only two black girls in the Mentally Gifted program, though there couldn’t have been more than thirty white kids in the whole school. Aja loved MG because there was a group of girls in her regular class who tortured her. Then in sixth grade, I got a scholarship to the Barrett School for Girls and Aja stayed where she was. Now she went to Central High, where she was always chasing these white city kids. It killed her that I went to school in the suburbs with real rich white people, while her French teacher at Central High was a black man from Georgia. Despite the fact that I had no true friends at my school and hated most things about my life, she was in a one-sided social competition with me. As a result, I was subjected to Aja’s peacocking around about things like how her friend Jess, who lived in a massive house down on Cedar Avenue, had invited her to go swimming with her family.