Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

And goes back empty-handed to the tub, slips off his robe, shuts off the faucets, slides in, and closes his eyes. He always loves this moment, the loft full of a teeming silence, a dense watery solitude. He stretches out. Cynthia. The tub at Patchin Place. The one in Montego Bay that time. The Plaza Athénée in Paris. He erases the images, and begins to think of Rome. The yellow light, the ocher walls, the gurgling of fountains. Talking with Fellini one night about Batman.

In a city so old that the buildings themselves dwarf the fear of death. What’s a single human life, Rome says, compared to millennia? To be there again, reading Catullus, in some year before Vietnam. And did he really see a man in a combat poncho on Wooster Street tonight? And was it Cynthia who said that she was delighted to know that a street in New York was named after Bertie Wooster?

A MOTHER WEEPS?

Ah, shit.

Briscoe wants to be in the golden city, studying Latin to ward off Alzheimer’s, waiting for Virgil to take him home…

Now he realizes that the ache is gone from his lower back, sucked away by hot water and visions of Rome. He opens his eyes.

1:45 a.m. Ali Watson. Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Two blocks from home, driving slowly in the Mazda, wary of the rain, he tries the cell phone again. Calling the house. Hears it ringing. He says out loud: Come on, Mary Lou. Pick it up, woman. Come on, baby. Three rings. Four. On the fifth, he hears her recorded voice. For the third time in the last hour. You have reached the Watsons. We are not available. Please leave a —. With his thumb, Ali Watson cuts off the call. He turns into a street with brownstones on both sides, where there is never a parking spot. Some of the cars never leave the block. The owners move them in the morning to the other side of the street, to avoid the ticket, but they are always here. Alternate-side-of-the-street squatting. He clicks the work number at Cynthia Harding’s house. Thinking: Maybe they all stayed late. Drinking, eating, talking. Mary Lou forced to wait until the final bell. No. The Harding lady wouldn’t do that. Mary Lou’s been working there twenty-one years. Definitely not. Mary Lou never did learn to drive, but on party nights at Patchin Place, she always calls the car service for the ride home to Brooklyn, and the Harding lady always pays.

No answer. He tries the other number. After four rings, the answering machine starts. Again, Mary Lou’s voice. You have reached the office of Cynthia Harding. Please leave…

He looks at his watch. One forty-eight.

Shit.

Something’s fucking wrong.

He eases the Mazda up the rainy street and pulls into the space beside the fire hydrant outside his house. He stops, turns off the lights. The wet street is empty. Not even a man walking a dog. The jobs are going and maybe the dumb kids will rise again. The stats say no. Crime keeps going down. But lesson number one from the sixties is still true: Never create guys with nothing to lose. Not here. Not Pakistan. Not Iraq. Not Afghanistan. But definitely not Brooklyn. Ali Watson leans across the front seat and gazes up at his house. No lights burning. Not from any of the three floors where he has lived with Mary Lou since he made sergeant. This was where they would live until they died. Ali and Mary Lou and Malik until he finished college and went on to his own life.

Then Malik comes to him like a jagged scribble in his mind, and Ali Watson’s heart quickens.

Malik, Malik, my only son. Twenty-three years old, but not yet a man.

Gone now for months, he thinks, God knows where. Maybe Pakistan, for all the fuck I know. Or Yemen. To become one of those goddamned foreign fighters we always hear about when generals hold press conferences. Or an amateur jihadist, who’ll come home on a U.S. passport. The kind of knucklehead we talk about at the weekly meetings of the task force. He knows just one thing about Malik. He’s gone. The task force has him on the list, and know to call if they pick up a scent. Ali Watson had told them all about his son. Ali became a Muslim because of Malcolm, and Malik became a Muslim because of Ali, his father. Mary Lou never became a Muslim, shouting at Ali once, They were the goddamned slavers who sold us to the English! And she was right. She always is. After the ’93 bombing of the World Trade Center, Ali gave it up. Good-bye, Islam. Fuck you, and Paradise too.

Malik was seven in ’93. Bright, smiling, an obsessive fan of the Mets and the Knicks. When he was twelve, he discovered the shelf near the top of the bookcase on the second floor. The shelf with all of Ali’s old books about Malcolm and Islam. Books no longer read. Books he should have thrown out. A year later the boy told his mother and father that he was now a Muslim. Mary Lou said, Don’t be ridiculous. But he went his own way, with a few friends that he had converted. Or who had converted him. He went to a mosque not far from here, just as he went to Brooklyn Tech, six blocks in the other direction. Ali tried to talk to him about it, to put doubt in him, or common sense, but he looked at his father with that knowing smile people have when they believe they know the truth, and you don’t. Not a smile. A sneer. And he started looking at his mother with dead, bitter eyes.

Malik prayed five times a day, shoes off, facing Mecca. Even when he was out among the crowds on DeKalb Avenue. He didn’t smoke or drink, of course, and that was a good thing. But he became more evasive by the day, barely talking to Mary Lou, looking at Ali as if he were a traitor. Ali tried to talk about the Knicks and the Mets, but Malik made a snorting sound with his lips, and retreated into silence. He was living with a secret script. Ali slipped into the boy’s mosque a few times, well to the rear, but never heard any talk of jihad or violence, only the usual stuff about submission and Allah. But as Malik grew up, taller and more muscular than his father, he became more rigid, more fanatical, right up to September 11. After that, he was even worse. He tried to grow out his beard, but the hair was thin and scraggly, a teenaged sketch. He wore a kufi on his head. He had been accepted by CUNY, but when he turned eighteen, he left home. Taking a place with his friend Jamal. A month later, Ali checked with CUNY and discovered that Malik had stopped going to classes. Ali used all of his skills and his craft, his police and FBI friends, his gangster contacts, to track Malik, but all he could find were rumors and maybes. He gave many details to the task force, just in case. There were a few reports. Malik, Jamal, and a few other Brooklyn friends had been seen in Jersey City, or in Miami, or preaching in Compton, out in L.A. If Malik had a cell phone, it was certainly under another name. And serious jihadists didn’t have Facebook pages. Malik called home once and Mary Lou answered. She insisted he come home, he shouted at her in Arabic (or what she thought was Arabic) and hung up. He never called again.

Ali told much of this to Ray Kelly when, as police commissioner, Kelly asked him to join the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Ali begged off. “Imagine if you had a son that might be in the Irish Republican Army,” he said. “Not is. But might be.” Kelly smiled and nodded, the way any good police commissioner would, especially a mick. Then he said he needed Ali because he understood the Muslim mind, and the way it worked in New York among American Muslims.

— Besides, he said. You can keep an eye out for Malik.

So many years now since September 11, and Ali still did his best for Kelly, every day of the week or, more often, every night. Some asshole shakes Ajax on the steps of a post office in the Bronx, and off goes Ali Watson and his young partner, Malachy Devlin. Three assholes in Crown Heights are bullshitting in a bar about blowing up the Williamsburg Bridge, the tip comes in, off go Ali and Malachy, saying that if these guys succeeded they would win an architecture improvement award.