Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

— Is there anything else, Ms. Gordon?

— Just one thing, she says, smiling wanly. Try to find me an Aleve. My elbow hurts like hell.

Amanda smiles in reply and leaves the office.

Now Sandra glimpses the photograph of Cynthia Harding. She averts her eyes, sees deep green foliage in Montego Bay, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, rainy streets in Paris, that boat in the Greek isles. All with Cynthia. She turns to face her desk.

She feels breath rush out of her. Dry with anguish. But she does not faint.

11:15 a.m. Ali Watson. Brownsville, Brooklyn.

He is driving past the overgrown lots, where Jews lived for years, and then blacks, and now nobody lives at all. He has called Jamal and left his own cell number on Jamal’s answering machine. He has told his partner to scan all chatter to see if Malik has been in New York. Hoping there’s been a whisper from Oakland. Or Pakistan. Montreal or Yemen. Not here. Please God: not here.

But he needs to speak to the other one, the man who dragged them both deeper into the seventh century. Ali for a season. Malik forever.

He needs to speak to Muhammad Ahmad, who two hours earlier whispered the meeting place below the El at Saratoga Avenue. “Around the corner from Moorz Cutz, the barbershop,” the man said. “Noon, okay?” Okay. If anyone knows whether Malik is in New York, and where he is, if he is — it’s Muhammad Ahmad.

In his day, Ali Watson remembers, he was a great fraud, Muhammad was, but a fraud with charisma and savage humor. The most dangerous kind. Ali remembers his young eyes now, the blaze of certainty in them, the ferocity of his language when they met that time in Brownsville in a mosque that had once been a Baptist church and before that a synagogue. His legend was spreading as despair deepened. The year was 1969. Malcolm was dead. Martin was dead. Bobby was dead. Heroin was alive and Brownsville was burning. And there in the lots rose Muhammad Ahmad, aged eighteen, standing in flowing white robes on the roof of a burnt-out Chevy. Singing the early version of his siren song.

His slave name, as they said in those days, was Ben Jenkins, and he was born right here in B-ville. The résumé was the usual pile of clichés. His father took off before he was born. His mother kicked him out when he was fourteen. He was a junkie at fifteen and then sent to the reformatory called Warwick, after Ali, a patrolman then at the 7–3 on East New York Avenue, busted him for dealing heroin. In Warwick, he became a Muslim. Like thousands of other young jailhouse Muslims. Then his life started.

Now Ali pulls over to the curb. He turns off the engine, and sits there, watching, and remembering.

Ben Jenkins took the name of the man who became the Mahdi in the late nineteenth century, the star of a Muslim tale right out of Hollywood. As Muhammad Ahmad, he began preaching in the lots and then on street corners, the way the communists once did in B-ville, and the guys who recruited soldiers for the Lincoln Brigade, and the passionate socialists who wanted to create Israel. As always, the goal was utopia. The big time was a corner on Pitkin Avenue, up the block from the huge movie house. Ben Jenkins, now called Muhammad Ahmad, became a soapbox boy wonder, telling his audiences how the Mahdi built his army in the south of Egypt, gathering thousands of followers, preaching jihad, until he finally surrounded the British at Khartoum. The Mahdi’s army captured the city and killed the British general, and militant Islam seemed clearly on the march. The Mahdi was now famous all over the world.

Listening to this passionate kid then, patrolman Ali Watson imagined the El as the walls of Khartoum, and fought off feelings he had when he first heard Malcolm preach. The song was a vision. He laughs, hearing Mary Lou’s voice: Are you nuts? You’re a grown-up, Ali! He gets out of the car now. Locks it. Shakes off Mary Lou’s sharp, intelligent voice. Stands there trembling for a long minute, but not from the cold.

Still watching.

On all these street corners, now so empty, Ben Jenkins told the bitter crowds, seething with anger, that he had been chosen as the new Mahdi. He was chosen by the Messenger himself in a visitation on the roof of his building in the Marcus Garvey Houses. Then he moved on to his own divine message, his vision, his addition to the many Brownsville utopias. On that windy rooftop, the Messenger told him Allah wanted him to lead a black revolt, inspired and commanded by Muslims, and then to create an Islamic republic in the American South. Start with Mississippi, then get the white infidels out of Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, northern Florida, and replace them with black believers. They could stay, whites and blacks, only if they accepted Allah, and agreed to sharia law. Otherwise, they must go, or die. Hearing all this, most blacks laughed. The way Mary Lou did. Some did not. Particularly if they were young. They saw a future.

He, the new Mahdi, would enlist all those Muslims whose faith died when Malcolm was killed. He would draw blacks to the Mahdi Army from all over the United States. The Panthers. The Five Percenters. America had enslaved them, crippled them, placed them out on the edge without power. America gave them the humiliation of welfare and forgot them. Now they would build the proud Black Zion. Gathering first in Mississippi, where blacks were already a majority. Where whites maintained power through the terrorist gang called the Ku Klux Klan. To meet white terror with black terror.

A kid from City College recorded a few of the Mahdi’s street-corner sermons and, years later, turned the tapes into a very special bootleg. That audiotape, peddled on street corners and then in barbershops and at rallies at schools, attracted many young listeners. One was Malik. Father and son argued bitterly about the message before Malik went away for good. Now Ali has to find him.

Ali Watson begins to walk on streets where he was young too. He wanders to Legion Street and then Grafton Street, where he can hear the screeching of the El, passing over corners where the street gangs once ruled until heroin cut out their hearts. When he married Mary Lou, she insisted that they move. “This place is doomed,” she said. On moving day, black smoke darkened the sky from a burning tenement two blocks away, and doom seemed certain.

Ali knew the B-ville story. He had seen it. The burning gashed every block and turned others into lots. Landlords paid twelve-year-old kids to torch the tenements so they could collect insurance money and buy condos in Fort Lauderdale. Some old dude dies in the building? Tough shit. Burnt-out automobiles were everywhere, stolen from other neighborhoods, driven until the gas ran out, then set on fire to become housing for rats. When Ali came over one time on the trail of a murder suspect, Brownsville looked like Stalingrad or Berlin in the old newsreels on the History Channel. When crack came, the neighborhood truly became a war zone. The infantry was made of young zombies with guns. Killing over ownership of a street corner. Killing old ladies. Killing their own mothers. At least the old junkies nodded out once in a while. The crackheads never did. They wanted more, and more, and more. Real Americans.

Ben Jenkins missed most of that. He was in Leavenworth. In 1980, the Feds nailed him and four others for possession of gelignite, four bag bombs made from boiled and dried horse shit, three AK-47s, fifteen Glocks, two MAC-10s, and plans to blow up the Statue of Liberty. One of the four associates was a rat. Off went the new Mahdi to serve twenty-one years of a thirty-year sentence. He came home in April 2001 to discover that the world he wanted to change as a kid was actually the good old days. Nobody he met remembered him, even those who had heard the audiotape. They were too young, even if, like Malik, they had learned the lyrics of his siren song.