Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

In Paradise, I shall live forever in the company of those I love and those who loved me. I shall live with the blessed ones. I shall live with Allah’s heroes and servants. I hope my example will inspire others.

Allahu akbar!

His signature is boldly written at the bottom. With the date.

He folds the letter, slips it into the stamped envelope, licks the gummed edges of the flap, and seals it. He does not need to read the stamped and sealed letter to his so-called father. It’s very short. Addressed to him at the house in Brooklyn.

All I wanted was to borrow some money to take my woman to a doctor. Your wife sneered at me, told me to leave, threatened to call the police. She is dead now, along with her slave owner, and so is my woman and our child. And the fake imam.

I didn’t kill them.

You did.

M.

Time to go. He pulls on his beret and closes the book, tears off the top page of the yellow pad, and slips the pad beneath the book. He folds the page and pushes it into his back pocket. Thinking: I don’t care if they find out I did it. After I do it. But some cop stops me on the way, he might wonder what this nigger is doing with a yellow pad. Malik stretches in a feigned sleepy way, zippers his coat, pulls the beret more snugly on top of his head. Then he nods and smiles like a young Uncle Tom at the white woman behind the counter, and goes out into the snow.

Across the street, Malik sees a young woman leave the Chelsea Hotel with a large black dog on a leash. A Lab. Thinking: Just like the Lab we had at home when I was what? Ten? His name was Sarge. My so-called father trained him. Had a guy come over from the bomb squad to help. Taught Sarge to wait. Taught him to sit. Teaching me at the same time. Telling me to sit. Like it was a joke. Doing that to me all my life, even after Sarge died, only four years old. Blamed me for the dog’s death too. I was walking him down by Myrtle Avenue, and some bitch crossed his path, some bitch in heat most likely, and Sarge lunged for her, I lost the leash, and a bus hit him and killed him. Allah surely had some reason. But I didn’t know that then.

He walks to Eighth Avenue, drops the letters in a mailbox, crosses the street, heads downtown. Thinking: I better not take another bus. The bus I took to 23rd Street, that worked. A gamble I won. Thinking: They don’t check the buses like they do the subways. They put a cop on every bus, they’d have to start a New York draft. Subways are different. He remembers the signs: IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. Yeah. Be a snitch. God bless America.

He sees a black man in the doorway of a shuttered store. Cardboard cup loose in his right hand. His eyes closed. No hat. No gloves. One leg under his ass, the other stretched out, snow gathering on his jeans and his unlaced sneaker. Malik thinks: How you like that fucking Obama now, baby?

He walks to the next block, steps into a deep doorway of a store with metal shutters covering the windows. Stamps his feet. Flexes his hands. Stands there watching the snow fall. And remembers that meeting he went to, out past Brownsville in East New York. Two years ago? Three? Less? Set up by Aref. Four other believers showed up. No names, please, said Aref. Malik didn’t know one of them. Most of them Malik’s age. Two guys with Paki accents, but all of them arriving separately. Nothing in the room but a table, folding chairs, and couches. A safe house. For believers on the run.

Then an older guy arrived, maybe sixty, clean-shaven, a little fat, losing his hair. Gray suit and tie. Carrying a briefcase. He looked like a professor Malik had during his first semester at CUNY. Teaching some course in literature. He laid the briefcase on the table, nodded at Aref, who locked the door. Then he snapped open the top of the briefcase and took out a vest. Spread it wide. Said, “You all know what this is, right?”

They all knew. They’d seen the vests on all the filthy anti-Muslim TV shows and the pages of tabloid newspapers. Yeah, they knew. Holding the vest, the older guy gave a brief lecture. Explained that Semtex was a plastic explosive, made in the Czech Republic. That it had no smell, he explained, but even one of those red bars had tremendous explosive power. The vest held six. They could only be ignited by one of these. At which point he held up a small detonator. “You slide the wire inside one of the pouches, attach it to a wire wrapped around a Semtex bar, and then press the button. That’s all.” And if the wearer is shot at, one bullet hitting a Semtex bar would do the same thing. Ka-boom.

The older man paused, then explained that Semtex was used by various groups around the world. The most famous case, he said in his flat voice, happened in 1988, when a small amount was used to blow up a Pan Am plane over Lockerbie, Scotland. This model, he said, was developed by Hamas. Malik saw two of the other students nodding in approval. Then the man was finished. He folded the vest, laid it back in the briefcase, closed the top. He paused, and said: “Allahu akbar.” And walked to the door.

Standing in this doorway on Eighth Avenue, staring at the snow, Malik wonders where that man is right now. And the four others who were his audience that night. He knows where Aref is. Tomorrow, all of them, except Aref, will remember that night. No matter where they are. The South Bronx or Somalia. They will see Malik’s face in the papers or on the TV, and know him. And pray for him. And praise him. For rubbing the magic lamp.

7:20 p.m. Beverly Starr. Washington Street, Manhattan.

They are making good time. The driver took the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, then West Street, where she saw snow falling through the emptiness of the place where the twin towers once stood. Then side streets. The driver explaining in the rhythms of old Brooklyn: Figget Fourteen’ Street. Cobblestones there, in this weather we’d slide right inta a furniture store… Then here, with the High Line rising to the left. Straight out of Gotham. Bob Kane would have loved it. Jerry Robinson would’ve drawn it. The wind blowing snow from the west.

The car stops on the corner of 14th Street. She looks across the street and sees the whirls and curves and minarets of Aladdin’s Lamp. She blinks. Records it. Then laughs out loud. Who says comic books make things up? She sees the palace as part Aubrey Beardsley, part Prince Valiant on a trip to the Orient, part Cecil B. DeMille. She hears Tony Curtis of the Bronx saying his famous line from some fifties desert flick: Yonda lies da castle of my fodda, da Caliph. If he ever said it.

— I’ll call you when I’m ready, Harry.

— Take ya time, the driver says. I’m goin’ to a diner an’ eat.

Beverly Starr gets out of the car, her back to the High Line. Sees a crowd of about twenty people standing below a platform that must have once been a loading dock. Flashbulbs. Snow-muffled shouts. Stairs, a railing, the platform, then the doors. A black man in an Arabian Nights costume checking invites. Then to her right sees four homeless men in long overcoats and caps. Standing under an overhang from the days when they actually packed meat around here. Way past them in the snow, a guy in a wheelchair. Not moving. Beverly thinks: You can’t make some things up.

She walks cautiously across the glistening cobblestones to the crowd, moves around the edge, starts up the stairs, hears shouts. Hey, lady, lady, look this way. Hey, lady. Smile. Lady, say “bellybutton.” She hears the last word and smiles. Then crosses the platform to the door. Hearing: Hey, lady, what’s your name? The black bouncer smiles at her, and starts to say something, maybe an apology for his silly costume, when one of the double doors opens and a man in a gray suit steps out, smiling.