Amsterdam 2012 (33 page)

I hadn’t seen Seth since the memorial service we held for Cynthia about a month after her death, a sunrise service on Venice beach.
 
We had no ashes, so as a white moon faded in the bluing sky, we sprinkled thousands of pink and white rose petals on the whispering surf.
 
Goodbye Cynthia.

“Ann, don’t just stand there!”
 
Seth grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the door.
 
I could already smell the smoke.
 
We ran to Montana Avenue, then east away from the beach toward Sixth Street.
 
Thunderous explosions shook the ground.
 
Dense black smoke swirled down the street.
 
People began running in all directions trying to escape.

A second blast of fire blew off the roof.
 
Some people fell to the
ground,
others screamed in terror and ran faster.

“There he is,” yelled Seth.
 
“Over there.”
 
We ran toward the community center part of the mosque.
 
The heat was like nothing I’d ever felt, like a heavy burning liquid, so intense the plate glass windows of the bank next door exploded into the street.

Up and down the street storefront windows were shattered.
 
Mannequins, headless and armless, were scattered across the road and seemed as horrible as the real thing.
 
Two men carried a limp body out of the mosque, while small fires burned in the rubble up and down the block.

We pulled Seth’s father away from the flames, stumbling back until he collapsed on the curb across the street.
 
He didn’t seem to recognize his son.

We heard sirens in the distance, and in a few minutes, the street was clogged with police cars and fire engines.

#

After I took Seth and his father to the hospital, I went home and collapsed at the kitchen table, my head throbbing.
 
I felt completely sick.
 
I heard horses’ hooves clomping down around me, on the table, on the refrigerator and stove, on the linoleum floor, I felt their hooves on my
head,
I felt the fire from their nostrils on my neck.
 
I was losing my mind.

I massaged my temples with my left hand and reached across the table with my right as if to some imaginary hand.
 
My fingers touched a pile of envelopes and magazines.
 
Saturday’s mail, untouched.
 
Everyone was too busy to look through it.
 
I took a deep breath and pulled the pile into my lap.
 
Among the bills and junk mail was a postcard, a picture of Disneyland in Anaheim, California.
 
I glanced at the other side, and gasped.

I grabbed the postcard and instinctively—like a fox stealing a bear’s prey—dashed to a corner of the house, backed in, and slid to the floor.
 
I was breathing hard, my heart racing.

I held the postcard tightly with both hands.

The handwriting was Peter’s, squat blocky letters crammed tightly together, and it was stamped and postmarked from Culver City.
 
On one side Peter had written my name and address, on the other, three words and a pair of letters: Anniversary, Dunces, you, SR.

The
you
and
SR
I understood immediately.
 
SR
had to be Stinking Rose, which meant he had received my message on the German website.
 
You
meant he wanted to meet me.
 
When?
 
On the
Anniversary
—the anniversary of what?
 
When we first met, first kissed, first made love?
 
Did he remember such things?
 
Did I?
 
It was sometime during my freshman year—October or November.
 
Maybe he meant the
anniversary of 9/11.
 
But those anniversary dates were so far away.
 
Then I realized it had to be the anniversary of the
Jenever
Murders in Amsterdam,
our
anniversary, when our lives changed forever, May 26.
 
Tomorrow.
 
Dunces?
 
It took me a few moments to remember.
 
It had been a stupid joke at college.
 
We had crashed a frat party, which—Canterbury being a liberal activist egghead college—was not a big deal.
 
It was, however, a source of free beer.
 
We got there too early and got mistaken for caterers, and Peter commented as we snuck away in the dark, “Only dunces get to dances before
doce
.”
 
From then on
dunces
was
our code word for midnight.

Peter wanted to meet me at midnight on May 26.
 
But where?
 
Then I realized the
SR
might not mean only Stinking Rose his web pseudonym, but The Stinking Rose restaurant on La
Cienega
Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

I was furious.
 
If Peter was in Los Angeles, why didn’t he simply call me?
 
Was he still hiding from the FBI?
 
Were they really even after him?
 
Maybe I should call the FBI and tell them to meet us at The Stinking Rose.
 
Or at least call Baron Fairchild.
 
He would know the responsible thing to do.

Not a word from Peter for two years.
 
Why should I have any loyalty toward him?
 
Why should I respect his desire for secrecy?
 
Damn him!
 
If he cared, he could have found some way to contact me before now.
 
If he was an Islamist, did I even want to know about it?

But I knew even as I tore up the postcard and flushed it down the toilet I would go and I would not call the FBI or Baron Fairchild.
 
I needed to know if Peter loved me as much as I still loved him.
 
That was all I cared about—duty and safety be dammed.

Chapter Thirteen

I don’t know who I had expected—maybe someone with a scruffy beard and long hair dressed in jeans.
 
That was not who I saw at the bar.

Peter’s hair was short.
 
He wore a black Armani suit with a black shirt, no tie, and glasses.
 
He looked like a young Hollywood agent.
 
His face was leaner, his nose and cheekbones more pronounced.
 
He took off his glasses when I sat down.
 
He still had bedroom eyes.
 
He asked me what I wanted to drink.
 
I eyed his gin and tonic and said I didn’t think Muslims drank.
 
He ordered me a Heineken, and we took our drinks to a table in back.

The bar was dark, but not especially noisy.
 
We looked at each other for a while without talking.
 
I wondered if he thought I had changed as well.
 
His eyes moved up and down my face and body, expressionless.
 
I couldn’t get any sense of what he was thinking or feeling.
 
I noticed his hands were covered with recent cuts—not serious, more like scratches from thorny bushes.
 
They were more muscular than they used to be, larger, like someone who worked with his hands.
 
Perhaps I didn’t remember right.

“You look like you’re safe, at least,” I said.

He lifted one side of his mouth, mocking my poorly disguised hurt, musing, perhaps, on how far from safe he was and how much he had endured, or perhaps he was remembering a time when he
was
safe, sauntering over the grounds of Canterbury College, or waking in my bed in my dorm room without fear of anything more than being unprepared for a test.
 
It wasn’t the smile of a college boy, but of a man who had experienced much yet revealed little, a man amused by how seldom life surprised him.
 
James Bond smirking over a martini.
 
It didn’t suit him.
 
I got a sick feeling in my stomach.
 
I didn’t want to hear his story.
 
Why should I?
 
I could already tell there was no going back.
 
There
was
no
us
anymore.
 
My answer was there in his perverse smile.
 

There was a shifty flickering in his eyes,
then
they got moist.
 
He slumped a little.
 
He reached for my hand, brought it to his mouth, and pressed it against his lips, eyes closed as if making a wish on Aladdin’s lamp.
 
He took a deep breath, kissed my palm twice,
then
gently released it to the table.
 
I took back my hand and placed it in my lap.

He then told me his story.
 

May 29, 2012, the day we returned to Kennedy Airport.
 
After he was led away to a small windowless room, federal marshals questioned him for about twenty minutes before calling in the FBI.
 
He waited two hours for them to show.
 
By that time Baron Fairchild was there with him.
 
The FBI interviewed Peter for another half hour.
 
They took him to FBI headquarters in New York City.
 
They grilled him for a couple of days, catching him in contradictions, confusing him, until he blurted out the truth about how he had seen
Marjon
and the others hours after their murder.
 
They asked him questions that let him know they were probing into every detail of his life: Who were his friends?
 
Why did he visit an Al Qaeda safe house in Philadelphia?
 
Why had he visited Islamist websites?
 
What did he mean in the paper he wrote for his International Global Politics class when he said, “the modern jihad is a manifestation of a world where economic slavery has achieved a moral acceptability that slaves in chains never had?”
 
Then a day without any questions, which scared him even more.
 

The following morning a man he hadn’t met before interrogated him about his background: Was he a practicing Muslim?
 
Was he good in Math?
 
Did he like death metal music?
 
What was he planning to do after he graduated?
 
What languages did he know?
 
How good was his Arabic?
 
Could he work on projects on his own?
 
Did he have a lot of friends?
 
He waited another day without interviews, then another.
 
They began to treat him better.
 
They asked if he wanted anything to read, or if he needed anything—cigarettes or a radio.
 
They let him work out in the gym.
 
Another day passed with no interviews.

The seventh day after his incarceration, Peter was led into a conference room.
 
There were six people there waiting for him: a man and a woman from the FBI, a man from Homeland Security, two officers from military intelligence, and Baron Fairchild.
 
Peter was uncertain how or why Baron Fairchild was there.
 
He had not been allowed to make any phone calls while incarcerated.

Agent Simons, who had done much of the previous interviewing, proposed a deal.
 
The FBI wanted Peter to work undercover as an American born Muslim who had turned to radical Islam, a “home-grown” they called it.
 
They wanted to imprison him at
Guantánamo
Bay and treat him as if he were a terrorism suspect.
 
Baron Fairchild and other lawyers would pursue a habeas corpus hearing and other defense strategies as if charges were pending.
 
They told him he should slowly befriend one or two prisoners, and, over the course of several months, affect a conversion to Islamic radicalism.
 

“You agreed?” I asked, incredulous.

“It wasn’t like I had a choice.
 
They don’t say, ‘Would you like a job.’
 
They say, ‘This is what we need.
 
Only a handful of people in the world can help us the way you can.
 
Your country needs you.’”

“What if you didn’t agree to it?”

“They said they’d turn me over to Dutch and Interpol authorities as a material witness to the
Jenever
Theater murders.
 
I could’ve done that and it would’ve been over, but they would have dragged you into it.”

“I would rather have gone through that with you than not see you for two years.”
 
I hated my voice, as plaintive as an actress on a daytime soap opera.