to hide in a housewife’s reading list?”
“Apparently enough to worry your daughter’s friend, Lucy Gray.”
“I’ll give Lucy a call right away.”
“That would make it clear I’d betrayed her confidence.”
“Well, we have to do something!” Olga Swenson said exasperatedly.
“I think there is something you can do, Mrs. Swenson. I have been repeatedly receiving a one-word e-mail message that might just be significant. It didn’t occur to me until just now, but the word in the message, ‘Blister,’ contains the word ‘list.’”
“And a B at the start of the word! That’s precisely the kind of shorthand Ellen and her colleagues often use. ‘Blown’ for ‘book on interlibrary loan’ and that sort of thing. Ellen has said they try to select words starting with b—for ‘book’ or ‘biblio’—that mean something in themselves.”
“I hope we’re onto something. Do you think you could get access to your daughter’s computer terminal and personal items at the library?”
“I think I’d find it easier to collect her knickknacks than log onto her computer. Why do you ask?”
“I’d like you to try that word on the library system and see if it’s a password to the circulation record. If it isn’t, perhaps you could look around and see if she kept a list of passwords to be used at work.”
“How would I guarantee that I’d have any privacy? I’m not very computer savvy, either, you know. Wouldn’t it be better for you to get Erik to do this?”
“I don’t think so. First of all, he hardly trusts me after he was misquoted in that article.”
“I could convince him that you’re working with us.”
“Even if you could, he’s under some suspicion in this case. I think the librarians would be much less likely to leave him alone in Ellen’s workspace than they would you.”
“But Ellen shares an office with Monica Phillips. If she’s not lording it over the library patrons, she’s at her desk impressing everyone with her efficiency.”
“That could be an advantage, since it would be quicker and easier to input a potential password on an active machine than to start up Ellen’s PC. And we have another advantage in predicting when Ms. Phillips would have to cover the reference desk. I happen to know when Lucy Gray’s coffee breaks occur.”
By the time the two had parted at the gate to the Pinetum, their scheme was complete, and scheduled for the next morning. As Olga Swenson walked off towards her home, she raised her blistered hand in a little salute to Liz. Both of the women held themselves taller as they strode purposefully in opposite directions.
New York City, December 16, 2000
“Of course it was a mistake,” Ellen said to the man in the closet, whose coffee-stained pants identified him as the fellow who had accidentally started the fire. “Anyone could see you didn’t set the fire intentionally,” Ellen added.
The poor fellow looked petrified.
Ellen was alarmed, too, to have been pushed into the closet by the stranger. But she saw his agitation as stemming from fear that he would be in deep trouble for the accident. After all, he appeared to be of Middle Eastern extraction, and wasn’t it common knowledge that crimes were punished harshly there?
“I would vouch for you, sir, and I’m sure my friend would, too,” Ellen said, hoping that he would relax enough to let her exit the closet without much ado. “Please don’t worry yourself so much.”
Samir Hasan was overwhelmed. One after the other, this woman had destroyed every assumption he had ever held about her. First, she looked like a spoiled American out-of-towner who knew nothing about New York traffic and less about his language. Then she seemed to know taxi routes and understand the radio communication she should never have heard. Now, it was clear that this assumption was a mistake, too. And last, the woman he had put into grievous danger turned out to be a person who would help him—Samir Hasan, a total stranger and an Arab, too—when he was in trouble. This was a good person, a kind woman.
Standing there, in the closet he’d thrust her into, this shaqra was a living and breathing contradiction to the kind of rhetoric that had won his cooperation in the code-passing operation. Large-eyed and clearly afraid, this woman who was putting his worries before her own proved all Americans are not cold-hearted infidels.
“Do you have children?” she asked him next, surprising Hasan with the question.
“A son, at home with his mother in Baghdad,” he found himself replying.
“You must miss him terribly,” the woman said. “I have a daughter at home. She’s just eight years old. How old is your son?”
Hasan’s head was spinning. Why in Allah’s name was this woman making small talk? He had to get this shaqra out of here. But how? And where to? “He’s the same,” he said. “The same age.”
And then, the closet door was flung open by a firefighter. Before the fireman could finish demanding, “Is everything all right in here?” Ellen flew past him and across the lobby, into the embrace of her pen pal.
“I thought I would protect the lady,” Hasan explained before brushing past the incredulous fireman. Inspired, Hasan added, “I see she has found my sister.”
Hasan hastened across the lobby as the women exited, arm-in-arm, crushed in one compartment of a revolving door. While Hasan followed, the pair crossed the plaza to the globe-shaped sculpture and asked a passerby to take their photo in front of it. While his head spun in the effort to find a way to warn her about her plight—or to somehow to be man enough to carry out his horrific order—he nevertheless found himself marveling, again, at the woman’s faith in other people. He would never hand his camera over to a total stranger and leave, as she did, valuables such as a purse and briefcase lying on a bench while the photo was being taken. In fact, the woman never picked up her things. Instead, rapt in animated conversation with her friend, she simply walked away from them.
Now I am a thief, as well, Hasan told himself as he picked them up. Or, maybe not, he thought, more happily. Here was the excuse to approach the woman again as a Good Samaritan.
Waving the purse and calling out, “Lady, lady! I have found your handbags!” Hasan attempted to get Ellen’s attention. But he was too late.
The women were already too far away to hear him, and before he could break into a run to catch them, they had entered an idling cab. To make things worse, Hasan’s cab was nowhere to be seen.
Exasperated and frantic, Hasan was confused as to where he had left his cab. Nevertheless, he retained the presence of mind to repeat to himself the medallion number and cab company name emblazoned on the women’s cab as it drove away, headed uptown. He could plant it in his memory.
At least in the eyes of one man, he didn’t look suspicious carrying the woman’s things.
“Nice try, buddy,” a businessman said to him. “You’re a rare bird.”
Whatever that meant, it was said in friendly manner. Still, Hasan was uneasy to be seen with the bags. He wished he still had his Gap bag containing his old clothes. But that had been left behind in the restaurant. Taking off his blazer, he wrapped the purse and slim briefcase in it and hailed a cab himself, asking the driver to follow the woman’s cab. But such chases are far more difficult in real life than they are in films, and the cabbie soon lost sight of the vehicle. Hasan ordered him to return to the World Trade Center and make a circuit of the building. Allah be praised, Hasan’s cab had not been towed away, although it was parked in a tow zone. Perhaps the police had been too preoccupied with the fire emergency to take heed of it.
Hasan’s relief was short-lived. The two-way radio crackled to life as Faud’s voice commanded, “You know what you have to do. The teena must go missing. For always.”
“Hamdu-lillah,” Hasan said, hoping his cohort would take it as assent,
