I Am Pilgrim(154)

I have to say it was a nice touch, and most of the listeners – blue-collar workers too – nodded in understanding: the details may have been different, but they too had entered Europe in a similar fashion.

The so-called illegal immigrant said he had been staying with a cousin in nearby Frankfurt but, desperate for work and down to his last few euro, he had made his way to Karlsruhe in the hope of finding a job. With the hook baited, he claimed he used to work in the shipping department of a big corporation in Beirut.

‘Insha’Allah, maybe there is something like that available in the large factory at the end of the road?’ he asked.

Nearly all the worshippers worked at Chyron Chemicals and, exactly as he had anticipated, they promptly took the bait and offered to make inquiries among their workmates and colleagues. He thanked them by offering an obscure but appropriate quote from the Qur’an, which confirmed to them that their first impression of him had been correct: most assuredly, he was an honourable and devout man.

Telling them that he was embarrassed, he said in a quiet voice that he didn’t have money for food or another rail fare and he was wondering if there might be one of the ‘safe houses’ he could stay at until he found work. Of course the congregation took him in, arranging meals and shelter – after all, one of the Five Pillars of Islam was to provide for the poor.

And so, without even realizing it, in little more than an hour, the Saracen had become their responsibility. They were the type of men who took such things seriously and, three days later, their inquiries and advocacy paid off: a Turkish supervisor in Chyron’s dispatch department reported that there was a place for the refugee as a storeman on the graveyard shift.

After prayers that night the men, so happy for him they took him to a café for dinner, told the Saracen about the remarkable working conditions he would enjoy: the on-site health care, the subsidized cafeteria and the beautiful prayer room. What none of them mentioned, however, was that all the jobs had once been held by Americans.

The old Nobel laureate in Virginia had been right when he had asked if the greatest industrial nation in history actually produced goods and machinery any more. Millions of jobs, along with most of the country’s manufacturing base, had been exported over the decades, and a great deal of the nation’s safety had disappeared with them. As for Chyron Chemicals, the danger was particularly acute – it was a drug manufacturer and exporter, one of the most respected in the world. Though few people realized it, the heartland of America was really only as safe as an anonymous factory in a city hardly anybody had ever heard of.

In a better world, the Saracen – seated in the café with its laminated tables and strange Turko-German music – would have had a final hurdle to overcome. Indeed, for a time, he believed it was the single thing most likely to cause his plan to fail. Surely, he had asked himself back in El-Mina, wouldn’t the American Food and Drug Administration inspect drug shipments for possible contamination?

He found the answer on the Web – a transcript of a congressional hearing into the FDA which told him that one country alone had over five hundred factories exporting drugs and their ingredients to the USA.

‘How many of those facilities did the FDA inspect during the previous year?’ a congressman asked.

‘Thirteen,’ came the reply.

The Saracen had to read it through again to make sure he had understood it correctly: only thirteen out of five hundred factories had been inspected. And that country was China, the nation with the worst history of product safety in the world. He knew then that nothing from Chyron – a subsidiary of a US corporation based in a First World country – would ever be inspected.

At 10 p.m. on the night following the celebratory meal he walked along a deserted Wilhelmstrasse, presented himself at Chyron’s security gates, was issued an employee pass and given directions to the distribution warehouse. There he met the Turkish supervisor, who, escorting him past endless pallets of drugs awaiting shipment to cities across the United States, explained his duties to him. None of the pallets were guarded, nothing was locked and sealed – they never had been; nobody had ever thought it necessary. Then again, nobody had ever thought it necessary to lock the cockpit doors on passenger jets either.

After the supervisor had left for home and the Saracen was alone in the cavernous warehouse, he took out his prayer mat, pointed it towards Mecca and said a prayer. A child who had been introduced to misery in Saudi Arabia, a teenager who went to wage jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a deeply devout Muslim who had graduated with honours in medicine, a man who had fed a stranger to wild dogs in Damascus, a zealot who had dosed three foreigners with smallpox and watched them die in agony, gave thanks to Allah for the blessings which had been bestowed upon him.