Are they looking for me? Do they know I came in with Father Jacobi? Is this a setup?
“Sir, I need to go to the Air France terminal—please!”
“This is the plane to take you where you need to go,” Cesur said as the pilot opened the plane’s door. He waved me aboard, and I rushed up the steps, trying not to look around, strapped in, and tried to make myself invisible. Two Turkish policemen approached, and the pilot calmly walked down the stairs to speak with them.
He showed them his papers, and he and the cops commenced walking around the aircraft, seemingly inspecting it for—what? I don’t know. They came around to the side where I was sitting, and they all looked up—right at me. The pilot even pointed at me as I tried to sink down farther into the seat.
Damn!
The two policemen checked something on their handheld devices and looked up again. They said something to the pilot and then bowed slightly. He did the same.
As we began to taxi out, I saw the two cops make the double sign of the cross. Extraordinary.
27
The plane took off, and I poured myself half a tumbler of Jack Daniel’s and gulped it down like one of those drunks on the TV rehab shows who get hammered the minute they get sprung.
Next I attacked the cheese, bread, and everything else that was in the cabin bar. I was wolfing down food like a death-row inmate—which I figured I was five minutes away from becoming anyway.
I had no idea whether what I’d seen and experienced in the House of the Virgin had been a holograph, or whether I’d been drugged, had a vision, or all of the above.
I turned on the seat-back TV to BBC International and got the latest on the trial. The British correspondent was going over yesterday’s events prior to the start of the live courtroom feed. Mostly, the trial the day before, he explained, had been filled with delays while ben Yusef’s lawyers tried to figure out what to do with a defendant who refused to cooperate in his own defense.
The trial was commencing later than usual this day, so I got to watch the overhead shots of the UN area of Manhattan. (Would I ever be free to go back to my home?) The crowds seemed to have swelled from the first two days of the trial, if at all possible. The helicopter was shooting the FBI and police vans as they wended their way toward the UN.
When they finally arrived, the door to ben Yusef’s armored vehicle opened, and the cops and Secret Service personnel hopped out first. Then, shackled, the tiny man who was considered the most dangerous human on the planet, ben Yusef himself, exited as well. He squinted as he stood waiting to be moved inside to the makeshift courtroom, as though the sunlight was disturbing to his eyes. He scanned the riotous crowds behind the gates and the rows of reporters in front of him.
Turn away, don’t look at him.
I found it almost hard to watch the man. Not because of his alleged crimes, but because he had a sort of hypnotic way about him and I didn’t want to be drawn in again. Ridiculous, I know.
Terrorist, desert rat.
But there was that something stirring in me again. Was it pity? God help me—love? Or was it a weird uneasiness that my reporter-self couldn’t reconcile with my female-self? Something just seemed so wrong about the accusations and the man I was looking at.
Stop it! You saw all those kids in the courtroom the other day. Spinal-cord injuries, blindness, burns from head to foot. He’s a filthy murderer!
At that exact moment, ben Yusef turned and looked directly into the camera as though he’d heard my thoughts—the same way I’d heard that soldier’s thoughts in the house. I felt that he was looking directly at me through the screen—even though I was thousands of miles away, not to mention forty thousand feet in the air.
OK, you are losing it. Turn off the TV. No, leave it on. You must watch—it’s your job. Not any longer. Now it’s your life. You need to know everything about his life to save your own.
I felt like his eyes were boring into me—yet his face held the most loving expression I’d ever seen on a man. Actually his expression transcended gender—hell, it even transcended species. It wasn’t human.
I could only compare his gaze to an expression on a face I’d only seen once before. On Lefty One Eye, our dog.
Lefty had shown it to me the night I picked up his shivering little self on the steps of the brownstone we lived in. I remember like it was yesterday how I carried him up the three flights to our walk-up, covered him in a blanket, and warmed up some milk for him. When Donald came home he found me curled up with Lefty on the bed, singing him to sleep. I explained his presence to Donald by kissing Lefty’s head and saying, “Lefty, this is your new dad.”