On a Clear Day (17 page)

M
orristown. Javier was a mess. His face was puffy and swollen, and I imagined him crying. Him being so upset messed with Anja, too. Dear, sweet Anja. She was the most empathetic person I had ever met. Sometimes it felt creepy the way she understood how I thought, but I loved being with her.

The talk was all about how Javier and Mei-Mei were sure that Sayeed had left Morocco and was somewhere in Florida.

“I estimate that he has close to a hundred people with him,” Mei-Mei said. She was back to center stage and confident. But her voice was shaky.

There was no talk about Ellen’s death, but I knew it was filling up Javier’s head. I wondered if he was thinking
of what they’d had going on at one time or how he had walked away from her.

“A hundred guys isn’t very much,” Tristan was saying. “He’s either going to have to sign up local guys or somehow get his hands on some super weapons.”

“If we find out where he’s headed in Florida, I can check out the local gang scene,” Drego said.

“It looks like Miami,” Mei-Mei said. “Some of Sayeed’s people have rented rooms there.”

“Let’s say that he is trying to make connections.” Michael turned sideways in his chair. “How do we stop him? How many people can we rely on?”

“We can count on about two hundred guys,” Tristan said. “We can outgun Sayeed if we need to up the two hundred number. After that it gets hairy. I can call on a bunch of young guys and some girls from around the country who are okay with fighting for what they believe in. Nobody wants to just run up on a beach to get killed.”

Tristan was more animated than I’d ever seen him.

“Javier, can you coordinate … Javier?”

Javier was losing it again. His head was down, his face in his hands. I tried to imagine him with Ellen, the two of them together.

“I’m okay,” Javier managed. “I can bring together whatever resources we have if Tristan gives me the contacts. In fact, I want to bring them together. I’m ready to do it.”

“The more we know about what Sayeed’s got going on, the better we’re going to be,” Tristan said. “We don’t want surprises.”

“Drego, you want to go to Miami? Maybe you and Tristan, so we have two sets of eyes going on?”

“Tristan looks like a cop,” Drego said. “He won’t function with the people I’m dealing with.”

“He’s probably right.” Tristan. No resentment. He was easing into his element.

“Mei-Mei?” Michael asked.

“No!”
Mei-Mei’s voice was high and sharp. Emphatic. Hard. I imagined her squeezing her legs together. She was out of her comfort zone. “I don’t think I’ll like Miami.”

The porcelain queen was vulnerable after all. I felt almost sorry for her.

“Drego.” Michael had a stub of a pencil in his hand and pointed it across the table. “This is your show—can you do it alone?”

A beat. Drego was thinking.

“You down, Dahlia?” Drego asked.

“I’m down,” I said.

Across from me, Mei-Mei sat up in her chair; she glanced at Drego, then quickly away.

“I’ll work it out,” Michael said. “We’ll set up in Miami when the time comes. Meanwhile, Drego and Dahlia will be our intelligence team. Javier, you can map out the scene. Tristan will nail down our resources. How about weapons?”

My stomach turned. They were still on the same kick.

“I think we can match Sayeed,” Tristan said.

“If I’m right,” I said, “if Sayeed is just a pawn that C-8 is pushing up the board, they won’t want him to win. They just need him to show up.”

Michael seemed confused. I thought back to when he was telling me how he’d put together his band. Get the best, let them work.

Michael, I’m the best you got
.

“Mei-Mei, will you and Anja make contact with some doctors or nurses in the area to see if they’re available in case we need them?”

“Yes.” Mei-Mei spoke softly. “I’m on board, Michael.”

“I think … I think there are a lot of people who thought like Ellen did,” Javier said. “They’ll work with us.”

“Okay, Javier and I will coordinate the operation and then work with Tristan’s people when the time comes,” Michael said.

“I think I got Sayeed’s style together,” Drego said. “I got some maps I made up from Al Jazeera news accounts. We know he’s the big man in North Africa,” he went on, shuffling through a sheaf of papers. “He’s got better players than some of the other groups in those mountains, but he’s still old-school and you can figure him out.”

Michael, Tristan, and Drego started talking about Sayeed the way you think athletes review tapes of a football team they are going to play. The tension in the room rose.

As the guys talked, they were all getting excited. The room was beginning to smell of sweat. They were talking about Sayeed, about a theoretical encounter, but their body language told me that they wanted to engage, not avoid an encounter. I hadn’t expected this. Maybe a little from Drego. Maybe even Tristan, but Michael was into it too. Some macho shit was kicking in, and I suddenly saw
what Anja was talking about. They were becoming believers in confronting Sayeed. The focus had changed.

I thought about Ellen saying that Javier just wanted to hang with the frat guys and show he had the right stuff. I wondered if he was doing the same thing this time.

“Sayeed always spreads his people at the foot of a mountain in Morocco,” Drego said. “You get this wide line with the mountains and fog as a backdrop; you never know how many people you’re going to be fighting. I’ve read reports where people started running away just looking at his men from across a field.

“He moves forward—is this useful to you, Dahlia? But he attacks from the wings.” Drego couldn’t wait.

“Where’s he in this formation?” Michael.

“In the rear.” Drego. “He’s coordinating the attack from behind the lines, mostly cell phones, but he makes a show of using falcons and stuff. We think that’s just Hollywood.”

“No!” I heard myself saying. “We’re not talking about a football game, and Sayeed is not the enemy. C-8 is the enemy!”

There was silence. Then Michael spoke.

“Dahlia, we know that C-8 is the enemy. But if they’re going to bring Sayeed into this country, with even a hundred of his people, then he’s the one we’re going to have to fight.”

“I think I want to go home and think,” I said. “I want to do projections based on what C-8 intends, not just on what Sayeed is doing. Sayeed has to be just another piece of shit to these big corporations. Can’t you see that? They don’t care any more about this man than they care for the
Sturmers or the poor slobs trying to scrape a living out of the streets. Sayeed cannot be our focus!

“We need to rethink this thing as if we’re playing with hard-nosed and
damned
intelligent professionals, not some brown-skinned cowboy out of North Africa!”

More silence. I felt suddenly alone. This was
not
what they wanted to hear.

“If that’s what you want,” Michael said. His voice was even, flat.

“Dahlia, what’s your take on this?” Tristan. “Where’s your train going?”

“For a combat situation, there have to be four components for the aggressor. The first is that the target has to be in his area of influence. Miami is
not
in Sayeed’s area. Second, he has to see a clear goal. There is no clear goal for a band of Africans in Miami,” I said. “He’s got to be sure he’s going to win. In America? No way! And last, if he’s going to start anything, he’s got to be sure there’s not going to be a kickback he can’t handle. None of this fits Sayeed. All of it fits C-8. The world is their area of influence. The goal is more money for their pockets. They always win. They don’t expect any opposition. No computer projection is going to make Sayeed the problem!”

Another friggin’ silence. At least they were thinking.

Michael said we needed a break and called somebody to get me a lift to the Bronx. I think he was disappointed.

As I checked my rucksack to make sure I had my chargers, Anja came to my side. She put her arm around my waist.

“Michael send you?” I asked.

“Yeah, he thinks all the talk of fighting has got you spooked.”

“What do you think?”

“I trust you,” Anja said. “You rely on what you have in your head, and you got a lot up there, girl.”

She smiled.

“You want to come home with me?”

“Yeah, sure.”

I hadn’t expected her to say yes, and my face must have shown it. She asked me if I really wanted her to come. I said yes.

T
he car dropped me and Anja off a little after five. The sky was still a cheery blue, with little wisps of clouds floating in the distance, but somehow the neighborhood looked different.

“Are we in the right place?” Anja.

“Give me a second,” I said. Then I saw what had changed. There were now rolls of ugly barbed wire between the houses where I had played as a child and where kids were always running between their backyards and the quiet street. I had been away for a minute, and there were wires coiled angrily from ground level to the eaves. Disgusting.

Mrs. Rosario greeted us, threw her huge arms around Anja, and squeezed her into the warmness of her body.

“Any friend of Dahlia is my daughter too,” Mrs. Rosario said.

“Thank you, ma’am.” Anja smiled.

“I am so glad you’re home!” Mrs. Rosario said. Then she said it again in Spanish. “We’ll have a wonderful dinner for you! Do you like stew?”

She was speaking to Anja, who nodded and gave the thumbs-up sign.

“One hour—it’s already on,” Mrs. Rosario said. “Dahlia, baby, are you too tired to eat?”

“Never too tired to eat with you. Mrs. Rosario,” I asked, “what’s with the barbed wire?”

“A few kids, maybe
favelos
, maybe not, were wandering around in the yards,” she answered. “Probably looking for something to eat. But you never know.”

Upstairs to my place. Mrs. Rosario, or someone, had changed the calendar to one that had a painting of St. Cecelia. She was beautiful.

Anja was looking around the room, and I watched her taking in every detail of the old furniture, every picture stuck around the mirror, every yellowed memento.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“Looks like a life,” Anja said. “I like that in a person.”

“The barbed wire wasn’t here before.”

“Dahlia, are you discouraged?” Anja asked me.

“Just a little,” I said. “At this last meeting, after coming back from St. Paul, I felt as if I was in the middle of the ocean in a storm. There’s lightning all around and big waves, and you don’t know what to do next. The guys
seem to be latching on to facing Sayeed somewhere, but Sayeed isn’t the big show, Anja. The big show is still C-8.”

“And they’re as hard to get at as the ocean,” Anja said. “I got you on that. You thinking of saying that we shouldn’t go to Miami?”

“We have to go to Miami,” I said. “But we need to bring our best minds with us, because we really don’t know what we’re facing. Figure this—somewhere there are two fat guys with double chins doing computer projections for C-8—”

“You’ve
seen
them?”

“No, but I want them to be fat guys with double chins,” I said.

“Oh, okay, and hair growing out of their noses!” Anja added.

“Right! And they’re entering data about Sayeed and how he’s going to affect things. I think they’re dragging bait through the water to see what happens. But with Sayeed, it’s going to be some dangerous bait!”

“Dahlia, Sayeed doesn’t look like any show-and-tell to me.”

“It’s not important what he looks like to you, or to the guys, Anja,” I said. “What does it look like to C-8? Whatever they’re doing, Sayeed is just another piece of it. Like Ellen was another piece of it. Maybe C-8 had her killed, maybe they didn’t, but they sure had some asshole beat her up in the bathroom!”

“You think it’s going to get ugly in Florida?”

“Yeah, Anja, I really do.”

Anja took the first turn in the shower down the hall. She came back in ten minutes and said that the water was cold and refreshing. I didn’t want to take a cold shower, but I didn’t want to stink up the place either, so I took my shower next.