Extraordinary Rendition

29

THE TILED WALLS OF the Astor Place subway station were decorated with murals depicting beavers. Astor Place was named for John Jacob Astor, who had built his early fortune on the trapping of beavers and other wildlife, making an industry out of the sale of animal furs. These murals, Byron thought as he walked over the platform toward the turnstiles, commemorated the slaughter of millions of innocent animals, and now they looked like cute pictures in a children’s book. Not the first time, Byron thought, that systematic slaughter had over time become trivialized. Once beyond the turnstile, he trotted up the worn iron steps that led to the wide Astor Place plaza.

He came to street level facing the Cooper Union building. Built with brownstone in the early nineteenth century, it was the place where Abraham Lincoln delivered his anti-slavery speech before he became president. The stone looked porous. A new, all-glass building, itself constructed with cube-shaped walls, stood at the far side of Astor Place on a space long occupied by an outdoor parking lot. On the streets around Byron were hundreds of young people moving quickly in the brisk late autumn air.

Byron walked south on Lafayette Street, passing the Public Theatre building. Long pennants were suspended from the upper floor of the building. One advertised The Merchant of Venice. Two stories high, the pennant bore a sketch of the familiar, now aging face of Al Pacino. Years earlier, in the mid-seventies, Byron had brought a date to the Public Theater to see Raul Julia-dynamic, bold-eyed, young-play Macbeth. Joseph Papp was in the small audience, near the stage, as was Al Pacino. Papp’s frizzy hair, shaped in an Afro, glowed in the theater lighting. Byron could remember Raul Julia, Joseph Papp, and Al Pacino from that night, but he could not remember the woman he’d brought with him. He did recall crossing Lafayette Street with her after the play, going into the Colonnade Building and having dinner in a restaurant known as Lady Astor. It had a dark and seductive bar and wall coverings that were really velvet theater curtains; they were blood-red and a little frayed. The waiters were aspiring actors. It was one of the few times in his life that Byron got drunk. He remembered the glow of innumerable bottles behind the bar and the reflection of his own handsome face in the mirror behind the rows of bottles.

Now there was a Thai restaurant, Boontang, in the space where Lady Astor had been. The tall windows between the Doric columns of the Colonnade Building were filled with bamboo trees, not the velvet curtains of the long-closed Lady Astor.

Fifteen minutes later, after a fast walk along Eighth Street to the West Village, he entered the quiet precincts of Waverly Place. He pressed the grimy buzzer to Simeon Black’s apartment. At the same time, he pushed open the lobby door. The buzzer sounded, but the lock had stopped working years ago. He stepped quickly up the one flight of stairs and opened the door to the apartment.

Early in his relationship with Simeon Black he had decided to just let go of what he knew. He felt that if he shared the information he had with another person, and broke his isolation, he might find some protection in that. He had restrained himself from telling Christina everything. He loved her, he admired her maturity and intelligence (and took delicious pleasure in her body and her presence), but something in his breeding or character or experience in life made him resist the temptation to tell her all he had learned about Ali Hussein, his heavy-faced and heavy-set brother, the judge, the prosecutors, the Imam in the mosque on Raymond Boulevard in Newark, and the passages from the Koran. She appeared to find it all exciting, but there were limits to what he wanted to share with her.

Not so with Simeon Black. Byron continued to believe, despite what he had learned about the unpredictability of journalists, that providing Simeon with what he had learned over the last six months gave him some protection in a world he knew was increasingly treating him as some bizarre outcast, a man who had been hijacked by some defect of his own character or by a misguided, or even demented, sense of justice. If he gave Simeon Black the truth, then there might be a credible person to bear witness for him. And so far, the drafts he’d seen of the article Simeon was writing gave Byron confirmation of his own hope. Simeon’s working title was America at War with Itself.

“Holy shit,” Simeon said, smiling, after hearing Byron tell him about the wire transfers, “it’s like missing the winning lottery by one number.”

“Imagine what we could have done with it. We could have lived out that scene at the end of Casablanca where Rick and Captain Reynaud walk into the desert and look forward to a beautiful friendship.”

Smiling, Simeon drew one of his unfiltered Gauloises out of its blue cellophane package. After lighting it, he snapped the match downward once and the flame went out.

“Sy, how many of those do you think you’ve had over the years?”

“Probably fifty-two million dollars’ worth.”

“We could be rich.”

“Who did you say this agent is?”

“He pronounces it Na-Shat-Ka. He didn’t spell it for me, I didn’t ask. He tried to hand me his card. I didn’t take it.”

“Was it Jesse Ventura?”

Byron laughed. “Who’s on first? Who’s on third? No, it wasn’t Jesse. This one was younger. But the same type of presence, only younger. The spawn of the devil.”

Simeon Black was not as open with Byron as Byron was with him. He needed information from Byron, not Byron’s protection. “I had a friend take some pictures of Jesse Ventura this week,” he said. He didn’t use the name Andrew Hurd.

Intrigued, Byron looked directly at Simeon, who turned the computer screen in his direction. The screen filled with a tableau of ten pictures. In that array-five on top, five under them-not one of the pictures was large enough to be seen clearly. Simeon clicked the trackball on the computer, and the first picture came forward enlarged, filling the screen.

It was Jesse Ventura. “Look at the devil,” Byron said, whistling between his teeth.

“Do you see who he’s with?”

In the picture, Jesse Ventura was opening the door to a modern office building, so much like the entrance to the Seagram Building that Byron searched the background of the picture to find any familiar object or sign. There was nothing definitive.

“Who is it?” Byron asked.

“Don’t you watch TV?”

“No, it’s on all the time but I don’t watch. I worry I’ll see myself. Complete with a turban and the dangling wires of a homemade bomb. House counsel to al-Qaeda.”

“It’s interesting, the company Jesse keeps. The blonde is a television star. She’s created an aura for herself as an anti-Muslim prophet. She’s also a professor of Islamic studies at Stanford.”

“Maybe Jesse Ventura has charms we can only guess at.”

Simeon passed through six more pictures. On the miraculous computer, they began as tiny images and instantly came forward with absolute clarity as they filled the screen.

Simeon said, “And he seems to keep company only with gorgeous women.”

Another picture blossomed on the screen. In it, Christina Rosario was leaning forward toward Hurd at a table in a restaurant. Her face had that vital animation that had attracted Byron since that moment at the Central Park Zoo when she had first approached him.

Byron barely flinched. Simeon may have sensed some slight tensing up. Simeon asked, “Who is she?”

“Let’s take a look at the next one.”

There were no other pictures of her.

In Simeon Black’s bathroom were the usual objects of old New York City bathrooms. None of that chrome and marble of modern bathrooms. The toilet, the sink, the bathtub were all made of bloated ceramic with spidery and faint veins and cracks on the surface. There were separate faucets for hot and cold water. The floor had chipped small tiles in a black and white pattern. There was grime between the tiles.

Even in that cold room, Byron was sweating. He bent over the sink and splashed cold water on his face.

And then he let himself slip down to the cool tile on the bathroom floor. “What,” he said out loud, “what have I done to my life?”