Black Sunday Read online

  Muzi was very fat, and he grunted as he lifted a pile of invoices off a chair and motioned for Lander to sit down.

  “May I offer you something? A refreshment?”

  Muzi drained his bottle of Perrier water and fished a fresh bottle out of his ice chest. He dropped in two aspirin tablets and took a long swallow. “You said on the telephone that you wished to speak to me on a matter of the utmost confidence. Since you haven’t offered your name, do you have any objection to being called Hopkins?”

  “None whatever.”

  “Excellent. Mr. Hopkins, when people say ‘in confidence’ they generally mean contravention of the law. If that is the case here, then I will have nothing whatever to do with you—do you understand me?”

  Lander removed a packet of bills from his pocket and placed it on Muzi’s desk. Muzi did not touch the money or look at it. Lander picked up the packet and started for the door.

  “A moment, Mr. Hopkins.” Muzi gestured to the Greek who stepped forward and searched Lander thoroughly. The Greek looked at Muzi and shook his head.

  “Sit down, please. Thank you, Salop. Wait outside.” The big man closed the door behind him.

  “That’s a filthy name,” Lander said.

  “Yes, but he doesn’t know it,” Muzi said, mopping his face with a handkerchief. He steepled his fingers under his chin and waited.

  “I understand you are a man of wide influence,” Lander began.

  “I am certainly a wide man of influence.”

  “Certain advice—”

  “Contrary to what you may believe, Mr. Hopkins, it is not necessary to indulge in endless Arabic circumlocutions in dealing with an Arab, especially since, for the most part, Americans lack the subtlety to make it interesting. This office is not bugged. You are not bugged. Tell me what you want.”

  “I want a letter delivered to the head of the intelligence section of A1 Fatah.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “I don’t know. You can find out. I am told you can do nearly anything in Beirut. The letter will be sealed in several tricky ways and it must get there unopened.”

  “Yes, I expect it must.” Muzi’s eyes were hooded like a turtle’s.

  “You’re thinking letter bomb,” Lander said. “It’s not. You can watch me put the contents in the envelope from ten feet away. You can lick the flap, then I’ll put on the other seals.”

  “I deal with men who are interested in money. People with politics often don’t pay their bills, or they kill you out of ineptitude. I don’t think—”

  “Two thousand dollars now, two thousand dollars if the message gets there satisfactorily.” Lander put the money back on the desk. “Another thing, I would advise you to open a numbered bank account in the Hague.”

  “To what purpose?”

  “To put a lot of Libyan currency in if you should decide to retire.”

  There was a prolonged silence. Finally Lander broke it.

  “You have to understand that this must go to the right man the first time. It must not be handed around.”

  “Since I don’t know what you want, I am working blind. Certain inquiries could be made, but even inquiry is dangerous. You are aware that Al Fatah is fragmented, contentious within itself.”

  “Get it to Black September,” Lander said.

  “Not for four thousand dollars.”

  “How much?”

  “Inquiries will be difficult and expensive and even then you can never be sure—”

  “How much?”

  “For eight thousand dollars, payable immediately, I would do my best.”

  “Four thousand now and four thousand afterward.”

  “Eight thousand now, Mr. Hopkins. Afterward I will not know you and you will never come here again.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I am going to Beirut in a week’s time. I do not want your letter until immediately before my departure. You can bring it here on the night of the seventh. It will be sealed in my presence. Believe me, I do not want to read what is in it.”

  The letter contained Lander’s real name and address and said that he could do a great service for the Palestinian cause. He asked to meet with a representative of Black September anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. He enclosed a money order for fifteen hundred dollars to cover any expenses.

  Muzi accepted the letter and the eight thousand dollars with a gravity just short of ceremony. It was one of his peculiarities that, when his price was met, he kept his word.

  A week later, Lander received a picture postcard from Beirut. There was no message on it. He wondered if Muzi had opened the letter himself and gotten the name and address from it.

  A third week passed. He had to fly four times out of Lakehurst. Twice in that week he thought he was being followed as he drove to the airfield, but he could not be sure. On Thursday, August 15, he flew a night-sign run over Atlantic City, flashing billboard messages from the computer-controlled panels of lights on the blimp’s great sides.

  When he returned to Lakehurst and got into his car, he noticed a card stuck under the windshield wiper. Annoyed, he got out and pulled it loose, expecting an advertisement. He examined the card under the dome light. It was a chit good for a swim at Maxie’s Swim Club, near Lakehurst. On the back was written “tomorrow three p.m. flash once now for yes.”

  Lander looked around him at the darkened airfield parking lot. He saw no one. He flashed his headlights once and drove home.

  There are many private swimming clubs in New Jersey, well maintained and fairly expensive, and they offer a variety of ex clusionary policies. Maxie’s had a predominantly Jewish clientele, but unlike some of the club owners Maxie admitted a few blacks and Puerto Ricans if he knew them. Lander arrived at the pool at two forty-five p.m. and changed into his swimsuit in a cinder-block dressing room with puddles on the floor. The sun and the sharp smell of chlorine and the noisy children reminded him of other times, swimming at the officers’ club with Margaret and his daughters. Afterward a drink at poolside, Margaret holding the stem of her glass with fingers puckered from the water, laughing and tossing her wet hair back, knowing the young lieutenants were watching.

  Lander felt very much alone now, and he was conscious of his white body and his ugly hand as he walked out on the hot concrete. He put his valuables in a wire basket and checked them with the attendant, tucking the plastic check tag in his swimsuit pocket. The pool was an unnatural blue and the light danced on it, hurting his eyes.

  There are a lot of advantages in a swimming pool, he reflected. Nobody can carry a gun or a tape recorder; nobody can be fingerprinted on the sly.

  He swam back and forth lazily for half an hour. There were at least fifteen children in the pool with a variety of inflated seahorses and inner tubes. Several young couples were playing keepaway with a striped beach ball, and one muscle-bound young man was anointing himself with suntan oil on the side of the pool.

  Lander rolled over and began a slow backstroke across the deep end, just out of range of the divers. He was watching a small, drifting cloud when he collided with a swimmer in a tangle of arms and legs, a girl in a snorkel mask who had been kicking along, apparently watching the bottom instead of looking where she was going.

  “Sorry,” she said, treading water. Lander blew water out of his nose and swam on, saying nothing. He stayed in the pool another half hour, then decided to leave. He was about to climb out when the girl in the snorkel mask surfaced in front of him. She took off the mask and smiled.

  “Did you drop this? I found it on the bottom of the pool.” She was holding his plastic check tag.

  Lander looked down to see that the pocket of his swimsuit was wrong side out.

  “You’d better check your wallet and make sure everything is there,” she said and submerged again.

  Tucked inside the wallet was the money order he had sent to Beirut. He gave his basket back to the attendant and rejoined the girl in the pool. She was in a water fight with two small boys. They
complained loudly when she left them. She was splendid to see in the water, and Lander, feeling cold and shriveled inside his swimming trunks, was angered at the sight.

  “Let’s talk in the pool, Mr. Lander,” she said, wading to a depth where the water lapped just below her breasts.

  “What am I supposed to do, shoot off in my pants and spill the whole business right here?”

  She watched him steadily, multicolored pinpoints of light dancing in her eyes. Suddenly he placed his mangled hand on her arm, staring into her face, watching for the flinch. A gentle smile was the only reaction he saw. The reaction he did not see was beneath the surface of the water. Her left hand slowly turned over, fingers hooked, ready to strike if necessary.

  “May I call you Michael? I am Dahlia Iyad. This is a good place to talk.”

  “Was everything in my wallet satisfactory to you?”

  “You should be pleased that I searched it. I don’t think you would deal with a fool.”

  “How much do you know about me?”

  “I know what you do for a living. I know you were a prisoner of war. You live alone, you read very late at night, and you smoke a rather inferior grade of marijuana. I know that your telephone is not tapped, at least not from the telephone terminal in your basement or the one on the pole outside your home. I don’t know for certain what you want.”

  Sooner or later he would have to say it. Aside from his distrust of this woman, it was difficult to say the thing, as hard as opening up for a shrink. All right.

  “I want to detonate twelve hundred pounds of plastic explosive in the Super Bowl.”

  She looked at him as though he had painfully admitted a sexual aberration that she particularly enjoyed. Calm and kindly compassion, suppressed excitement. Welcome home.

  “You have no plastic, do you, Michael?”

  “No.” He looked away as he asked the question. “Can you get it?”

  “That’s a lot. It depends.”

  Water flew off his head as he snapped back to face her. “I don’t want to hear that. That is not what I want to hear. Talk straight.”

  “If I am convinced you can do it, if I can satisfy my commander that you can do it and will do it, then yes, I can get the plastic. I’ll get it.”

  “That’s all right. That’s fair.”

  “I want to see everything. I want to go home with you.”

  “Why not?”

  They did not go directly to Lander’s house. He was scheduled for a night-sign flight and he took Dahlia with him. It was not common practice to take passengers on night-sign flights, since most of the seats were removed from the gondola to make room for the on-board computer that controlled the eight thousand lights along the sides of the blimp. But with crowding there was room. Farley, the copilot, had inconvenienced everyone on two previous occasions by bringing his Florida girlfriend and was in no position to grumble at giving up his seat to this young woman. He and the computer operator licked their lips over Dahlia and entertained themselves with lewd pantomimes at the rear of the gondola when she and Lander were not looking.

  Manhattan blazed in the night like a great diamond ship as they passed over at twenty-five hundred feet They dropped toward the brilliant wreath of Shea Stadium, where the Mets were playing a night game, and the sides of the dirigible became huge flashing billboards, letters moving down its sides. “Don’t forget. Hire the Vet” was the first message. “Winston. tastes God—” This message was interrupted while the technician cursed and fumbled with the perforated tape.

  Afterward, Dahlia and Lander watched while the ground crew at Lakehurst secured the floodlit blimp for the night. They paid special attention to the gondola, as the men in coveralls removed the computer and reinstalled the seats.

  Lander pointed out the sturdy handrail that runs around the base of the cabin. He led her to the rear of the gondola to watch while the turbojet generator that powers the lights was detached. The generator is a sleek, heavy unit shaped like a largemouth bass, and it has a strong, three-point attachment that would be very useful.

  Farley approached them with his clipboard. “Hey, you people aren’t going to stay here all night.”

  Dahlia smiled at him vacuously. “It’s all so exciting.”

  “Yeah.” Farley chuckled and left them with a wink.

  Dahlia’s face was flushed and her eyes were bright as they drove home from the airfield.

  She made it clear from the first that, inside his house, she expected no performance of any kind from Lander. And she was careful not to show any distaste for him either. Her body was there, she had brought it because it was convenient to do so, her attitude seemed to say. She was physically deferential to Lander in a way so subtle that it does not have a name in English. And she was very, very gentle.

  In matters of business it was quite different. Lander quickly found that he could not browbeat her with his superior technical knowledge. He had to explain his plan in minute detail, defining terms as he went along. When she disagreed with him it was usually on methods for handling people, and he found her to be a shrewd judge of people and greatly experienced in the behavior of frightened men under pressure. Even when she was adamant in disagreement she never emphasized a point with a body movement or a facial expression that reflected anything other than concentration.

  As the technical problems were resolved, at least in theory, Dahlia could see that the greatest danger to the project was Lander’s instability. He was a splendid machine with a homicidal child at the controls. Her role became increasingly supportive. In this area, she could not always calculate and she was forced to feel.

  As the days passed, he began to tell her things about himself—safe things that did not pain him. Sometimes in the evenings, a little drunk, he carped endlessly about the injustices of the Navy until she finally went to her room after midnight, leaving him cursing at the television. And then one night, as she sat on the side of his bed, he brought her a story like a gift. He told her about the first time he ever saw a dirigible.

  He was a child of eight with impetigo on his knees, and he was standing on the bare clay playground of a country school when he looked up and saw the airship. Silver, wearing for a reach across the wind, it floated over the schoolyard, scattering in the air behind it tiny objects that floated down—Baby Ruth candy bars on small parachutes. Running after the airship, Michael could stay in its shadow the length of the schoolyard, the other children running with him, scrambling for the candy bars. Then they reached the plowed field at the edge of the schoolyard and the shadow moved away, rippling over the rows. Lander in his short pants fell in the field and tore the scabs off his knees. He got to his feet again and watched the dirigible out of sight, rivulets of blood on his shins, a candy bar and parachute clutched in his hand.

  While he was lost in the story, Dahlia stretched out beside him on the bed, listening. And he came to her from the playground, with wonder and the light of that old day still in his face.

  After that he became shameless. She had heard his terrible wish and had accepted it as her own. She had received him with her body. Not with withering expectations, but with abundant grace. She saw no ugliness in him. Now he felt that he could tell her anything, and he poured it out—the things that he could never tell before, even to Margaret. Especially to Margaret.

  Dahlia listened with compassion and concerned interest. She never showed a trace of distaste or apprehension, though she learned to be wary of him when he was talking about certain things, for he could become angry at her suddenly for injuries that others had done to him. Dahlia needed to know Lander, and she learned him very well, better than anyone else would ever know him—including the blue-ribbon commission that investigated his final act. The investigators had to rely on their piles of documents and photographs, their witnesses stiff upon the chair. Dahlia had it from the monster’s mouth.

  It is true that she learned Lander in order to use him, but who will ever listen for free? She might have done a great deal fo
r him if her object had not been murder.

  His utter frankness and her own inferences provided her with many windows on his past. Through them, she watched her weapon forged....

  Willett-Lorance Consolidated School, a rural school between Willett and Lorance, South Carolina, February 2, 1941:

  “Michael, Michael Lander, come up here and read your paper. I want you to pay strict attention, Buddy Ives. And you too, Junior Atkins. You two have been fiddling while Rome burns. At six-weeks tests, this class will be divided into the sheep and the goats.”

  Michael has to be called twice more. He is surprisingly small walking up the aisle. Willett-Lorance has no accelerated program for exceptional children. Instead, Michael has been “skipped” ahead. He is eight years old and in the fourth grade.

  Buddy Ives and Junior Atkins, both twelve, have spent the previous recess dipping a second-grader’s head in the toilet. Now they pay strict attention. To Michael. Not to his paper.

  Michael knows he must pay. Standing before the class in his baggy short pants, the only pair in the room, reading in a voice barely audible, he knows he will have to pay. He hopes it will happen on the playground. He would rather be beaten than dipped.

  Michael’s father is a minister and his mother is a power in the PTA. He is not a cute, appealing child. He thinks there is something terribly wrong with him. For as long as he can remember he has been filled with horrible feelings that he does not understand. He cannot yet identify rage and self loathing. He has a constant picture of himself as a prissy little boy in short pants, and he hates it. Sometimes he watches the other eight-year-olds playing cowboys in the shrubbery. On a few occasions he has tried to play, yelling “bang bang” and pointing his finger. He feels silly doing it. The others can tell he is not really a cowboy, does not believe in the game.

  He wanders over to his classmates, the eleven- and twelve-year-olds. They are choosing sides to play football. He stands in the group and waits. It is not too bad to be chosen last, as long as you are chosen. He is alone between the two sides. He is not chosen. He notes which team chose last and walks over to the other team. He can see himself coming toward them. He can see his knobby knees beneath the short pants, knows they are talking about him in the huddle. They turn their backs to him. He cannot beg to play. He walks away, his face burning. There is no place on the red clay playground where he can get out of sight.