The Submission - Amy Waldman [10]
“Yes,” the mayor’s aide said. “For their own good it might be better to … to … not change the outcome, but, well, just think if there’s perhaps a different way to arrive at an outcome that could be different—or the same, of course!—for their own good. As I said, just something to think about. What is the best outcome for everybody? Then we can figure out how to get there.”
“She’s right,” Wilner said. “Claire, you know I respect you and your loss. But you are out of your mind if you think we can pretend this is just any winner.”
Claire’s mouth was tight, a cinched purse; Paul could see she wouldn’t be budged tonight. He proposed that they adjourn for a few days so he could further assess Khan’s suitability. “As I would do for any designer,” he was quick to add. They would meet again at the end of the week. “No talking to the press. Or anyone. Not even your families.”
“I told you, Paul, but you wouldn’t listen,” Wilner launched in before he left. He sounded almost triumphant. “I told you we should bring the finalists in for interviews, instead of keeping them anonymous until the end. It would have solved everything. He could have been a finalist, but he wouldn’t have had to win. We would have looked liberal, but we wouldn’t be stuck. You’ve really put us in a pickle, Paul. You really have.”
Paul had always counseled his juniors at the bank to consider remote contingencies. Their improbability did not make them impossible; their unlikelihood would not reduce their expense. And here was the most remote of all contingencies. Or was it? Why had something like this never occurred to him? His imagined contingencies included fights over the cost of maintaining the Garden, or the ordering of the victims, or whether to differentiate the rescue workers’ names from the others, but never this.
“If you’ll remember, Bob, I was against an open competition, and it was my idea to vet the finalists.”
“Lot of good that did,” Wilner said. With glum faces and defeated postures, the jurors gathered their possessions and departed, leaving Paul to preside over a congress of crumpled napkins and smeared glassware. Did Muslims ruin whatever they touched? The question, so unfair, startled him, as if someone else had asked it.
At last he heaved himself from the table and made his way outside, to his black Lincoln Town Car (“Satan’s limousine,” his son Samuel called it). Vladimir glided past the mansion gate into the dead quiet of East End Avenue. A block west, where a thin stream of traffic still flowed, Paul saw some of his jurors standing on different corners, angling for taxis, pretending not to see the others doing the same. He couldn’t offer one a lift without offering all; he wanted the company of none. Vladimir drove on. But the image of his jurors scattering like loose petals came to Paul over the next hours almost as often as Mohammad Khan’s name.
3
His name was what got him pulled from a security line at LAX as he prepared to fly home to New York. The attack was a week past, the Los Angeles airport all but empty except for the National Guardsmen patrolling. Mo’s bag was taken for a fine-tooth combing while he was quarantined for questioning in a windowless room. The agents’ expressions remained pleasant, free of insinuation that he had done anything wrong. An “informational interview,” they called it.
“So you say you’re an architect?”
“An architect, yes.”
“Do you have any proof?”
“Proof?”
“Proof.”
Mo fished out a business card, ruing that the Gotham font screamed his full name, MOHAMMAD KHAN, although of course the agents, four of them now, already knew it. On the metal school-issue desk between them he unrolled a slim stack of construction plans and