The Submission - Amy Waldman [105]
In truth he was looking for salvation only from his new lawyer, but this, too, fed new rumors. Scott Reiss was confident, droll, professional, and expensive. As soon as word of his retention leaked—was leaked by Scott’s firm, which believed all publicity good—the Post ran a nasty story questioning how Mo was paying for such a high-powered firm and insinuating that the Saudis were underwriting him. The article noted how low architects’ salaries were in New York, even quoted anonymous sources at ROI. Mo’s take was slightly higher than their estimate, but the paper was right: not high enough to finance a five-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer-cum-PR firm. The truth was that Mo’s father had tapped into his retirement account, four decades of savings dripping like an IV into Reiss’s Armani-suited arm. This could have been publicly documented with a single 401(k) statement, but Mo wanted to shelter his parents. Even more, he refused to prove his innocence. He knew this position was right, but it was like keeping his arms in stocks with no padlock. His muscles ached.
Reiss’s first plan was for a public relations offensive.
“We need you holding up pictures of your children,” he said, and, when Mo reminded him he had none, “Borrow some. We’ve got to humanize you. No, Americanize you. We want your family albums. Your Boy Scout medals. We want to run ads in advance of the public hearing. You have a lot of supporters out there willing to pay for commercials.”
Mo was ashamed to imagine Laila watching an ad campaign after he had said no to MACC’s. But also he didn’t want to hawk himself; he wouldn’t reassure his own compatriots that he wasn’t to be feared.
“No ads,” he told Reiss, who rolled his eyes.
Ramadan stretched on. Mo still fasted from dawn to dusk each day, still ate alone most nights, despite his father’s admonition. The memory of the mayor’s Iftar seared, left him sure that he would upset any gathering of Muslims he entered. But the solitude wore at him, especially as the hearing approached. Four nights before it, he went to Brooklyn to dine with five Protestants: Thomas, Alice, and their children.
Alice still dolloped out anger for Mo’s having, as she regularly put it, “screwed over Thomas and endangered our family,” but mostly she doled out new conditions for forgiveness. The latest was the construction of a Lego Seattle Space Needle for Petey. Once dinner was finished and the children tucked in, Mo worked on the living-room floor, happy to lose himself in the relative mindlessness of miniature construction. Alice was stretched out on the sofa, her feet in Thomas’s lap, and Mo tried to block out the memory of Laila arching her dainty feet like cats’ backs and settling them in his.
Channel surfing, Alice paused on Mo’s face. Mo automatically shifted, as he always did now when watching himself, from the first person to the third. Issam Malik and Lou Sarge were debating the memorial, and seeing them jolted Mo back to that night with Yuki less than a year ago. These two men had been strangers, cartoons to him then, and he nonexistent to them. Now they were all characters, cast members in some sinister opera, unable to leave its stage or, in the case of Malik and Sarge, its TV screen.
Some of their exchanges were so perfectly turned Mo wondered if they practiced off camera.
“You, with this rhetoric, you’re putting up walls of suspicion,” Malik said.
“No,” Sarge said. “Mohammad Khan is putting up suspicious walls.”
Malik smiled involuntarily, and Thomas, Alice, and Mo looked, as one, at the Space Needle. Sarge continued: “He’s created the perfect bind. If we build it, it’s a martyrs’ paradise, which will only embolden the enemy. If we don’t, the enemy comes after us for discriminating against a Muslim.”
“It’s you who’s created the bind, Lou. If Khan fights for his rights he’s an aggressive, angry Muslim