The Submission - Amy Waldman [132]
It was then that he saw Alyssa Spier being whirled around by the angry mob. There was fear on her face and he hated himself for the pleasure this gave him. He elbowed through to her. “Come, come now,” he said roughly, grabbing her arm. She resisted, thinking him just another angry member of the crowd. “We met, you know me, I will help you,” he spat through his teeth, and she yielded to him. He dragged her until he saw a police officer, then almost threw her at the cop. It was right she be safeguarded, whatever she had done, but inside he raged no less than the mob.
“Protect her,” he said. “She is responsible.”
23
In the midst of the mob, Alyssa had craved, for the first time in her reporting life, anonymity. Surrounded by wild eyes, livid mouths, shoving hands, stomping feet, sweaty stink, and foreign cries, her great terror had been that she would be recognized as the person who had exposed Asma Anwar to danger—exposed her first as illegal, then as rich, then, almost down to the hour, as entering exile (OUTTA HERE! the Post had headlined that morning). If she was identified, she would be torn apart. Instead, the sole person who recognized her had saved her, allowing the police to shove her into the safety of their mobile station. For all her fear, the minute she was out of the crowd, she wanted to be back in it. The news, for the first time in her experience, had been a completely physical phenomenon, one that absorbed and churned her, as if she were inside someone’s bloodstream. It was the closest she had come to covering a war.
Alyssa told the police everything she had seen, which wasn’t much, since she had been in the outer ring of reporters around Asma Anwar. To make matters worse, she lost an hour of reporting time because of her rescuer’s parting comment: “She is responsible.” Three different detectives made her walk through, article by article, what he could have meant by it. By the time she finished, the crowd and any interview-worthy witnesses had dispersed, and she was reduced to interviewing her fellow reporters.
She had no clue who had killed Asma. No one did—so many people had been crowded around her that even news footage had so far proved useless. But that didn’t stop the speculation. Debbie Dawson of SAFI was sure it was a Wahhabi offended by a woman playing a public role. “See what they do to each other!” she kept saying on television. Chaz was sure, with no basis in evidence, that it was a Bangladeshi jealous of Asma’s money. Issam Malik of the Muslim American Coordinating Council insisted that Asma had been slain by an Islamophobe. No, a xenophobe, insisted immigration reform activists. Random groups—Muslim, anti-Muslim—called news organizations to take credit. But as in psychological warfare, there was no knowing if the calls were legitimate or attempts to pin the killing on opponents.
To Alyssa’s chagrin none of these calls came to her, which left her scrambling for an angle. Her own nagging feelings of guilt had been largely expiated by her fear in the crowd and her questioning by the police. Both seemed to her sufficient cosmic retribution. Besides, she had only reported on what Khan had started. If anyone was responsible, it was he.
“Unless he’s the Tin Man, he’s got to feel guilty,” Chaz said approvingly when she mentioned this as a possible angle. “Find him and ask if he feels guilty. Ask him if he’s going to withdraw. Think of the cover when he gives up: SAYAN-ALLAH!” He started laughing. “Get him to drop out just so we can use that. And find out if they’re going to bury her in his garden: She’s a martyr, right?”
Alyssa staked out Khan’s Chinatown loft. He never turned up. But his type was her own: he couldn’t stay away from work. She parked herself near ROI and waited him out. As the day ended, the architects, all disdainful glances and rectangular glasses, glided by. No Khan. But a hunch told her to hang tight and for hours she did. At eleven, he emerged, looking around warily. She stepped from her