The Submission - Amy Waldman [23]
“The way of all empires,” Mo murmured. “That’s how our embassy’s going to end up.”
“How about a little team spirit?” asked the plump, middle-aged architect seated next to Mo. He looked like he’d been on a few too many of these driving tours.
“We’re not on the same team, remember?” Mo said.
After a while they entered a roundabout lined with the jagged duncolored crusts of bombed-out buildings, visual rhymes to the seismograph of the mountains behind. The barren craters were the work of shells lobbed during the civil war in the 1990s, the driver was saying. To Mo the ruins had a timeless quality.
“The way of all fucked-up third world countries,” his seatmate said.
They were dropped off for dinner at a French restaurant hidden behind high earthen walls. There was a garden draped with grapevines, a small apple orchard, and a swimming pool full of Europeans and Americans dive-bombing one another. Chlorine and marjoram and marijuana and frying butter mingled in an unfamiliar, heady mix.
“Wonder what the Afghans think of this,” one of the architects said, waving his hand to take in the bikinied women and beery men.
“They’re not allowed in,” said Mo’s seatmate from the van. “Why do you think they checked our passports? It’s better if they don’t know what they’re missing.”
“Hot chicks and fruit trees: they’re missing their own paradise,” said someone else at the table—Mo hadn’t bothered to remember most of their names. “I’m surprised they’re not blowing themselves up to get in here.”
“Some of them don’t have to,” his seatmate from the van said, his eyes on Mo.
6
At Paul’s request, the security consultants had expanded their initial report on Mohammad Khan to include more detail about what Paul called his “identity.” A messenger delivered the revised report well after dark. Paul clutched the envelope and hurried from the foyer’s marble and mirrors into his voluptuously tweedy study, seated himself at his Louis XV desk, and began to read. Khan’s résumé, first: stellar, and thus unremarkable. He was thirty-seven years old, educated at the University of Virginia and the Yale School of Art and Architecture. Four years at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; six at ROI. Khan had been the project architect for a museum in Cleveland, a residential tower in Dallas, and a library in San Francisco that had won enough acclaim for Paul to have read about it. He had been featured, along with Emmanuel Roi, in some of the press clippings. Khan was on the ascent, and this made Paul remember the time in his own life when his appetite and ability to climb had seemed limitless. In retrospect the anticipation, that hunger, was almost as rewarding as the success it brought.
Khan, the report said, had been raised in Alexandria, Virginia. His parents had emigrated from India in 1966, which, Paul reckoned, would have been soon after the United States had lifted its quotas on Asian immigrants, a policy decision that, nearly four decades later, had translated into an Indian American, albeit a Hindu one, running his old investment bank. Khan’s father, according to the report, was a senior engineer at Verizon, his mother an artist who taught at a local community college. They had bought their house in 1973 and owed $60,000 on their mortgage. Khan himself owned no property; he lived in Chinatown, which struck Paul, the uptowner, as an odd place for an Indian American. He had no criminal record, no lawsuits pending against him, no tax liens.
The website of a mosque in Arlington, Virginia, recorded two donations from Khan’s father, Salman, both made after the attack; this, along with inquiries to the mosque as well as the family’s neighbors and colleagues, had confirmed that the family was, indeed, Muslim.
The mosque, which had opened in 1970 and moved to its current building in 1995, had “no known radical ties,” although the cousin of the son of one former board member had gone to school with some Virginia youths recently accused of training for terror through paintball games (“I used