The Submission - Amy Waldman [45]
Near her car Claire increased her pace, tucked her hand in her purse to locate her keys, pressed the unlock button, twisted into the driver’s seat, and slammed the door, praying it didn’t catch the reporter’s fingers. Spier shouted questions through the window, and when Claire pulled away, Spier was in the rearview mirror, still shouting, although by then she could no longer be heard.
Claire drove up Manhattan in the dark. The wind roughed facets into the black river, its foreboding look coloring Claire’s thoughts.
The radio was replaying Governor Bitman’s remarks. Now Claire understood why the crowd had been so riled up. But what was Bitman, whose campaigns Cal, then Claire, had donated to, suggesting? She was supposed to rubber-stamp whatever the jury did, or so the jury had been told. Claire saw that, inside and outside the jury, she was fighting alone.
It was after ten when she made it back to Chappaqua. As she walked to the front door from her car, she spotted what looked like a homeless man’s encampment beneath the copper beech. Moving closer, she saw, in the milky light cast by house and moon, a box of Raisin Bran (“Daddy’s favorite,” she had told the children, although she was no longer sure that Cal had loved Raisin Bran, only that saying so got William and Penelope to eat it); a pile of books pillaged from Cal’s study; a stray tennis racket; his $2,000 wedding tuxedo—all of it arranged around the cairn. A child’s necromancy: William believing he could coax the stones to life, or his father home.
“For all we know some one-eyed, bearded killer wearing pajamas came up with this—that’s what’s scary,” Alyssa had told Lou Sarge on his radio program that morning.
Said killer was now before her, about to reveal his identity to waiting reporters, and he didn’t look the part. He had a beard, but it was tastefully trimmed. His suit looked expensive, and his bearing, unlike the grasping, too-eager-to-please Indians in her neighborhood, was haughty. Next to him sat a dark-haired, foreign-looking woman in a cardinal-red suit that suggested she was not only comfortable with attention but craved it. Men, some of them in Islamic costumes, and a few women in headscarves, stood stiffly against the wall behind them, looking like a police lineup of terrorism suspects. Alyssa gnawed her cuticles until she tasted metal. Blood.
She was in the offices of the Muslim American Coordinating Council, an organization she had never heard of until that morning. The entire New York press corps seemed to be crammed in with her. Together, the reporters endured the introduction of all twelve members of the council, who then took their seats.
The main attraction waited for the rustling to die down before holding up the Post with the picture of the ski-mask-clad face. “My name is Mohammad Khan, and I believe this is meant to be me.” Flashbulbs popped, cameras clicked—for a moment, the only sounds in the room.
“I am an architect and an American,” he said. “I also happen to be a Muslim. I was born in Virginia and have lived most of my adult life in New York. In Manhattan. I entered the memorial competition because I believed my idea would provide a way for the families, the nation to mourn and to remember all that was lost that day, and also to heal. Apparently the jury agreed: everyone knows by now they chose my design.” He gestured at illustrations of a garden, placed on an easel to his right. “It seems they just have a problem with the designer.”
Alyssa scribbled fast, not wanting to miss a word, although her tape recorder was running and she knew his words would be replayed dozens of times on television. It was an exercise in redundancy: there had to be fifty reporters and cameras in here, all itching to report the same news, the same words.
After a pause, Khan continued: “I have been asked to withdraw from the competition, or to remain anonymous rather than have my name associated with the design, or to partner with someone else who could submit under their name. But I will