The Submission - Amy Waldman [46]
His voice had risen—the tone of impending harangue. “He’s looking for a fight,” someone near Alyssa whispered. But the woman next to Khan leaned into the microphone with a look at him and said, “The process needs to move forward as it is supposed to, as is spelled out in the guidelines for the memorial selection.”
“Who are you?” someone called out.
“My attorney, Laila Fathi,” Khan said, calm now. He spent some time discussing his design—some sort of garden, with the names of the dead scrolled on the surrounding walls. The note-taking slowed, the room deflated, the reporters pranced in place. No one cared about the design, Alyssa thought. Didn’t he get that?
“Any additional questions can be directed to Ms. Fathi,” he said, gesturing at her before rising and heading toward a side door. The order in the room collapsed. A thud in her back jolted Alyssa forward; a fat cameraman shoved by. “Move!” he shouted. Before she could reply she was hit again and again by waves of men gunning for Khan, trampling anyone in the way.
“Fuck!”
“He’s over there!”
“Get him!”
“You’re in my shot!”
“Motherfucker! That’s my bad leg! Motherfucker!”
He was gone. In the stampede the easel had been knocked over, sending the illustrations to the floor. One of them bore the brown imprint of a pixilated rubber sole. “Get a shot of that,” Alyssa ordered her photographer. More dramatic than the drawings on the easel—his dream trod upon. Serves him right, she thought, except she wasn’t sure if it was her thought at all or her imagination of what her readers thought.
Her hands full with notebook and tape recorder, Alyssa wiped her forearm across her face, trying to stanch the sweat stinging her eyes. It was always the same in these media mosh pits—the close, hot air; the chafing bodies.
“Guess you got scooped by your own subject,” Jeannie Sciorfello, a Daily News reporter, said, and it was all Alyssa could do not to punch her.
Back at the office, she filled a bag with ice and tried to drape it across her bruised back. She wished she could ice her ego. Nameless, Khan had been hers. Now he was everyone’s. Clearly he thought he could seize the initiative by unveiling himself. Alyssa chuckled at the phrase, then realized it would make great cover type: “Muslim Unveiled.” They could run the ski-mask photo and Khan’s side by side. She sent a quick e-mail to her editor, hoping the cleverness would hide her lack of an exclusive.
After filing her story, she began investigating Khan. The paper had already dispatched reporters to the architecture firm where he worked and to his home, so she turned to the computer, Googled his name, and got 134,000 hits. “Mohammad Khan”: the “John Smith” of the Muslim world. The glowing mentions of the correct Mohammad Khan’s architecture would make for mealy copy at best. The rest of the entries referred to rulers and doctors named Mohammad Khan, businessmen and villagers, heroes and war criminals, a global community in name only. She skimmed past intriguing tales (“Taxi driver Mohammad Khan listened to his conscience when he decided to return a bag containing gold ornaments to its owner”) and seductive scraps (“Mohammad Khan, a son of Firoz, devoted all his time to pleasures”). There was an order to the order, a hidden hierarchy, but only Google or its algorithms knew it.
She began a public records search. Criminal databases yielded nothing, but business records turned up a K/K Architects, registered by a Mohammad Khan and a Thomas Kroll. Kroll, she found through a quick Web search, worked at ROI, too, which meant this must be her Khan. Relief surged through her—it was something—then panic that other reporters were on the same trail. Unable to reach Kroll at ROI, she found his home listing: a Brooklyn address that matched the one given for K/K