The Hazards of Good Fortune Read online

  He wore a diamond-encrusted gold wedding band, and she looked at it as he twirled the remains of his linguine al vongole. The man I’ve spent most of my adult life with, she thought as the veal marsala repeated and she covered her mouth, is blathering as if this were just another evening out; as if the two of us will have one like it next week and the week after. As if we’ll finish dinner, have coffee, drive home, go to bed, then wake up and repeat the whole charade. How was it that I missed this sadly predictable midlife meltdown of my husband’s? And why did I decide to confront him in a restaurant where I feel myself becoming ill? Yes, of course, the kids, the kids, always the kids, who do not need to overhear our marriage fragment while they try to do their homework. But I can’t possibly drag this out any longer, let it go on another day, wake up next to him and pretend I have no idea what he has done to me, to our children, to our lives.

  Her husband’s lips were moving but, for the last minute, Christine had not heard a word. Now she focused her attention on what he was saying.

  “This cheese we’re going to import is like no artisanal cheese I’ve ever tasted.” Cheese! Their world was ending, and Dominic was yammering about cheese! “A cross between Reggiano and manchego, pungent but not too, and the cheese maker creates this earthy flavor with only six months of aging.” He stabbed a clam and stuck it in his mouth.

  “Pungent but not too?” She said this in a way designed to see if he was paying attention to her. The remark meant to be banal.

  “Exactly,” he said, and confirmed her suspicion.

  The waiter appeared at the table, and Christine requested a club soda. She indicated that he should clear her plate, but Dominic asked for more of the restaurant’s “delicious rustic bread” so he could dip it in the broth which, he always told her, everyone knew was the best part of the meal. The waiter, an elfin man in his seventies with a crooner’s head of dyed black hair, smiled wearily and retreated to the kitchen. She would inform Dominic what he could do with that delicious rustic bread.

  “I’ll bring some of the cheese home tomorrow,” Dominic said, resuming where he had left off. She could tell he thought the evening had gone far better than anticipated.

  “Don’t bother.”

  He looked at her quizzically. “Why not? I think you’ll like it.”

  Her briefcase rested on the floor. She reached down and removed a file that she placed on the table.

  “What’s this?” her husband said. “Vacation pictures?”

  “Open it,” she said, not smiling at his feeble joke.

  He glanced at the contents. Dominic might have been obtuse but he was not stupid, and almost instantly the situation was clear. Several seconds elapsed before he spoke. She tasted the repeating veal marsala again, wondered where the waiter was with the club soda.

  Finally, Dominic cleared his throat, swallowed, and said, “You had me followed?”

  “You look at what’s in that folder, and the first thing that comes out of your mouth is to ask me if I had you followed? Yes, I had you followed. Obviously. Is there anything else you’d like to say?”

  The concentrated aggression his wife displayed neutered him. She watched him attempt to force disparate thoughts to cohere into something he could sell. Shock at having been exposed quickly gave way to irritation over having to deal with it, which yielded to shame about the whole situation. He nervously played with his wineglass.

  She waited for him to say something.

  Finally, he managed, “What do you want to do?”

  She had decided it was imperative that he move out but unexpectedly found his discomfort energizing and wanted to prolong it before getting into logistics. To Christine’s surprise, her husband brought his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes—those deceitful eyes—and pursed his lips. Apparently believing himself to be in sufficient control of the maelstrom within, he rested his chin on his fist, opened his eyes, and appeared to examine some breadcrumbs on the white tablecloth. Then he choked back a sob and gazed at the ceiling.

  This display of emotion was not what Christine had expected. Like the trial lawyer she had been, she played this scene out in her mind, imagined the various permutations until she had some idea how it would unfold. Hostility and a request for a divorce, perhaps, apology and a plea, maybe, but not this, not tears. Not weeping at Castaldi’s over his linguini al vongole. Dominic was still looking at the ceiling—at a light fixture? For an angel? He seemed as breakable as one of the clamshells littering the ceramic bowl in front of him. She had the urge to reach out and take his soft hand.

  Dominic glanced guiltily at his wife, whose eyes looked like volcanoes.

  “What can I say?” he managed, voice rough with suppressed feeling.

  “That’s the best you can do?”

  He paused and looked away as she awaited his next foray.

  Pitiably, he said, “I’ll do whatever you want.” Then: “I love you.”

  “I love you?” Christine had not expected to hear that. What kind of a gullible dupe did he think she was? Certainly not the kind who would fall for a gambit so transparent.

  “I need you to hear that what you’ve inflicted—” Here her voice gave out. Until now she had been completely in charge. Christine had let him talk about the cheese while she waited like a sniper. But now that the real conversation had begun, it was hard to stick to the dialogue she had so laboriously composed. After a wordless interval during which she willed her intestines to behave, she finally managed to say, “This is the worst day in my entire life.” The sadness that started to arise shoved aside the well-cultivated fury, catching her off guard.

  . . . worst day in my entire life.

  That delicate petal floated between the couple, husband not daring to utter a word, wife unsure what to say next.

  “You live for twenty years with someone,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, “and you want to believe them.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you want to believe in their decency, you know?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And just when I need to be able to trust you the most—”

  Christine sensed the waiter standing next to her, but when she looked up, she did not see the waiter. What she saw was a bearded toffee-skinned black man in his forties, dressed in a knee-length gray cotton robe buttoned to his neck. At least it appeared to be buttoned to his neck. She couldn’t see his neck due to the voluminous nature of the beard that had colonized much of his upper chest. On his head, a white skullcap.

  “Christine Lupo?” he asked. The accent was distinctly American. The district attorney, due to her frequent appearances on television, was accustomed to being approached by constituents in public. The man turned to Dominic. “Please forgive the intrusion.” His voice was brandy-smooth if his timing was not.

  Too flummoxed to respond, and still fighting a welter of feelings, Dominic sat blinking, a frog on a lily pad. But the man did not appear to be dangerous, and Christine secretly welcomed his presence since it temporarily delivered her from continuing to experience the emotional pain that had so recently flared. Since she would appreciate this man’s vote in the race for governor, along with that of any other black person he knew who might want to vote for her, she said, “You are—?”

  “Imam Ibrahim Muhammad,” he said as if he was someone she should know. The name did not ring a bell. “The leader of the mosque the martyr John Eagle attended.”

  Ah, he was someone, more specifically the same someone who had been calling the office nonstop for the past twenty-four hours trying to arrange a meeting with the district attorney, who was not a fan of the word imam. It reminded her of ayatollah, a word she, like many who had lived through the seizure of the American embassy in Teheran, positively loathed. What did imam, in its unutterable foreignness, even mean? Father? Head Man? And what about his use of the
remarkably loaded word “martyr”? That designation could not in this context possibly presage anything encouraging. Muhammad pulled a chair from a vacant table and sat down. Reflexively, Christine looked around for Sean Purcell, her savior in these situations, and remembered he had taken the night off.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Dominic said, having regained the ability to speak.

  “It’s all right,” his wife said.

  “Again, please forgive the intrusion,” the imam said. Despite his polite manner, the apology sounded like a threat. He would make them listen.

  At this point, the elderly waiter returned with a glass of club soda and the basket of the rustic bread. He looked quizzically at Dominic, presumably the one running things. When Dominic did not say anything, the waiter placed the bread on the table and turned to the imam.

  “Will the gentleman be eating?”

  “The gentleman will just be here for a minute,” Ibrahim Muhammad replied in a slightly bemused tone. The waiter nodded and departed.

  The district attorney had recently read an article on the Internet where she learned that an entire one fourth of the Earth’s population were adherents of the Muslim faith. To her, this was not welcome news. She was not outwardly prejudiced against Muslims but was highly aware that they were the primary actors in a huge percentage of the conflicts in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Further, if these Muslims weren’t killing non-Muslims, they were murdering each other at an ever-increasing clip. A massacre in Nigeria one day, a suicide bombing in Iraq the next, all of the violence melted together into a miasma of horror. There were so many of them, and their birth rate was so astronomical that none of the killings would ever make a dent. Not that the District Attorney of Westchester County thought any killing was a good idea—she didn’t. But no government official seemed to know how to deal with this state of affairs, and it made her nervous that the number of Muslims in America was burgeoning, however incrementally.

  Until this evening, the DA had been unaware that the shooting victim was Muslim. Her relief at being given a break from the poignant effusions of her adulterous spouse was tempered by the realization that she would now have to get rid of this meddlesome cleric without making a scene. What was it with men? Did they think they could do anything they wanted? Several other diners stole glances in their direction. She took a sip of her club soda.

  “I know why you’re here,” Christine said. “We have channels in our office, and you need to go through them.”

  “I was not getting satisfaction that way.”

  “You followed her to the restaurant?” Dominic asked, ever the vigilant spouse.

  “And I debated whether or not to go in,” the imam replied. “I’ve been standing outside for an hour and a half. I followed you here from work.”

  “You were stalking her,” Dominic said. “There are laws against that.”

  Ignoring him, the imam continued, “I nearly interrupted you when you walked into the restaurant, but I had second thoughts and decided to wait for you outside. Then it occurred to me that if I accosted you in the parking lot someone might shoot me.” Here he paused, and the tiniest sardonic smile flickered on his lips, “and then another man would have to talk to you on my behalf. I’m sure you can see the problem.”

  “You should get the hell out.” Dominic’s intensity surprised both his wife and her visitor. “Maybe I should throw you out.”

  “I said I’d handle it,” the district attorney reminded her husband.

  “Your impatience is understandable,” the imam said to Dominic. “Once again, I apologize for the untimely intrusion.”

  Christine was pleased that this man was polite and did not seem to be the type who sent suicide bombers hurtling through barricades.

  She asked, “Who are you, exactly?”

  “I am the imam at the Lower Westchester Muslim Society. We serve members of the ummah who live in the area and build bridges with our neighbors of other faiths in accordance with the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad.”

  “Nice speech,” Dominic said. His wife ignored him.

  “Tell me, what exactly does ‘imam’ mean?”

  “An imam is a worship leader of Sunni Muslims.”

  “Proceed,” she said, taking another sip of club soda. “You have two minutes.”

  Ibrahim Muhammad inched his chair closer to the table. Christine noticed he smelled pleasantly of nutmeg and Ivory soap.

  “John Eagle was a recent convert to Islam,” the imam told her. “He showed up at the mosque one day as a young seeker and requested instruction. I talked to him and recommended some books, and he began to learn how to pray. His life had not gone well. He was lost.”

  “Is this going anywhere?” Dominic wanted to know. His wife leveled him with a look.

  “Inshallah,” the imam replied evenly. “God willing. John Eagle was using drugs, and it appeared that he was not mentally stable. I don’t know what happened with the officer. I know there were witnesses, and hopefully, those people will tell the truth, you will bring that truth to the grand jury, and they will act by that truth. I am here merely as the representative of a poor man who is unable to advocate for himself. He was without money, and without luck, but he was not without friends. More friends than you probably realize.”

  More friends? What, exactly, did that mean? Certainly not that the dead man had “friends” in the sense of ones with whom he went bowling but, rather, those with whom he made common cause. Was the imam threatening some mass civil action in the event the situation did not go his way? How many “friends” could some unemployed, mentally unstable victim of police violence have anyway? Other than the imam, who Christine supposed might want to use the current situation to make a name for himself as an activist.

  While she considered this, the imam stood up and thanked the Lupos for their time.

  “G’bye,” Dominic said, not looking at him.

  “I wanted you to hear about this man personally,” the Iman said. He bowed his head slightly, then departed, gray tunic swishing around his knees.

  The district attorney watched as Ibrahim Muhammad navigated through the tables and out the door. In his evident sincerity and high moral purpose, both of which appealed to her sense of fair play, she had infinitely more admiration for this clergyman than she did for her wayward spouse.

  “That was weird,” Dominic said as if their evening had been going well up to the imam’s arrival. He caught his wife’s eye and smiled, trying to create a mutual appreciation, a disillusioned but bighearted acceptance of the fruitcakes in this nutty world, the kind of shared experience husbands and wives in long marriages will reflect on early in the morning or before going to sleep, something we’ll laugh about in the future, remember the night when the Muslim interrupted our dinner at the Italian restaurant, ha-ha-ha.

  “Can you believe that guy’s nerve?”

  “I want you to move out of the house,” Christine said.

  Two hours later, her husband relocated to the guest room, the DA sat in bed propped on pillows, unable to sleep, laptop open, in search of distraction from her marital woes. She researched the price of her house on Zillow, since it would surely be a factor in the divorce, purchased a mystery novel from Amazon, then checked tomorrow’s headlines. The media reported that Russell Plesko had been placed on desk duty, and the office of the district attorney was continuing their investigation. The situation perplexed Christine, who felt besieged from all sides. What of the imam’s request? She understood and believed herself sympathetic to the grievances of the black community. They were valid, and her office needed to address them systematically. And Muslims were certainly entitled to equal protection under the law. However, Plesko, as far as she knew, had not done anything wrong. It was a question of gauging who she wanted standing behind her on the campaign trail, angry activists or first responders. The imam had not helped his ca
se by cornering her in a restaurant. But she loathed that hostile cop who represented Plesko’s union.

  She wondered who this meddling imam was so she googled him. Originally from Florida, Ibrahim Muhammad’s name at birth was Dwayne Sykes. A former U.S. Marine who had done jail time for armed robbery and drug dealing, he had several wives and at least ten children. According to an article in the Orlando Sentinel, the U.S. government recruited him to infiltrate radical Muslim organizations but the official relationship terminated when he assaulted his handler. She wondered what the former Dwayne Sykes would have done if Dominic had followed through on his threat to escort him out of the restaurant. The dark part of her, the part that the nuns had made her ashamed of, almost wished she had seen it.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The flight to Los Angeles on the private jet that Trey chartered passed with the alacrity of a geological epoch. It felt to Dag like he was checking the time on his phone every five minutes. Church was not happy when his star player called to tell him an urgent family matter would cause him to miss practice. Dag couldn’t worry about that now. The team’s next game was three days away, and a win would make Church forget today’s absence.

  Dag looked around the plane. How long was this flight supposed to take? Already, it felt like they’d been flying for twenty-four hours. He rechecked his phone. They’d left New Jersey an hour ago. He and his brother were the only passengers. The pilot, co-pilot, and stewardess, for whom proximity to fame was nothing special, kept to themselves. Trey played games on his laptop while Dag contemplated his phone call with Little Dag.