The Language of Secrets Page 10

  With a creeping sense of horror, Rachel realized that she recognized the words. They had been part of the dossier from INSET. A frequent tag on jihadist websites: Seek death where you expect to find it. An exhortation from a speech delivered by Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, spiritual leader of ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, delivered during the month of Ramadan.

  “Well? Do you agree or disagree? Do you have anything to share?”

  Rachel was surprised when Grace Kaspernak spoke up.

  “It was not a crime to love you,” she said, “though they will hang me for it.”

  Her heavily painted eyes sought out Dinaase’s dark face. He was hunched over his knees, avoiding a connection with Grace. Zakaria looked over at Sami and snickered.

  Grace unearthed a crumpled piece of paper from the back pocket of her leggings. She smoothed it out with nervous fingers. Rachel craned her neck to read the words over Grace’s shoulder. The poetry described a romance that ended in tragedy. It was signed, “The Rose of Damascus.”

  Realization was swift and a little sad.

  Was it possible that Grace herself was “The Rose of Damascus”? Or had she stumbled across words that spoke to her longing for Dinaase, as desperate in its way as Paula’s hopeless enthrallment with Ashkouri?

  Because it was hopeless. Khattak had been frank with Rachel, though she could see that it cost him to speak of matters within his family. If Hassan Ashkouri was engaged to Khattak’s sister, Paula’s fate was sealed; Ashkouri was out of her grasp. And Rachel didn’t think Paula had joined the Masjid un-Nur for the sake of religious enlightenment.

  She had to wonder, who in these difficult days would choose to enter the fold of Islam? It was hardly a popular choice when outrages connected to political Islam were becoming routine and mundane. Unless the message struck deep to the soul.

  Or maybe its extremist practitioners attracted a particular kind of personality: deranged, friendless, suffering from alienation or a kind of spiritual want. Or all of the above. Angry at the injustices of the world, as Ashkouri had described them, in search of an outlet for that rage.

  The poetry Grace offered spoke of rebellion, a hope of genuine grace in a tyrannical climate. Was this something the Nakba group would support?

  It was not a crime to love you, though they will hang me for it.

  It also suggested that the reason Grace had joined the Masjid un-Nur was because of Dinaase Abdi. Rachel studied Dinaase, to see if the poem had affected him at all. His face was fine-boned, narrow, triangular, his teeth large and white, his forehead high and smooth. No beard, no stubble, just a loose accumulation of curls that bounced back from his skull, giving him an inch or two of added height. Tall and nearly as skinny as Grace.

  It was clear that Dinaase recognized the poem. And wished to dissociate himself from it.

  Why? Because the other young men were mocking him? Or for Hassan Ashkouri’s sake?

  Rachel didn’t know if despite her careful training she was trading in stereotypes, or if it was a valid judgment that the feminine rebellion expressed by the poem would not be in line with a terror cell’s patriarchal orthodoxy, misogyny and murder walking hand in hand.

  Beneath the heavy makeup and the agonizing assortment of piercings, Grace’s plump, red lips were unmarked. Except for the damage she was doing by picking at them.

  “Mohsin liked these poems—you remember, Din?” Grace asked him.

  Dinaase Abdi shrugged. He looked over at her, and something in the forlorn expression of her eyes caught at him. Ignoring the others, he gave her the ghost of a smile.

  “I know, Gracie. Mo loved poetry. He was always drumming up a line from somewhere.”

  Dinaase spoke like any other Canadian kid, with a touch of hip-hop swagger.

  Grace’s eyes were wet. “He looked scary, but you could always talk to him, you know? Like he made time for you.” She glared at the other young men in the circle. “Especially when no one else made you feel welcome.” Her glare encompassed Paula. “You took up a lot of Mo’s time. Too much.”

  “I didn’t ask to,” Paula fired back. “Mohsin was a nuisance. He was the one who followed me around, as if he wasn’t married. As if he never thought of Alia at all.”

  Embroiled though she was with Ashkouri, there was a deep satisfaction in Paula’s voice. It gratified Paula’s sense of herself to be pursued. It made her desirable, something she wanted Ashkouri to recognize.

  Rachel began to wonder at the goings-on at this mosque.

  “Sitara,” Grace whispered. “He called his wife ‘Sitara’; he said he loved her very much. And he told me ‘Sitara’ meant ‘star.’”

  Dinaase nodded.

  A sign of support for Grace. And a confirmation of her words.

  * * *

  The preaching continued, Hassan’s voice a golden thread of continuity, swelling and dipping with the poetry he espoused, the fables he used as parables, returning to a single theme time and again: the quality of justice.

  By the time it was done, Rachel found the quality of justice very strained indeed. She was first to join the line for tea and dessert.

  She slurped at her tea, her hand reaching out to a lemon tart.

  She needed to clear her head. She felt as though Ashkouri’s words had shrouded her mind in fog. And no mention of Mohsin Dar: no mournful lamentation, no indication of the Islamic rituals of grief and remembrance. Why not?

  Jamshed Ali faced her across the island, his face grim. And mistrustful.

  If Ashkouri was swept away by the spell of his own rhetoric—none of it overtly jihadist—Jamshed was pragmatic, sober, keenly assessing, keeping the three young men in the cell in view at all times.

  Rachel swallowed a mouthful of mousse.

  Grace and Dinaase were both at her elbow, their limbs knocking against each other in a rhythm that spoke of a long familiarity. Din’s hand skimmed the back of Grace’s skull. Jamshed watched him with an unwarranted intensity.

  “You need to get these checked out, Gracie. I keep telling you I don’t like them.”

  Grace brewed another glass of qahwe for Dinaase.

  “Where’s yours?” he demanded.

  From Grace’s quick smile as she dipped her head, Rachel guessed that it had been some time since Din had exhibited this much concern for her. The smile, with lips as red as a cherry tree, was enchanting. Grace raised her glass. Din knocked his against it.

  They grinned at each other like old conspirators.

  “Please,” Din said. “My Gracie, my own. You get them out, eh? You dye your hair any color you like, but this you don’t do. For me.”

  Given how pointedly he’d been ignoring her, Grace would have been well within her rights to tell the boy that her appearance was no concern of his. But like the Rose of Damascus in the poem that spoke of a hazardous yearning, she seemed to be in thrall.

  Rachel studied them. They were polar opposites—Grace a mix of alt-punk and Goth, Dinaase a kid with a penchant for his faith, and more than a smattering of carefree charm.

  Something had brought Grace and Din together. And someone now wanted them apart.

  Rachel saw Jamshed’s face, the menace in it.

  Grace wasn’t wanted at Masjid un-Nur. Jamshed Ali didn’t want her there.

  “That was interesting tonight,” she said to Grace. “Not what I expected.”

  “Sometimes there’s more poetry, less politics. Not tonight for some reason.”

  Another of Ashkouri’s tests. Waiting to see how Rachel would respond.

  “This is Dinaase. Din—Rachel’s new.” Grace made a little room between herself and Din, shoving him at Rachel.

  Dinaase didn’t shake Rachel’s hand. He curled two fingers at his forehead and waggled them at her. He might have meant it to be rakish. It came off as childlike and sweet.

  Grace must have thought so too. She knocked Din’s hand away, the gesture unconstrained and easy, a rebuttal to Paula’s anxious clamor for Hassan Ashkouri’s notice. />
  “Loser,” Grace said. “I keep telling you that’s not in. You just don’t listen.”

  “You take out the studs from your head, I give up the signature Abdi salute.”

  “You first.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “Of course I trust you. It’s your grasp of popular culture I don’t trust.” She shook her head.

  Dinaase lightly touched his fingers to the front of Grace’s neck.

  “I’ll go first. If you take out the staples too, my Gracie.”

  Grace didn’t object to the nickname. Maybe her objection was to anyone else’s usurping Dinaase’s pet name for her. People who hadn’t earned the right through genuine closeness.

  For a girl in the foster care system, closeness was never a guarantee. Rachel could understand why it was precious to Grace.

  Din shared the warmth of his crooked smile with Rachel. “Welcome to the house of Islam. Always room for one more.”

  Rachel was quick to demur.

  “Oh, I’m not a convert. I’m just—exploring.” She made her next remark sound like an afterthought. “I’m sorry about your friend. This probably wasn’t the best time for me to intrude.”

  Paula bustled into their midst carrying a tray.

  “We don’t say ‘convert,’” she said, her face cross. “We say ‘revert.’ Each one of us was born in a state of submission. Some of us are lucky enough to find our way back to it.”

  When Jamshed Ali turned away to talk to the young men, Rachel jumped in. “Was your friend one of them? The one you were talking about?”

  Paula’s look was incredulous.

  “Mohsin? Mohsin talked the talk. He didn’t walk the walk.”

  So here was one person who did not grieve Mohsin Dar’s death.

  “My friends.” Din’s voice sounded anything but friendly. “Mohsin was born into his faith. He didn’t need anyone to teach him his religion.” Here he smiled at Rachel. “Sometimes newcomers get carried away, like they have something to prove to the rest of us.”

  Another point of tension, and one that hadn’t occurred to Rachel before. A clash between those who had inherited their faith, at ease in their skin, and those who had sought it out, bewildered and hopeful. Grasping at the light, like she was supposed to be.

  “Mohsin may have been born a Muslim, but he lacked decorum.”

  Paula had the final word on the subject, slamming the tray she carried onto the counter.

  And Rachel wondered, had Mohsin Dar truly been in pursuit of this woman?

  “Will you have a memorial for him?” she asked Dinaase, noting that Jamshed was muttering something to Zakaria and Sami. She would have to check them out later.

  A look flashed between Grace and Din.

  “We should,” Grace said, biting her lip.

  “Don’t do that,” Din told her. “Your mouth is the only bit of poetry left on your face.”

  And then Rachel saw it. What connected this girl to this boy, so different from her in everything else, was a fierce, immutable love. With more than a hint of eroticism.

  Grace didn’t blush. She took Din’s hand and folded it between her own. And in that gesture, there was more intimacy than Rachel had known in most of her adult relationships.

  “Din writes his own poetry,” Grace said. “Except—not like Hassan and what he shares.”

  “You didn’t like the halaqa today?” Rachel asked.

  Grace shook her head, impatient. “Hassan is obsessed with politics. The grandeur of the past, the glory of a dead civilization. The poetry he likes—it’s old-fashioned. Old battles, out of step. Always angry, always looking for something.”

  “And Din?”

  “Din does spoken word. Sometimes he raps. He’s won a lot of slams.”

  Rachel had heard of poetry slams that pitted talented young artists against one another. She wouldn’t have expected this of Dinaase Abdi, who looked like he’d be most at home at the helm of a boat, at the edge of viewless winds, a fine blue mist haloing his curls.

  She made the uninspired leap to Somali pirates. Unfair or not, there was a skull and a pair of crossed swords tattooed on Grace’s neck. Was that for Dinaase?

  “I’d like to hear that sometime.”

  As she said the words, Rachel reminded herself that she was a detective. She was supposed to guard against prejudgment. Din was a Somali kid, the son of immigrants, so he couldn’t express himself through poetry? Grace was tattooed, pierced, and dressed like a mother’s worst nightmare, so she couldn’t be in the throes of a genuine, adult love?

  It was much too soon for Rachel to arrive at conclusions. Except for one.

  Every time she brought up the subject of Mohsin Dar, someone changed it.

  Before she could try again, there was a soft knock on the door. Rachel looked up in time to see the flash of wretchedness that crossed Paula’s face.

  The newcomer was a woman. Slim, elegant, tall. With a face to inspire more of Dinaase’s poetry. Pale-eyed, fair-skinned, delicate. She wore her scarf with an artless grace, concealing waves of night-dark hair.

  Rachel knew the face. She moved behind the island, pretending to retrieve something she had dropped on the floor. She couldn’t afford to be recognized.

  The beautiful woman was Esa Khattak’s sister.

  12

  Friday afternoon. The heaviest snowfall of the year thus far. Record-setting for December.

  The highway traffic a random assortment of metal boxes bolted to the asphalt. Everything covered by a carapace of muddy white. Snowplows proceeding at an incremental pace, six of them side by side, the time-sensitive concerns of commuters held hostage behind them.

  Khattak used the shoulder and his siren.

  The road through Unionville was worse, the side streets the last to be plowed. There were accidents up and down the 401, the 404 was closed north of Newmarket, and as with every heavy snowfall, the city lurched toward a slumberous slowdown.

  Too much volume, too few traffic solutions.

  But in Unionville, the streets were quiet. Half of the business owners had opted to stay home. Most of the shops on Main Street were closed. Kids chased each other across the pond.

  And along both sides of the park, a familiar sight: couples trekking through new-fallen snow in their snowshoes, enjoying the winter tramp.

  As a reflex, Khattak checked the warning signs at the pond. Frozen solid. And destined to remain that way, if the forecast was correct. Which meant that Rachel’s heart’s desire had been achieved—her all-star game would take place at an outdoor rink.

  He parked his car on the street across from Masjid un-Nur. In spite of the weather, the mosque’s small parking lot was full.

  And to Khattak that meant that either the Friday sermon at this mosque was so noteworthy that no one wished to miss it, or that word had spread that the head of Community Policing had asked to speak to the congregation about the death of Mohsin Dar. Given his past experience of Friday sermons, he thought the latter possibility more likely.

  He joined the prayer in good time, keeping to the back, matching the men in the prayer rows to photographs in the INSET files. Several of them turned to look at him, then began to whisper to each other. Khattak was ready for this. Especially since his resemblance to his sister was unmistakable.

  Rachel had called to let him know that her phone had been off during the halaqa. She had received his text warning her about Ruksh’s presence at the halaqa, just a little too late.

  I met your sister after I got your text, but I didn’t need to do damage control. I don’t think she gave me away.

  And Rachel had told him something else. She had told him of Ashkouri’s unusual question, along with her conclusion. She suspected that Ashkouri might be suffering from a form of mental illness.

  Khattak wasn’t as sure. Whoever was behind the planning of the Nakba attacks needed a cool and rational mind, in addition to the ability to map out the various stages of the attack, and the nerve and dis
cipline to see it through. He would also need to be able to maintain control over a disparate group of followers, several of whom were gathered at the prayer—Jamshed, Din, Zakaria, Sami. They were all on INSET’s radar, though the files were focused primarily on the trio of Ashkouri, Jamshed, and Din.

  Rachel had speculated that Dar’s murder, right before the attacks were scheduled to take place, might have unhinged Ashkouri, providing an additional source of worry to add to all the things that could go wrong with his New Year’s plan.

  But Khattak knew something that Rachel didn’t. He understood Ashkouri’s question in a completely different context than Rachel would have had access to. And it assured him, if there had been any doubt, that Ashkouri was committed to his plot.

  Do you come from mud and crime?

  It was the reworking of a line from a poem that had galvanized the Arab world. A cataclysmic poem that well predated Huntington’s thesis on the clash of civilizations, the thesis that read Islam as a monolithic force hostile to the West, due to an ingrained inferiority and a permanent sense of inadequacy. The thesis paid scant attention to historical encounters with deeply damaging, long-term consequences, reinforced by new incursions into the Islamic world.

  But in Adonis’s famous poem, the East spoke back to the West, in a voice that was bold and unafraid. A voice that rejected the judgment of the West, demanding accountability instead.

  The poem was called A Grave for New York.

  And the question Ashkouri had asked of Rachel was taken from the poem’s blazing indictment of New York as a symbol of imperial power, an icon of decay. To come from New York was to come from mud and crime, and to be destined to return there.

  Without difficulty, Khattak could see how Ashkouri would graft his particular ideology onto the poem’s surface, ignoring the work’s riches and subtleties, along with its critique of the dearth of creativity within the Arab world.

  The poem looked in both directions at once: at the decadence of imperial power, and at the societies whose internal corruption had permitted the imperial expansion. Who even now suffered from postcolonial identity crises.