Chapter 30: Information Exchange
The next day, Clare managed to get some work done in the store before two more strangers rode into town, except they were no longer strangers. Jennifer and Adeleh Ebrahim drove in, and found Clare in The Rag and Bone Shop. Clare figured they must have spent the night someplace between Akron and Greenline. She hoped no one had followed.
“Oh, hello!” Clare said. “Don’t you two look nice. I really need to get my nails done. So … you’re here to visit Ali?”
“We brought him some clothes,” Jennifer said.
“And halal food?”
No answer.
“Well, there’s always pie from the Greenline Café. Does he have a lawyer yet? I have an idea that he didn’t call a lawyer with his one phone call.”
“We’re going to visit him now.”
Clare wondered if either of them would recognize the men from the surveillance tape. Clench had brought back a copy of the tape, and maybe they could take a look. He or the sheriff had probably showed it to Ali already.
This time Clare wasn’t present during the exchange of information between the Ebrahims and the sheriff. Clench wasn’t there, he was at work on the farm that morning. She hoped that he would find out what went on and tell her. She was beginning to feel like Nancy Drew, girl sleuth, poking around in the middle of criminal matters for which she had no expertise. It’s every citizen’s business, she told herself impressively. But especially hers when it was her stuff and herself being grabbed.
Jennifer and Adeleh stopped in the store again after leaving the sheriff’s office, and were not averse to having pie and coffee.
“So, did Ali get a lawyer?” Clare asked.
“He seems to keep calling other people,” Jennifer said. “Maybe he’ll end up with the public defender. He does want to get out of jail but he doesn’t seem to care how, or how soon. But Sheriff Matheson doesn’t want him here indefinitely. At least he’d like to shift him to Akron, but this is where he assaulted you. I think I’d have to press charges to get him moved to Akron.”
“I suppose you could get him a lawyer. But who is he calling?”
“I don’t know if I want to pay for his lawyer. I’m doing him a big enough favor by not pressing charges. I don’t know who he called. Anyway, the sheriff showed us the video of the theft at the Chillicothe station.”
“Oh? I thought I recognized the two men wearing suits. They came in here the other day pretending to be from the FBI and CIA.”
“They look familiar to me too.”
“They don’t go to your mosque, do they?”
“No. But I think I saw them talking to somebody outside the mosque once. And to Ali once.”
“Do you know who they are?”
“Here’s who I think they are. I think they work with the FBI. They are not FBI. They are Mafia.”
“What?” Clare almost shouted.
“That’s what I heard anyway. Well, Mo told me.”
“How did he know them?”
“I’m not exactly sure. The FBI uses Mafia guys to, uh, interrogate people when the FBI doesn’t want to get its hands dirty but they want results, so they make deals with the mob guys, who will do more than a little harmless waterboarding. So they’ve gotten involved with Al Qaeda prisoners. Not at Guantanamo. Along the way they’ve gotten to know other Muslims in custody in the U.S. They can blackmail them, and they can use them. Suppose a mob guy learns about plans to set off a bomb. He can give that information to the FBI. But if it serves his purposes, he won’t. Or maybe they want to kill someone and they don’t care about collateral damage. See, they can use jihadists to accomplish their goals with no risk. Like if they want to get inside a bank and rob it.”
Clare started.
“It’s a perfect match,” Jennifer said sardonically. “Jihadists don’t mind rubbing shoulders with the mob, because they think all Westerners, especially Americans, are corrupt anyway. So they think they can use the Mob, in spite of the torture. They actually respect them. And Mafia guys today are not like Michael Corleone, struggling immigrants and family men and patriots, if they ever were.”
Clare was stunned at this intelligence, and at the idea that this ordinary looking, affluent woman of Akron could know so much about the inside of crime. Could it be true? And if it were true, was Ali somehow involved with the Mafia? Al Qaeda she could believe, or whatever form Al Qaeda chose to appear in, or disappear in, at any given moment. But she’d never heard of any connection between the Mafia and jihadists. Well, it would hardly be on the news, would it?
But it explained why the two men in suits looked as if they might be from the Middle East; they might be Italian.
“Why would they want the helmet?”
“Maybe to influence Ali for some reason.”
“And why would they want the Sears house?”
“Money.”
“Seems like it’s too much work for the money. So big and bulky. Drugs, prostitution, and gambling are easier.”
“It might be low-level guys trying to get a reputation and make a little money. I don’t know.”
Clare was suddenly horrified by the idea that mobsters might show up at her store, demanding protection money.
“Uh, Ali doesn’t know where you’re staying now, does he, Adeleh?” Clare asked.
“No. He wanted to know if I’m going back home but I said no and then he wanted to know where I’m living and how I knew where he was. I just said I called Mom and she told me to meet her in Greenline. But he thinks Mom doesn’t know where I’m living.”
“So you’re not going back to Akron when school starts?”
“No.”
“Well, don’t tell me. Then the Mafia won’t be able to force it out of me.” She laughed but no one else did.
“They’re not interested in Adeleh,” Jennifer said seriously. “But Ali … he could be used, and if they would do anything to her, Ali wouldn’t cooperate with them. He might kill her to save his honor, but he wouldn’t do what they wanted.”
Clare was horrified that Jennifer Ebrahim could talk calmly about these possibilities in front of her daughter. But the girl must have been long familiar with this reality.
“I suggest you both take a concealed carry class,” she said.
Clare was feeling as if she’d tumbled into a snake pit, after the magical rabbit hole of her aunt’s mysterious Sears catalogue collection.
“Suppose Ali gets out of jail. Which he will. What do you think is going to happen? It seems like Adeleh can’t come home. And I don’t see how you can keep living with him comfortably, Jennifer. Do you think after time he will mellow out and not be a threat?”
“Mo didn’t. He did the reverse of mellowing, even though we had a happy marriage and children and a good business, no worries. I don’t know,” she said sadly. “I don’t think they have interventions for jihadist radicalization.”
“This might be the time to organize a service like that,” said the ever-entrepreneurial Clare.
“Some kind of, uh, apostasy protection program might be more useful,” Jennifer said. “Give people who want out a new identity and place to live.”
Chapter 31:
The shop was closed on Sunday and Clare stayed home for once. She was not as relaxed as usual in the old house, but her practical and optimistic nature took over. She made some cornbread from scratch, her own concoction with sage, onions, black pepper, corn, and pork rinds. It was good with beer.
The Mafia would probably not come to her store and demand protection money. They tended to live and work in cities. Greenline was too far to drive.
If she had a railroad track opened in Greenline, she could hire an armed guard, and she could insist that customers schedule a pickup from the freight cars as soon as they arrived. No overnights.
Ali was a bigger problem. Since he knew that the helmet wasn’t in Greenline anymore, maybe he’d give up. She hoped he wouldn’t threat
en her personally. But he was trouble any way you looked at it. If his mother seemed rather hard, it could only be because years of soft affection did not seem to touch him.
Reducing the problem to its simplest elements, Clare could only think of two possibilities. Ali must change, or he must go away.
He couldn’t be locked up indefinitely. When he got out, he would continue to be a torment to his mother. Maybe he’d go back to college in the fall, and he’d go back to the mosque, and he’d go back to the friends who’d been influencing him — and his father. What could stop his trajectory toward some horrendous act of violence? Only an inner conversion, an epiphany, and that was not something anyone could engineer. American boys sometimes got hustled out of trouble by joining the military, but that was the last place Ali should be. Sending him to his father’s relatives in Iran would be disaster, though it might keep his mother safe … but only if she never knew what happened to him after he went away.
Was there something Clare could engineer? She couldn’t change him. Was there anyplace he could go, or be made to go, or want to go?
He might want to go to Iran, but that was out. Who could make a young man of 19 go anywhere he didn’t want to? Even if you could do it, you couldn’t stop him from coming back or going someplace else.
She drank some more beer.
She needed Aladdin’s magic genie. Ali thought he already had the magic lamp in the form of the helmet. Without the helmet, perhaps he would not take action. Here was a case where you didn’t want to convince him that he “always had the power inside him all along.”
The closest thing to a genie Clare knew was Jackson.
Jackson.
Where did he come from and where did he go?
Could he take Ali with him?
Jackson was due in town with a delivery tomorrow, Monday. There was never any way to contact him except in person, when he drove into Greenline. She had to make sure that Ali was still there Monday. But there was no reason to think Jackson would take him. Couldn’t hurt to ask.
Clare would have to call Clench and tell him of her idea to send Ali away to a magical unknown land, so the sheriff could keep Ali locked up until Jackson took him away. Yeah, right.
He could be released into someone else’s custody or on his own recognizance. His mother didn’t particularly want custody of him at the moment, and was not able to monitor his movements or, seemingly, to influence him. There was no reason for him to be released in custody of a stranger, though his mother might not mind, if Clare explained it to her. Or at least explained some of it, since most of Jackson’s story was unbelievable. Or if he were released on his own recognizance, on bail, she and Jackson and Clench could see that he was kidnapped and taken away in one of Jackson’s many Sears delivery vans. Would they? And if Jackson took him away, where would he be? Someplace he couldn’t get back from, unless Jackson brought him back?
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