Stuart hadn’t been able to locate a single person who knew any more about these clandestine programs than what Sugarman included in the report. And that was based on the recollections of several agency veterans. No paper trail existed. It was worse than an archeological dig. In essence, Stuart had one tooth, but the rest of the skeleton remained buried. Lost.
Sometimes programs were discredited or found to have gone too far. Agencies disavowed all knowledge. In some cases, programs ran until a tenacious journalist outed the effort through Freedom of Information Requests. A media frenzy would coalesce around the discovery, then die out. The program would change names, shift agencies, burrow deeper into the bureaucracy, or terminate.
No sooner had he gone down one wormhole than he ended up in a completely different universe, a different program, different rationale, different paper trail. But he noticed one name that kept popping up. Vernon Meracle. A Syrian. Supposedly a priest. He’d apparently gone by the name “Father Moody” for years. And he’d been on and off the payroll since 1959.
He placed a call to a colleague at One-Eye and his friend answered his personal cell phone after several rings.
“Hey, Stuart. What can I do for you.”
“I need your help. I would like to interview one of your guys in the field. A Vernon Meracle. And I need this to be arranged with the utmost secrecy. It’s nothing official, so keep it between us two. No questions asked. Call in the favor whenever and wherever.”
After several weeks of waiting, his friend finally delivered, and using a discretionary, innocuous budgetary line authority, Stuart paid for plane tickets to be delivered to this Vernon Meracle. He pre-paid his hotel room near Dulles Airport. Through contacts at the One-Eye Intelligence Fusion center in Illinois, Stuart instructed Meracle to take his meals at the hotel. He would meet him there at 10:00 a.m. Sunday morning.
Vernon Meracle thought about the day he’d figured it out. He’d been watching the address in Saluki for almost a year. That meant driving by the property to see if anything had changed, documenting changes with photography, recording notes on any activity that took place in the vicinity, and tailing people entering and exiting. Only when the Islamic Information Center sign went up in the window, did he understand why the place was under surveillance.
It took longer to figure out the identity of the woman who approached him on the park bench back in December. He’d been trained to rely at least as much on out of the ordinary features and quirks, such as unusual facial marks, extrapolations of physical features. The way the woman reached to her ear and outlined the perimeter of it with her index finger triggered a faint memory. Elias Haddad, he realized later. Elias Haddad tracing the outline of his daughter’s ear, a playful gesture of endearment between a father and his daughter.
He’d scolded himself for being so lame. He shouldn’t have been so fooled by the dyed blonde hair. He had spotted her once as an adult in Chicago when he was assigned the nascent AAAI office, and one of his protégés had become a member to get information from the inside.
He’d been under strict orders to report anything which could jeopardize his cover in Saluki. Nothing, in fact, was more critical. If he’d informed the field office a Saluki resident could possibly recognize him, it would create all sorts of unwanted complications. He was too old for that. What was the NSA going to do? Fire him? He could have retired years ago, but retirement was as unappealing as death. He had nothing else he could or wanted to do. Spying on the lives of others was his life.
Now he sized up the man across the table. Young, mid-fifties, physically fit, not an extra pound, flat stomach, black thick hair, no gray, probably dyed, maybe partly filled in with plugs, neither slender nor stocky, sized to play guard in basketball. He seemed to tilt comfortably between confidence and arrogance.
“My name’s Stuart Eisenstat. I’m a contractor with CSIA; we’re about as close to DHS as you can get without actually being DHS.”
Meracle stared at him with disinterest. He wanted none of the man’s chitchat.
“So?”
“I’m going to ask you a few questions, and I need some straight answers.”
“You know as well as anyone there’s very little I can share with you.”
The area around the two men vibrated with the nervous movement of Meracle’s legs.
“There’s probably less I can share with you.”
“This looks to be a short conversation.”
“Let’s hope,” Stuart said.” Meracle’s torso above the table barely twitched. “Look, Vernon, if that’s your name for our purposes, it’s pretty simple, really. First, I need to confirm you are the person we’ve identified as Father Moody, who worked for the FBI beginning in the early 1960s, based in Chicago.”
“You seem to already know this.”
“As I said, I need confirmation.”
“There are records to show this. I am sure you have them. I am not, however, at liberty to discuss the projects I was involved with.”
“I’m not interested in reliving your fascinating career. Were you acquainted with a man from your home country by the name of Elias Haddad?”
“I did favor for his father. At his request, I helped bring his son to this country.”
Stuart was impressed with Meracle’s look of sheer innocence. “What I am most interested in, Vernon, are the circumstances by which Elias Haddad left the country, not how he entered.”
“That, I do not know.”
“That, I do not believe. You attended backyard barbecues with the Haddads.” Meracle flinched at the mention of the barbecues. “He was in your charge. You met with him regularly. And yet you know nothing about how or why he decided to leave?”
“His father was ill, gravely. So, he wanted to return to see him before he passed. This is the last I heard of him.”
“You have no knowledge of what happened to him after that?”
“I do not.”
“That I do not believe, either. But, assuming you are telling the truth, were you not even the least bit curious? You spent time at his house. Knew his wife and daughter. He was the son of a friend of yours from the old country.”
“It was a country I was only too happy to leave and never see again. Such a shithole.”
Stuart took note of the epithet. “Understandable, given the political chaos of the time, but these are friends, family acquaintances we’re talking about. Surely you had friends at home?”
Meracle sneered. “It was not a place to so easily separate your friends from your enemies. My job was to obtain information. That is still my job today. I do my job. I’m good at it.”
“My job is to analyze information. I also do my job.”
“I deliver my information, and I don’t ask what is done with it. When you are a position on the assembly line, you don’t wonder who bought what rolls off the other end.” The man looked up at the ceiling, then out the window, as if he were looking for an escape route.
“Wouldn’t you be a tad curious if the machine blew up and killed someone because of a defective part, or your defective workmanship?”
“Others deal in quality control.”
Stuart marveled at the man’s detachment. He lifted a photo out of his briefcase and slid it across the table. “Is this the man you knew as Elias Haddad?”
Meracle glanced at the photo and remembered the day Elias passed his drivers’s test. “Yes.”
“And it doesn’t concern you that he left his wife and child and never returned?”
Meracle pushed the photo back toward Stuart without taking a second look. Prior to him being assigned to tail her and others in the Chicago AAAI chapter, he had wondered many times what had happened to the little girl who always seemed to dislike it whenever he showed up. Suddenly, he could taste the Haddad baklava. It was the strangest of all coincidences that he had been assigned to watch the Islamic Information Center in Saluki and that he would run across her in the same town so many decades later.
“I am sorry for them. But they were not my responsibility. Life has many twists and turns.”
“Had you ever communicated with Elias’s family back in Syria after he disappeared?”
Meracle’s voice rose in pitch, mismatched to the square thickness of the body it emanated from. “Of course not. This was impossible. The new regime wiped out their enemies, anyone who was part of a group who did not support the Assads. I would not be surprised if this was the original motivation for getting the son out of the country.”
“Would it surprise you to learn Elias Haddad will be returning to this country soon?”
Meracle’s face remained as blank as the décor around them. “I did nothing illegal. I was and still am under oath to the same government you serve. I assisted Elias in returning to see his sick father. That is all. What happened after that was not my concern.”
“Can you at least confirm he did, in fact, arrive in Syria?
Meracle stared through Stuart and began to fidget. He looked away and took a sip from his cup of coffee. Stuart waited. Meracle leaned back and rubbed his hands against his belly. “Yes. He landed in Damascus. He disembarked and made his way to Customs. In Syria, my father always said that to get anything done, you had to know the right person on the inside. There was no other way. I have often known the right person.”
He glanced down at the photo of Elias and tapped it with a tobacco-stained finger. “It seems Mr. Haddad’s daughter finally found the right person on the inside here in America.”
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Meracle. I hope your current project to establish Islamic Information Centers around the Midwest as One-Eye listening posts is a success.”
Stuart knew he shouldn’t have said it, but Stuart wanted to see what reaction he would get from Vernon Meracle. There was none.
Ya abi.
The entries in here have become few and far between. Know you are with me always, when I sit at the piano, when I walk in the woods, when I visit Penndel and we spend time at Joe. But the words—my words—have become more and more difficult to formulate.
The days are compressed, the cycle of time distorts. I think of the men who have come and gone in my life. I can’t allow myself to feel them, even when I wanted their touch, their caress, when I needed their strength, friendship. I do not understand them because I lost you. I think they will leave me because you left me.
Each man came into my life with the imperfection of impermanence through no fault of his own. Their best intentions bring out the worst in me. I understand men. I can handle men. I just don’t trust the authenticity of a man. If there is such a thing.
What causes a beautiful moment to end, when you walk down the street overflowing with joy, mid-conversation with someone whose company you enjoy, in the midst of playing the piano, listening to the radio, everything is right about the moment, and the moment ends, destroyed by an errant thought from the abyss? One moment, I see leaves greening on the trees in spring. In the next second, the leaves turn over, shimmering steely gray with the fear of an approaching storm. This is what it is like for me with every man I’ve been with. A beginning and an end in one breath.
Now, another man has entered my life. Re-entered really. The kind man I met at the senator’s office so many years ago, the man whose campaign I worked on. John Veranda. I believe he is taking over some of your space in my mind. Will it end as others have? Will I make him leave because I expect him to abandon me? He embodies so much of what I need. I wonder if you would have liked him. Would you have thrown a football around with him, like you did with the uncles? Would you sit in front of the television and scream at the news? Laugh at the comedians? Cringe at embarrassing moments?
I was looking at one of Maya’s paintings the other day. I wanted to hang it in a different place where there is more light and I noticed that amidst the repetitive series of gold diamond shapes, there are letters. Letters that spell the word baklava! I laughed with joy! And then I put it in the back of my closet, so I don’t sob every time I see it.
—Yom tanni fil jannah bin tak