“But there’s still always the other thing. Our yearning. Our deep need for it to be true. Somewhere, down at some shameful dark recess of the national soul, we need to feel betrayed, even guilty. As if it was us who created Bush and his gang, Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld and Feith and the rest of them—we who called down the sacred lightning of ‘democracy,’ and then the fascist majority on the Supreme Court threw the switches, and Bush rose from the slab and began his rampage. And whatever happened then is on our ticket.”
A week or so later, Maxine and March do breakfast at the Piraeus Diner. There is now a huge American flag in the window and a UNITED WE STAND poster. Mike is being extra solicitous to the cops who come in looking for free meals.
“Check this out.” March hands over a dollar bill, around the margins of whose obverse somebody has written in ballpoint, “World Trade Center was destroyed by CIA—Bush Senior’s CIA is making Bush Jr. Prez for life & a hero.” “I got this in change at the corner grocery this morning. That’s well within a week of the attack. Call it what you like, but a historical document whatever.” Maxine recalls that Heidi has a collection of decorated dollar bills, which she regards as the public toilet wall of the U.S. monetary system, carrying jokes, insults, slogans, phone numbers, George Washington in blackface, strange hats, Afros and dreadlocks and Marge Simpson hair, lit joints in his mouth, and speech-balloon remarks ranging from witty to stupid.
“No matter how the official narrative of this turns out,” it seemed to Heidi, “these are the places we should be looking, not in newspapers or television but at the margins, graffiti, uncontrolled utterances, bad dreamers who sleep in public and scream in their sleep.”
“This message on this bill doesn’t surprise me so much as how promptly it showed up,” March sez now. “How fast the analysis has been.”
Like it or not, Maxine has become March’s official doubter, and happy to help, usually, though these days like everybody else she’s feeling discombobulated. “March, since it happened, I don’t know what to believe.”
But March, relentlessly on the case, brings up Reg’s DVD. “Suppose there was a Stinger crew deployed and waiting for orders to shoot down the first 767, the one that went on to hit the North Tower. Maybe there was another team stationed over in Jersey to pick up the second one, which would’ve been circling around and coming up from the southwest.”
“Why?”
“Anti-compassion insurance. Somebody doesn’t trust the hijackers to go through with it. These are Western minds, uncomfortable with any idea of suicide in the service of a faith. So they threaten to shoot the hijackers down in case they chicken out at the last minute.”
“And if the hijackers do change their minds, what if the Stinger team do the same and don’t shoot the plane down?”
“Then that would explain the backup sniper on the other roof, who the Stinger people know is there, keeping them in his sights till their part of the mission is over. Which is as soon as the guy with the phone gets word the plane’s committed—then everybody cleans up and clears out. It’s full daylight by then, but not that much risk of being seen ’cause all the attention is focused downtown.”
“Help, too byzantine, make it stop!”
“Trying, but is Bush answering my calls?”
• • •
HORST MEANTIME IS PUZZLED ABOUT something else. “Remember the week before this happened, all those put options on United and American Airlines? Which turned out to be exactly the two airlines that got hijacked? Well, it seems on that Thursday and Friday there were also lopsided put-to-call ratios for Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, couple others like them, all tenants of the Trade Center. As a fraud investigator, what does that suggest to you?”
“Foreknowledge of a decline in their stock prices. Who was doing all this trading?”
“Nobody so far has stepped forward.”
“Mystery players who knew it was going to happen. Overseas maybe? Like the Emirates?”
“I try to keep hold of my common sense, but . . .”
Maxine goes over to her parents’ for lunch, and Avi and Brooke are there as expected. The sisters embrace, though you could not say warmly. There’s no way not to talk about the Trade Center.
“Nobody that morning had anything to say,” Maxine, noticing at some point that there’s a NY Jets logo on Avi’s yarmulke, “Ain’t it awful’ is about as profound as it got. Just the one camera angle, the static telephoto shot of those towers smoldering, the same news that’s no news, the same morning-show airhead idiocy—”
“They were in shock,” Brooke mutters, “like everybody that day, what, you weren’t?”
“But why keep showing us that one thing, what were we supposed to be waiting for, what was going to happen? Too high up to run hoses, OK, so the fire will either burn itself out or spread to other floors or—or what else? What were we being set up for, if not what happened? One comes down, then the other, and who was surprised? Wasn’t it inevitable by then?”
“You think the networks knew ahead of time?” Brooke, offended, glowering. “Whose side are you on, are you an American or what are you?” Brooke now in full indignation, “this horrible, horrible tragedy, a whole generation traumatized, war with the Arab world any minute, and even this isn’t safe from your stupid little hipster irony? What’s next, Auschwitz jokes?”
“Same thing happened when JFK was shot,” Ernie belatedly trying to defuse things with geezer nostalgia. “Nobody wanted to believe that official story either. So suddenly here were all these strange coincidences.”
“You think it was an inside job, Pa?”
“The chief argument against conspiracy theories is always that it would take too many people in on it, and somebody’s sure to squeal. But look at the U.S. security apparatus, these guys are WASPs, Mormons, Skull and Bones, secretive by nature. Trained, sometimes since birth, never to run off at the mouth. If discipline exists anywhere, it’s among them. So of course it’s possible.”
“How about you, Avi?” Maxine turning to her brother-in-law. “What’s the latest on 4360.0 kilohertz?” Nice as pie. But he gives a violent jump. “Oops, or do I mean megahertz?”
“What The Fuck?”
“Language,” Elaine automatically before realizing it’s Brooke, who seems to be looking around for a weapon.
“Arab propaganda!” Avi cries. “Anti-Semitic filth. Who told you about this frequency?”
“Saw it on the Internet,” Maxine shrugs, “ham operators have known about it forever, they’re called E10 stations, operated by Mossad out of Israel, Greece, South America, the voices are women who figure in the erotic daydreams of radio hobbyists everywhere, reciting alphanumerics, encrypted, of course. Widely believed to be messages to agents, salaried and otherwise, out in the Diaspora. Word is that in the run-up to the atrocity, traffic was pretty heavy.”
“Every Jew hater in this town,” Avi making with the aggrieved tone, “is blaming 9/11 on Mossad. Even a story going around about Jews who worked down at the Trade Center all calling in sick that day, warned away by Mossad through their”—air quotes—secret network.’”
“The Jews dancing on the roof of that van over in Jersey,” Brooke fuming, “watching it all collapse, don’t forget that one.”
Later as Maxine prepares to leave, Ernie catches up with her in the foyer. “Ever call that FBI guy?”
“I did, and you know what? He thinks Avram really is Mossad, all right? On station, tapping his foot to a klezmer beat only he can hear, waiting to be activated.”
“Evil Jewish conspiracy.”
“Except you’ll notice Avi never talks about what he was doing over in Israel, neither of them do, any more than what he’s doing here now for hashslingrz. The one thing I can guarantee you is, is it’ll be well compensated, wait and see, he’ll give you guys a Mercedes for your anniversary.”