Читать книгу Soul Murder - Daniel Blake - Страница 18

Homewood, Patrese thought; always Homewood. It seemed less a geographical area than a vortex, forever dragging him back in.

On the sidewalk, a handful of youths waved at them, their gestures heavy with sarcasm. Patrese waved back, deadpan, his mind miles away.

After a few seconds, he glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw exactly what he expected; a couple of them flipping the detectives the bird, another pair dropping their pants and mooning.

Patrese laughed. Beradino, swiveling round to follow his gaze, was angry.

‘Stop the car, Franco. Let’s go bust their asses.’

‘Ah, they’re just screwin’ around.’

‘To a marked cop car? You let that go, you let anythin’ go. Zero tolerance.’

‘You don’t like black people?’

‘I got nothin’ against black people. I’m a good Christian man, Franco. Jesus says that we should accept all men equally. I just don’t like these black people. If they were white people actin’ this way, I wouldn’t like ’em any better. Shoot, I’d probably like ’em worse.’ He pointed forward. ‘There, that’s the mosque.’

There was a plaque on the building’s front wall. In 1932, it read, Pittsburgh became home to the first chartered Muslim mosque in the United States.

‘What a claim to fame,’ said Beradino, deadpan. ‘Personally, I’d still take the four SuperBowls, you know?’

They stepped inside the main door of the mosque.

It didn’t seem like Osama’s nerve center, that was for sure. No firebrand preachers hollering death to the Great Satan or burning the Stars and Stripes; no rows of prostrate worshippers facing Mecca. Only the rows of shoes lined up inside on gray plastic shelves gave a hint as to the religion of those within.

It seemed more like a social club than a place of worship. People walked in groups or stood around chatting. Patrese and Beradino, watching this, noticed something pretty much simultaneously; most of the mosque-goers were black rather than ostensibly Arab. They could have been in pretty much any major city.

‘Help you?’ a man asked.

‘We’re looking for Mustafa Bayoumi,’ Beradino said.

‘You’ll find him in the outreach center.’ The man extended an arm to his left. ‘Through the double doors, then first right.’

They followed his directions and, after a couple of further inquiries, found Mustafa alone in an office, entering some data on a computer terminal.

Mustafa was skinny, with cheekbones you could cut your wrists on, hair blacker than Reagan’s when he’d been hard at the Grecian 2000, and a neatly trimmed beard. Like his mother, he looked substantially more black than Arab.

Still tapping the keyboard, he looked up. ‘Help you?’ he said.

They sure were polite round here, Patrese thought. That was two more offers of help than he’d usually get in a year in Homewood.

‘We’re with the Pittsburgh police department,’ said Beradino quietly, ‘but we’re not going to flash our badges, because we don’t want to embarrass you or cause a scene. We just want to ask you a few questions.’ He nodded towards a couple of chairs. ‘May we?’

He sat down without waiting for Mustafa’s assent. Patrese followed suit.

Beradino gestured around the room.

‘What is it you guys do here? Outreach – what’s that?’

‘It’s, er, reaching out.’

Beradino laughed, pretending to be offended. ‘Hey, educational standards at the PD ain’t that bad just yet. I worked that one out for myself.’

Mustafa smiled too. Patrese said nothing, but he admired Beradino’s approach; relax them, put them at ease, find common ground.

‘Sorry. Outreach is helping people, mainly. We have a day-care facility, programs for entrepreneurs and released inmates, and a health clinic.’

‘Pretty impressive.’ Beradino sounded as though he meant it. ‘Who funds it all?’

‘We receive an annual grant from a non-profit organization called the Abrahamic Interfaith Foundation. In addition, Islam obligates all those who can feed their family to give two and a half per cent of their net worth in alms. Many of us give considerably more, both in time and money. Then there are book sales, telephone fundraisers, auctions, banquets; you name it, people have pitched in and helped out.’

‘Very good. We could use some of that community spirit round my way. But listen, Mustafa – you don’t mind if I call you Mustafa, do you? – we’re not here to admire your work, you know that. We’d like to ask you some questions about Dr Michael Redwine.’

Mustafa’s face darkened. Patrese supposed that was only natural.

‘The man who killed my father, you mean?’

‘I’m sure he didn’t mean to kill your father.’

‘If you shoot someone, detective, and you mean only to wound them, but instead they die, you’ve still killed them, haven’t you?’

Patrese hoped that neither of them saw him wince.

Beradino chose not to answer the question, and parried it with one of his own. ‘You know Dr Redwine was killed yesterday evening?’

‘I saw it on the news.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘How does that make you feel?’

‘Does it matter, how it makes me feel?’

‘It does if I’m asking you.’

Mustafa took a deep breath. ‘All right. I hope he suffered more than any of us could possibly imagine. That enough for you?’

‘Suffered, as in burning in hell?’

‘I don’t care how. It’s not a fraction of what he’s caused my mother and me.’

‘OK. Let me ask: where were you yesterday evening?’

‘At home. I got back about five, and didn’t go out again till this morning.’

‘Is there anyone who can confirm that?’

‘My mother. Of course.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘No. Just her. I had nothing to do with Redwine’s death, so I didn’t take the precaution of getting five people to give me an alibi, if that’s what you mean.’

‘I didn’t ask whether you had anything to do with his death.’

‘Why else are you here?’

‘Listen, Mustafa, I’m sorry for your loss –’

‘That’s what people always say, when they don’t know what else to say.’

‘– but you being aggressive and giving me static isn’t going to help anyone here.’

‘Your father still alive, Detective?’

‘He is, as it happens.’

‘Then don’t tell me not to get aggressive. Not till it happens to you.’

Patrese reckoned Mustafa had a point. Best keep that thought to himself.

When it came to unsettling suspects, Patrese knew Beradino was a master. His trick – rather, one of his tricks – was to use their mood against them, as a martial arts practitioner will exploit his opponent’s weight and momentum to his own advantage.

If a suspect or a witness was calm, so too would Beradino be, looking to lull them into a sense of ever greater security until they, forgetting he was a cop rather than their best friend, let slip something they regretted.

If, on the other hand, they were upset, as Mustafa Bayoumi was increasingly becoming, Beradino would stoke the fires of their agitation as high as he could until they lost their sense of self-control – and again let slip something they regretted.

Beradino gestured around the room.

‘You only help Muslims?’ His tone was suddenly snappy, all reasonableness and bonhomie gone as though in a puff of smoke.

‘We help our community.’

‘You proselytize?’

Patrese knew what Beradino was thinking. Places like Homewood – poor, deadbeat ’hoods where those who didn’t seek their oblivion via the liquor store or the crack house were open to almost anything which promised to improve their lot – were fertile grounds for Islamic recruiters.

And everyone knew what they were like, because everyone had seen footage of the Nation of Islam: Farrakhan and his bow-tie-wearing, bean-pie-selling disciples who hated whites, Jews, women and gays.

‘We welcome those who choose to come to us. Your religion does the same.’

‘Our religion was what America was founded on.’

‘And what an unqualified success Christianity’s been, hasn’t it?’

‘What does that mean?’ Beradino was no longer acting annoyed, Patrese knew; this was the real deal. The two of them had long ago agreed not to discuss religion, because it always ended in arguments; Beradino the devout, Patrese the unbeliever.

‘Jesus died for your sins, right?’

‘That’s right, yes.’

‘Then explain this to me. Either that was for everyone’s sins right up to the moment he died, in which case we’ve had two thousand years of some serious bad behavior left unchecked. Or he died for everyone’s sins then and for all time; in which case it hasn’t helped much, has it?’

Patrese almost laughed. It was a question he’d asked himself, and others, more than once, and no one – not teachers, not priests, probably not even the Pope himself – had been able to answer it properly.

‘Not to mention the impeccable behavior of priests up and down the country where young children are involved,’ Mustafa continued.

‘A few bad apples. Sinners, as we all are. Everyone in your culture’s perfect?’

‘I look around here, and I see people brought up to believe in the Christian faith. But I also know that, round here, all too often BC means before crack, and AD means after death. That’s not good enough. And it’s not good enough just to pray and hope everything will turn out all right. We have to go out and do the work.

‘And that work starts here. Islam prohibits drugs and alcohol. You stay off those, you can be a productive member of society. You turn to them, and you’re just waiting to die. And if the only way out of that is through Islam, then so be it. Because Islam places paramount importance on the education of our children. To be a teacher is a special calling. When I’ve finished my studies, I’m hoping to teach at the school we’re raising funds to build here; preschool to fifth grade.’

‘Somewhere to train the next generation of bombers?’

‘Not at all. A school where everybody has a strange name, so nobody feels alone. Muslim kids feel like outsiders in public schools. No matter how good those schools are, they can’t teach Islamic beliefs and morals. So we will. Kids hate being different; so we’ll make them not different. And you know why?’

‘I’ve no doubt you’re going to tell me.’

‘Because we have to do it ourselves now. Since 9/11, we haven’t been able to receive money from other Muslim countries, even from registered Islamic charities.’

‘That’s damn right. There’s a war on.’

Mustafa didn’t take the bait. Perhaps he hadn’t heard.

‘We relied on that money a lot; perhaps too much. That was one of the reasons why, before 9/11, we – the immigrant Muslims – didn’t really have that much to do with the black Muslims.

‘Then suddenly we couldn’t move for surveillance, police raids, airport searches, special registration, and so on. All the time, we had to prove our loyalty to the flag. Still do, every day. I look black anyway, but African-American Muslims sympathize. They know what it’s like; not from being Muslim, but from being black.’

He looked at Beradino first, then Patrese; two white men who he felt would never understand, not fully.

‘We’re all niggers now, basically.’