Finishing her sandwich, Liz returned to her car and phoned Faisal al-Turkait. He sounded far more reserved than he had been during their earlier encounter. But he consented to meet her later that day in his shop. Unsure what she wanted to say to Olga at this stage, Ellen nearly turned her car eastward towards Boston. What point was there in dredging up the ugly fact of her husband’s behavior, except to see if Olga was aware of it? But, even so, on impulse she turned west and drove to the Swenson house.
If Olga was perplexed to see Liz, she hardly showed it. Instead, she seemed relieved to have company and to share her thoughts about the terrorist attacks.
“It personalizes things, doesn’t it, when you have a loved one who has been on the scene where a tragedy later occurs? Only months earlier, Ellen was having such a memorable meeting with her pen pal on the top floor of one of those towers,” Olga said as she poured hot water into a china teapot.
“Yes,” Liz said. “It makes the unimaginable all too imaginable, unfortunately.”
“Shall we take the tea outside and enjoy the weather?”
“Good idea. Let me help.”
Liz welcomed the chance to be occupied with the tea things, since she remained uncertain about sharing Ali’s revelation. The walk through the house, down the stairs, and through the mudroom bought her a few minutes to think. In the mudroom, Liz noticed Olga’s aluminum vases were filled with fresh-cut flowers, and an incomplete flower arrangement stood on the potting table.
“Did I interrupt you in your arranging?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t matter. Just as I felt strange taking up old hobbies although my daughter remains missing, I now find myself feeling odd about arranging flowers while the world is in such a state. It feels rather like fiddling while Rome burns.” Olga seemed to shake herself as she stood poised to exit the mudroom.
Meanwhile, Liz took a scarf from her purse. “I seem to have picked this up accidentally during an earlier visit. Shall I hang it here?” she asked.
Olga nodded. As Liz tried to drape the scarf on an overloaded coat hook, she knocked a coat to the floor. Picking it up, she tucked the scarf into its pocket and hung the coat on the hook again by the little chain sewn to its collar.
Burdened with the tea tray, Olga signaled Liz to make haste into the fresh air. “That is one of Ellen’s favorite old scarves,” she said, her eyes brightening with tears. Thrusting the door open with her shoulder, she added, “It’s stuffy in here, don’t you think?”
“I’d call it ‘close,’ thanks to the mixed fragrances of the flowers.”
Liz contented herself with making small talk, until she realized it was time to head for her appointment with Faisal al-Turkait in Cambridge.
“Was there a particular reason for your visit, Liz?” Olga asked.
“I thought I’d let you know, ‘shaqra’ means ‘blonde’ in Arabic.”
“‘Shock-rah!’ Then that Al Leigh was not so tongue-tied!” Olga said, her eyes widening. “It’s dreadful, don’t you think, the assumptions we make about foreigners? No wonder they hate us! What will become of us, Liz?”
Faisal al-Turkait greeted Liz with polite formality at the door of Turkoman Books. Moving a stack of volumes off his sofa, he invited her to take a seat and join him in drinking coffee.
“This time I was expecting you, you see,” he said as he poured. “I hope you will understand if I am reticent in other regards, though,” he said. “At this time, I would not like to have my name in the paper or even to discuss much of anything over the phone.”
Liz was shocked. “Do you think you are under some kind of surveillance?”
“Certainly. This country is under attack by enemies of Middle Eastern extraction. As an American citizen, I applaud this vigilance.”
“As a person of Middle Eastern extraction, surely you feel uncomfortable about it as well?”
“I understand it.”
“I can only express my admiration! I’m not so sure I would feel similarly understanding if the nation were under attack by women with auburn hair and I was hounded as a result.”
“When I walk down a city street at night and a woman is the only other pedestrian, should I blame her if she crosses the street to ensure her safety from a male stranger? I am no assailant, yet I am not offended to see a woman exercise such caution. The same is true now. In the interests of our nation’s security, I am not offended to see our government scrutinize me. But let us talk of other matters. You have some more words for me to translate, I assume?”
“Actually, it is the same list of words that concerns me,” Liz said, taking out the grocery list. “Do any of these words have double meanings? I mean, could they refer to some sort of terrorist activity, meeting, delivery, or anything of that sort?”
“No, I think not. These are the most ordinary of words. Truly, they look like a simple grocery list of fruits.”
“I guess I’m searching for significance in Ellen’s interaction with the cabdriver, even trying to connect it to the terrorist attacks. That’s a pretty big leap, though, isn’t it?”
“That’s understandable, particularly after the events of September eleventh. Didn’t you show me, last time you were here, a photo of a book she had that was written for intelligence experts?”
“Yes, and I still don’t know where she acquired that. I plan to see if they have any record of selling it to her at the Brattle Book Shop in Boston, where, I understand, she purchased something in order to prepare to meet her pen pal.”
“I know the owner there and I know he now records his book sales on the computer. Most book dealers do, these days, because so many of us also sell on-line. We need to keep track of individual volumes. He might be reluctant to tell you who bought the book, but if I ask him for the book, as though I wish to acquire it, he might tell me if and when it was sold.”
Putting through a call to the store, the book dealer discovered the book in question had been sold there on October 13, 2000. There was no credit card or check information, since the purchase had been made in cash. But the Brattle’s owner did let on he’d thought the customer was surprising. Most of the time, he told his colleague, he sold odd books like that to professors or students. This customer looked like a suburban housewife.
The likelihood of Ellen serving as an intelligence operative seemed unlikely now. Surely, if Ellen were a spy, she would be supplied with such books, not reduced to finding one in a used-book shop. Liz returned to the question of the cabbie’s grocery list.
“Are any of these words also used euphemistically, as sexual slang, I mean?”
“This is not easy for me to discuss with a lady,” the book dealer said, echoing a similar statement by Ali. “But the answer is yes. Teena, the word for fig, can also be used—man-to-man only, of course—to refer to a woman.” He blushed.
“What about the other fruits? Here in America a man might say of a woman, ‘Look at them apples,’ for instance,” Liz said.
Faisal’s complexion reddened further. “No, I wouldn’t say the other words on this grocery list would be used in that way. More coffee?” he said, ducking into the kitchen.
“I ask because we know that the cabdriver who drove Ellen Johansson in New York, and who also visited her house on the day she disappeared, made her uncomfortable by using that word in a sleazy tone in a two-way radio conversation with another male. She wondered if the cabbie was talking graphically about her, and then, when she heard him continue to use the word, she relaxed a little, thinking he was talking in sexual terms about a woman called Tina.”
Returning to the room, Faisal underlined Nadia’s view. “I think she was correct in feeling uncomfortable. I think perhaps the driver was talking in a most improper manner about his passenger.”