The Command

She knew she lived in the biggest city in the world. Her mother was from Worth, outside another big city called Chicago. She didn’t remember anything about the Carolina place her grandma and her aunts talked about when they sat in the kitchen and drank beer. That was where Grandma was from, back when Grandpa had come north to work in the factory.

She remembered Worth: the Fourth of July parades, Worth Days in September, with the parade and the flea market. When they went to church with her grandma, no one there mentioned Allah. They stared and whispered when she did, and told her to pray to Jesus instead.

Every summer her grandma took her to the carnival. Her favorite was the pony carts. The yellow one was hers. She wondered if that ride was still going around. That old metal cart with its layers of buttery enamel so thick it looked melted at the edges, and the chips here and there showing it had always been yellow, coat after coat, all the way down to the silvery core.

Then one day Grandma died, and they never went to Worth again. And she and Zara and Layla and Fatima had gone to the Clara Muhammed School, and grown up in Harlem and yet not in Harlem, in New York but not in New York, in America, yet not really. Instead they lived in another nation inside America, surrounded by the close-knit, self-isolated world of the old Nation of Islam that fiercely walled off the idolatrous and licentious and above all white world outside. That bought from its own, learned from its own, stayed with its own. That was only gradually waking to the worldwide Islam Malcolm El-Shabazz had grasped in the last years of his life was out there. The bigger, freer world she’d always wanted to see. Always wanted to be part of.

And now, she was.

* * *

As she let herself into the narrow second-floor office, an enlisted man glared up from a vintage olive-drab Selectric. “Hi, Kinky,” she said. “How you doing, ma’am.”

The office was the size of a Comfort Inn double, with gray metal desks and file cabinets and a refrigerator-sized evidence safe. Racks of three-ring binders and cardboard evidence boxes. Kinky was the investigative assistant, a desiccated little man with black-framed glasses and a change-purse mouth tucked under a prissy mustache. He wore the old-style dungarees and a Belleau Wood ball cap, as if he was still aboard ship. His paychecks said Rossetti, but everybody called him Kinky. She’d never asked why. She didn’t want to know.

“Get that call about the body in Quraifa?”

Quraifa was where the Arab had gotten run over. Where the kids had thrown mud and yelled insults. Sitting at her desk and turning on her computer: “Yeah. I checked it out.”

“One of ours?”

“I don’t think so.”

She waited for the screen to come up, then typed in her password. It didn’t work again. The computer security people insisted the password be a random string of numbers and letters, even punctuation signs, so it was impossible to guess. Which meant nobody could remember them, so they had to write them down somewhere. She slid her drawer open and looked at where she’d penciled it inside. The machine recognized her then and told her she had mail. She said again, “I don’t think so. We’ll probably leave it for the locals. Anything for me?”

“The backgrounds are piling up again.”

She sighed. The Defense Investigative Service did background investigations for military security clearances. But DIS agents didn’t go overseas, so Washington sent the investigations for personnel posted there to the service-specific agents in the field. Who considered them a pain, so the junior agent ended up with them. Other than that, there were reports on pending investigations that had to go out, naval messages to release. She went through them and returned her phone calls. One was from the base exec, who’d heard about the body and wanted to know what was going on.

When she was done with that, she was face to face with the backgrounds again. She still didn’t want to do them. The computer was running slow, so she put it on cleanup and sat thinking, as it ran a little icon of a disk taking itself apart and putting itself back together over and over again.

She found herself thinking about the dead man again. Who had he been? Where’d he gotten the base ID? That’d been his picture on it. But the bicycle hadn’t had a base sticker. Which meant he hadn’t kept it on the base, possibly hadn’t been on the base at all — maybe. Unless he parked it outside and walked in. But she couldn’t see him doing that, it wouldn’t stay there long, not in that neighborhood. And … with an Omani passport. That wasn’t out of line. They came to the island for jobs; the Omani economy sucked and Bahrain’s was booming. But why was he using two names? And why didn’t the crushed face match the picture on the driving license?