she was in her Egyptian period, meaning ankh earrings and a beaded gold necklace and a tan sleeveless vest adorned with hieroglyphic figures. Executive legal secretary, Queen Nefertiti style.
“Good morning. You’re looking very Cradle of Civilization today.”
“Good morning, Andy,” she said, too brightly. There was something wrong with her face, as if she were trying to decide how she felt about the terminal illness of an unpleasant relative.
“Everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine. Why do you ask?”
“No reason, other than you look like you just swallowed a mayfly.”
“What a thing to say. Besides, it’s June. Burke’s ready for you,” she said, gold bracelets clicking as she waved her right hand down the hall. “Go on in.”
“Thanks, warden.”
She laughed nervously. I walked around the corner to Cunningham’s office and stepped inside.
“Jesus Christ,” I said involuntarily.
“Oh, very funny,” Freddy Cohen said.
“What are you doing here?”
He was leaning against the far wall, favoring his back. He didn’t reply right away. First he glanced at Cunningham, sitting behind his mahogany desk, then at the ceiling, and then at me again.
“I need your help.”
“My help?” I said.
A pause, during which galaxies spun and tectonic plates shifted. “I need help with a case,” Cohen said. He shifted his position. He was standing between Cunningham’s framed law degree and the “Whites Only” sign Cunningham hung up as part of his rotating display of Jim Crow memorabilia. “Lest we forget,” he liked to say.
“What kind of case?”
“I’m getting to that.”
“I can hardly wait.”
“Don’t take that attitude with me—”
Cunningham cleared his throat.
We both looked at him. His hands were folded atop his desk like a pastor at a mandatory counseling session. “Why don’t you take a seat, Andy?”
I walked to the leather chair to the left of his desk and sat. I knew it hadn’t been a request.
“Nice weather we’re having,” Cunningham said.
“Indeed,” I said.
“Though perhaps a little warm.”
“Very humid.”
“You know what they say. It’s not the heat. Good weekend?”
“Too short.”
“They always are. Especially when you’re saving damsels in distress. Which brings me to the matter at hand.”
Before he could continue, LaTasha entered with a silver tray bearing large white porcelain coffee mugs, a tall carafe, and cut-glass containers of sugar and cream. If a plastic swizzle stick or a Styrofoam cup had ever despoiled the inside of Cunningham’s office, I wasn’t aware of it. We sat in silence while LaTasha poured our coffee; mine black, Cunningham’s light, Cohen’s with both cream and sugar. She left as gracefully as she’d entered. My eyes followed her out, admiring the thick, pleated cotton skirt completing her Nile ensemble. I hoped my figure held up as nicely when I was a mother of four someday.
“Go ahead, Freddy,” Cunningham said.
Cohen picked up his mug, took a sip of coffee, and placed it back on the edge of Cunningham’s desk beside a carved African fertility statue. He was still standing, which meant his back was bad again. Which was my fault, depending on how you felt about blaming messengers. Thin, gray hair receding, wire-rimmed glasses pushed down on his nose, he’d grown a trim salt-and-pepper beard, heavy on the sodium, since the last time I saw him. He wore a tailored, dark-gray suit, black shoes that uncharacteristically needed shining, and a frown suitable for an infant’s funeral.
“Hassan Mohamed,” he said. “Name mean anything to you?”
“No. Should it?”
“Try reading the news instead of making it for a change. Columbus man killed in Syria last month. Made CNN for five seconds between Cialis commercials.”
The headline came back to me. Stories of radicalized young men sneaking overseas blurred in my mind anymore. But I remembered the local connection and the two days of news coverage it garnered.
“Now I recollect. Islamic State?”
“That’s right. Everyone’s favorite homicidal psychopaths.”
“Was Mohamed Syrian?”
“Somali. Came to Columbus when he was four. Parents made it out of Mogadishu during the civil war and spent several years in a refugee camp in Kenya before emigrating.”
That sounded about right. Columbus had the second-largest Somali population in the country, after the Twin Cities in Minnesota, thanks to its low cost of living, reams of warehouse jobs, and the snowball effect of one outpost of settled refugees attracting others. They’d clustered in large groups on the north and west sides and were now such a common sight they hardly turned a head any more. With some variations to the tale, it was the same reason Columbus once had half a dozen German-language newspapers. I thought of the woman in the parking lot. I’d learned her name since: Kaltun Hirsi.
“With you so far,” I said.
“First for everything,” Cohen said. “So, the feds are still putting the pieces together, but it sounds like a pretty familiar recruitment story. Hassan dropped out of high school, sold some drugs, ran with a gang for a while. Agler Road Crips, if you’re counting. Guys like him are low-hanging fruit for Terror Inc. A week’s diet of an extremist imam preaching on YouTube and he was in their pocket.”
“Meaning?”
“Classic case of self-radicalization. First he cleaned up his act. One day he’s running the streets, the next day—well, couple of days, figuratively speaking—he finds religion. Then he became superreligious. Changed his look: beard, robe, sandals, the whole nine yards. His parents were elated.”
I took a drink of coffee and nodded.
“That didn’t last long. Before they knew it he was tearing into them because they weren’t Muslim enough. He demanded his mom and his sisters go full-on burka. When the imam at his mosque denounced a terrorist attack in France, Hassan called him an infidel on Facebook. He was asked not to return. He left the country not long after that.”
“To Syria?”
“Turkey first, then he crossed over. He tweeted a picture of himself with his new brigade and a pledge to the caliphate. A week later he was killed in a firefight.”
“It’s
