blurted out, “Do you know something I don’t?”
McKinnon was back in his book. “I certainly hope so.” He waved Spinner away.
Back in his cubicle, Spinner frowned at the carpet-covered wall for some minutes and thought that he really shouldn’t take it anymore. McKinnon was a supercilious shit. On the other hand, he liked and needed the job.
He had gone to a Barnes and Noble and bought Leo Strauss’s The City and Man because it was the thinnest Strauss book on the shelf. He had been dipping into it. It was heavy going for a man whose idea of a book was a thriller. He had almost self-destructed on a paragraph that went on for two pages. He was put off by sentences like “For Aristotle political inequality is ultimately justified by the natural inequality among men,” because he had been raised on “All men are created equal,” but he assumed that no matter what sentences like these meant, Strauss would pull a democratic rabbit out of his philosophical hat. He didn’t want to face the possibility that neither Strauss, Aristotle, nor Plato was in fact democratic.
Naples
By Saturday, Dukas had Salem Qatib’s bio and knew that he had studied classics and archaeology at the University of Michigan but hadn’t taken a degree. Dukas tried to get the university on the phone, but on weekends academics are resting their brains. He made notes on what else he knew about Qatib: emigrated to the US with his parents at fourteen; his father returned to Palestine when Salem was seventeen and the parents later divorced; Salem did his Navy stint then and followed it with his college work, remaining a reservist. Then he’d gone off to Palestine himself and had kept a fairly clean record, except for whatever Mossad knew about him and was now not giving up—their current stance was “Who, me? Never heard of him!” The CIA had Qatib’s name but was saying that other than his being a Palestinian and having attended an anti-settlement rally in Gaza, they weren’t interested in him.
“Well, somebody was interested in him,” Dukas said to Triffler.
“Or Al Craik’s police lady is wrong about the Mossad involvement.”
“You think Al was kidnapped by four guys who just happened to be in the neighborhood?”
“Stranger things have happened.” Triffler checked his watch. “We have a meeting downtown in half an hour.”
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