Flashback

But a day later, over a rare shared microwave-zapped dinner, Leonard had gone all teachy and preachy on Val, trying to tell him all about what it had been like on the real 9-11, and all about himself—he’d been teaching The Etymology of John Keats’s Ass or some such crap at the University of Colorado in Boulder and had been between wives and raising Val’s three-year-old mom at the time, going to school and joining other instructors in the faculty lounge as they watched the aftermath of the martyrs’ planes crashing into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center and…

Val had cut him off. Who gave the slightest sparrowfart about such ancient history? What was he, Val, supposed to do next—get all emotionally worked up about Stonewall Jackson getting killed at Gettysburg? It was all old and done and dead, man.

Stonewall Jackson died before the Battle of Gettysburg was Leonard’s pedantic response.

Well, had been Val’s withering riposte, this right-wing anti-Caliphate crap died before Leonard had gotten senile. Like all American kids, Val had studied the Q’uran since kindergarten and Islam was the Religion of Peace—any dickshit knew that. Why would Leonard get all blubbery about the beautiful Mosque of the Martyrs of the Holy Place in New York? What did he want? demanded Val. For them to move warmonger Greg Dubbya Bush’s bones to New York and build a crypt for them there?

“George W. Bush” had been Leonard’s sad response.

Then Val had gone out to be with the flashgang all that night and the next morning and the conversation was never picked up again.

But now, looking at the New York mayor and vice president slobbering all over the scowling, bearded New York chief imam on the TV images, Val felt uneasy for reasons he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Maybe it had to do with all the hajjis here at the open market ripping everyone off. Or maybe it was as stupid as all those American boots and uniforms being piled up and sold as if they really had just been stripped off dead American soldiers on some unpronounceable Chinese battlefield.

Val shook his head to chase away stupid thoughts and sidled over to the gun table—the reason they’d come here this morning—to watch from a distance as Coyne tried to make his purchase.

Coyne was the oldest and tallest and darkest of the eight of them—his attempt to grow a beard wasn’t completely successful, but at least he’d achieved some good, dark stubble—and although he couldn’t tamper with his NICC, he had a separate military-exemption card, originally Brad’s and then fucked around with by Brad’s AB buddies, that said he was over eighteen. Obviously, if Coyne scored with the guns he wanted, he’d have to pay cash… but he seemed to have the cash.

The hajji in charge of the gun table had shooed Toohey and the other boys away—the cop and DHS mini-drones were buzzing and hovering just a few hundred feet overhead—and now the bearded Iranian glowered suspiciously at Coyne. But the military-exemption card seemed to pass his scanner’s inspection. When the scowling hajji demanded Coyne’s NICC, Coyne smiled, shrugged, and said he hadn’t brought it—just his army-out card and a lot of cash. He was a hunter, you see, and wanted to stock up on some new weapons before deer season was over in Idaho.

That last line was such Coyne-ish bullshit that Val had to turn his face away at the nearby table where he was pretending to inspect some VRI glasses from Brazil. It was either turn away or laugh.

The hajji wasn’t laughing, Val could see in the mirror provided for those trying on the glasses, but neither did he appear to be buying Coyne’s bullshit. Still, the bearded men in the stall didn’t chase Coyne away from the table. They were letting him inspect the guns.

Coyne had been able to buy two more guns for the gang at the Old Plaza but the weapons were crap: a .38 revolver that went back to Raymond Chandler days—Val did love to read, despite himself—and a new, plastic, folding frame-grip Indonesian pistol that fired toy biodegradable .228 cartridges, the whole thing designed to sneak aboard an airliner sometime in the happy hajji past. Gene D. was carrying the .38 belly gun—it had a two-inch barrel—and Monk had been placated with the Indonesian toy.

Coyne hadn’t yet told the gang where or how they were supposed to do this endlessly flashable hit on an important Jap, but he was insisting that they all needed weapons and that he needed at least one serious auto-flechette mini-gun. To Val, he’d whispered that he’d give him the 9mm Beretta, which pleased Val. He’d liked the heft and feel of the gun in his hand and he was still having images of shooting his old man in the belly with one of those big dum-dummed bullets.