The Identity Thief (13 page)

Asar oohed and aahed, and X embellished further and further, inventing a palatial estate worthy of an Oriental despot. The physical descriptions came mostly from old movies he used to watch with his mother, like "The Prince of Baghdad." It was the only time he remembered her being at peace, the two of them lost together in a fantasy world.

Each night "Ali Nazeer" regaled the teen with tales of family trips around the world to hot spots like Paris and Beijing, playing with the children of rich and famous movie stars and jet setters. He became Asar's Scheherazade.

X had to admit it was fun creating this blissful imaginary childhood so different from his own. The rich, powerful father, the doting, educated mother reading Dickens and Shakespeare to him and his loving sibling at bedtime.

Asar would ask him to repeat stories, and X did, fleshing them out with more minute details as he did. Some were funny. He told anecdotes about maids and gardeners who misunderstood orders - plagiarized from homophone-challenged Amelia Bedelia - that made the teen roar with laugher.

A week passed before "Ali Nazeer" was escorted from his cell for his first interrogation.

"Be strong, my brother," Asar told him, clapping him on the back.

"We'll have him back in a jiffy," one of the guards said cheerfully. "You'll be amazed how quick your hero breaks."

X was marched down a long corridor with barred cells on either side. It looked like one of those old black and white movies about Alcatraz except that rather than Jimmy Cagney or George Raft, the residents were bearded, swarthy men, two or three to a cell. Some were prostrate in prayer, others were scribbling on pads. Some saluted him; a few even bowed reverently.

"Allah will protect you, brother," one called.

Unfortunately, the identity thief didn't believe in Allah (or hold much stock in the god of the Hebrews either).

He was shoved into a small, barren room at the end of the hall. X was not pleased to see that Pizza Face, Giant Redneck and Big Tits were all in attendance. This time they were joined by a clean-cut young man in natty, wire-rimmed glasses that must have cost $600, a blue blazer, yellow sweater and fraternity tie. He looked as if he was home for the holidays from an exclusive prep school.

"I give him about eight minutes," Pizza Face snickered.

"Five," said Big Tits.

"It's a bet." They shook hands.

He was stripped again, and hung by his wrists with ropes from a hook on the ceiling. The Yuppie, who had been silent up until now, stepped forward and spoke in a calm voice, barely above a whisper.

"Now let me tell you the game plan for today, Mr. Nazeer," he said. "I am going to ask you questions and you're going to answer them. Any time you don't answer, this gentleman will do something to you that's not very nice."

He pointed to an ugly-looking cattle prod in the hands of Giant Redneck. This time X was ready for them. He would not be intimidated, he would not be crushed.

"You can't torture me," X said smugly. "We watch CNN, you know. I know your leaders have forbidden it."

The Yuppie laughed and the soldiers followed suit.

"That's right, dude." he said. "All that went out with the Bush administration. You have absolutely nothing at all to worry your little head about." He nodded to the Giant Redneck, who poked X in the testicles with the cattle prod.

Volts lanced through his gonads and X screamed in agony. It was hard to believe he'd ever be able to reproduce.

Okay
, he thought
. Hold out for a minute to make it believable, then tell them the most credible lie you can muster.

"Now whereabouts can we find The Chief?" the Yuppie asked pleasantly, as if asking the directions to the nearest Starbucks.

X shook his head. Giant Redneck zapped his private parts again.

To hell with holding out a minute.

"All right, all right," he sputtered. "He's in Afghanistan, near the village of - "

The Yuppie imitated a game-show buzzer. "Wrong answer. We know he's crossed over into Pakistan."

Another electrical assault on his testicles.

"I have to, I have to go the bathroom," X moaned.

"He's stalling," Pizza Face warned the Yuppie in his nasal New Jersey accent.

"You can drain the old dragon on the floor," the Yuppie offered. "You have our permission."

Big tits snickered.

"Go ahead, I told you to piss yourself," the Yuppie said more sternly. Now it was a command.

Finally X let go. If he was worried about his dignity, that ship had sailed. A yellow stream shot from his dangling organ onto the concrete floor.
This psycho prep-school brat from hell probably did worse plenty of times after keg parties back in college
, he told himself, if it was any consolation.

"Look at what that filthy sand nigger did," Giant Redneck said, shaking his head. "He messed up the floor. They just mopped it yesterday."

The Yuppie clucked his teeth. "Well, here we clean up our own messes. We don't want to create extra work for the staff." He nodded to the Marines.

They unhooked X's hands. The Giant Redneck dragged him across the floor by the nape of the neck and stuck his face in the pool of piss. Big Tits planted a boot on his backside to hold him in place. Pizza face tossed him his underwear.

"Now wipe up that fucking piss," the Redneck said.

"Next time we'll make you lick it up, ass eater," Pizza Face put in.

X sighed and began to scrub up the yellow pool. He felt the urge to weep again, but steeled himself this time. He refused to give them the satisfaction.

"You're going to break, bro," the Yuppie informed him. "Maybe after we pump you full of babble juice so strong it leaves your brain fried. Maybe after we show you snapshots of some street thugs partying in your wife's tush. Sooner or later, you'll talk. So why not cut to the chase?

"Now I'm going to ask you one last time, Ali. Where is The Chief? Work with me here, dude."

"I don't know," X said, in his most convincing voice, what he always thought of has his "honest" voice. "As Allah is my master, I do not know."

"You are one lying Arab bastard," the Yuppie hissed. "You are so going to get your clock cleaned." He nodded to Giant Redneck, who seized a fistful of X's hair. He dragged the prisoner out of the room into the corridor, where fellow detainees flocked to the bars of their cells to see what was going on.

X could see Asar clutching the bars, looking on as if it were his father being abused.

"In front of all your homies here, you're going to swear to Allah that you don't know where The Chief is," the Yuppie demanded, raising his voice for the first time. "No, dudes and dudette, I'm getting a brainstorm here. Swear on the freaking Koran."

X vaguely recalled accounts of how at Guantanamo Bay the Koran was abused in interrogations back in the Bush days, but had chalked them up to Arab propaganda.

The Yuppie snatched the Koran from Asar's hand and said, "Enjoy the show."

Giant Redneck and Pizza Face hoisted X up to his feet and the Yuppie waved the Islamic holy book in his face, "Put his hand on it."

Big Tits grabbed the prisoner's hand and forced it onto the book.

"Swear you don't know where The Chief is," the Yuppie demanded.

"I swear on the Holy Koran that I do not know the hiding place of The Chief."

"Bullshit. Bullshit!" the Yuppie exclaimed, turning blue in the face and flying into a fury that looked almost genuine. "Make him eat the freaking thing."

There came howls of protest from the cells and prisoners began banging objects on the bars. The din only added to X's torment.

Big Tits tore out four pages from the book with obvious relish and stuffed them in his mouth, knocking a filling out of his mouth in the process.

"Eat it," the Yuppie snarled. "You're going to eat your beloved Koran and shit it out. That's right, Ali, you're going to turn Mohammed's words into doo-doo. "

Giant Redneck pulled his sidearm from its holster and pressed up against X's temple.

"Do it, camel jockey!" he barked in X's ear. "Do it right now, or we'll splatter your brains on the floor."

The Muslim prisoners booed in fury. They shook their cages like furious baboons.

"Infidels!"

"Cursed American dogs!"

"May Allah give you strength, Ali!"

"It is better to die with honor than to live on in shame!"

The Yuppie paced back and forth. "Let him go," he said after a moment.

"Ali Nazeer" collapsed to his knees, the leaves of paper clenched between his teeth.

"I'm going to count to three, you freaking sand monkey," the Yuppie said quietly. "And if you aren't chomping down on your good book by then, I swear to Christ himself - the
real
God, by the way - I'm going to give the order to shoot."

X had had enough. He was 99 percent sure they weren't going to shoot him. Besides, what would happen to him if he defiled the Koran in front of that pack of fanatics? Surely he'd be beaten to death in the exercise yard within a day.

So "Ali Nazeer" stood up, and spat out the pages. He grabbed his dick and waved it at the Yuppie.

"Eat this, you sick cunt," he shouted. Then, for the benefit of his fellow prisoners, he repeated the colorful insult in Arabic.

From the row of cells, the roars of his fellow prisoners were deafening.

"You see," Asar called to the guards, triumphantly. "To threaten a brave man with death is like promising water to a duck."

While X tried to make sense of that, his fellow prisoners chanted a phrase meaning, X knew, "one who is praiseworthy in the eyes of Allah."

Strangely enough, the admiration of these strange men - with whom he had nothing in common and whose philosophy he despised - uplifted him. Perhaps it was because it had been so long since anyone had shown him admiration. He felt like he was a seven-year-old child again, getting applause for the winning a spelling bee, his mother in the audience.

I'd forgotten about that.

His moment of glory was short-lived, though. He was gang-tackled by the Marines and hauled back to his cell.

Another few weeks dragged on. Now, without the Koran, X and his cellmate were forced to converse even more. The nightly tales became more vividly detailed and intricately embroidered, to the point that X almost convinced himself he really had been raised with love in the lap of luxury. They also conversed about their current lives, and inevitably, women. Asar had a girlfriend in the small town in Afghanistan where he'd been born, a neighbor's daughter who had been promised to him at birth.

"I have composed a poem for her," Asar said diffidently. "Would you like to read it?"

"Read it to me," X said.

The teen took a sheet of paper from under his mattress, cleared his throat and began:

"Your voice is like a babbling brook,

Sweet and gentle,

When you speak,

I hear the harps of angels."

He was praising her voice, X realized, because in all likelihood the girl was veiled and the teen had never actually seen her face. Still, it was touching. Hard to keep in mind that the boy was a stone killer who would murder him in a New York minute if he knew his true identity.

X could not share with the boy the names of the many American women he'd bedded. Nor could he say he'd slept with them, of course - intercourse outside marriage was contrary to Islam. The call girls, the barmaids, the grifters, the occasional housewife who pegged him for a con artist and jumped his bones nevertheless because she found it exciting. So he talked about Ali Nazeer's third and youngest wife, Jasmine. She was the upstanding daughter of an iman, according to the backstory he concocted - a woman who was wise, virtuous and obedient.

"If I told her to put her hand in fire, she would do it without question," X said and the boy nodded reverently.

One night before they went to sleep, Asar announced that he had something to say.

"Your friendship has meant so much to me," the teen said solemnly. "I thank Allah for bringing you into my life."

X hated to admit it, but he felt the same way (except for the Allah part). He didn't know how he would survive the cruelty and monotony of this place without the relentlessly cheerful and optimistic young man. It was puzzling, because he'd never felt the need for company before. Never.

"It is written, 'Without companionship even paradise would be boring,' " he told Asar. In preparation for his role as Ali Nazeer, he had boned up on Middle Eastern culture by perusing a list of Arab proverbs he'd found on the Internet. It was coming in handy.

It was not only with Asar that X forged a bond. Now a hero to his fellow prisoners, he was surrounded by followers who hung on his every word.

They told him stories of their suffering in wars and mistreatment by their captors. They asked for his help in settling disputes. They sought his advice about how to deal with problems at home - pushy mother-in-laws, rebellious sons. One asked him how to handle a black-sheep cousin who refused to do his manly duty and volunteer to be a suicide bomber. He was an unemployed ne'er-do-well who could, in the frustrated prisoner's view, at least do that much for the family name.