The opening of John Fremont's Comedy of Terror
Chapter 1
“We are inevitably at the mercy of luck.”
—Nicholas Rescher
Joe Benton did not know he was suspected of terrorism. Benton was a demographer, a statistician, employed by Democratic Congressman Zack Powers, an African American who’d won gold at the XXV Olympiad in Barcelona when Joe was in high school.
Since he was considering running for Senate, Congressman Powers wanted to know what issues his constituents considered important.
“Tough question,” Joe said to Wally Aronson when he dropped his Volvo off at his mechanic’s repair shop and mentioned the congressman’s concerns. “Most people think more about sex and religion than politics.”
Wally did not find this surprising. “I think about sex and religion a lot,” he said.
Benton winked. “That just goes to prove you’re not unique.”
Aronson smiled through crooked teeth. “In God’s eyes, we’re all unique.” He stuck a dirty finger in his ear and vibrated it. “I believe God has a purpose for all of us. I just don’t know what mine is.”
Most Christians believe God takes a personal interest in their lives. Like Santa, He knows if you’ve been bad or good… Joe thought it kind of spooky to regard God as head of celestial intelligence, but that’s not what got the FBI to thinking Joe was not a patriot. They’d had Walter Aronson on their radar since his release from prison two years earlier.
Joe Benton was more comfortable around numbers than around politicians or priests. And despite a busted hand that never quite healed properly, Wally Aronson was more comfortable around cars than around cops or musicians. He complained about both.
“Doesn’t your god have more important things to do than listen to you whine?” Joe teased.
“Like what?” Wally asked as he peered under the hood of Benton’s Volvo S80.
“I don’t know; creating new galaxies maybe, or new species, or new weapons of mass destruction.”
Aronson was gaunt and weathered and looked years older than Joe, though they’d been in the same freshman class at Princeton. Wally dropped out in his junior year when Soul Motion’s Forgery made the top ten on the charts, number one in the blues category.
Waving a busted hand that had once caressed a cello, Wally speculated that naughty fantasies might be a form of prayer. “Hindus worship Shiva’s dick,” he said. After wiping his twisted fingers on his blue mechanic’s coveralls, Wally said, “When I envision God, I see Angelina Jolie. What do you have to say to that?”
Joe shrugged. “Sammy’s been running hot.” Sammy was Joe’s Volvo.
Walter Aronson no longer cared about fame and fortune. He just wanted to live forever. As for Joe, he wanted Sammy ready by five.
Wally was a loser. Bad luck shadowed him, poised to thwart his every endeavor. By contrast, Joe was lucky—some might say he was blessed. Joe wouldn’t say that; he was not a believer; he was a liberal and an agnostic, but along with those of unquestioned faith, he accepted the possibility of life being controlled by a force outside his ken. Whatever that force, call it coincidence, call it chance, call it luck, call it divine intervention, red lights seemed to turn green at his approach, cabs were always nearby when he needed one, and he could usually find a place to park on the streets of Brooklyn.
A lucky statistician is an oxymoron, but luck laughs at odds. Probabilities get tossed out the window. Although statistics fascinated Joe, he was not a heartless person. He was a good husband and father, and he earned a decent living. He was average in height and build, slightly above average in looks, but he was not content. Like Wally, he felt something was missing. Joe did not know what that might be, but it had nothing to do with luck or faith.
It pleased him, of course, when he won a Sierra Alpine Spa in a lottery to benefit cancer research. The spa was the deluxe model with seventy-six jets, embedded lights, and a wraparound sound system, fully installed. Then Congressman Powers dropped by the district office and presented his aide with free tickets for a Caribbean cruise (all expenses paid, excluding gratuities and port taxes).
When Powers removed the tickets from his attaché case, he inadvertently spilled a pair of black lace panties on the floor. Esmeralda the receptionist looked away as Zack scooped them up. “Good thing I’m not married,” he laughed.
“I don’t,” Joe said, “I mean, that is—” He took a breath. “I don’t know what to say. About the cruise, that is.”
“Try, ‘thank you.’ That usually works.” Zack pounded him on the shoulder. “You need a vacation, my man. You and—?”
“Evelyn.”
“Right. Evelyn.”
“She’s my wife.”
“You can take someone else’s wife if you’ve a mind to,” the congressman laughed.
Joe hardly listened to the rest, something to do with the approaching departure date. He was thinking how a cruise would be good for his marriage. Evelyn was still grieving the loss of their daughter.
Joe went to work for Zack Powers after graduate school. He was interested in the play of forces, political chess games played in parallel universes, but he had no political aspirations himself, which was a good thing because a liberal agnostic who occasionally drinks too much doesn’t stand much of a chance in the political arena.
The first few years of work and marriage were happy times, fun times for the Bentons, but then their six-year-old daughter Alison was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, rare in children under fifteen. In time, Joe grew disillusioned with medicine as well as politics. He knew that political decisions rarely arose from ideals, but he had not anticipated the refined rapacity of the two-party system or the inadequacies of medical science.
Zack Powers was a handsome, charismatic African American of taste and distinction who maintained his mother’s apartment in Brooklyn Heights and visited the district office on weekends, usually for ribbon-cutting ceremonies. He was fond of partying and, according to the Brooklyn Observer, was a frequent man about town.
A moderate in a district of old Jews, older Italians, wealthy Presbyterians, middle-class Blacks, and a potpourri of poor immigrants, Zack was trim and fit. Stroking his muscular abs, he refused the slice of birthday cake Esmeralda offered him. “Gracias, señorita,” he said. “I had lunch on the plane.” Esmeralda licked her lips, but whether she was looking at the cake on the tray or the congressman on the other side of it was hard to tell.
Joe Benton flipped through the papers Zack gave him and saw that Queen of the Seas was scheduled to sail in four days. “I can’t possibly—”
“Yes, you can do this,” Esmeralda said. “You need some vacation.”
“You’ll come back refreshed,” Zack agreed, “with greater enthusiasm for 1097.”
HR-1097, the Mosque Indexing Bill, was the sophomore congressman’s first attempt at major legislation. It authorized the closure of mosques in times of national emergencies. As a nonbeliever, the closing of houses of worship set off no alarms for Joe, but he thought it unfair to single out one form of idolatry. “There are thousands of Muslims in the district,” he told the congressman.
“How many of them are terrorists?”
Joe swallowed. “Probably none.”
“Muslims vote, right?” Looking somewhat consternated, Powers shared his thoughts with his staff. “If they’re citizens, they can vote. How many are we talking about here?”
“Muslims?”
“Voters,” Zack said impatiently. “From the Middle East. How old are you?”
“I’ll be three-three tomorrow,” Joe sighed.
The cake tray exhausted, the rest of the staff resumed their office chores.
The congressman looked the demographer up and down. “You need to work out more.” Zack snapped a punch at his aide’s shoulder. Joe flinched and Zack laughed. “A vacation will do you beaucoup good, champ. Get the numbers to me before you leave, okay?”
“What numbers?”
“What were we talking about?”
“Voters?”
“Muslims, Joe. Muslim voters in my district. Do I have to spell it out for you?”
He didn’t. Initiating a computer search, Benton was able to inform the congressman before he left that there were more than a million Arab Americans in the United States and that two-thirds were Christian. “There are more than three million Muslims in the US, almost half of them African Americans.”
That brought a smile to the congressman’s handsome brown face. “I knew one played for Fordham,” he recollected. “Rashad Something. Muslims are weird. Did you know that in Lebanon, men are legally allowed to have sex with animals, but the animals must be female. Rashad told me that.”
“I didn’t know that,” Joe said. “Did you know that in Bahrain, “a male doctor may only examine a woman’s genitals through a mirror.”
“I’ll remember that. Get me the numbers, Joe.”
“Right. Numbers are my forte.”
“You don’t look forty.”
“I’ll be thirty-three,” Joe said, aggrieved.
“That was a joke, champ.” Zack Powers was a clean-shaven, coffee-colored man who wore expensive suits and open-collar shirts. White voters liked him because he was a black man with white sensibilities. Black voters liked him because he was black. What the congressman liked was to be photographed at fancy gatherings and galas. He looked good in hard hats and baseball caps. The head beneath the hat housed a brain softened by inactivity. “One more thing before you go, champ. I need to know how 1097 is polling.” He slapped his aide’s shoulder. “HR 1097 is our ticket to the Senate.”
The right hand giveth and the left… “There’s no way I can collate and analyze that kind of data by Tuesday.” Joe gave him a resigned grimace. “It’s all right. It was a nice thought, though, the cruise and everything.”
“Don’t analyze it; just run the numbers. You can do it. How are the kids?”
“Alison’s dead and Tyler’s working on it,” Joe replied. Their daughter had died the year before. Their adopted son had anger issues.
“Great. Terrific. So, you’ll get the data to me before you go, right?”
“I’ll do my best,” Joe said and left the office in a daze.
“We are inevitably at the mercy of luck.”
—Nicholas Rescher
Joe Benton did not know he was suspected of terrorism. Benton was a demographer, a statistician, employed by Democratic Congressman Zack Powers, an African American who’d won gold at the XXV Olympiad in Barcelona when Joe was in high school.
Since he was considering running for Senate, Congressman Powers wanted to know what issues his constituents considered important.
“Tough question,” Joe said to Wally Aronson when he dropped his Volvo off at his mechanic’s repair shop and mentioned the congressman’s concerns. “Most people think more about sex and religion than politics.”
Wally did not find this surprising. “I think about sex and religion a lot,” he said.
Benton winked. “That just goes to prove you’re not unique.”
Aronson smiled through crooked teeth. “In God’s eyes, we’re all unique.” He stuck a dirty finger in his ear and vibrated it. “I believe God has a purpose for all of us. I just don’t know what mine is.”
Most Christians believe God takes a personal interest in their lives. Like Santa, He knows if you’ve been bad or good… Joe thought it kind of spooky to regard God as head of celestial intelligence, but that’s not what got the FBI to thinking Joe was not a patriot. They’d had Walter Aronson on their radar since his release from prison two years earlier.
Joe Benton was more comfortable around numbers than around politicians or priests. And despite a busted hand that never quite healed properly, Wally Aronson was more comfortable around cars than around cops or musicians. He complained about both.
“Doesn’t your god have more important things to do than listen to you whine?” Joe teased.
“Like what?” Wally asked as he peered under the hood of Benton’s Volvo S80.
“I don’t know; creating new galaxies maybe, or new species, or new weapons of mass destruction.”
Aronson was gaunt and weathered and looked years older than Joe, though they’d been in the same freshman class at Princeton. Wally dropped out in his junior year when Soul Motion’s Forgery made the top ten on the charts, number one in the blues category.
Waving a busted hand that had once caressed a cello, Wally speculated that naughty fantasies might be a form of prayer. “Hindus worship Shiva’s dick,” he said. After wiping his twisted fingers on his blue mechanic’s coveralls, Wally said, “When I envision God, I see Angelina Jolie. What do you have to say to that?”
Joe shrugged. “Sammy’s been running hot.” Sammy was Joe’s Volvo.
Walter Aronson no longer cared about fame and fortune. He just wanted to live forever. As for Joe, he wanted Sammy ready by five.
Wally was a loser. Bad luck shadowed him, poised to thwart his every endeavor. By contrast, Joe was lucky—some might say he was blessed. Joe wouldn’t say that; he was not a believer; he was a liberal and an agnostic, but along with those of unquestioned faith, he accepted the possibility of life being controlled by a force outside his ken. Whatever that force, call it coincidence, call it chance, call it luck, call it divine intervention, red lights seemed to turn green at his approach, cabs were always nearby when he needed one, and he could usually find a place to park on the streets of Brooklyn.
A lucky statistician is an oxymoron, but luck laughs at odds. Probabilities get tossed out the window. Although statistics fascinated Joe, he was not a heartless person. He was a good husband and father, and he earned a decent living. He was average in height and build, slightly above average in looks, but he was not content. Like Wally, he felt something was missing. Joe did not know what that might be, but it had nothing to do with luck or faith.
It pleased him, of course, when he won a Sierra Alpine Spa in a lottery to benefit cancer research. The spa was the deluxe model with seventy-six jets, embedded lights, and a wraparound sound system, fully installed. Then Congressman Powers dropped by the district office and presented his aide with free tickets for a Caribbean cruise (all expenses paid, excluding gratuities and port taxes).
When Powers removed the tickets from his attaché case, he inadvertently spilled a pair of black lace panties on the floor. Esmeralda the receptionist looked away as Zack scooped them up. “Good thing I’m not married,” he laughed.
“I don’t,” Joe said, “I mean, that is—” He took a breath. “I don’t know what to say. About the cruise, that is.”
“Try, ‘thank you.’ That usually works.” Zack pounded him on the shoulder. “You need a vacation, my man. You and—?”
“Evelyn.”
“Right. Evelyn.”
“She’s my wife.”
“You can take someone else’s wife if you’ve a mind to,” the congressman laughed.
Joe hardly listened to the rest, something to do with the approaching departure date. He was thinking how a cruise would be good for his marriage. Evelyn was still grieving the loss of their daughter.
Joe went to work for Zack Powers after graduate school. He was interested in the play of forces, political chess games played in parallel universes, but he had no political aspirations himself, which was a good thing because a liberal agnostic who occasionally drinks too much doesn’t stand much of a chance in the political arena.
The first few years of work and marriage were happy times, fun times for the Bentons, but then their six-year-old daughter Alison was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, rare in children under fifteen. In time, Joe grew disillusioned with medicine as well as politics. He knew that political decisions rarely arose from ideals, but he had not anticipated the refined rapacity of the two-party system or the inadequacies of medical science.
Zack Powers was a handsome, charismatic African American of taste and distinction who maintained his mother’s apartment in Brooklyn Heights and visited the district office on weekends, usually for ribbon-cutting ceremonies. He was fond of partying and, according to the Brooklyn Observer, was a frequent man about town.
A moderate in a district of old Jews, older Italians, wealthy Presbyterians, middle-class Blacks, and a potpourri of poor immigrants, Zack was trim and fit. Stroking his muscular abs, he refused the slice of birthday cake Esmeralda offered him. “Gracias, señorita,” he said. “I had lunch on the plane.” Esmeralda licked her lips, but whether she was looking at the cake on the tray or the congressman on the other side of it was hard to tell.
Joe Benton flipped through the papers Zack gave him and saw that Queen of the Seas was scheduled to sail in four days. “I can’t possibly—”
“Yes, you can do this,” Esmeralda said. “You need some vacation.”
“You’ll come back refreshed,” Zack agreed, “with greater enthusiasm for 1097.”
HR-1097, the Mosque Indexing Bill, was the sophomore congressman’s first attempt at major legislation. It authorized the closure of mosques in times of national emergencies. As a nonbeliever, the closing of houses of worship set off no alarms for Joe, but he thought it unfair to single out one form of idolatry. “There are thousands of Muslims in the district,” he told the congressman.
“How many of them are terrorists?”
Joe swallowed. “Probably none.”
“Muslims vote, right?” Looking somewhat consternated, Powers shared his thoughts with his staff. “If they’re citizens, they can vote. How many are we talking about here?”
“Muslims?”
“Voters,” Zack said impatiently. “From the Middle East. How old are you?”
“I’ll be three-three tomorrow,” Joe sighed.
The cake tray exhausted, the rest of the staff resumed their office chores.
The congressman looked the demographer up and down. “You need to work out more.” Zack snapped a punch at his aide’s shoulder. Joe flinched and Zack laughed. “A vacation will do you beaucoup good, champ. Get the numbers to me before you leave, okay?”
“What numbers?”
“What were we talking about?”
“Voters?”
“Muslims, Joe. Muslim voters in my district. Do I have to spell it out for you?”
He didn’t. Initiating a computer search, Benton was able to inform the congressman before he left that there were more than a million Arab Americans in the United States and that two-thirds were Christian. “There are more than three million Muslims in the US, almost half of them African Americans.”
That brought a smile to the congressman’s handsome brown face. “I knew one played for Fordham,” he recollected. “Rashad Something. Muslims are weird. Did you know that in Lebanon, men are legally allowed to have sex with animals, but the animals must be female. Rashad told me that.”
“I didn’t know that,” Joe said. “Did you know that in Bahrain, “a male doctor may only examine a woman’s genitals through a mirror.”
“I’ll remember that. Get me the numbers, Joe.”
“Right. Numbers are my forte.”
“You don’t look forty.”
“I’ll be thirty-three,” Joe said, aggrieved.
“That was a joke, champ.” Zack Powers was a clean-shaven, coffee-colored man who wore expensive suits and open-collar shirts. White voters liked him because he was a black man with white sensibilities. Black voters liked him because he was black. What the congressman liked was to be photographed at fancy gatherings and galas. He looked good in hard hats and baseball caps. The head beneath the hat housed a brain softened by inactivity. “One more thing before you go, champ. I need to know how 1097 is polling.” He slapped his aide’s shoulder. “HR 1097 is our ticket to the Senate.”
The right hand giveth and the left… “There’s no way I can collate and analyze that kind of data by Tuesday.” Joe gave him a resigned grimace. “It’s all right. It was a nice thought, though, the cruise and everything.”
“Don’t analyze it; just run the numbers. You can do it. How are the kids?”
“Alison’s dead and Tyler’s working on it,” Joe replied. Their daughter had died the year before. Their adopted son had anger issues.
“Great. Terrific. So, you’ll get the data to me before you go, right?”
“I’ll do my best,” Joe said and left the office in a daze.