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the bank to consider remote contingencies. Their improbability did not make them impossible; their unlikelihood would not reduce their expense. And here was the most remote of all contingencies. Or was it? Why had something like this never occurred to him? His imagined contingencies included fights over the cost of maintaining the Garden, or the ordering of the victims, or whether to differentiate the rescue workers’ names from the others, but never this.
    “If you’ll remember, Bob, I was against an open competition, and it was my idea to vet the finalists.”
    “Lot of good that did,” Wilner said. With glum faces and defeated postures, the jurors gathered their possessions and departed, leaving Paul to preside over a congress of crumpled napkins and smeared glassware. Did Muslims ruin whatever they touched? The question, so unfair, startled him, as if someone else had asked it.
    At last he heaved himself from the table and made his way outside,to his black Lincoln Town Car (“Satan’s limousine,” his son Samuel called it). Vladimir glided past the mansion gate into the dead quiet of East End Avenue. A block west, where a thin stream of traffic still flowed, Paul saw some of his jurors standing on different corners, angling for taxis, pretending not to see the others doing the same. He couldn’t offer one a lift without offering all; he wanted the company of none. Vladimir drove on. But the image of his jurors scattering like loose petals came to Paul over the next hours almost as often as Mohammad Khan’s name.

3
    His name was what got him pulled from a security line at LAX as he prepared to fly home to New York. The attack was a week past, the Los Angeles airport all but empty except for the National Guardsmen patrolling. Mo’s bag was taken for a fine-tooth combing while he was quarantined for questioning in a windowless room. The agents’ expressions remained pleasant, free of insinuation that he had done anything wrong. An “informational interview,” they called it.
    “So you say you’re an architect?”
    “An architect, yes.”
    “Do you have any proof?”
    “Proof?”
    “Proof.”
    Mo fished out a business card, ruing that the Gotham font screamed his full name, MOHAMMAD KHAN, although of course the agents, four of them now, already knew it. On the metal school-issue desk between them he unrolled a slim stack of construction plans and began to leaf through them. “These are of the new theater I—we are building in Santa Monica. It’s been written about in the
Los Angeles Times, The Architect’s Newspaper, Metropolis
…” In the corner of the blueprints he pointed out the firm’s name, ROI—recognizable enough, he was sure, to elicit some deference. The agents shrugged and examined the designswith suspicion, as if he were planning to bomb a building that existed only in his imagination.
    “Where were you during the attack?”
    “Here. Los Angeles.” Naked beneath the sheets in his hotel room, the attack a collage of sound—panicky sirens, fissuring broadcasters’ voices, rescue helicopters pureeing the air, the muffle and crush of implosion—from his hotel clock radio. Only when the buildings were gone did he think to turn on the television.
    “Here,” he said again. “Working on the theater.” Working and longing for New York. Southern California was the white dress at the funeral, ill-suited to national tragedy. Its sun and BriteSmiles still gleamed; its deprived bodies and contrived breasts strutted. Even the sunset’s glorious mottle seemed a cinematic mock-up of the fires burning back home.
    Each day brought more proof that the attackers were Muslims, seeking the martyr’s straight shot to paradise—and so Mo braced for suspicion as he returned to the theater under construction. A few days later, as he heard himself say to the contractor, “Would you mind if I suggested an alternate location for that wall chase? Only if it would help,” he realized that the difference