Leviathan (35 page)

“I can’t begin to convey the power of my happiness to you. I felt free again, utterly liberated by my decision. It wasn’t that I wanted to leave Lillian and Maria, but there were more important things to take care of now, and once I understood that, all the bitterness and suffering of the past month just melted out of my heart. I was no longer bewitched. I felt inspired, invigorated, cleansed. Almost like a man who had found religion. Like a man who had heard the call. The unfinished business of my life suddenly ceased to matter. I was ready to march out into the wilderness and spread the word, ready to begin all over again.

“Looking back on it now, I see how pointless it was to have pinned my hopes on Lillian. Going out there was a crazy thing to do, an act of desperation. It might have worked if I hadn’t fallen in love with her, but once that happened, the venture was doomed to fail. I had put her in an impossible bind, and she didn’t know how to cope with it. She wanted the money, and she didn’t want it. It made her greedy, and her greed humiliated her. She wanted me to
love her, and she hated herself for loving me back. I don’t blame her for putting me through hell anymore. She’s a wild person, Lillian. Not just beautiful, you understand, but incandescent. Fearless, out of control, ready for anything—and she never had a chance to be who she was with me.

“In the end, the remarkable thing wasn’t that I left, but that I managed to stay as long as I did. The circumstances were so peculiar, so dangerous and unsettling, that I think they began to excite her. That’s what sucked her in: not me, but the excitement of my being there, the darkness I represented. The situation was fraught with all sorts of romantic possibilities, and after a while she couldn’t resist them anymore, she let herself go a lot farther than she ever intended to. Not unlike the weird and implausible way she had met Dimaggio. That had led to marriage. In my case, it led to a honeymoon, those two dazzling weeks when nothing could go wrong for us. It doesn’t matter what happened after that. We couldn’t have sustained it, and sooner or later she would have started running around again, she would have slipped back into her old life. But while it lasted, I don’t think there’s any question that she was in love with me. Whenever I begin to doubt it, I have only to remember the proof. She could have turned me in to the police, and she didn’t. Even after I told her the money had run out. Even after I was gone. If nothing else, that proves that I meant something to her. It proves that everything that happened to me in Berkeley really happened.

“But no regrets. Not anymore at least. It’s all behind me—over and done with, ancient history. The hard part was having to leave the little girl. I didn’t think it would affect me, but I missed her for a long time, much more than I ever missed Lillian. Whenever I happened to be driving west, I’d start to think about going all the way to California—just to look her up and pay her a visit. But I never did. I was afraid of what might happen if I saw Lillian again,
so I kept myself clear of California, and I haven’t set foot in the state since the morning I left. Eighteen, nineteen months ago. By now, Maria’s probably forgotten who I am. At one time, before things fell apart with Lillian, I used to think I’d wind up adopting her, that she would actually become my daughter. It would have been good for her, I think, good for both of us, but it’s too late to dream about that now. I don’t suppose I was ever meant to be a father. It didn’t work with Fanny, and it didn’t work with Lillian. Little seeds. Little eggs and seeds. You get just so many chances, and then life takes hold of you, and then you’re off on your own forever. I’ve become who I am now, and there’s no going back. This is it, Peter. For as long as I make it last, this is it.”

He was beginning to ramble. The sun was already up by then, and a thousand birds were singing in the trees: larks, finches, warblers, the morning chorus at full strength. Sachs had been talking for so many hours, he scarcely knew what he was saying anymore. As the light streamed through the windows, I could see that his eyes were about to close on him. We can go on talking later, I said. If you don’t lie down and get some sleep, you’re probably going to black out, and I’m not sure I’m strong enough to carry you over to the house.

I put him in one of the empty bedrooms on the second floor, pulled down the shades, and then tiptoed back to my own room. I doubted that I would be able to sleep. There were too many things to digest, too many images churning in my mind, but the moment my head touched the pillow, I began to lose consciousness. I felt as if I’d been clubbed, as if my skull had been crushed by a stone. Some stories are too terrible, perhaps, and the only way to let them into
you is to escape, to turn your back on them and steal off into the darkness.

I woke up at three in the afternoon. Sachs slept on for another two or two and a half hours, and in the interval I puttered around the yard, staying out of the house so as not to disturb him. Sleep had done nothing for me. I was still too numb to think, and if I managed to keep myself busy during those hours, it was only by planning out the menu for dinner that night. I struggled over every decision, weighing each pro and con as if the fate of the world depended on it: whether to cook the chicken in the oven or on the grill, whether to serve rice or potatoes, whether there was enough wine left in the cupboard. It’s odd how vividly all this comes back to me now. Sachs had just told me how he had killed a man, how he had spent the past two years roaming the country as a fugitive, and all I could think about was what to prepare for dinner. It was as if I needed to pretend that life still consisted of such mundane particulars. But that was only because I knew it didn’t.

We stayed up late again that night, talking through dinner and on into the early hours of the morning. We were outside this time, sitting in the same Adirondack chairs we had sat in on so many other nights over the years: two disembodied voices in the dark, invisible to each other, seeing nothing except when one of us struck a match and our faces flared up briefly from the shadows. I remember the glowing ends of cigars, the fireflies pulsing in the bushes, an enormous sky of stars overhead—the same things I remember from so many other nights in the past. That helped to keep me calm, I think, but even more than the setting there was Sachs himself. The long sleep had refreshed him, and right from the start he was in full command of the conversation. There was no uncertainty in his voice, nothing to make me feel I couldn’t trust him. That was the night he told
me about the Phantom of Liberty, and at no point did he sound like a man confessing to a crime. He was proud of what he had done, unshakably at peace with himself, and he talked with the assurance of an artist who knows he has just created his most important work.

It was a long, incredible tale, a saga of journeys and disguises, of lulls and frenzies and last-minute escapes. Until I heard it from Sachs, I never would have guessed how much work went into each explosion: the weeks of planning and preparation, the elaborate, roundabout methods for amassing the materials to construct the bombs, the meticulous alibis and deceptions, the distances that had to be covered. Once he had selected the town, he had to find a way to spend some time there without arousing suspicion. The first step was to concoct an identity and a cover story, and since he was never the same person twice, his powers of invention were constantly put to the test. He always had a different name, as bland and nondescript as he could make it (Ed Smith, Al Goodwin, Jack White, Bill Foster), and from one operation to the next, he did what he could to produce minor alterations in his physical appearance (beardless one time, bearded another, dark-haired in one place, light-haired in the next, wearing glasses or not wearing glasses, dressed in a suit or dressed in work clothes, a set number of variables that he would mix into different combinations for each town). The fundamental challenge, however, was to come up with a reason for being there, a plausible excuse to spend several days in a community where no one knew him. Once he posed as a college professor, a sociologist doing research for a book on small-town American life and values. Another time, he pretended to be on a sentimental journey, an adopted child looking for information about his biological parents. Another time he was a businessman hoping to invest in local commercial property. Another time he was a widower, a man who had lost his wife and children in an auto accident and was thinking about settling in a new town.
Then, almost perversely, once the Phantom had made a name for himself, he showed up in a small Nebraska city as a newspaper reporter, at work on a feature article about the attitudes and opinions of people who lived in places with their own replicas of the Statue of Liberty. What did they think about the bombings? he asked them. And what did the statue mean to them? It was a nerve-shattering experience, he said, but worth every minute.

Early on, he decided that openness was the most useful strategy, the best way to avoid creating the wrong impression. Rather than skulk around and keep himself hidden, he chatted people up, he charmed them, he got them to think of him as an okay kind of guy. This friendliness came naturally to Sachs, and it gave him the breathing room he needed. Once people knew why he was there, they wouldn’t be alarmed to see him strolling through town, and if he happened to pass the site of the statue several times during the course of his walks, no one would pay any attention. Likewise with the tours he made after dark, driving through the shut-up town at two in the morning to familiarize himself with the traffic patterns, to calculate the odds of anyone being in the vicinity when he planted the bomb. He was thinking of moving there, after all, and who could blame him if he wanted to get a feel for the place after the sun went down? He realized that it was a flimsy excuse, but these nocturnal outings were unavoidable, a necessary precaution, for not only did he have to save his own skin, he had to make sure that no one was ever hurt. A bum sleeping at the base of the pedestal, two teenagers necking on the grass, a man out walking his dog in the middle of the night—it would only take a single fragment of flying stone or metal to kill someone, and then the entire cause would be ruined. That was Sachs’s greatest fear, and he went to enormous lengths to guard against accidents. The bombs he built were small, much smaller than he would have liked, and even though it increased the risks, he never
set the timer to go off more than twenty minutes after he had taped the explosives to the crown of the statue. There was nothing to say that someone couldn’t pass by in those twenty minutes, but given the hour, and given the nature of those towns, the chances were slim.

Along with everything else, Sachs gave vast amounts of technical information that night, a crash course in the mechanics of bomb-building. I confess that most of it went straight through me. I have no knack for mechanical things, and my ignorance made it difficult for me to follow what he said. I understood the occasional word, terms like
alarm clock, gunpowder, fuse
, but the rest was incomprehensible to me, a foreign language I couldn’t penetrate. Still, judging from the way he talked, I gathered that a great deal of ingenuity was involved. He didn’t rely on any preestablished formulas, and with the added burden of having to cover his tracks, he took great pains to use only the most homespun materials, to put together his explosives from odds and ends that could be found in any hardware store. It must have been an arduous process, traveling somewhere just to buy a clock, then driving fifty miles down the road to buy a spool of wire, then going somewhere else to buy a package of tape. No purchase was ever larger than twenty dollars, and he was careful to avoid using anything but cash—in every store, in every restaurant, in every broken-down motel. In and out; hello and good-bye. Then he would be gone, as if his body had melted into thin air. It was hard work, but after a year and a half, he hadn’t left a single trace behind him.

He had a cheap apartment on the South Side of Chicago, which he rented under the name of Alexander Berkman, but that was a refuge more than a home, a place to pause between travels, and he spent no more than a third of his time there. Just thinking about his life made me uncomfortable. The constant movement, the pressure of always pretending to be someone else, the loneliness—but Sachs
shrugged off my qualms as if they were of no importance. He was too preoccupied, he said, too absorbed by what he was doing to think about such things. If he had created any problem for himself, it was only how to cope with success. With the Phantom’s reputation steadily increasing, it had become more and more difficult to find any statues to attack. Most of them were guarded now, and whereas in the beginning it had taken him anywhere from one to three weeks to accomplish his missions, the average time had grown to nearly two and a half months. Earlier that summer, he had been forced to abandon a project at the last minute, and several others had been postponed—put off until winter, when the cold temperatures would no doubt slacken the determination of the all-night guards. But still, for every obstacle that arose, there was a compensating benefit, another sign that proved how far his influence had spread. In the past few months, the Phantom of Liberty had been the subject of editorials and sermons. He had been discussed on call-in radio shows, caricatured in political cartoons, excoriated as a menace to society, extolled as a man of the people. Phantom of Liberty T-shirts and buttons were on sale in novelty shops, jokes had begun to circulate, and just last month two strippers in Chicago had presented an act in which the Statue of Liberty was gradually disrobed and then seduced by the Phantom. He was making a mark, he said, a much greater mark than he had ever thought possible. As long as he could keep it up, he was willing to face any inconvenience, to gut his way through any hardship. It was the kind of thing a fanatic would say, I later realized, an admission that he didn’t need a life of his own anymore, but he spoke with such happiness, such enthusiasm and lack of doubt, that I scarcely understood the implication of those words at the time.