Leviathan (36 page)

There was more to be said. All sorts of questions had accumulated in my mind, but dawn had come by then, and I was too exhausted to go on. I wanted to ask him about the money (how much
was left, what he was going to do when it ran out); I wanted to know more about his breakup with Lillian Stern; I wanted to ask him about Maria Turner, about Fanny, about the manuscript of
Leviathan
(which he hadn’t even bothered to look at). There were a hundred loose threads, and I figured I had a right to know everything, that he had an obligation to answer all my questions. But I didn’t push him to continue. We would talk about those things over breakfast, I told myself, but now it was time for bed.

When I woke up later that morning, Sachs’s car was gone. I assumed he had driven to the store and would be coming back any minute, but after waiting over an hour for him to return, I began to lose hope. I didn’t want to believe that he had left without saying good-bye, and yet I knew that anything was possible. He had run out on others before, and why should I think he would act any differently with me? First Fanny, then Maria Turner, then Lillian Stern. Perhaps I was only the latest in a long line of silent departures, another person he had crossed off his list.

At twelve thirty, I went over to the studio to sit down with my book. I didn’t know what else to do, and rather than go on waiting outside, feeling more and more ridiculous as I stood there listening for the sound of Sachs’s car, I thought it might help to distract myself with some work. That was when I found his letter. He had placed it on top of my manuscript, and I saw it the moment I sat down at my desk.

“I’m sorry to sneak out on you like this,” it began, “but I think we’ve covered almost everything. If I stayed around any longer, it would only cause trouble. You’d try to talk me out of what I’m doing (because you’re my friend, because you’d see that as your responsibility to me as a friend), and I don’t want to fight with you, I don’t have the stomach for arguments now. Whatever you might think of me,
I’m grateful to you for listening. The story needed to be told, and better to you than to anyone else. If and when the time comes, you’ll know how to tell it to others, you’ll make them understand what this business is all about. Your books prove that, and when everything is said and done, you’re the only person I can count on. You’ve gone so much farther than I ever did, Peter. I admire you for your innocence, for the way you’ve stuck to this one thing for your whole life. My problem was that I could never believe in it. I always wanted something else, but I never knew what it was. Now I know. After all the horrible things that happened, I’ve finally found something to believe in. That’s all that matters to me anymore. Sticking with this one thing. Please don’t blame me for it—and above all, don’t feel sorry for me. I’m fine. I’ve never been better. I’m going to keep on giving them hell for as long as I can. The next time you read about the Phantom of Liberty, I hope it gives you a good laugh. Onward and upward, old man. I’ll see you in the funny papers. Ben.”

I must have read through this note twenty or thirty times. There was nothing else to do, and it took me at least that long to absorb the shock of his departure. The first few readings left me feeling hurt, angry at him for absconding when my back was turned. But then, very slowly, as I went through the letter again, I grudgingly began to admit to myself that Sachs had been right. The next conversation would have been more difficult than the others. It was true that I had been planning to confront him, that I had made up my mind to do what I could to talk him out of continuing. He had sensed that, I suppose, and rather than allow any bitterness to develop between us, he had left. I couldn’t really blame him for it. He had wanted our friendship to survive, and since he knew this visit could be the last time we ever saw each other, he hadn’t wanted it to end
badly. That was the purpose of the note. It had brought things to an end without ending them. It had been his way of telling me that he couldn’t say good-bye.

He lived for another ten months, but I never heard from him again. The Phantom of Liberty struck twice during that period—once in Virginia and once in Utah—but I didn’t laugh. Now that I knew the story, I couldn’t feel anything but sadness, an immeasurable grief. The world went through extraordinary changes in those ten months. The Berlin Wall was torn down, Havel became president of Czechoslovakia, the Cold War suddenly stopped. But Sachs was still out there, a solitary speck in the American night, hurtling toward his destruction in a stolen car. Wherever he was, I was with him now. I had given him my word to say nothing, and the longer I kept his secret, the less I belonged to myself. God knows where my stubbornness came from, but I never breathed a hint to anyone. Not to Iris, not to Fanny and Charles, not to a living soul. I had taken on the burden of that silence for him, and in the end it nearly crushed me.

I saw Maria Turner in early September, a few days after Iris and I returned to New York. It was a relief to be able to talk to someone about Sachs, but even with her I held back as much as I could. I didn’t even mention that I had seen him—only that he had called and that we had talked on the phone for an hour. It was a grim little dance I danced with Maria that day. I accused her of misguided loyalty, of betraying Sachs by keeping her promise to him, while all along that was precisely what I was doing myself. We had both been let in on the secret, but I knew more than she did, and I wasn’t about to share the particulars with her. It was enough for her to know that I knew what she knew. She talked quite willingly after that, realizing how futile it would have been to con me. That much was
out in the open now, and I wound up hearing more about her relations with Sachs than Sachs ever told me himself. Among other things, that was the day I first saw the photographs she had taken of him, the so-called “Thursdays with Ben.” Even more importantly, I also learned that Maria had seen Lillian Stern in Berkeley the year before—about six months after Sachs had left. According to what Lillian had told her, Ben had been back to visit twice. That contradicted what he had told me, but when I pointed out the discrepancy to Maria, she only shrugged. “Lillian’s not the only person who lies,” she said. “You know that as well as I do. After what those two did to each other, all bets are off.”

“I’m not saying that Ben couldn’t lie,” I answered. “I just don’t understand why he would.”

“It seems that he made certain threats. Maybe he was too embarrassed to tell you about them.”

“Threats?”

“Lillian said that he threatened to kidnap her daughter.”

“And why on earth would he do that?”

“Apparently, he didn’t like the way she was raising Maria. He said that she was a bad influence on her, that the kid deserved a chance to grow up in healthy surroundings. He took the high moral ground, and it turned into a nasty scene.”

“That doesn’t sound like Ben.”

“Maybe not, but Lillian was scared enough to do something about it. After Ben’s second visit, she put Maria on a plane and sent her to her mother’s house back East. The little girl’s been living there ever since.”

“Maybe Lillian had her own reasons for wanting to get rid of her.”

“Anything is possible. I’m just telling you what she told me.”

“What about the money he gave her? Did she ever spend it?”

“No. At least not on herself. She told me that she put it in a trust fund for Maria.”

“I wonder if Ben ever told her where it came from. I’m not too clear on that point, and it might have made a difference.”

“I’m not sure. But a more interesting question is to ask where Dimaggio got the money in the first place. It was a phenomenal amount of cash for him to be carrying around.”

“Ben thought it was stolen. At least at first. Then he thought it might have been given to Dimaggio by some political organization. If not the Children of the Planet, then someone else. Terrorists, for example. The PLO, the IRA, any one of a dozen groups. He figured that Dimaggio might have been connected to people like that.”

“Lillian has her own opinion about what Dimaggio was up to.”

“I’m sure she does.”

“Yeah, well, it’s kind of interesting once you start to think about it. In her view, Dimaggio was working as an undercover agent for the government. The CIA, the FBI, one of those cloak-and-dagger gangs. She thinks it started when he was a soldier in Vietnam. That they signed him up over there and paid his way through college and graduate school. To give him the right credentials.”

“You mean he was a plant? An agent provocateur?”

“That’s what Lillian thinks.”

“It sounds pretty farfetched to me.”

“Of course it does. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

“Does she have proof, or is she just making a wild guess?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t ask her. We didn’t really talk about it much.”

“Why don’t you ask her now?”

“We’re not exactly on speaking terms anymore.”

“Oh?”

“It was a rocky visit, and I haven’t been in touch with her since last year.”

“You had a falling out.”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“About Ben, I suppose. You’re still stuck on him, aren’t you? It must have been hard listening to your friend tell you how he’d fallen in love with her.”

Maria suddenly turned her head away from me, and I knew I was right. But she was too proud to admit anything, and a moment later she had composed herself sufficiently to look back in my direction. She flashed me a tough, ironic smile. “You’re the only man I’ve ever loved, Chiquita,” she said. “But then you went off and got married on me, didn’t you? When a girl’s heart is broken, she’s gotta do what she’s gotta do.”

I managed to talk her into giving me Lillian’s address and telephone number. A new book of mine was coming out in October, and my publisher had arranged for me to give readings in a number of cities around the country. San Francisco was the last stop on the tour, and it wouldn’t have made sense to go there without trying to meet Lillian. I had no idea if she knew where Sachs was or not (and even if she did, it wasn’t certain she would tell me), but I figured we would have a lot to talk about anyway. If nothing else, I wanted to set eyes on her myself, to be able to form my own opinion of who she was. Everything I knew about her had come from either Sachs or Maria, and she was too important a figure for me to rely on their accounts. I called the day after I got her number from Maria. She wasn’t in, but I left a message on her machine, and much to my surprise, she called back the next afternoon. It was a brief but friendly conversation. She knew who I was, she said. Ben had talked to her about me, and he had even given her one of my novels, which she
confessed she hadn’t had time to read. I didn’t dare to ask her any questions on the phone. It was enough to have made contact with her, and so I got right to the point, asking her if she would be willing to see me when I was in the Bay Area at the end of October. She hesitated for a moment, but when I told her how much I was counting on it, she gave in. Call me after you check into your hotel, she said, and we’ll have a drink together somewhere. It was that simple. She had an interesting voice, I thought, somewhat throaty and deep, and I liked the sound of it. If she had ever made it as an actress, it was the kind of voice that people would have remembered.

The promise of that meeting kept me going for the next month and a half. When the earthquake hit San Francisco in early October, my first thought was to wonder if my visit would have to be canceled. I’m ashamed of my heartlessness now, but at the time I scarcely even noticed it. Collapsed highways, burning buildings, crushed and mangled bodies—these disasters meant nothing to me except insofar as they could prevent me from talking to Lillian Stern. Fortunately, the theater where I had been booked to do the reading escaped without damage, and the trip went off as planned. After checking into the hotel, I went straight to my room and called the house in Berkeley. A woman with an unfamiliar voice answered the phone. When I asked to speak to Lillian Stern, she told me that Lillian was gone, that she’d left for Chicago three days after the earthquake. When was she coming back? I asked. The woman didn’t know. You mean to say the earthquake frightened her that much? I said. Oh no, the woman said, Lillian had been planning to leave before it happened. She had run the ad to sublet her house in early September. What about a forwarding address? I asked. She didn’t have one, the woman said, she paid her rent directly to the landlord. Well, I said, struggling to overcome my disappointment, if you ever hear from her, I’d appreciate it if you let me know. Before hanging up, I gave her my
number in New York. Call me collect, I said, any time day or night.

I understood then how thoroughly Lillian had tricked me. She had known she would be gone before I ever got there—which meant that she had never had any intention of keeping our appointment. I cursed myself for my gullibility, for the time and hope I had squandered. Just to make sure, I checked with Chicago information, but there was no listing for Lillian Stern. When I called Maria Turner in New York and asked her for Lillian’s mother’s address, she told me she’d been out of touch with Mrs. Stern for years and had no idea where she lived. The trail had suddenly gone cold. Lillian was just as lost to me now as Sachs was, and I couldn’t even imagine how to begin looking for her. If there was any consolation in her disappearance, it came from the word
Chicago
. There had to have been a reason why she didn’t want to talk to me, and I prayed it was because she was trying to protect Sachs. If that were so, then maybe they were on better terms than I had been led to believe. Or maybe the situation had improved after his visit to Vermont. What if he had driven out to California and talked her into running off with him? He had told me that he kept an apartment in Chicago, and Lillian had told her tenant that she was moving to Chicago. Was it a coincidence, or had one or both of them been lying? I couldn’t even guess, but for Sachs’s sake I hoped they were together now, living some mad outlaw existence as he crisscrossed the country, furtively plotting his next move. The Phantom of Liberty and his moll. If nothing else, he wouldn’t have been alone then, and I preferred to imagine him with her than alone, preferred to imagine any life other than the one he had described to me. If Lillian was as fearless as he had said she was, then maybe she was with him, maybe she was wild enough to have done it.