The Company You Keep (12 page)

Ben, listening hard, answered slowly. “Okay. They traded a marijuana dealer for one of the longest-standing federal fugitives in America. What’s wrong with that?”

“From my point of view? Nothing. They’ve virtually freed my client. From the point of view of the American taxpayer? Plenty.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because if you believe that the greatest crimes should get the greatest weight of law enforcement, then you have to ask why they let a serious, known criminal free in order to arrest a minor accomplice in a quarter-century-old crime who’s probably been leading an exemplary life ever since.”

Ben nodded understanding, and when he answered, I had the feeling that he had been in control of this conversation all along.

“Is that all she is? I thought she was a dangerous accomplice in a violent armed robbery who had eluded the law for a quarter century.”

“Sure, kid. That’s what they want to you think.”

The kid went on without a break, his voice suddenly very tired. “But, of course, if I understood the context, I’d know that it was different.”

I didn’t answer that one. A slippery little fellow, this. And frighteningly good at his job. I tried one more time to get in front of him.

“Okey-doke, Benny. So I won’t tell you about the ’68 Democratic National Convention, I won’t tell you about Woodstock, and I won’t tell you about Kent State. Why don’t you fuck off now?”

He smiled. A wide, intelligent smile. “You mind if I ask the question I actually came to ask? Or does your support of the Bill of Rights end when it’s you in the hot seat?”

I couldn’t help but smile back. “Go ahead.”

“So, why didn’t you represent Solarz?” Without asking, he lit a cigarette.

Jesus. Thank God he was smoking, because it gave me something to do. I went over to the window and opened it. Then I walked back to
Ben, took the cigarette out of his fingers, and threw it out the window. Then I returned to the desk.

“I felt that Solarz deserves a defense that I can’t give her.”

“How’s that?”

I hesitated. “I’m not ready to answer that question at this time.”

“No? How interesting. Well, do you believe she is guilty in the Bank of Michigan robbery?”

“What I believe isn’t the issue.”

“Um-hmm.” Ben seemed—seemed—satisfied with the answer. But he also seemed as if it wasn’t entirely what he cared about. “Tell me, Mr. Grant. How did Solarz know you?”

“She didn’t. Only by reputation.”

“Did you know who she was?”

A tiny pause. “Sure.”

“How?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“Really? How old are you?”

The question surprised me. “Thirty-nine.”

“Thirty-nine.” Ben calculated ostentatiously, eyes up at the ceiling. “Then the Bank of Michigan robbery took place when you were, what, seventeen?”

“I guess.” I answered slowly.

“And you remember it?”

Now I raised a single eyebrow. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Really? Well, let’s see. Iran-Contra happened when you were, what, fifteen? Ever hear of Oliver North?”

“Mr. Grant. There’s a difference between a crime that was a pimple on the ass of the sixties and Oliver North’s constitutional crisis. I studied Iran-Contra in college.”

“I don’t see that at all, Benny.” I made my voice sound very, very reasonable, rather than pissed off. “In the seventies, for the second time since 1776, white Americans defending the ideals of democracy took up arms against our government. That might have slipped by in your education. It didn’t in mine.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I did not seem to have impressed him with the point. “Thomas Jefferson didn’t fund the revolution by writing home to Daddy and Mommy in Larchmont, and neither did John Brown. It didn’t slip by me at all.”

“Well, if you want to argue the antiwar movement, I’m all yours.”

Oddly, that seemed to be precisely what the boy wanted to argue. “What were you doing during it?”

I narrowed my eyes, not at all sure I believed we were actually having this conversation. “Why is this your business?”

“Why is it a secret?”

“There’s no secret. I’m from Bakersfield, California. I went to the University of Chicago, Yale University Law School, and came up here to practice. The war ended in ’75, which was my freshman year of college.”

I had the feeling that this guy knew, already, most of what he was hearing. “That’s when you met your wife?”

“Yeah. I met Julia Montgomery at the U of C. She was there because of the Steppenwolf Theater. Her father had just been elected senator from New York State. He was very, very good to me. He helped me through my college, then law school. It was incredibly generous.”

“He’s valued at seven billion dollars.” Ben’s voice went dry once again.

“Today. Doubt that he had more than half of that, in those days.” I smiled, not my most, but perhaps my second most disarming smile. “It was still a wonderful thing to do. Changed my life.”

“Though, of course, it did give his daughter’s foundation a perfect employee.”

I shrugged. “If you want to put it that way, I can’t stop you. Myself, I loved him.”

“Uh-huh. What about your own parents?”

“My parents died in a car crash when I was a baby.”

“Okay. Then Julia left you in 1994, and moved to her father’s place in England.”

I paused. Then I shook my head. “I have no comment about my wife, about her life, about where she is now.”

Now the boy let a little bit of dead air sit between us before asking, “Had any contact ever with Mimi Lurie?”

“What?” My voice rose.

“Mimi Lurie. Sharon Solarz’s partner.”

“I know who she is. Of course I’ve had no contact with her.”

“Jason Sinai?”

“Nope.”

“Any idea where they are?”

“Oh, fuck off Benny, would you?”

He smiled suddenly and switched topics.

“What’s going to happen to Sharon Solarz?”

“She’s going to be sentenced to many, many years in jail.”

“And what do you think should happen?”

“That’s up to the judge, isn’t it?”

“Oh, come on, Mr. Grant. I know you think she’s some kind of hero.”

“For participating in a bank robbery where a guard was killed? Come off it. I doubt even she thinks she’s a hero.”

Now he shook his head, emphatically, and for the first time I had the feeling I was seeing him speak honestly. “Oh, I don’t believe that at all. A hell of a lot of people had a lot of sympathy for those guys, in the days. A hell of a lot of people’ll fall over themselves to prove they blew a joint with Weatherman in San Francisco when they were underground. Sharon, Mimi, Jason: good revolutionaries fooled by a bad person, that’s what people like you think.”

I interrupted. “How do you know all this?”

The question surprised him. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“Kind of strange, a kid your age so interested in an event that was over twenty-five years ago.”

“Hey, you’re the one with the bullshit about Weatherman and 1776.”

“Yah.” I nodded. “Only, Sharon Solarz wasn’t in Weather. Not during the Bank of Michigan robbery, anyway.”

“Weather, MDB, BLA.” Ben let contempt into his voice. “May 19th Collective. What’s the difference?”

“All the difference in the world. No one in Weather has ever been convicted, so far, of killing anyone, for one thing—except themselves. Nor did they ever practice violence against people, only property.”

“What about the Army Math bombing? Kids who blew up that lab at the University of Wisconsin?”

“Wasn’t Weather. Was independents. But that’s beside the point.”

“Which is?”

“Which is that you’re stereotyping me. You’re trying to associate me with a kind of radicalism I had nothing to do with. I’m a lefty lawyer today, sure, but I was a child in 1974—we already established that—and I was in the mainstream of American politics, not the revolutionary fringe. Please don’t interrupt.”

Ben had been trying to talk, but now he stopped. “Moreover, you’re drawing me into an argument that’s not worth having. That was then. This is now. There are real battles to fight, now, today. There’s the RRA transfer station on Route 32. Do you know the Empire-Besicort recycling plant proposal in Saugerties calls for drawing ten
million
gallons of water out of the Esopus
per day
and raising its temperature a full degree? And all up and down this county there are people, in the system, with constitutional rights being stomped on. See, that’s what you have to understand. I don’t want to talk about the battles of thirty years ago, I want to talk about the battles of today. And that’s why I turned down Sharon Solarz. She needed a lawyer who did want to fight that fight, and that was Gilly Morrealle. Get it?”

“I guess.”

Standing now, suddenly, I walked to the door. “Enough. I’m due in court. Go away now, Benny. Mikey’ll see you out. Mikey”—As I walked out, I spoke in a stage voice to Mike—“come watch this man so he doesn’t steal any office supplies.”

3.

Outside, across the sun-flooded street, I waited for a moment in a doorway to see Benny leave. When at last he did, I called up to the office on my cell phone while I began to walk toward court.

“Mikey, Jim. What did you and this Schulberg cat talk about?”

“Talk about? When?” Mike sounded truly surprised by the question.

“Before I came in this morning.”

“Nothing. In particular.”

“Mi-
key
.” I used my slow-speak-for-idiots voice. Come to think of it, I learned that voice from you, Iz.
“Dad
-ee.
Did you or did you
not
buy Fig Newtons?”
“Did he or did he
not
ask you any questions?”

“Yes.” Mikey had gone defensive now, and committed himself to nothing more.

“Were the questions about me?”

“Yes.”

“Could you characterize them as his business or not his business?”

“Well…as an investigative reporter, it’s his business to go outside his business, isn’t it? Fourth estate? First Amendment? All those little things you’re constantly going to court about?”

I know Mikey, and when he gets mad, he can be pretty cutting. But I managed to keep my tone even.

“Would you consider telling me what some of his questions were?”

“Public record stuff. Where you come from, where you went to school, what you do with yourself.”

“And you told him?”

“Let’s see—where you come from, where you went to school, what you do with yourself.”

“I see. Hey, Mikey? You ever speak to a reporter about me again, and you’re fired.”

“Hey, Mr. Grant? Go to hell.”

My cell gave that horrid beep it gives when the line goes dead.

I wondered if Kunstler’s assistants spoke to him like this.

And while I wondered that, I saw myself surrounded by merciless young men: efficient, idealistic, bloodless young men who had no idea the damage they were going to do in the name of their ideals.

And yet I had to admit to myself that if anything I’d ever believed in was worth anything—which, right that moment, I rather doubted—I could not criticize them for it.

Head down, I walked slowly to court, pinching my lip and thinking.

When I got there, it took me several long minutes, standing in the lobby, looking at the floor, to remember why I’d come.

4.

So I got my hit-and-run defendant dismissed, which may have satisfied the Constitution but earned me no friends at all. Afterward I hung around the courthouse, wasting some time. A couple lawyers made some reference to the
Times
article—Norman Bailey, who was helping Sharon Naylor buy a large portion of the Adirondacks with her Enron stock; Wayne Curry, who was doing a title search on a packet of land off Route 23C—but neither of them cared too much. Chances are, they believed that Sharon Solarz had in fact come to find me to negotiate her surrender—why not? I had handled First Amendment cases, labor cases, and was well known to have worked hand in glove with the ACLU on capital cases. My father-in-law was Bobby Montgomery, the third in what William Buckley once called the “Tristate Troika” with Bob Torricelli and Joe Lieberman. My soon-to-be ex-wife was always inviting people like Paul Newman up to her Woodstock home, or Katrina van den Heuvel, or Alec Baldwin. And Hillary Clinton had twice asked me to meetings with her committee exploring a run for the New York State Senate, which up in the Saugerties courthouse passes for very lefty indeed.

Mostly, however, my colleagues didn’t care: the more work I took on for free, the less was assigned to their pro bono dockets by the court, and the more they could focus on getting rich, which, in the nineties, anyone with an opposable thumb could do. Bailey said to me, in passing, in this syrupy voice with his eyes half shut as if he were stoned, “Like, Sharon Solarz, wow man. Miss Days of Rage herself. That’s some far-out heavy shit.” And Curry said, hey, if the Hollywood Radical Chic was footing the bill, could he sit in as cocounsel? “Cause ah got to git me a new telescopic .22 and git my pickup outa hock in time for deer season, boy.” Of course in fact Bailey’s wife was a gynecologist down in New Paltz, and he probably sat on the board of the Metropolitan Opera.

It was not lost on me that when four o’clock rolled around and I knew Molly was warming up for our afternoon run—leaving you with your hero, Leo—I suddenly found myself too busy to go: even running
with Molly was a pensive activity, and I found myself entirely unwilling to think. Nor did I have to: not until that evening, after I had picked you up and fed you, played with you, gotten you to bed, cleaned the dinner dishes, and swept the kitchen floor, and put on the laundry, and paid a couple bills, and watched
Ally McBeal
, which only tragedy on the international level could make me miss, did I have to face my thoughts. Then, sneaking a can of Coke from its constantly shifting hiding place—always just one step ahead of your search—I turned on the computer and found that without my having to ask, Mikey had done research on Schulberg and e-mailed me the results, and the time stamp on the e-mail showed that the poor guy had been in the office till 10:30.

Ben had been at the
Times
for a year. Originally, he was from New York, where he’d attended some fairly fancy private schools. At the
Times
he had been promoted three times but was considered, Mikey’s friend Andrew told him, an oddball: solitary and moody. Mikey had included the Nexis URL of Ben’s major stories, all of which were muckraking: a shabbily built school in Margaretville, an iffy land sale by a town alderman in Schuylerville, Medicaid fraud in Hudson.