The Company You Keep (15 page)

And then it was light, and I must have slept in the deck chair, because you were standing next to me in your nightdress, your body still warm from sleep, your face artless in its awakening. And I noticed, as I did every morning, that no matter what kind of night I had had, or what kind of pain I was in, before you, before your reality, it seemed that all horrors were an illusion and that everything was going to be okay.

But which was the illusion?

No decision had been made, no understanding had been accomplished, no clarity achieved. But with the vision of your face, smoothed by sleep and softened in early light, I slowly, with saturnine unwillingness, acknowledged that what I had for so long feared was here.

Bobby Montgomery and I, our little game of nuclear parity was at an end.

As long as the threat I posed to him—my ability to ruin his chances of becoming ambassador to the Court of St. James by exposing his daughter’s years of drug abuse and trouble with the law—was balanced against the threat he posed to me, everything was stable.

But now Sharon Solarz was going to trial, and somehow, somehow, your grandfather had gotten Ben Schulberg on the case and caused him to put Jim Grant’s name in the press. That changed the whole equation. Because Ben Schulberg, whether he knew it or not, was on the story of his career, a story that would be followed not just in Saugerties and Albany but by the
New York Times,
by
60 Minutes,
by reporters like Douglas Frantz and producers like John Marks, and these remorselessly intelligent, infinitely energetic people would focus the same energies on me as they did on embezzlers, dictators, and murderers, and when they did, they would find out the truth.

Watching you, with an unwillingness as big as the big blue Catskill sky, I began the long process of finding the words to describe, to a seven-year-old, the absolutely incomprehensible thing that I was about to do.

“Kid?” The voice in the telephone receiver, when I got to work on Wednesday morning, was hard to place—particularly through the fog of hangover: I had spent the evening at the Shandon Star the night before, and tested, not for the first time, Hemingway’s statement that a bottle of wine was the best dinner companion. Of course, the wine, in this case, was bar scotch and soda—at some point I dropped the soda—and dinner was sliced turkey and gravy on white bread from the Shandon Star’s steam table. Memory serves, I believe instant mashed potatoes had also entered into the picture. Nonetheless, Hemingway was not entirely unrelated to the evening, if only because now, this morning, I felt like shooting myself.

“Yes?”

“Billy Cusimano here. Have you been in touch with my lawyer?”

I looked at my watch, which I had been avoiding in order not to know how late I was to work. It was ten. “Yesterday I was. I’m due to see him at four this afternoon.”

“I see.” There was a silence.

“What’s up, Mr. Cusimano?”

There was real ambivalence in the man’s voice, but at last he answered. “He hasn’t shown up at my arraignment.”

Foggily, I tried to figure that one out. “You’re in court?”

“Christ, you should know. Remember, those fuckers had a bug in my Sea of Green? Caught Sharon like that?”

“I thought you said Mr. Grant would have that thrown out of court?”

Cusimano seemed a bit testy this morning. Perhaps he was hung over too. “First he has to show up
in
court. Then he gets it thrown out
of
court. That’s the way it works. You seen him, or not?”

I was stammering a little. “No.”

“Okay, kid. You’ll see him this afternoon, then. I guess.”

The call had come in as I sat down at my desk. Now, thinking about it, I checked my messages and found that it was the third time Cusimano had called that morning. I booted my computer, launched my phone book, and called your daddy’s house, where there was no answer, then his office, which picked up right away.

“Mike? Ben Schulberg, up at the
Times.
”

“Hey, Ben.” Jim’s assistant answered in what struck me as an anxious voice.

“Mr. Grant in?”

“No, he’s not.”

There was a silence. I found myself holding the receiver with both hands.

“Mike, tell me what’s up.”

“Nothing’s up.”

“Yes, something is. Tell me. Off the record. I can help.”

I listened to the silence of Mike’s struggle for a moment, holding his breath. Then he spoke.

“Well, the woman who takes care of Jim’s daughter? This morning, Jim and Isabel don’t come over. So Molly goes over to his house, and finds that they hadn’t slept there.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Well, yeah. She’s…she’s kind of Jim’s girlfriend. They’re very close. It’s very unusual. Look, we’re badly worried.”

“And why?”

“Because…look, you know the kind of work Jim does. And he’s been under a great deal of pressure. We’re extremely worried.”

“Okay. Could you keep me in the loop? I’ll see if I can find something.”

Ten-fifteen. I was standing before I even hung up the telephone, and
my cigarette was lit before I got out of the building lobby. Still, it was only half smoked before I was back at my desk, on the edge of my chair, dialing the number of the Albany FBI field station and speaking in a voice that, since I’d last spoken to Cornelius, I had not yet used.

“Mr. Cornelius. Listen. I’ve got something for you. The terms are that I get exclusive coverage, and the fullest disclosure the law allows.”

This time, Cornelius was prepared. “Mr. Schulberg, if you have evidence of a crime, you are legally obliged to tell me. And don’t give me any privileged-source bullshit, my bosses are itching to take the question to court.”

“Okay. Send someone over to arrest me. Because I have solid suspicion of a serious crime, and I’m not telling you anything. And by the time you even get me handcuffed, it’ll be too the fuck late.”

I hung up. There was a pause of perhaps two minutes, during which I kept my hand on the receiver.

I wanted to smoke.

At last, the phone rang. “This better turn out good, Schulberg.”

“It will.”

“Go ahead then.”

“Okay. I’m on the way to your office. While you’re waiting, you know Jim Grant, Billy Cusimano’s lawyer? James Marshal Grant. Run a check on Jim Grant’s recent credit card activity, EZ Pass usage, and cell phone. I’ll be right there.”

“Wait. Why?”

It was like my whole body was on the way to the door while the phone tethered me to the desk.

“Because Jim Grant’s kidnapped his daughter to escape his wife’s custody suit.”

Clayton, New York. Midsummer sun, rich with the potamic hues of the St. Lawrence River. The shores of Canada a virtually neon green in the distance.

At 10:00, I parked at the bottom of the highway exit ramp and listened to the hourly news on NPR, all the while carrying on the game of “I Spy” I was playing with you, buckled in the backseat, over the sound of the radio. When nothing on the news made me nervous, I drove on into town and found the post office.

On the street: vacation families in shorts and sandals and T-shirts advertising various products moved under the high, hot sun, overflowing out the door of the breakfast joint, the drugstore, the sporting goods shop. I watched the scene through the windscreen for a time. No one was hanging out casually watching the post office front door, no vans were parked, no pedestrians passed, then passed again. Finally, instructing you to stay in the car, I pulled on a baseball cap from Jam’s Café and Pancake House in Haines Falls, climbed out into the heat, and went through the front door.

Wearing the hat on my head and my heart, I swear to you, Izzy, in my mouth. Right between my teeth. Red, and beating, and dripping blood.

The post office doubled as a convenience store, and I noticed, in passing, that Sharon Solarz was on the front page of the
New York Times.
I didn’t buy the paper but went straight to the counter and picked up the package of clothes I had express-mailed to John Herman, care of General Delivery, in what seemed like another life. The woman behind
the counter gave it to me without a second glance, but it was not until I was walking out that I allowed relief to flood through me, like a drug. I went back to the car, and I remember, I lifted you out and hugged you like I had not seen you in six weeks.

God, I was scared.

I locked the car and, carrying the package, walked with you down the main street to the little Greyhound terminal, announced by a neon sign surviving from the 1940s. With the sun already up for hours, the temperature was in the high nineties, the air laden with moisture. In the station, there were two ticket booths, and I approached the left-hand one, then hoisted you into my arms so you could see in the window while I bought two tickets on the 10:30 to Montreal, an adult and a child, the adult wearing a hat reading “Jam’s Café and Pancake House,” across the border to Montreal.

The bus was leaving in ten minutes. Plenty of time, I assured you, for you to go to the bathroom. You asked me, what if we missed it? Then there was a 10:50, I told you. You didn’t, of course, think to ask how I knew this schedule by heart. Your daddy, you still thought, knew everything.

And I didn’t, of course, think to tell you that I had memorized, long before, virtually every bus leaving that station, any morning of the week.

Albany, New York. I arrived at the Albany FBI’s office by 11:00 to find Kevin Cornelius in the situation room with a task force of four. Three were on the telephone, one before a computer screen. Kevin took me directly to the wall, where a state map was hung.

“Grant’s credit card paid a motel room in Watertown last night. This morning his EZ Pass paid a toll on I-84.”

Watching the map, I nodded. “Canada.”

“Yep. More important, he express-mailed a package to himself in Clayton last Saturday, from Albany.” There was thinly veiled satisfaction in Cornelius’s voice. “Must have been a change of clothes for his kid. Used the same credit card then. Not smart. Not smart at all. For such a smart guy.”

Cornelius laughed—a laugh I recognized as the one a sixty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year cop laughs when a Yale-educated lawyer makes a mistake. When he was finished, I said, “That’s the day I first went to see him.”

He nodded happily. “Never fails. Use the press, make the criminal make a mistake. Clayton police already found Grant’s car on Clayton Main Street, right near the post office.”

I watched him now, mouth open, which seemed to satisfy him. “Did he pick up his package?”

“Sure did.”

“Have you checked the bus station?”

“Better yet, we have a middle-aged man with a daughter buying tickets on the 10:30 to Montreal. Bus left thirty minutes ago. Canadian police are searching for him.”

“You mean, they don’t have him yet?”

“No, buddy.” He said it in a singsong, with a western lilt. “The bus made four stops in Canada before we traced him to it. There’s a dragnet out already. Won’t be long, Ben. And when we get him, we’ll get him on the other side of the border. That’s international flight.”

“Is it really?” And as I said that, Cornelius’s earlier comment, about your daddy not being smart, came back to me, and I sat down heavily on a chair, as realization after realization washed through me.

Eleven o’clock. In the bus station in Clayton.

At ten-twenty, when you went to the bathroom, I left you with strict instructions to wash your hands and then wait just inside the bathroom door until I knocked.

Then I went to the men’s room.

Inside, I went into a stall and locked the door. I took off the baseball cap and put on sunglasses. I took off my white shirt and blue jeans. Then I opened the Mailboxes Etcetera box and took out the nylon Sportsac bag. From it I put on a loud blue tropical shirt and a pair of white pants. I stuffed my other clothes back and closed the bag. Then I peeled the address labels off the box, tore them up, and flushed them down the toilet. Finally, I folded the box carefully and wedged it behind the toilet.

I went right back out now, a balding man in a loud shirt and black glasses, carrying a Sportsac bag, hoping I looked like a tall Jack Nicholson traveling alone, knowing I looked like an upstate loser who had just lost all his money at a reservation casino. I crossed the little terminal to the right-hand teller and bought two adult tickets to New York City, Port Authority.

Then I collected you from the girl’s room.

The New York bus left at 10:40. We waited together, sitting in the little lunch counter in the back of the terminal. You talked to the counter-person, played with an activity book I had bought, drank an orange juice. I, next to you, watched the police following the trail I’d left from the Mailboxes Etc. in Albany to the bus to Canada.