The Company You Keep (16 page)

This was a key time, the time at the beginning when, I knew, any mistakes you had made would come out and bite you, hard. And that was as it should be: if there were mistakes, I wanted to find out early, at the beginning, rather than later, when I would have involved other people too.

I watched—and I didn’t quite watch. An unreal air hung over the scene for me. Both state cops and what looked like FBI were in the ticket booths, and after a time a few carloads left, lights flashing, in the direction of the bridge to Canada.

Then it was just a bus station again. The smell of bus exhaust and hot dogs was familiar from ages spent in bus terminals when I was younger. But nothing felt familiar. The sense of loss that had been tearing at me since early in the morning, it shocked me.

Izzy. I can’t tell you how happy I had been as Jim Grant. It was like being a child. I missed everything: the kitchen of the house in Saugerties; the run to Dutcher Notch; I missed Molly. It was a feeling of mourning, a mourning nearly as intense as I’d felt when I read that my father had died in ’94, and with it came shock, for I had not known that I could feel this mourning for my own life. And I asked myself, How was I, an overgrown baby feeling homesick, meant to take care of you?

And then we were on the bus, with its stale smell of gas and old smoke, pulling out and through town. At the post office, two state police cruisers were parked, and I could see that the police were searching my car, but the bus went right on by, out onto the highway, the pitch of its tires on concrete rising with its speed.

New York City.
Just like I pictured it.
From far in my mind came Stevie Wonder’s voice from “Living for the City.” Believe it or not, Izzy, I hadn’t been to New York City in twenty years.

I closed my eyes now, tight, and all of New York—the whole city—appeared to me a strange, foreign, frightening world.

At twelve-thirty, Kevin Cornelius and his task force were eating sandwiches in the situation room. The subject of discussion was marriage and its discontents—particularly when those discontents caused arrests to be made, which was more often than one might have thought.

That’s always the way with cops, when writers get to them. First they have to tell you what weasels all writers are. Then they have to tell you how tough they are. Only when the proper pecking order has been established, and they’ve proved themselves to be the purplest-assed baboon in the troop, do they start spilling their guts all over the floor. And before long, everyone is telling you about the screenplay they’re writing, or the short story, or the novel, or failing that, their secret passion for needlepoint. Never fails—or hardly ever.

These guys were still at stage two. All of them had been involved in parental kidnappings before; all had war stories to tell me.

Only I, it seemed, was watching the big clock on the wall ticking.

When I could, I excused myself and went outside. Stepping into the sun, I put a cigarette in my mouth, then ostentatiously patted down my pockets, looking for matches. Clearly having none, I walked now over to my car, sat in the front seat, and turned on the engine. I lit my cigarette from the lighter, then switched to the battery charger and placed a call.

Anyone watching could have seen I was calling a pager. I punched in some numbers, then hung up and waited, smoking. In a few moments my phone rang, and I answered.

“Hey, bub.” Billy Taylor’s deep, rich voice sounded in my ear, and as
always, I felt a little safer. Billy, as law enforcers go, was the exception that proved the rule. For one thing, he’d much rather have been a writer, and he admitted it. For another, he only enforced laws he believed in.

“Billy, how are you?”

“Better’n you, the sound of your voice.”

“You haven’t had the chance to run the check, have you?”

“I have not. My assistant has, though.”

“What’d she get?”

“Well, bub, your boy’s pretty interesting. You know that?”

I realized my hand was holding the cell phone like a vise. I changed hands and lowered my voice.

“Bill, I’m outside an FBI field station, and there’s a manhunt going on. Give it to me.”

Billy’s voice changed. “There’s three datapoints. One: your man hasn’t filed taxes on his social but once, and the social was only issued in one-nine-seven-six. That’s from Autovan, so it’s not so reliable. But there it is. That make sense?”

Me, dry mouthed: “It could. But it also couldn’t—he worked for his wife’s foundation, unpaid. What’s two?”

“A death certificate in the name of James Marshal Grant was issued in Bakersfield, California, where your man says he comes from, in 1959. A two-year-old boy, killed in a car crash.”

“Oh, God. Dead baby.” My stomach was plummeting.

“Not bad, for a college boy. But three’s the kicker.”

“I’m listening.”

“Your man had a PSA test last year.”

“PSA?”

“Prostate-specific antigen. A screening for prostate cancer.”

“So?”

“The doctor’s records specify it was a screening, mind. No specific complaint. No benign hypertrophy, no problem pissing, no burning, no tingling. No impotence, pain, weight loss, anemia. No—”

Billy was mid-fifties. I interrupted. “Billy?”

“Yes, bub.”

“How’s your prostate?”

“Sucks. Big time.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“That’s okay, bub. Four marriages, five kids. I’m about done with it, anyways.”

“Hope so. Now, about my man.”

With satisfaction in his voice, Bill answered. “In the absence of a specific complaint, you only screen for PSA after forty-five. Your man’s supposed to be thirty-nine.”

I let a long silence hang in the phone. “I see.”

Billy, who had done three tours of duty in Vietnam, spoke with a chuckle in his voice. “You got a tiger by the tail there, bubba?”

“I believe I do.”

“Need some protection? I can have a man with you in a quarter hour.”

“No, it’s not me that needs the protection.”

“On the hunt, are we? Well, boy, remember, that’s dangerous too. If it hollers, you let it go and call me tout suite. Promise?”

“I promise, Billy.”

God, I felt exhausted as I walked back into the situation room. A glance was enough to see that nothing had changed except the subject of conversation, which was now sex crimes. Drained, I sat down next to Cornelius. A
New York Times
was on the table. I picked it up and turned to page 21, where I knew—I had already read the article and noted the reference to my having broken the Solarz story—there was a photo. Here, a picture ran of Sharon Solarz, sitting on the hood of a car between Billy Ayers and Skip Taube, in front of the University of Michigan campus. The caption had it at 1971, and dully I registered the mistake: it must have been before March 6, 1970, in fact, because Diana Oughton was visible in the background, and Diana Oughton died in the town house bombing. Next to her was Jason Sinai, and it was at his picture that I peered closely. Staring across twenty-five years back at me, the young man told me nothing. Then, without looking up, and interrupting the description of the apprehension of a serial rapist, I asked.

“Kevin, didn’t you say you got Grant’s prints out of Cusimano’s house?”

“I did.”

“Did you run them against anything?”

“No. Just against Grant’s known prints.”

“I see.” Now I closed the papers and sighed. “Can you run them against Jason Sinai?”

Cornelius stared. “Why would I do that?”

I checked my watch. Nearly eight hours to deadline. It seemed like no time at all for the story I had to write.

“Because I was wrong. Jim Grant didn’t run to escape his wife’s custody suit.”

Pause, while they watched me.

“What actually happened is that Jim Grant ran to avoid being arrested as Jason Sinai. And Jason Sinai’s just evaded your capture in Clayton, New York.”

In New York City the summer’s heat was coming in, the part of the year approaching when even Woodstock summer residents rented out their houses for criminal prices to unsuspecting New Yorkers and escaped to cooler climes, a killing heat interrupted, only if you’re lucky, by vicious rains.

It was early afternoon when we arrived at the Port Authority, and I led you into the city as if into a magical forest. You had never, ever imagined that there could be a place like this, and for every moment that you found yourself, literally, squeezing my hand so hard that it hurt, you also found yourself utterly lost in your field of vision.

For seven straight hours I led you, and carried you, and had you driven, and even had you pulled by a horse in a carriage. Without ever explaining to you how I knew this place so well. I took you to a round building where you took an elevator to the top and then skipped down in circles, like on the inside of a corkscrew, you running up and down while I watched, and when you were bored of running, we looked, together, at some of the paintings on the wall. I took you to a toy store to buy presents and a jewelry store for earrings and a grand, massive hotel for tea. I took you to the zoo, to the carousel, and there, next to the carousel, I had a horse and chariot take you through a park. A taxi swept you down a wide river, which I said was the same that flowed by your house, at home, the one I always said got so small that the people in the Adirondacks could step over it. Watching it, you thought of the people in the Adirondacks, who you always thought of as Indians. Watching,
you wondered how far we were from home and when we were going back. Watching, you wondered why you were being so spoiled today.

We went to a store where I dressed you in new clothes, then I bought you a whole bunch more. Then we went to a restaurant where you ate, for the first time in your life, a lobster. It was dark when we came out, and a taxi took us way into another part of the city, where the buildings were high and thin and the streets like long, shadowed canyons. In one building was a hotel, and here they were expecting us, because they greeted me by name. Admittedly, it was by the wrong name, but I had warned you they were going to do this. I had even told you the name: Robert Russell. From now on, I told you, I was going to be Robert Russell, and you were going to be little Isabel Russell. It was all part of the game.

Here, in a hotel room, I bathed you by the open window, the slow summer dusk flowing in while you chatted away about the day before with Molly. Standing, your body was like a kidney bean on a stick: still round with baby fat, but your legs already showing the slim length they would, just like your mother’s, one day hold. When you were washed I dried you, first telling you to hold your hands up, then your chin up, then your legs open. Then I hit you lightly with the towel and said to go get dressed, which you did, still holding your chin up, hands up, legs open as you marched to the bedroom, until one by one I told you to resume normal stance.

I had to call down to the front desk for a toothbrush, because in all the things I had packed to send to Clayton, and in all the things I had bought in New York, I had forgotten a toothbrush. While you waited, you watched cable TV, which you had never seen before.

You argued over combing your hair, you argued over turning off the TV, I sang you a song, and we lay together in your bed by the open window, feeling the hot night wash in, smelling the sea. I told you you were just on the tip of the Island, the southern tip. It was, I told you, where sailors used to sail for the ocean to hunt whales. I talked until your eyes shut, and then I lay next to you, staring at you, until you were asleep.

Or so I thought.

Much later I found out, not from you but from someone you told,
that when you opened one eye, to surprise me, you found me not waiting but crying, and surprised, you closed your eyes again to think.

Only, so long had been the day, filled with so many things, that even seeing something this strange didn’t stop your descent into sleep, and the vision of your father crying, with your thoughts, turned into dreams.

While you slept, I watched. I watched, lying on the bed next to you, stroking your forehead, while you slept, and I watched while the clock passed ten, then eleven, to twelve. I watched you, in fact, until the time when the
Albany Times
posted its next morning’s Web edition.

At two o’clock, I finally got up from the bed and walked down the hallway to the little office suite the Wall Street Marriot advertised having on each floor. True to their word, a computer sat with an always-on Net connection. I found and launched Netscape, then entered the URL for the
Times
and then, for a long moment, shut my eyes; longer than it took for the front page to launch, much longer.

When I opened them I was looking, of course, at a picture of myself.

Three pictures, to be exact.

One taken recently at a dinner at the Albany Civil Liberties Union, the second from a twenty-year-old wanted poster for Jason Sinai, and the third, a computer enhancement showing the effects of aging and plastic surgery, rendering it crystal clear that, as the article under Ben Schulberg’s byline made clear, they were the same.

So Benny had done it. Twenty years before, Senator Montgomery had discovered who I was with the aid of the FBI’s background check of his daughter’s fiancé, and then he had used resources that only a U.S. senator could command to bury the truth again. Now, with a telephone and a computer, for the second time ever, Benny had figured it all out.