The Company You Keep (20 page)

Mac noted it all. With a nod, I turned to the door, and only stopped when McLeod spoke.

“Mimi?”

“Yes?”

“Do you understand why Sharon did it?”

My back was toward him, in the doorway, and I didn’t turn. “Wanted to surface, you mean?”

“Yes.”

I shrugged. “I guess I know what she was thinking about, at least.”

“Think she’s wrong?”

I answered guardedly. “I can’t judge what Sharon did.”

“Um-hmm. You know, I met Gillian Morrealle at a party a couple years ago. She said Jason and Sharon’s status was totally different from yours. Said that the fact that Mimi had tipped off the state police where to find Dellesandro would mitigate heavily in her favor. With a negotiated surrender, she said Mimi could count on the minimum hit, ten to fifteen years, first parole eligibility at eight. Less if Gore follows Clinton: could hope for presidential clemency. Come out of jail legal at sixty. Get a fucking college degree in there.”

“Mac?”

“Yes, doll?”

I still had not turned around. To be honest, I did not trust myself to.

“Let’s not kid ourselves, okay? I’m already in jail. I’ve been there since April 1974, and I’m going to be there for the rest of my life. I can walk my ass off across this country, I’m still in jail. So I don’t need anyone to give me absolution.”

“Okay.” He answered softly. And then, master of myself again, I turned around.

See, I knew exactly what your father was doing. I knew why he had abandoned you, and why he had run. I knew the moment I heard he had a daughter. And I knew because I had thought it all out, long before.

See? Isabel? I knew that your father had dumped you in a hotel bedroom so he could come looking for me.

And I knew that until I looked Jason in the eye and told him I wasn’t going to do what he wanted, neither of us would really ever know it for sure.

And I don’t need to explain to you of all people why, before I could do that, I had to look him in the eye.

7.

The next morning, at the Old Cigar Store in North Beach, a woman, good-looking and no longer young, sat at a window table over a cappuccino, smoking. She wore a light green silk blouse and a black skirt, both from Kmart, both bought for cash; black pumps; a faded jean jacket. Her hair was jet black, as were her eyes, and she held in her lap a weathered leather handbag. Next to her, on the floor, sat a vinyl American Standard suitcase, by no means new. On her nose rested a pair of Ray-Bans.

The Ray-Bans were out of character. But I have my vanity, too.

Outside the window, where she was vaguely watching, a Mercury Sable, maybe three years old, circled Washington Square, looking for parking. When a man in a suit, holding keys, left a building, the Sable slowed, trailing him down the street, ignoring the blasting of horns from
the growing line of traffic behind it. The man in the suit finally climbed into a Toyota Land Cruiser, and the Sable waited for him to pull out, the cars behind him now no longer even honking. When the Sable had at last taken the parking space, and the driver exhibited her middle finger to the line of cars at last freed to pass, a young woman in heels, a skirt, and a leather jacket came out and, carefully locking the car and feeding its meter, came into the café.

Clearly the younger and the older woman were close friends, for they greeted each other with a kiss and a long hug. Then, busily, the young woman sat down, ordered a cappuccino, and got to work. She took a car registration and keys out of her bag, also an extra set of keys and a manila envelope, all the while talking in a flat California accent.

“Thank you so much for lending me the car, Cleo—I can’t tell you how it helped. Did I keep you waiting? Here’s your registration and extra keys, oh, and here’s some papers I found in the apartment—important?”

The older woman transferred all these things into her purse, answering in a low-pitched voice with a slightly western twang. “My God, yes, darling. I was so scattered when I left the house, I left my papers there. Was the shithead at home when you went by?”

“Yes.”

“How was he?”

“Drunk, doll. He was drunk. Now you listen, Cleo. Don’t you think about that bastard any more. You just get into that car, drive safe, and do what you have to do, you hear? There’s a full tank of gas, you don’t have to stop before you’re halfway through Nevada.”

“Okay.” The older woman smiled, perhaps bravely, because her lower lip was trembling. Then the two embraced again, and the older woman, after trying to pay for her coffee and not succeeding, stood up and left, leaving her suitcase too.

She opened the car and checked the trunk, where an old backpack with Eurail stickers lay. She put her jacket on the passenger seat with her handbag, and her shoes on the floor, as if she were, in fact, planning on driving through Nevada without stopping. Then she started the car, adjusted the seat and mirrors, and pulled out.

•   •   •

Once out of North Beach, I stopped and checked my papers. There was a social security card, bank card, driver’s license, library card, a few other pieces. My name was Cleo Theophilus, Greek in origin, which was why McLeod told me on the phone, when we set up this meet at the Cigar Store, to make my hair black. I memorized my address and birth date, then started moving again, while I made a mental list of what I had to do. I needed to invent a family history, why my parents came from Greece, and when; where they lived, when they died, where I grew up. I needed grade schools, high schools, jobs, marriages, in-laws. And for all of those, I needed authenticating detail.

A new identity is like a novel, and like all novels, if they are to be good, you have to
need
to write them, not
want
to. With a sigh, I began to sketch out Cleo Theophilus’s life, and by the time I was on the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, I had begun to feel the whitewash of imagination over the present, perhaps the most seductive feeling I knew. The day was brilliant, that pure, thin northern California sun, all of the bay spread out to my right, the endless Pacific to the left. I was on the move, on the move, and for the first time since I’d come home, my spirits began to rise: to be on the move was lonely, but it was also the closest we ever came to being free. With a little flash I wondered if this was what Jason, wherever he was, was experiencing. Then, to chase away the thought, I turned on the radio, and I swear to you, Chrissie Hynde was singing, just like that:

You want to know how you walk out on your daughter.

Like this: you empty the Sportsac shoulder bag of her books and her stuffed animals.

Arrange them next to the bed.

Without looking at her.

Then you put some of your clothes in it.

Doesn’t matter which clothes. All you need is the bag. Without a bag, you look strange, traveling.

Then you walk out the door.

Just like that.

Isabel. Everyone always wants to know how I left my seven-year-old-daughter alone in a hotel room. Everyone always wants to know the true, inside story of the Weather Underground, the first exclusive interview, the secret we’ve never told. They want the little thrill of terror and pleasure. How does it feel to be on the run, to be in an explosion, to be hunted by the police? How does it feel not to see your family for thirty years? How does it feel to lie, day in, day out? To live incognito? Not to be able to tell anyone the truth? To read of your father’s death in the newspaper?

The world is full of people who think they can ask you to tell them about the worst moment in your existence. You are a criminal, a fugitive, an icon of an age gone by, you are public property.

Izzy. You, of course, you are the only one with a right to know, and you have never asked.

How do you abandon your daughter in a hotel room?

Like this: the freshly vacuumed carpet of the hallway, its synthetic pile all bending this way, then that, with the track of a vacuum cleaner, and far and away I hear the dulcet sound of a vacuum cleaner warping a childhood afternoon.

Like this: the elevator panel, a broken button for the second floor flickering at me with blank accusation, and for a moment I hang on the very borderline of feeling that accusation to be real, and intentional, and personal.

The denial of reality, as schizophrenics and acid lovers know, comes at a price. The symptoms of terror—tunnel vision, hypnagogic memory, distortion of vision, and paranoid delusion—years and years of practice are no good; each time they come, they are new. The tiled floor of the lobby, a chemical smell in my nose and mournfully, funereally, an orchestral version of “Harvest Moon” sounding faintly from hidden speakers. The hotel bar, a couple of men in suits with a woman between them, the bartender watching CNN, CNN being hosted by a woman with jagged black bangs, a background of desolate desert behind her, and the three people at the bar watching. Blackness beyond the bar’s door to the street, a virtually uncontrollable urge to run: the police are waiting for me outside that door, everyone knows it, the people at the bar, the bartender, the woman on the screen reporting from a desert, they know it.

Outside, a moon I could not see angled silver light into the space between the buildings. A hooker in a leather minidress shifted from her perch next to the hotel bar to move down the deserted street. Air conditioners hummed from the windows above, and far away a police siren rose and faded.

I waited for the hooker to move away, the street shimmering, swimming before my eyes, my heart racing. And when she was gone, before pure panic could overtake me, I began to walk.

•   •   •

How do you abandon your daughter in a hotel room in downtown Manhattan?

In my case, badly. Stupidly. Dangerously.

I should have known a good, long, circuitous route to take, preferably through a large and crowded place, to where I was going, though it was only two blocks away. I should have had a partner watching my trajectory, ensuring no one was following, and failing that, I should have had a rehearsed itinerary, one of those I had figured out in the old days, one that crossed large spaces, doubled back, gave me the chance to check my tail and, should I find anyone, lose them. Most importantly, I should have been doing it all by day, in crowded streets, not at night when I was virtually the only figure to be seen. “Going downtown during the workday is like putting water through a filter.” Mimi’s rule. “You may get stuck, but if you don’t, you’re as clean as you’ll ever be.”

But to follow rules, you have to want to stay safe. The hollowness reamed through my body, the brute ache, the terror. And I knew it to be just the tip of the awfulness that was available to me. All of my being went into its denial. I had nothing left over to protect myself with. No energy to care about being safe. And so without the slightest thought for the safety of what I was doing, without ever looking back, I went toward the river, then turned north, then turned west, and had anyone been following me, they could have watched me as clear as in the light of day walking into the ornate lobby of an office building, where I signed the register in the name Daniel Sinai in front of the uniformed night guard who, once he had looked up the name, nodded me toward the elevators.

The Pine Street entrance of the Exchange Building. Daniel Sinai, tenant. Come to burn some midnight oil over a contract, a lease, a negotiation. The night guard went back to sleep and, not hurrying, I moved toward the elevators. Then my heart began to accelerate.

Not from worry, however. I had no doubt that my brother would still hold the lease on my father’s law office, a two-room suite on the twenty-second floor that had once been my grandfather’s. At least while my mother was alive, there was no chance of that office ever leaving the family.

That, as the elevator doors closed and the floor lifted, carrying me to a place I had not been for a quarter century, was not what made my heart pound.

2.

Here’s a rule for you: when you are afraid, take the stairs. At least your beating heart can process the adrenaline in your blood. Left passive in the elevator, panic returned, not just an edge, this time, but the real thing: bad panic, so strong that I had to crouch down on the floor.

First it was physical, burning in my underarms and crotch, as if my skin had been massaged with pepper. Then it passed in a wave, leaving me dripping with sweat, and in its wake I felt a gravitational pull, like an ocean undertow, toward the hotel room where you still slept. All this happened in the moments of the elevator rising, that quickly, and yet it left me so weakened that I nearly could not get out when finally the doors opened on the twenty-second floor. I held the door until I was afraid the alarm would sound, and it was only that risk that made me, at last, step out of the elevator and walk, one step after another, down the hallway, my steps hollow against the green-marbled linoleum floor that had not, apparently, been changed, for it was as familiar to me as the very smell of the hall. Number 2232. At the door, another debilitating wave of panic came over me. I let my back go against the wall and, eyes clenched, lowered myself onto the floor, trying to visualize something, anything, that would organize my thoughts and make my panic recede.

Two-two-three-two, Exchange Building. A single-room office overlooking the Brooklyn docks. Sitting in the hallway, I could close my eyes and see the view. Once my grandfather, your great-grandfather, wrote deeds and supervised closings here. My father, your grandfather, joined the practice after his graduation from Fordham Law School in 1935. Sinai and Son: when I was a child, the clouded glass window of the office still held that name. In fact, it was not Sinai and Son for long: while my father was in Spain with the Lincoln Brigade, his father died, and
when he came back, a twenty-five-year-old man with shrapnel scars up his left leg from the defense of Cape Tortuga, my father was no longer interested in property law.