The Company You Keep (34 page)

So I did not tell my dad that I had been arguing politics with the exact same reporter whose calls he was ducking. That gave me a little twinge: I do not lie to my parents—my mom, for example, knew I was thinking of going to bed with Rob. I personally thought then—and think now—that because I was adopted and our relationship transcends genetics, my tie to my parents had always been infused with the choice of friendship, rather than the obligation of family.

So I was not in the habit of lying to my father. But I thought that if he knew that a reporter who was dogging him was also chumming up to his daughter with clearly sexual intent, he might run the guy right out of the state, and I did not want Ben run out of state. So I swallowed my sense of dishonesty and asked Dad if he had known Jason Sinai when he was at school—“at school” being a euphemism for the time he spent undercover, infiltrating the SDS, after his return from Vietnam.

And when he answered, I had the feeling that the subject wasn’t far from his thoughts, which when you think of it wasn’t so far-fetched. I mean, he never told me what business he was on when he came to town, but I suppose I could have guessed that a manhunt for fugitives wanted for a Michigan crime might have involved the station chief of a Michigan FBI office, could I not? He gave the question one of his long thinks while chewing—I had barbecued vegetables out on the porch, because my father is vegetarian since Vietnam—and then answered in his slow, slightly drawly voice.

“You hear the report on them the other night?”

“Um-hmm.” The local public radio station had done a long piece on the Bank of Michigan robbery, and I had heard it twice: once on local radio, the second when
All Things Considered
picked it up.

“Huh.” He bit, chewed, and watched me through these blue eyes of his, which, more than anything else, reveal that you’re not talking to some country-dirt cop. “I never met Sinai, though I saw him around campus. He was too big to speak to us little folk. Those guys, they had a social hierarchy like the military.”

Chew. Think. I could see that he was thinking, so I waited, and after a time, he went on in a different tone.

“You know who I did know, Beck? I knew Mimi Lurie.”

“Really? When you were undercover?”

“No. I had to avoid her, then. That’s the weird part. I knew her when I was a kid. Her parents had a cabin up by Point Betsie; summers, they’d be at church with us.”

“Huh?” I had stopped eating and was watching my father with real surprise. “You knew Martin Luria?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Daddy, for God’s sake. Why didn’t you ever tell me that before?”

“Never came up. What’s so special about him?”

“Well, that he was a Soviet spy, for one thing.”

He shrugged. “So they said. Martin Luria—Mimi changed it to Lurie after he killed himself. Poor bastard. He was red, that’s for sure. Was he a spy? I don’t know that, Beck. I do know that your granddaddy hated Commies as much as J. Edgar Hoover, and he still made us all go to Luria’s funeral.”

My fork was still hanging in the air. “My granddaddy made you go to the funeral of a known Communist?”

Pause, but not, this time, to chew: he paused to look out the window, not attentively as when he’s heard a noise, but absently.

“Communist, Communist. All communism said to someone like Lurie was that the rich in this world are too few and the poor too many.” Now he looked at me again. “You know, we were the only people there beside the immediate family and the FBI agents taking pictures of the immediate family. My daddy, when the funeral was over, he shook hands with all the Lurias, and then with all the agents. They worked for him, after all.”

“And how were the Lurias?”

“Oh, God, I don’t remember. I used to think Mimi’s brother was great, sharp as a damn hawk, this kid. Had these eyes like he was Chinese. Always wondered what happened to him.”

And that, I can tell you, was my father all over. Works undercover infiltrating the SDS—after returning from Vietnam with bullets up his left thigh and through half his stomach—then becomes a career FBI agent, but feels awful over the red-baiting that came before he was even out of high school. See, Martin Luria had been pretty famous up north: a
physicist, a Los Alamos Red, and he’d killed himself by the beach at Point Betsie after losing his teaching job to the blacklist. Listening, I realized that my fork was still poised in the air. “What happened to him?”

Daddy looked confused. “He killed himself. You know that.”

“No. The son. Mimi’s brother.”

“Oh, him. Well, he was in grad school when I was here. Did archaeology. Totally nonpolitical. Supposed to be some kind of genius. Then, I don’t know. Someone told me once he went to Turkey, for God’s sake, to work on a dig. Apparently, if you’re an archaeologist, Turkey’s the place to go. He never came back. I never heard of him again….”

I waited, and when he didn’t go on, kicked him under the table.

“But?”

“But…” My father filled his big chest with a sigh, then leaned back and crossed his legs. “You remember that case last year? That arms dealer they arrested in Phoenix? His conviction got overturned because the AUSA—the assistant U.S. attorney—was having an affair with the perp’s daughter?”

“I remember you went to Washington over that. Never knew why.”

“Well…this is between us, right?”

“Right.”

“Why was because the guy—Rosenthal, he was called—some of his transactions were papered through a Saginaw holding company, which got me a week in Washington helping out. But while I was there, I got to see the whole file. And I saw that when the daughter took flight to Europe, we got Interpol to watch her. She ended up taking a job for this Italian businessman, a guy who did a lot of business importing antiquities from Turkey. And, Beck, I saw a picture of this guy, and you could have knocked me down with a feather if I wasn’t looking at Peter Luria.”

“Did you follow up?” My mouth was open, watching my father. See, this is why you go into criminal work. It is so
interesting.

“No way. European art market? You get involved in that kind of thing, it’s hello investigation, good-bye five years. Besides, there were no grounds for investigation: we weren’t looking for extradition, and there was no reason he couldn’t hire her. No, I let it go.”

“Huh.” I started eating again, watching my father. “So when you going to catch Sinai?”

“God, I don’t know.” He uncrossed his legs now and put his face in his hands, which surprised me quite a bit. Then he looked up. “Truth to tell, Beck, I don’t have a lot of heart for this hunt.”

I thought about this. The thing was, I didn’t ask him a lot about Vietnam. In fact, my mother and I avoided subjects that were close to Vietnam—he had seen and done a lot of horrific things, and very nearly died. As it was, his injury had left him on lifelong hormone replacement therapy, and if you can’t figure out what kind of an injury it was from that, then you’ll just never know. It wasn’t the Jake Barnes injury—thank God for my mother—but the equivalent of a vasectomy, performed by machine-gun fire and without anesthetic. Still, I thought I could maybe ask a little more about Sinai.

“Okay. Why not?”

“Oh, God.” He had returned to his food now and was eating steadily. “See, they got a change of venue for the Solarz trial, they’re moving it up to Traverse City, and already, the bugs coming out of the woodwork, man, it’s intense. Up to Roby’s, you’d think it was 1965, the way these bastards are talking.”

Roby’s was the bar Daddy went to up in Traverse City. “I fought that damn war once, Beck, that’s the truth. It was not fun, and I do not want to do it again. And I don’t have a lot of heart for any gung-ho manhunt. Sharon Solarz? She’s spent the last twenty-five years in jail, you ask me. Living underground is no life at all. I mean”—his plate completely empty now, he put his big hands on the table—“I got to watch every public school to see kids aren’t into their daddy’s arsenals to shoot up their cafeterias; I got crackheads blowing each other’s heads off to get high another sixty seconds; I got whacked-out white militias sealing off farms with barbed wire and buying satellite surveillance of synagogues from Russian companies; and I’ve got a population of depressed Michiganders who feel ripped off blind by the government and see no reason at all not to turn to crime. I do
not
need a trial of a twenty-two-year-old crime in my jurisdiction, and I do
not
need a bunch of liquored-up vets getting out their MIA black flags over this.”

“Daddy, take it easy.” Like I always do, I reached over and rubbed my hand on his heart, thinking about the 250 pounds that little thing pumps blood to, and how once it stopped pumping for just a few seconds and nearly killed him. “I hear you. Let’s just have some dessert now.”

We did have some dessert. Then we watched the news, and played some cards. And finally, toward eleven o’clock or so, I made up the couch for my father—it was the one piece of furniture in my house that hadn’t come, used, from Treasure Mart, because he needed a full seven feet to sleep on—and went into my own room. And as always, when my father slept over, it was with particular delectation that I changed into my nightgown and climbed into bed, particular comfort, and a particular sense of safety. If you come to Michigan later this month and meet him, I think you’ll see why: to have this man sleeping in your house is to know that whatever happens during the night, terrorists, war, or natural disaster—whatever morning might bring after he leaves, during this night, everything is going to be all right.

Something, in other words, not far from how you felt, in June of 1996, before he abandoned you in the Wall Street Marriott, about your father too.

So, that is all very interesting, Beck’s account of those days in Ann Arbor. Very interesting. And worrisome, if you want to know the truth. I mean, her claim that she did not in fact find me the single most seductive man she had ever met in her life, for example. It casts a certain doubt over everything else she has to say. But let it pass.

As for me, if you want to know what I did for the days in between Wednesday and Friday, the answer is absolutely nothing.

Nothing productive, that is.

The heat over town was so intense, so enervating, that I never wanted to leave either my hotel or my car. The only real business I had was with Beck’s father, up in Traverse City—or, as they put it in Michigan, up
to
Traverse City—but by now I’d faced up to the fact that he was not going to see me. Just for the hell of it, I kept the pressure on by telephoning his secretary pretty frequently. He was unavailable all day on Tuesday, and on Wednesday failed to return any of my calls. Journalists are supposed to be inured to this kind of thing. Not me: some alcoholic bum in a county jail refuses me an interview, I take it personally. Not very polite of you, Osborne, was my feeling, and in fact I was spending quite a bit of time writing cutting letters to him about it, focusing largely on his obligations as a federal employee to the citizenry, and also mentioning the First Amendment frequently, but in the fight between my indignation and my laziness, I did no more than compose them in my head.

What did I do? I lay around my hotel a lot. I smoked. I drank at a
sports bar up near campus, though never, I assure you, before breakfast. I used my mobile Nexis connection on my notebook computer, looking for something, anything, anywhere, that might indicate that someone knew something about where Sinai had gotten to. I called everyone I’ve ever known in either journalism, law enforcement, or any criminal activity whatsoever. Jay Cohen, out in Los Angeles, who knows as much about people who do things secretly, and illegally, as anyone else in the country, laughed at me.

“You want to find Jason Sinai? Easy. Just sit back and relax, Benjamino. He’ll show up. When and where he wants to.”

Thanks a lot, Jay. You asshole.

Thanks to the town’s many and excellent used bookstores and the fact that my entire life had become a totally useless waste of time, I read, cover to cover, Judy and Stewart Albert’s collection
The Sixties Papers,
Stanley Karnow’s
Vietnam,
and Ron Jacobs’s
The Way the Wind Blew.

Mostly, however, what I did was I avoided Rebeccah’s neighborhood altogether.

See, that was a careful professional calculation. I did not want a source to think of me as some pathetic loser who was hanging around a totally irrelevant town in the Midwest pretending to work because he couldn’t think of anything else to do with his vacation.

I certainly did not want her to think of me as some useless geek who was using up his whole vacation and spending his own money on a wild goose chase.

Finally, I did not care to have her thinking of me as a ridiculous bozo who had become convinced that she was his only chance.

His only chance, I mean, of course, to find Jason Sinai.

Because, whatever else may have been going on, and I admit that something else was going on, the fact remained that I knew, with moral certainty, that the way to find Jason Sinai was to hang around Ann Arbor. No, I don’t know why I was convinced. I never know why I’m convinced of anything. Yes, I believed on a logical level that Rebeccah’s father, sooner or later, was going to become involved in the manhunt. And yes, I knew that Sharon Solarz would soon be extradited back to Michigan, and I could go to her arraignment, and see who else was there, and all that
kind of reporter’s crap. But that wasn’t really it. It was on another level that I
knew
it. I knew it as if the whole shape of what was about to happen, what was on the very verge of exploding, was just waiting for me to discover it. I didn’t know what I was going to find, but I knew it was there, and that has been how every good story in my career has worked.