by Neil Gordon
And the FBI is national, not local. So when Walt’s elders and betters found out how much he knew about the BOM murder, they’d several times seconded him to investigations that touched on Weatherman, such as the aforementioned Park Police Station bombing in San Francisco, the only other unsolved fatality from the Vietnam days. That one, he’d interrupted the middle-class lives of ex-Weathermen to take depositions in New Mexico, in Chicago, in Los Angeles. And now, for four months, he’d been seconded to the FBI office in Albany, New York. Luckily, he was not yet married—luckily because he was mobile enough for the assignment; luckily because Albany was a college town. Even better, Skidmore College was just up the New York Thruway, and Skidmore had a dance school, which meant two important things: horny girls, gay men.
In 1995, Walt was having a good spring.
This is why Walt Arden was sent to Albany Station: the Bank of Michigan robbery had been carried out by three Weatherman fugitives, all underground since the townhouse bombing in 1970: Jason Sinai, Mimi Lurie, and Sharon Solarz—this was, remember, before Jason was proven innocent. They weren’t the most visible fugitives, nor the most famous. But they were the most notorious, so much so that they’d even been repudiated by the self-styled Weather Bureau itself after they had, led by a fucked-up criminal vet called Vincent Dellesandro, shot and killed a cop in a holdup at the Briarwood Mall. Dellesandro was caught some months later—turned in, we learned later, by Mimi Lurie herself. They were after all, even Walt knew, hippies, and they must have been utterly shocked by finding that their little games with guns had actually taken a life. But after that: dead letter. The leads got cold, the perps got old. Not even the slightest whiff of a clue. They disappeared so thoroughly, so completely, that although until ’80 or so there were teams of agents on the case, in the past ten years the total man hours put into their pursuit were virtually all Walt’s, and could be counted on a handful of pay stubs.
Until last year.
Last year, a few months before, routine surveillance of a suspected dope grower in a little Catskill town called Saugerties had suggested that Sharon Solarz had been in touch in touch with him. A blip on the radar, but more than they’d had in a quarter-century and, indeed, the lucky break that was going to lead, within the next year and a half, to Jason Sinai’s surrender, as the dope dealer was represented by none other than Jim Grant, which led to the discovery of his true identity as Jason Sinai by an enterprising reporter from the Albany Times, who used, oddly enough, negative evidence in making his identification. Which was when my father abandoned me in a hotel room downtown so he could go on the run. It was an elaborate and successful enterprise: he succeeded in leaving me alone only as long as it took for my Aunt Maggie, whom I had never met, to come get me. Only, before she got there, the police did, and when she did get there, she found them in the process of apprehending a dangerous twelve-year-old child at gunpoint. I expressed, I believe, my high level of culpability by crying.
Anyway, as soon as the name Sharon Solarz came up, Walt was seconded to Albany Station. And while there, he’d taken the trouble to come downstate and meet the New York City agents who were still detailed to the surveillance of Jack Sinai, routine coverage, occasional really, whenever there seemed to be some steepening in the curve that Jason may make contact.
When he read about the Spanish Medal of Honor, Walt had contacted his friends downstate, and they paid him the courtesy of inviting him to join the day’s surveillance of Jack Sinai.
Now, dressed in a jean jacket, a Yankees cap, and carrying a well-thumbed copy of Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent—he’d read the fucker, too, though to make it looked well-thumbed had taken him a couple hours of abusing the book—he watched as Jack Sinai was approached by a young man. And although briefly his heart had picked up at the encounter, quickly it slowed again. This guy was a weedy little fellow with bony wrists sticking out of his plaid sleeves and a tennish-year-old girl at his side, significantly younger than Jason could ever pretend to be. Worse yet, he was shorter and bore no resemblance to any of the possible computer-generated projections, all in his pocket, of Jason Sinai’s appearance as a middle-aged man.
In any case, if he wanted to listen, it was time to rotate. He called the pattern into his sleeve, then stood, ambled slowly past the old man, catching a word or two of his conversation with the weedy guy—housing court. Perhaps ten feet past, he leaned idly against the railing and opened up the book to read, for all the world another lefty killing time before the VALB ceremony. A big lefty, admittedly: Walt stood six-five in his running shoes. A well-coiffed lefty—he wore today a blond hairpiece with a luxuriant pony-tail that neatly hid the earpiece of his radio. And a bulky lefty: his wool-fringed jean jacket concealed his Kevlar vest, radio, handcuffs, spray-can tear gas, night-vision scope, and nine-millimeter Glock.
Meanwhile, colleague number one from the New York Station, Michael Robbins, moved south along the walkway and sat in his seat, while colleague number two, Richard Numeroff, detached himself from the river view and strolled south.
And right about this time, Jason Sinai, accompanied by his daughter, ambled past the huge space of the Winter Garden, hands in pockets, alternately watching the surface of the water to the right and casting worried glances at the unbelievable, massive square towers to the left, heading south.
5.
“Mr. Sinai, you represented my father, William Flanagan, in the New Bedford’s Carpenters’ Guild, in 1953. Do you remember?”
William Flanagan? Billy, his friends would have called him. Briefly, Jack cast his mind’s eye inside, but could not bring back a face. He could remember the New Bedford defense—carpenters’ union vs. a phalanx of red-baiting forces that ranged from local thugs to the FBI, around the time Jason was born. His house in Martha’s Vineyard came from them: he’d bought the plot, and the construction was payment in kind. But Billy Flanagan? A blank.
Billy Flanagan’s bairn, however, in his Red Sox cap and plaid jacket, remembered him. The Irish. They would not only not forget, like the cops and their families up to Nyack had never forgotten, what had been done to them. They would also never forget the kind of thing that Jack had done for Billy Flanagan’s father and his mates in the union. But the boy was speaking.
“Congratulations, Mr. Sinai.”
“Why thank you.” Somewhere between disappointment and frustration, he found his voice. “Are you coming to the ceremony?”
“Yes sir.” The young man spoke earnestly. “Read about it in the paper last week. It would have meant a lot to my father to be here too.”
“Your father is no longer alive?”
“He passed over the winter.”
The young man looked as if he were about to cry. The girl, holding the young man’s hand, was looking up at him—as Eleanor would say—across the twentieth century. For a long moment, Jack watched her absently. Then, aware he was being strange: “And what do you do?”
Shy, with a look that told Jack he was witnessing a profoundly important moment in this boy’s life, the chance to pay homage: “I’m a defense lawyer. In the housing court.”
Oh, so it was this kind of thing. Old Billy Flanagan, evenings over a glass of Bushmill’s, had liked to tell his son about the lawyer who stood up for them at the height of the red scare—A Jew he was, but so was Joyce, now wasn’t he? And as fine a man as ever stood up, a grand friend of the working man—and the boy had grown up to be a lawyer. And now he, Jack, was about to receive an accolade. Some thrived on this—Bill Kunstler, for example; and so—in his way—had Lenny Boudin. Jack had never cared for it. Long ago, he had tailored a response. With a nod, he held the boy’s thin arm, thinking that it made sense: it was not likely that he had gone into his father’s profession, or his union, with arms like that. “That’s very good work. I’m very pleased to hear that.”
“Really? It just sometimes seems like such a total waste. Housing court’s busting at the seams. This damn country. The rich get richer, the poor get blacker.”
/>
Evenly, in the same mendacious tone, Jack answered. “Isn’t that the way it is.”
“Don’t you ever wonder what’s the point?”
“Oh no.” Jack was lying smoothly now, without second thoughts. Youth had stages, hope and disappointment, and to a young man in his thirties, thick in the first experience of the latter, there was no question how you responded. You lied. Later, in his fifties, he may learn a more durable, more informed, equally futile hope. And even later, there is something else—something stronger, a passage beyond judgment. Then, and only then—with the rare comrade who has lived long enough, and well enough to make that passage with you—you told the truth. Not now. He had decided this question long before. “No, I never think that at all. We’ve made tremendous strides in American law; in international law, in every arena. Sure, there are setbacks. But look at tort reform, gay rights, freedom of information. Look at the International War Crimes Tribunal. Look at the EU. And look at your own court—it may be imperfect, or overwhelmed, but it’s not corrupt, and at least there’s redress for tenants available and paid for by the government.”
Brad Flanagan was listening, so eagerly that it made Jack wince with guilt.
“You feel hopeful, then?”
He hesitated, tightening his focus on the child. But this young man didn’t want to know the truth. This young man was in mourning, for his father, for his father’s time.
“Absolutely I feel hopeful.”
Holmquist and Flanagan: two exemplary conversations, one short, the other sweet. Later, Jack Sinai couldn’t remember how he and the boy had parted company. They must have talked more, because later that night, much later, when he was telling his news to his wife, a conversation neither short nor sweet, he knew that the boy had gone to BU and Northwestern, and that Northwestern was forgiving all his loans because he was just finishing ten years’ work in the public interest. But he could not remember how they had said goodbye.
All he remembered was that after a time he came to himself again, pulling his gaze from the surface of the Hudson River, the glassine surface under morning sun, high-tide slack water not yet disturbed by the wake of morning traffic, with a line from a song his eldest son had used to listen to in the old days, a sweet, nasal-voiced singer: “Our conversation was short and sweet.”
Two conversations. One short, the other sweet.
6.
The short conversation had been that morning at his doctor’s office at Beekman Hospital. A week earlier he had had a routine checkup. On Monday his doctor had ordered X-rays. On Thursday he called again and asked Jack to come in with his wife.
Jack had declined to panic. At eighty-seven? To be summoned by your doctor and told to bring your wife? This was not an emergency. It was an appointment, long scheduled, again and again delayed.
And he would not be rushed. His days had already had been choreographed hour by hour to leave himself open to an approach from Jasey. That meant being out and about and in public as much as possible in the kind of places where Jasey could evade surveillance. To make it easier, he planned—as they say—to “clean his tail” several times every day, doubling back through public spaces with multiple entrances; taking long taxi rides and watching behind for followers; going to movies and leaving, while the room was dark after the film started, through the emergency exit. Odd activities at his age. It pleased him to think that Jasey, following him, would understand. It was a form of communication.
A morning, however, in Beekman Hospital, speaking to Dr. Holmquist, would be a total waste. He would not be approachable in Beekman Hospital.
On the telephone, all the while downplaying the urgency, Holmquist had insisted, finally agreeing to a Saturday morning appointment: he had to be in the hospital that morning for rounds anyway. Jack had listened to the young man—Holmquist couldn’t be more than forty—lying. He just wanted to be sure to see Jack before he, Holmquist, left on vacation. Then he contradicted himself utterly: Jack should be sure to bring his wife.
Jack didn’t even listen: what mattered was that Saturday morning was the least likely time of the week for his son to make contact. Streets are too empty on Saturday mornings; there is no crowd to disappear into.
Of course he’d known what the doctor was calling about. Of course he’d had to go. Politeness demanded it. But he had not brought Eleanor—the suggestion itself was a characteristic impertinence of young Dr. Holmquist. In the morning he’d arranged to meet her later at the Spanish ceremony with Danny and Maggie, and let himself out in to the chill spring air. As if an act of defiance, he had walked downtown to Beekman. Eighty-seven years old, and he still swam every day during the summer in the pond at Hancock Beach—admittedly, no longer in the ocean. Later, thinking back, that walk had a slightly surreal quality. “Unreal,” Jason would have called it in his druggy slang of the day.
The spring morning was so dry, and so chill, and the morning light from a still weak sun so long, only the naked trees gave the lie to the impression that it was autumn. In what he later knew to be bravado, he did not even think about Holmquist. Rather, as had happened all week, his mind reverted to imagining the contact with his son. This time he let play the scenario where they went to Wolff’s Deli, sitting across from one another over bagels and lox, talking all morning as if the twenty-five years since they last had met was known, was understood. He could smell his son, the whiskey-rich odor of tobacco, the sweet fresh sweat of a young man. He could feel him, the smooth strength of his straight back and strong arms.
But then this scenario was interrupted by the nagging reality. How could they talk all morning when he was due at VALB at 11:30 and he was wasting half the morning with this idiot doctor? The thought made frustration rise in his belly, and it took all of his eighty-seven years to remind himself that it was all just imagination anyway.
That it seemed so inevitable? That was only because of longing.
The conversation, when it came, was very short. Holmquist was nettled that Eleanor was not there. Nonetheless, the facts were very simple. He had a lesion in his lower right lung that had spread to his liver and entered his lymphatic system. This was very bad news. Worse was that his pancreas was affected. Holmquist illustrated this with a little plastic model of the human body. Immediate, and very aggressive treatment was required. A course of radiotherapy and chemotherapy would be followed by a series of operations. Probably the whole lung and a portion of the liver would go. Following would be further treatment. Jack was to make arrangements to check into the hospital immediately.
But Jack had stopped listening when he heard the word “pancreas.” He watched the young man sweating through the conversation as if from a distance. He should, he remembered feeling, help the young man out. Then he thought, perhaps, when you are being given a death sentence, you do not need to feel compassion for your executioner. Or perhaps you do.
Our conversation was short and sweet. Out in the street, in the blinding early sunshine, the empty downtown avenue on a Sunday morning, blocks away from his own father’s law office, the line of the song had come to him for the first time. Holmquist had been unwilling to let him leave without an escort. But the one thing you got from the life Jack Sinai had led—a life that had included taking a couple-three bullets at Cape Tortuga and being left for dead in the Jarama Valley—was not being afraid of reality. Anyway that same folk singer had also said: He not busy being born is busy dying. Now there was a young man’s perception. Should have been: He not busy dying is busy making a living. The thought made him smile.
And yet, he didn’t feel like smiling. And he didn’t care that he was dying. What he cared about was his conviction, his moral certainty, that today he would be in touch with Jasey.
Now it was sure. Now it had to be today. The realization came to him factually, a certainty, logically correlate to Holmquist’s announcement. Tomorrow Jack would checking into the hospital, who knew for how long? It would be incredibly difficult for Jasey to visit him in the hospital, imposs
ible really. That, clearly, was why the universe had arranged for Jasey to make contact today.
And the universe had arranged that. This incredible day. The depthless blue sky, the sun south over Staten Island, that high delta of distant geese coming back north, so high as to be nearly translucent, the mass and glitter of the huge, heaving river. Walking north now, slowly, through the brilliant spring morning, the ebullient expectation that had animated his week took hold of his mood again. Now he had something else to discuss with Little J.—how lucky, because his younger son Danny would be no help. Danny would fall to pieces at the news. In what was ahead Jasey, however, his strong, smart, stand-up son, would be an incredible support.
And then he was walking along the river, his eyes directed down, as if searching for a submerged object, or a fish, and a voice was interrupting him, Mr. Sinai, you defended my father, William Flanagan, in the New Bedford’s Carpenter’s Guild, in 1953…
I knew it. It couldn’t be. Another conversation. Another false alarm. Young Brad Flanagan, his eager face, meeting his hero. Wanting to mourn his own father with Jack Sinai, who had inspired his father, who was dying. And Jack, shocked that such a demand was waiting in the wings, even now, even today, waiting in the wings, unable to say no.
7.
And as for Jason Sinai, he walked south along the river, holding my hand, squinting against the sun over Staten Island, the Colgate clock on the Jersey shore, the heaving, pregnant surface of the neap tide, quoting Whitman aloud—Flood-Tide below me! I watch you face to face; Clouds of the west! Sun there half an hour high! But in his stomach he felt anxiety swell, just like the high tide. 10:45. He had fifteen minutes to kill before starting for the Borough of Manhattan Community College. This would get them there just late enough to find their seats after the lights came down. Their seats were stage right, last row, next to the emergency exit. He’d found the plans of the auditorium at the Department of Educational Services website: BOMCC was part of the State University system. But how much further south could we walk? Already, I was complaining of tiredness. So he broke one of the rules of his life and bought me a warm pretzel from a Sabretts guy—perhaps the second time I’d had white flour in my life—and a bottle of water; then we sat on a bench and while I ate he closed his eyes, tipped his face into the sun, and let his mind go through permutation after permutation of fear.
