True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  11

  Because I’m conscientious to a fault, I phone my hotel in Washington. Despite our on-time takeoff from LAX, I tell the clerk, it turns out I will arrive two hours late, due to an unscheduled stop in Omaha, Nebraska.

  Just after we crossed the Rockies, a large, middle-aged Hispanic woman in a fringed leather jacket who was reading Ron Paul’s book The Revolution: A Manifesto, became convinced that a Sikh man in the seat next to her was “a Tibetan terrorist.” She stood declaiming—”We are in danger! Dear God, somebody tell the damn pilot to take this aircraft down right away!” People got nervous. A woman across the aisle started crying. The guy sitting next to me seemed less terrified than resigned. “If it’s your time, it’s your time,” he kept repeating until I asked him to stop.

  By the time we landed in Omaha, a lot of the passengers were under the impression that the loud woman was the alleged terrorist—the shouting, the “God,” the “damn pilot” the “take this aircraft down,” maybe her brown skin, maybe the title of her book—but in any event, FBI agents hustled both her and the Sikh off the plane. Somewhere over Iowa, the captain came on the speaker and calmly explained: the woman had misunderstood her neighbor when he’d mentioned that he was a breeder of Tibetan terriers, that he had “three good boys” in the cargo hold who weren’t a bit scared but whose tranquilizers fortunately would wear off before the plane reached the nation’s capital. “The gentleman and his three puppies,” the chuckling pilot said, “will be put on the first flight east in the morning, with our sincere apologies.” We all applauded and laughed and shook our heads and have been guzzling free wine and cocktails ever since.

  The terror caused by the 9/11 attacks had a half-life, it seems to me, of eighteen months. By the spring of 2003, we were definitely half as scared as we’d been on September 12, 2001. The half-life of the terror following the Boca Raton yacht bomb has been about a year, although we’ve all learned of a new acronym (RDD, for radiation dispersal device) and a new radioactive element (californium), and we have opinions about dispersal radii and an obscure new Muslim country (Mauritania). Given how ineffectual the attack was by 9/11 standards—eleven deaths, four pleasure boats, and a pier—the fear it whipped up seems remarkable to me. Even now, tourism to Miami and the rest of South Florida is two thirds what it was before the bomb.

  For a few years when I was young, we had political bombings in this country, and not just a couple. Believe it or not, during 1969 and 1970 there was an average of eight bombings every day in America. Security at office buildings and government facilities did not get noticeably tighter. Travel didn’t become more difficult. No squads of soldiers with automatic weapons appeared. Sweeping new law enforcement protocols were not passed by Congress. Those hundreds of bombings caused no wholesale national freakout. Maybe people who had endured the Great Depression and World War II were not so easily spooked by bombings of police stations and recruiting offices and banks. Or maybe that same generation had been so utterly discombobulated already by the spectacle of the previous few years—assassinations and race riots, a bewildering, unstoppable hedonism at home and a bewildering, unstoppable asceticism in Vietnam—that by 1970 they simply had no more outrage and panic to spare for the small-bore dynamite antics of a few far-left freaks. And most of our homegrown bombers back then did scruple to avoid killing people.

  Imagine if bands of militant young American outlaws today were setting off dozens of bombs a week around the country, hitting banks and the Capitol and the Pentagon and getting away with it, as the Weatherpeople did forty years ago. Twenty-first-century America would be crazed, consumed, talking of nothing else.

  I think I know what the big difference is. Those bombings back then seldom made the national news, because the national news consisted of twenty-two minutes each evening on the three broadcast TV networks. Which meant that only stories deemed important by the Establishment received attention, and the attention they received was always calm. There was no alarmist electronic drone about the sky perpetually and sensationally falling. The radicals’ bombings in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s were publicity stunts, and our national publicity gatekeepers refused to rise to the bait. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn badly wanted to be revolutionary celebrities, household names, but they never were, not really, in their prime. Even after their nth bombing, the nightly news still had to identify them as “a radical group calling itself the Weather Underground.” Bill Ayers finally became famous when he was a harmless sixty-three-year-old professor, because now our proliferating electronic media are free to focus on the irrelevant, obliged to fill air time and keep viewers and listeners riled by any means necessary. We’ve given the bad guys—a radical group calling itself al Qaeda—an unprecedented opportunity to scare us silly.

  As we begin our descent toward Reagan National Airport, I shut down my computer and return my seat and tray table to their upright and locked positions, brush the pretzel crumbs off my skirt, and glance out at the obelisk and dome shining white against the night sky. They always look like splendid toys to me.

  12

  When Alex returned at the end of August 1963 from Toronto, he was distinctly Alexier. “It’s so sophisticated,” he said. His sense of Canadian sophistication derived mainly from their television programs, and he wouldn’t stop talking about an old movie he’d seen called The Third Man.

  He had missed seeing the March on Washington two days earlier. “Rats,” he said when Chuck and I told him about Dylan.

  “‘He can’t be blamed,’” Chuck sang, Dylanishly, about the Klansman who’d assassinated the Mississippi civil rights lawyer two months earlier, “ ‘he’s only a pawn in their game.’”

  Did tiny little hearts fly out of my crossed eyes and circle around my head for a couple of seconds?

  It was the last Saturday of the last summer before high school, and we were preparing to embark on our final Bond mission—spying on a crypto-Nazi U.S. senator, then assassinating his secret fascist compatriot who was a UN diplomat. We’d never been to Chicago by ourselves.

  Alex’s brother gave us a ride down to the Riverview amusement park.

  “So are you nerds trying to get beat up?” Flip Macallister asked.

  We were overdressed for Riverview, Chuck and Alex in white dress shirts and hound’s-tooth jackets, me in an aquamarine shift with a scoop back. Chuck was carrying an old attaché of his father’s.

  “I mean, for Christ’s sake,” Flip said, “at least unbutton your top buttons and loosen the ties.”

  “I’m wearing sandals,” I said.

  From the backseat, I could see Flip look at me in the rearview and grin. “Yeah, of course you are, Brenda Beatnik.”

  Alex had pushed for Riverview because its giant Ferris wheel was just like the one in Vienna that he’d seen in The Third Man. We also rode on the new Space Ride, a tram that crossed back and forth over the park, pretending the older man in our car was the Nazi senator.

  We took the El down to the Loop, headed for a jazz club called London House. The inspiration for this was a chapter in Live and Let Die in which Bond visits Harlem nightclubs looking for the Negro villain Mr. Big. The Chicago River and the brand-new Marina City, whose sixty-story cylinders we called Jetson Towers, looked super-sophisticated in the summer twilight.

  Alex had phoned a week before, telling London House we were students “arriving on holiday” from Europe. To my astonishment, the lie worked. The young woman with the beehive hairdo at the front desk, and then the guy in charge, treated us like honorary adults. He apologized that they wouldn’t be able to serve us alcohol. “Drinking age here in the States,” he said, “twenty-one.”

  “Would you care to check your briefcase?” the girl asked Chuck.

  “Thanks awfully, but no,” Alex answered in a more extreme Etonian voice than he’d ever used. “All our passports, the visas and so forth, you know.”

  “Gosh, I love that accent,” she said as she led us to a table. “Are you two from England also?
”

  “I am Sweess,” Chuck said. He sounded like a Spanish Count Dracula. “Frome Gee-neva.”

  “Ukrainian,” I said. “Part of USSR.”

  “Oh, I know—my granddad’s from Ukraine. I didn’t realize they let you come here. I mean, travel overseas.”

  Uh-oh: she knew what Ukrainian-accented English was supposed to sound like.

  “Tanya is a fantastic ballet dancer,” Alex said. “One of the best her age in the Soviet Union. And also her father, Comrade Romanova, happens to be a very important commissar, one of the senior men at the Kremlin, a great chum of Mr. Khrushchev’s, so she’s free to go anywhere. Wherever she pleases.” He winked.

  The London House girl, apparently impressed by this elaborately improvised backstory, didn’t ask any more questions.

  As soon as she was out of earshot, I said in my Natasha-from-Rocky-and-Bullwinkle voice, “And we are to be expecting two friends before music begin—when they arrive, please show moose and squirrel to table.”

  Chuck laughed and Alex shushed us, but we all grinned at one another, three North Shore kids on our own in downtown Chicago, playing European secret agents playing European students.

  Whenever we went to Chuck’s house before a mission, he’d put on the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue to get in the mood. One of the saxophonists on that record, Cannonball Adderley, was performing that night. Until a middle-aged man appeared at the bar, the only Negroes in the place had been the musicians and two busboys.

  Although the music was a perfect soundtrack for the mission, I couldn’t imagine loving jazz, easily and naturally, the way I did “Wipe Out” or “Heat Wave,” songs that were nervous and a little crazy but also as fun and easy to gobble down as a McDonald’s hamburger.

  “Zo,” I said when the first song ended, “wheech man is secret ringleader of Tyranny League?”

  Alex suggested that we go stand at the bar to get a better look at everyone. “Right next to Mr. Big,” he said. He meant the bald Negro in a suit and eyeglasses who was writing in a notebook.

  Shockingly, as soon as we stationed ourselves at the bar and lit cigarettes, Mr. Big turned to us and smiled. “You’re the kids from overseas?”

  It felt wrong to carry on our masquerade with this nice man, but we had no choice now.

  “Yes. I am Tatiana, and these are school friends”—I thought fast—“Hillary,” Bond’s alias in the latest novel, “and, um, Emilio,” the main villain in Thunderball.

  “Very good to meet you all,” he said. “I’m John Levy.”

  I glanced at Chuck, whose mouth opened and eyes bugged as he asked, “You’re the bass player John Levy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Chuck turned to us—“He played with Erroll Garner and Billie Holiday!”—then turned back to Levy. “Who you with now?”

  “Leave the gigs to the great players nowadays. I type up contracts and sign checks. Management.”

  “Therefore,” I said, “in American jazz world, you are … Mr. Big.”

  Levy laughed. “You’re a funny girl, Tatiana. So you aficionados liking the show?”

  “Completely,” Chuck said,

  “How long you all visiting?”

  “We’ve been in the States for a fortnight,” Alex said, “and jetting back across the Atlantic on Monday. But sir, I have a question—is that a Windsor knot on your necktie?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then I guess you disagree with a man in England I know who says a Windsor knot is the mark of a cad.”

  He was quoting Bond, and I thought of his brother’s crack—Are you nerds trying to get beat up?—but Levy put his arm around Alex’s neck and laughed loudly. He was so tickled by this impertinent little English twit that he instructed the bartender to give us all drinks, on him—real drinks, gin and tonics and a Negroni. Mr. Levy mentioned that there was another European visitor in the club, “a West German fella.” He pointed out a handsome blond man with gray temples and excused himself.

  The German was wearing a turtleneck and a red pocket square. He was smoking a cigar, and smiling a lot, and accompanied by two younger women, one of them in a low-cut dress. His table was on the edge of the room, near the door. We had found our assassination target.

  I couldn’t tell if I was feeling the effects of the gin or of the spectacular success of the mission or both. I went to the bathroom. Staring at myself in the mirror as I touched up my lipstick, I imagined it was a one-way mirror, like the one through which Tatiana and Bond were filmed having sex by SPECTRE. I grinned at myself. I was tipsy.

  Chuck, as usual, would be the triggerman. In the shadows beneath the bar, Chuck opened his briefcase and took out the Luger, which he’d fitted with a silencer—a thick Tinkertoy dowel wrapped in black electrical tape—and wedged the gun into his inside jacket pocket. His plan was to make his way, just before the set ended, close to the UN Nazi’s table, then take his shot during the applause.

  None of us noticed the man approaching from the front of the club.

  “Hello there.”

  We turned. He hadn’t taken off his hat. He was holding up his open wallet. “I’m Lieutenant Murray, from the Chicago Police Department.”

  I figured it was because we were underage. The maître d’ and the woman at the podium near the front door were staring at us. I felt frightened and embarrassed and … underage. The mission was over.

  When Chuck spoke, I was startled all over again, afraid in a new way.

  “Hello, signore, I am Emilio Largo, pleased to meet you. How may we help?” He was still Swiss.

  The policeman looked at me. “You are Miss Tatiana Romanova?”

  Oh, Christ. I paused, took a breath. Then caved. “My name is Karen Hollaender, actually.” I was using my normal voice and trying to smile.

  The policeman’s face tightened. By telling the truth, I’d made him angry.

  “We’re from Wilmette. And we didn’t order these drinks or lie about our age.”

  “Didn’t you identify yourself earlier tonight as a Soviet citizen by the name of Tatiana Romanova?”

  “Yes, but—well, we were just goofing around. Pretending. That’s a name from a book, from a James Bond book.”

  The policeman stared at me. “Nice shade of lipstick, Karen. What do you call that?”

  Oh, Jesus. “Coral.”

  “That’s what you used to write ‘Death to Nazis’ on the mirror in the ladies’ washroom?”

  Actually? I’d written DEATH FOR NAZIS. “I’m sorry.”

  For a long moment the policeman said nothing and looked each of us over. “Do you have identification on you?”

  There was only one form of identification that any fourteen-year-old American might carry in 1963, and we hadn’t brought along our Wilmette Public Library cards. We shook our heads.

  “And I suppose you’re not British?” he said to Alex.

  “Uh-uh, no, sir. Born and raised in Wilmette.”

  “Who’s Ernie Banks?”

  “What? Who?”

  “Ernie. Banks.” He was testing us, the way soldiers did in World War II movies, to see if we were actually Americans.

  “A baseball player,” Alex said. “For Chicago? The pitcher for the White Sox—no, the Cubs?”

  Oh, Alex.

  The policeman was getting excited, and his lips verged on a smile. “What league are the Cubs in?” the cop asked.

  “Um … the American?”

  “National League,” I said, “and Ernie Banks plays first base. He doesn’t really follow baseball, Lieutenant.”

  Lieutenant Murray turned back to me. “What place are the Cubs in?”

  “Low. Out of the running for the pennant.”

  Now he smiled. “Good guess.”

  “Seventh place, I think. And the White Sox are in second, twelve games behind the Yankees.”

  His smile disappeared. I had finally managed to convince him we were not junior Soviet spies.

  “You got very quiet all of a sudden, Emilio,
” he said to Chuck.

  Chuck just shrugged. It was an impressively cool move, like James Dean’s character in Rebel Without a Cause imitating Brando’s in The Wild One. I found it scary as well as sexy.

  Lieutenant Murray had us each write our name and address on a note card. He said that if any of us “ever get on the radar of the Chicago Police Department again,” we would regret it, because—and I couldn’t believe he said this—”Big Brother’s watching.” He told me to “go clean up your mess in the little girls’ room.” And then he left.

  Chuck was angry. “I cannot believe the way you wussies just immediately finked out and left me hanging. Jesus.”

  “I can’t believe you’re not thanking your lucky goddamn stars,” Alex whispered. “What if he’d found our guns? We lucked out. We completely lucked out.”

  “Alex is right. We could’ve really gotten in big trouble,” I said.

  “Yeah, and we could’ve kept going and made it the all-time perfect mission that we’d be proud of forever and always remember. It was real! It was everything we’ve ever imagined coming true! I’m just surprised at the two of you.”

  I went to wipe my anti-Nazi graffito off the mirror, and on the way out, I avoided the stares of the maître d’ and his snitch.

  Alex was alone out front on the sidewalk. Had my boyfriend, who wasn’t really my boyfriend, gotten so pissed off that he’d already broken up with me? Left in a huff, ditched us?

  “He won’t quit,” Alex said softly.

  “What do you mean?”

  He nodded up the street. The West German in the turtleneck was standing by the curb. Chuck, smoking a cigarette, was having a jolly-looking conversation with him.

  A parking attendant pulled up the car. The two girlfriends got in, then the German man shook Chuck’s hand and patted him on the left shoulder, slipped into the driver’s seat, and closed the door.

  Chuck whipped his toy Luger out of his jacket, pointed it at the driver’s-side window with the tip of the silencer inches from the man’s head, and pulled the trigger two, three, four times. The car moved forward, then lurched to a rocking stop. Meanwhile, Chuck had popped open the briefcase and taken out a cherry bomb, which he touched to the tip of the cigarette in his mouth until it started sparking, and tossed it low, like he was skipping a stone. It exploded under the back of the car as they screeched away.