“And how’s your mom dealing with it, do you think?”
“Sad because she’s not that sad about it.”
Like mother, like daughter; like grandma, like grandkid.
As our conversation drifts into the backwaters of small talk—the rap song I heard this morning “is really old, like from eighth grade”; Sophie sold her fake dynamite on eBay for $2,245 and donated the money to Anonymous—I wonder why Waverly hasn’t said anything about the most recent pages I’ve sent her. Neediness never ends.
“So,” she says suddenly, “is Stewart hot? He sounds like he’d be hot.”
“For an old guy. To me, he is. His name’s not really Stewart, you know.”
“Duh. Did you feel guilty about cheating on Grandpa? That’s the most shocking thing to me in the whole book. So far.”
“I did. But your grandfather wasn’t faithful, either. There was a woman in New York and another in Helsinki. Maybe more.” I’m pathetic.
“Do you like this Stewart guy more than you liked Grandpa?”
“Your grandfather was a good man.”
“It seems from the book like you married him because he was boring. And not white.”
“He was very nice. And very creative. And a great father.” And entirely self-contained. And really boring.
“If you hadn’t done what you did when you were young, the assassination thing? Do you think you would have lived your life differently?”
“Yes.”
“How? Exactly?”
“I’m not sure. I would’ve had more fun. Taken different kids of risks.”
“Fun is overrated.”
“That’s funny. But I’m not sure it’s true.”
“You’re the one who said it to me. When I was ten and made you take me to Disneyland. I wrote it down.”
“Maybe just Disneyland is overrated.”
“I should get going. Love you, Grams.”
“I love you, too, Wavy.”
When Christianity was new, confession of sin took place very differently. You didn’t slip into a private booth and secretly confess your wrongdoings to some discreet divine bureaucrat, privately recite the prescribed words and go home cleansed. Nowhere does the Bible mention any such one-on-one confession. Nor did you confess habitually, not for serious transgressions, sinning and confessing, sinning and confessing, sinning again and sincerely confessing again—for these and all the sins of my past I am truly sorry—before being wiped free of sin and absolved yet again. You confessed publicly. You were absolved only after performing your penance. And you were permitted to do it once a lifetime.
Doing away with the public confession of sins and mandating private confession at least annually—”Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat,” as Stewart says—enabled Christianity to scale up. So did the Protestants’ subsequent abandonment of confession altogether. Back when public, one-time-only confession was the rule, Christianity was a cult of a few million, 1 or 2 percent of all the people on earth. Today there are two billion of us.
Us? I’m afraid so. Fifty-two years after refusing confirmation, I’m still a Catholic, the way I’m still a midwesterner thirty-nine years after moving away for good—nonpracticing, diasporic, heretical, but never entirely former. It’s like how I’ll always be a person who was eighteen in 1968.
Although I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell only metaphorically, I do detest and am heartily sorry for what I did, and having firmly resolved to do penance and amend my life, I confess my sins. Mea culpa. Amen.
Something like our modern legal system might have developed without a thousand years of religious practice beforehand, just as something like Homo sapiens might have evolved without a million years of intermediate species, without the Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis and etcetera. But that’s not the way it happened. Christian confession and penitence in the first millennium were beta versions of the second millennium’s legal trials and statutory penalties. Hell and purgatory were replaced by capital punishment and prison and probation, and the Bible by constitutions and statute books.
When I learned in law school that James Madison was the founder who insisted that criminal confessions must be voluntary—who wrote the Fifth Amendment to the constitution, with its unambiguous rule that “No person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”—I smiled. Like James in the Bible, I thought, Saint James, the apostle who encourages voluntary public confession: So confess your sins to one another.
The Fifth Amendment has gotten a bad rap—the weasel amendment, the one that allows crooks to get away with their crimes by “taking the Fifth.” However, I’ve always considered the clause prohibiting coerced self-incrimination one of the great underrated American achievements because it takes free will seriously, even to the point of letting scoundrels and liars go free. You may confess your crimes, or you may keep them secret; it’s all up to you.
I didn’t have to write this book. Nothing and no one forced me to confess. I did so, as the relevant Supreme Court decision says, “knowingly, voluntarily and intelligently.” There were no threats or improper inducements. My secret might have remained my secret forever. Although I will never entirely forgive myself for what I did in 1968 and what resulted, I have sincerely confessed and thereby gotten, in the Roman Catholic term of art, satisfaction.
I may now be loathed and castigated, maybe deservedly, but I don’t believe that I can be prosecuted successfully. I violated Title 18 U.S. Code 1751, conspiracy to assassinate the president. Given that two of my three coconspirators were government agents, I could mount a defense of entrapment, but it would be weak, since obviously I didn’t require much inducement by Alex or Chuck to engage in our criminal conduct. People died—Chuck, the CIA agent, and the army intelligence agent in his room in Washington—but my accomplice didn’t fire his weapon and killed no one. None of those three deaths was a capital crime, I had withdrawn from the conspiracy and notified the authorities two weeks earlier, and in any event the shootout was not an outgrowth of the conspiracy. I was never arrested or charged or indicted, so under the law, I was never a fugitive. In other words, as soon as we abandoned our conspiracy, the five-year federal statute of limitations began running, and therefore, since the spring of 1973, I have been free of legal liability for those crimes. And I am not waiving those applicable statutes of limitation now.
However, because America can put you to death for treason, treason is a capital crime, which means there’s no statute of limitations. No American has been convicted of treason in my lifetime. But could I be prosecuted today for treason under 18 U.S. Code 2381? Were we levying war against the United States and giving aid and comfort to its enemies in 1968? Arguably. But because various federal government agencies have known what we did since 1968, that forty-six-year pre-indictment delay would get a federal prosecutor laughed out of court. In any event, I would be saved by Article 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which says that “No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.” Alex is the only living witness to my (and his) overt acts. And I don’t intend to confess to treason in open court.
It has been a week since I met with Alex, and classes start next week. I plan to send this manuscript to my editor (and my lawyer) on Friday. It feels like the calm before the storm. Which would be enjoyable, I think, if I’d heard from Stewart.
I’ve sent more emails. I’ve left voice mails on his home number, which may not even be his number anymore; the outgoing message is computer-generated. I can’t very well call the National Counterterrorism Center or the National Security Council or CIA and ask where the hell Stewart Jones is. I’ve never met any of his friends, and I don’t know his mother’s new last name. Several times a day I comb through Google News, searching for stories of Americans arrested or kidnapped or killed in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen or Iran. “In theater” is all I knew of his whereabouts in July. There are a lot of
theaters these days.
I go out for a hike and walk three miles, sweating like a pig. I see a dead coyote.
Back home, I print out a fresh manuscript and start reading it again.
I can’t concentrate.
I am worrying like a wife.
I make a tuna salad. It’s only half past one. I can’t have a drink.
There are twenty-four area codes in L.A., of which I’m familiar with maybe five, so I’m used to seeing entirely unfamiliar caller IDs. Area code 562? Long Beach? Maybe the roofer?
“Hello?”
“Hi. The eagle has landed. I’m here.”
“Oh, God, I am so happy to hear your voice! I thought you were dead.” Saying it makes my throat tighten and tears seep. “Why the fuck haven’t you called? I don’t care if I’m acting like a wife. What do you mean, you’re here?”
“On the 405, about to get on the 710. Heading in your direction. To your house, if you’re not otherwise engaged.”
I haven’t showered in two days. I have a kayak rented nonrefundably in Marina del Rey at four. I’m not getting my hair color touched up until the day after tomorrow. Shit. “Sure, yes, of course, come over. But why no word, nothing, for a month? I was terrified.”
“Out of range for a while, then I didn’t want to call or text or email. I’ll tell you when I get there.”
“Is everything okay?”
“I’m alive. My dick works. So, yeah. I’ll be there in forty-five minutes or so.”
He rings my doorbell forty-seven minutes later. He’s wearing a baseball hat that says General Atomics. I’ve never seen him so tan. “The Middle East is a sunny place,” he explains as he steps inside to hug me. “You’ve got blood on your face.”
Every hundredth time I test my blood, some of it sprays out a foot from my pricked finger in a super-thin mist. I’ve ruined a couple of blouses this way. Stewart licks his thumb and wipes the spatter off my temple.
The day he returned to Washington two weeks ago, he explains, he was “called over to McLean” and dismissed from government service for “suspected security breaches, unauthorized distribution of classified material, blah blah blah”—that is, for acting as my back-channel researcher.
Another bad boy’s life wrecked by Karen Hollander.
Until the dust settled—a signed agreement not to prosecute him, his pension secured—he thought it was unwise to be in touch with me in ways “vulnerable to comment.”
“Comment by whom?”
“COM-MINT, C-O-M-I-N-T, communications intelligence.” He means electronic eavesdropping.
He insists he’s fine, he was planning to get out before he turned sixty anyway, what’s a year give or take, it’s all good. “Kind of a nice, friendly fuck-you adios, good for my buckaroo rep. And now they’re all going to be eager to read your book. I think you’ll sell a thousand copies in the 22102 zip code alone.”
“How did they find out?”
“I got blown.” It takes me a second to realize he isn’t talking about a woman who performed oral sex on him. “By Alex Macallister the Third.” Or a man.
“That evil scumbag motherfucker.”
“Keep it up, I love that.”
“How did he even know who you were? I swear to God I didn’t tell him.”
“He’s a smart guy. That night we had the drink with him in Georgetown in ninety-nine, he made me give him a card. So now or back then, he put two and two together. Turns out he’s in the spook auxiliary, keeps in touch with a couple of the old fucks he knew from when you were kids.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no, no, I told him who I was. And I did what I did for you. Fuck it. It was fun.”
He grins and shrugs like a boy who’s been grounded for getting drunk and staying out all night. When I hug him, I wipe my tears on his shirt. It has a slight foreign tang, lye soap and diesel and spicy tobacco.
“So … why are you in L.A.?”
“I’ve got nowhere else to go. School doesn’t start for a week, right? Maybe I’ll move here. Although I always thought Molokai. When your book comes out and they fire you, you can come hang out in Hawaii with me.”
“Okay. You want to practice some Hawaiian living right now? If you’re not too pooped.”
“Does that mean fuck?”
“That means going out in a sea kayak at the UCLA Marina Aquatic Center in an hour and a half.”
As we wriggle into our plastic boat and begin paddling, I smile—at the improbability of Stewart appearing here and participating in an actual outdoor leisure activity with me, at the cliché of rowing into the Pacific sunset. All Clichés Are True, as my friend Lizzie says, and their being clichés doesn’t necessarily make them bad in real life.
“We look like a fucking Viagra commercial,” he says. “California is so … lifestyle-y.”
I tell him that for nine months I haven’t felt like a fraud. He replies that he hasn’t killed anyone for almost nine months but then says he’s joking—that he has actually, personally killed someone only once, in Belgrade twenty-one years ago. “I’m surprised you never asked until now,” he says. And then: “Or maybe I’m not surprised.”
I talk through the book in detail for the first time. He tells me I’m “the ultimate poster child for my generation—you have everything you could possibly want, sky’s the limit, then you decide you’ve got to burn down the joint, you do all this lunatic shit, then you suddenly change your mind and decide, ‘Nah, America’s not so bad after all—waiter, I’ll have another chardonnay,’ tuck in to this sweet life, and get away with it all scot-fucking-free.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“Although, actually? I’m busting your balls. Keeping big secrets is a fucking soul suck. You’ve paid. Not retail, maybe, but I know you’ve paid.”
“It’s after five. We should probably head in.”
I’m in the back of the kayak, so he lifts his paddle from the water and lets me turn us around, then starts paddling again.
“ ‘So we beat on,’” he says, “ ‘boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’”
I’m unspeakably happy that my friend the rough, tough former secret agent has quoted the last line of The Great Gatsby. I stare at the sweat dripping down the short hairs on the back of his brown neck.
“Would you be angry,” I ask, “if I told you I loved you?”
“Not angry.” Then: “Thanks.” And then: “Don’t make any rash decisions.”
We paddle in silence for a few minutes. Then he says that that since he’s out of the game, I can use his real name in my book if I want. I tell him I’ll think about it. “I wouldn’t want to make any rash decisions.”
Acknowledgments
For fifteen years, my friend and agent, Suzanne Gluck, has been an indispensable enabler. And Random House—especially and most recently in the persons of Gina Centrello, Kendra Harpster, and my impeccable editor, Jennifer Hershey, as well as Avideh Bashirrad, Karen Fink, Deborah Foley, Erika Greber, Susan Kamil, Sally Marvin, Steve Messina, Sarah Murphy, Tom Perry, and Emily Beth Thomas—the perfect publishers.
One large germ for this story came out of a discussion many years ago at Spy magazine that was consummated in Bruce Handy’s brilliant article “James Bond Mania.” So thank you, Spy comrades.
As I wrote the book, there were things I needed to learn about music, young women in the 1960s, Chicago in the 1960s, suicide, flying small airplanes, Supreme Court clerkships, Danish, German, Harvard in the 1960s and early ‘70s, the intelligence community, and the law, and I’m grateful to David Andersen, Kristi Andersen, Tom Dyja, Tad Friend, Colin Summers, Jeffrey Leeds, Pejk Malinovski, Guy Martin, Frank Rich, Evan Thomas, and the generous Bruce Birenboim, respectively, for filling in my blanks. Thanks also to Larry O’Donnell for his large and unwitting assistance.
Finally, I’m grateful to all the women I’ve known—in particular, the three I know and love the best, Anne Kreamer and Lucy and Katherine Ande
rsen, for their specific suggestions and corrections, and for splendidly teaching me day in and out how the other half thinks.
About the Author
KURT ANDERSEN is the author of the novels Heyday and Turn of the Century, among other books. He also writes for television, film, and the stage, contributes to Vanity Fair, and hosts the public radio program Studio 360. He has previously been a columnist for New York, The New Yorker, and Time, and he co-founded Spy. He lives in Brooklyn.
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