The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  Three o’clock. Immediately, on the walkway, in the night air, something struck me as wrong. At the top of the stairs I paused, trying to identify it, stomach sinking: despite my precautions, I found, I was not ready to face any serious threat of danger. That there could really be surveillance so wide that it could find me in New York—that implied a level of governmental interest that I would not have thought possible and, indeed, which I was not ready to acknowledge. Ready to run back down the stairs, I paused, trying to chase down the feeling of unease. And then I pinpointed it: the bridge was virtually silent; there was none of the ever-repeating Doppler of car tires against the metal mesh surface that characterized any trip even near the bridge as I remembered it. Gingerly I crossed to look at the roadway, and indeed it had been paved.

  This, a mysterious and dangerous place, awash in the successive Doppler echoes of cars passing, was no-man’s-land when I was a kid, a place so dangerous—like Coney Island at night, or Spanish Harlem—that even we, battle-hardened kids from the still largely Italian West Village, avoided it. Sometimes, on a dare, one or another would cross on a bicycle at night, more than once having to turn back on the uphill and race back, pursued by a gang from Brooklyn. Now, however, I understood the bridge to be safe—someone had told me so, part of Giuliani’s cleanup of the city.

  But who cared? What did I really have to be scared of now? There was resignation in my posture as I began to walk, carrying twenty-five thousand dollars up the arch of the bridge. For a few minutes I continued, anxiously watching over the river, a view I had not seen since 1970.

  And then, as if by appointment, I turned and looked west to see the moon, full at last, resting on top of two massive, towering, columns of light. With real shock I stared at them, real confusion, as if I were hallucinating, or had been transported to another city. Only slowly did I realize that I was seeing buildings that had not existed the last time I was in New York, in the early spring of 1970. Only slowly did I realize that I was looking at the World Trade Towers for the first time in my life.

  A literally incredible sight to someone who had never seen them before, transforming not just the view, but somehow the conception of the city. We did not know then, of course, how transforming the future reserved them to be. They were tremendously ugly, rectangular blocks of seventies nondesign. And they were shockingly beautiful, if for nothing else than for their sheer mass, towering over the ornate, suddenly quaint, turn-of-the-century Woolworth Building with its precious emphasis on the decorative, like guardians of a more innocent past.

  For a long time, a great long time, I stared at those buildings, the moon moving slowly to bisect the southernmost tower. When I finally left, I walked backward, staring, and it was only when I reached the point that the Statue of Liberty became visible to the south around the eastern edge of the Battery that I turned and found myself looking at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, far away across the water, and I remembered crossing this bridge with my own father in 1960 on the way to Washington for the civil rights demonstration.

  My brother, with his ID and money, had come to help me as surely as if he were there, holding my hand. And now, as if an ancient oracle had spoken, my father, now that he was dead and gone, came to my rescue and guided me over that bridge and into what I had next to do as surely as he had, a lifetime ago, driven me across in his Dodge Dart.

  5.

  Brooklyn. Three-thirty in the morning. Cadman Plaza, the green of the trees around the park lost in the black of night, but still casting a carpet of shadow in the moonlight. I had been the only person on the bridge, the only person at all, and if that didn’t prove that I was not being followed, nothing would. My mind now was empty, flat: the next few hours, I had planned them out years ago, and now all that I needed to do was follow the plan. What was important, now, was to stay untraceable, or rather, to calculate when and how I was traceable and use it.

  At High Street, I took the A train into Brooklyn, riding with a few Latin American workers heading for the early shift at the airports, in cowboy boots and jeans and hats, a tough uniform for gentle people. I knew the train well—in high school we would travel out this way again and again, Coney Island, Owl’s Head, Borough Park, Bay Ridge, strange, often violent places: I had had a taste for the gutter from a very early age. But, you see, the level of violence then was so low-tech, I could participate in it too: playing on an even field with Brooklyn blacks and Italians, crossing paths with Guardian Angels and JDL kids in their tiny little yarmulkes. There were no guns and no one ever got seriously hurt. And later, when the time came to fight seriously, I knew how.

  At Howard Beach I got off, stepping out and directly across the platform to the shadows of the wall. Along with the Latin Americans, for whom a shuttle was waiting, two kids had also gotten out, way down the other end of the platform, but they were too busy shouldering their backpacks to notice me. I watched them descending the stairs and climbing onto the waiting airport bus, and when that was gone, I went down myself and began to walk along Conduit Road.

  God, I was hungry. The little streets next to the road held an occasional open bodega, but I did not want to be seen by anybody. And so I walked. Walked my heart out. I remembered John Sanford’s line about his years on the blacklist, his passport confiscated: “You can walk your ass off but you’re still in jail.” Then, after a time, with each step a flash of you came into my mind, your face tilted upward, your nut-brown hair flowing back, and your lips pursed. For a time I watched it, consumed in the pain it conjured. Then, to the contrary, I began to worry about losing it. But it never left me, and in time I came to accept that in some way you were accompanying me while I walked, walked and breathed, walked with my steps hitting the concrete the way they had as a kid, hollow and lonely at night in Brooklyn.

  And at last, when a distant sun was just beginning to color the sooty day gray, I found myself before the chain-link fence of Kennedy Airport.

  I found and took the long-term parking shuttle, now, and got off at the TWA terminal. Inside I ate breakfast at a McDonald’s, with distaste but with appetite. Then I bought a calling card at a newsstand and went over to a bank of pay phones, my brother’s perpetual calendar page in my hand. The phone rang twice. And to my surprise, a woman’s voice answered.

  “Don’t hang up. My name is Maggie Calaway.”

  I paused. Then, slowly, I answered. “Where’s Daniel?”

  “He’s in jail. In Canada. I’m his wife.”

  Even more confused, I paused. But the woman went on. “You were reported to have fled to Canada in the New York Times. When we read about it, we thought it was probably a red herring. Was it?”

  This time I answered, hesitantly. “How did you know?”

  “I know someone who used to be…with you. She suggested Daniel drive up to Canada and get himself arrested. She also suggested we keep the identity updated and the money and all in your father’s safe. You found it, right? She showed us how to do all that. I’m telling you all this so you’ll trust me. Is it working?”

  She had a low voice with a Boston accent, and seemed to be injecting an ironic lilt, almost as if making fun of me, into the question.

  “Yes. It’s working.”

  “Good. Our friend suggested Daniel go up to Canada as if he were going to meet you. Suspiciously, and stupidly. It worked: they arrested him in Montreal, and they’re holding him for questioning. They still think you’re there, but I doubt they’ll keep thinking that for long.”

  I didn’t know what to say, Isabel. Why would my brother be taking this kind of risk for me?

  “You all are risking trouble.”

  “And you? What are you risking?”

  I hesitated. “Maggie, I’m the guilty one.”

  “Are you now.” She answered immediately. “That’s not usually a disrecommendation to lawyers. My husband—your brother—and I are both lawyers.”

  “Neither of you have privilege.”

  “Nor are either of us cowards.”
r />   It was as if we were having a fight. “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.” Her voice had changed now, as if soothing a child. “You know, I did a death penalty defense in Michigan a couple years ago?”

  “Did you now?” I was, Isabel, utterly at sea.

  “I did. I took it on for the University of Michigan Law School Death Penalty Project. Daley Stewart? Guy convicted of killing his girlfriend? You remember the case?”

  “Sure.”

  “We lost. But, you know, I got to know the arresting officer pretty well. Being friends with me did not fit his profile, let me tell you. Vietnam vet, undercover with the FBI on the U of M campus. And still, we got to know each other. Wonderful guy. Had me to dinner with his family one Saturday.”

  “How nice.” My heart was jumping out of my chest. Could she conceivably, conceivably, be talking about Johnny Osborne?

  “Isn’t it? He’s the head of the FBI field office in Traverse City. John Osborne.”

  Iz. There was a long, long silence while, word by word, I absorbed what she had just told me. A long silence. Then I said:

  “When was this?”

  “Couple years ago.” She spoke blithely, cheerfully, as if to counterweigh the enormity of the message hidden in what she was saying. “You know, he’s this big Republican, Vietnam vet, right? But staunchly against the death penalty. And after he saw my work, he…well, he took me into his confidence about another injustice. An old, old injustice. Something that happened in the seventies.”

  There was silence on her end now, and I left it there for a long, long time, struggling to understand. Then I said, simply:

  “He told you?”

  “He told me.”

  “Did you tell my brother?”

  “I told your brother.”

  “And that’s why he left the IDs.”

  “We’d have done more, if we could.”

  It was an amazingly powerful thing, Izzy. An amazingly powerful thing, this…this beneficence from a total stranger. Finally I said, “Maggie, can you help me?”

  “That’s the idea, Jason. That’s exactly the idea.”

  “I’m bringing you yet more trouble.”

  “What is it?”

  “My daughter. Her name is Isabel. We call her Izzy. She’s a lovely girl.”

  “Where is she?”

  “At the Marriott Hotel on Wall Street. Room 504. She’s alone. She won’t wake up till eight. When she does, she’ll be terrified. Can you go to her? Do you have kids?”

  “Yes. I have a baby-sitter with my kids. I’ll catch a cab right this second.”

  I was speaking quickly now. “I doubt you can avoid being followed. All that matters is that you get in before the police. Tell Daniel I’ll need to get a court order to keep my daughter from her mother. Tell him to take her up to the house on Martha’s Vineyard, because Massachusetts law will give me at least a stay of custody against my ex-wife. Ted Kennedy hates my ex-father-in-law, that should be worth something. Also—”

  She interrupted me. “Jason. I’m a partner at Frankfurt, Garbus, Klein and Selz. I’ll tie the thing up every which way but Sunday.”

  I was crying now, but so softly that when your aunt Maggie helped me to reconstruct this conversation, just last week, she still didn’t know it. Still, I managed to tell her about your allergies, what you liked to eat, and how important it was to keep you from the television. “I’ll need a few weeks.”

  “Go. What’s your plan?”

  “I’m going to find Mimi Lurie.”

  “You know how?”

  “I think so.”

  “Go then. We’ll keep your girl. Tell us when we can help.”

  Still crying, I hung up. Left the terminal. Caught the bus back to Howard Beach—the crowded bus now filled with the departing night shift, and arriving passengers, where no one would notice me—and then the A train, settling in for the long, silent, sinister ride through the morning back to New York. Got off at the Port Authority. By then it was nine-thirty in the morning, and I had slept only an hour in the past seventy-two. Which is why, once I had located the 10 A.M. bus to Denver, bought a ticket, and climbed into the evil, stale, antiseptic atmosphere, I fell into an immediate, total, defenseless sleep. Or better perhaps, a defensive sleep. For it kept me from even imagining the scene that was taking place at the Wall Street Mariott, where by then Maggie Calaway had arrived, accompanied by no less than Martin Garbus himself. She had with her a court order granting her temporary custody of her niece, a court order that protected them entirely from the two dozen armed Rapid Response Force police who stormed the hotel, minutes behind her, having—we found out later—had her under surveillance continuously since I went on the run.

  Later, your aunt Maggie told me, remembering the scene, it occurred to her that it was Garbus who confronted the police with the court order. She, to her amusement, was not being a lawyer then, but a mother. Sitting on the unmade bed where a terrified, crying little girl was sitting in her nightclothes, shaking uncontrollably, having woken to find herself abandoned by her father in a hotel room, surrounded by police.

  You want to know how I walked out on you? Just like you do anything dangerous. You plan for as long as you can, then you throw yourself on the mercy of events. You count on nothing but foresight, and you watch to see what is your luck. You expect help from nobody, and you take any help you can get. You try to manage your mind. Close it down. Focus your perceptions on the immediate. Put off pain, manage panic. Later there will be time to feel both in all the blossoming and flourishing of their horror.

  Or have I got it wrong, Izzy? Is it that you don’t care how I walked out on you, you only want to know why?

  Oh, well, why. Why is also the same as why you do anything unthinkable. You do it when there’s no other choice.

  Date: June 12, 2006

  From: “Benjamin Schulberg”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 18

  I find it kind of amusing that your father and Mimi were both writing all weekend. Myself, I have a life that takes up my weekends and a job to go to on Monday. It’s taken me a couple hours to catch up with this story. It’s nearly Tuesday already, and I’m just getting to work. So if this is less than perfectly crafted, Ms. Isabel, you’ll have to excuse me, okay?

  Now, one thing that’s bugged the many observers and critics of this little drama is that by the end of June, that summer, virtually every player in this story was in Michigan, including me. At the time, that even let loose some talk of conspiracy, which will do no one any good if it comes up at the parole board. So let me explain something right off the bat. Mimi Lurie had her reasons for going to Ann Arbor, like she said. That of course meant that your father had reason to go there too. Rebeccah Osborne was already in school there, as is natural for a girl from Traverse City. Jed Lewis, too, had been in Ann Arbor as an undergraduate, graduate, and now as a professor. So in fact, the only real unlikely thing was that I, Benjamin, a New Yorker who has been to Europe more often than to any of those weirdo states between Jersey and California, should end up in Michigan.

  To understand how this happened, you have to figure that one of the real prime places the story of your father was getting attention was, of course, Ann Arbor, because Jason Sinai was seen there as something of a native son.

  I knew all about it. Because in the day or two after your father’s flight, all I could do—and all I in fact did—was watch the Web and see what was being written, and where. And when those dozen or so times a day I ran a Nexis on Jason Sinai, the tiny little daily paper from the University of Michigan often turned out to have the most interesting stuff—a sad commentary on our national media, considering that the rag was run by a dozen stoned undergraduates.

  When I exposed Jim Grant’s identity in the Albany Times—and the story was picked up nationwide—it was, in Ann Arbor, a time of indi
gnation. The next morning’s Michigan Daily ran an editorial asking why we cannot forgive a crime twenty-two years old when we forgave a president for concealing from the American Congress and people alike a secret campaign of bombing and terror in Laos and Cambodia, Nixon’s secret war of 1970. “If we’re prosecuting war criminals,” the article went on, “let’s get them all. Lieutenant Calley’s still out there somewhere, Fred Hampton’s murderers too, Henry Kissinger’s in New York. But if we’re pardoning war criminals, then let’s pardon them all, and Sharon Solarz, Jason Sinai, and Mimi Lurie are just the right place to start.”

  When it became known that your father had gone on the run, it was a time of jubilation in Ann Arbor—all the more so because it was summer, Hash Bash season, and there were pot smokers from far and wide on campus, most too young too have any idea what it meant that Jason had abandoned his seven-year-old daughter in a New York hotel room. A local group of high school students that had formed in Seattle lockup during the anti-WTO protest celebrated by posting all over campus excerpts from an article in New Left Notes from August 1969:

  Look At It: America, 1969: The war goes on, despite the jive double-talk about troop withdrawals and peace talks. Black people continue to be murdered by agents of the fat cats who run this country, if not in one way, then in another by the pigs or the courts, by the boss or the welfare department. Working people face higher taxes, inflation, speed-ups, and the sure knowledge—if it hasn’t happened already—that their sons may be shipped off to Vietnam and shipped home in a box. And the young people all over the country go to prisons that are called schools, are trained for jobs that don’t exist, or serve no one’s real interest but the boss’s, and, to top it all off, get told that Vietnam is the place to defend their “freedom.”

  None of this is very new. The cities have been falling apart, the schools have been bullshit, the jobs have been rotten and unfulfilling for a long time.