The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  “Mimi’s like you, Donal. She liked being underground. The rest of us, we were half in mourning for our families, always scared, always wishing we were normal again. Mimi, the whole thing gave her a bounce. Like being good-looking. And you. You liked being underground, you liked being famous, you liked the way people looked at you when they recognized you. You and Mimi, man. You loved breaking the law.”

  “Didn’t seem to bother you none. Breaking the law. You did your share.”

  And I had. I did my share of fucking, too, I was thinking. I spoke, however, with intellectual rather than emotional heat.

  “There’s a big difference. I was a revolutionary criminal. You two, you were criminal revolutionaries. Mimi wasn’t going to take some suburban matron’s identity. Or become a small-town lawyer. Mimi wanted to go see if she could run smoke out of South America for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. That was her idea of a lifestyle.”

  I sat again. “She’d been looking for them for years, but she’d saved the one real connection she had. You. You were the connection. When Leary was arrested and the Brotherhood decided to reach out to Weather to get him out of jail, they used a distributor they had in New York. The distributor sold to a Panther called Douglas Lowe. Lowe drank at the West End, where you bartended. You made the connection between Lowe and Weather, and someone from Weather got to meet the Brotherhood.”

  Donal looked amused. “Who from Weather?”

  “Ah. That’s the question. Who from Weather? Because when Mimi came to you after B of M, you gave her a transitional identity and sent her to see whoever it was from Weather that met the Brotherhood.”

  “And why would you want to know that?”

  “Because compartmentalization of information dictated that he be the only connection with the Brotherhood. And so, if you tell me who he is, I can go to him and find out who the Brotherhood contact was. And if I can find the Brotherhood contact, in turn, well, I’m thinking I can find Mimi Lurie.”

  Donal whistled. “So you want to find Mimi Lurie.”

  “I do.”

  “And why?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “I see.”

  I could see the calculation behind the blue of his eye. Patiently, I watched him conclude that he did not have the datapoints to know what his old friend was doing. Finally, Donal exhaled.

  “Jase, you always were a lucky bastard. You know that?”

  “I didn’t figure this out through luck, Donal.”

  “I know that. I mean, you’re lucky that the one person who can answer your question is me. Because I’m the only one who’d trust you with information that makes me accessory to murder.”

  “Donal. Christ sake. They could take my left arm off, you know that.”

  Donal lowered his voice. “The Brotherhood dude made us submit a list of names of Weather people. I took the name to the Panther, Doug Lowe, and he had some way of getting it out to the Brotherhood dude. I don’t know if Doug ever met the Brotherhood dude, but I never did. Then the Brotherhood dude gave Doug Lowe the name of the guy he was prepared to meet. They set up a meeting, and from then on every contact between Weather and the Brotherhood took place through him.”

  Donal paused, watching me, as if still, all these years after, the discipline of those days made it hard for him to break security and tell me a secret he was supposed to have kept forever. “The one he picked from Weather was one of yours. Jed Lewis. In Ann Arbor. This is why: before Jed got into Weather, he did the Hash Bash with Billy Cusimano, right? Then Big Bill moved out to Mendocino and began planting the seed professionally, right? At which time, he must have hooked up with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. So Billy vouched for Jed Lewis, and that was good enough for the Brotherhood dude.”

  Jed Lewis. I thought. “Jesus, Jeddy never told me about this? We were tight, man. We were part of an affinity group.”

  “Right, go figure. Now, Jed put together the personnel for the Leary thing, notably Mimi. And that was the end of that. Except, after B of M, in 1974, Mimi came and asked me the exact same question as you. After B of M, she wanted to find out who the Brotherhood dude was.”

  “And you sent her to Jed.”

  “No. What I did was, I went to Jed for her. And Jed made some phone calls. Then he gave me a sealed envelope, which I gave to Mimi.”

  I interrupted. “Still sealed?”

  “Still sealed. And Mimi took it, and took off, and that, my friend, was where the revolution ended for me.”

  I thought about that. “So Jed’s the only one who knows where Mimi went after B of M?”

  “Only Jed, pal.”

  “And where’s Jed now?”

  Donal hesitated for some time, now, watching me. Then he spoke, pronouncing the words slowly.

  “Still in A-squared. Only now he’s a professor. University of Michigan. Department of American Studies.”

  Watching his eyes intently watching mine, I nodded.

  Donal washed the clothes I was wearing while I showered and redid my mustache and toupee. We talked while the clothes dried, then we went out for breakfast in a Jeep Cherokee, a brand-new one, clearly Donal’s pride and joy. After breakfast, we went on downtown, where Donal parked in a lot next to the Marriott. In a couple stores—Kenneth Cole, Banana Republic—I bought a new wardrobe. Outside Banana Republic, on the—by now crowded—sidewalk, we stopped, and I put out my hand.

  Donal looked surprised. “Where you going?”

  “Train station.”

  “Train? What the fuck for?”

  “Got to go do my thing, Donal.”

  “Sure, but why the train?”

  I was confused. “You think I should take a taxi?”

  “No, man. I think you should drive.” With a wide sweep of his arm, he slapped the keys to the Cherokee, attached to a little transponder, into my palm. Then he took out his wallet for the registration. “Leave it somewhere sensible when you’re done. Backseat sleeps two. There’s a half a J in the ashtray.”

  Holding the keys, I looked at him in some wonder, and Donal shrugged.

  “You want to tell me what you’re doing, I’ll come with you. You want to tell me?”

  I shook my head.

  “Okay then, brother. And hey—”

  He paused portentously, as if waiting for me to give him a sign I was listening, which I did with a nod.

  “Let’s be careful out there.”

  And then I was standing alone on a sidewalk in Milwaukee, watching Donal disappear into the crowd, his black jeans and shirt blending into the businessmen’s suits around him, beginning to pull my mind from where it had been and focus it on the fact that after a quarter century I was going back to Ann Arbor.

  PART THREE

  Hush little baby

  Don’t you cry

  When we get to Tucson

  You’ll see why

  We left the snowstorms

  And the thunder and rain

  For the desert sun

  We’re gonna be born again

  What’s important

  In this world?

  A little boy

  A little girl.

  —Chrissie Hynde,

  “Thumbelina”

  Date: June 15, 2006

  From: “Rebeccah”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 24

  So now it is my turn to take up the thread of this story.

  I’m not so sure what I have to add. None of this is anything I talk about happily. And now, ten years later, as you know, my role in this whole story is still secret.

  Secret. That’s a word I know a lot about, Iz, my girl. Secrecy is my profession. One more secret, you could say, doesn’t hurt.

  Okay, it hasn’t hurt. And now it may even help.

  But if that’s the case, then why on earth are they making me put my whole role in this whole thing on-line, for all the future
to read?

  It was a weekend meeting, earlier this summer, with what Ben calls “the Committee” when it was decided—an expanded meeting of the Committee, out at Michelle Fitzgerald’s beach house on Long Island. Basically, everyone who had the slightest chance of helping with the parole board was there, which meant everyone and his brother was there, and let me tell you, everyone and his brother had an opinion. When toward the end of the weekend I was told that I was to be a writer of this little history of the summer of 1996, I protested vigorously. I am a Johnny-come-lately to this story, I had no stake in the politics, I was then, and am now, a Republican.

  To which it was pointed out to me—rather dryly—by Jason that, A, if it weren’t for me this story would never have happened, and B, the very fact that I was not a perpetrator but a victim of the events of the summer of 1996 only makes me more convincing in my role in explaining them to you, Isabel Montgomery Grant, who is being asked to change her life and the lives of people she loves for us.

  Anyhow, it was all a total waste of time arguing because, as you will find out if you join our little party in Michigan later this month, there’s no discussion with these guys. The reason they all got involved in their little drama of the sixties in the first place is because they are such powerful personalities, each of them in their own way, and why they bothered with bombs is a mystery when they could probably have ended the war in Vietnam by force of character alone. Peer-pressure Lyndon Johnson into dropping acid. Browbeat McNamara into a criticism-self-criticism session. Argue the McBundys into a semicomatose state.

  They’d have probably given in just to shut them up.

  God knows I did.

  So, as my daughter would say, “whatever.” It’s a perfect June day in 2006, and instead of sitting in traffic on the West Side Highway trying to get out of town, as every other self-respecting New Yorker is doing, I’m staring out a window at the sunstruck green of what passes for my garden and typing away on my laptop, and the way things are looking, I’m going to be spending the next few days doing that. But here’s the deal: if I’m going to tell my story, I’m going to tell the part I care most about first, and believe it or not, this part is not about Jason but about someone else I first met in the summer of 1996, and who was to become a very important person to me indeed.

  So picture with me, if you will, a summer afternoon in a college town in the Midwest. Ann Arbor, late June of 1996. Streets of little lawns and houses divided into student apartments; kids skateboarding; an occasional snatch of music, or a conversation, as if the whole town were an outdoors dorm.

  Joseph Brodsky once gave the commencement speech at the U of M, and in it he said that you can judge your success as an adult by how fondly you remember Ann Arbor. By that standard, my adult life promised great things. This was my last summer in Ann Arbor, and already a patina of nostalgia was over everything I saw, the dear, familiar streets, the happy stops in my routine, the diner, the library, the Honors Office in Angell Hall. Even Dr. L’s office—Jed Lewis, my senior thesis adviser, now a member of the distinguished body we call the Committee—was a place where I savored the minutes, the last long, engaging discussions with his head framed by the light of the window, the picture-perfect views of campus. That summer I was writing my senior thesis in American studies, on the siege of Khe Sanh, to be exact. It was the last requirement for my degree, and I had delayed it to the summer in order to spend May, after classes ended, interviewing participants, largely friends of my father, who had lived through Khe Sanh and were prepared—unlike the friends, I may add, of Jason—to tell their story. Now it seemed I could not work slowly enough, the pages piling up on my desk with effortless ease, the summer spinning toward its end with all the speed that happiness lends to time. In August I would move to Virginia and begin training to become an FBI agent. From that, there would be no turning back: the agency would be sending me to law school at Georgetown, and when I finished, I would be one highly qualified criminologist. The change loomed: inevitable, exciting, unwelcome. It was, I knew, the last summer of my childhood, and every moment was precious to me.

  In this rich time, the advent of a person who gave every appearance of becoming an admirer did not make much of an impression on me.

  Not at first.

  There was no reason for it to: you work at a restaurant in a college town, you are a sitting duck for men to fall in love with you. Any college town is filled with tortured, good-looking young men, each seeming more interesting than the last. Once you’ve hung out with a couple of them, though, you find that everything so interesting about them is just some phase they’re going through, and that sooner or later they’re going to reveal themselves as what they in fact are: boys. I had long ago sworn not to meet any more boys at the diner. And then there was Robert Bruner, who really was captain of the squash team and a Rhodes scholar, and who really was no longer a boy, having finished law school and a year at Oxford, and who really was moving to Washington in August, just when I was moving to Virginia, and had driven down from Traverse City to take me out every night I had free for the past month. Rob had been a senior in high school when I was a freshman; was back from England just for a month, and when Ben showed up, I was very close to taking him to bed.

  Altogether, Ben appeared to me rather like a guy at a party who no one wanted to talk to. There was nothing wrong with him: he was probably very nice. It’s just that no one knew him, and no one really wanted to get to know him—the party had been going on too long before he got there. So I don’t think I thought about him even once between the Sunday night he came to the diner and the Wednesday when I was supposed to meet him for coffee. And in fact, I’m a bit ashamed to say, when I remembered, on Wednesday, that I was due to meet him in five minutes, I thought seriously about not going. There was just no room for him in my summer, my summer that was hurtling through space and time to autumn, every moment of which I needed to taste, to hold, and to miss its passing.

  But I couldn’t stand him up. He knew where I worked, after all. And so Wednesday afternoon I entered the sudden dark of Drake’s, a coffee shop next to campus—not the modern cappuccino joint my father had taken Ben to, but a dark little place from the fifties that I adored—and, once my eyes had adjusted to the light, saw the guy sitting alone at a booth. That wasn’t hard: no one came to Drake’s anymore. Outside, within a three-block radius, there were seventeen or eighteen beautiful light-flooded, air-conditioned cafés, each serving spectacular coffee, biscotti, and panini, in contrast to the watery brew the rude waitresses poured here from big vats, big vats that added to the ambient temperature of about one-oh-one…in fact, the summer of 1996 was the end of Drake’s existence. No one understood my fondness for this place, and when that day I sat down in front of Ben, he, sweating profusely, expressed some opinions in this regard. I nodded, bored.

  “Uh-huh. Lots of people feel that way.”

  “Doesn’t stop you, though?”

  An inauspicious start to the conversation, I thought, resisting the urge to look at my watch and changing the subject as quickly as I could. “Not at all. I commune with the ghosts of the fifties. So, have you seen my father again?”

  He answered quickly, agreeably, although there was something in his eye that made me think he had caught my boredom. “Yeah, we caught a Tigers game last night. Tonight we’re playing poker. He asked me to call him Dad, isn’t that sweet? And you?”

  “Nope.” He was an interesting, if not exactly agreeable-looking, person: badly shaven, with full, expressive lips and black eyes. “He’s coming to town tomorrow. For the night.”

  “Oh.” His full lips smiled happily and, somehow, easily. “Great. What time?”

  “What time what?”

  “Dinner. What can I bring?”

  I smiled now too—really, he was too ridiculous. “Nothing. Including yourself. You are so uninvited, I can’t tell you.”

  “But why, Beck? Dad and I are probably going to be meeting to shoot some stick after dinner, anyw
ays.”

  Beck. Only my parents call me Beck. “He doesn’t want to see you. Why do you think he’s ducking your calls?”

  “Boy.” His smile faded, as if he were really hurt, and yet his black eyes remained steadily trained on mine, observant, expressive. “I’m not angry, you know. Just very, very hurt. Now look.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He looked around the place, no doubt observing that the single waitress, a blond adolescent girl, was ignoring us, and lit a cigarette with his outsize hands. Then he leaned forward to me. “It’s ridiculous to call Sharon Solarz and Jason Sinai murderers. Sharon and Jason drove the getaway car. They were twenty-four and never dreamed ex-Special Forces Vincent Dellesandro would use his gun.”

  Apparently we were on to a new part of the conversation: he was referring to the Michigan Daily editorial I’d written the week before, in which I argued that Solarz should serve the maximum term possible for the Bank of Michigan robbery. Okay. I can adapt, I was thinking, and I gave him a stern look.

  “Oh, nonsense. A guard with a wife and two children was killed at B of M, and in this country, we punish murderers equally, whether they’re the perpetrator or the accessory. Anything else is an excuse. A liberal, paranoid, nonsensical excuse.”

  While I talked, I watched his mouth, of which the wide lips, which were very red, seemed to be forming words of response even before I finished. And in fact he hardly let me finish.

  “I agree, it’s no excuse. But that’s not the point. Four students were killed by the National Guard at Kent State—four Americans on state ground exercising the constitutional right to free speech, by the National Guard. But no one was punished for that.”

  “So what? That excuses the murder, in cold blood, of a bank guard?”

  “No, no, of course not. The question is, why are some murders legal if all of them are wrong?”

  I was thinking, what a jerk, and perhaps I let some of that tone into my voice. “Listen, democracy’s imperfect, we all know that. Don’t give me a bunch of garbage about Vietnam. My father was nearly killed in Vietnam, and anything he did there he was required to do by the United States Army and its commander in chief. You call soldiers murderers? That’s ridiculous. I know dozens and dozens of vets, and they’re just like anyone else in this country, only they were called on to kill, and they did it. As for those kids in the National Guard who screwed up at Kent State, you think they’re proud of it? There was a civil war in this country: what’s amazing is that there were so few screwups and so few casualties.”