The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  And now, to my dismay, he smiled, and I realized that I had just been baited. Quietly now, in a calm, very reasonable tone, as if speaking to a child, he answered. “Well, that’s my point. Jason Sinai’s mistakes had a context. He’s not proud of his past either, I’m guessing. But the context is a meaningful part of his punishment. When Clinton pardoned the Puerto Rican terrorists from the FALN, that had a context in the bombing of Vieques—same thing when Clinton let Sylvia Baraldini go to apologize for his air force cutting down an Italian ski lift. I mean, Sylvia Baraldini was convicted in the Brinks robbery, just like Kathy Boudin. But Clinton needed to appease the Italians, and so she got out, while Boudin stays in. Even Ford’s pardon of your hero Nixon had a context. I mean, you don’t believe in the pardoning of criminal misconduct on the part of government officials, do you? But I think we all agree that there was no point in sending Nixon to jail. Please let me finish.”

  This last part was in response to my trying to interrupt. When I stopped—trying to interrupt, that is, although I was more than a little outraged—he went on, enunciating clearly.

  “When those…those children robbed the Bank of Michigan, the context was that it seemed to a great many reasonable people in this country that a real, genuine coup was going on, a coup against the Constitution by the Nixon White House. Such gross illegality was going on at the highest levels of our government that the president had to resign over it to avoid being impeached. This country was at war with itself. I’m not saying they were right to rob the bank. They were, in fact, wrong. That’s a given. But that war’s never ended, it’s just gotten deeper and more bitter.”

  This time, when he finished, I thought before I answered. “So we were at war. Great. Then the murder of that cop was a war crime, a crime against humanity.”

  He nodded now, letting a thick shock of brown bangs fall over one eye, then brushing it back. Pleased with himself. “That’s exactly what I think. Our law doesn’t account for war crimes. South Africa has a Truth and Reconciliation Council; Argentina has the same. For God’s sakes, after World War II we even reconstructed our enemies’ countries. But Nixon only ended the war in Vietnam—the war over Vietnam’s still going on. Clinton and Gingrich are fighting it today, Gore and W are going to fight it next election! Nothing in our constitutional law encompasses the idea of reconciliation: we are a country adamantly opposed to ourselves.”

  “Listen.” I sat back now, and nodded. “I understand what you’re saying. It’s interesting, it’s perceptive, it’s maybe even true. But to go from there to defending Jason Sinai and his crew is a leap you’re not going to get anyone to make.”

  He too lowered his tone. “I’m not defending him. If Sinai’s complicit in manslaughter, he should be convicted. Then he should be pardoned in the name of national reconciliation. We don’t call soldiers murderers, fine. But William Calley served three years for murdering a village full of women and children at My Lai. All I ask is that we pardon someone who made a mistake in the context of what we now understand was a patriotic duty to fight against the war in Vietnam. Calley served three years? Between Kathy Boudin, David Gilbert, and Judy Clark—I’m speaking only about accessories, now, the helpers, not the shooters—you know how much time’s been served for the Brinks Robbery? Sixty years. Hard state time in maximum-security prisons, and no one expects any paroles to be handed out, ever. What should Solarz and Sinai get for driving the getaway car in a misguided robbery gone wrong? What should Mimi Lurie get for participating in it? How about double Calley’s sentence? Would you be happy with that, counselor? How about six years apiece?”

  2.

  Now apparently Ben had been foolish to think that his smoking would go unnoticed, because it was during this last speech that a man came out of the kitchen and suggested that we leave, immediately. But such was the heat of our discussion that neither of us really paid any attention. We walked together out of the café back into the light of the afternoon, me holding my books to my chest—I was wearing a tank top and a short cotton skirt—and he fell into step beside me, his head exactly at the level of mine. For a time we argued on. And only after some time did the conversation fall to a more normal decibel level.

  “So, what’s your dad think of this Jason Sinai thing?”

  “Thinks it’s a pain in the ass. I think,” I answered absently, because something was beginning to disturb me.

  “They gonna catch him?”

  “If Sinai’s stupid enough to come to Michigan, they are.”

  “Uh-huh. Not that they have any great track record, of course.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I was unwilling to go on in this vein; strangely unwilling. “Hey, mind if I don’t defend the whole FBI this afternoon?”

  He didn’t answer, walking next to me with his big hands clasped behind his back and his head bent down toward the pavement. Finally, I asked, “And you? What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t even know who Jim Grant was till I figured it out.”

  “Then why did you help the FBI out?”

  He looked at me now, surprised. “Because I’m a reporter. And he’s a criminal.”

  “A criminal you sympathize with.”

  “Hey, don’t simplify. I’m just talking. I don’t sympathize with anybody.”

  We were at the door of the diner where I worked now, so I stopped and turned to face him. We were almost exactly the same height. And I still felt disturbed—enough so that I was willing to put an end to this relationship before it started. I spoke without the hint of a smile.

  “You know, Ben, you don’t fool me with all your East Coast liberal bullshit. This isn’t about the war in Vietnam, for God’s sake. It’s about a bank robbery, a shooting, and a dead cop. A quarter century of evading the law. Oh, and then that finicky legal issue about being an accessory to a crime carrying all the weight of being the primary perpetrator. I’m just a country girl, I guess, ’cause it’s all so simple to me. You can romanticize the left all you want. It’s still a bunch of damn criminals.”

  He answered me with the same seriousness. “Think so? Me, I think the left can use a little romance, after the beating they’ve taken the last twenty years. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you the cosmopolitan, liberal, Jew perspective on it tonight, over dinner.”

  “No, you won’t.” We were standing face-to-face, talking quickly, now.

  “And why not?”

  “Because I work tonight.”

  “After work then.”

  “After work I have a date.”

  “I see. The bozo?”

  “The bozo.”

  “Okay, then, we’re on. You cancel the bozo, and I’ll defend Jason Sinai, Mimi Lurie, and Sharon Solarz against the charge of accessory to murder. And I’ll throw in Kathy Boudin, David Gilbert, and Susan Rosenberg too.”

  And suddenly the root of my discomfort crystallized for me. The problem was, do you know how many people in 1996 had any idea who Susan Rosenberg was? Robert Bruner didn’t. None of my friends did. In fact, outside Jed Lewis and my parents, I doubted there was a single person I knew who did.

  But this guy—this funny-looking guy with his full lips and big hands, staring straight across a few inches of space into my eyes—he did.

  I answered more slowly this time. “No. Tonight’s out. And my dad’s in town tomorrow. Friday night. I get off work at ten. I’ll meet you at the Del Rio. Now tell me, where are you staying?”

  He answered without a beat. “Me? Good God, you move fast, Beck. Gimme an hour, I’ll run out and get a waterbed, a Lionel Richie CD, and a gram of cocaine.”

  I put on a patient voice, now—the kind you use for children. “You do that, Ben. I, meanwhile, will go to work, and then out with Robert Bruner.”

  “And meet me after up at my hotel? The bottle of Grand Marnier’s a given, don’t worry.”

  This time, to my slight surprise, I found myself poking him in the chest with my forefinger. “Friday. And don’t let me see you before then
. Is that clear?”

  For a moment we watched each other. And then, with what I can only describe as a grin, he turned on a heel and walked away.

  3.

  So, as for Ben, I don’t know what he did for the next few days. I admit, at the time, I was kind of conscious of him, at a distance, waiting to see me again. I didn’t give it much thought. My attitude was, maybe he’d disappear, which would simplify my life.

  As for me, when later that night I met Rob—the squash team Rhodes scholar bozo—for drinks, I found myself pretty attentive. I watched him carefully over the little table in the Del: his amazingly handsome face with its evening shadow over the jaw; his strong neck with its tanned, warm skin; his beautiful hands gesturing as he spoke, with passion, about the job he was going to take in the Justice Department. I watched him and thought about the fact that we had known each other most of our lives, he a few years ahead of me in school, our parents friends. It was when he came back from Oxford in the early spring that, for him, I’d become something other than a local girl. Watching him, I tried to remember when that change had occurred, and whether he knew, then, that I was also about to become an FBI agent with every reason to expect her career to take her high up into the administration, a powerful wife for a Washington insider lawyer. When we stood to go, I looked at the pure solidity of his chest and shoulders, just like my father, and when, on the sidewalk outside my house in the summer night he kissed me, I felt that strength as if pierced right through my breast to a spot in my back just below my shoulder blades. I gently stepped back, and for a moment, although I did not know it, a great deal of my life balanced. Then I said good night, quickly, and walked into my house alone. Not pronouncing to myself why I had just done what I had just done.

  Of secondary importance to me, but much more, I suppose, central to our business at hand, was the next evening, which I spent with my Dad.

  Daddy, as is usual when he has business downstate, stayed with me, and as usual, I cooked for him—my father does not like restaurants, he likes to be in a house, and preferably a house where he’s had the chance to check the security himself, as—I suppose—befits a man who has arrested dozens and dozens and dozens of people throughout the state of Michigan.

  He’s a good eater, being enormous and active, and I get a kick out of cooking for him. I suppose, Iz, you’ve realized already that I adore my father about as much as possible. As for Daddy, I think he got a kick out of being cooked for, as Mommy had stopped doing much cooking since being named to the appellate bench: she was by that summer Judge Osborne and got home too late to cook. Whereas my dad ran what had to be one of the sleepier FBI stations in the country, and hadn’t really worked through dinner since Vincent Loonsfoot went on his little spree up north.

  So I did not tell my dad that I had been arguing politics with the exact same reporter whose calls he was ducking. That gave me a little twinge: I do not lie to my parents—my mom, for example, knew I was thinking of going to bed with Rob. I personally thought then—and think now—that because I was adopted and our relationship transcends genetics, my tie to my parents had always been infused with the choice of friendship, rather than the obligation of family.

  So I was not in the habit of lying to my father. But I thought that if he knew that a reporter who was dogging him was also chumming up to his daughter with clearly sexual intent, he might run the guy right out of the state, and I did not want Ben run out of state. So I swallowed my sense of dishonesty and asked Dad if he had known Jason Sinai when he was at school—“at school” being a euphemism for the time he spent undercover, infiltrating the SDS, after his return from Vietnam.

  And when he answered, I had the feeling that the subject wasn’t far from his thoughts, which when you think of it wasn’t so far-fetched. I mean, he never told me what business he was on when he came to town, but I suppose I could have guessed that a manhunt for fugitives wanted for a Michigan crime might have involved the station chief of a Michigan FBI office, could I not? He gave the question one of his long thinks while chewing—I had barbecued vegetables out on the porch, because my father is vegetarian since Vietnam—and then answered in his slow, slightly drawly voice.

  “You hear the report on them the other night?”

  “Um-hmm.” The local public radio station had done a long piece on the Bank of Michigan robbery, and I had heard it twice: once on local radio, the second when All Things Considered picked it up.

  “Huh.” He bit, chewed, and watched me through these blue eyes of his, which, more than anything else, reveal that you’re not talking to some country-dirt cop. “I never met Sinai, though I saw him around campus. He was too big to speak to us little folk. Those guys, they had a social hierarchy like the military.”

  Chew. Think. I could see that he was thinking, so I waited, and after a time, he went on in a different tone.

  “You know who I did know, Beck? I knew Mimi Lurie.”

  “Really? When you were undercover?”

  “No. I had to avoid her, then. That’s the weird part. I knew her when I was a kid. Her parents had a cabin up by Point Betsie; summers, they’d be at church with us.”

  “Huh?” I had stopped eating and was watching my father with real surprise. “You knew Martin Luria?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Daddy, for God’s sake. Why didn’t you ever tell me that before?”

  “Never came up. What’s so special about him?”

  “Well, that he was a Soviet spy, for one thing.”

  He shrugged. “So they said. Martin Luria—Mimi changed it to Lurie after he killed himself. Poor bastard. He was red, that’s for sure. Was he a spy? I don’t know that, Beck. I do know that your granddaddy hated Commies as much as J. Edgar Hoover, and he still made us all go to Luria’s funeral.”

  My fork was still hanging in the air. “My granddaddy made you go to the funeral of a known Communist?”

  Pause, but not, this time, to chew: he paused to look out the window, not attentively as when he’s heard a noise, but absently.

  “Communist, Communist. All communism said to someone like Lurie was that the rich in this world are too few and the poor too many.” Now he looked at me again. “You know, we were the only people there beside the immediate family and the FBI agents taking pictures of the immediate family. My daddy, when the funeral was over, he shook hands with all the Lurias, and then with all the agents. They worked for him, after all.”

  “And how were the Lurias?”

  “Oh, God, I don’t remember. I used to think Mimi’s brother was great, sharp as a damn hawk, this kid. Had these eyes like he was Chinese. Always wondered what happened to him.”

  And that, I can tell you, was my father all over. Works undercover infiltrating the SDS—after returning from Vietnam with bullets up his left thigh and through half his stomach—then becomes a career FBI agent, but feels awful over the red-baiting that came before he was even out of high school. See, Martin Luria had been pretty famous up north: a physicist, a Los Alamos Red, and he’d killed himself by the beach at Point Betsie after losing his teaching job to the blacklist. Listening, I realized that my fork was still poised in the air. “What happened to him?”

  Daddy looked confused. “He killed himself. You know that.”

  “No. The son. Mimi’s brother.”

  “Oh, him. Well, he was in grad school when I was here. Did archaeology. Totally nonpolitical. Supposed to be some kind of genius. Then, I don’t know. Someone told me once he went to Turkey, for God’s sake, to work on a dig. Apparently, if you’re an archaeologist, Turkey’s the place to go. He never came back. I never heard of him again….”

  I waited, and when he didn’t go on, kicked him under the table.

  “But?”

  “But…” My father filled his big chest with a sigh, then leaned back and crossed his legs. “You remember that case last year? That arms dealer they arrested in Phoenix? His conviction got overturned because the AUSA—the assistant U.S. attorney—was
having an affair with the perp’s daughter?”

  “I remember you went to Washington over that. Never knew why.”

  “Well…this is between us, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Why was because the guy—Rosenthal, he was called—some of his transactions were papered through a Saginaw holding company, which got me a week in Washington helping out. But while I was there, I got to see the whole file. And I saw that when the daughter took flight to Europe, we got Interpol to watch her. She ended up taking a job for this Italian businessman, a guy who did a lot of business importing antiquities from Turkey. And, Beck, I saw a picture of this guy, and you could have knocked me down with a feather if I wasn’t looking at Peter Luria.”

  “Did you follow up?” My mouth was open, watching my father. See, this is why you go into criminal work. It is so interesting.

  “No way. European art market? You get involved in that kind of thing, it’s hello investigation, good-bye five years. Besides, there were no grounds for investigation: we weren’t looking for extradition, and there was no reason he couldn’t hire her. No, I let it go.”

  “Huh.” I started eating again, watching my father. “So when you going to catch Sinai?”

  “God, I don’t know.” He uncrossed his legs now and put his face in his hands, which surprised me quite a bit. Then he looked up. “Truth to tell, Beck, I don’t have a lot of heart for this hunt.”