The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  Instead I stood and took his hand. Led him back inside the cabin, back to the nest of sleeping bags on the floor. He followed, willingly, as if he, too, knew that in the impasse between us there was only one kind of communication that was possible, or that made any sense.

  Inside I knelt with him on the nest of sleeping bags. I held his face in front of mine. The dusky light, the high sun splashing light on the floor but leaving the corners in absolute shadow. “Little J.” He nodded watching me. “I can’t do what you’ve asked me to.”

  He nodded, again. “I know you can’t.”

  “Then what are you asking me?”

  “To become the person who can.”

  The sun dipped and deepened, dipped closer to the ground so its rays lengthened into the windows of the cabin, creeping up across our bodies; deepened in color so that the afternoon light that filled the cabin when I woke with Jason’s head sleeping on my shoulder, it was a light that seemed to stain rather than illuminate. Slowly, I felt myself sinking into that light; slowly I felt myself traversing the whole range of emotions conjured by that light, the whole territory of emotions that had been waiting to have their way with me again these twenty-two years and more.

  Then the process stopped short, and before even being able to think what I was doing, I shook your father’s head and whispered.

  “Jason, wake up. There’s a car coming.”

  Date: June 24, 2006

  From: “Benjamin Schulberg”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 38

  The road up to the Linder cabin veered off the state trailhead outside of Rose City, and although it had not been used for years, by the look of it, it was passable.

  I kept the Montero in four-wheel low, but even then I wouldn’t have made it had not a guy in the camping store where I was buying my maps advised me to take a chainsaw and a towing chain in case of falling trees. Twice, thanks to him, I cut away trunks that would have stopped me dead from the road and pulled them to the side by looping a chain around them, allowing me to pass. What had taken Jason over two days to hike—he took the state trail—took me some four hours to drive on the old logging road.

  I arrived at last in an overgrown meadow, bordered by a pond, with a little cabin turning its back on me. I turned off the engine and stepped out of the car into a late-afternoon silence filled with the rush of wind. It was, it felt to me, a lot of wind, and above the tree line I could see scudding clouds across the sky. As for the sun, low to the north, it both looked into my eyes from above and bounced off the surface of a pond from below. With a hand over my eyes. I stepped through the thick grass around to the front of the house. There was a small wooden porch to the open door, and inside I saw, when my eyes adjusted, two backpacks and a pile of sleeping bags. I did not go in but went back a few steps into the pasture.

  I’d been wondering for hours how I was going to do this, but now that I was doing it, I found it coming by itself.

  “Mr. Grant. Ms. Lurie. I’m here alone. I have not notified the police. I think I can help you.”

  I don’t know what I was expecting. What in fact happened was that with no warning, your father was behind me. Speaking in a conversational tone.

  “Help? You’ve sure helped me a lot so far, Benny.”

  “I haven’t come as a journalist.” I turned while I was speaking, and found myself facing your father. He wore a wool sweater over jeans, and was barefoot. And now, in his suddenly obviously Jewish face, I saw everything.

  “No? What have you come as?”

  Of course, I couldn’t answer that, because I didn’t know. And after a moment your father nodded, absently, as if thinking about something else. At last he said, “Okay, Benny. Let’s just go sit out there by the pond, should we? I’d hate to miss the last sunset of my life.”

  He walked off to the pond, and I followed, speaking to his back. “And why would this be the last sunset of your life?”

  “Oh, what with the chance of being in jail tomorrow night. Funny thing, Benny. Every time I see you, the chances of my going to jail seem to go up so.”

  I thought about that. “That’s not a causal relationship, Mr…. Sinai. It’s that, I only figure out where you are just before the police do.”

  “Don’t think they haven’t noticed that. Don’t think they’re not coming here, right now, because of you.”

  That surprised me. Could I have been under surveillance myself? “Hmmm…I guess it might seem that way. To a certain way of thinking. But I’m told that they’re on their way anyway.”

  “Yeah, well then. Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?” He let his voice get low for that one.

  Was this guy actually joking with me? Now? I asked: “What are you going to do, Mr. Sinai?”

  “Well, I was thinking of getting you to violate the ethics of your profession, for one thing. Then, of getting you to break the law.”

  So we went to talk by the pond. And later I realized that as we did so Mimi Lurie must have gone back into the cabin, prepared her things, and left the house on the logging road to the west, running quietly across the unmowed field around the house, right behind me, her passage covered by the noise of the wind, and into the tree line that seemed to be beckoning her as the wind blew the crowns of the tree, this way, then that.

  Date: June 24, 2006

  From: “Rebeccah Osborne”

  To: “Isabel Montgomery”

  CC: maillist: The_Committee

  Subject: letter 39

  The patrol car pulled up, and from the backseat I saw my parents waiting outside their neat little house in Traverse City. My mother was still in her work clothes—a black pants suit that would be hidden by her judicial robe—but my father had already changed, jeans, sneakers, a white T-shirt. He came forward and shook the policeman’s hand through the driver’s window, then opened the door for me.

  I felt tall, suddenly. Tall and awkward, walking between the two of them, these aging people, into their kitchen. It reminded me of how I’d felt as an adolescent, when I’d started to gain my height. An ungainly swan with a ridiculous neck.

  At the kitchen table we sat, the three of us. For a time there was silence, and I remember a feeling of pure unwillingness to hear whatever it was they were about to tell me. Cancer, divorce, bankruptcy: whatever it was, I remember, I simply did not want to hear about it.

  And then, almost exactly when, way up north, Jason Sinai was beginning to talk to Ben Schulberg, my father began to talk to me, and in both cases, they were telling the same story.

  2.

  1974. In mid-June, in a midwife’s office in Ypsilanti, Michigan, assisted by her husband, a young woman called Sally Maynard gave birth to a daughter.

  Two weeks later, on a Friday afternoon, just before closing, a man walked into the front door of the Briarwoods Mall branch of the Bank of Michigan. As he walked in, he put on a rubber mask. Inside, moving swiftly and efficiently, he closed the large drape at the bank’s front window, while from behind the counter a teller—a black-haired woman—moved next to the bank’s guard and put a handgun to his head, elbow pointing out. Then the man rounded up the customers in the bank, obliging them to lie down, with the guard, on the floor. While he did that, the black-haired woman returned behind the counter, ushering her colleagues at gunpoint into the bank vault.

  When she returned, the masked gunman tossed her a canvas sack, into which she emptied the contents of all five teller drawers, what would later be estimated at $700,000. She hoisted this over the counter onto the floor. Then the gunman tossed her another canvas bag, which she took back to the vault. For several minutes, all was silent on the floor of the bank, the masked gunmen holding his hostages quiet. When the teller emerged again, this canvas bag was also filled, this time with what was estimated later to be another half million dollars. She managed to hoist that
over the counter, then she climbed over herself. Now she picked up one bag, leaving the man covering the guard, and carried it out the door to a parked car.

  A Dodge Dart.

  With a single person in the driver’s seat.

  The black-haired woman, Sharon, stopped in surprise.

  “Where is he?”

  Moving steadily, Mimi climbed out of the car, opened the trunk, and the two put the bag of money inside.

  “With the baby.”

  They got into the car now and pulled it around to the front door of the bank. As they drew up, the gunman came out, pulling off his mask as he came to show a laughing, happy face. Vincent Dellesandro. He threw the second bag of money into the trunk, then climbed into the backseat of the car, and Mimi pulled away.

  For a time they drove in silence. Then Dellesandro, still laughing, said: “So, the little daddy bailed?”

  It was a comment to which she made no answer. She drove carefully, slowly, while her passengers squirmed into fresh clothes, then stopped the car and traded places with Sharon so she could change herself. At the train station, in Ann Arbor, she pulled into a parking spot, and the three left the car. They transferred the money to the back of another parked car, which Vincent Dellesandro and Sharon Solarz then drove away. As for Mimi, she walked into the station restaurant and went into the bathroom, where she stuffed her hair into a hat and put on a pair of sunglasses. When she came out, she went to yet a third car and, alone, drove it away.

  The money was with Sharon and Vincent. John and Sally Maynard, with their new baby, were to relocate the very next day to West Virginia, where John was to be working at the new Arcata printing plant—so they had been telling their neighbors, for weeks. In fact, what the Maynards had planned was a complicated series of identity switches that would leave them in northern Oregon, absolutely unconnected with the couple who had just left Ann Arbor.

  The house in Ypsilanti was half packed.

  Three-fifty-five. Baby would be waking from her nap just now, waking to the smells of Jason’s last dinner in Ypsilanti.

  The car’s dashboard clock must have been a minute fast, because at four, when Mimi turned on the news, music was playing, “Magical Mystery Tour,” the final bars.

  Then came the news.

  “WGHJ, CBS Radio, Detroit, Michigan. A cop is dead in a bank robbery, and four suspects have been identified as members of a radical underground group. The leader, Vincent Dellesandro, is a veteran of the U.S. Army in Vietnam and a paroled state prisoner. With him were three others, all prominent in antiwar circles from the University of Michigan, thought to be members of the Weather Underground group. From Briarwood Mall, Ann Arbor, Ted Martz reporting.”

  “Jimmy, it was a textbook case of a perfect plan gone wrong. Witnesses say that at approximately five minutes before closing, a masked gunman entered the Briarwood Mall branch of the Bank of Michigan and subdued the guard and customers. Meanwhile a teller, apparently a plant, pulled a gun from her cash drawer and took control of the other employees. According to witnesses, it wasn’t until the whole robbery was nearly over that one of the gunmen shot the guard. Witnesses say that as he was leaving, he said to the guard: “I was a cop too, once. Military Police in ’Nam. Want to see something they taught me?” He then shot Sergeant Hugh Krosney from Chelsea, Michigan, at point-blank range in the chest.”

  A road in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Mimi Lurie, sitting at the wheel of a running car, moments from home.

  She knew the consequences, knew them with brilliant clarity, and right away. Now she was an accessory to murder. Now she could never surface, never. Now she could never, ever come back.

  And she knew what Jason would say. He had said it, in night after night of argument, as they went over every possible consequence of the robbery that was about to take place.

  “Mimi, it’s too risky. Let them do it without you.”

  “No. I’ve been with Sharon since the beginning. She saved my life in Chicago. I owe this to her, Jasey. This one last thing, I owe her.”

  “And if it doesn’t work out?”

  “Jasey, I’m just driving the car. We don’t need to surface. Baby never needs to know that we were anyone else. We never need to change identities back.”

  “No.” He had been lying beside her in the dark while he spoke, and now, like an animal surprised, he stepped out of bed and began to pace. “No. I’ve thought about that, and I’m not doing it, Mimi. You stay home, and if it goes bad, you take that child and you surface. You won’t be implicated.”

  Mimi shook her head. “No way. You stay home. I do the job. It’s my gig, and I do it. Besides, I’m better than you. End of story.”

  “And if it goes south?”

  “Then you surface, with baby. Deny any knowledge of it.”

  She watched him pacing in the dark room, a slim, naked young man, his body covered by fine red hair. “It won’t happen, Mimi. I’m an accomplice already. She’ll be a year in a foster home by the time I’m cleared. If I’m cleared.”

  The child was two weeks old, and, as if it held magic power, they had not yet started calling her by her name.

  For a long time, nothing. Then, Mimi, eyes focused on the baby, said very softly what she had known, all along, she was going to have to say.

  “I had a friend when I was young. A kid. His father was a friend of my father’s. His only friend.”

  “And?”

  “I grew up with him. Until he went to ’Nam. He came back with a combat vasectomy. Do you understand?”

  Jason turned on the light. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “You do what I say, Jasey. You hear me? If something goes wrong at the Bank of Michigan, you take our baby to him.” Still looking at the baby, she spoke as if in a trance. “His name is John Osborne. He lives in Traverse City. His father was good to mine, and he’ll be good to her. He needs her. And no one will ever, ever in the world connect Johnny Osborne’s daughter with us. She’ll have the perfect new identity.”

  3.

  Two o’clock in the morning, June 27, 1974. In the bedroom of his little house in Traverse City, John Osborne woke up next to his wife. Someone was downstairs.

  My dad had always hated this house. There was no security in it, none, and even now that he was no longer undercover but an investigator in the Traverse City FBI field office, he knew that he needed more security than most. But the department had refused to underwrite his housing expenses, and this had been all they could afford. And, as he often thought, it wasn’t as if they needed room. Vietcong Dong. Ho Chi Minh Birth Control. Happened all the time. He was luckier than most—with hormone replacement therapy, all he lost was his fertility, not his virility. Now someone was in the house.

  Just like he had always known would happen one day. There was a criminal in his house. One of the hundreds of people in this state he had put in jail. One of the hundreds of people in this state with reason to hate him.

  Lying awake, he processed the noises, quickly, before the roar of blood filled his ears, as he knew it was about to. The kitchen screen door had opened—that was the sound that had woken him—a pane had been knocked out of the window, and the inner door was being opened now, as he listened.

  A wave of adrenaline went through him. When the screen door closed again, John climbed out of bed. In his underwear, he moved across the room to where his holster hung on the back of a chair, and took his gun. Then he began to make his way to the door, holding the gun in both hands, pointed down.

  Which was when he heard a baby cry.

  The sound woke his wife.

  Flabbergasted, they made their way down to the kitchen, where they found a young man, barely in control of himself, sitting with a two-week-old baby.

  4.

  Twenty-two years later, in that same kitchen, I sat across from my parents as they finished talking. I turned in my seat sideways and stared out the window at the lawn. The poplars were bending in wind gusts; big clouds were beginning to jostle each
other in the sky. I stared, and for minutes on end—literal minutes—said nothing. Until, finally, in a voice that surprised even me, I spoke without looking at them.

  “I’ve never asked you about my birth parents.”

  “We know that.” My father, but I couldn’t look at him right now.

  “It was a decision I made early.”

  “Yes. We understood.”

  “But if I had?”

  My mother, this time, speaking readily. “Your father and I intended to tell you the truth.”

  “At least, we had intended to decide whether to tell you the truth.” My father.

  “And if all this hadn’t happened? Then I was supposed never to know?”

  “Never. We redid your identity. Papered a legal adoption. With the resources of the FBI at my disposal? Nobody ever needed to know.”

  “But what the hell were they thinking?”

  “Thinking?” My father rose now, that massive man, and paced to the window. “Thinking? I don’t think anyone was doing that much thinking, that night.”

  “And you? You had an accomplice to murder in your kitchen?”

  “Sinai was innocent, Beck. He wasn’t in that damned car. Any lawyer could have made the case that he didn’t even know they were planning the robbery.”

  “Then why didn’t he?”