Mandi described me as overworked, underslept, and overwhelmed. Mark said I was utterly career-obsessed. “Some people live and learn,” he told me. “You just live.” My sister said I would never have quit the Times job on my own, and that she had feared, as my parents had, that my intensity and my risk-taking may have ended up costing my life.
One friend told me that she cared less about the Times incident than the insensitive way that I’d treated her. For a few weeks, she said—this was while I was still working for the Times—I’d fawned over her as if I were interested in initiating a serious romance, and then, without warning, I’d dropped almost completely out of contact. Another woman told me the very same thing. “It was like you were pretending to be some sort of character,” she said. “You can stop that now and start being an actual person.”
I drove across New Mexico and into Arizona. I thought about what my friends and family had said. I realized that what I’d done with the Times article wasn’t entirely a random event. There’d been an inflation of ego, a buildup of stress, a ratcheting of risky behavior. By the time I wrote the West Africa story, I’d become so manic and arrogant that I assumed the rules of journalism no longer applied to me.
I was still driving when I learned that the Times investigation into my other stories had been completed. There was nothing to report but a single spelling mistake and an inconsequential numerical error. This was gratifying to hear, though it didn’t much boost my spirits. I was still ashamed of myself.
Five thousand miles into my road trip, midway through Utah, I spoke with my friend Mark again. This time, he called me. He’d been taking care of my house, and he knew about the letter I’d written to Christian Longo. “There’s a strange phone number on the caller ID,” he said. Mark hadn’t been there to pick up the phone, but he figured I’d want to know. The number itself wasn’t strange, though the area code, 541, was unfamiliar. But beneath the number, Mark said, where the caller’s name or business is usually displayed, it read this: INMATE PHONE.
Immediately, some of my gloom lifted. I programmed my home telephone to forward calls to my cell, in hopes that Longo would try to contact me again. I was already on my way back to Montana, and I filled the miles by imagining what kind of conversation we might have. I found myself flush, once more, with enthusiasm. A few days later, on Tuesday, April 9, 2002, while I was parked at a desert overlook near the town of Moab, Utah, the phone rang and it was him.
NINE
YOU CAN’T SPEAK with an inmate of the Lincoln County Jail right away. The first thing you hear, when you receive a collect call from the jail, is a recorded message. It’s in a woman’s voice. “To refuse this call,” the message starts, “hang up.” Then it says that the call may be monitored or recorded, and mentions information on “terms and conditions” and “binding arbitration” and “limitation of liability.” This goes on for about a minute. Finally, the message says, “To accept this call, dial one after the tone. Please make your selection now. Thank you.” Then there’s a beep.
I dialed one. The phone lines opened.
“Mr. Longo?” I said.
There was no salutation, no small talk. Christian Longo greeted me with a question. “How do I know,” he asked, “that this is the real Michael Finkel?”
I was taken by surprise. In every conversational scenario I’d envisioned, I was the one asking questions. I was in charge of the discussion. Yet now, in the course of a single exchange, Longo seemed to have grabbed command, and I was the one scrambling to reply.
“I’m not really sure how to answer,” I said. “If you were here, I could show you my driver’s license. I don’t suppose you know my Social Security number or my mother’s maiden name?”
“I don’t,” said Longo.
“Well,” I said, “I think you’re going to have to take it on faith.”
“Not good enough,” he said. “Any journalist could’ve written me that letter, trying for a scoop.” He said this in a friendly way, though with a hint of challenge, as if he were prodding me to think through a riddle.
But I was stuck. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said.
“I was prepared for that,” he said. Beyond the audioscape of his flat midwestern vowels, I envisioned a brief, smug smile. “I have a couple of questions for you.”
“Great,” I said, relieved and somewhat amazed. I was clearly not the only one who’d spent time thinking about our talk. “Go ahead,” I said.
He paused for a moment, and his voice shifted into a less colloquial cadence, as if he were reading. He was, as I later found out: He’d prepared a test for me, thirteen questions in all, complete with answer key. “Okay,” he said. “What’s the name of the main character in the story that got you fired?”
Good question, I thought—the type of question a fake Michael Finkel probably wouldn’t know. How Longo himself knew this was unclear, though I figured I’d learn soon enough. First I had to ace his test. “His name is Youssouf Malé,” I said. Then I added, going for extra credit, “The last name is spelled m-a-l-e, though it’s pronounced ma-lee. There’s an accent on the end. An accent aigu.” I was pleased with the thoroughness of my answer. “So,” I asked, “does that prove I’m me?”
“No,” he said. He continued reading from his test: “In that story, how much money did you say Youssouf Malé earned in a year?”
“Tough one,” I said. From the time I’d written the article until the time Longo asked me this question, more than eight months had passed. “Details like that don’t tend to stay with me. I think it was a hundred and fifty dollars.”
“One hundred and two dollars,” Longo said. He sounded skeptical.
“Give me another,” I said.
“What was the headline of the last story you wrote for the New York Times Magazine?”
I couldn’t believe it. I’d actually written two articles in the time between the publication of my child-slave story and the uncovering of my deception. Both of the pieces were about the war in Afghanistan; the second, printed only days before I was caught, was about a group of villages trapped between the Northern Alliance and Taliban fronts. The problem was that I didn’t write the headline. I never wrote headlines for my Times articles; the editors did. And with all the trauma of the firing, I’d scarcely glanced at the issue in which my last story appeared.
“It’s funny you should ask this,” I said, attempting to divert the question with a touch of levity. I told him that writers don’t write headlines. I said I could nearly picture the headline in my mind. “It was five words long,” I said. “It was ‘To Stay or to Go,’ but not quite that. ‘To Hide or to Seek.’ No. ‘To Something or to Something Else.’”
“‘To Wait or to Flee,’” Longo said, pointedly. I got the impression that he felt he’d outfoxed an impostor. I couldn’t blame him. A tightness came to my throat; the first stage of distress. It was possible that I’d lose my chance to speak with Christian Longo because I was unable to prove that I was really me. Somehow, it seemed a fitting punishment.
“Hold on,” I said. “I know all about that story. I can probably recite the opening paragraph.”
I happen to be a slow, methodical writer, and every hour or two while I’m working, I tend to reread my manuscript from the top, so the beginnings are usually burned into my memory. “Here’s the first sentence,” I said. “‘They had a radio, just a single battery-powered radio, so the news traveled by word of mouth up and down the footpaths of Abdulgan, village to village, until everyone knew.’ That’s the opener. The second sentence is, ‘They knew what was happening elsewhere in Afghanistan.’ The third is—”
“Okay,” said Longo, cutting me off. “I believe you.”
TEN
AND SO WE were free to talk. For a long moment, though, there was only silence. Longo was clearly waiting for me to say something, but I was unsure how to begin. He’d made no public statements since his arrest three months before, and I felt it was important that his first impressio
ns of me put him at least somewhat at ease. But what do you say to a man who has likely murdered his family, then fled the country and stolen your identity?
“Call me Mike,” I said.
“Call me Chris,” he said.
I asked him why he decided to phone me. He said he’d read my letter several times, and had debated making contact. My letter, he told me, was the first he had heard of my firing, and he’d asked his lawyers to verify its truth. The lawyers brought him a copy of the Editors’ Note, the child-slave story, and my Afghanistan articles, which was how he’d been able to quiz me so thoroughly.
“In your letter,” Chris said, “you wrote that you weren’t upset with me for using your name. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt responsible for you losing your job. It just seemed too much of a coincidence, and I wanted to know if I was in any way to blame.”
He was concerned, he explained, that his actions in Mexico or the publicity surrounding his arrest had somehow exacerbated my troubles. He said this worry was so great that he felt compelled to call. He added that I was the only person he’d phoned since he had been incarcerated—he hadn’t spoken with friends or family, not even his parents, and certainly not with members of the media. His lawyers, he added, did not know about this call, and if they found out, they’d likely throw a fit.
It seemed clear, from the way Longo had made me submit to his quiz, that he was a cautious man. I found it odd, therefore, that he would ignore the counsel of his legal team merely to learn if he had damaged my writing career. But if there was another reason he’d contacted me, this didn’t seem the right moment to pry.
I assured Longo that he had nothing to do with the Times disaster. I’d written my fake story, I pointed out, long before anything happened to his family. That’s actually the way I phrased it: “before anything happened to your family.” I was careful not to say “before you murdered your family” or something similar. There was no need for bluntness. Longo had yet to enter a plea to the charges; therefore, at this moment, he was legally innocent. And though the facts of the case did not look good—four dead bodies found in Oregon, one live man found in Mexico—I had to concede it was possible that Longo was actually innocent. So rather than speak to him as a person who had committed a terrible crime, I addressed him as a person to whom something terrible had occurred.
“Why,” I asked, keeping the conversation on safe ground, “did you decide to impersonate me, of all people?” I had actually developed a theory about this. I had assumed that while Longo was escaping from Oregon, he’d somehow come across a Sunday New York Times. Many people keep sections of the Sunday paper lying around all week. I’d had an article in the Times Magazine on December 16, 2001, the day before the murders were thought to have occurred. My byline, Michael Finkel, was printed on the magazine’s cover. It’s a rhymy and rather funny name, and therefore perhaps easy to remember. (When I was young, kids would tease me by playing “Michael Finkel” instead of “Marco Polo” in the local swimming pool.) Longo, I figured, had spotted my name and borrowed it as his own—a random act.
My theory was wrong. Longo told me that he’d long been familiar with my work, and not just from the Times. He’d read my stories in Skiing, and Sports Illustrated, and National Geographic Adventure. He said my articles appealed to him. He’d always thought, he said, that if he were to become a journalist, he’d want to write the same sort of stories that I wrote. He knew so much about my articles, he added, that he’d been able to speak about them, confidently and convincingly, while in Mexico. He explained all this in a droll, relaxed manner. “You have a writing style,” he said, “that I wasn’t embarrassed to call my own.”
In other words, Longo was a fan. And there is perhaps nothing more dangerous to a writer’s common sense than encountering an enthusiastic reader of his work, even if he’s calling collect from county jail. During our conversation, I jotted quotes and impressions in a notebook, and as Longo continued to praise my work, my objectivity began to soften. “A v. nice guy,” I wrote down.
I sustained the patter by asking the most basic, blind-date sort of questions, then exclaiming eagerly about any similarity I uncovered. For example: We both had January birthdays! Longo had recently turned twenty-eight, two weeks after I’d turned thirty-three. Neither of us was a native of the West—he’d grown up in suburban Indianapolis; I was from suburban Connecticut. He’d been a Jehovah’s Witness but had been kicked out of the organization. I was a lapsed Jew.
He told me that he felt battered by the media’s coverage of his case. “There’s no way you can know me from reading the papers,” he said. I told him I understood exactly what he meant. He said he had never written anything for publication but had once worked for a company that handled home delivery of the New York Times. “I was always proud to say I worked for the Times,” he told me. I was always proud of that too, I said.
It was clear that Longo wanted to keep the conversation light—he chuckled at even the slightest trace of humor, releasing a quick, staccato “heh-heh-heh-heh.” Of course, I wanted to ask about the murders. But it wasn’t the appropriate time. So instead of murder we spoke about travel, and skiing, and the flavoring we preferred in our lattes (me: vanilla; him: Irish Cream). His voice was as controlled and steady as his laugh; no shouts, no whispers, scarcely any inflection. It was a voice that could be transcribed into text without ever needing an exclamation point. He was partial to repeating the word “gotcha” as a conversational space-filler.
The discussion flowed with no uncomfortable silences, though the whole thing—a casual, bantering chat with a man who’d recently been a Most Wanted fugitive—felt more than a little surreal. Once it was over, I was wildly energized, as if I’d been freed from some confinement, and I had to put on my running shoes and go for a jog to settle myself down. When I returned to my truck I sat in the driver’s seat, panting, and spoke my thoughts into my pocket-sized tape recorder.
Everything Longo said had seemed honest, until late in our talk, when he mentioned his time in Mexico. “If I hadn’t been caught down there,” he told me, “I was going to fly home anyway, and turn myself in.” This may or may not have been true—there’s no way to know—but to me it sounded like a lie. Who would swap a beach resort in Mexico for a jail cell in Oregon?
Our conversation had ended abruptly. When we’d spoken on the phone for nearly an hour, there was a loud beep on the line. Longo told me that this was the jail’s indication that we had only a few seconds remaining before the line was cut. I took this moment to ask him if I could come for a visit.
“Let me just check my schedule,” Longo responded, dryly. “Well, yes, I think I might be able to find the time.”
ELEVEN
THE LINCOLN COUNTY JAIL is a shoebox-shaped building, made of cinder block and brick, solid-looking on the outside save for two rows of slits, like dashed lines, that mark the cells’ windows. When I arrived at the jail’s entrance area, an officer instructed me to remove my belt and leave it in a locker, along with my car keys. I passed through a metal detector and then was directed into an oversize elevator that had stainless-steel doors and a rubberized floor. There were no buttons to press. The doors shut; the elevator rose; the doors opened.
The jail’s visiting room consisted of five booths. Each had a short metal stool bolted to the floor in front of a gray metal shelf, mounted at desk height. A black telephone receiver hung on the booth’s left-hand side. Embedded in the wall over the shelf was a thick square of reinforced glass, through which I could see, on the prisoners’ side, another stool, shelf, and telephone. Every booth was empty. Longo’s segregation status in the jail meant that no other inmates could be present while he was in the visiting area.
I sat at the far booth and waited. I studied the fingerprints on the window, some of them tiny, clearly children’s, and I counted the kiss marks. I dried my palms on my pants. Graffiti had been scratched into the desk: “Bobby R”; “Tammy”; “Hi Dad”; “I love you so mu
ch Chava”; “Amanda y Edgar”; “Eat Shit”; “Fuck Toad.” The scent in the air brought to mind fresh paint and sour milk.
Longo strode into the room, energetically, as if he were ready to sell me something. He was wearing a navy blue sweatshirt that read LONGO in black permanent marker on the front, blue sweatpants that read JAIL in white silk-screened letters down the right leg, and tan plastic sandals and white socks. He carried a large brown envelope, a yellow legal pad, and a golf pencil outfitted with an arrow-shaped eraser. He was on the tall side—a shade over six feet, he later said—and fit-looking. He sat on the stool across from me, and we peered at each other through the smudged window.
He had a baby face—that was my first thought—with a scattering of freckles across his cheeks and not so much as the hint of a beard. His ears angled sharply outward; his hair, short and neat, was either reddish blond or blondish red. He had hazel eyes, long eyelashes, pale skin, and an utterly characterless nose, the kind of nose that people who get nose jobs always want to have. His features had achieved an enviable harmony—he was casually good-looking, in a sporty, fraternity brother sort of way, and he managed to appear self-assured even in his jail uniform.
There was nothing about him that seemed remotely scary, and he was sealed off behind a slab of bulletproof glass, with armed guards watching from their own glass-walled station inside the jail. But despite all this I felt a twinge of genuine, stomach-tightening fear. The person facing me was considered so dangerous he was not allowed near other criminals—not even permitted, or so it appeared, to share the same air as anyone else, as if he were the carrier of some lethal disease.
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