The Middleman_A Novel

by Olen Steinhauer

  “Justice!” she called back.

  “When do we want it?”

  “Now!”

  “Praise the Lord.”

  She’d grown. She had a thousand hands and feet; she was as big as a city block. Her voice could be heard for miles.

  She was so entranced by the expanse of her body, the sheer power of all her limbs, that the brief shout, and then the scream, didn’t register. When a fat woman to her left looked over, past her, and said, “Oh, damn,” Ingrid looked, too. There was a fight breaking out. She jumped to see better, and at the apex of her leap she saw the shining Plexiglas helmets and the white smoke of tear gas. Everyone saw it now. The shouts erupted, mouths no longer in sync. Voices dislodged from the great beast, each voice betraying only panic. Someone shouted, “Hold your ground!” A few people did, pulling up shirts to cover their noses and mouths, but T-shirts and blouses aren’t made to repel tear gas. A gunshot—she didn’t know from where—and the panic took over. Run.

  It was a mess now, her massive body breaking apart into smaller pieces that stumbled and shouted and fled. The cops mingled with the crowd, sticks high, grabbing shirts, pulling and dragging to waiting vans. The young fought back, throwing rocks and swinging backpacks, but were soon overwhelmed. Truncheons rose and fell. She saw an old man trampled. The flash of a Plexiglas shield. Another gunshot. A dazed boy with blood on his head. Sirens. Ingrid’s body was scattering, tumbling down side streets into the city.

  Then she, too, was gone. Alone again in the streets of Newark. She didn’t know where she was anymore.

  17

  “YOU REMEMBER when I got home?” Ingrid asked David nine months later, and he didn’t reply; his embarrassed expression was enough. To Rachel, she said, “He saw blood on me, and when he found out where it was from he lost his shit. It was all about Clare. I was out there risking our baby for some people I didn’t even know.”

  “I didn’t use those words.”

  “Don’t lie, okay?” She turned to Rachel. “I’m telling you all this because by the time I got to Bill and Gina’s party, I was ready for a change.”

  Rachel looked over to Kevin, but he was standing by the window again, eyes closed, listening to a story he’d probably heard many times already. She said, “You don’t need to make excuses.”

  “No,” Ingrid snapped, shaking her head. “These aren’t excuses. They’re explanations. Don’t think at any point that I’m apologizing for my decisions. I might be stuck in this house worried about my baby’s safety, but this isn’t the result of bad decisions. It’s the result of the hypocrisy that feeds this selfish country.”

  Rachel leaned back, feeling an instant revulsion but trying to hide it. Hypocrisy was just another word for reality, but not to someone like Ingrid. She lived in a world of absolutes that, history taught, led to blood in the streets.

  “Seventeen people were injured at that demonstration. A couple of days later, an old man died from injuries there. Why? Because the police were paid to get rid of what the ruling class fears most: angry people who are ready to smash banks and businesses in the face of injustice.”

  “Enough, Ingrid,” Kevin said, sounding annoyed.

  She looked at him. “What?”

  “There’s no soapbox here. The only thing that’s going to help is if you tell her what happened.”

  Ingrid locked eyes with him, and Rachel felt there was a lot unsaid going on between them. But of course there would be—Kevin had saved her from arrest and, more likely, death in Watertown, and she had repaid him by turning him in, guessing that Ben Mittag would kill him before the Bureau’s team arrived. Yet here Kevin was, protecting her from everyone, even Rachel. She’d seen no sign of affection between them; this wasn’t a love affair. So why was he risking himself for the sake of an ungrateful revolutionary? She was beginning to finally understand Fordham’s critiques of Kevin.

  “Fair enough,” Ingrid eventually said, then turned to Rachel. “Look, I get carried away. And I’m not saying anything original; I know that. I just want you to understand me. And you should know that when I met Martin at the party here, I knew him—I knew his type. My father was a Communist, and that was both good and bad.”

  She paused, looking down at Clare, who was dozing, little bubbles forming on her pursed lips. Rachel remembered the details David had shared about Ingrid’s father, the ones Ingrid was choosing to keep locked away: the abuse, going after him with a shovel, him drinking himself to death beside the Kearsley Reservoir. As Kevin had told her, anyone who tells you there’s one reason for what they do is a liar.

  Ingrid said, “I fell in with the radicals at U Mich. This was pre-Twitter, but we spray-painted Twitter-length manifestos all over the buildings. I got into the language of the left, and soon I was an expert on the Red Army Faction and Weather Underground, Black Panthers, Action Directe—all those guys. So when I met Martin, I was back on familiar ground. And after the police attacked our protest in Newark, I needed to get involved again.”

  “Did you start the conversation?” Rachel asked.

  She shook her head. “I’d wandered around the party, looking for someone, anyone, who wanted to talk about Jerome Brown. No one did. Like the subject embarrassed them. Then this guy sits next to me on the sofa and says, ‘So what do you think about what went down in Newark?’ He had me from his opening line.”

  18

  HE LOOKED different from his photo in Rolling Stone, and as he talked Ingrid was surprised, in a way, by his ignorance. “All I know is there’s something wrong,” he said. After days of well-spoken and well-educated pundits filling the airwaves, the famous Martin Bishop, radical provocateur, was underwhelming.

  She said, “I thought you and your people had contingencies for all this. Didn’t you say in some article that you supported rioting as a way of fighting back?”

  He rocked his head, noncommittal. “What I support is an honest expression of emotion. I support voices being heard.”

  “And smashing store windows?”

  “Depends.”

  “On?”

  “On how pure the emotion is.”

  She laughed. “Do you even know what you’re saying?”

  He smiled. “Want me to grab you a drink?”

  Ingrid hesitated, for some reason not wanting to admit that she was pregnant, and only said, “Get me a water, will you?”

  By the time he’d returned with a beer and a glass of tap, she’d recalled more of the Rolling Stone piece, and as they spoke of Newark she reassessed him. It wasn’t ignorance. He was just open to being wrong, a trait she hadn’t seen in a very long time. Which wasn’t to say he didn’t believe in anything—his beliefs were hardwired—but his beliefs were built on a foundation of self-criticism that was unfamiliar to most everyone she knew.

  Ingrid shared far more than she thought she would, simply because Martin asked. She began with her employer, the Starling Trust. Founded in 1972 by the hippie child of a hotel magnate, its mission was to spread freedom of thought to the darkest corners of the world and bring about a new age of wisdom. But over the decades, Ingrid confessed, it had gone from idealism to pragmatism, and by the time she came on board in the early aughts, the foundation had fallen prey to the conviction that only under a stable government could free thought flourish. Which meant that they, and Ingrid, spent as much time helping regimes stay in power as they did engaged in their original mission.

  “Time rots,” Bishop told her, but his tone was sympathetic, not cynical. “The most beautiful things are like a proper punk band—a blast of energy that quickly self-destructs.”

  A couple of hipsters squatted around them and started a discussion about the dysfunction of democracy in America. Eventually Gina arrived and joined in, then David, and Ingrid watched how Martin dealt with resistance, drawing back into the realm of what was provable. “Unlike all your friends, David, I don’t presume to know. I’m not smart enough. Few people are that smart, least of all—and no insult meant—your smart
friends.” Ingrid kept thinking about how David had reacted to Jerome Brown’s murder: Hey, the guy was reaching for a gun, right? Now he was acting as if he had put a lot of thought into social justice. It was excruciating to watch.

  After David left, Martin confided that before finding himself in the service of political justice he had barely been living. “I clocked in and clocked out every day. I drank myself to sleep. All my friendships were surface. The problem was that it was always about me. I, I, I. They say I’m converting people. Not true. I’m the convert. Everyone out there—the miserable and wretched and oppressed—they converted me.” He smiled, gentle. “Know what I mean?”

  “Yeah.” She told him about her college obsession—the West German Red Army Faction, or Baader-Meinhof Gang. To prove her knowledge, she rattled off the names of its major members, its acts of arson, robbery, kidnapping, and murder, and then quoted at length from its manifesto, “The Urban Guerrilla Concept.”

  “Wow,” he said, impressed. “I never would have guessed.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t have,” she said. “Why would you?”

  He shook his head, as if he were going to dispute this, but instead he came out with his own quote from “The Urban Guerrilla Concept,” which was in fact a quote Baader-Meinhof had borrowed from Eldridge Cleaver, minister of information for the Black Panther Party. He said, “‘Either you’re part of the problem or you’re part of the solution. There is nothing in between. This shit has been examined and analyzed for decades and generations from every angle. My opinion is that most of what happens in this country does not need to be analyzed any further.’”

  They shared a warm moment of mutual recognition, and he talked about the Plains Capital–IfW scandal, and how he wanted to be optimistic but knew from history that the investigation would lead to nothing. “They’ll find a way to shut it down. They always do.”

  Then Ingrid remembered something from the Rolling Stone article. “We were in Berlin at the same time.”

  A look crossed his face, his smile quickly disintegrating, and he said, “What?”

  “I lived there for ten years. Prenzlauer Berg. I miss it. Where were you?”

  “Friedrichshain,” he said, almost reluctantly. “Left in ’09.”

  “Oh-nine…” It was coming back to her. “That group—Kommando Rosa Luxemburg. Did you know they were going to bomb the train station?”

  Martin opened his mouth, then closed it. As if he couldn’t find any air. Then: “The Kommando wasn’t going to bomb anything. They weren’t violent.”

  “I read in the—”

  “The newspapers were wrong,” he said with finality, and she felt stupid, as if by having bought the line of the mainstream media she had lost all the credibility she’d spent their conversation building up. But he showed no sign of contempt, only smiled and shook his head. “They always get it wrong. This is the world we live in. Listen,” he said, reaching into his pocket. He took out a notepad and a short pencil, the kind that littered IKEA stores, and wrote down four numbers separated by periods—an IP address. He handed it to her. “If you ever want to talk more. Here’s a way to do it without anyone listening.”

  Then they walked out to the patio, and David marched up through the grass and said, “Hey, you!”

  19

  THE NEXT day, when Ingrid thought back to the hours that followed Bill and Gina’s party, she would be surprised to find that they were mostly a blur. Which was troubling, because once she’d followed through on her radical solutions to her marital troubles she would need to justify herself. She would need to say, When David did this I knew it had gone too far. If not to her friends, then, one day, to her unborn child. And whatever “this” was had to be so horrendous and unbelievable that her reaction, no matter how extreme, could be justified. But her memory would work against her in this project, as if it didn’t give a damn about right and wrong.

  The things that came to her, in fact, had little to do with David. She remembered the silence of the drive home, and the continued silence in the apartment, her shower, then waking in the middle of the night to find David asleep on the couch while the television played desolation: A factory had leached mercury into a midwestern town’s water supply. A baby in a hospital bed, fighting for its life. A weeping, overweight mother. She turned it off and lay in bed, thinking of babies and the diets of the poor and the great, rich expanse of the United States that lay between its coasts.

  It wasn’t until her alarm woke her in the morning that she heard from NPR that Martin Bishop and his associate Benjamin Mittag were being sought for questioning in connection to a missile launcher discovered in a New Jersey storage space. “Authorities are asking for the public’s help tracking down the pair.”

  David was still passed out in front of the television, and when she looked at him she thought less of the embarrassment he’d caused yesterday than she did about the past months, the past year, and the past decade of their lives together. She wasn’t thinking of social justice or proletarian revolution but about a marriage that had been based on a premise that, she now realized, had been proven false. The premise was that she and David saw the world similarly, that they both held the same basic values. That was why they could do something as dangerous as raise a child together. She’d known this was wrong, probably from the beginning, but out of comfort or laziness or some other sin she’d chosen to ignore it. David looked inward, while she looked outward. All the meaning in David’s life was built on a craftman’s pride in the books he wrote, whereas Ingrid found meaning primarily in her effect on others.

  Did this mean that David was self-centered, and she was a paragon of philanthropy? No. It only meant that they had and would forever engage the world in different ways, and therein lay the source of their conflicts. They were simply not made for each other.

  So with the clarity that followed her coffee she wrote a note telling him that she would spend the night with her friend Brenda up north in Pelham. She wasn’t sure Brenda would be open to her staying there, but she would make do. She wasn’t leaving David, not yet at least, but without a few days’ separation she would never be able to think through the enormity of what she’d just discovered.

  On the way to the subway she called Brenda, who seemed happy to have a visitor, even if it was because of a collapsing marriage.

  Then she was at her desk on the twenty-fourth floor of the Starling Trust headquarters in Midtown, reading the most recent report from their local office in Abuja, Nigeria. Boko Haram fighters had descended on an all-girls’ school in the northeastern district of Borno, slaughtered the administration, and kidnapped 120 children. The girls were gone, and the local police held out little hope of finding them. This was the second time Boko Haram had stolen Nigeria’s daughters. Across the region families were weeping, and that sadness was beginning to morph into anger at a government that had been unable to perform its most basic role: protecting the lives of its citizens. The Starling report spent six full pages speculating on the potential for destabilization in that corner of the country, based on political trends, and the ramifications in the capital. Nigeria was one of Africa’s success stories, and the report lamented how the weakening of the government would lead to pressure from neighboring countries, which would lead to further destabilization.

  But Ingrid wasn’t thinking about the repercussions. She wasn’t thinking of stability. She only thought about 120 girls in chains, their crisp white uniforms filthy, full of terror. One moment learning how to diagram sentences in a clean classroom, the next dragged across the desert by men who would, sooner rather than later, rape them, and either sell them on to traffickers to fund their war, or execute them on camera, to be uploaded for the world to see. There would be two or three weeks of international outrage before the public eye moved on to other atrocities, and the girls would be left to their dismal fate. Yet all the Starling Trust worried about was whether or not this act of terror would undermine the ruling party. Ingrid didn’t give a shit
about the ruling party.

  This is the world we live in.

  She’d already walked out on her husband. The first step was done, and it had been so easy. Much simpler than she’d ever imagined, because the buildup is always worse than the act. So she took out the slip of paper Martin Bishop had given her and typed in the IP address. A blank page with a single link to download and install a Tor client. She did so, and the program told her what to do, what settings to change. Then a single cursor blinked in a small black window, waiting for her to speak. She typed, This is Ingrid Parker. We met at the party yesterday.

  Return.

  Wait.

  She looked around at her colleagues with their coffee mugs and TV-show conversations. From the kitchenette, a burst of laughter. A hundred and twenty girls gone, and the small talk rolled on. Her cell phone rang. She almost didn’t answer it, but she didn’t want to feel like she was hiding.

  “Hi, David.”

  “Well?” he said.

  “I’m at work. And I asked you not to call.”

  “How am I supposed to not call?”

  “I’ll call you tonight, okay?”

  “Look. I’m hammering out a new book. It’ll … I’ll be easier to live with.”

  Did he really think that a book could cure a marriage? “And then you’ll finish that book and go back to how you are right now.”

  “We can fix this. You know that, right?”

  “I just have to clear my head. Sometimes we all need to clear our heads.”

  When she hung up, her computer said, Hi Ingrid. It’s Martin. I’m really glad to hear from you.

  Her hands were cold as she typed, Where are you?

  You know I can’t tell you that.

  Of course he couldn’t. He was a wanted man. She wasn’t sure what to write back, but he knew:

  Would you like to visit us?

  So easy.

  20