Backward-Facing Man

by Don Silver

  It was Russell’s idea to surveil the girl after the HR manager from Drinker & Sledge called Friday and told Russell she’d called in—or e-mailed at the very last minute—saying she’d been in a commuter train accident. Russell checked with Septa. There’d been no accident. When the ASAC approved the tail, he’d told him to take the new kid and bring him up to speed.

  “We’re not sure how he’ll do,” the assistant special agent in charge had told Russell when Dodson first came to Philly. “But he impressed the hell out of them at Quantico, and not just with computer stuff. Con law, personal safety, defensive tactics, even firearms. He was off the charts. Only problem is he’s green. No field experience. No sense of history.” Russell winced. It was a brittle bone he was being tossed, and Russell knew it. How could a kid who wasn’t even born then manage a case that originated in the sixties? The future of the Bureau was sitting across from him in a blue blazer, an open Oxford shirt, fresh-pressed Dockers, and Cole Haans, while in six months, everything—his caseload, the contents of his desk, all his clearances, and his institutional memories—would be gone and his career with the FBI would be over.

  “Anybody who’s connected to a fugitive goes missing,” Russell had said as they left Center City, “you pay attention.” He’d been following the mother and daughter for years, waiting for Keane to make contact, asking a few of her neighbors and each of her employers to call him with anything out of the ordinary. The woman in the black dress pretended to swat something aside. “Not on your life,” she told the bartender, shaking her finger and laughing. The two agents sat across from each other in silence, Dodson’s hands on the table, his back to the entrance.

  “What brought you to law enforcement?” Russell asked him in the car.

  “I never pictured myself doing this,” Dodson said, as if he was talking to his uncle at a cocktail party. “I spent my early twenties traveling, you know, various projects and assignments. One summer, I came home to visit and wound up at my dad’s country club in a foursome with a retired G-man. At the end of the round, he took my number, and, I don’t know, maybe a year later, I got a phone call.” He turned his hands up and shrugged. “Next thing you know, I’m at Quantico.” How nice, Russell thought. No waiting for the mail, no agonizing interviews, no torturous psych evals. A fucking phone call. Russell didn’t like a single thing about the new, improved Bureau with its casual Fridays and its emphasis on computer programmers and hot shits. He knew, even if they didn’t, that of all the problems the Bureau faced, it was lack of discipline that would hobble them.

  Dodson’s FBI career thus far consisted of three months doing lab work in D.C. before being shipped out to Denver, where he spent his first year tailing a special agent and playing intramural softball. As they drove up Broad Street, Dodson went on about how easily he made friends on account of him being an extrovert and how happy he was for the opportunity to move east. “The day I got here, I found this awesome sublet. I can actually walk to work.” All his other cases had something to do with cyber-crime.

  Russell disliked Dodson from the moment they met. What pissed him off most was not how easily things had come to Eric Dodson or how little the young man knew about the sixties or even how Russell, who’d tracked the Volcano Bomber unsuccessfully for thirty years, was now supposed to tell this kid everything he knew about the sixties’ most elusive radical. What got under his skin was how untroubled the kid was, how trusting and confident he looked sitting across the table, waiting to be briefed. Even here now, at four in the morning in the heart of North Philly, with an old whore and a junkie bartender and a washed-up special agent with no manners, Eric Dodson had faith. And why shouldn’t he? Had Dodson been more articulate, he would have said his life was like a time-lapse photograph of a bouquet of flowers opening, a series of fortuitous coincidences, strung together like chemical reactions, resulting in his being secure in whatever moment he was in, assured that the ground he stepped on would support him, that those around him who could, would help him when he needed it.

  The two men sat in silence nursing their drinks. Russell flicked his toothpick onto the floor. Dodson rubbed the bridge of his nose. Dodson held the older agent’s gaze as long as he could and then took his glasses off and spoke. “So what was he like?”

  “Never start an interview like that,” Russell said immediately. “Unless you want to be bullshitted, you don’t ask something outright before establishing rapport.” Dodson nodded. If he was insulted, he didn’t show it. “Since we’re both professionals, why don’t you try out an idea of your own,” Russell said, sipping his drink. “That is, if you have one.” Dodson smiled but said nothing. After another long, uncomfortable silence, Russell looked toward the ceiling and said, “I can see you’re gonna need my help.” He opened his napkin and wiped the table in front of him.

  “What did you mean, the whole thing was a fluke?” the young agent said quietly. His hair, spiked with gel, appeared in silhouette against the window.

  Russell finished his drink and folded his arms across his chest, feeling the familiar bulge under his arm. He would miss a lot of things about this job. Wearing the badge, carrying a weapon, maintaining that practiced vigilance even when he wasn’t on a case, especially the long hours in surveillance, with nobody breathing down his neck. Everything but the red tape and the bullshit approvals you needed before you could get anything done. Without answering, Russell stood up and walked toward the bathroom. He let himself into the small closet, unbuckled his pants, and then turned his head away.

  Despite his recent health problems, John Russell had aged well. His hair was silvery white and thick enough on top to hold its form all day. Without much effort, he’d stayed trim enough to be asked to pose in an ad for a retirement community. Even up close, the mirage held. His teeth were good; the skin on his hands and face, tan, tight, and supple; and his features, thin and sculpted, patrician-like. Except now, after sixty-two years without as much as the flu, he was pissing blood.

  John Russell didn’t see himself as an aging G-man with malignant cells and incontinence. In his mind, he was the kid from Cleveland who busted his ass for an appointment letter from J. Edgar Hoover and six months later, a badge, a regulation Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver, and a $12,500-a-year salary. Back in the days before there was an academy—before the Hoover Building, before Efrem Zimbalist Jr. put a face on the FBI—Russell and thirty other guys went rushing downstairs in the DOJ Building, stripped down, butt to butt, for defensive training. They sat together in their starched white shirts and laced wing tips in academics and ate cheeseburgers at the Globe and Laurel, hurrying back by curfew to sleep on cots, twelve to a room. This was before there were voices in his head other than his supervisor’s and doubts in his mind about good and evil, and which he was destined to become. At twenty-five, Jack Russell became Special Agent John Russell III, Esquire, smart and fit, ambitious and handsome.

  At first, he came across as a guy with charm, ambition, and intelligence. With a law degree, no wife or girlfriend, and no kids to tie him down, he had none of the attachments that distracted the younger agents and, in many cases, limited their careers. During his first few months, his supervisors thought he’d be promoted fast. But that was in the beginning, when he mastered his assignments and managed to show up consistently in the right place at the right time.

  After his training, Russell was sent to the Boston office, where he was attached to Special Agent Lou D’Mitri. From the get-go, he was commended for following procedure, being quick on his feet, and reading between the lines. One day that summer—it was 1968—he picked up an Airtel from Chicago. A very unusual kind of incendiary device had gone off in Oneonta, New York, killing a kid and severely burning three others. That same day, Selective Service Headquarters in D.C. got one of those letters composed of cutout newsprint that read, “Peace Erupts Now.” No signature. No attribution. No rumors from informants. The bomb data center drew blanks, but the Chicago office suspected Weather Underground. By luck,
Russell remembered a strange incident at Fenway Park involving the same type of explosion. It was the beginning of his involvement in a case that would stretch forward some thirty years.

  John Russell was transferred from Boston to Chicago, then Denver, then Philadelphia, where he became an expert on the Weather Underground. In 1972, he played a key role leading to the apprehension of Mark Henry and Diana Applegate. In the mid-seventies, Russell solved some cases involving the Mob and counterfeiters, but his career languished. In the late seventies, he was transferred again. While his peers showed their talent for training new agents and handling paperwork, John Russell was a one-trick pony—an extraordinary hunter—capable of devoting himself to a single task like the pursuit of fugitives without distraction. The problem was what to do between stakeouts. He became easily bored and irritated; he drank too much and spent too much time at the track. Unless he was in pursuit, he was hot-tempered and unpredictable.

  Shortly after he arrived in Philadelphia, people at work learned to keep their distance. John Russell seemed a bit cardboard, his personality contrived, as if something sinister was fighting his manners for control. He was erratic. He was obstinate with his superiors. Some days, he was like a ghost, a vaporized version of a real person, or a person who hadn’t fully formed. In the late eighties, after an interview and a Minnesota Multiphasic, he overheard the shrink at the Bureau tell his ASAC that he thought John Russell might be dissembling. By the mid-nineties, Russell understood deep down that although as an agent he might have been viable, as a human being he was failing.

  In recent years, he had moved himself and his mother into a spacious twin in East Falls, and for the first time in his life, he opened and read his retirement account statements. Nights after work, leaving her in front of the TV, he’d walk to McCabe’s and order the prime rib, then sit there watching television and drinking himself into a stupor. Once in a while, for exercise, he’d hit on one of the neighbor girls, somebody’s recently separated wife, the single woman who lived next door. Other nights, he preferred to lease company for a few hours, though never at the house.

  Russell returned from the bathroom and ordered himself another bourbon. He’d doused himself with cologne from a bottle he carried and slicked back his silvery hair. Like an old gumshoe, it was his way of welcoming the new day. “It was a cool night in September,” Russell began. “No rain. No humidity.” It took Dodson a second to realize that Special Agent John Russell was going to tell him the story of the Volcano Bomber from the very beginning.

  PART II

  Fall 1998

  Lorraine Nadia was an attractive woman and as she stood in line at Borders in Center City, people’s heads turned. She wore a light blue skirt, a white blouse, and a purple-and-black scarf that accented her eyes, which were big pools of blue, set wide apart. Her hair, streaked blonde, framed an open face that glowed with a mix of moisture, melanin, and optimism. I guessed correctly that she was fifty, although she could have passed for at least five years younger. When it came her turn, Lorraine looked directly at me as if she and I were the only two people in the room and she, not I, was the one signing books. “Inscribe it to Stardust,” she said, as I opened the front cover. Then she leaned forward and whispered in a voice that was private, almost flirtatious, that she had something important to tell me about my friend Patty Hearst and her time underground.

  I’d first noticed Lorraine hanging in the back of the store, watching me read and then answer questions. Apparently, she’d waited until the line had dwindled to ask me if I’d join her for a cup of tea. I was exhausted from the attention and eager to relax. “The whole SLA thing was a government setup,” she said as soon as we were alone, her eyebrows arching with intrigue. There was something intimate, almost physical, about the way she engaged me. “I want you to tell the world a very different story.”

  I held the cup under my nose and inhaled deeply. “I’m sorry,” I said as politely as I could. “I’m a poet. This project with Patty was a fluke. Just a way to pay the bills. I’m not really into conspiracy stuff, or even journalism, for that matter.” I remember thinking that the Hearst family was going to dog me for the rest of my life.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “This isn’t UFOs or Watergate. I’m talking about history and the human condition.”

  I told her I had the feeling that I’d been born too late to get all lathered up about the sixties and that I was more a weed than a flower child. When a clerk approached and asked me what to do with the extra copies of my book, I thanked Lorraine for coming and said I had to be going. She followed me downstairs, past the registers, and out onto Walnut Street. When we got to my car, I stuck my hand out. “It’s been nice meeting you.”

  “The next time you talk to Patty,” Lorraine said, “ask her if she knows somebody named Frederick.” Then she handed me a piece of paper with her phone number on it and walked back toward the bookstore, her bag bouncing against her hip.

  I did a few more book signings and some local TV, including a cable show about people who’d once been famous; and then, mercifully, the book disappeared. If I hadn’t heard from Patty almost a year later, I doubt I would have ever remembered that conversation with Lorraine.

  Fall 1999

  It was late in the afternoon, and one of the neighbor kids was setting up the computer in my mother’s cottage. I’d joined the Y, found a local twelve-step group, and had pretty much forgotten about What Mattered Most and William Randolph Hearst when Patty called, distraught.

  At first I thought it was the reviews. I hadn’t spent much time in the limelight, and, honestly, I was surprised at how ferocious the critics had been. But it wasn’t the press; it wasn’t even about the book. That morning, UPS delivered a package to her house in Connecticut. “It was a box…cardboard…heavy…wrapped in brown paper, about the size of a laptop,” she said. “Hand-addressed, not like Lands’ End or L.L. Bean.” Using instincts honed during her time with revolutionaries, she called the police. No sooner had she hung up than another van came screeching into the driveway. “Winnie, you have no idea what these people will do,” she whispered into the phone. The last thing she heard before collapsing was muffled conversation on a two-way radio. When she awoke, she was sprawled on the front steps, the cordless phone in pieces, watching three people in jumpsuits huddled by the van talking into a handset. Then her voice softened, and she spoke in the same monotone I would later recognize from audiotapes of her kidnapping. “I knew I was in Connecticut,” she said, “but it felt like Berkeley. I knew it was 1999, but it felt like 1974. I knew I was forty-five, but I felt like I was nineteen again.”

  I pictured Patty, her platinum blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, her famous profile, without makeup, having lost the sharpness of the extreme upper class. I felt sad that with all the money and fame, she was still traumatized by the past, whether real or imagined.

  “When I came to,” Patty said, “the back of the van was open. A man in a suit was kneeling, and I could see that the guys in the jumpsuits had DEA printed on their backs. The three agents talked to one another for a few minutes, and then one of them came over and told me that the package contained narcotics and that I was damned lucky I hadn’t taken it inside. Just like that, Winnie. Like they intended to bust me.”

  I must confess to being quite skeptical. I was also surprised that of all the people in her Rolodex, she’d have picked up the phone and called me to tell me about it. “What do you think it was all about?” I asked her.

  “Somebody set me up, Winnie. To blow my chances for a presidential pardon.” She paused to sip something. I struggled to think of something to say, and then for some reason, I remembered what Lorraine had told me.

  “Have you ever heard of a guy named Frederick?”

  Patty sucked her breath. “Oh God, Winnie,” she mumbled. And the line went dead.

  It took me several hours to get through again, and when I did, Bernie answered. “Patty’s sleeping,” he said brusquely. “She’
s all shook up. Had to take a pill.” Bernie told me Patty would call me when she awoke, but she didn’t—not that night or the next—or on any of the following days, despite many messages I left on her machine. When I finally reached Bernie in his office a week later, he told me that Patty was all right, and that those who hadn’t lived through what she had couldn’t understand. He said it was important for us not to keep pushing the past back in her face, or something to that effect. That it’d be best if I didn’t call again for a while.

  I felt compelled to tell him what I’d heard. “Somebody approached me at one of the book signings and said Patty’s kidnapping was some kind of government plot,” I said, half expecting him to laugh out loud. Bernie sighed. He sounded weary, perhaps because this single episode of Patty’s past had become the major theme of their entire adult lives.

  “A lot of people say a lot of things, Winnie. You’re gonna have to sort them out yourself. Meantime, cut us all a little slack, will you?” Until then, I hadn’t really understood what a burden the kidnapping was on Patty, her husband, her children, her family, even her friends. The wall had gone up. What an odd little footnote to our reunion, to our little project together, I thought as I hung up.

  People don’t realize it, but too much time on your hands, too much money in the bank, and no idea what you want to do with your life is a dangerous combination for a recovering addict. I wrote bad poetry and went out to dinner a lot with my brother and his wife. I went to AA and joined a health club, where I tried to make new friends. I read books I found in the cottage—mostly mysteries. I went to Target a lot and bought household items. One morning, I called Meredith Hutchinson, Patty’s agent, to see if she’d heard anything about the UPS incident. She hadn’t. Then, more out of boredom than anything else, I took out the little card with Lorraine’s phone number.