by Don Silver
After dinner, he rehearsed what he would tell her. “Frederick didn’t quit. He was thrown out of MIT for stealing. He’s a speed freak. He doesn’t care about you or anybody.” Chuck passed the early part of the evening smoking little bowls of hash and reading magazines. A dozen times, he made his way down the hall to make sure the elevator was working. At midnight, he opened his door a crack and studied the light pattern that spilled on the floor. A half dozen times, someone other than Lorraine walked in its path.
Chuck woke to the sound of glass breaking and footsteps, heavy and hurried. The dial on his clock showed five o’clock. His door was still open. She was very late. “Chuck,” a voice whispered. He strained to see. The door opened slightly. “You got the shit?” It was Frederick. Something had gone wrong again. Chuck reached for the lamp. “Don’t touch it.” Frederick whispered again. His glasses reflected light from outside.
“Where’s Lorraine?” Chuck said. He wanted to say no, he hadn’t gotten the chemicals—to tell him that he hadn’t even bothered to try—but by then, Frederick had grabbed the knapsack and turned it upside down on his desk. “Where is she?” Chuck said weakly. It came out as a plea.
“I was just playing with you, man.” Frederick took the jars from Chuck’s knapsack and stuffed them in his. “She told me to tell you she never cared about you,” he said, standing over the bed. Then he was gone. Chuck listened to the sound of glass crunching as Frederick made his way down the hall.
Three weeks later, in early November, a postcard arrived with an Ansel Adams photograph of the Rocky Mountains, lush in detail at the low elevations, snowy and crisp at the top. It was postmarked Boulder, Colorado. On the back was written “N.Y. Times, Oct. 23, pg. 3.” Chuck walked along Memorial Drive, past the bushes where he had first seen Lorraine stretching. That would be Lonnie, he thought, lucky to be away from all this.
In the library, Chuck sat among students and professors reading back issues of foreign newspapers, magazines, and technical journals. He found the October 23 issue of the Times. The front page had articles about President Nixon, floods in India, and a giant drug bust on the border of Texas and Mexico. On page 3 was a thin column.
UPI Oneonta, N.Y. An unusual explosion rocked an area in front of a Selective Service Induction Center in upstate New York yesterday, killing a teenage boy and severely burning three others. Witnesses reported seeing a young man carrying a brown box approach the building, which had been picketed several weeks ago by antiwar demonstrators.
Asher Worman, owner of the Five Star Deli, said he heard an explosion before seeing a plume of fire extending several stories into the air. Waves of heat melted parking meters and blew out plate glass in nearby commercial establishments.
“It was like a volcano,” Worman said. The boy, who was a tenth-grade student at White Pine High School, had been a part-time deliveryman for the deli for only six days.
While authorities speculate that antiwar demonstrators were behind it, they were baffled by the type of bomb and the severity of the blast. The three survivors suffered severe third-degree burns and are in critical condition at Graduate Mercy Hospital. No other injuries or structural damage was reported.
Suddenly, everything changed. In an instant, Chuck felt less like an MIT student and more like a criminal. Any currency of cool he’d earned hanging around Frederick was gone. It seemed as if his classes were being conducted in a foreign language. Even mathematics was impenetrable. He reviewed his visits to the lab to be sure he hadn’t left anything incriminating behind. He considered the possibility that Lonnie, now halfway across the country, might somehow implicate himself and Chuck in the Fenway hack. He was struck by the audacity of Frederick’s action. If the law were to catch up with him, Frederick would be fucked. Over the next several days, Chuck’s mind scaled a ladder that teetered before collapsing into paranoiac gloom. His instinct was to leave Boston immediately—to disappear—yet to do so would expose him to the draft. He needed cash, and to get cash, he needed to do a big deal.
There was a period of about a week that fall when Chuck Puckman sat in his dorm room, day and night, paralyzed with fear—listening with anticipation for footsteps signaling his imminent arrest or a phone call from the road manager of the Inter Galactic Messengers. The call came first. It turned out that the Messengers were having a little crisis of their own. Chuck’s friend Augie explained that the lease on the house in East Windsor would be up soon, and the band was hoping to buy an old Victorian in Hartford, for which they needed a large down payment by Christmas. A shipment of weed was expected from Colombia in a few weeks. In code, the two of them arranged for Chuck to buy ten kilos for a small deposit up front. If he paid for it in full before then, there would be no interest. If he missed the deadline—even by one day—he would owe them double. Chuck made his calculations. If he broke it up into quarters and sold them to distributors, he would have the money by December, which meant he could be in Canada or Key West by Christmas.
Sampling a big buy is an art. You want to taste enough to know you’re getting good stuff, without getting wasted. There were three of them in the room, including Augie and Frederick’s nemesis, the road manager. Chuck took a pinch from each bag and laid them in little piles on the glass table. For the first hit—the one that dulls the taste buds—he took out a tiny stone pipe, brand new, and pressed a shred of leaf against the screen. Tilting the lighter, he created a second of suction and then took a small furry wisp of smoke into his mouth. Quickly, he blew it out. Twice more he did this from the other bags before indicating his approval. Heads bobbed on shoulders, and there were forced smiles and handshakes. Chuck set his deposit, ten crisp twenty-dollar bills, on the table. Then he opened a canvas suitcase with two leather straps and laid the bags inside. Downstairs, Chuck stopped to say good-bye to a few of the girls he recognized from prior visits. If things went as planned, he would never see them again.
On the ride home, Chuck imagined carrying his suitcase up the staircase to his dorm and double-locking his door. His routine was the same: After stuffing a towel under the door, he would light incense and open the bags one at a time over newspaper, setting the clumps on his laboratory scale and breaking them apart. He was thinking about how to accommodate this quantity quickly when the little car he’d borrowed for the day sputtered and then stalled fifteen miles west of Worcester. For a few minutes, he sat there, his forehead pressed against the steering wheel. How stupid to run out of gas carrying so much dope.
Traffic whizzed by in both directions. To his right, a thick stand of maple trees quivered with the remnants of leaves: red, yellow, orange, and gold. His problem was the smell. If he left the weed in the trunk, a state trooper might stop and inspect the vehicle. If he took the suitcase with him, he would be dependent on somebody cool giving him a ride. He cursed Frederick for having set these events in motion. A mile earlier, maybe more, he’d passed an exit. He decided to stash the suitcase in the woods while he hitchhiked back for gas. It was risky, but there were no other good alternatives.
Forty paces in, he found a maple tree whose trunk split six feet off the ground and buried the bag underneath some leaves. He tried to memorize the spot using a crude form of triangulation. It took less than thirty minutes to hitch a ride to the previous exit. At a Texaco station, he bought a five-gallon container of gas and caught a ride from the owner back to his car. After retrieving the suitcase from the woods, Chuck experienced a moment of relief so strong it resembled euphoria, and after a week of unremitting worry after hearing about Oneonta, that feeling extended for the rest of the ride.
On the outskirts of Boston, he exited the Mass Pike and drove into Cambridge. He found a parking place near an empty lot and walked about seven blocks to his dorm room, carrying the canvas suitcase up the stairs carefully, as if it were a bomb. He turned his room key, opened the door, let the bag gently down onto the floor, shut the door behind him, leaned back, and closed his eyes. Before he opened them, he knew something was wrong. The room was
close and fresh with the smell of sweat and cigarettes.
“Hello, Charles,” a gravely voice said. “My name’s D’Mitri, and this here’s Special Agent Russell. We’re with the FBI.”
Saturday, March 14, 2000
“From the get-go, everybody suspected Weather Underground.” While Special Agent John Russell drove, Eric Dodson riffled through a stack of memos, photographs, transcripts, and notations testifying to the absence of Keane. “In the fall of 1968, you had radical factions blowing up statues and sending letters of attribution to the papers—pipe bombs, cluster bombs, antipersonnel, carpet bombs, Vietnam vets fucking around with napalm, frag bombs, phosphorous and defoliants, you had bombs that sucked the air out of buildings, bombs that suffocated people, bombs that simulated earthquakes, bombs that caused buildings to cave in. Still, something about Oneonta was different.” At a traffic light, Russell swallowed a pill, his hands shaking.
“Different,” Eric Dodson said, nodding. “How?”
“Like a fucking Salvador Dali painting, that’s how,” Russell answered. “It melted a mailbox. It vaporized a street sign. It liquefied a kid and peeled flesh off a couple bystanders. Guys who’d been working domestic security for years had never seen anything like it.”
“Did you see it?”
“Didn’t need to. I talked to the bomb squad,” Russell said confidently. “Off-the-shelf stuff—iron oxide, permanganate, aluminum.” Russell took a sip of water. “Used in a combination that hadn’t been seen before in the radical movement.”
“And the target?”
“The Selective Service Building in Oneonta.”
“Why the kid?”
“Mistake,” Russell said. “We talked to his mother, his teachers, his friends. He was sixteen years old. No political leanings, no friends in the movement, nothing to protest except his curfew. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“And the others?”
“Same deal. A high school teacher, a housewife, and a barber. Three people with nothing in common—no connection to anything—burned over fifty percent of their bodies—hair, skin, cartilage.” Russell looked at his watch. In ten minutes, they’d be at the Nadias’, in time to see the girl coming in from last night or going out for the day.
“Why was he holding the bomb?”
“Why do you think?”
“You said the kid had already made his deliveries for the day.”
Ordinarily, Russell would have shown a young agent some encouragement. Asking questions, thinking out loud, making leaps, testing hypotheses, this was the job of an apprentice in every field, particularly law enforcement. The real trouble was, after thirty years, Russell didn’t know. “In a little while, Septa starts running,” he said, changing the subject again. We should keep watching her.”
“How’d you know it was Keane?” Dodson asked.
John Russell kept his eyes on the road. “The Oneonta police called the crime scene unit, who called the bomb techs, who took one look at the crater in the sidewalk and called the Bureau.” There were a half dozen faded Polaroids stapled to a manila backing. In one, a uniformed cop stood beside a gaping hole where sidewalk should have been. In another, onlookers behind yellow tape stared into the void, perhaps imagining the molecules of a teenage boy. “It was big news for a college town,” Russell said, heading east on Street Road. “There’d been protests against the Vietnam War, and a few arrests, but no violence. These kids were into drinking beer, watching stock car racing, and riding snowmobiles. Nobody even burned their draft cards.”
“It says here that the Volcano Bomber investigation was part of something called Weatherfug out of Chicago.” Dodson was looking at a section of the file that detailed the Oneonta bombing incident.
Russell stuck a toothpick in his mouth. “There was the usual jurisdictional bullshit,” he said sideways. “The FBI is a paramilitary structure. Back then, there was a special agent in charge of each office, and an assistant and supervisors who directed squads that specialized in three basic areas—violent crime, domestic security, and bank fraud. This was right after the Democratic Convention,” Russell said. “Our undercover agents were telling us that the radical groups were in the process of spinning off military units. The police in Oneonta were happy to turn the whole thing over to us.”
It was close to six A.M. and the sun had just crested over the horizon. Russell pulled out a pair of silver sunglasses. “The bomb squad isolated two chemicals that combined to produce what’s known as a thermite reaction.” He looked over at Dodson. “It’s unusual. Aluminum extracts oxygen from the iron oxide and forms aluminum oxide, which combines with the iron oxide and releases heat. Lots of it. Enough to weld iron underwater or to fire booster rockets.”
“Jesus,” Dodson said.
“Our agents interviewed guys at Monsanto, chemistry professors up at the State University, personnel managers at the metals factories, the out-of-state firms that build the big tunnels.”
“NASA?” Dodson said.
“Everybody there has clearance,” Russell said. “You gotta remember, this is 1968. Radicals didn’t work straight jobs.”
“So what happened?” Dodson asked, his frustration evident.
“The Bureau pressed its informants, but after the Democratic Convention, most of the heavy hitters were either laying low, at emergency meetings, or locked up awaiting trial. The New York City office thought it was a whacko—some ex-con, or vet—who went over the edge.”
“Mind pulling over?” Dodson said, as they approached a 7-Eleven.
Russell turned into the parking lot and let the car idle. “Try to remember this is October 1968,” he said, before the young agent could let himself out. “I wasn’t much older than you are now.” Dodson was holding on to the door handle, his head facing Russell, his body turned away. “Working the Boston office. We got an Airtel from Chicago. They had no leads. So we asked around—students, boyfriends and girlfriends of known radicals, drifters. We got nothing.”
“I’ll just be a second,” Dodson said, opening the car door. He had to piss. A bread truck was parked on the side of the store, and a guy with a kidney belt was unloading plastic crates. Maybe over the summer, Russell would volunteer to help crack cold cases. No way he was going to spend his sunset years delivering pizza or feeding pigeons in Fairmont Park. Dodson came back with a couple of egg sandwiches and two coffees. He set the cardboard tray between the two of them and pulled a wad of napkins out of his shirt pocket.
Russell shook his head. “Coffee on a stakeout?” Dodson ignored him. Russell backed the car up and then pulled into traffic. “I knew this cop who hung around Fenway Park. Big baseball fan. Turns out, there was a Sunday game in August when an area between second and third base started smoking. It was no big deal, but the game was televised and the owner was pissed.” Dodson took a bite out of his sandwich. “The head groundskeeper wanted to make it seem like it’d been some kind of accident—a cigarette butt or something smoldering in the dirt—but Mr. Yawkey insisted the cops check it out.”
Russell found a parking space at the end of Medley about six houses from the Nadias’. He rolled down his window and tapped the mirror with his index finger so he could see the sidewalk in both directions, angled the car for a quick exit, and turned the ignition off. He blinked several times, as was his habit, until he saw the street with fresh eyes. A slow-moving van threw shopping circulars onto the lawns. A storm door slammed shut. From behind them, a dog started barking and then stopped.
“At this point, the baseball season was just about over,” Russell continued. “Most of the grounds crew was gone. The cops talked to a few old-timers, but nobody’d noticed anything suspicious. There was this one guy, though—a wetback. He emptied the wheelbarrows that day. Remembered a metallic smell. I had the Dumpster scraped.”
“You gonna eat that?” Dodson interrupted, pointing to the other sandwich.
John Russell squinted at the younger man. “Maybe.”
Dodson w
as bored. So far, with the exception of the story of Stardust’s New Year’s Eve adventure, everything the old man had told him about the Volcano Bomber was in the file. Dodson was beginning to think that the old man’s better days were behind him, and that maybe he was tracking the Nadia girl out of some kind of obsession. As for what happened Friday, the girl had probably skipped work because she could. With her mother’s pension in the bank and the prospect of selling the house, why would an attractive thirty-year-old woman care about some Joe job? Dodson told his ASAC as much yesterday. “For his tracking skills alone,” his boss replied, “you should spend a day or two with John Russell.” Still, as far as the young agent was concerned, he was wasting another precious weekend in Philadelphia, one of only a few so far when he’d had a chance to make social connections.
After that, the agents fell silent for a while. Dodson whistled and tapped his fingers against the dashboard; Russell picked his teeth and filed his nails. Just before ten, Dodson stated the obvious. “Keane’s been underground for over thirty years now, longer than any other radical fugitive from the sixties.”
“You saying you think I fucked up?” Russell said.
“No, yeah, I mean, no.” Dodson rolled his eyes. “It’s just…”
Russell stared at him, smiling.
“I mean, how’s he been so…elusive?”
Special Agent John Russell put his arm behind his head. “You want to know what makes a good fugitive, don’t you?” Russell took a deep breath in and blew out. “Well, that’s a damn good question, and I’m going to answer it if you promise not to tell anyone. Okay?” He looked in the rearview mirror and smoothed his hair. “The best fugitives, Agent Dodson, are the ones who master the art of not…getting…caught.”
