by Paul Auster
I woke up at three in the afternoon. Sachs slept on for another two or two and a half hours, and in the interval I puttered around the yard, staying out of the house so as not to disturb him. Sleep had done nothing for me. I was still too numb to think, and if I managed to keep myself busy during those hours, it was only by planning out the menu for dinner that night. I struggled over every decision, weighing each pro and con as if the fate of the world depended on it: whether to cook the chicken in the oven or on the grill, whether to serve rice or potatoes, whether there was enough wine left in the cupboard. It’s odd how vividly all this comes back to me now. Sachs had just told me how he had killed a man, how he had spent the past two years roaming the country as a fugitive, and all I could think about was what to prepare for dinner. It was as if I needed to pretend that life still consisted of such mundane particulars. But that was only because I knew it didn’t.
We stayed up late again that night, talking through dinner and on into the early hours of the morning. We were outside this time, sitting in the same Adirondack chairs we had sat in on so many other nights over the years: two disembodied voices in the dark, invisible to each other, seeing nothing except when one of us struck a match and our faces flared up briefly from the shadows. I remember the glowing ends of cigars, the fireflies pulsing in the bushes, an enormous sky of stars overhead—the same things I remember from so many other nights in the past. That helped to keep me calm, I think, but even more than the setting there was Sachs himself. The long sleep had refreshed him, and right from the start he was in full command of the conversation. There was no uncertainty in his voice, nothing to make me feel I couldn’t trust him. That was the night he told me about the Phantom of Liberty, and at no point did he sound like a man confessing to a crime. He was proud of what he had done, unshakably at peace with himself, and he talked with the assurance of an artist who knows he has just created his most important work.
It was a long, incredible tale, a saga of journeys and disguises, of lulls and frenzies and last-minute escapes. Until I heard it from Sachs, I never would have guessed how much work went into each explosion: the weeks of planning and preparation, the elaborate, roundabout methods for amassing the materials to construct the bombs, the meticulous alibis and deceptions, the distances that had to be covered. Once he had selected the town, he had to find a way to spend some time there without arousing suspicion. The first step was to concoct an identity and a cover story, and since he was never the same person twice, his powers of invention were constantly put to the test. He always had a different name, as bland and nondescript as he could make it (Ed Smith, Al Goodwin, Jack White, Bill Foster), and from one operation to the next, he did what he could to produce minor alterations in his physical appearance (beardless one time, bearded another, dark-haired in one place, light-haired in the next, wearing glasses or not wearing glasses, dressed in a suit or dressed in work clothes, a set number of variables that he would mix into different combinations for each town). The fundamental challenge, however, was to come up with a reason for being there, a plausible excuse to spend several days in a community where no one knew him. Once he posed as a college professor, a sociologist doing research for a book on small-town American life and values. Another time, he pretended to be on a sentimental journey, an adopted child looking for information about his biological parents. Another time he was a businessman hoping to invest in local commercial property. Another time he was a widower, a man who had lost his wife and children in an auto accident and was thinking about settling in a new town. Then, almost perversely, once the Phantom had made a name for himself, he showed up in a small Nebraska city as a newspaper reporter, at work on a feature article about the attitudes and opinions of people who lived in places with their own replicas of the Statue of Liberty. What did they think about the bombings? he asked them. And what did the statue mean to them? It was a nerve-shattering experience, he said, but worth every minute.
Early on, he decided that openness was the most useful strategy, the best way to avoid creating the wrong impression. Rather than skulk around and keep himself hidden, he chatted people up, he charmed them, he got them to think of him as an okay kind of guy. This friendliness came naturally to Sachs, and it gave him the breathing room he needed. Once people knew why he was there, they wouldn’t be alarmed to see him strolling through town, and if he happened to pass the site of the statue several times during the course of his walks, no one would pay any attention. Likewise with the tours he made after dark, driving through the shut-up town at two in the morning to familiarize himself with the traffic patterns, to calculate the odds of anyone being in the vicinity when he planted the bomb. He was thinking of moving there, after all, and who could blame him if he wanted to get a feel for the place after the sun went down? He realized that it was a flimsy excuse, but these nocturnal outings were unavoidable, a necessary precaution, for not only did he have to save his own skin, he had to make sure that no one was ever hurt. A bum sleeping at the base of the pedestal, two teenagers necking on the grass, a man out walking his dog in the middle of the night—it would only take a single fragment of flying stone or metal to kill someone, and then the entire cause would be ruined. That was Sachs’s greatest fear, and he went to enormous lengths to guard against accidents. The bombs he built were small, much smaller than he would have liked, and even though it increased the risks, he never set the timer to go off more than twenty minutes after he had taped the explosives to the crown of the statue. There was nothing to say that someone couldn’t pass by in those twenty minutes, but given the hour, and given the nature of those towns, the chances were slim.
Along with everything else, Sachs gave vast amounts of technical information that night, a crash course in the mechanics of bomb-building. I confess that most of it went straight through me. I have no knack for mechanical things, and my ignorance made it difficult for me to follow what he said. I understood the occasional word, terms like alarm clock, gunpowder, fuse, but the rest was incomprehensible to me, a foreign language I couldn’t penetrate. Still, judging from the way he talked, I gathered that a great deal of ingenuity was involved. He didn’t rely on any preestablished formulas, and with the added burden of having to cover his tracks, he took great pains to use only the most homespun materials, to put together his explosives from odds and ends that could be found in any hardware store. It must have been an arduous process, traveling somewhere just to buy a clock, then driving fifty miles down the road to buy a spool of wire, then going somewhere else to buy a package of tape. No purchase was ever larger than twenty dollars, and he was careful to avoid using anything but cash—in every store, in every restaurant, in every broken-down motel. In and out; hello and good-bye. Then he would be gone, as if his body had melted into thin air. It was hard work, but after a year and a half, he hadn’t left a single trace behind him.
He had a cheap apartment on the South Side of Chicago, which he rented under the name of Alexander Berkman, but that was a refuge more than a home, a place to pause between travels, and he spent no more than a third of his time there. Just thinking about his life made me uncomfortable. The constant movement, the pressure of always pretending to be someone else, the loneliness—but Sachs shrugged off my qualms as if they were of no importance. He was too preoccupied, he said, too absorbed by what he was doing to think about such things. If he had created any problem for himself, it was only how to cope with success. With the Phantom’s reputation steadily increasing, it had become more and more difficult to find any statues to attack. Most of them were guarded now, and whereas in the beginning it had taken him anywhere from one to three weeks to accomplish his missions, the average time had grown to nearly two and a half months. Earlier that summer, he had been forced to abandon a project at the last minute, and several others had been postponed—put off until winter, when the cold temperatures would no doubt slacken the determination of the all-night guards. But still, for every obstacle that arose, there was a compensating benefit, another sign
that proved how far his influence had spread. In the past few months, the Phantom of Liberty had been the subject of editorials and sermons. He had been discussed on call-in radio shows, caricatured in political cartoons, excoriated as a menace to society, extolled as a man of the people. Phantom of Liberty T-shirts and buttons were on sale in novelty shops, jokes had begun to circulate, and just last month two strippers in Chicago had presented an act in which the Statue of Liberty was gradually disrobed and then seduced by the Phantom. He was making a mark, he said, a much greater mark than he had ever thought possible. As long as he could keep it up, he was willing to face any inconvenience, to gut his way through any hardship. It was the kind of thing a fanatic would say, I later realized, an admission that he didn’t need a life of his own anymore, but he spoke with such happiness, such enthusiasm and lack of doubt, that I scarcely understood the implication of those words at the time.
There was more to be said. All sorts of questions had accumulated in my mind, but dawn had come by then, and I was too exhausted to go on. I wanted to ask him about the money (how much was left, what he was going to do when it ran out); I wanted to know more about his breakup with Lillian Stern; I wanted to ask him about Maria Turner, about Fanny, about the manuscript of Leviathan (which he hadn’t even bothered to look at). There were a hundred loose threads, and I figured I had a right to know everything, that he had an obligation to answer all my questions. But I didn’t push him to continue. We would talk about those things over breakfast, I told myself, but now it was time for bed.
When I woke up later that morning, Sachs’s car was gone. I assumed he had driven to the store and would be coming back any minute, but after waiting over an hour for him to return, I began to lose hope. I didn’t want to believe that he had left without saying good-bye, and yet I knew that anything was possible. He had run out on others before, and why should I think he would act any differently with me? First Fanny, then Maria Turner, then Lillian Stern. Perhaps I was only the latest in a long line of silent departures, another person he had crossed off his list.
At twelve thirty, I went over to the studio to sit down with my book. I didn’t know what else to do, and rather than go on waiting outside, feeling more and more ridiculous as I stood there listening for the sound of Sachs’s car, I thought it might help to distract myself with some work. That was when I found his letter. He had placed it on top of my manuscript, and I saw it the moment I sat down at my desk.
“I’m sorry to sneak out on you like this,” it began, “but I think we’ve covered almost everything. If I stayed around any longer, it would only cause trouble. You’d try to talk me out of what I’m doing (because you’re my friend, because you’d see that as your responsibility to me as a friend), and I don’t want to fight with you, I don’t have the stomach for arguments now. Whatever you might think of me, I’m grateful to you for listening. The story needed to be told, and better to you than to anyone else. If and when the time comes, you’ll know how to tell it to others, you’ll make them understand what this business is all about. Your books prove that, and when everything is said and done, you’re the only person I can count on. You’ve gone so much farther than I ever did, Peter. I admire you for your innocence, for the way you’ve stuck to this one thing for your whole life. My problem was that I could never believe in it. I always wanted something else, but I never knew what it was. Now I know. After all the horrible things that happened, I’ve finally found something to believe in. That’s all that matters to me anymore. Sticking with this one thing. Please don’t blame me for it—and above all, don’t feel sorry for me. I’m fine. I’ve never been better. I’m going to keep on giving them hell for as long as I can. The next time you read about the Phantom of Liberty, I hope it gives you a good laugh. Onward and upward, old man. I’ll see you in the funny papers. Ben.”
I must have read through this note twenty or thirty times. There was nothing else to do, and it took me at least that long to absorb the shock of his departure. The first few readings left me feeling hurt, angry at him for absconding when my back was turned. But then, very slowly, as I went through the letter again, I grudgingly began to admit to myself that Sachs had been right. The next conversation would have been more difficult than the others. It was true that I had been planning to confront him, that I had made up my mind to do what I could to talk him out of continuing. He had sensed that, I suppose, and rather than allow any bitterness to develop between us, he had left. I couldn’t really blame him for it. He had wanted our friendship to survive, and since he knew this visit could be the last time we ever saw each other, he hadn’t wanted it to end badly. That was the purpose of the note. It had brought things to an end without ending them. It had been his way of telling me that he couldn’t say good-bye.
He lived for another ten months, but I never heard from him again. The Phantom of Liberty struck twice during that period—once in Virginia and once in Utah—but I didn’t laugh. Now that I knew the story, I couldn’t feel anything but sadness, an immeasurable grief. The world went through extraordinary changes in those ten months. The Berlin Wall was torn down, Havel became president of Czechoslovakia, the Cold War suddenly stopped. But Sachs was still out there, a solitary speck in the American night, hurtling toward his destruction in a stolen car. Wherever he was, I was with him now. I had given him my word to say nothing, and the longer I kept his secret, the less I belonged to myself. God knows where my stubbornness came from, but I never breathed a hint to anyone. Not to Iris, not to Fanny and Charles, not to a living soul. I had taken on the burden of that silence for him, and in the end it nearly crushed me.
I saw Maria Turner in early September, a few days after Iris and I returned to New York. It was a relief to be able to talk to someone about Sachs, but even with her I held back as much as I could. I didn’t even mention that I had seen him—only that he had called and that we had talked on the phone for an hour. It was a grim little dance I danced with Maria that day. I accused her of misguided loyalty, of betraying Sachs by keeping her promise to him, while all along that was precisely what I was doing myself. We had both been let in on the secret, but I knew more than she did, and I wasn’t about to share the particulars with her. It was enough for her to know that I knew what she knew. She talked quite willingly after that, realizing how futile it would have been to con me. That much was out in the open now, and I wound up hearing more about her relations with Sachs than Sachs ever told me himself. Among other things, that was the day I first saw the photographs she had taken of him, the so-called “Thursdays with Ben.” Even more importantly, I also learned that Maria had seen Lillian Stern in Berkeley the year before—about six months after Sachs had left. According to what Lillian had told her, Ben had been back to visit twice. That contradicted what he had told me, but when I pointed out the discrepancy to Maria, she only shrugged. “Lillian’s not the only person who lies,” she said. “You know that as well as I do. After what those two did to each other, all bets are off.”
“I’m not saying that Ben couldn’t lie,” I answered. “I just don’t understand why he would.”
“It seems that he made certain threats. Maybe he was too embarrassed to tell you about them.”
“Threats?”
“Lillian said that he threatened to kidnap her daughter.”
“And why on earth would he do that?”
“Apparently, he didn’t like the way she was raising Maria. He said that she was a bad influence on her, that the kid deserved a chance to grow up in healthy surroundings. He took the high moral ground, and it turned into a nasty scene.”
“That doesn’t sound like Ben.”
“Maybe not, but Lillian was scared enough to do something about it. After Ben’s second visit, she put Maria on a plane and sent her to her mother’s house back East. The little girl’s been living there ever since.”
“Maybe Lillian had her own reasons for wanting to get rid of her.”
“Anything is possible. I’m just telling you what she
told me.”
“What about the money he gave her? Did she ever spend it?”
“No. At least not on herself. She told me that she put it in a trust fund for Maria.”
“I wonder if Ben ever told her where it came from. I’m not too clear on that point, and it might have made a difference.”
“I’m not sure. But a more interesting question is to ask where Dimaggio got the money in the first place. It was a phenomenal amount of cash for him to be carrying around.”
“Ben thought it was stolen. At least at first. Then he thought it might have been given to Dimaggio by some political organization. If not the Children of the Planet, then someone else. Terrorists, for example. The PLO, the IRA, any one of a dozen groups. He figured that Dimaggio might have been connected to people like that.”
“Lillian has her own opinion about what Dimaggio was up to.”
“I’m sure she does.”
“Yeah, well, it’s kind of interesting once you start to think about it. In her view, Dimaggio was working as an undercover agent for the government. The CIA, the FBI, one of those cloak-and-dagger gangs. She thinks it started when he was a soldier in Vietnam. That they signed him up over there and paid his way through college and graduate school. To give him the right credentials.”
“You mean he was a plant? An agent provocateur?”
“That’s what Lillian thinks.”
“It sounds pretty farfetched to me.”
“Of course it does. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
