American Spy

by Lauren Wilkinson

  Helene had taken over making the lunch I took to school and walking me home from the bus stop. We lived in Cambria Heights, one of the black middle-class neighborhoods in Queens. There was also Laurelton and St. Albans. Wealthy black people—doctors, lawyers, and a couple of entertainers like James Brown and Count Basie—lived over in Addisleigh Park.

  In September, as Helene and I walked toward our little house, I asked her about the speech Kennedy had given on television and what it meant. She answered my questions as best she could, tried to be as soothing as possible, but could tell I was still anxious. And I knew she was too, even though she tried not to show it in front of me.

  I don’t know if in twenty years, when you’re adults reading this, you’ll be able to understand the stranglehold that Cold War terror had on the psychology of my generation. We were kids who wondered what we would do if we grew up, not when.

  When we got home, we called hello through the bathroom door to Pop, who was in the shower. He’d be leaving for work soon. Helene snuck into his room, fished around for a little bit in his desk, which was forbidden, then came out into the hall and put Pop’s dog tags around my neck. “Hide those under your shirt.”

  “Why?”

  “Just wear ’em,” she said. After dinner, I helped Helene wash the dishes, then went with her to the living room to watch television. When the doorbell rang, my sister let Mr. Ali into the house. Pop came out of his room and passed in front of the TV, headed to the closet beside the front door. He pulled out his trench coat and slapped at the wrinkles, then looked over at me. “Those call your name from out my drawer?”

  I’d already forgotten to keep his dog tags hidden and was playing with them around my neck.

  “She has to wear them,” Helene answered on my behalf.

  “Put ’em back.” Pop slipped on his coat. “I already told you I don’t want you two going in my room, Helene. I’m gonna start locking the door.”

  “But she has to wear them. Now you’ll know it’s Marie even if she gets burned up.”

  “Pop, am I gonna get burned up?” I pictured my body charred past recognition, and nausea overwhelmed me. He didn’t answer the question. He was distracted, looking for his wallet.

  “Can we get stuff?” Helene asked.

  “What do you mean? What kind of stuff?” he asked absently.

  “Supplies.”

  “What kind?”

  “Ms. Baptiste said we should get food,” Helene said.

  “Your teacher don’t know what she’s talking about,” Pop said. “Canned peaches won’t do nothing for nobody if those missiles hit DC.”

  “Pop, am I gonna get burned up?” I asked again.

  “Your girls are smart; they want to be prepared,” Mr. Ali said. “We could do with some nice girls like yours at work. Remember that fat old secretary they stuck me with?”

  “Right before you went undercover?” Pop asked as they left.

  “Ooo-wee, mean as a snake, wasn’t she?” The front door closed behind them.

  I turned to Helene. “Am I gonna get burned up?”

  “No,” she said, knowing what I needed to hear.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think they’re doing?” I asked.

  “Working.”

  “Doing what?”

  She didn’t answer, but put her arm around me and kissed my temple. Then we both turned back to the television.

  1965

  Mr. Ali was the first person I understood to be undercover. It was only once I was older that my idea of cover became more flexible, and I realized that Agathe had also been hiding in plain sight before she left us.

  I remember watching TV with Helene in our living room, staring at footage from Malcolm X’s funeral. We had the news on because Pop had told us to look out for him—Betty Shabazz, who was pregnant with twins when she was widowed, had requested that the city supply black cops for crowd control at her husband’s funeral, and Pop was the only one in his precinct. The camera did catch him, but only for an instant, in the background, while he was standing beside an easel spray of red and white carnations (I’m assuming; the TV set was black and white) arranged to look like the Nation of Islam flag.

  Then Mr. Ali unexpectedly appeared on the screen, talking at a podium. White words appeared, superimposed over the bottom of his image, introducing him as the Nation of Islam’s secretary and referring to him by a name we’d never heard before.

  Helene said my name and I turned my face, resting my head on the crook of my other arm so I could see her. She was sitting cross-legged on our plastic entombed sofa, with Bunny stretched out beside her, his jowl resting on her calf. Even from where I was lying on the blue shag, I could sense the whir of her mind as she watched Mr. Ali. At first I didn’t understand what had set her off. The news program had moved on to the next story before she finally spoke. “Moi aussi, je serai une espionne,” she said. I’m going to be a spy too.

  “He’s a spy?”

  “What else would he be on the TV for with a fake name and a fake job? You know he works for the FBI.”

  I thought about that for a moment, then asked her, “Where are you gonna be a spy?”

  “In Cuba,” she said confidently. “Or Russia.”

  She was twelve, a grown twelve, speaking with adult seriousness. I had just turned ten; Malcolm X was assassinated two days after my birthday. If I’d been a little older I might’ve challenged her, might’ve asked if she really expected white folks to let her do that. Go to those places. Or maybe not—when it was a question of something she had her mind set on, anything seemed possible.

  A spy. The idea floored me. Helene having spoken the words made them possible, not just for her but for me. I was suddenly excited to strike out into the world too, in pursuit of adventure, provided that I could do so with my sister. I pictured walking along behind Helene on a snow-dusted street, my hands tucked into a fox fur muff. I pictured following her into a Soviet café and sitting beside her in a booth, my sister’s face still red with cold, across from our handler, a balding man in a pince-nez. I still can’t help but wonder at her. Where had she picked up the idea that she could do anything? Be anything? That the world was so much bigger than Queens?

  * * *

  —

  SHE THOUGHT THE WAY she did because she was naturally braver than I was. Consider the events of her thirteenth birthday, which Pop took us hunting to celebrate. We went up to the Catskills to a ranch a few miles down the road from Paradise Farm, a black resort that we used to visit in the summer. We’d ride ponies on the ranch when it was warm, but that winter we were headed to the hunting grounds.

  Back then my father had a Mercury Monterey in what he called persimmon and white. We sat up front with him (this was before that Ralph Nader book), me with the aluminum foil–covered cake on my lap that our neighbor Mrs. Hawkins had made for Helene’s birthday. She’d started baking for us after our mother left, and while I loved her desserts—Helene did too—it upset me when my sister would joke that they more than made up for Agathe’s absence.

  We drove through the city and north on the Palisades toward the Hudson Valley. At the ranch, we found a spot near a deer trail where someone had set up a makeshift ground blind out of dead branches. The three of us waited quietly, Helene and I sitting on the cold ground with our backs against a wide tree. I was nearly asleep when Pop waved my sister over to where he was and gestured toward the deer trail. A doe had appeared there and was grazing on a low shrub. He handed Helene his .30-06, and she lifted it into position. “Can she see us?” I whispered.

  Pop put a finger to his lips.

  “It’ll kick, Helene,” I whispered. “It might hurt you.”

  I spoke louder than necessary, trying to give the deer a chance to run. It didn’t look up from the shrub. Helene took a brea
th and pulled the trigger. The bullet hit it in the neck; my sister was already an excellent shot, having practiced with my father at a range that bent their rules about minors shooting because he was a cop. The doe dropped to the leafy ground, legs moving like it was finally trying to run.

  “Great eye, kid!” Pop clapped his hands once. “Did it kick hard?”

  “If it did I couldn’t even feel it,” she said.

  Pop told her to squat next to the doe and hold its head up. There was blood on the black nose, pooling in its open mouth, dripping down to the white fur beneath its nearly human teeth. He took pictures of her and the deer while I looked on, jealous.

  As he put his camera away and got out his knife, I stood beside my sister and took her hand. I was afraid, looking in the animal’s eyes, and wanted her comfort. Helene knew it and gave my hand a light squeeze. Smiling, she kissed the top of my head. “It’s okay.”

  Pop turned the doe on its back and pressed the knife into its belly. “Your first cut is right here where the white fur starts. Then you pull up to the top of the sternum.”

  I can close my eyes now and still see Helene’s face in profile as she watched him, her eyes alive with curiosity, the slanting winter sunshine igniting the golden down along her hairline.

  As my father began to field dress the deer, I was flooded with nausea. I announced that I was going back to the car; Pop called after me to wait, but I was already on my way.

  “Can I make the next cut?” I heard Helene ask behind me.

  I climbed into the back of the Mercury, stretched out, closed my eyes. I saw the deer. My father cutting into its flesh, the sack of its stomach ballooning from the incision, intestines writhing like a snake’s nest. There’d been so much movement. Too much, I thought, for something that was supposed to be dead. I’d looked into its eye to be sure and saw no emptiness there. The fear I’d felt then was what made me sick.

  Pop and Helene arrived with the doe and strapped it to the wide trunk. We started toward Middletown and the black butcher there who was friends with Pop. As he drove, he talked animatedly with my sister about her shot. I rested with my head against the window, clutching my sister’s cake, feeling jealous and excluded. I thought my sister was our father’s favorite too, as well as our mother’s.

  The motion of the car brought my sickness back to the surface. I bolted upright and began to roll down the window as fast as I could.

  I wasn’t fast enough; my vomit splashed the glass. Pop pulled over. I scrambled out, doubled over, and threw up again.

  “You all right?” Helene asked when I got back in the car. I said I was and wiped my mouth with a napkin from the glove box. We used the rest of the napkins to clean the window, the seat, my jeans, the foil on Helene’s squashed cake. Then Pop started up the car.

  “I’m sorry I ruined your birthday,” I said quietly, after we’d driven a few miles in silence.

  “You didn’t,” she said, so gently that I almost believed it, and offered me her shoulder to rest my head against.

  As a child, whenever I thought of that afternoon I’d feel ashamed. I’d shown weakness where my sister had shown curiosity and courage. As I got older, I learned to hide that vulnerability and fear. I had to. It was plain evidence that my sister was my better.

  6

  NEW YORK, 1987

  MR. ALI AND I HAD AGREED to meet for lunch, and he’d chosen a place in Chinatown that was close to the field office. I stepped into an alcove where an algae-green tank sat on a wide counter, the large yellow carp inside slowly orbiting each other. It was a long, narrow restaurant. Most of the tables were pushed close to the walls, and waiters in green polo shirts were working in the corridor that ran down the center.

  Mr. Ali was already there. As I approached his table, he looked up from the menu in his hand and stood. His thick hair was gray at the temples now, and he was wearing a blue suit with a small American flag pin on the lapel.

  He pulled me into a hug. “Marie Mitchell, pretty as all get-out. I always say it: One of these days you’re gonna come to your senses and quit law enforcement.”

  “Maybe.” I laughed listlessly. He’d been making the same joke for years.

  “When you go out to Hollywood and make a million bucks, don’t forget about me.”

  I sat. A waiter put a white teapot and two cups down as he sped toward another table.

  “How are you?” he asked. “I’m sorry about your grandfather, Marie.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How’s your dad? I spoke to him, but you know how it is. Hard to tell what’s going on in his mind sometimes.”

  “I saw him a few days ago. I think he’s okay.”

  “You having any trouble planning the funeral?”

  “I wouldn’t know. He said you’re helping him with that.”

  “Did he?”

  Neither of us were surprised at having caught Pop in that lie. Mr. Ali might’ve wanted to say something else, but the waiter returned then to ask if we were ready to order. Once he’d gone, Mr. Ali took off his reading glasses and tucked them into their soft case. “This was a good idea. It’s nice to get a moment to talk away from the office.” He smiled. “Say, have you heard anything from Gold about this big case coming up, the fellow they suspect of spying in the Foreign Mission office? They’re putting a squad together to keep him under surveillance and you might—”

  “You know I never get picked for anything high profile.”

  “I talked to Gold this time.” He looked disappointed. “I said I wanted you on the squad, and he told me he’d see what he could do. Huh. Guess I don’t have the juice I used to.”

  He was embarrassed. I was too. I felt bad that he’d gone out of his way to help me, and about witnessing his failure to do so. The waiter put our entrées and a large bowl of white rice between us on the table. Mr. Ali asked for a fork as he spread a paper napkin across his lap. I pulled my chopsticks apart and picked up a piece of chicken.

  I watched Mr. Ali for a moment as he worked through his meal. I considered his career. He’d been one of a small handful of black special agents hired during J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure at the bureau. They were brought on to participate in the Counterintelligence Program—COINTELPRO—and used almost exclusively to undermine civil rights activists. Still, he was in the vanguard, and there was much to respect in that. I could guess at how it had been for him when he’d first started at the bureau. Hoover had his idea of the perfect agent, and Mr. Ali damn sure wasn’t it. Hoover’s ideal was the white boy in a black suit, crew cut, spit shined. The superman. He didn’t even like it when his agents drank coffee at work. Mr. Ali once told me that he’d seen someone get written up for that.

  “Your recruitment numbers are excellent though,” he was saying. “One of the highest in the division. They can’t keep ignoring you forever.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah. Don’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Marie,” he pressed, knowing I didn’t mean it.

  “I’ve recruited more informants than anyone else, but only because that’s all they’ll let me do. I’m stuck. How can I prove I can run a counterintelligence operation if they won’t even give me the chance to be in one?”

  I sighed. We only relied on recruitment numbers to quantify success in our division because they were so easy to measure. Gold wanted me to have as many snitches as possible because it made him look good in front of the brass, not because doing so was an especially productive tactic. But it was a waste of energy for the most part, and the intel was rarely worth the money we paid for it.

  “You want my advice? Keep your head down and toe the line. That’ll get you where you want to go. Hard work always pays off.”

  I shrugged. “I do work hard. I just met with an informant the other day who I’ve had for almost a year now. I worked hard to
get that snitch.”

  His eyebrows went up at the word.

  “The group was high on our target list, because their director was in the Black Liberation Army and they’re funded by the CPUSA. But, to tell the truth, all they do is protest apartheid and promote Pan-Africanism. That’s it. And that’s perfectly legal. So how’s my hard work going to pay off there? It’s pointless.”

  “Pointless?”

  “It’s not going to get me a promotion.”

  “Why’d you become a Fed? Not for the glory, I know that. Because you have a duty. We both do. We swore an oath.”

  “Sure. But I also want to be a SAC, Mr. Ali.”

  “Because you believe in what we do,” he said, responding to what he’d wanted to hear.

  “I want to be a SAC. And why shouldn’t I be? I’m as smart as anyone else here.”

  “Then take my advice. Don’t rock the boat,” he said, bringing the circular conversation back to its starting point.

  I nodded even though I would never take his advice. His career had stalled because of his involvement in COINTELPRO, which had targeted Americans who weren’t doing anything illegal and done so—ironically enough—through means that were illegal. Mr. Ali had been involved in a few black-bag jobs—unconstitutional surveillance and searches. After Hoover died, there was a sea change at the bureau, which made Mr. Ali political poison. The brass couldn’t promote an agent who’d been hired to carry out illegal operations. So they’d given him a corner office and a few raises, but after thirty years he was still only an ASAC. That was how he’d been repaid for keeping his head down and following orders.

  “I think I’m going to have to rock the boat a little if I want to get anywhere,” I said, trying one last time to get him to understand me.

  He shrugged and gave a short, patronizing shake of his head.

  “Really? You never did anything that was out of bounds?” I asked. “Nothing against policy?”