“Never.”
“Honestly?”
“I thought you knew me,” he said, his tone suddenly defensive.
“I do.”
“So why would you think something like that?”
It sounded like he had a guilty conscience, but I would never have asked why, and he would never have told me if I had. I’d asked because I was thinking of having fired Aisha. It was a tiny infraction, and yet the most questionable thing I’d done as a special agent. It had absolutely nothing to do with him.
The silence between us was tense, so I tried to backpedal by telling a version of the truth. “I have an informant I want to dismiss, but I can’t get my ASAC to sign off on it. That’s why I was wondering.”
“Oh,” he said, and once he realized that the question had been for my own sake, visibly started to relax. “I see. Well, if your ASAC won’t sign off, then I wouldn’t do it. Really, why bother?”
“I told you. The group isn’t doing anything illegal. I want to be out helping track a spy, not wasting my time writing up reports about a sit-in at city hall.”
“So you meet your informant a few times a month. Put a little money in his pocket. I don’t see the harm in that. Going behind your ASAC’s back, on the other hand, is trouble.”
I nodded again. The truth was that I had a moral concern, and the political climate at the bureau made me feel like I could come to a sorry end if I wasn’t strict with my ethics. I didn’t want to participate in spying on citizens who weren’t doing anything illegal. In a certain sense things were simple: I was a servant of the law. But intelligence policy sometimes descended into such murk that the dividing line between the organizations engaging in legal political dissent and the illegal—posing a military threat to the government—became impossible to see.
What the bureau had done to Mr. Ali meant, for me, that individual agents had to conduct themselves based on a choice: They could either follow bureau policy or they could uphold the law. They weren’t always the same thing. I knew what I’d always pick: I’d become a special agent to uphold the law when it was consistent and fair.
I’d like to tell you I had a shatterproof moral compass—that I really was good, that I was nobly trying to redress past wrongs. But really, I was acting out of professional self-preservation. I didn’t want to end up like Mr. Ali.
We finished our meals, and as he picked up the check, I said, “Sounds like you think I’d regret stepping out of line.”
He nodded as he counted out a few bills.
“Can I ask you something? Do you feel…Do you have any regrets?”
“Regrets?” He looked up at me from the cash in his hand, frowning at the word. “No. No, no, no.”
He paused, then spoke again: “No. But the bureau has really played dirty sometimes, hasn’t it? Fred Hampton? Those Feebees in Chicago murdered that boy in his sleep.”
I nodded. I thought Hampton’s murder was a state-sponsored execution, and didn’t feel disloyal to the FBI for thinking so. A bureau informant—a snitch—had passed a blueprint of the apartment Hampton was sharing with a few other Black Panthers to the FBI agent running him. He’d also slipped a barbiturate into the drink Hampton had with dinner the night the Chicago police raided the apartment.
Hampton’s only crime had been his competence as a civil rights leader. Still, they’d fired off nearly a hundred rounds on the sleeping Panthers, killing two. Hampton had been curled in bed with his pregnant fiancée when he was murdered. He was only twenty-one years old.
I saw Mr. Ali’s remorse. I believed it was sincere. But I also think that if he’d been in Chicago back then, and his ASAC had asked him to find a snitch who’d drug Hampton, he would’ve done it.
By the time you read this, you’ll be adults. I’m telling you a lot of things, as much as I can really, and some of it you’ll surely find difficult to parse. One thing I can say for sure is that I don’t want you to be moral absolutists. If what I’m telling you of our story means to you that the people it involves are either saved or damned, then you’ll have misunderstood me.
Mr. Ali wasn’t a monster—he was a foot soldier doing what he thought was right. And if you believe he’s an irredeemable villain, to be consistent, you’ll also have to believe that about your grandfather—the man you love spending summer days with. I don’t know what goes on when the three of you get together, only that I’ll drop you off with enough clothes for the weekend, remind you about your manners, and show up again to wild men wearing exactly what you had on when I left.
I remember the two of them going out together when Mr. Ali was undercover in the Nation of Islam. I can imagine the bureau leaving a black agent dangling, without resources, without a decent partner. I can imagine Mr. Ali having to rely on someone outside of the FBI—but still in law enforcement—for help.
And I was a special agent too. So whatever you think of Mr. Ali and your grandfather, to be consistent, you’ll have to think it of me too. Fred Hampton, Bunchy Carter, Anna Mae Aquash—all of them affiliated with organizations that were declared Communist enemies of the government to justify their infiltration. All of them Americans who were assassinated after a special agent like me got involved. There’s a pattern there that’s difficult for me to ignore, one that makes me feel culpable.
We stepped outside—it was a mild afternoon—and started back toward the field office, striding together along narrow Pell Street. On Mott, we passed a fish market, one flooded in harsh fluorescent light, where a man in rubber boots pushed a wide broom across the tile floor, and slid gray sudsy water out into the street.
We crossed by a fruit market, a gift shop with red paper lanterns hanging from the awning and shelves of merchandise crowding the sidewalk out front. Mr. Ali was quiet. I’d inadvertently rattled his cage and didn’t know how to fix things.
At the Javits building, we went up in the steel elevator. Mr. Ali greeted the guard stationed in the hall as we both showed him our credentials and passed through the turnstile. We went through the set of glass doors and into a carpeted reception area where there was a secretary sitting behind a black desk. There weren’t many women in the office, but she and I never treated each other with any particular sense of camaraderie.
Mr. Ali walked me to my desk, where I saw that a pile of investigative requests had accumulated beside the word processor. Without having to flip through them, I knew they were rookie leads that had quietly circulated the division office and wound up with me because no one else wanted to handle them. Forward criminal so-and-so’s birth certificate to agent so-and-so in Salt Lake; forward criminal so-and-so’s identity history summary—their criminal record—to agent so-and-so in Atlanta.
There was also a memo from Gold, which I picked up. Coincidentally enough it read: Want to meet with you re: PLC. I let out a nervous laugh.
“Everything all right?”
I looked up at him. “It’s a memo from my ASAC. Guess what it’s about.”
“What?”
“He wants to talk to me about that organization I mentioned at lunch. The Patrice Lumumba Coalition.”
“The one with the informant you want to cut?” he said with a lowered voice. “Good thing you didn’t. Told you. Not the hill you want to die on, girl.”
I stretched my mouth into a smile.
“That was fun. Let’s do it again soon.” He surprised me with a kiss on the cheek that made my face flush with embarrassment. I saw my training agent notice—his desk was near mine and he was a gossip. Mr. Ali should’ve known better than to do things like that when we were around colleagues.
I’d been at the New York field office for two years, but could still sense the assumption that he’d gotten me my job lurking around the carpeted halls. And I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the more bad-minded among them believed I’d slept with him so he’d do so. These were men for whom it so
mehow made more sense that a politically castrated old man had ushered me through a back door and into a highly specialized career with a rigorous screening process. The notion that I worked as hard as they did (or a whole lot harder in some cases) never crossed their minds.
Mr. Ali said he’d see me Sunday at the funeral, and started toward that enviable office of his, which was large, nicely furnished, and had wide windows that looked out onto downtown’s farrago of skyscrapers. It was a beautiful office that he was boxed into: unable to advance, unwilling to retire.
7
NEW YORK, 1966
I WANT YOU TO UNDERSTAND MY SISTER, because what happened at our house in Connecticut started with Helene.
When she was thirteen she was obsessed with spies, and read as much as she could about them. For an outsider, it might’ve seemed like her preoccupation was unusual, that it was surprising for a black girl from Queens to know so much and have such strong feelings about Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. For me, that was simply who she was.
She’d started grilling Mr. Ali about his work, and to his credit he took her seriously. He answered her questions thoughtfully, treating her like a potential agent instead of dismissing her as a girl child. It was through their conversations that she decided she didn’t want to be a spy anymore because she didn’t want to be anyone’s lackey. She wanted to run them.
Every summer, the three of us (me, my sister, and Bunny) would stay at our grandfather’s in Brooklyn for a few weeks. When Goldfinger came out we went to see it at the Sumner Theatre, which was in walking distance of his brownstone. While I’d thought it was sexy and cool and a little scary, she’d thought it was ridiculous. She said Ian Fleming was no match for John Le Carré, whose spy novels were advertised as the real thing. He was in MI6, she’d said, eyes shining.
I’ve since read the Le Carré biography that argues he was interested in spies and secret lives because his father was a confidence man and a professional liar. I think that conclusion was drawn too neatly—people are too complex for such simple arithmetic—but I understand the purpose it serves.
Our mother could pass; she could hide in plain sight. And then one day she suddenly left us. That is all a spy does—they hide in plain sight, and once they’ve exploited all they can from their relationships, they leave. I know what would’ve been written in Helene’s biography.
Our grandfather would send us to a black day camp run by St. John’s Rec Center in Prospect Heights where we were given yellow T-shirts and green plastic totes in which to keep our lunch and bathing suits and whatever money we had.
At thirteen, Helene felt she was too grown up for camp, but went because she was popular there and because I liked it so much. They would take us on field trips; my favorites were the ones to McCarren pool, in Williamsburg, on the other side of Brooklyn.
Both Helene and I could swim; that we should know how to was one of the few things our parents agreed on, Agathe because she was from an island, and Pop because he’d learned at the Harlem Y. Growing up near a pool that black folks could use was one of the privileges he’d had that made him think of his childhood as a lucky one.
As I was sitting at the edge of the pool, tucking my pressed hair up under my bathing cap, running footsteps drummed behind me. I turned to see two boys my age jump in; while one of them bobbed up immediately, the other took so long to ascend that it scared me. Inwardly I chided myself: He’s fine. Don’t be so afraid. Still, when the boy broke the surface coughing and laughing, gems of water slipping out of his black hair, I was relieved.
I climbed down the ladder, tread water for a bit, then tentatively dog-paddled along the edge of the pool toward the deep end, avoiding the groups of kids who were shrieking and laughing as they played. I was almost to the far wall when I felt a pair of hands on my shoulders. They dunked me under. I flailed, sending off plumes of bubbles as I tried to fight the hands off. Through the hazy water I recognized Rhonda’s worn-out green bathing suit.
Rhonda was probably twelve that summer. The hardness of her features, her sinewy neck, and the scars on her legs made her look rough, but she also always wore bows in her hair and floral dresses under her yellow camp T-shirt. Her appearance is seared into my memory because she picked on me. Little things mostly: a shove in the back, a yank on one of the braids Helene had done for me. Her behavior wasn’t exactly vicious; it was more like she wanted attention and had run out of good ideas.
I surfaced, coughing, heard a whistle tweet as Rhonda dunked me under again. I scratched her and she recoiled. I got free for a moment and broke the surface of the water. “Rhonda! Stop!”
She laughed and shoved me under a third time. I tried to push her hands off me, but she was much stronger than I was. I fought her until the strength started to course out of me. She was still laughing. I could hear it, muffled and coming from far above.
Helene’s skinny legs sliced into the water, causing a surge of bubbles. She tackled Rhonda, and I floated up to the surface of the pool, limply paddled to the closest ladder, and pulled myself out of the water, panting.
Helene pushed Rhonda’s head underwater and kept it there until the lifeguard blew his whistle. She let go and Rhonda bobbed up. As she was climbing out of the pool, my sister, who was just behind her on the ladder, yanked on Rhonda’s ankle, and she tumbled to the concrete pool deck. Helene pulled herself out of the pool and stood over her. A counselor flew to Rhonda’s rescue before Helene could land a punch.
“Calm down!” the counselor shouted at Helene, which never failed to further agitate her.
“You could’ve drowned her!” Helene shrieked.
“I was just playing,” Rhonda said.
“What’s the matter with you? Who plays like that?”
She turned away and came over to where I was sitting. “You okay?”
Still coughing, I nodded.
“You don’t look it.”
“I’m fine,” I said as Rhonda and the counselor approached.
“Listen,” he said to her in front of us. “You can act like that around where you live, but you can’t do that here. Apologize.”
Rhonda muttered that she was sorry. Helene screwed her face up, and I braced myself for an explosion—my sister had an unusual capacity for rage. I didn’t understand all of the reasons for it and never will, but I do know it wasn’t a coincidence she got into her first fight only a couple of months after Agathe left.
Something unexpected happened though. Her face suddenly relaxed. She took a breath, smiled. She said: “It’s okay. Marie’s all right. Aren’t you?”
I glanced at her, at that point more concerned by the strangeness of her reaction than having nearly drowned. “Yeah.”
As they walked away she touched her head. “Made me get my hair wet,” she muttered, appalled.
* * *
—
A YEAR LATER, the summer I was twelve began quietly enough. My favorite thing to do when school was out was read. I liked to keep to myself, which isn’t to say I was a disagreeable kid. In general, when people first met me they liked me, and that’s still the case. I close up though when they start getting familiar; I can’t run the risk of caring too deeply about too many people. The result is that I’ve never had very many close friends, but have always excelled at being an acquaintance.
Helene, on the other hand, always had a lot of friends, and she’d started counting Rhonda among them. When we stayed overnight at our grandfather’s house, they’d wander the neighborhood together, and occasionally Rhonda would come all the way out to Queens too, which was so far to travel that she’d usually sleep over. She adored Helene, and had attached herself to my sister with incredible speed and loyalty. If I wondered about what Helene got out of the friendship, I probably settled on it being some exercise in the power of kindness. Whatever she was doing had worked: Rhonda was as sweet as pie to me.
He
lene’s best friend was Robbie Young’s sister, Pam. They lived with their uncle Chickie, who worked as a porter somewhere in the city, and his wife, a God-fearing Seventh-day Adventist who saw herself as persecuted for righteousness’ sake because none of the badass kids living up underneath her roof were hers.
Sometimes Helene forced me to go outside, and we’d ride bikes around the neighborhood, or I’d look on as she and some of the other girls jumped double Dutch, too afraid to jump in myself. Pop still worked a lot, and often at odd hours, so it fell to my sister to give me chores, send me on errands, and help me with my homework. My grades were more important to her than her own. She said that was because I was smarter than her, that if I used my brains and got A’s I could make a million bucks.
But Helene was plenty smart. Actually, I think her intelligence was the reason she was barely passing her classes—because so much came naturally to her she couldn’t stand having to apply herself. If she couldn’t understand a concept within twenty seconds, she considered it a waste of time and dismissed it. Being her sister often felt like trying to catch up to someone who was beating you so effortlessly that they weren’t even aware you were trying to compete.
Pop had put up a wall to split the room we shared in two, which meant Helene had to pass through mine to get downstairs. One afternoon, as I was sitting at my desk, she came out of her room and asked in French, “What’s that you’re reading? One of the books on the list from your teacher?”
I nodded. I was being skipped ahead to eighth grade, so the school had given me a summer reading list to make sure I didn’t miss any of the hits on the seventh-grade curriculum.
“I’m going over to Chickie’s with Rhonda. Take a break and come outside. You need some fresh air. And I want you to go pick up a few groceries.”
I grudgingly agreed and followed her downstairs where Rhonda was waiting. She’d slept over; the blanket and backpack she’d brought were sitting neatly on the sofa. The three of us left the house, Helene closing the door behind us in Bunny’s disappointed face. Chickie’s house was a few blocks from our own, directly across the street from the neighborhood convenience store that belonged to Mrs. Menoni.
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