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TRUE BELIEVERS
A Novel
Kurt Andersen
Random House
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Tentative On-Sale Date: July 10, 2012
Tentative Publication Month: July 2012
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Also by Kurt Andersen
Reset
Heyday
Turn of the Century
The Real Thing
This is an uncorrected ebook file. Please do not quote for publication until you check your copy against the finished book.
True Believers is a work of fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Bedoozled, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
[Permissions acknowledgments go here.]
Andersen, Kurt, [date]
True believers: a novel / Kurt Andersen.
p. cm.
eBook ISBN 978-1-58836-686-3
I. Title.
PS3551.N34554T78 2012
813 54—dc23 2011049326
www.atrandom.com
987654321 246897531 123456789
[Designer credit goes here.]
For Kristi, David, and Erika
Contents
Cover
eBook Information
Also by This Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, “The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement”
I dreamed I was born, and grew up … and this dream goes on and on and on, and sometimes seems so real that I almost believe it is real. I wonder if it is?
—MARK TWAIN, a letter to his sister-in-law
I shouted out, “Who killed the Kennedys?”
When after all, it was you and me.
—MICK JAGGER, “Sympathy for the Devil”
1
My publishers signed me up a year ago to write a book, but not this book. “A candid and inspirational memoir by one of the most accomplished leaders and thinkers of our times,” their press release promised. They think they’re getting a slightly irreverent fleshing out of my shiny curriculum vitae, a plainspoken, self-congratulatory chronicle of A Worthy Life in the Law and the Modern Triumph of American Women, which they’re publishing, ho-hum premise notwithstanding, because I’ve written a couple of best sellers and appear on TV a lot.
By far the most interesting thing about my life, however, is nowhere in my résumé or official bio or Wikipedia entry. I’m not exactly who the world believes I am. Let me cut to the chase: I once set out to commit a spectacular murder, and people died.
But it’s not a simple story. It needs to be unpacked very carefully. Like a bomb.
Trust me, okay?
I am reliable. I am an oldest child. Highly imperfect, by no stretch a goody-goody. But I was a reliable U.S. Supreme Court clerk and then a reliable Legal Aid lawyer, representing with all the verve and cunning I could muster some of the most pathetically, tragically unreliable people on earth. I have been a reliable partner in America’s nineteenth largest law firm, a reliable author of four books, a reliable law professor, a reliable U.S. Justice Department official, a reliable law school dean. I’ve been a reliable parent—as trustworthy a servant, teacher, patron, defender, and worshipper of my children as anyone could reasonably demand, and I think on any given day at least one of the two of them would agree.
I was not an entirely reliable wife for the last decade of my marriage, although my late ex, during our final public fight, called me “reliable to a goddamned fault,” which is probably true. And which may be why the surprising things I did immediately afterward—grabbing his BlackBerry out of his hand and hurling it into a busy New York street, filing for divorce, giving up my law firm partnership, accepting a job that paid a fifth as much, moving three thousand miles away—made him more besotted by me than he’d ever seemed before. As my friend Alex said at the time, “That’s funny—telling Jack ‘Fuck you’ finally made him really want to fuck you.”
I am reliable, but I’m not making the case that reliability is the great human virtue. Nor am I even making the case that reliability is my great virtue. In fact, after four decades in the law, I’ve lost my animal drive for making cases for the sake of making cases, for strictly arguing one of two incompatible versions of the truth, for telling persuasive stories by omitting or twisting certain facts.
So I am not arguing a case here. I’m not setting out to defend myself any more than I am to indict myself. I’m determined to tell something like the whole truth—which, by the way, I don’t believe has ever been done in any American court of law. To tell the whole truth in a legal case would require a discovery process and trial that lasted years, hundreds of witnesses each testifying for many weeks apiece, and rules of evidence rewritten to permit not just hearsay and improperly obtained information but iffy memories of certain noises and aromas and hallucinatory hunches, what a certain half-smile or drag on a cigarette decades ago did or didn’t signify during some breathless three A.M. conversation.
In any event, for the purposes of this book, I am extremely reliable. I have files. Since long before I went to law school, for half a century now—half a century!—I’ve saved every diary and journal, every letter I ever received, catechism worksheets, term papers, restaurant receipts, train schedules, t
icket stubs, snapshots, Playbills. At the beginning, my pack-ratting impulse was curatorial, as if I were director of the Karen Hollaender Museum and Archive. I know that sounds narcissistic, but when I was a kid, it seemed like a way to give the future me a means of knowing what the past and perpetually present me was actually like. Prophylactic forensics, you could say.
My memory has always been excellent, but the reason I’m telling my story now is also about maximizing reliability: I’m old enough to forgo the self-protective fibs and lies but still young enough to get the memoir nailed down before the memories begin disintegrating.
Only one in a hundred people my age suffer dementia, and the Googled Internet is like a prosthetic cerebral cortex and hippocampus, letting us subcontract sharpness and outsource memory. But after sixty-five? Atrocious: the incidence of neurodegenerative disease increases tenfold during that decade, and it’s worse for women. I turn sixty-five next May.
So, anyhow, here’s my point: I am a reliable narrator. Unusually reliable. Trust me.
2
Starting in fifth grade, I thought of myself as a beatnik. I first heard about beatniks from my father in the spring of 1959. He was a social psychologist who earned his living doing market research. He’d just come home from a convention in San Francisco and was telling us about a study that a psychiatrist had presented—well, telling my mother, really, since my brother and sister were only three and seven. But I was almost ten, fascinated by what Dad was saying and eager to distinguish myself from the little kids. This psychiatrist had spent a hundred nights studying beatniks in the beatnik neighborhoods of San Francisco, attending all-night parties in their “pads,” and administering personality tests, my father said, “to a full quarter of the tribe.”
A tribe? In a big city in modern America? “Like the Lost Boys in Peter Pan?” I asked.
“Yes, exactly,” my father replied with a smile.
Notwithstanding my antiestablishment precocity, I became a member of pep club, the same as every girl at Locust Junior High School in Wilmette, Illinois, in the early 1960s. My cheering was always just this side of pointedly unenthusiastic. Our uniforms—black tights, black skirts, black gloves outdoors in cold weather—made the whole business easier for me to rationalize, as did the fact that we were the Locust Wolves. Wolves seemed like a beatnik animal.
Near the end of eighth grade, for the entire week before the last baseball game of the school year, Chuck Levy had been going on and on about how I was going to go bananas when I heard the band play at the game. He and Alex Macallister had written the arrangement with the music teacher. But neither Chuck (sax) nor Alex (percussion) would tell me what their surprise song was, which finally irritated me so much that on the morning of the game I lied and told them I might skip it and go to a ban-the-bomb rally in Chicago with my mother and father.
My parents thought it was important to keep an eye on what Dad called “even the reasonable war machine.” He’d grown up in Denmark and had been involved with the Danish Resistance as a young man, then spent a year as a political prisoner in a Nazi camp at the end of the war, which made our Republican neighbors cut the peacenik foreigner some slack.
“You’ll regret it forever if you’re not there, Viv,” Chuck told me. His big smile made the nickname even more annoying.
“I’ll regret it more if World War III starts and I didn’t do everything I could to prevent it.”
Alex had a big grin, too. He was dying to spill the beans. “It’ll be a cooler experience if it’s a surprise, trust me.”
“ ‘Cooler’? We’re talking about the band.” I tried guessing while simultaneously pretending I didn’t care.
“You have got to come, Hollaender,” Chuck said, sounding a little desperate. “Seriously. It’s going to be amazing. For you.”
For me? Maybe “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” But the band had already played that at the Thanksgiving concert after the Cuban Missile Crisis. “Blowin’ in the Wind”? They shook their heads. I couldn’t keep guessing unsuccessfully and maintain an air of omniscient ennui. “Well, enjoy yourselves. I’m late for study hall. Bye.”
I don’t remember the opposing team that afternoon, or who won, but I remember with absolute clarity the first song the band played during the seventh inning. As the musicians lined up and readied themselves, I noticed Chuck wasn’t among the other saxophones and clarinets, which worried me. Then I caught Alex’s eye, and he was grinning and excited, drumsticks at the ready.
I didn’t recognize the tune when they played the first four long, low notes, the tuba squeezing off a quick blast between each one, nor when the same sequence repeated—a kind of dohhh, wah, rayyy, wah, meee, wah, rayyy, wah. But when the electric guitar broke in with the loud, twangy eighth notes, however, I shrieked and jerked my hands and knees up as if I’d gotten a shock. Tears formed, and I started giggling. All of which would’ve been a major embarrassment if the song hadn’t also startled all the other pep club girls, who were smiling and murmuring and glancing around.
It was the theme music from Dr. No. Not many of the other kids knew the song, since the movie had come out only a couple of weeks earlier, and it was the first James Bond film. But an electric guitar played fast and loud at an official school event in the daytime in 1963 was unprecedented, subversive, thrilling. And the big amplifier was right beneath us, under the bleachers, with the volume turned all the way up. We felt the sound hitting our thighs. There had never been a more glamorous moment at Locust Junior High.
I was in the top row, as always, and a girl nudged me to turn around and look down. Standing on the grass behind the bleachers was Chuck Levy, in his band uniform, long legs slightly apart, staring down at his right hand, willing his fingers to pick out the correct notes at super-speed, he and his silver Stratocaster awash in the pink light of the late-afternoon sun. He was the soloist, but he was offstage, an anonymous star; how cool. Near the end of the song, as the trombones and trumpets blared their final, rising notes, and Chuck prepared to strum the big final chord, he looked up and saw me and smiled.
By the time he unplugged and trotted out onto the field to take a bow with the rest of the band, my fond, sisterly, quasi-adversarial regard for Chuck Levy had changed.
I had a history of going a little nuts for certain adventure novels. The first was Alice Through the Looking Glass, back in fourth grade. When I got to page six, I felt as if some new section of my brain had been activated. I shivered with a pleasure I hadn’t known. “ ‘Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow,’ Alice said to her cat as she stared at herself in the mirror. ‘Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through.’ And the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist. In another moment Alice was through the glass.” Then I read The Once and Future King, and for most of a year I was young King Arthur, Dad was Merlin, and it was my destiny to create the perfect kingdom of Camelot somewhere beyond northeastern Illinois.
Chuck and Alex and I were not just James Bond “fans.” We were in thrall to Bond. It started the summer after sixth grade. On one of those summer-vacation days that waver between luxuriously open-ended and achingly dull, I happened to pick up my mom’s pink hardcover copy of From Russia with Love, which I figured was some kind of soft-on-communism Soviet-American romance. Around the same time Alex read his father’s brand-new hardback Thunderball. When we discovered, one afternoon at Centennial Park swimming pool, that we had independently discovered and fallen in love with the world of James Bond, we (as my mother enjoyed saying for the rest of her life) bonded. Up until then I hadn’t known Chuck Levy well, even though the three of us and two girls and Jimmy Graham had been the Smart Kids in our class. But Alex and Chuck were already best friends, and Chuck took Alex’s lead in many things cultural—abandoning Ricky Nelson in favor of Duane Eddy, skipping the second half hour of Route 66 on Friday nights in order to watch 77 Sunset Strip. And then James Bond.
At the be
ginning it was just a book discussion group, like the Hobbit Fellowship my little brother Peter and his friends started a few years later. But when the Wall went up in Berlin at the end of that summer, our interest in Bond spiked—the books seemed more legitimate, like extra-credit reading for social studies. Alex and I had a head start on Chuck, but in the fall he caught up quickly and then passed us, since every member of the Levy family was a certified Reading Dynamics speed reader. By Christmas vacation we had acquired all nine Bond books, and each of us had read every one—although just to make sure, I created, typed, and carbon-copied a hundred-question exam covering the minutiae of the eight novels and five short stories.
We didn’t have formal meetings, but that first year, all through seventh grade, when we were alone at lunch or walking together to and from school, we’d fall into discussions of characters and scenes and plot points. Even basic facts were open to debate: we once spent days arguing over what year Bond had been born and whether he aged. Alex loved the wordplay titles (Live and Let Die and, later, You Only Live Twice), but the books he liked best were Doctor No and Thunderball because the villains had nuclear ambitions, whereas stealing gold or smuggling diamonds struck him as ordinary uninteresting criminality. Chuck’s favorite was From Russia with Love because he thought it was the most realistic—the way, for instance, it says professional assassins start feeling guilty about killing people. What I loved about Moonraker was the fact that Sir Hugo Drax, a British industrialist, is actually a secret Nazi madman, and that the Special Branch operative who figures out Drax’s nuclear missile plan is a young woman, Gala Brand.
We all loved Bond’s line in Casino Royale after Vesper Lynd’s suicide, “The bitch is dead now,” which became a jokey private catchphrase, employed whenever we were angry at one of our sisters or mothers or the crone who served as Locust Junior High’s Rosa Klebbian assistant principal.
It wasn’t exactly a secret club. I didn’t hide the books or my extreme interest from my parents. They were entertained, I learned later, by the contradiction between the softhearted politics I’d inherited from them and the ruthless Cold Warrior fantasy life I acquired from Ian Fleming. The Macallisters wholly approved of Alex’s Bond hobby, his mother because Life magazine had reported that From Russia with Love was President Kennedy’s favorite novel, his father because it seemed like hopeful evidence for his son’s fundamental manliness. One of Chuck’s mother’s Hadassah friends had told her that Goldfinger was anti-Semitic, which gave Chuck a new opportunity to remind her that she drove a Volkswagen.
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