“Mom, evil?”
“Lying about me when I’m the one proposing to finally tell the truth about what we did? Christ.” Steady, Karen. “Yeah, evil.”
“This is exactly what he said you’d say.”
“Really—those words? ‘Weasel’? ‘Evil lying weasel’?”
“No, how he said you’d react. Anosognosia—the suspiciousness and paranoia when people with a disability are unaware of the disability and deny it.”
“How am I trying to blackmail him? What am I trying to force him to do?”
“He didn’t say—”
“And exactly what is he claiming I’ve fabricated? Exactly what is my ‘morbid fantasy’?”
“He didn’t go into the specifics. He said for possible legal reasons, it was better if I didn’t know the details.”
“He is such a pathological bullshitter.”
“Some kind of plot, he said, political violence in the sixties.”
Another wave of relief. I’d caught him red-handed. “Really? How interesting. Because in the only conversation I’ve had with him about this during the last forty years, two months ago, in January, I didn’t mention any of the specifics at all, nothing. So whatever he said to you came entirely from his own memory.” The defense rests. Or am I the prosecution?
Greta is sitting perfectly still, breathing normally, staring straight at me, as tears start running down her cheeks. I move my computer and put out my arms, and she lets herself fall into my embrace, her head on my lap.
“Honey, it’s okay.” Now she’s shuddering, crying the way she did as a child, almost noiselessly. I stroke her head. “Shhhh … Take a breath. Look at me.” She looks up. “Have I said or done anything at all that seems off or demented? Tell me if I have.”
“Nooo,” she says, sounding twelve again, sniffing, wiping the wetness from her face. “So what did you do? That you’re writing about? Blow up a building or something?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“It’s complicated.”
I can’t tell her. It was Greta’s absolute ignorance that led Alex to overplay his hand and say too much; I worry I’ll somehow lose leverage with him if she or anyone else knows the details before the book is finished. She might tell Jungo, who might in turn tell God knows who. Any chatter or rumor that reached Washington could ruin whatever chance Stewart has of finding and quietly plucking confidential files from the government’s bowels. For that matter, what if she continues to think I’m confabulating false memories? What if she, a respected Rockefeller University neuroscientist, were to go to my publisher and tell them she’s worried that I’m senile and made everything up?
“Darling, I promise you will be the first person to read the whole thing when it’s all done,” I say, by which I mean edited, locked down, printed, irrevocably headed out into the world for the unseen finally to become the seen. “Until it’s done, all the blanks filled in, all my unanswered questions answered, it’s … I wouldn’t be comfortable. Also?” This is lame and lawyerly but accurate: “My publisher and I signed a very strict mutual nondisclosure agreement.”
“Okay.” She hugs me tighter. “I was worried. I am worried.”
“Don’t be, sweetie.”
As I lie in bed, unable to sleep, I realize that I’ve never had a serious enemy—indeed, that making no enemies had been an unconscious but defining MO for me. I’ve gone out of my way to mollify and even befriend rivals. I’ve mostly steered clear of politics. I’ve had legal adversaries, but I was always the one who sincerely preferred pleas and settlements to trials. I stayed married to Jack as long as I did so he wouldn’t hate me. Since I was nineteen, I’ve avoided making implacable enemies, tried hard not to give anyone a motive to dig out the truth and ruin me with it. For forty-six years, I’ve blackmailed myself into being collegial and unthreatening. But now I’ve become a threat. Alex Macallister, my oldest friend, is now my first true enemy.
Outside Grand Central I see three girls standing on the corner, all in burgundy University of Virginia sweatshirts, each taking cell-phone snapshots of one another, grinning as if they know they’re being secretly taped for a reality TV show. They’re like a sign of spring, giant red-breasted robins, seasonal urban megafauna. How is it that white tourists in New York look so much whiter than white New Yorkers?
I miss New York. I miss the hubbub. In particular, I miss the subway. In Los Angeles I’m either entirely alone—in my car, in my house—or among people I know well at my office, in class, in meetings, at meals. But on the New York City subway, I’m a member of a tightly packed group of strangers, alone but not alone, entirely free to read or daydream or snoop, dropped into a random sample of humanity, people of every age and race and circumstance at whom I can stare, at length and close up, examining each one’s face and clothing, noting the book she’s reading, the music to which the head right next to mine is bobbing, inferring sensibilities and moods and habits, imagining lives.
I even find the insane people interesting.
“There is no … more … witchcraft,” a wild-haired man sitting three seats away on the platform repeats quietly every ten seconds.
In New York, plenty of people actually look and act as I imagined people looked and acted when I was a teenager taking hallucinogens. I get up from the bench, lean out and look to see if a train’s coming, then glance down when I notice one of the ties on the track squiggling—it’s two rats trying to crawl over the rail. I gasp, disgusted, and turn away. Funny: during the first of my three hallucinogenic experiences I was in New York for the first time and rode the subway. The tracks wriggled then, too, but ratlessly.
“There is no … more … witchcraft,” the man says again.
The subway this morning also reminds me of Southern California’s apartheid quality. Riding the train between Grand Central and Brooklyn Bridge, I have probably seen more black people than I’ve seen during the entire two thousand days I’ve lived in Los Angeles.
I have one appointment in New York before I’m scheduled to get on the bus for the trip to Miami. I arrive at the restaurant, a diner with café airs west of Foley Square, toward the born-again World Trade Center. In my twenties and early thirties, when I was an habitué of courthouses and prosecutors’ offices and the Tombs, we all thought the hokey new name TriBeCa would never take.
“My gosh—Karen Hollander! What on earth are you doing here in New York?”
It’s Stewart.
“Expecting someone,” he asks, “or may I join you?”
As he gets close, I ask very softly, “You’re kidding, right?” He picked the restaurant.
“Uh-uh,” he replies, moving his mouth not at all, and as he leans in to kiss me, he whispers, “You never know around here.” New York’s main federal office building is nearby, and various government agencies keep discreet suites all over the neighborhood. He resumes his louder-than-necessary voice of fake surprise and bonhomie. “Oh, I’m just up here for the day from D.C., routine bureaucratic blah-blah-blah bullshit. But running into you makes it all worthwhile.”
He orders oatmeal and blueberries. He’s a vegetarian, which is one of the anti-stereotypical quirks that made me like him on our first date. I order an omelet and bacon.
He speaks softly. “Did you know your old man worked with the OSS? In the summer of 1945, in Europe, right after the war?”
“My father was in the CIA?”
“He wasn’t ‘in’ anything. And the organization to which you refer didn’t exist yet. But he was apparently very helpful. It’s why he got the instant U.S. citizenship and came here. Meaning, therefore, that Karen Hollander exists as a result of the good offices of the intelligence community of the United States of America. Yes, we are godlike in our powers.”
“Is that—was his connection why—is that the reason I didn’t ever get, you know, in trouble? In 1968?”
“No way. You’d have to be Allen fucking Dulles’s kid to pull that Get Out of Jail Free card, and not
even then. Uh-uh. I can say with ninety-five percent confidence that there’s no connection. When did you change your name?”
Whoa. “College. I was admitted as Hollaender, with the asch, the ae, but I graduated as H-O-L-L-A-N-D-E-R. Sorry. I should have told you. I sent Freedom of Information requests for both spellings.”
“No problem. Anyhow, as a result of your two different surnames, believe it or not, part of the United States government, the stupid and confused part, the part that can’t manage to correctly spell half the fucking Arab names in the database, thinks you’re two different people.”
“How unintentionally correct of them.”
“And in this case, not unhelpful. It’s always better when there’s a little built-in ambiguity and confusion on the other side of the game board. Have the FOIA cretins sent you anything yet?”
“The army says they have no files on Karen H-O-L-L-A-N-D-E-R. Homeland Security says they’ve got nothing on me with either spelling.”
He nods as if he expected that answer. “You know what? You started your junior year of high school on the very day LBJ signed the Freedom of Information Act.”
I often feel as if Stewart is a move or two ahead of me, and even though I know it’s an impression he cultivates, I find it both disturbing and attractive. “Why is that significant?”“
“It’s not. But you were the one who always loved coincidence, your ‘synchronicity’ bullshit. And speaking of high school, you were in the Model UN and SDS and the Student Peace Union and you started the Esperanto Club? Why didn’t you just go ahead and get a fucking hammer-and-sickle tattooed on your forehead? Such an ambitious little commie pinko do-bee.”
“Jesus, they have all that in my files? What am I saying? Of course they do.”
“No, they don’t. I bought a copy of your yearbook on eBay. You really were a hottie nerd, by the way. Were you still a virgin junior year? I liked the black hair.”
“Dark brown. But thank you.”
After our food arrives, he puts his arms on the table and leans in. And talks even more quietly than he did before. “This is an interesting episode. I mean extremely interesting. So far I’ve only got a few bits and pieces. But I can see the outlines of a bigger picture. And there was obviously, I think, some massive cock-up, panic about blowback off the fucking charts, epic black-boxing and file-ditching. I mean, this was ass-covering and roll-up the way they did it in the heyday, when it was so much easier to get away with that shit. It looks the kind of thing that should’ve come out in 1975, seventy-six.”
“After Watergate, you mean, the CIA hearings?”
“The year of the Great Emasculation, when they let the sun shine in and all the dirty deeds of the past were confessed. Supposedly. Yeah. But certainly weren’t, in your case, which leads me to think it couldn’t have been just one agency. There must have been too many dirty hands in too many different places. That’s my theory. Everybody was gonna get fucked if this came out.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“I don’t know yet, exactly.” He sips his coffee. “One thing that really piques my interest now is how you passed the background check when you worked for Fat Boy.” He whispers so emphatically he nearly growls. “Worked for the fucking DoJ.”
“I know. I know.”
“I mean, that was truly living dangerously, Karen. I’m not your shrink. But did you want to get nailed?”
“No. Maybe. But no. After thirty years of getting away with it, I thought I could keep getting away with it. It didn’t seem totally real anymore. So I pushed my luck. And then I did. Get away with it. Do you think maybe the FBI covered it up so they wouldn’t be blamed for not knowing about it?”
Stewart is shaking his head. “But they had to know, the feebs, you’d think, somebody in the fuckin’-F entity should’ve known about you in fuckin’ 1997 when you got the job in their own fuckin’ department, and decided to give you a pass for his own reasons. Or if they didn’t know, then they’re more fucked up than even I dreamed.”
“I’ve wondered. I’ve wondered all those things. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
He takes a deep breath. “You were penetrated, it looks like to me.” He takes another sip of coffee. Is he waiting for me to ask what he means so that he can make a dirty joke? “I believe you had a federal asset in your little group.”
He knows we were a group. “You mean … somebody who—that one of us notified the authorities at the time?” Does he know who it was? Do I detect the slightest possible smile?
“I mean an asset, somebody working for the United States government.”
“An agent provocateur?”
“That would be the tendentious colloquial term.”
“Who? Do you know who?” Buzzy? Or Alex?
He shrugs. “Still working it.” He smiles. “You know, I’d figured you for some kind of draft-board vandal, maybe.”
“Nope.”
He leans in closer and lowers his voice some more. “You must have been a serious fucking enemy of the state.”
I nod. “Briefly. Very briefly.”
The waiter brings the check. I pull out a credit card, but Stewart insists that we each pay our own share in cash.
“When do you go home?” I ask.
“Detroit tomorrow,” he says, “then Ottawa, back to D.C. Tuesday. It’s a glamour fucking job. How long are you in town?”
“Just today. And then off to Miami.”
“And tonight? It’s not a school night.” He’s smiling his let’s-do-it smile.
“I’m staying with my daughter and her family.” A couple of hours at his hotel this afternoon I could manage, however. The fact that he’s helping me, taking risks and performing his spook-craft on my behalf, I have to admit, I find arousing. Also, as long as I’m being honest—not with him, not entirely, but here, with you—I want to do everything I can to keep him invested. Once a Bond girl, always. “But they’re not expecting me until dinnertime. I’m going to MoMA, but I could come to your hotel afterward, at three?”
“Yes. What’s in Miami?”
“The special G-20 summit.”
He grins at what he thinks is the contradiction at hand—young anti-Establishment militant turned powerbrokering grande dame, from fanatical would-be destroyer of the system to fancy-pants overseer of the system.
“I’m not attending. I’m babysitting my granddaughter and her friends. Who are going down to rage against the machine and strike a blow for equality and justice.”
“Seriously?”
“And going down with them, if you can believe it,” I say, “by bus.” I think this is what Waverly calls a humblebrag.
“Don’t be in the vicinity when they start smashing windows on Collins Avenue. It’s an NSSE.”
I know “NSSE” means “national special security event,” because I was at Justice when they were invented to coordinate FBI and Secret Service and police deployments around State of the Union addresses, inaugurations, political conventions—and, starting a few years ago, the Oscars.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I plan on mostly getting massages.”
“But seriously—I mean, especially given this book, you’ve got to watch your step. As of the first of March, there were eleven thousand new CATV cameras installed on every spare square inch of downtown Miami and Miami Beach. Totally swarmed. The undercovers will probably outnumber Waverly and her friends.”
“You remember her name? You’re amazing.” I stand.
“The first night you stayed overnight at my shithole was her first birthday. Hey—I think you forgot something.” He nods at an unmarked envelope on the table that he’s tucked between the salt and pepper shakers. I hadn’t noticed it before.
“Oh, right!” I pick it up. “Thanks!” I’m a terrible actor.
18
Once I was sixteen, I could suddenly see the world and all its machinations clearly. The code had been broken. Everything (with the sole exception of Chuck Levy’s tragic lack
of romantic interest in me) became obviously and completely understandable. At eight I discovered that Santa Claus didn’t exist; at eleven, I learned that companies paid my father to do research to prove whatever they wanted to prove; and at thirteen, I stopped believing in the Roman Catholic God. But at sixteen, I became the truth-telling child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” full-time, seeing naked power and crazed vanity everywhere I looked.
Of course a nation built upon the slaughtered bodies and burned villages and stolen lands of primitive dark-skinned heathens was slaughtering and burning the primitive dark-skinned heathens of Indochina. Of course a nation that enslaved Negroes for 350 years still refused to consider them fully human. Of course Magnavox and Ford and Mattel brainwashed us to want and buy gewgaws we didn’t need, of course the weapons companies and the generals wanted Americans to remain in a perpetual state of fear, and itched to use the super-weapons in their arsenals. For the first time in years, I thought of the phrase I’d loved from the Nicene Creed, all that is, seen and unseen.
“Karen,” my little brother asked confidentially one Saturday night in the spring of 1966 while I was doing homework, “how much do you think each Easter Bunny weighs?”
Peter had recently concluded that there must be not just a single Easter Bunny but hundreds or thousands of them. Easter was the following day. At that moment I had another of my teenage aha revelations about the System. The supernatural myths of American childhood—Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny—were ostensibly for the sake of children’s enchantment. Their real function was habituating adults to perpetuate pretty fantasies, to get them comfortable joining a routine conspiracy of fabrication, to make telling the plain truth seem churlish and wrong. Using cute little Peter as a pawn, Easter was all about trying to turn me into a liar and a cynic.
“How come?” I asked him.
“Well, if ours is my size or even smaller, it’d leave footprints on the grass, especially if there’s dew. And if I get out there early enough tomorrow morning, I could track it.”
True Believers Page 18