Janson kept a sharp eye out, scrutinizing each in turn. The nearest resembled a long, brown-shingled bungalow, with a small turbine vent atop a roof of red corrugated steel. Another resembled a tall, floating greenhouse; inside, the long glass panels were lined with curtains, affording the residents some privacy. Nearby was a houseboat with an intricate trellislike fence around a flat-topped enclosure. A pair of lanterns sprouted out from what looked like stone bird feeders. Boxes of geraniums spoke of a house-proud squatter.
Finally, he saw the familiar blue-painted cabin with an abandoned look. The flowerpots were mainly empty; the windows were small and sooty. On the deck next to the cabin was a bench of age-silvered wood. The boards of the low, wide deck were warped and irregular. It was anchored just next to a small quayside parking lot, and as Janson approached, he felt his pulse quicken. Many years had passed since he had last been there. Had it changed hands? He detected the distinctive resinous scent of cannabis, and he knew it had not. He stepped on board and then walked through the door of the cabin; as he expected, it was unlocked.
In one corner of the sun-dappled space, a man with long, dirty-gray hair was crouched over a large square of vellum. He had pastels in both hands, which veered toward the paper in alternation. A smoldering marijuana cigarette lay next to a red pastille.
“Freeze, motherfucker,” Janson said softly.
Barry Cooper turned around slowly, giggling at some private joke. When he identified his visitor, he sobered up a little: “Hey, we’re cool, right? You and me, we’re cool, right?” There was a fatuous half smile on his face, but the question was tinged with anxiety.
“Yeah, Barry, we’re cool.”
His relief was visible. He held his arms open wide, his palms speckled with pigment. “Show me some love, baby. Show me some love. How long has it been? Jeepers.”
Cooper’s speech had long retained an odd mixture of idioms—part stoner, part Leave It to Beaver—and the fact that the American had lived abroad for nearly a quarter century served as a linguistic fixative.
“Too long,” Janson said, “or maybe not long enough. What do you think?” The history they shared was complex; neither man fully understood the other, but both understood enough for a working relationship.
“I can make you some coffee,” Cooper said.
“Coffee would be fine.” Janson sat down on a lumpy brown sofa and looked around.
Little had changed. Cooper had aged, but exactly as one would have expected him to. A tangle of graying brown hair had surrendered almost fully to gray. Crow’s-feet crowded his eyes, and the lines between the corners of his mouth and his nose were incised now with a fine line; there were vertical creases between his eyebrows, and horizontal creases on his forehead. But it was Barry Cooper, the same old Barry Cooper, a little scary and somewhat crazy, but mostly neither of those things. In his youth, the ratios had been different. In the early seventies, he had drifted from college radicalism to the real thing, a harder, more callous reality, and, by incremental steps, ended up a member of the Weather Underground. Smash the system! It was a greeting in those days, a simple salutation. Hanging around the college town of Madison, Wisconsin, he’d fallen in with others who were smarter and more persuasive than he was and who took his inchoate disquiet with the misdeeds of Authority to a crystalline extreme. Small pranks, designed to nettle law enforcement, led to more extreme acts.
One day, in New York, he found himself in a Greenwich Village town house when a bomb one of the members was concocting went off prematurely. He had been taking a shower and, singed and sooty but largely unharmed, walked around in a daze for a while before he was arrested. When he was out on bail, the police determined that his fingerprints matched those found at the scene of another bombing, this one of a university laboratory in Evanston. It had happened at night, and there were no casualties, but that was a matter of luck as much as anything; a night watchman could easily have been in the area. The charges were increased to attempted murder and federal conspiracy, and Cooper’s bail was revoked. By that point, however, he had fled the country, making his way first to Canada and then to Western Europe.
And in Europe, another chapter of his curious career began. The exaggerated reports about him circulated by American law enforcement were swallowed whole by the radical groups of Europe’s revolutionary left—the circle associated with Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, known formally as the Rote Armee Fraktion, informally as the Baader-Meinhof Gang; the tight-knit organization that called itself the Movement 2 June; and, in Italy, the Red Brigade. Intoxicated by the romance of urban insurrection, these militants regarded the shaggy-haired American as a latter-day Jesse James, a free rider for the revolution. They welcomed him into their circles and disputatious factions, asking him for advice about tactics and techniques. Barry Cooper was pleased by the adulation, but his visits were also a strain. He knew a great deal about varieties of marijuana—about how Maui sinsemilla differed from Acapulco red, say—but had little interest in, or knowledge of, the practical affairs of revolution. Far from the criminal mastermind of the Interpol advisories, he had been a slacker, along for the ride—for the drugs and the sex. He had been too dazed to comprehend the ferocity of his new comrades—too dazed to comprehend that what he regarded as student pranks, the equivalent of stink bombs in the bathroom, they regarded as prelude to violent upheaval and the forcible overthrow of the existing order. When he was among the revolutionaries, he kept this to himself, hiding behind gnomic responses. His reticence and pointed lack of interest in their own activities rattled them: surely this showed that the American terrorist did not trust them or take them seriously as a revolutionary vanguard. They responded by revealing to him their most ambitious plans, trying to impress him by disclosing the extent of their human and material assets: the safe house in East Berlin, the front organization in Munich that provided them with financial support, the officer in the Bundesrepublik national guard who kept his radical lover supplied with quantities of military-grade ordnance.
As time passed, Barry Cooper grew uncomfortable, and not simply with the masquerade: he had no stomach for the acts of violence they vividly described. One day, in the aftermath of a subway bombing in Stuttgart arranged by the Revolutionary Cells, he saw a list of victims in a newspaper. Pretending to be a newspaper reporter himself, he visited the mother of one of the passersby who were slain. The experience—coming face-to-face with the human reality of the glorious revolutionary violence—left him shaken and repulsed.
Janson paid him a visit not long afterward. In the - attempt to gain entrée to the shadowy world of these terrorist organizations, he searched for people whose fealty to civilization might not have completely eroded—people who were not yet dead to so-called bourgeois morality. Barry Cooper’s association with those organizations always struck him as odd; he knew his file well, and what he saw was someone who was essentially a joker, a cutup, a clown, rather than a killer. A get-along go-along guy who had found himself getting along and going along with some very bad company.
Cooper was already living in Amsterdam, in the very same houseboat, making a living selling colorful sketches of the old town to tourists—kitsch, but sincere kitsch. He had the affect of someone who had smoked too much pot for too long a time: even when he wasn’t stoned, he had a slightly unfocused and ingenuous manner. The two men did not bond right away: it was hard to imagine two souls less alike. Still, Cooper finally appreciated that his visitor from the U.S. government tried neither to ingratiate himself nor to make threats. He looked like a jarhead but he didn’t come on like one. Oddly low-key in his approach, he played it straight. When Cooper diverted the conversation to the inequities of the West, Janson, as a trained political scientist, was happy to follow him. Rather than jeering at his politics, Janson was happy to concede that there was much to criticize in the Western democracies—but then rejected the dehumanizing simplifications of the terrorists in direct, hard-hitting language. Our society betrays humanity whenever it
doesn’t live up to its own expressed ideals. And the world your friends wish to create? It betrays humanity whenever it does live up to its expressed ideals. Was the choice so hard?
That’s deep, Barry Cooper had said, sincerely. That’s deep: the reflexive rejoinder of the shallow. But if Cooper were shallow, his very shallowness had saved him from the worst temptations of the revolutionary left. And his information proved to be the undoing of dozens of violent cells. Their safe houses were shut down, their leaders imprisoned, their sources of funding identified and rooted out. The pothead in the funky blue houseboat had helped to do that. In that respect, the posturing, hard-hearted spokesmen of the revolutionary vanguards had it right: sometimes a small man can make a big difference.
In return, the State Department quietly desisted in its attempts to seek extradition.
Now Janson sipped hot coffee from a mug that still bore smudges of acrylic paint.
“I know you’re here just to hang,” Cooper said. “I know you don’t, like, want something from me.” It was banter that survived from their first interviews, a quarter century ago.
“Hey,” Janson said. “OK if I crash here for a while?”
“Mi casa es su casa, amigo,” Cooper replied. He raised the small marijuana cigarette to his lips; Janson was never sure whether it still really affected Cooper or whether the maintenance dose just returned him to what passed as normal. The smoke made his voice pebbly. “I could use the company, tell you the truth. Doris left me, I ever tell you that?”
“You never told me Doris joined you,” Janson said. “Barry, I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
“Oh,” Cooper said, and his forehead knit in a moment or two of furious concentration. He was visibly searching for consequence: And therefore … and therefore … and therefore. The engine of reason was turning over but not catching. Finally, he raised an index finger. “Then … never mind.” He had obviously worked out that someone he hadn’t seen in eight years might have little interest in the recent end of a six-week relationship. Cooper was so pleased to have come up with an appropriate response that he leaned back and grinned. “Hey, man, it’s really good to see you.” He mock-punched Janson’s arm. “Roomie,” he said. “Be like having a roommate again. Felix and Oscar.”
Janson winced: the side of his arm was still tender from the tussle in Regent’s Park.
“You all right, man?” Cooper’s eyes filled with concern.
“Fine, fine,” Janson said. “But this time, I think we’ll keep this little visit between ourselves. Comprende?”
“Comprendo mio maximo,” Cooper responded, in the made-up lingo he favored—some mishmash of Spanish, Italian, and schoolboy Latin, with moods, aspects, and tenses of Cooper’s inconsistent devising. This was someone who was born to be a minor character in a Hunter S. Thompson escapade, Janson reflected on occasion. He’d come a long way in some respects, and seemed almost the same in others.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Janson said.
“Cool,” Cooper said.
The streetlights glowed brightly, holding at bay the evening sky, as the two men walked along the Golden Bend of Herengracht. Once it was the favored address of the shipbuilders and merchants who prospered three hundred years ago, during Amsterdam’s golden century. Most of the splendid estates now belonged to banks, museums, publishing houses, consulates. The wash of mercury light made the seventeenth-century dwellings shimmer with a peculiar glamour and seemed to pick out the differences among them. One house had an odd French influence, its sandstone facade adorned with acanthus leaves and volutes; another was a somber affair of dark brick, decorated only by the neck gable. Everywhere one found rounded cornices, modillions, finials, decorative consoles, and bull’s-eye windows: there was no end to the nooks and crannies that a hidden observer could exploit. To Janson, even the projecting hoist beams, securely built into the roof timbers, took on a menacing appearance by night.
“So you see these streets every day,” Janson said.
“Every day, man,” Cooper replied. “My art. I draw what’s in front of my eyes. Only a little different. Street scenes, or sometimes just one of the mansion houses. Or churches. Tourists really dig churches.”
“Could I commission a picture?”
Cooper looked moved. “Really, man?”
“There’s a mansion on Prinsengracht, the corner of Leidsestraat. Know the one I’m talking about?”
“You got good taste, man. It’s a beauty.”
The structure had been made by combining three existing dwellings, but the facade was reconstructed as if it had been built as a single estate. Eight fluted Corinthian pilasters ran under the pediment; seven bay windows faced the street. Red bands of masonry alternated with dressed stone. The world headquarters of the Liberty Foundation had history inscribed on every brick.
“Think you could do that for me now? As detailed as you can make it.” A bicyclist whizzed past, going the wrong way down the one-way street, nearly colliding with them.
“Jeepers. You know, I never knew you really grooved to my work. You always were kinda standoffish about it. Thought maybe it wasn’t your bag.”
“As much detail as you can, Barry,” Janson stressed. “Also, if you can get a rear view. Should be visible on Lange Leidsedwarsstraat.”
“I’m gonna break out my new pastels,” Cooper said. “Just for you.”
Bicyclists and street artists: two species who never got a second look in Amsterdam’s old town. Cooper could set down on the sidewalk right in front of the place and would not be noticed. He had spent decades doing so. He disappeared into the scenery because he was part of the scenery.
Back in Cooper’s houseboat, an hour later, Janson reviewed the sketches. He was not heartened. There were various points of possible egress, but none that were protected from public view. It was likely, too, that sophisticated motion detectors were in use throughout the building. And because the rear faced Lange Leid-sedwarsstraat, there would be no surreptitious way to gain entry there, either.
As a rule, there were two ways of achieving security. The more familiar method was through isolation: the castle on the mountainside, the subterranean vault. The other involved proximity and publicity: the building in the town common, where unauthorized entry was inhibited by exposure. The brilliance of the Liberty Foundation headquarters was that rather than relying entirely upon a security detail, it effectively turned hundreds of passersby—the denizens and pedestrians of the city itself—into sentinels. It was protected, ultimately, by being in plain view.
Janson was annoyed at himself: he was thinking inside the proverbial box, was coming up with solutions that had served him in the past but were inappropriate to the situation he now confronted. He needed to think differently.
Demarest’s words of counsel—echoing from another age—came to him now: Can’t see a way out? Take the time to see things differently. See the two white swans instead of the one black one. See the slice of pie instead of the pie with the slice missing. Flip the Necker cube outward instead of inward. Master the gestalt. It will make you free.
He closed his eyes for a few seconds. He had to think as they had. Exposure and publicity, they saw, could be the most effective shields of clandestinity—which was a logic that Janson himself would have to embrace. A stealthy entrance was what they were anticipating, what they would be well protected from. He would not arrive stealthily, then. He would arrive as conspicuously as possible, and at the front door. This operation called not for discretion but for brazenness.
Janson surveyed the balled-up papers on the floor near the pastels. “Got a newspaper?”
Cooper padded over to the corner and triumphantly returned with a copy of the latest De Volkskrant. The front page was smeared with paints and pastels.
“Anything English-language?”
“Dutch papers are in Dutch, man,” he answered in a cannabis croak. “They’re fucked-up that way.”
“I see,” Janson replied. He scanned the
headlines, and his knowledge of English and German cognates allowed him to get the gist of most. He turned the page, and a small article caught his eye.
“Here,” Janson said, tapping it with a forefinger. “Could you translate this one for me?”
“No sweat, man.” Cooper looked up for a moment, gathering his powers of concentration. “Not the jukebox selection I’d have gone for. Now wait a minute—didn’t you tell me your mother’s Czech?”
“Was. She’s dead.”
“Put my foot in it, didn’t I? That’s awful. Was it, like, a sudden thing?”
“She died when I was fifteen, Barry. I’ve had some time to adjust.”
Cooper paused for a moment, digesting the fact. “That’s cool,” he said. “My mom passed last year. Couldn’t even go to the goddamn funeral. Tore me up. They’d clap irons on me in customs, so, like, what would be the point? Tore me up, though.”
“I’m sorry,” Janson said.
Cooper began to read the article, laboriously translating the Dutch into English for Janson’s benefit. It was not, on the face of it, a remarkable story. The Czech foreign minister, having been in The Hague to meet with members of the government, was visiting Amsterdam. There he would meet members of the stock exchange and leading figures of its financial community, to discuss Dutch-Czech cooperative ventures. Another inconsequential trip, by someone whose job it was to make such trips, hoping to raise the level of foreign investment in a country that was pining for it. Holland was rich; the Czech Republic was not. It was the same sort of trip that might have taken place a century ago, or two centuries ago, or three, and probably had. It would, one could safely hazard, solve no problems for the Czech Republic. But it just might solve a problem for Janson.
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