Backward-Facing Man

by Don Silver

  Dodson flinched. “So how come the guy who’s supposed to be such a great agent couldn’t find him?” He said it quietly.

  “Becoming a fugitive isn’t that difficult,” Russell said quickly. “Anybody smart can find the name of somebody his age who died, write the Bureau of Vital Statistics for a copy of the birth certificate, and get himself a Social Security number, a driver’s license, a bullshit job, some credit. It’s staying a fugitive that’s tough—cutting yourself off from your family and friends, building a new life, finding new things to care about, blending in. That’s what Fergus Keane has done really well.

  “Think about it,” Russell said. “The Unabomber writes a letter that his brother recognizes. Serial killers are like addicts. Revolutionaries get impatient. But Keane is an anarchist, and in anarchy, there are no patterns, no precedents. Nothing needs to make sense. You want to know how come I haven’t found him, Agent Dodson? I’ll tell you. Either Keane’s dead, or he’s a better fugitive than I am an agent.”

  They weren’t getting anywhere, and they both knew it. The chances of Stardust Nadia walking down the street arm in arm with Fergus Keane this afternoon were so low it was ridiculous. More likely, Dodson was involved in some kind of FBI hazing ritual. The young agent let himself out of the car.

  It had started to rain lightly. John Russell took out the racing form. In ninety days, this case and all the bullshit he’d put up with for thirty-two years at the Bureau would be somebody else’s problem. Somebody on the street turned their downstairs lights off. Two houses down, shades came up. Russell put on his reading glasses and circled his bets. There was a time, Russell thought, leaning back, a man’s car was his castle. A place you could be alone. You could do your job without being interrupted by cell phones. He considered himself a damn good agent. He didn’t bellyache in public or write ambiguous reports that covered his own ass, and he could follow a trail, ferreting out the scumbags as well if not better than anybody. His only problem was getting along with people. And in the FBI, if you couldn’t develop “assets,” you didn’t get promoted.

  Dodson returned to the car.

  “What you learn about surveillance over thirty years,” Russell said, calmer now, almost apologetic, “is that for the most part, nothing happens. An agent who’s jacked up or haunted by something, or is driven to make the world a better place, lasts about two weeks. Guys looking for quick answers fuck things up. They start trying cases in their heads. They miss subtleties, and they overreact when it’s time to move.” You kids are academy-trained, but you need time in the field to know your ass from your elbow.

  “A good agent sees patterns,” Russell said. “Somebody lingers by the mailbox too long or looks at their watch a lot. They start missing work, or coming in late on weeknights.” Russell started the car. “Listen,” he said. “Nobody’s seen Keane in over thirty years. He didn’t show up at his mother’s funeral. He’s never visited his father’s grave, his old lady, or his little girl. Whether he’s even alive is anybody’s guess. Buy me a bourbon, and I’ll connect the dots for you as best I can.”

  They drove slowly toward the boulevard. “Oneonta’s a small town,” Russell said, more relaxed now. “We interviewed people who were downtown that day. Four blocks from where it blew, a woman saw the boy walk out of an office building, cross the street, and enter an alley. He was wearing a short-sleeve shirt. Shorts. Sandals. There was nothing in his hands—no boxes, no bags, no nothing.” Russell switched from the center to the right-hand lane. “Five minutes later, the deli owner saw the kid holding a package—brown, about the size of a shoebox. We don’t know if he was taking a shortcut or meeting somebody. All we know is when he crossed the street—boom. A little piece of downtown Oneonta disappeared. The next day, the Selective Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., gets a letter.” He pointed to the file on the seat between them. “Peace Erupts Now.”

  Russell turned right on Broad Street and then made a U-turn, snagging a parking space right in front of the bar. “I was pretty green at the time,” Russell continued, “but when I heard this, I remembered something my friend Reilly—the cop in Boston—told me.” In the daylight, the Stinger had a kind of southern, downhome diner feel—a blackboard with the names of sandwiches scribbled across it and a bunch of ketchup dispensers on a tray near the waitress station. Inside, Russell continued. “The day after the incident at Fenway Park, they found a banner: two sheets, sewn together and covered with acrylic paint. It was a volcano, crudely drawn, but recognizable. Underneath was the message ‘Peace Erupts Now.’ Somebody found it in the centerfield bleachers.”

  Eric Dodson motioned to the waitress. This, too, all of it, was in the file.

  “When we called the Chicago office, the investigation shifted into high gear. Agents started collecting records of one-time purchases of aluminum and iron oxide by private individuals, industrial-welding contractors, even high school and college labs in the preceding months. There were only a dozen weld shops in New England that would have had anything to do with exothermic reactions, and we visited them all, asking about irregularities in workforce, workers who’d quit, customers with seditious tendencies, and chemicals that might have mysteriously disappeared from their inventories. Nobody’d been ripped off. None of them had fired any employees.

  “Out of a couple hundred high school and college labs, only about sixty were large enough to have these three chemicals in sufficient quantities, and, of those, only a handful allowed students access. For the most part, students told teachers when they were ready to conduct experiments, and teachers gave them what they needed. Of all the labs I talked to, only a couple thought it possible their labs could’ve been ripped off. When I asked about radicals, I got nothing, except from this one graduate student at MIT who said he thought it would be worth our while to come over for a visit.”

  “So he gave you Keane?”

  “Not exactly.” A waitress approached and asked them what they wanted. “He told us there was a guy who’d left school the year before under questionable circumstances. The graduate student didn’t remember the guy’s name, but he put us onto an undergrad who’d been asking about him a few months earlier.” The waitress brought them drinks. Dodson narrowed his eyes. There was nothing about this in the file.

  “What was his name?”

  “I don’t remember. The Chicago office was under pressure from D.C. Nobody had claimed responsibility for Oneonta, and Hoover was having a fit. My boss—a guy named Lou D’Mitri and I—we decided to pay this kid a visit.” Russell took a sip of bourbon and closed his eyes. “We let ourselves into his room, which was a mess—balled-up blanket, stained mattress, standard-issue desk and chair, piles of dirty clothes all over. Under the bed were some porn magazines, a couple of pipes, some rolling papers, and a laboratory scale.

  “D’Mitri’s’s theory was that everybody has a secret—some blemish or indiscretion, an embarrassment. It doesn’t have to be illegal. Our job is to guess and then mention it, stand next to it or refer to it obliquely, and then threaten to reveal it. The kid came in a couple hours later, hauling a suitcase. I started questioning him. “‘Did you ever know a guy who went to school here? A big talker, radical, may have stolen shit from the lab?’ At first, he said nothing. ‘Never heard of the guy.’ I kept pressing him, while D’Mitri just stared at the suitcase, which was getting pretty fragrant.” Russell smiled. “Some guys’ll piss themselves if you get the pressure just right. After a while, the kid couldn’t even see straight.” Russell started giggling. “It was the three of us in this tiny little room.” Russell was talking in falsetto now. “It was shameful!” He put his palms down on the table and let his shoulders heave. He pulled his handkerchief out and put it to his face.

  “What happened?”

  John Russell wiped the tears from his eyes and emptied his drink. “The kid gave us a physical description: twenty-three or twenty-four years old, about six feet, reddish brown hair, mustache, freckles, glasses. The funny thing is,” Ru
ssell said, turning serious, “we didn’t really need it. We already had a list of Fenway employees we were in the process of crossing with kids that dropped out of MIT.

  “The registrar had something like six students named Fred or Frederick enrolled during the four prior academic years. Four were in good standing; and two had graduated. There was nobody named Frederick on the Red Sox payroll, but the guy who fit the description had worked the day of the incident. Fergus was his name. Fergus Keane. The address on his W-2 was a house in Worcester.

  “We went out there one day, D’Mitri and me. In those days, we wore the dark suits and dress shoes. When his mother came to the door, she thought we were undertakers. Mom said she hadn’t seen her boy in months. We tested the chemicals we found in barrels in the backyard, but they turned out to be motor oil and transmission fluid. A couple of us watched the house for a few days and talked to the neighbors. Fergus was a smart kid who didn’t have much of a childhood. His dad ran booze down from Canada—part of Joseph Kennedy’s operation. The old man became pretty fond of the stuff himself. One night, Fergus came home and heard his mother wailing. Turns out mom and dad were going at it pretty good. Rough sex or something. I don’t know. Whatever it was he saw, Fergus took off.”

  “Within a week, the U.S. attorney issued a warrant for Keane’s arrest. Keane’s high school picture was copied, distributed, and posted in police stations, FBI branches, and U.S. Post Offices from Boston to L.A. By late November, he was on the most-wanted list, which is when I heard from the MIT kid again. He said he’d seen Keane in Harvard Yard with some people who were selling copies of The Mission, an underground magazine with anarchistic leanings published by a commune in North Cambridge. He had the feeling Keane and his girl were crashing there.

  “We knew about the Highest Choice, a commune where drug addicts, drifters, and dropouts loyal to a self-styled guru Leland Medvec lived. The place had marathon acid parties, group sex, and long rap sessions where people sat in a circle, picking away at each other’s faults until Medvec interceded, usually by making a speech and then suggesting that to demonstrate their liberation, somebody’s girlfriend come upstairs and fuck him.

  “We had an informant at the time—a nursing student named Anna—with long brown hair and granny glasses.” Russell’s eyes sparkled. He was in his element now. “We had her warm up to a couple of the guys out there, and she wound up getting pretty close to Medvec. When she found out they were expecting Keane and his old lady to show up soon, we started watching the place.

  “It was a Monday night—late November 1968. Anna called just before midnight. She said Keane and his girl had just gotten back from a road trip and they were really wired. Somebody gave them a couple of reds, and Anna guessed they’d be asleep within the hour. We told her to clear out. When she left the house, Keane was babbling like a baby. One hour before dawn, we had sodium lights up, agents all over the place, and both ends of the street sealed off. It would’ve been suicide for them to fight.”

  Russell took a sip of his drink and grimaced. “When we got inside, the house was a shithole. We searched it for four hours, looking in closets, crawl spaces, tunnels, and trapdoors. There was all kinds of drug paraphernalia, pornography, and seditious materials, but no weapons and no explosives. We rounded up sixteen people that morning, including Lorraine Nadia, Keane’s girlfriend. But Keane was gone.”

  Eric Dodson considered the possibilities. “Scribbled on meth, somebody can stay awake seventy-two, ninety-six hours straight. It sucks the nutrients out at a metabolically accelerated rate,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” Russell asked.

  “I’m just saying, some people think they’re invincible; others get paranoid. If you’re a fugitive, paranoia can work for you.”

  Russell leaned back against the booth and closed his eyes. “Medvec found a liberal lawyer from Harvard to defend them. Lorraine claimed she knew nothing about Fenway or Oneonta. We wanted to hold her, but she was pregnant. Eventually, Medvec’s lawyer got the prosecutor to back off.”

  “That’s it?” Dodson said. “That’s the closest we’ve come in thirty years?”

  Russell was exhausted. Between the radiation treatments and work, he didn’t have the stamina he used to have. “A couple weeks later we found an old school bus with stripper from a hair dye kit and some cigarette butts with Keane’s prints on them. In the spring, police picked up a guy in New Orleans who said he’d met Keane washing dishes, but by the time we showed up, he was gone.” Russell’s face was sagging. “Since then, we’ve watched his kin; we’ve tried to send messages to him through other radicals; we’ve even tried baiting him over the Internet, but the trail went cold.”

  “Ever doubt he did it?” Dodson asked quietly. If there was going to be a moment when John Russell let his guard down, this was it.

  Russell shook his head, and reached into his shirt pocket. “Nah,” he said softly. “A few days after Keane disappeared, somebody sent me this.” Carefully, Russell unfolded a withered piece of paper, folded over many times. It was a place mat—the one from the diner—with Frederick’s scribblings.

  Dodson put some money down on the table and followed the older agent outside. Russell took a seat behind the wheel and rolled down his window. As he did, his eyelids fluttered, and he took air in through his nose. It was late afternoon, dusk. A streetlight spilled through the windshield, casting a shadow over his face. “I’ve had my successes, Agent Dodson,” Russell said. “A couple citations, a promotion or two. You could say I’ve had a pretty good run.” Russell’s shoulders slumped against the upholstery. There was a long silence. “Why don’t you watch the house yourself tomorrow? Can call me if you need to.”

  Eric Dodson laid his jacket on a table in the foyer and opened the refrigerator. He took out a stack of deli meats, cheese, and three different kinds of mustards and set them on a large serving plate—the only dish he owned. With a bread knife, he slathered mustard on the meat and wrapped it in a piece of cheese. Still standing, he opened the Keane file to a page he’d marked and began reading.

  In 1971, a farmer in Indiana hired a kid from the east who took off with a hundred bucks in cash, his 1963 red Rambler, and his eldest daughter. There was a photograph of the guy bending over—long, reddish brown hair, glasses, handlebar mustache, his face partially visible. It may or may not have been Keane. The car showed up clean of prints in Denver.

  In the mid-seventies, there were Keane sightings at truck stops, state parks, and in small towns from Northern California to Maine. People said they’d seen him doing everything from splitting wood outside a ranger station to counting change in a tollbooth, which of course no fugitive would do. In early 1980, the U.S. prosecutor in Rochester charged Fergus Keane with the Oneonta bombing.

  Dodson made himself another lunch meat roll and riffled through the rest of the file. In thirty years, there’d been nine case agents, two reenactments of the Oneonta bombing on America’s Most Wanted, dozens of bulletins dispatching cops and marshals to remote locations where special agents had received tips or hunches that Keane was about to come forward for an event; everything from Frederick’s mother’s funeral to the big moments in Lorraine Nadia’s daughter’s life. Every once in a while, a U.S. attorney somewhere would hear from some lawyer asking what would happen if his client, a radical from the sixties, surrendered, but it was never Keane, or, if it was, he never materialized. Dodson put a piece of Lebanon bologna and a chunk of Italian table cheese in his mouth.

  By the time Russell got home, it was raining hard. His throat felt like someone lit a wad of paper and shoved it in there, and his head hurt. Over the course of a career, a law enforcement officer becomes identified with a case by the amount of time he puts into it, the progress he makes, how badly he screws it up, or, in some cases, the notoriety it gets. Some agents develop specialized knowledge or skills—the former art student who breaks up a counterfeiting ring, the Italian kid who goes undercover in the Mob, the former CPA who traps
an embezzler.

  The Volcano Bomber was John Russell’s baby. It spanned his career. It facilitated his learning things that became his specialty—explosives, sixties’ radicalism, and fugitive behavior. Unfortunately, with the exception of his linking the Fenway prank and the Oneonta explosions by the ingredients of the bomb—no small accomplishment—Russell had little else to show for himself as he neared retirement. Maybe it was the same for men in corporations, he thought, putting a lozenge in his mouth. All these years, he’d kept his nose clean. There may not have been many promotions, but there weren’t any scandals either, something pretty rare in this day and age. He poured himself another bourbon and turned the radio on low.

  Summer 1974

  It was slow at the bank, which meant Lorraine Nadia was contacting delinquent safe deposit box holders, a task she despised, when a coworker slid a postcard across her desk. On one side was a picture of Niagara Falls. On the other, a long-distance phone number and 8 PM written in block letters. The man who answered had a high-pitched voice and talked like a sports announcer. He told Lorraine that a certain individual would like to see her and gave her directions to a turnoff near the Scranton exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

  Lorraine left work early on Friday, stopped home, threw some clothes and toiletries in one bag—toys and coloring books into another—and picked her daughter up from day care. To be sure she wasn’t being followed, she took a circuitous route north—309 North to the Northeast Extension to Route 6 East to a turnoff near Steene, where she pulled over, rolled down the windows, and let the smell of hay and horseshit soak into her clothes. About an hour after sunset, a woman with long black hair in a pickup truck pulled alongside her and waved, indicating Lorraine should follow. Ten minutes later, the pickup turned onto a dirt road.

  After the raid on the Highest Choice Commune, Frederick disappeared. It had been the plan all along. He would hitchhike to the cape or take a bus to Ann Arbor or Providence—it didn’t matter—as long as he avoided his old haunts and didn’t contact anybody from his past for a while. Lorraine would return to Philadelphia. She had expected this even before the incident in Oneonta. Remembering this, she shuddered.