American Subversive (14 page)

Through the small windshield, I watched the rotor slice through the air, once, twice, then catch with a dull roar that immediately rendered communication impossible. Touché motioned toward a Vietnam-era headset hanging in front of me. I put it on and the world fell silent.

“Better, no?” His voice in the earphones was calm, almost soothing.

“This isn't fun for me,” I responded, but he didn't react. Instead he pointed at a button on the console.

“Press this to talk.”

We were moving now,
taxiing
. I pressed the button. “Please tell me you actually know what you're—” I was cut off. A third voice was talking, spewing forth a sequence of Whiskeys and Tangos that Touché repeated back as he turned onto the runway and slowly pushed the throttle. The engine gained power, and when we came to speed, my friend pulled lightly on the yoke and lifted us into the sky. It was like pulling a water-skier from a lake. Once, then again, he received coded instructions, and we banked smoothly and ascended. Below us, north Jersey spread out like green carpeting, stained in places but still lush.

Touché pressed his button. “You don't look so bad. Why all the fuss before?”

“It's okay to talk? I don't want to interrupt some critical ground-to-air directive.”

“Your headset is only wired internally. You can hear everything coming in but can only talk to me.”

Up ahead, the Hudson River slithered its way north, or maybe south, and I couldn't help but think about that US Airways jet that had glided to a miraculous water landing two winters back. Did Touché know how to glide? We turned east and suddenly there was Manhattan, the slender middle finger of the American fist, glittering so damn brightly I had to look away.

“Hold on,” said Touché. “We're flying over the Palisades. Sometimes the air gets choppy.” Seconds later, we swooned, down and then right back up, before returning to humming tranquillity.

There was a rhythm to flying. We moved up the coast and were passed from tower to tower—Stamford, Norwalk, Bridgeport, New Haven. Touché had filed a flight plan, so each new region of the sky was expecting us. The radio back-and-forths were friendly, jocular,
routine
. It's the word I kept coming back to. I relaxed and looked out over Long Island, which from my perch looked small and manageable, the harbors and vineyards of the North Fork, the mansions and azure pools of the—

“Tell me what we're doing,” said Touché's voice in my ears.

“What do you mean?”

Touché pointed at his headset and then at the button in front of me. I pushed it and repeated myself.

“I mean,” Touché said, “is any of this real? A girl like that. Do you honestly believe she could be involved?”

“I don't know. It seems unlikely, doesn't it?”

“If someone really had information about her, wouldn't they go directly to the police or FBI? Certainly, they wouldn't e-mail some amateur blogger—”

“Hey, I get paid,” I said, but I'd forgotten to press the button again.

“—which means that whoever's sending the messages, your Mr. Empires Fall, is also likely to be involved.”

“But isn't that a bit obvious? Why take the risk?”

“It's not a risk if the e-mail can't be traced back to the source,” Touché said. “And I'm assuming it can't be?”

“Probably not. There are ways to cover your tracks online, from using public computers and proxy servers to data wiping and virtual tunneling. But that stuff's not my strong suit.”

Touché furrowed his brow. “Perhaps they sent you the photo because they assumed you'd post it immediately.”

“But why wouldn't
I
call the cops?”

“That's a good question. Why haven't you?”

Which is how we left it. Everything open to interpretation. But at least Touché was intrigued. Or maybe he was just bored. Maybe he was already planning to fly to Fishers Island and just wanted company. With Touché, it was best not to ask. And anyway, we were beginning our descent. I could see the island in front of us, a thin spit of land two miles off the coast of Connecticut. The airwaves had gone quiet.

“Why isn't anyone talking to us?” I asked.

“There's no tower. It's just a little landing strip. The military built it during World War Two.”

“Then who guides us in?”

“You're the copilot,” Touché said, grinning.

I could see the runway, an impossibly short strip of concrete on the western tip of the island. But we were well centered, and as I bit my
lip and dug my fists into the seat, Touché brought us down. Slowly. Smoothly. Safely. Nothing to it.

He cozied the craft up beside the only other plane at the airfield and cut the engine. A minute later—and not a moment too soon—I stepped gingerly down the stairs onto the weed-strewn tarmac. Touché was still shutting things down, so I put in a quick call to Derrick. In my absence—I'd told him I was going to a wedding—my boss had agreed to take the reins of Roorback for the day (after that I'd be off the hook until Monday, as I didn't usually post on weekends). Like most publishers, he didn't mind occasionally sullying his hands on the content side of life, if only to seem involved. As a precaution, the night before, I'd moved the two EmpiresFall e-mails from my Roorback account to my personal account (though they were probably still on the server if someone was really looking). As for the possibility of another missive arriving while I was gone, I could only hope Derrick wouldn't notice it amid the hundreds of others clogging up my in-box. If he even checked my Roorback account at all.

To my relief, Derrick sounded normal when he answered the phone. In fact, he sounded like he was having a ball. “Just sitting here lobbing little grenades at the haughty fourth estate,” he said.

“Isn't it fun?”

“For a day, yes. But make sure you're back Monday morning.”

“I will be.”

“Where are you again?” he asked.

“Fishers Island.”

“Florida?”

“Long Island Sound.”

“Never heard of it.”

“I think that's the point,” I said.

When Touché had secured the plane (with little blocks on either side of the wheels, as if the thing might roll away), I followed him to a battle-scarred Grand Wagoneer with wood-paneled siding.

“Your car's here. What a stroke of luck.”

“Isn't it?”

We threw our bags in the back and were soon turning onto the island's main road.

“So I did a little research last night,” I said.

“And?”

“There's a lot of old money here.”

“So old there's no bank. No hotels or restaurants either. They don't want another Nantucket.”

Touché recited a quick history of the island, the upshot being that the small group of industrialists—the Du Ponts among them—that had originally bought it had somehow managed, through a century of family infighting and sweeping societal change, to maintain control of their little paradise.

“How often do you come up here?” I asked.

“Once, maybe twice a year. It's all I can handle. The people. You'll see.”

Except there were no people, just land, lush and wild. The road wound through meadows and tangled forest, then, out of nowhere, we came upon a guardhouse. Touché waved to the man inside and we kept going.

“Welcome to the private side of the island,” Touché said.

“I thought the whole thing was private.”

“There are levels to these things.”

We pressed on, past ponds and coves, glimpses of water, sailboats shimmering in the sun. Then the road bent sharply and the trees opened to reveal a series of golf holes surrounding an elegant clubhouse. The fairways were crowded with men in outfits of unfathomable patterns and hues. “The Club Championship is this weekend, which is why I'm fairly sure we'll run into Mr. Carlyle.”

“He's a golfer?”

“Everyone up here's a golfer.”

We continued past the parking lot, filled with cars from another era—vintage Mustangs and diesel-powered Mercedeses—and on toward the end of the island.

“No Ferraris or Hummers, at least.”

“The landed gentry has its upside,” Touché said.

That he somehow said this without sounding like an asshole was a tribute, not only to the statement's veracity, but to my friend's obvious
indifference to his surroundings. Touché thrived on creativity, diversity, the manic hum of humankind. Fishers Island was the opposite of all that. It was comfort, idleness, boredom . . . golf.

It was also real estate. I had never been anyplace I could rightly call a compound until we turned into Touché's crushed-shell driveway. My God, the place was magnificent. The main house, which backed up to a bluff overlooking the sound, was painted white and peeling in places, but looked all the more elegant for the deterioration. And the surrounding grounds—which were immaculate—hosted a barn, a pool, and a well-kept grass tennis court.
Grass
.

We parked, eventually, and walked inside. Touché led me up a winding staircase to the third floor and pointed down a row of open doors. “That's your wing. I'll meet you downstairs in an hour.” With that he turned and loped away. I wandered down my assigned hall and settled on a corner suite lined with books and windows. I let some air into the room and then collapsed upon the massive bed.

I woke up during the falling part of an airplane dream. I could hear my heart pounding in the dead silence of the house. How long had I been asleep? An hour? Two? Outside, the air had cooled and flags were whipping in the wind. It was the time of day when my father used to lay his thumb along the horizon, and if part of the sun disappeared behind it, he'd announce it was cocktail hour. I was young then. He no longer made such distinctions.

I showered, shaved, and slipped on an Izod and an old pair of khakis I'd dug up for the occasion. I searched the house, but Touché was nowhere to be found, so I made myself a gin and tonic and settled into a wicker chair on the front porch. What a life. Yet Touché saw right through it. This side of his family, his
American
side, was something he hardly acknowledged. But in truth he'd been living in the States for almost twenty years now. In an effort to keep him out of harm's way, Santo had shipped his only son off to a famous prep school outside Washington, D.C., then on to UCLA. Touché rarely discussed his time in Los Angeles; I'm guessing he liked it a little too much. All that money and panache in a town like that. It took him five years to get his diploma, and one more to recover from the
exertion. He sniffed around the movie business for a while, but little came of it. So he decamped to his parents' apartment in New York and applied to NYU—right across the street—for grad school. While I, like so many others, saw journalism as something concrete in a suddenly arbitrary world, I think Touché saw it in simpler terms—as the old aristocratic fallback. Apparently, journalism was once an honorable profession.

I don't mean to say that my friend lacked beliefs; it was just tough to know what they were. Certainly, Touché identified with his Venezuelan roots, if not in revolutionary terms, then with a subtle anti-Americanism that lingered around the edges of his person. That his father was risking his life for a political cause, that he would take it
that far
, no doubt had an impact on his son. But what of his mother? She almost never came up. Du Pont, to Touché, was just another name in a world of big names. What were the odds two families like the Touchés and Du Ponts would come together? I used to wonder, back when we first met and I didn't know the odds were actually quite good. The rich do get richer, I realize that now. Between Dalton and Middlebury I'd known plenty of well-heeled offspring, but no one like Touché. He was too wealthy to understand money, to realize it was the permanent focal point of everyone else's existence. Debt, like public transportation, just wasn't part of his world.

His way of dealing with monetary imbalance was simply to pay for everyone, all the time. But he did more than that. He was a patron in every way, and the Washington Square apartment was his clubhouse. You never knew who might be there. Claire Danes. Will Sheff. Drew Barrymore. Mark Ruffalo. Jenny Lewis. European beauties over on United Nations contracts. Pasty-faced guitarists from the latest British invasion. He'd funded any number of projects—from political documentaries to conceptual clothing lines—and had lent his name to countless benefits without becoming overexposed. Being around him made you feel as if you'd made it in some way. Smoking a cigarette with Zadie Smith, a joint with Joss Stone. And the best part? He didn't give a damn about any of it. Which is why the whole thing worked, and why it never lasted. With Touché, the rules of friendship were different, unpredictable. We'd see each other for days on end, and just when I thought we were inseparable, I wouldn't hear from him for
months. Eventually, I'd get a choppy voice mail from a European airport or a hurried text from another hemisphere, and there we'd be, a day later, sipping scotch in that living room . . . or flying up to Fishers on the trail of a terrorist.

I saw him, then, pedaling toward the house on a beat-up bicycle. He was completely at ease, at home in the world, his world, and I was suddenly thrilled that we were in this together. My cause had become his cause, and it made our mission seem less absurd. Chasing Paige Roderick wasn't a lark anymore, and even if it was, who cared? A beautiful sunset was coming, and we had nothing better to do.

He waved and dismounted, leaving the bike on the ground like a ten-year-old.

“I talked to our man,” he said, as he climbed the steps and took a seat beside me.

“
Brendan Carlyle?
How'd you find him?”

“I thought he might be hanging around the clubhouse after his round, so I rode over, and sure enough, there he was, sitting with a few other guys, drinking beer and replaying his match, shot by shot.”