I Am the Cheese (14 page)

The bomb. Planted in the car. Waiting for his father to turn the key in the lock. But the explosion never occurred because a local policeman had observed two strangers lurking near the Delmonte household. A telephone call from police headquarters warned his father to stay in the house. A crew of bomb experts appeared at the scene and towed the car away. A later report disclosed that a bomb capable of destroying the car and everything within a ten-foot radius had been located, attached to the accelerator.

The next attempt came three nights later. His father had worked late at the newspaper. He had felt nervous and edgy as he typed away but he refused to give in to his feeling of uneasiness. Anyway, there was a police officer on duty at the entrance of the building, assigned by the police chief at the insistence of
Roscoe Campbell. His father finished writing—a three-part series on a possible scandal in the municipal purchasing department. No kickbacks this time but rental fees paid for equipment that did not, in fact, exist. His father walked down the stairs. The sight of the police officer provided a touch of comfort. The police officer turned toward him—a gun in his hand. His father froze. The gun was raised and his father saw the face, the expressionless eyes—the look of the hired killer, the hit man. A terrible sadness flooded him; he had let his wife down, his son—they would be left alone, abandoned. A pistol shot rang out, echoing as loudly as the detonation of a bomb. His father braced himself and then saw, in slow motion, the policeman crumpling up, mouth agape, eyes bulging from their sockets. He fell forward, the gun loosed from his hand, dropping to the sidewalk.

That was the night Mr. Grey entered their lives …

How they talked. Or, rather, his father talked and Adam listened. But Adam also asked questions, a hundred, a thousand it seemed. During those first few days after the discovery of his identity and the lives they led, he and his father talked incessantly, the terrible silence finally broken. Sometimes they talked in the paneled room in the cellar and at other times outside, walking the streets, sitting in a restaurant, lounging on a park bench. His father explained why
they covered so much territory. The paneled room was a Safe Room; it had been searched for “bugs”—listening devices—by Grey’s men and given clearance. If they didn’t talk in that room, it was best to conduct their conversations while they were on the move, coming and going, in public places, when the chances of being overheard or eavesdropped on were negligible. It was during these conversations that his father brought him up to date, told him how they had become involved in this new life of theirs.

“In the final analysis,” his father said, “we really had no choice. Grey spelled out the options, the alternatives. He had helped to develop the Department of Re-Identification. The department had grown out of a sudden need as people began to testify against organized crime. The first people to give testimony were criminals themselves, members of the organizations and syndicates who, for one reason or another, decided to turn against their own kind. In exchange, they asked protection. The early cases were provided with bodyguards, nothing else. Some of the first witnesses were convicts and they had to be transferred to prisons where they couldn’t be reached by the organizations. In some instances, new identities were created for witnesses who weren’t in jail. They began new lives under assumed names.”

Adam and his father were walking by a schoolyard where some kids, mostly girls, were playing hopscotch and other games, their shouts and laughter innocent on the afternoon air. Adam suddenly felt like an alien.

“Grey explained the situation,” his father continued, unaware of the children and the sunshine, head down, his eyes cruising the sidewalk. “My life as I had known it, he said, was ended. It was a matter of time before a bullet or a bomb or some other weapon finished me off. He had been my watchdog from the beginning. He and his men had alerted the police department when the bomb was placed in the car. One of Grey’s men had shot the assassin who had impersonated the cop outside the newspaper office. Grey said that sooner or later the assassins would succeed. I couldn’t be allowed to live—for a lot of reasons, the least of which was revenge. I had to be made an example to other people who might want to become witnesses. And they still didn’t know how much I had really learned during the investigation, how much I could still tell the authorities. Or how much I knew then that wasn’t worth much but might become important if later disclosures were made.”

His father kicked at a stone, watched it roll into the gutter. “I’m not the hero type—I get scared too easily—but I tried to reason with Grey. I told him that I would take my chances, that this was still a free country, a country of laws, and that a citizen shouldn’t have to go into hiding for his own protection. But Grey pointed out the clincher—he said that the bomb in the car hadn’t been aimed at me alone but at whoever happened to be in the car when it exploded, and most likely that would be my family. He said that you and your mother weren’t any safer than I was. Not as long as I continued to be Anthony Delmonte, resident of Blount, New York. I remained unconvinced—feeling
that there was something wrong somehow with our entire system—until I returned home after Grey’s visit with me at the office and learned that your mother had received a phone call. A simple and brief phone call in which someone quietly informed her that two funeral masses would be reserved in the next week at St. Joseph’s Church. For her husband and son. Her punishment was that she would be allowed to live …”

The sun had no right to be so bright, the shouts of the playing children so happy.

“That night, I called Grey, using a special number he had given me.”

And the names. Adam could still hear his father’s voice, a mixture of anger and disgust when he talked about their new names.

“Farmer, for God’s sake. Grey and his bunch come up with Farmer. White, American, Protestant. WASP. And here I am Italian, and your mother Irish. And both us of Catholic, your mother a devout Catholic who never misses mass on Sunday or on holy days.”

Grey resorted to more improvisation, suggesting that the Farmer family be converts to Catholicism.
This meant baptismal certificates, confirmation papers.

“We were like puppets, you, your mother, and I,” his father said. “As if we had no control over our lives. And we didn’t, of course. Others pulled the strings and we jumped. Sometimes, I think someone with a terrible sense of humor was toying with us. Look at the name they selected for you—Adam. Somebody’s whim, maybe. Adam: new birth, first man. I don’t know. Your mother and I felt helpless but the thought of that bomb and that phone call made me go along. And so we found ourselves in Monument, Massachusetts.”

The cellar again. With his father. His mother upstairs. His father reached inside his jacket and pulled out an envelope. A narrow manila envelope, slightly larger than letter size. He held the envelope in the palm of his hand for a moment, as if his hand were a scale and he was trying to determine its weight, its value, its importance. Finally, he unsealed the envelope, carefully lifting up the Scotch tape that crisscrossed it. He withdrew something that looked like a newspaper clipping. Yellowed, fragile. He handed it to Adam.

“This was the insurance Grey said he was providing us with,” his father said, his voice filled with a bitterness Adam had never heard in his father’s voice before.

Adam looked down at a five-column headline that
preceded a long news story. He didn’t have to read the story. The headline told him all he needed to know:

B
LOUNT
R
EPORTER
, W
IFE
, C
HILD
K
ILLED IN
C
RASH ON
H
IGHWAY

END TAPE OZK012