The Company You Keep (21 page)

His heroism in battle, however, was little celebrated in his own country, and likewise the law that my father now practiced did not impress the other lawyers in the Exchange Building. In the fifties, the building management moved to evict him. My mother, your grandmother, used to say that it was the single rejection that had really hurt Jack Sinai. Dies Committee blacklisting, rejection from the U.S. Army due to “premature anti-fascism,” attacks by McCarthy and Hoover, death threats; my mother told Kai Bird for his biography of my father that the single thing she could remember depressing—as opposed to outraging—Jack Sinai had been the Exchange Building’s attempt to evict him. He sued them, of course—disproving the adage about a lawyer who represents himself, necessarily, as virtually no lawyer would represent him—and in 1996, two years after my father’s death, my brother Daniel now kept the lease out of pure spite.

The key had always been kept in a tiny hollow behind the door molding. When I at last was able to look for it, my heart sank to see that the molding had been changed to steel. Still, when I twisted my body, in its sitting position, to look more closely, I found the drywall hollowed out just where the wood used to be, and a Medeco key nestling inside. With a fingernail I pulled it out, letting it fall to the ground with a thin ping. Then I stood and opened the door onto the most perfectly preserved piece of the past I had ever seen.

3.

A Steel Age desk, massive, sat against the window; two smaller Wakefields, where the para and secretary had sat, against the wall. A black fan, its blades worn glossy by use, rested on top of a bank of black steel file cabinets. The windows had been replaced—they were double-glazed and aluminum—but the green venetian blinds lowered halfway over the glass were original, and the oak molding was too. With something near
reverence I ran my hand over the wood, watching out at the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge, at the black of the river. The moon was over the West Side, and I could not see it, but the intensity of the light spoke of its size, lighting the whole of the cloudless sky. Far away the glitter of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was faintly visible next to the ambient lights of Bay Ridge. As if in prayer I leaned my forehead against the glass and shut my eyes.

You want to know how I left you. By standing, for a very long time, thus, my eyes clenched shut against reality. I must tell you, Isabel, I have no memory of that time. Perhaps, eyes closed, I saw the view before me better than I had with my eyes open. Perhaps I was seeing the light glittering on the surface of the East River, the black water swollen with tide, inscrutable, lapping against the pilings of the Brooklyn Ferry. For so long, in fact, did I stand thus that again, far in my mind, I felt panic approach, and it was only when I felt that that I stood straight and opened my eyes, half expecting to see a hallucination in the place of the view, proof that I could not take the strain, that I should give up.

I would have welcomed that proof.

But once again, reality held.

I sat now, at the desk in the swivel chair I’d used to play in as a child, and put my hands on the surface of the desk where lay the draft of a Nation article my brother was working on. In the drawers, I knew, were the letters and deeds and records of a lifetime in New York, the office here, the house on Bedford Street, the Vineyard house over Menemsha Bay. Everything was here, preserved forever in the tiny office over the water, precious reminders of a glorious life, a life that would never be repeated. Only the smell was gone, the smell of my father’s Bay Rum shaving lotion, and as I realized that, for me, suddenly the whole office became a tomb.

I rose and crossed the room to kneel in front of a squat black safe. The combination came immediately to mind, as did the workings of the ancient lock. I swung the door open and pulled out the sliding shelf on top. And here was my first surprise.

The papers were there, precisely where I had left them. March 8,
1970, my last time in New York: two days after the town house bombing I had traveled from the Midwest in the identity that I was to live in until 1974, just to hide this identity, Robert Russell. It was, I knew, the best identity I would ever build, and although I had no use for it in mind, although I had spent months building it, and although I was risking my liberty to be in New York at all, two days after the town house blast, while the rubble on West Eleventh Street was still smoldering, I had traveled east to hide it, here, in the one place I knew would never be touched by time. A social security card, a Wisconsin driver’s license, and a passport—the big green kind they used to use—in the name of Robert Russell. Now they sat in the back of the safe, just where I had left them. That did not surprise me.

But below them was another set of IDs, and as I looked at them, I grew confused, so confused that I thought I had perhaps lost my mind. Here was another driver’s license—also Robert Russell’s, also Wisconsin—with a picture of myself wearing a black beard. The license was, however, current, renewed some eighteen months before. And here was another passport, not one of the big green ones from the seventies, but one of the little navy blue ones they used in the nineties. With confusion, I saw that this, too, was current—it had been taken out in 1995. The photograph on this one, clearer than the computer-generated license, was less convincing—it had clearly been taken before I’d had my nose fixed. The thought made my head swirl: the man in the picture was middle-aged, and yet I’d had my nose fixed twice, the second time in 1982, when I could still be described as young. The passport and driver’s license shared the same address: Water Street in Racine, Wisconsin.

Dizzy with confusion, I looked back into the tray and found two more baffling items. The first was a stack of twenty-dollar bills, all old, tied with a rubber band. Later I would count a total of twenty-five thousand dollars. And there was a page torn from a perpetual calendar. Each day had a New York telephone number written next to it—a pay phone number, if this was in fact what it seemed to be. A yellow Post-it, clipped to the top, had in the same writing, the key.

For a long time I stared at the documents, unable to understand. An identity I had created and hidden twenty-five years before had been updated with photos of myself. An impossibility.

Then I got it.

Peering closely at the pictures on the IDs, I saw that it was not me at all but my younger brother, Daniel.

Jesus Christ Almighty. I said the words out loud in the empty office. Daniel had been twelve when I went underground. I barely remembered the child.

How long had he been keeping a valid identity in the safe? And how had he known to do it?

Slowly, I saw that my forgotten little brother, in the forgotten little office, had for at least the last ten years kept up Robert Russell’s identity. He must have grown a beard for the pictures, and dyed it black, for I distinctly remembered him as a redhead. And therefore the nose, which so resembled mine before it was fixed, an aquiline, Jewish nose.

Now why the fucking hell—I said it out loud—would he have done that?

And yet, even if speaking to myself about it would have helped, there wasn’t time.

I checked my watch and found it to be nearly midnight on June 20. Starting my brother’s time cycle, that made my first chance to call at six the next morning. Fair enough—in that case, I knew what to do. My plan had always been to contact my brother—this only made it easier. I rose now, packed the bills and the ID into your Sportsac shoulder bag, and left the office.

Now, at last, exiting onto Pine Street, I had the presence of mind to start following a trajectory.

4.

New York City. The financial district at two-thirty in the morning. Down the long canyon of Pine Street a garbage truck idled while a worker
tossed bales of papers into it. In front of it, a limousine pulled into the intersection and passed, and I remember that instinctively, I stepped against the wall. When the limo was gone, I began to walk, watching the garbage man carefully. He did not turn, working his way steadily through a small mountain of corporate recycling. At the corner of Pine and Williams, where a delivery truck was turning north, I slowed, waiting for it to block the intersection, then ran across Williams Street under its cover, pulling on a baseball cap from my pocket as I reached the sidewalk. I jogged for a time at the side of the truck before, suddenly, coming to a halt. The truck passed and, walking slowly now, I crossed to Maiden Lane, doubled back to Cedar, then went north on Pearl, taking a long look at the empty street behind me.

The tunnel, we called it. At the beginning you are straight, and at the end you are underground. A long, clean passage away from everyone who knew you, unnoticed and unremarked. If it works right, absolutely nothing happens, and yet, at the other end, you are in another world. Your legal identity is changed. Your appearance is changed. And because there are no witnesses to either transformation, you are, now, literally, someone else.

The patterns were as simple as a three-point turn in a driving test. If there were two of you, you could walk a known trajectory—through a department store or public plaza—and have your tail watched. If you were solo, you could stop on the street, look in a store window, turn to look behind you, watch each face passing and pronounce its details to yourself. Change directions, walk, repeat. Each set of circumstances had been carefully choreographed by intensely smart, detail-oriented people, and the police were absolutely unable to follow us. That’s why, Izzy, we thought we could rob a bank: everything else, from jailbreak to planting a bomb in the Pentagon, it had been so easy. We thought we could do anything.

Later, we had delighted in bringing friends through the tunnel, giving them directions to follow and, out of nowhere, appearing at their sides. It had been Thai and Arthur who had brought Emile de Antonio through the tunnel out in Sheepshead Bay, then choreographed all the twists and turns, the backtracking and switches, to bring a whole camera crew to their safe house near Los Angeles for the filming of
Underground.

Now, at the top of Pearl, I walked quickly past Wolf’s Deli and into the courtyard of the Mitchell-Lama housing development. I crossed the central courtyard and, at its edge, hid behind a corner and waited. For ten long minutes the courtyard was empty. Then I crossed back, still meeting no one. Walking slowly now, I took Fulton to Nassau, Nassau up past 5 Beekman and Pace. At Pace I descended the subway stairs, took the deserted underpass—a place literally impossible for any surveillance to hide—and climbed back up onto the Brooklyn Bridge.

Three o’clock. Immediately, on the walkway, in the night air, something struck me as wrong. At the top of the stairs I paused, trying to identify it, stomach sinking: despite my precautions, I found, I was not ready to face any serious threat of danger. That there could really be surveillance so wide that it could find me in New York—that implied a level of governmental interest that I would not have thought possible and, indeed, which I was not ready to acknowledge. Ready to run back down the stairs, I paused, trying to chase down the feeling of unease. And then I pinpointed it: the bridge was virtually silent; there was none of the ever-repeating Doppler of car tires against the metal mesh surface that characterized any trip even near the bridge as I remembered it. Gingerly I crossed to look at the roadway, and indeed it had been paved.

This, a mysterious and dangerous place, awash in the successive Doppler echoes of cars passing, was no-man’s-land when I was a kid, a place so dangerous—like Coney Island at night, or Spanish Harlem—that even we, battle-hardened kids from the still largely Italian West Village, avoided it. Sometimes, on a dare, one or another would cross on a bicycle at night, more than once having to turn back on the uphill and race back, pursued by a gang from Brooklyn. Now, however, I understood the bridge to be safe—someone had told me so, part of Giuliani’s cleanup of the city.

But who cared? What did I really have to be scared of now? There was resignation in my posture as I began to walk, carrying twenty-five thousand dollars up the arch of the bridge. For a few minutes I continued, anxiously watching over the river, a view I had not seen since 1970.

And then, as if by appointment, I turned and looked west to see the moon, full at last, resting on top of two massive, towering, columns of light. With real shock I stared at them, real confusion, as if I were hallucinating,
or had been transported to another city. Only slowly did I realize that I was seeing buildings that had not existed the last time I was in New York, in the early spring of 1970. Only slowly did I realize that I was looking at the World Trade Towers for the first time in my life.

A literally incredible sight to someone who had never seen them before, transforming not just the view, but somehow the conception of the city. We did not know then, of course, how transforming the future reserved them to be. They were tremendously ugly, rectangular blocks of seventies nondesign. And they were shockingly beautiful, if for nothing else than for their sheer mass, towering over the ornate, suddenly quaint, turn-of-the-century Woolworth Building with its precious emphasis on the decorative, like guardians of a more innocent past.

For a long time, a great long time, I stared at those buildings, the moon moving slowly to bisect the southernmost tower. When I finally left, I walked backward, staring, and it was only when I reached the point that the Statue of Liberty became visible to the south around the eastern edge of the Battery that I turned and found myself looking at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, far away across the water, and I remembered crossing this bridge with my own father in 1960 on the way to Washington for the civil rights demonstration.

My brother, with his ID and money, had come to help me as surely as if he were there, holding my hand. And now, as if an ancient oracle had spoken, my father, now that he was dead and gone, came to my rescue and guided me over that bridge and into what I had next to do as surely as he had, a lifetime ago, driven me across in his Dodge Dart.