The Company You Keep (23 page)

And the local T-shirt company began selling T-shirts with FBI Ten Most Wanted posters from the seventies on them, a fact that became dramatically known to Mimi Lurie when a girl walked into the Del Rio—where she was now installed as a bartender—wearing Mimi’s twenty-year-old face on her own twenty-year-old breasts.

That there could be any connection between the middle-aged lady serving her a drink, though, and the sixties icon she sported on her T-shirt—that, I think, was too far-fetched to occur to anyone.

Only a day or two later did the
Daily’s
editorial page express a dissenting view, one that called for Jason Sinai to face the charges against him and let them be decided in court. With Jason’s family pedigree, the article pointed out—son of Jack Sinai, brother of Daniel Sinai, a professor of law, Columbia University, brother-in-law of Maggie Calaway, and, if that wasn’t enough, his parents were the adoptive parents of Klara Singer, who worked in Clinton’s Commerce Department—the editorial did not see him lacking either Beltway connections or representation. Nor did it miss the fact that Jason Sinai had abandoned his daughter—the author of this editorial gave that prominent play. She also gave prominent play to the fact that were it not for the overturn of Mitchell’s 1970 wiretap, Jason Sinai—as well as all the extant members of the so-called Weather Underground—would all be in jail anyway.

Finally, and most importantly, it disclosed that its author was the daughter of the director of the FBI field office, in Traverse City, that had originally been tasked with investigating the Bank of Michigan robbery. The article was signed Rebeccah Osborne, and her father, I found out in short order using PACER, was called John.

As it happened, Rebeccah Osborne, Mimi Lurie, and I were all to meet the next day.

Of course, we would not know who Mimi was, any more than the girl wearing her picture on her T-shirt did.

This is how it happened.

2.

After your daddy went on the run, I had spent a couple of the most frustrating days of my life in Albany.

When his flight to Canada turned out to be an elaborate and highly successful setup of the police, I published a front-page article on the real identity of James Grant, an article that was picked up all over the country or, in those papers that had done their own reporting, quoted extensively. That was good, and for a few moments there, it looked like my editor might actually address a sentence to me that did not contain any obscenities. Until, that is, he got into his third drink at our celebratory Shandon Star office party, and I overheard him tell the J School graduate that “fucking Benny Schulberg turned out to be right on the fucking money, for once.”

Sure, I was hurt by the sentiment. But more than that, I was shocked by the language in so august a figure of authority.

Anyway, I was riding high for a moment or two there—as evidenced by the fact that Harmon even invited me to the Star, as the invitations to his drinks parties were pretty capricious, one of his little ways of keeping the staff divided. But when you, Isabel, were discovered in a hotel in downtown New York, the tables were turned. Now all the big papers gave the story to big metro reporters, and I was relegated to recycling their on-the-scene reporting in the
Albany Times,
which declined to pay my expenses to go 150 miles down 87 to New York City. A legal affairs
stringer in Massachusetts had then taken over the story of Maggie Calaway’s maneuvering to keep you from your mother—God forbid I should get any travel money, which could have run into the low three figures.

The only things that left me with were, firstly, the satisfaction of having been used by a person or persons unknown—Montgomery, I assumed—to expose Jason Sinai, and secondly, the exclusive story on Julia Montgomery’s drug addiction and child abuse. I didn’t need to ask my editor how he felt about running that. For one thing, he had been kissing Bobby Montgomery’s ass for so long now I doubted he’d remember how to stop. For another, the Julia Montgomery story had the singular inconvenience of adding moral ambiguity to the Jason Sinai story, which the
Times
, in the finest contemporary standards of American journalism, hated to do.

So I sat on what I knew about Julia Montgomery, promising myself that my time would come.

Still, I did not give up. When my editor tried to reassign me, I put in for all my vacation owing—never having taken any at all, I had six weeks coming—and requested permission, hastily granted—as if my editor couldn’t believe his luck—to spend them at my desk.

I then spent a single day moving out of my apartment and into a Super 8 Motel—it had weekly rates that groups of Mexican men were taking good advantage of—happily abandoning my security deposit and last month’s rent to my landlord, his due, I felt, for dealing with the refrigerator. My possessions, which were few, I had put into storage, and my bills and unanswered correspondence, which filled two cardboard boxes, I recycled. That settled, I went back to my cubicle at the Times and set about making Kevin Cornelius of the Albany FBI field station regret ever having had the idea of using a journalist to leak news. I called Kevin every day, often several times, to check in on his progress in tracking Jason Sinai. The trail, however, had ended at Clayton. Finally, in exasperation, Cornelius admitted that they were powerless to catch a practiced, well-disciplined fugitive. America, he said, just wasn’t built to find a person who was determined enough to get lost. “Could be anywhere, Ben.”

No, he couldn’t, I thought to myself. If he were just anywhere, he would have taken his daughter.

I didn’t tell Cornelius that. For one thing, I doubted that Cornelius would understand.

To me, though, it was clear as the big blue midwestern sky. If Jim Grant had wanted to go hide with his daughter, he would have done so. Changing identities, hiding somewhere: this is what Jason Sinai was good at. Probably, in fact, he had been making preparations to do so well before Sharon Solarz was arrested. He must have known there was no way he was going to win his custody suit. He was, after all, a lawyer.

But, and this was the thing, he
didn’t
go hide. I thought about this for a great long time. He
didn’t
take his daughter and go hide. What he did was much more complicated. What he did was, he conducted a delicate and risky series of switches, got to New York, and contrived to get his daughter to the safekeeping of his brother. Then he ran off, alone.

That changed everything.

Why had he done this? I thought about that a long time, sitting in the baking heat of the courtyard outside the
Times
, smoking cigarettes. Why would Mr. Grant—I still could not think of him as Jim, never mind as Sinai—have gone through so much trouble to get his daughter to his brother, when he could just as easily have taken her with him? The apparent answer to that—reported by the
New York Times
—was that Sinai’s sister-in-law, the constitutional lawyer Margaret Calaway, had removed Isabel Sinai to the commonwealth of Massachusetts, filed for custody on behalf of her husband Daniel, Jason’s brother, and successfully obtained a temporary injunction against Ambassador Montgomery, who had come from London to take his granddaughter immediately upon receiving news of Jason’s flight. This, however, simply did not satisfy me, and even as I followed the legal battle between Calaway and Montgomery, which twice held the front Metro page of the
New York Times
, not because of Jason but because of Margaret Calaway’s involvement, I still didn’t buy it.

For one thing, I realized that the combined might of Daniel Sinai,
Calaway’s law firm, and the friendly Teddy Kennedy was only going to delay—not prevent—Montgomery’s eventual custody of Isabel Sinai. You can’t take a child away from her mother like that, even when the mother is not connected up the wazoo. And Jason, I knew, knew that also. It was a temporary measure.

And for another thing, I knew that Jason was not a man who left his daughter easily: an idiot could have seen that, and while in 1996 I was something of an idiot about my own life, I wasn’t about other people’s.

No, the only conclusion was that Jason had found a very good, very temporary solution to the issue of his daughter’s custody, the only way to keep his daughter from his ex-wife without making her a fugitive too. But it was only a temporary measure. So what did he have in mind?

See, you know, because Mimi just told you so, what your father was doing. You know, and now I know, that he was preparing to go find Mimi Lurie. In June 1996, however, there was no way I could know that.

And still, I could know something. A day of nearly constant telephoning, as well as using up virtually every favor owed to me by anyone with any faintly liberal credentials, finally got me a short off-the-record telephone call with Daniel Sinai, speaking from his house in Martha’s Vineyard, where he had gone to join his wife, two children, and you, his niece, directly upon being released from the Canadian jail. Sinai, a soft-spoken man with a slightly patrician accent, began the conversation by telling me he had nothing to say. It was an opening that made me, uncharacteristically, feel defeated, and I let dead air hang on the line until Sinai spoke again.

“Just what is it you want, Mr. Schulberg?”

“Well…what is it you think your brother’s doing, Dr. Sinai?”

“I haven’t spoken to my brother in twenty-six years. How am I supposed to know what he’s doing?”

A reporter’s reflex to give an interviewee the chance to lie made me ask, “You haven’t spoken to him since he went on the run?”

Sinai spoke carefully, accenting the first word. “I have not.”

That meant someone had. But I found myself still feeling bad. “Well, what do you think he’s doing?”

“I have no idea.”

“How long do you think you can hang on to your niece?”

“However long the law says, Mr. Schulberg. Until I can return her to my brother, I hope.”

“I see.” I suddenly felt fed up. It was one thing when a right-wing government source clammed up on you; another altogether when someone you admired treated you like the enemy. “Well, Dr. Sinai, you’ve been very informative. Thank you.”

“Mr. Schulberg?”

I put the phone back to my ear, and waited.

“This is off the record. Agreed?”

“Okay.”

Now his voice shifted. “I don’t know what my brother’s doing. I probably know less about him than you do, if you want to know the truth. The last time I saw him, I was twelve. But I’m guessing the same thing that occurs to me about him has already occurred to you.”

“And that is?”

“That…” Daniel Sinai hesitated. “That nothing my brother’s doing makes any sense if he’s guilty.”

I took a moment to absorb this. Then I answered slowly, with equal honesty. “No. I mean, I knew there was something I didn’t understand. I hadn’t quite put the question that way.”

“Well, think about it. If he’s guilty, he should have absconded with his daughter. Changed his name, moved away. Clearly my brother knows how to do that. And I can tell you, also off the record, that he has the means. The only logical reason to leave Isabel with us, temporarily, is that it buys him time.”

“Okay. For what?”

Your uncle answered without hesitation. “To exculpate himself of charges stemming from the Bank of Michigan robbery.”

I took a long moment to absorb that. “To prove himself innocent? And how could he do that?”

There was a silence now, and for a moment, I had a strong intuition that your uncle knew the answer to this question. That, in other words, what he said next was a lie. “Mr. Schulberg, if I knew that, I’d be out helping him now.”

I thought about that for a long time. Then I began the process of getting a call through to Gillian Morrealle, Sharon Solarz’s lawyer.

•  •  •

When I finally did get through, Morrealle informed me that she had nothing to say, would only speak off the record, and that only because of our common friendship with Jay Cohen at the
North American Review
out in Los Angeles. Then she proceeded to answer my questions with a lawyer’s care. Sharon Solarz had been arraigned, had pleaded not guilty, had been remanded without bail to Bedford Hills Correctional Facility pending extradition to Michigan. Morrealle was now preparing to represent Sharon at her Michigan arraignment, which would be in Traverse City in the next day or two. Sharon’s morale was good; she had of course met old friends at Bedford Hills in Kathy Boudin and Judy Clark; as an accessory to a cop killing she was being treated with respect in the prison; she was already becoming active in the AIDS education program that Boudin and Clark had built up. No: Sharon had specifically instructed Morrealle to go to trial on a not guilty plea; she wanted to see the issues tried in court. No: she had given no interviews; she had turned down 60
Minutes
and the
New York Times
and was not considering any other interviewers, including Mr. Schulberg. No, she could not suggest anyone else for me to talk to.

“Mr. Schulberg? Let me tell you something. You don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting anyone who knew Sharon to talk to you. You know why? Because Sharon’s prosecution is a travesty of justice, and everyone with any sense knows you won’t write that.”

That, at last, was too much for me. “Ms. Morrealle? Let me tell you something. I would write it, if I thought there were a snowball’s chance in hell of it being true. Since no one in your little coterie of supposed defenders of the Bill of Rights has enough faith in our free press to go on the record with me, of course, I don’t have any way of determining that. And seeing none of you heroic lefty freedom fighters will tell me anything, your moral indignation plays with me like just another damn lawyer’s ploy.”

And, of course, I thought as I hung up the phone, there’s the small problem that even if someone
would
speak to me, and even if I
did
write the article, what with our free press being such a Mickey Mouse operation and all, there’s the minor problem that no one would publish it.

•   •   •