Andersen, Kurt (24 page)

“There is
no … more … witchcraft,
” the man says again.

The subway this morning also reminds me of Southern California’s apartheid quality. Riding the train between Grand Central and Brooklyn Bridge, I have probably seen more black people than I’ve seen during the entire two thousand days I’ve lived in Los Angeles.

I have one appointment in New York before I’m scheduled to get on the bus for the trip to Miami. I arrive at the restaurant, a diner with café airs west of Foley Square, toward the born-again World Trade Center. In my twenties and early thirties, when I was an habitué of courthouses and prosecutors’ offices and the Tombs, we all thought the hokey new name TriBeCa would never take.

“My gosh—Karen Hollander! What on earth are you doing here in New York?”

It’s Stewart.

“Expecting someone,” he asks, “or may I join you?”

As he gets close, I ask very softly, “You’re kidding, right?” He picked the restaurant.

“Uh-uh,” he replies, moving his mouth not at all, and as he leans in to kiss me, he whispers, “You never know around here.” New York’s main federal office building is nearby, and various government agencies keep discreet suites all over the neighborhood. He resumes his louder-than-necessary voice of fake surprise and bonhomie. “Oh, I’m just up here for the day from D.C., routine bureaucratic blah-blah-blah bullshit. But running into you makes it all worthwhile.”

He orders oatmeal and blueberries. He’s a vegetarian, which is one of the anti-stereotypical quirks that made me like him on our first date. I order an omelet and bacon.

He speaks softly. “Did you know your old man worked with the OSS? In the summer of 1945, in Europe, right after the war?”

“My
father
was in the
CIA
?”

“He wasn’t ‘in’ anything. And the organization to which you refer didn’t exist yet. But he was apparently very helpful. It’s why he got the instant U.S. citizenship and came here. Meaning, therefore, that Karen Hollander
exists
as a result of the good offices of the intelligence community of the United States of America. Yes, we are godlike in our powers.”

“Is that—was his connection why—is that the reason I didn’t ever get, you know, in trouble? In 1968?”

“No way. You’d have to be Allen fucking Dulles’s kid to pull
that
Get Out of Jail Free card, and not even then. Uh-uh. I can say with ninety-five percent confidence that there’s no connection. When did you change your name?”

Whoa. “College. I was admitted as Hollaender, with the asch, the
ae,
but I graduated as H-O-L-L-A-N-D-E-R. Sorry. I should have told you. I sent Freedom of Information requests for both spellings.”

“No problem. Anyhow, as a result of your two different surnames, believe it or not, part of the United States government, the stupid and confused part, the part that can’t manage to correctly spell half the fucking Arab names in the database, thinks you’re two different people.”

“How unintentionally correct of them.”

“And in this case, not unhelpful. It’s always better when there’s a little built-in ambiguity and confusion on the other side of the game board. Have the FOIA cretins sent you anything yet?”

“The army says they have no files on Karen H-O-L-L-A-N-D-E-R. Homeland Security says they’ve got nothing on me with either spelling.”

He nods as if he expected that answer. “You know what? You started your junior year of high school on the very day LBJ signed the Freedom of Information Act.”

I often feel as if Stewart is a move or two ahead of me, and even though I know it’s an impression he cultivates, I find it both disturbing and attractive. “Why is that significant?”“

“It’s not. But you were the one who always loved coincidence, your ‘synchronicity’ bullshit. And speaking of high school, you were in the Model UN
and
SDS
and
the Student Peace Union
and
you started the Esperanto Club? Why didn’t you just go ahead and get a fucking hammer-and-sickle tattooed on your forehead? Such an ambitious little commie pinko do-bee.”

“Jesus, they have
all that
in my files? What am I saying? Of course they do.”

“No, they don’t. I bought a copy of your yearbook on eBay. You really were a hottie nerd, by the way. Were you still a virgin junior year? I liked the black hair.”

“Dark brown. But thank you.”

After our food arrives, he puts his arms on the table and leans in. And talks even more quietly than he did before. “This is an interesting episode. I mean
extremely
interesting. So far I’ve only got a few bits and pieces. But I can see the outlines of a bigger picture. And there was obviously, I think, some
massive
cock-up, panic about blowback off the fucking charts, epic black-boxing and file-ditching. I mean, this was ass-covering and roll-up the way they did it in the heyday, when it was so much easier to get away with that shit. It looks the kind of thing that should’ve come out in 1975, seventy-six.”

“After Watergate, you mean, the CIA hearings?”

“The year of the Great Emasculation, when they let the sun shine in and all the dirty deeds of the past were confessed. Supposedly. Yeah. But certainly weren’t, in your case, which leads me to think it couldn’t have been just one agency. There must have been too many dirty hands in too many different places. That’s my theory.
Everybody
was gonna get fucked if this came out.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“I don’t know yet, exactly.” He sips his coffee. “One thing that really piques my interest now is how you passed the background check when you worked for Fat Boy.” He whispers so emphatically he nearly growls. “Worked for the fucking
DoJ.
”

“I know. I know.”

“I mean, that was truly living dangerously, Karen. I’m not your shrink. But did you
want
to get nailed?”

“No. Maybe. But no. After thirty years of getting away with it, I thought I could keep getting away with it. It didn’t seem totally real anymore. So I pushed my luck. And then I did. Get away with it. Do you think maybe the FBI covered it up so they wouldn’t be blamed for not knowing about it?”

Stewart is shaking his head. “But they had to know, the feebs, you’d think,
somebody
in the fuckin’-F entity should’ve known about you in fuckin’ 1997 when you got the job in their own fuckin’ department, and decided to give you a pass for his own reasons. Or if they
didn’t
know, then they’re more fucked up than even I dreamed.”

“I’ve wondered. I’ve wondered all those things. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

He takes a deep breath. “You were penetrated, it looks like to me.” He takes another sip of coffee. Is he waiting for me to ask what he means so that he can make a dirty joke? “I believe you had a federal asset in your little group.”

He knows we were a group. “You mean … somebody who—that one of us notified the authorities at the time?” Does he know who it was? Do I detect the slightest possible smile?

“I mean an asset, somebody
working
for the United States government.”

“An agent provocateur?”

“That would be the tendentious colloquial term.”

“Who? Do you know who?” Buzzy? Or Alex?

He shrugs. “Still working it.” He smiles. “You know, I’d figured you for some kind of draft-board vandal, maybe.”

“Nope.”

He leans in closer and lowers his voice some more. “You must have been a serious fucking enemy of the state.”

I nod. “Briefly. Very briefly.”

The waiter brings the check. I pull out a credit card, but Stewart insists that we each pay our own share in cash.

“When do you go home?” I ask.

“Detroit tomorrow,” he says, “then Ottawa, back to D.C. Tuesday. It’s a glamour fucking job. How long are you in town?”

“Just today. And then off to Miami.”

“And tonight? It’s not a school night.” He’s smiling his let’s-do-it smile.

“I’m staying with my daughter and her family.” A couple of hours at his hotel this afternoon I could manage, however. The fact that he’s helping me, taking risks and performing his spook-craft on my behalf, I have to admit, I find arousing. Also, as long as I’m being honest—not with him, not entirely, but here, with you—I want to do everything I can to keep him invested. Once a Bond girl, always. “But they’re not expecting me until dinnertime. I’m going to MoMA, but I could come to your hotel afterward, at three?”

“Yes. What’s in Miami?”

“The special G-20 summit.”

He grins at what he thinks is the contradiction at hand—young anti-Establishment militant turned powerbrokering grande dame, from fanatical would-be destroyer of the system to fancy-pants overseer of the system.

“I’m not
attending.
I’m babysitting my granddaughter and her friends. Who are going down to rage against the machine and strike a blow for equality and justice.”

“Seriously?”

“And going down with them, if you can believe it,” I say, “by
bus.
” I think this is what Waverly calls a humblebrag.

“Don’t be in the vicinity when they start smashing windows on Collins Avenue. It’s an NSSE.”

I know “NSSE” means “national special security event,” because I was at Justice when they were invented to coordinate FBI and Secret Service and police deployments around State of the Union addresses, inaugurations, political conventions—and, starting a few years ago, the Oscars.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I plan on mostly getting massages.”

“But seriously—I mean, especially given this book, you’ve got to watch your step. As of the first of March, there were eleven thousand new CATV cameras installed on every spare square inch of downtown Miami and Miami Beach. Totally swarmed. The undercovers will probably outnumber Waverly and her friends.”

“You remember her
name
? You’re amazing.” I stand.

“The first night you stayed overnight at my shithole was her first birthday. Hey—I think you forgot something.” He nods at an unmarked envelope on the table that he’s tucked between the salt and pepper shakers. I hadn’t noticed it before.

“Oh, right!” I pick it up. “Thanks!” I’m a terrible actor.

18

Once I was sixteen, I could suddenly see the world and all its machinations clearly. The code had been broken. Everything (with the sole exception of Chuck Levy’s tragic lack of romantic interest in me) became obviously and completely understandable. At eight I discovered that Santa Claus didn’t exist; at eleven, I learned that companies paid my father to do research to prove whatever they wanted to prove; and at thirteen, I stopped believing in the Roman Catholic God. But at sixteen, I became the truth-telling child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” full-time, seeing naked power and crazed vanity everywhere I looked.

Of course
a nation built upon the slaughtered bodies and burned villages and stolen lands of primitive dark-skinned heathens was slaughtering and burning the primitive dark-skinned heathens of Indochina.
Of course
a nation that enslaved Negroes for 350 years still refused to consider them fully human.
Of course
Magnavox and Ford and Mattel brainwashed us to want and buy gewgaws we didn’t need,
of course
the weapons companies and the generals wanted Americans to remain in a perpetual state of fear, and itched to
use
the super-weapons in their arsenals. For the first time in years, I thought of the phrase I’d loved from the Nicene Creed,
all that is, seen and unseen.

“Karen,” my little brother asked confidentially one Saturday night in the spring of 1966 while I was doing homework, “how much do you think each Easter Bunny weighs?”

Peter had recently concluded that there must be not just a single Easter Bunny but hundreds or thousands of them. Easter was the following day. At that moment I had another of my teenage a
ha
revelations about the System. The supernatural myths of American childhood—Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny—were ostensibly for the sake of children’s enchantment. Their real function was habituating
adults
to perpetuate pretty fantasies, to get them comfortable joining a routine conspiracy of fabrication, to make telling the plain truth seem churlish and wrong. Using cute little Peter as a pawn, Easter was all about trying to turn me into a liar and a cynic.

“How come?” I asked him.

“Well, if ours is my size or even smaller, it’d leave footprints on the grass, especially if there’s dew. And if I get out there early enough tomorrow morning, I could track it.”

“You’re very smart, Peter. But to tell you the truth, I’ve never seen the Easter Bunny, so I have no idea of his size.”

“
An
Easter Bunny.
Their
size.”

The next morning, Bach’s Mass in B Minor was playing on the kitchen radio as I stepped out on the porch and lit a cigarette and spotted, one by one, each of the dozen eggs scattered around the back yard. So
obvious.
On his way out to join me, my father turned up the volume on WFMT and, for the first time ever, asked me for a cigarette. Finally, Sabrina and my mother appeared at the back door holding Peter back, like a greyhound in his starting gate, then let him go. We watched, the three of them smiling and shouting encouragement, as he crept and scurried from obvious hiding place to slightly less obvious hiding place—the faucet handle, the lowest oak limb, a swing-set seat—holding each egg up in the air before placing it in the special Easter bucket painted (by me, nine years before) with golden crosses and pink bunnies.

Ten minutes later, he was done, Mom and Sabrina were upstairs getting ready to go to church, Dad was watching Dean Rusk or Robert McNamara or somebody on TV defend the war in Vietnam, and Peter was lining up his eggs on the kitchen table according to their colors while I ate Rice Krispies and read the
Tribune.
“I think,” he said to me, “that they must either hide their tracks somehow, or else they’re weightless. The Easter Bunnies.”