Andersen, Kurt (48 page)

“Okay,
yes,
” Alex said, “this thing has gone
completely
pear-shaped. But he’ll spend a day or two sulking alone and figure out what makes sense and get a grip. Flying the Dauntless by himself and then getting away? I don’t think so. I mean, Karen, come on, Chuck isn’t a
nutter.
”

“He’s got the explosive. He’s got the gun. It sounds like he may not be thinking about getting away. Remember, at the beginning, he was the one who said, ‘We could do it close up.’”

“Yeah, but we were brainstorming. He didn’t want to go kamikaze. Remember? We quoted Churchill, and he agreed.”

The Churchill quote had come up when we were hatching the plan—Buzzy had said “ ‘Although always prepared for martyrdom,’” and Alex finished the sentence with him: “‘ I prefer that it should be postponed.’”

“That was two months ago,” I said. “A lot’s happened since then. Once we made the putty and bought the pistols—”

“
They
bought the pistols.”

“—I think Chuck sort of started, you know, tripping on violence.”

“Ours is now
gone,
by the way, the pistol,” Alex said, “along with the bullets. Down a sewer.”

“He used to play with the Luger sometimes, he’d look at himself in the mirror holding it. And one night a month ago, he asked if I’d ever believed in an afterlife, and when I said yeah, until I was eleven I thought I was going to heaven, he told me he’d never believed any of it—that Jews don’t. I said, ‘Another reason to like Jewish people. They’re rational.’ He said his dad says that’s why Jews are so neurotic, because they know
this, life,
is
it.
‘No do-overs.’ But Chuck said now he realized the flip side of that—he said, ‘I don’t have to worry about dying because I don’t have to worry about going to hell.’”

“He’ll ring. We can talk him off the ledge. Take a deep breath. Sit down.”

I took a breath, and then another, and we sat on a bench. “Buzzy told him we slept together. Buzzy and I. We did. We are. We have been.”

“
What?
Oh my
God,
Hollaender! I
knew
it. I mean, I didn’t actually know it, but I’m not surprised.” With the slightest smile, he leaned back and looked me over and shook his head, not so much in disapproval, I thought, but interestedly, maybe enviously. “Very déjà vu, Hollaender.”

I had no idea what he meant.

“ ‘Oh, my
goodness,
’” he cooed in a high-pitched voice meant to be mine, “ ‘what can you
possibly
be talking about?’
Last
spring, when you and Chuck started your shagging and kept it secret from me. Now I get why he’s so freaked out. He feels betrayed. By you two.”

I wanted to curse Alex, slap him. But he was right. So I resorted to the tactic we, especially he, used when we were little—
I know you are, but what am I?
“Keeping secrets from your best friends, huh? Secret sex, huh? Like you and your secret rendezvous, your ‘friend’ in Yugoslavia and your ‘friend’ in Switzerland and calling your teacher and ‘window-shopping’ this morning. Give me a break.”

“No—you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.
No
idea.”

I already regretted my bitch gambit. Alex’s private life was none of my business. And arguing about sex and lies was a stupid digression. We had to figure out some way to stop Chuck from killing people and destroying himself and wrecking our lives.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe I should drink a pop.”

He bought me a Coke from a hot-dog cart, and after a few minutes I felt better, my anger gone, my panic and regret still intense but proportionate, no longer spiraling down into some hypoglycemic pit. I cried, and Alex got me a napkin so I could blow my nose.

We talked about going to the authorities, turning Chuck in, but apart from the ethics of squealing, the chances of that ending badly seemed high. Besides, then we would be implicated.

Alex said Chuck was not the sort to try to kill us—which hadn’t even occurred to me—because if he did make some final grand gesture, he would want us to feel one-upped and admiring and guilty, to understand that he was nobler and braver than any of us, a bold maker of history.

Surely he would call or just drive back to Cambridge alone, and when he heard our voices and felt my love, we could, Alex said and I hopefully half-believed, reel him back in. Except, I didn’t say, I wasn’t sure I still loved him, and maybe he would hear and see and feel
that,
and then what?

“Come on,” he said, “it’s just
Chuck.
”

We walked down Sixth Avenue, and Alex said he was going to the Dada show now, but I begged off. As I zigzagged west and south into Times Square toward our hotel, I wasn’t certain I was going to stop at a pay phone until I did.

As I dialed Washington directory assistance, and then after I asked for the number and waited for the operator to come back, I kept my index finger—”your trigger finger,” Buzzy had called it a month ago—on the phone lever, ready to end the call.

As I was dialing the eleven digits and even after I deposited my quarters, I thought I might hang up and keep walking. I thought so even after the switchboard operator answered and started putting me through.

But when the second voice came on the line—”Good afternoon, United States Secret Service, Special Agent Hardison, how can I help you?”—I did not hang up.

27

I know I’ve reached the practical end of my working day because I’m checking email every ten minutes, and I just spent an hour Googling the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by the heroic Levy family friends of friends. The assassination so upset Hitler, I learned, that the Nazis immediately murdered a thousand Czech civilians in retribution, and named the extermination-camp phase of the final solution in his honor, “Aktion Reinhardt.” Which makes me think of all the conversations Chuck and I had about unintended consequences.

I check my email again and see a new one, from the FBI. Did I give them my email address when I submitted my Freedom of Information request?

It’s from the Anti-Terrorist and Monetary Crimes Division, J. Edgar Hoover Building, 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

Oh, Jesus.

You have just 72 hours to prove to us you are not a terrorist. Failure to comply with our instruction, you will be arrested and detained until this matter is settled.

Fortunately, the second paragraph informs me that
the sum of $10.5 million United States dollars were transferred to the Bank of America here in the United States, bearing your name as the beneficiary, from the Central Bank of Nigeria.

Ah, Nigeria.

We did not believe this at first until we saw the transfer. Note that we have done a proper investigation on this transaction and from our investigation, this funds truly belongs to you and it is not a scam, but we have instructed the Bank of America not to release the $10.5 million to you until you prove the legitimacy of the funds you are about to receive.

We have your full contact address, which makes it easier for us to arrest you when ever we want to. As a matter of fact, you will be charged for money laundering as well as terrorism if you fail to prove to us that you are not a terrorist or a money launderer by obtaining the above mentioned certificate from the funds originated country, and if you are found guilty as charged, you will go to jail. Therefore you have been advised to get back to us immediately you receive this email or you will be arrested by the FBI. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Appealing to fear as well as greed seems like a brilliant scam-email innovation. However, you’d think that among the eight million people in Lagos, they could find an editor who might nudge the language of their fiction closer to plausibility. Good concept, but execution is everything.

Waverly calls. She’s finished reading the previous chapter. “Were you really willing to go to jail or die?”

“It’s hard to know for sure. It’s hard to remember exactly what you were thinking so many years ago, at that age, in those strange times. But yeah, I think I thought I was willing.”

“Did you
want
to die? Was it like a suicidal feeling?”

“No.” I think for a second. “Although the line between a willingness to sacrifice yourself and a desire to do so can get pretty thin.”

“But you really would’ve gone through with it if he hadn’t stepped down, the president?”

“Again, I can’t be absolutely sure. I think yes. Although since the CIA apparently knew what we were up to, thanks to Alex, I’m sure they would’ve come in or told the Secret Service to pick us up.”

“Sophie thinks somebody in Miami snitched on her, told the cops about her fake dynamite. She thinks maybe it was that Dartmouth kid she hooked up with.”

Sitting alone on my patio this Friday of Memorial Day weekend, relishing the L.A. weather, reading the new paperback of Daniel Moynihan’s correspondence, I marvel at how wise and grown up Moynihan was, how he managed to take the long view in the late 1960s when almost nobody else did, to see each frantic flibbertigibbet twist and turn as a curious moment in the continuum of history. And I think of that rainy night in the fall of 1967 when a high-strung Radcliffe freshman made the forty-year-old professor smile, almost, in the Kirkland House junior common room by suggesting that Lyndon Johnson shouldn’t be allowed to campaign for reelection. “In a sense,” I read now in Moynihan’s memo to President-elect Richard Nixon from January 1969, Johnson “was the first American President to be toppled by a mob. No matter that it was a mob of college professors, millionaires, flower children, and Radcliffe girls.” I don’t smile, but I sigh and sip my seltzer. I sigh a lot these days.

Buzzy did not leave a suicide note because, as
The
Washington Post
definitively reported today, he had staged his death to look like an assassination by an al Qaeda killer. When he was in Chicago giving a speech in April—six weeks after I told him about this book—he had paid a Yemeni taxi driver twenty dollars to write
SERVING
JUSTICE
TO
THE
ZIONIST
REGIME
AND
HER
WASHINGTON
MASTERS
in Arabic on the back of a menu from a hookah bar. The evening of his death, with Mrs. Freeman in Maryland on a Presbyterian overnight retreat, he used a brand-new Home Depot crowbar to jimmy open the locked front door of his house, went on his regular evening jog through the park, stopped at a reservoir and tossed in the crowbar, returned home, stuck the fake jihadist message with a letter opener to the wood paneling in his den, sat down in his desk chair, tied his hands and ankles with Home Depot bungee cord, and pulled the pin from a Swiss-made hand grenade. The authorities believe he acquired the grenade during a visit to El Paso. “Although Freeman had grown increasingly alarmed about what he termed ‘the free world’s delegitimization and betrayal of Israel,’” according to the article, “family members and colleagues said he was proud of the book he had recently completed, and that they know of no illness or other motive for suicide.”

His death saddens me—the fact of it, the blame I bear for it, his deception, the failure of his deception. And I feel horrible that I feel fortunate that he left no suicide note. His deceit has made my life more convenient. He hasn’t broken the embargo on my book before it’s finished.

The
Post
’s headline calls the suicide a “mystery,” as do two people quoted in the article, a former senior administration official friendly with Freeman and Buzzy’s head of PR. “‘God only knows why he took his life,’ said the spokesperson for Freeman’s Civilization Group, ‘and that mystery will be an unknowable mystery forever. But the legacy of Buzzy’s heroic lifetime of work on behalf of freedom and justice remain unambiguous and untarnished for all time.’”

There’s a wishful null set for you:
legacy … unambiguous and untarnished for all time.

I know why he killed himself. He didn’t want to be around when the world learns that, as a young man, he instigated a conspiracy to assassinate the president of the United States.

There are nevertheless at least two small unknowable mysteries. Buzzy’s faux-martyrdom was driven by vanity and politics and maybe kindness toward his family, yet I wonder if he also thought that by making it look like murder instead of suicide, he was doing me one last favor, trying to prevent me from feeling responsible for his death. I also wonder if he instructed his Arab scrivener to write “her” instead of “its” as a bit of faked illiteracy, to make it seem more authentic.

“You got to hand it to him. Going to all the trouble of acquiring a late-model HG 85 from a Mexican narco instead of just picking up some army-surplus Vietnam-era piece of shit at a gun show in Virginia. For an amateur, that’s an admirable commitment to tradecraft.”

“Hello, Stewart.”

He has called my third disposable cellphone for the first time. I’d found it hard to throw the perfectly good ones in the trash, although that’s what you’re supposed to do with burners. I play by the rules. I assume correctly that Stewart is praising Buzzy’s choice of hand grenade.

“If the broad at Dalecarlia Reservoir,” he continues, “hadn’t seen him toss the crowbar, I think he would’ve gotten away with it, gone down as the first victim of homeland terrorism in 2014. And don’t you love
why
she called the cops?”

“Stewart, I am really not into joking around about Buzzy Freeman’s suicide.”

“I know, I know, but seriously—because she saw him praying and he had a beard, she thought he was an Islamic terrorist tossing poison into D.C.’s water supply? I mean, whoa, you really can’t make that shit up. Oh, and speaking of calling a suicide a homicide, another thing? That nobody’s mentioned?”

“Stop. Come on. Please.”

“Remember right after 9/11, when FOX News and the White House tried to get everyone to call suicide bombers ‘
homicide
bombers’? You know whose bright idea and personal mission that was? Your boy Buzzy.”