Andersen, Kurt (56 page)

Later on, I asked both the emergency room doctor and the surgeon who’d wired my separated left shoulder back together if I’d said “anything strange.” The ER guy smiled and said yeah, but that was standard, and I shouldn’t worry about it.

“What did I say?”

“Are you a big James Bond fan?”

“When I was a girl.”

“You were shouting, ‘I don’t
have
a license to kill, I don’t
have
a license to kill.’ You made everybody in the ER crack up.”

Is it meaningful that I’ve been “so completely
out
” about the diabetes, as Waverly says, testing my blood and injecting in public, never treating it as an embarrassing secret? Is it my compensation for the giant secret I’ve chosen to keep all this time? Confessing everything but the one great sin? Maybe. (Maybe that’s also why, at law school, I told Hillary Rodham when we met that I recognized her from eight years earlier—that I was the snotty fifteen-year-old who had, with two snotty fifteen-year-old boys, heckled her and her fellow Goldwater canvassers on that fall afternoon in Kenilworth.)

Being female has made it easier to keep my secret. People, even people you’re married to, chalk up moody or anxious days to hormonal tides. No one noticed that every April fifteenth (the day Chuck died), I got very blue. My highly emotional reactions to certain news events have probably made people think I’m more feminine than I am. Like when I was a 1L and Arthur Bremer shot George Wallace. And every second month during the late ‘70s, when Red Brigade or Red Army Faction squads—people who considered 1968 a fantastic beginning rather than a horrifying end—shot or kidnapped or murdered another European politician or businessman, or got or killed or arrested or committed suicide in prison.

I got upset my second year in law school, for instance, when Lyndon Johnson died, almost five years to the day after we decided to kill him. And I got upset in 1977, when Jack and I went to see
Black Sunday
in midtown Manhattan. All I’d known beforehand was that it was a thriller set at a Super Bowl. When I started crying halfway through, Jack asked if I was low and offered to get me a Coke. I was upset because it’s about a deranged former air force pilot who plots with terrorists to kill thousands of people from the Goodyear blimp. “It’s just a stupid
movie,
” Jack said.

We’d moved to New York right after the Bicentennial. Jack had gotten a Guggenheim Fellowship, and I started my job at the Legal Aid Society. My parents were pleased, but everyone else I knew was surprised, completely baffled, since by then I wasn’t at all a bleeding-heart lefty. “Teddy Roosevelt liked Legal Aid,” I said with a smile, “because it kept the poor people from becoming revolutionaries.” To a lot of my classmates and fellow clerks, it looked like the worst of all possible worlds—the low salary of public service, depressing clients and unimportant cases, and not a rung on any ladder to worldly acclaim in the judiciary or academia. I shrugged. “I’ll do it for a few years.”

I was going to do it for exactly five years, because the priest on the other side of the confession box at the church in Evanston had assigned a penance of five years “serving the indigent and afflicted.” I didn’t believe, as he told me, that on Judgment Day I’d go to heaven if I had helped the poor and the imprisoned (or to hell, according to Matthew 25, if I failed to do so). But I did accept Father Whomever’s absolution on that summer day in 1968, so now I had to do as he’d instructed.

Thus I spent three years in the Bronx and two in Manhattan representing unlucky nincompoops and psychopaths, many more of the former than the latter—hookers and three-card-monte dealers and car-antenna breakers, muggers and looters and men who’d beaten or stabbed or shot and sometimes killed their wives or girlfriends or perfect strangers. As a Legal Aid criminal lawyer—”lawrys,” our clients tended to call us—I was mainly a negotiator, persuading people more or less like me to let a client out on a thousand dollars bail instead of fifteen hundred or to knock an E felony down to an A misdemeanor, then persuading people almost nothing like me to agree to the plea bargains I’d negotiated on their behalves.

At the beginning of the Legal Aid job, the details of my clients’ alleged crimes—the handguns found hidden in ovens, the accomplices who ran amok, the fingerprint evidence, and their (indifference to) operational security in general—reminded me of 1968. I decided that was part of my penance, being forced to remember that there but for the grace of God go I. Over time, however, all those thousands of cases, the weapon serial numbers and gram amounts of heroin and wound dimensions and complicated alibis and lies, served to do something like the opposite, overwhelming and obscuring the memories of my own brief life in crime.

Once I became a corporate lawyer, wearing fancy clothes, meeting zillionaires, traveling first class, I experienced a James Bond moment every month or so—benign and imaginary, brief, silent, impromptu one-woman replays of our childhood games. The fictional template always lurked. Maybe, I think now, it was a way of not thinking about Operation Lima Bravo Juliet.

I’d feel Bond-girlish when I drove a European car with a stick shift on a European road, and when I ordered a martini at a revolving restaurant in Tokyo or Cape Town or overlooking Iguazu Falls in Brazil. It happened almost every time I passed through a big new airport, especially in China or the Middle East. If I’m alone in a high-rise hotel room at night in my underwear—dressing for dinner, putting on perfume, half-listening to CNN International—for a few seconds, I become Vesper Lynd or Tatiana Romanova or Gala Brand.

Even though my adolescent immersion in the Bond books has made me freakishly alert to this subtext in glossy, sexy, chilly modern life, I know I’m not alone. The world must be crawling with make-believe secret agents. Every day and night in every city on earth, aging children of both sexes fleetingly and half-consciously enact some version of the fantasy, dazzled by the cosmopolitan sheen, reassured by the platinum and black credit cards and exotically stamped passports and electronic devices in their attachés, hoping to feel tough and adventurous instead of brittle and existentially marooned.

When I was born, before Bond girls (and
Playboy
and the Pill, all invented simultaneously), an unmarried woman who indulged in guiltless sex was pathological, debased, wretched; afterward, she was a standard-issue modern female. The world’s obsession with “brands” is now so unremarkable that it no longer seems like an obsession, but a half century ago, James Bond’s fetishes for obscure brand-name merchandise—Tattinger champagne, Charvet shirts, Beretta pistols, Aston Martins, all of it—were peculiar. After Alex came out in the late 1970s, he told me that Bond’s extreme and snobbish brand loyalty had been one of the traits that made 007 seem, to a twelve-year-old gay boy in Illinois in the early ‘60s, “quasi-queer.”

Have you ever looked at the names of makeup? Chanel has lipstick colors called Intrigue, Secret, Captive, Incognito, Clandestine, and Fatale. Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi and Dick Cheney and Steve Ballmer and Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are all Bond villains. Richard Branson and Tom Ford and Tom Cruise and Donald Trump and Julian Assange (such an Ian Fleming
name
) are Bond villains under the impression that they’re actually Bonds. Valerie Plame Wilson and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and Madonna and Anna Wintour are (well,
were,
in their twenties and thirties) Bond girls.

The annual conclaves of the World’s Most Important People in chic, picturesque mountain resorts—Davos, Sun Valley, Aspen—are preposterously Bondlike. Globalization itself is a James Bond phenomenon. From the last Ian Fleming novel I read,
You Only Live Twice,
I still remember the speech by Tiger Tanaka, the head of Japan’s spy service. “For the time being,” he told Bond, “we are being subjected to what I can best describe as the ‘Scuola di Coca-Cola.’ Baseball, amusement arcades, hot dogs, hideously large bosoms, neon lighting—these are part of our payment for defeat in battle.”

When the call came from the Department of Justice in the spring of 1997, at first I thought it was about an antitrust case that my firm was litigating. The DoJ guy—sounding terribly serious, according to my assistant—said no, “it concerns a private matter,” which he wouldn’t divulge to her. Maybe because the anniversary of Operation Lima Bravo Juliet was upon me, I thought, in a way I hadn’t for twenty years,
This is it, the jig is finally up.
I thought:
Won’t Jack be surprised?
I thought:
I’ve lucked out—I’m forty-seven years old, I’ve got money saved, Greta is about to graduate college, Seth is in high school.
I felt relief mixed with the terror. Before I returned the call, I made sure my best friend in the firm’s criminal defense practice was in town.

Reality did not outrun apprehension. When the call turned out to be about a possible job, I was shocked. A different kind of relief swept over me, and a different kind of terror. Having spent a half hour adjusting to the prospect of being outed, I thought:
What have I got to lose?
And given that a former antiwar activist was president, and bombers and ex-cons who still called themselves radicals were welcomed into the Establishment—the City Club of Chicago had just named Bill Ayers its citizen of the year—what was stopping someone with no criminal record whom a newspaper columnist had once called “practically a Republican”?

A couple of weeks later, I heard from Alex for the first time in years. He’d gotten a phone call from an FBI special agent who was interested in my background and character. Alex made him prove who he was by sending an email from his @fbi.gov domain.

“It’s a government job,” I told Alex. “A big government job.”

“Brilliant! Judge Hollander?”

“Nope. I’m not supposed to tell you. Did you talk to the FBI guy?”

“Absobloodylutely! Gave him the finest arse-licking he’s ever had. He asked, ‘What kind of person is she?’ and I said, ‘She’s a Taurus.’”

“You didn’t.”

“I did, and he laughed. I flirted with a G-man! I said, ‘She’s a totally
great
person.’ I said that in the forty years I’ve known you, I’ve never met a smarter, better, tougher, more honest American. He asked if you’re a drunk or a druggy or a racist or a spendthrift, and I said no, you quit smoking and you’re cheap. He asked if I, quote, ‘have any reason to believe Ms. Hollander is disloyal to the United States government.’ I said, ‘Agent Reiss, she’s as all-American and patriotic as New Yorkers
get.
’ I said, ‘She voted for Rudolph Giuliani for mayor—
twice.
’ And then he asked if there’s anything in your, quote, ‘past or background that could be used to pressure or compromise’ you. It was like an actor reading lines from a script!”

“And you said …”

“I said, ‘I can’t
imagine.
’”

A few weeks later, amazingly, they offered me the job, and amazingly, I accepted. Later, I learned from a guy in the White House that I’d “shown up on the radar” because of my work on the Czech constitution. I was hired, he said, because I was “a woman with liberal cred from Legal Aid and intellectual cred from teaching at Yale, but with the hardball big-money corporate-litigator experience and no big liberal political record to upset the Republicans” during Clinton’s second term. “We didn’t want a lefty.”

And so in the summer of 1997, I started living alone in an apartment in Washington four nights a week. I wouldn’t have accepted the position if any of my responsibilities had been on the right-hand side of Justice Department org chart—that is, if I’d been asked to oversee the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals, the U.S. attorneys, and the federal prisons. I had almost nothing to do with enforcing laws against criminals. The prosecutions of the 1993 World Trade Center truck bombers and Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski were entirely outside my bailiwick.

My Washington service, naturally, was thick with Bond moments. One morning I rode in a government Town Car past the exit for CIA headquarters to the (Bondish) Dulles Airport, flew into the (super-Bondish) TWA terminal at JFK, and then from New York on to China. Two days later, I fired an AK-47 at a Chinese government shooting range; put my bare feet into a pedicurist’s glass tank to let hundreds of teeny carp nibble the dead skin off my toes; and, in a hotel shop, saw a brand of condoms called Jissbon. When I asked if Jissbon was derived from “jizz,” a word my translator didn’t know, she said no, it’s short for
Jieshi Bang,
the Chinese transliteration of James Bond.

During my single personal moment with President Clinton, at the 1997 White House Christmas party, I told him we’d briefly met once before, at Yale, when he was twenty-six and I was twenty-three, the day our constitutional law professor posed the hypothetical about FBI infiltrators of radical groups and I hyperventilated. A year later, as Clinton was lying about his adultery in the Oval Office and losing his fight against impeachment, I met Stewart and embarked on my only extramarital affair (if we exclude from our definition of “affair” making out one time in a Manhattan law firm conference room at three
A.M.
in 1989). I was forty-nine and Stewart was forty-three, but that flattering fact was incidental to the deeper satisfactions that I’d denied myself for so long.

“Wow,” Sarah said to me a few months after I met Stewart, “government work agrees with you!”

I’d lost fourteen pounds and changed my hair color, neither of which Jack seemed to notice. I was smiling more. People actually said I looked “radiant.” I knew I was living a cliché, but I didn’t mind. And I was living a lie, but at that I’d had thirty years’ practice. My risk-management skills were good. I’d been successfully background-checked by the FBI. I was working for the Department of Justice. Having an affair didn’t seem as scary to me as it might to other married women. It ended—went “on hiatus,” as Stewart said at the time—in 2001, when I returned to private practice and teaching and he was about to be posted overseas.