The Company You Keep (54 page)

Want to know what happened? Benny—the open book—told me all about it. It was pretty brilliant, I guess. In its way. What happened was that when all the emotion had settled down, and everyone was sitting around at the kitchen table, John Osborne suggested something. He suggested that now that my father was cleared, there was no necessity now to reveal publicly the fact of who Rebeccah’s birth parents were. No one had a lot of objection to that. But when, right after that, he suggested that another part of my father’s story be kept secret, that was another matter altogether.

What Osborne suggested here, it turned out, was to have an enormous effect on the rest of my life. Sitting at the kitchen table with the core members of what I would later come to know as the Committee, Johnny Osborne looked around the table with a slightly sheepish expression. Benny thought, at first, that it was just the discomfort of having Rebeccah’s birth father there in the same room. But, of course, there was much more to his sheepishness than that. Because, what he said, after getting the table’s attention was as follows:

“You know, guys, there’s something else we maybe want to keep secret. That is…well, you know, Jason, now that you’re not under any criminal charges, there’s no way Senator Montgomery’s going to sue you for custody.”

“No, of course not.” Benny, had already worked this part out for himself. “You’ve got him by the short hairs, Mr. Gran—Jason. That old bastard. He was never planning on suing you. He was blackmailing you.”

My father nodded. “Um-hmm. He’s all mine now. I tell a reporter how he knew, all during his senatorship, that I was Jason Sinai. And how he consistently used his influence to keep his daughter, who made Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin look like Mormons, out of court. Then tried to take custody of my daughter? Yeah, right. So much for his ambassadorship at the Court of St. James, I’m guessing.”

“And I know just the reporter to write it,” Benny says. Except, to his surprise, that comment is greeted with silence. And then, John Osborne, in this agreeable voice, like he was talking to a child, speaks.

“Well, that would be one way to go.”

It appeared there was also another way to handle it. And that was the
subject of a pretty detailed analysis over the next half hour. And when they were done, Ben pursed his lips and whistled.

“Yikes. That’s not legal.”

“Nope. Nor is it fit to print.” Both Osborne and my father regarded their future son-in-law as if wondering what he would do.

But Ben didn’t need convincing. I can hear him saying it.
Truth or love? Fuck truth.
So he never wrote the story of Rebeccah Osborne’s abandonment and adoption. And he never wrote the story of my grandfather’s deceptions concerning my father and mother. And he never wrote the story of my mother’s drug and alcohol addiction.

See, what John Osborne and my father understood, the one from all his years in the FBI and the other from all his years as a fugitive, was that keeping a secret, you don’t necessarily have to have an actual reason to do it for the secret to have power. They understood that the very act of keeping a fact secret gives you options that you may never have had otherwise. In a way, what they did, that day, was metaphysical.

On the other hand, it was intensely practical. Because, by 2006, when Mimi Lurie came up for parole, Rebeccah Osborne had finished law school, and finished her FBI training, and to no one’s surprise, had her own office in the Federal Building on Duane Street. She had been at the 2004 presidential inaugural, and sat on the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Staff. And therefore, when in the late winter of 2006 Beck requested an interview with the office of the senator from the great state of New York, she got onto the schedule of the chief of staff—a certain Michael Rafferty—the very same day.

To Rafferty’s surprise, Rebeccah Osborne was there to discuss the impending parole hearing of one Mimi Lurie in the state of Michigan, a parole hearing that raised key issues of punishment and rehabilitation, of the scars of Vietnam and the imperative to forgive. It was an impressive presentation, and Rafferty listened. He listened to the circumstances of Mimi Lurie’s minor accessory role in a crime, to the story of Mimi Lurie’s life—a fiction, admittedly, given that Beck did not tell the senator’s chief of staff that Lurie had been one of the most successful marijuana smugglers in history—and to the litany of wonderful things she had done with her ten years in jail. He listened and considered and reviewed the file Rebeccah Osborne had brought about this case that
she felt so strongly about. And all the while he listened, he wondered what on earth Rebeccah Osborne thought could convince the senator to go to bat for a woman widely seen as a domestic terrorist.

And then Rebeccah, to Rafferty’s surprise, changed the subject entirely. “Mr. Rafferty, I understand that Ambassador Montgomery is endorsing Todd Shawcross for the senator’s seat in the midterm elections.”

He stopped short. “That’s right. What of it?”

“He has an awful lot of clout in New York State, the ambassador. An awful lot. I heard that he handpicked the senator for the job, and now he’s going to handpick her successor. What was it those two disagreed about, again? Wasn’t it when he kept the senator off of the Foreign Relations Committee because she refused to support the invasion of Iraq?”

Well, Mikey was not used to being talked to in this way, even by his old boss’s daughter, and he was about to dismiss Rebeccah when his own political aide intervened, and suggested he continue to listen. At which point, still speaking in her quiet, polite voice, Rebeccah went on.

“Mike, here’s the thing. Do you remember Ambassador Montgomery’s press conference at the time of Jason Sinai’s arrest? How he expressed shock and regret that all these years he’d been harboring a criminal in his house and his heart? And his regret that his ex-son-in-law couldn’t be legally held accountable for his moral responsibility for a heinous crime? And his satisfaction that, at least, Mimi Lurie was to serve the maximum time for what she had done?”

As was the case when this kind of horse-trading took place and plausible deniability became possible, it was Rafferty’s aide who answered. “Mr. Rafferty remembers, Ms. Osborne. Make your point, please.”

But my sister, she was not subdued by this. After all, she’d testified before Congress and spoken to presidents by this point in her career. So what she did was, she went on in the same tone.

“Well, tell me this. What would you think if I told you that I have proof that Ambassador Montgomery knew, and concealed the knowledge, all through his three terms as U.S. senator, that his son-in-law James Grant was in fact the federal fugitive Jason Sinai? And that, furthermore, all through those three terms, he also interceded multiple times with the New York State police and court system to protect his
daughter from criminal charges stemming from her drug and alcohol addiction? Do you think that this might change the terms of the midterm elections a little bit?”

Silence greeted this statement, Mikey standing by his desk and staring at the young FBI agent before him. And again it was, in the end, his aide who—with a constant and loyal eye to plausible deniability—answered.

“Ms. Osborne, no one’s going to listen to that, coming from Jason Sinai.”

“No, I agree.” In the same exact voice, Rebeccah addressed Rafferty, pretending the aide was not there. “How about coming from the ambassador’s granddaughter? In sworn testimony? At Mimi Lurie’s parole hearing?”

Rebeccah says she could hear the water splashing in the fountain outside the Hart Building, so silent did it become. And the silence lasted so long that she began to talk again.

“The way I see it, it’s pretty effective. Isabel Montgomery, testifying on behalf of Mimi Lurie, describes how Mimi’s surrender saved her from being raised by her mother, a deeply addicted and incompetent person, and her grandfather, who had repeatedly, over years, abused the privilege of his office and concealed knowledge of a federal fugitive’s identity.”

“The ambassador will go to jail, Ms. Osborne.” At last Mike said something, and at that point, my sister told me, she knew her work was done.

“Not at all. The statute of limitation’s run out. And there’s no charges on Sinai for the ambassador to be accessory to. But he won’t be serving as kingmaker in New York State anymore, that’s for sure.”

“And what is it you require, Ms. Osborne?”

“The senator’s personal appearance on Mimi Lurie’s behalf at the parole hearing, and a supporting letter from the president. The president, Mikey, is no fan of Ambassador Montgomery either.”

See? It was easy. And all that they needed to do now, the Committee, was find a way to make good on their promise.

To get, in other words, Ambassador Montgomery’s granddaughter—me—to
agree to expose her own mother as a former drug addict and then, if that weren’t enough, to ruin her grandfather’s long and distinguished political career.

And so it was that June of 2006, in my room at Exminster, I spent two long weeks reading a series of e-mails designed to explain to me who my father was, and who Mimi Lurie was, and why, thirty years after the war in Vietnam was over, it should matter to me whether or not she goes free.

Matter so much that I would sacrifice two of the most loved people in my life.

On Sunday morning, June 25, 2006, I turned away from my computer and lit a cigarette, leaning out the window into the wet spring dawn.

I was a slight girl, at seventeen, brown-haired and brown-eyed, a pierced eyebrow and ear, a penchant for black clothes, lightweight materials. No one ever expected me to look the way I did, the dark daughter of ash-blond Julia Montgomery, the slight granddaughter of towering Robert Montgomery. There were other ways I seemed to defy genetics. And there were other ways I didn’t deny them at all.

That morning, I called home and told my mother I was coming up for the rest of the day. Did she believe me? I don’t know. I don’t even know what she wanted me to do. I can tell you that in her voice, that day, there was a distant and wistful quality. And I can tell you that she said to me, before we hung up, the following, apropos of absolutely nothing I had said.

“Hey, baby? Listen, remember something. I take heat in the tabloids every week. You saw what they did to me when they got those topless pics at Brian’s place in Saltaire? Didn’t kill me, now, did it? You felt you had to do something public now, well, all this must pass, or some such thing, right, darling? You know how I love you.”

I wasn’t feeling too hot just then, but what I said was, “I know, Mom. But what about Granddad?”

“Granddad’s made his own choices, darling.” There was forced cheer in her voice. But remember, Mom, in her way, is from the sixties too. “He’s had half the world in his pocket for half a century, hasn’t he? That old bastard, he eats stuff like this for breakfast. What you have to worry about as far as Granddad’s concerned, it’s his bloody security personnel,
you hear me? You got to find a way round the bodyguards he has on you, and Izzy, your Momma’s no use to you whatsoever on this front.”

See why I love my mom? But I, I knew what it would do to Granddad, though, and I knew what it would cost her, too. I guess I knew that somehow Granddad would weasel his way back into the corridors of power, someday. But what he was really after, at this point in his career, was not a job as much as a place in history and that, for sure, I was denying him now. It was a massive fucking enormous and
huge
drag, for the both of them, and that their daughter and granddaughter, respectively, was going to do it, it made it that much worse.

I packed an overnight bag, a very small backpack, and threw in my palmtop.

3.

The day was wet, a warm British spring day, the sky as if dissolving moisture onto the lawns and hedges. I took a taxi to the airport, then the commuter to Bournemouth, a long hop cross-country. Bournemouth, an international hub, was busy even this Sunday morning, whereas the local airport had been deserted, the ticket taker drinking tea in the waiting room. Our local airport, however, had made it easy to see Granddad’s security. Here, in Bournemouth, I could not know who was watching. I knew, however, that the plane the Committee had booked me on—the plane to Michigan—left from the south Terminal. And because they had e-mailed the ticket, I knew that my grandfather’s security teams knew too. Therefore, I walked up through the big glass corridor to North Terminal and took the London commuter.

We got in at Islington at eleven, and I stepped off the plane, through the airport, and directly into the Angel tube stop. I took the train one stop to King’s Cross, and then changed one more stop for Russell Square.

I didn’t care if I was being followed when I came out and walked over to a tiny little street off Gordon Street called Gower Court. Stores were open, though most of the folk out today seemed to be tourists—tourists never stop in London. I didn’t pay much attention to the stores,
though. I checked my A to Zed on my palmtop, and I made my way to number 2, Gower Court.

See, I’m no idiot. I don’t go leaping on airplanes using tickets e-mailed to me when my granddad, the American ambassador, doesn’t want me to and has a government-paid security detail to help him. You don’t
do
things like that when people like my grandfather don’t want you to. No, I had a whole other plan.

Years ago, when I first came here, my father had given me this address, 2 Gower Court. He told me that some day I might need some help with some little thing, and maybe my mother wouldn’t be able to give it me. And he told me what I was to do if such a need arose.

Now, when I walked into a little office in the top of a Victorian town house at 2 Gower Court, I found myself, for a moment, in an empty reception room, with a black leather couch and, on the wall, a number of miniature city landscapes that I recognized—because my grandfather owned two—to be Horowitzes, and a massive abstract frame, floor-to-ceiling height, which I recognized—because my mother owned one—to be a James Nares. I waited in the company of these canvases for a time until at last a person came out: a blond woman in slacks and a beige silk shirt, perhaps thirty. She stopped short when she saw me and gazed with frank interest, then amusement. And at last, in a low, American-accented voice, she spoke.