The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up (13 page)

“You wouldn’t?”

“No, I wouldn’t. But you have to go.”

This wasn’t going according to plan. It hadn’t crossed Arnold’s mind the girl might actually turn him down, but she sounded sincere.

“I was one hundred percent in the wrong about the interview,” he said. “I promise I’ll make it up to you. Why don’t we do another interview?”

“And like what am I supposed to do with it? If I print it, I’m basically admitting I’ve been talking to the most wanted fugitive in the country. I’m not looking to be the next Judith Mitchell.”

“They let her out eventually.”

“Because she was really on their side. Screwing over Valerie Plame is not the same thing as screwing over God and apple pie.”

“You can print it as soon as I leave. You can say you interviewed me last week. You
were
at my office….You even have witnesses.”

The girl appeared genuinely torn—not nearly as enthusiastic as he expected. Her thick eyebrows came together in absorbed reflection. Then she stood up suddenly, crossed over to the bureau and retrieved a tape recorder from the upper drawer. “Fine, you can stay,” she said. “But a couple of days, tops. So don’t get too comfortable.”

“Deal,” he agreed.

“And we do the interview right now,” she added. “I’m not trusting you and any farther than I can kick you.”

“Throw you. The expression is ‘farther than I can throw you.’”

“Fuck off. You say things your way and I say things my way. It’s called evolution.”

Arnold had been wandering the city all day wearing a hot rubber mask. He was thirsty. His calves ached. His hair felt heavy and matted. The last thing he wanted at the moment was an argument about linguistics. Or almost the last thing. The only thing he wanted less was a grilling on complex political issues.

“Can I at least take a shower—?”

“Now,” snapped Cassandra. “Before you screw me over again.”

“Once bitten, twice shy,” mused Arnold.

“I don’t let myself get bitten,” retorted the girl. “And I’m never shy.”

“I didn’t mean anything….” he said—but it wasn’t worth apologizing.

She lit a clove cigarette and made room for him on the futon. “Have a seat,” she said, patting the mattress. “I don’t get bitten, but I also don’t bite.”

“How about the dog?” asked Arnold.

“Son of a President? She only bites when I tell her to,” answered the girl.

“How reassuring,” he muttered—but he settled hesitantly onto the corner of the bed.

Cassandra poked her head into a mini-fridge in the corner. “You want a beer before we start?”

“No thanks. I put my foot in my mouth enough when I’m sober.”

“Suit yourself.”

She returned to the futon with one beer and took a swig. Then she turned over the cassette and pressed the record button.

“Interview with Arnold Brinkman. Monday, May 21,” the girl said into the machine. It was actually Friday, May 25. “So, Mr. Brinkman,” she continued, “Can you tell me how this all came about? Was it something you’d been planning for a long time or was it a spontaneous protest?”

Arnold took a deep breath. “I’d been planning it for a long time,” he said. “I’ve been terribly disturbed by the events of the last four years….of American’s increasingly bullying role on the world stage…and this was my way of showing my opposition.” Total bullshit—but exactly what the readers of the
Daily Vanguard
wanted to hear. Not a word about the Scottsboro Boys or Sacco & Vanzetti. “I’m a bit surprised at how much publicity I’ve inspired. Surprised, but also pleased. It’s because I love America—with all of my heart—that it pains me to see her drift so far astray.”

The girl grinned. She flashed him a thumbs-up. “So
the war must have been a major motivating factor for you?”

“How couldn’t it be?” answered Arnold. “I have such deep respect and admiration for our boys—and girls—in uniform. But the flag no longer belongs to ordinary patriotic citizens like them. It’s being held hostage by the military-industrial complex, by Big Oil, by a right-wing conspiracy of greed. That’s why I wouldn’t stand up—not to dishonour the flag, but to honour the principles it stands for.”

He mouthed the word “bullshit” at Cassandra. She glared back at him.

“And how does your wife feel about your one-man protest?”

Arnold squeezed and un-squeezed his fist, letting the knuckles crack. “Judith is a very independent-minded woman,” he said. “So I’m very reluctant to speak for her…. But I do know that she’s also deeply troubled by the gross injustices perpetrated in the name of the American flag.”

“Injustices,” prodded Cassandra. “Would you say atrocities?”

“Sure,” agreed Arnold. “Atrocities. Carnage. Mayhem. You can trace it all back to the massacre of the Native Americans.”

The girl pounded her fist on the railing of the futon.

“I’m just saying….”

“—That the United States is currently committing atrocities abroad.”

Arnold cupped his fist in his palm. “Yeah. I guess I’m saying that.”

“Good,” answered Cassandra. She shut off the machine. “You pass.”

“With flying colours?”

“In a manner of speaking. I wish I could ask you about that manager of yours, but then they’d know I did the interview after his arrest.”

“What arrest?”

“The feds finally caught up with him.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You really don’t know, do you? That office manager of yours. Sambarino—?

“Zambrano. Willie Zambrano.”

“That’s him. Well he’s actually Willie Vargas. As in: Willie Vargas, Castro’s man in Caracas. He blew up a Peruvian jetliner in the early 60s.”

“Who told you that?”

“Nobody fucking
told
me. I heard it on the radio on the way home.”

“Willie? Apolitical Willie?”

The girl took another swig of beer. “I can’t tell if you really didn’t know or if you’re snowing me. But in any case, it’s amazing what secrets people have. Right now, we’re doing a story on a big name conservative politico—I can’t tell you his name—who has a second family living in Florida. I mean children, grandchildren. He’s even served
on the P.T.A. down there a number of years ago. His wife in New York doesn’t have a fucking clue.”

“But you’re going to do her a favour and tell her.”

Cassandra shrugged. “We just report the news. We don’t
make
the news.” She hoisted her bare feet onto the bed and settled into the lotus position. “Everybody’s pretty screwed up, when you get right down to it. You can live with someone your entire life and not know the first thing about him.”

“I can’t believe this. Willie doesn’t have a political bone in his body. He doesn’t even vote.”

“Maybe he reformed,” answered Cassandra. “Not that it will do him much good now. He’ll probably face a firing squad in Peru.”

“You think?”

“This administration’s taken such a tough line on terrorism, they don’t exactly have much wiggle room. If he’s lucky, he may get a straw pallet next to Lori Berenson. In my humble opinion, he’s probably better off being shot.” The girl set her empty beer bottle on the window sill. She retrieved another pair of beers from the refrigerator and passed one to Arnold. “I’m sure he’s glad you generated all this publicity for him. If not for your tongue antics, they’d never have caught him.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“I’ve got to hand it to you, Mr. Foot-in-your-Mother,” said the girl. “It’s starting to look like a conspiracy.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t think it strikes anyone as a bit weird that a wanted terrorist has been employing another wanted terrorist for the last thirty years….I bet they’ll sock you with a conspiracy charge too.”

“Shit,” said Arnold. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

“You’re not good luck, are you?” asked the girl. “But you
are
famous. The Bare-Ass bandit abducted two federal judges this afternoon and ran off with their robes, but not before making them sing
We are teapots, short and stout
stark-naked in a five-star restaurant, and you’re still the lead story on the news. Or you and Willie and the rest of your henchmen.”

“I’m starting to feel like Job,” said Arnold.

“You’re starting to look like Job too,” said the girl. “You might want to think about shaving. And, for what it’s worth, you stink.”

“Thanks. Anything else?”

The girl took one of the pillows from the futon and handed it to him. “You sleep on the floor,” she said. “You also
wake up
on the floor.”

“I wake up on the floor,” he repeated.

It hadn’t crossed his mind that he would wake up anywhere else. But something in her tone of voice suggested that
she
had been debating other possibilities, so much so that he kept waiting for her to add the words: “For now.” She didn’t. Instead, she took a shower while Arnold
listened to the news on the radio. The media was indeed speculating that he’d conspired to cover up Willie’s past. They’d raised the bounty on his head to $125,000. That meant he was worth two school teachers, five convenience store clerks. As a fugitive, this terrified him. As a taxpayer, it raised his gall. Who in hell’s name would pay that kind of money to apprehend an unpatriotic botanist? He turned off the radio and tried to find a comfortable position on the floor. In the morning, after she’d gone to work, he’d shower and shave at his leisure.

When Cassandra emerged from the bathroom, she was wearing only an apricot towel. A second towel was wrapped around her hair. Arnold tried to keep his gaze off her bare, dripping thighs. This was particularly difficult as she rose on her toes to pull shut the heavy curtains, letting the towel inch up her body.

“It’s good for your back,” she said.

“What is?”

“Sleeping on the floor.”

Arnold grunted. By that logic, he might as well sleep on a bed of nails—they’d be good for his character. He looked up at the dog, still perched on the futon. The animal glowered at him as though preparing to pounce.

“He’s not going to maul me in my sleep, is he?”

Cassandra laughed. “He is a
she
. And she’ll leave you alone—as long as you stay on the floor.”

“But
she
gets to sleep on the bed,” observed Arnold.
“That seems fair.”

“Do you know why she gets to sleep on the bed? Because I trust her.”

Then Cassandra flipped off the lights and the room went black—but not before the girl winked at Arnold. Or at least he thought she’d winked at him. It had happened so fast, he couldn’t be certain.

Arnold woke the following morning to the scent of wet dog. The German shepherd, covered in lather, was tracking suds around the apartment. Great balls of foam covered its pointy ears. When the animal noticed that Arnold was moving, she lunged at him and rubbed her wet coat across his face.

“We went for a walk,” the girl explained. “Son of a President found a skunk.”

Cassandra grabbed hold of Son of a President and pulled the dog toward the bath. The sound of splashing water soon filled the apartment. Here was yet another advantage of Manhattan that he and Judith had taken for granted: You didn’t have to worry about skunks. Or rabbits. Or woodchucks. In contrast, Brooklyn was a jungle of herbivorous pests just waiting to sink their canines into burgeoning flowers.

Arnold wiped the soapy dog-froth from his lips. “You need ketchup.”

“What?”

“Don’t waste your time with soap or shampoo. Cold water and ketchup works wonders.”

“Are you for real?”

“I had a Fulbright to Italy a couple of years ago. I came up with the ambitious notion that I was going to
do for tomatoes what George Washington Carver did for peanuts.” Arnold stood up and stretched; his muscles ached from sleeping without a blanket on the cold floorboards. “Dried tomato paste is also an excellent adhesive. Not to mention a very efficient source of automotive fuel. If I ever find a way to show my face in public again, I’d love to market a tomato-powered car.”

“You call that ambitious?” answered the girl. “I call that wacko.”

She shut the water off in the bathroom and set about preparing breakfast. It struck Arnold how easily they’d settled into a domestic routine—as though they were a married couple. As peculiar as it must be for this girl to have a stranger twice her age sleeping on her floor, and a fugitive on top of that, she acted as though it were nothing out of the ordinary. Arnold glanced at his watch. It wasn’t yet six o’clock. When he pulled open the heavy damask curtains, the sky was still grey.

“I like to get up my ass up early,” said the girl. “Otherwise you lose half the day.”

Cassandra sliced a mango with a pocket knife and ate a sliver directly off the blade—a sin for which Arnold’s great-grandmother, The Baroness, had once fed him castor oil. Then the girl handed a morsel to Arnold. The fruit tasted perfectly sweet. For their main course, Cassandra prepared granola and blueberry pancakes—a far cry above the botanist’s standard fare of orange juice and toast. It
was impossible to imagine Judith labouring over a frying pan early in the morning unless she were arranging a still life. He could never forget the first meal his wife had cooked for him. She’d baked eggplant lasagne, but she’d forgotten to boil the pasta before she put it in the oven. The end-product had displayed the consistency of birch bark. Judith had learned her way around the kitchen over the last thirty years, but she was a one-meal-a-day chef—and that meal was dinner. So it was a treat it was to wake up in an apartment that smelled of sizzling butter. As soon as he made the comparison, though, the botanist hated himself for it. How could you weigh three decades of companionship against a stack of organic flapjacks? Besides, he’d derived more pleasure from cracking the
birch-bark
lasagne with Judith than he ever could from a five-star meal. Arnold’s thoughts drifted to his life with Judith, to the memory of one morning when he’d ducked out of a symposium on “Environmentalism & Diet” to meet his wife for breakfast at McDonalds, not because they enjoyed fast food—they probably ate it a total of two or three times in thirty years—but because sometimes a healthy serving of hypocrisy was just what the doctor ordered. When Arnold looked up from his reminiscences, the girl was examining him intensely.

“So, Professor Tomato Cars,” she asked. “How exactly do you intend to go about showing your face in public again?”

“I’m working on that.”

“The way I see it,” continued the girl. “You’ve got three choices.”

“Do I now?”

“Yes, you do. You want know what they are?”

Her matter-of-fact tone struck Arnold as smug. “Enlighten me,” he said.

“First, you can turn yourself in right now and face the firing squad. Or death by hanging. Or whatever it is they do to accused terrorists these days. Maybe they’ll even tear your tongue out as a symbolic gesture—a warning to other would-be traitors.”

“Sound like a great choice to me.”

“It wouldn’t be my top choice,” said the girl, feeding batter scraps to the dog while she spoke. “But at least it would all be over with. I imagine they’d put you out of your misery pretty damn quick.”

“Or subject me to slow torture. What’s my second choice?”

“You could try to escape. While you were sleeping, I printed out a list of countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the United States. You actually have quite a selection. You could probably become a leading botanist in Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan or Tajikistan. Assuming they have plants in those places.”

It amazed Arnold what odd prejudices ordinary people had about vegetation. How could you possible have
a country without plants?

“The Uzbeks actually have a first-rate botanical garden in Tashkent,” he observed. “Persimmons and Magolepian cherries come from the Caucasus.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” she mocked. “But I guess that’s a good thing for you. There’s only one problem with your escape to who-knows-where-istan plan.”

“Getting there.”

“Bingo,” said the girl. She began clearing the plates. “So much for those leprous cherries.”

“Magolepian cherries.”

“Which leads us,” the girl continued, “to choice three.”

“I’m not going to like this, am I?”

Cassandra stacked the dishes on the drainage board. “You can lay low until the furore subsides,” she suggested. “I don’t mean for a few weeks. I mean years. Like the Weathermen or any of those Puerto Rican nationalists from the 1950s. When you eventually do poke your head out again, you’ll still draw a prison sentence, but it will be much lighter—maybe a couple of years and a long parole.”

“You’re suggesting I go underground for years?”

“It’s an option,” said the girl. “It’s an amusing one too, you have to admit. You’re
so
not the sort of person who usually jumps to mind when people think about underground fugitives.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” demanded Arnold.
He didn’t relish the prospect of life on the lam—but that didn’t mean he wasn’t capable of it. Nobody had any business questioning his adequacy as an outlaw, at least not until he’d had a chance to show his mettle. “I’m more resourceful than you think,” he insisted.

“Yeah, whatever. That’s why you’re crashing on my floor.”

She sat down opposite him at the table and lit a cigarette. The smoke smelled both toxic and inviting. Arnold said nothing. It was amazing how easily this damn girl got under his skin.

“Can I ask you something?” asked the girl. “Off the record.”

“That’s a first.”

“What I mean is, I’m not asking you for my article. But I
am
curious. Would you do it again?”

“You mean not stand up?”

“All of it. Not stand up. Stick out your tongue. Refuse to apologize.”

Arnold hadn’t really thought about this before—not in such explicit terms. He’d been too busy dealing with the consequences of his actions to consider the desirability of undoing them. Moreover, he sensed the girl was delving beyond the specific incident. She wasn’t asking: ‘Do you regret not standing up at the baseball game?’ She was asking: ‘Do you really think you can possibly make a difference?’ That wasn’t a fair question, because you could
ask the same thing of almost anybody who defied the rules. The big rules. Arnold realized he might indeed be one of those rule-crushers, one of the rare few who are actually
part of history
. He might even have it in him to murder a lout like Spitford to make that happen. But he wasn’t prepared to share these thoughts with his hostess.

“I really don’t know what I’d do,” he said. “My brain is a bit addled these days.”

“Well, you’ll have a long time to think about it,” said the girl. “I should be home around six-thirty.”

“Say hello to the Revolution for me,” said Arnold.

The girl tossed her canvas bag over her shoulder. “By the way, I hope you weren’t planning on wandering the neighbourhood in that mask of yours.”

“Why not?”

“You’ve got to stay on top of things,” answered the girl. “They’ve detained your two transvestite friends. There’s a manhunt on for a fugitive in a costume.”

“They’ve arrested Gladys and Anabelle?”

“Detained,” said the girl. “As material witnesses. But they haven’t specified what sort of costume—so it looks like they’re keeping your secrets. For now.”

“This is outrageous. They haven’t done anything. Anabelle wasn’t even awake….”

“The noose tightens,” observed Cassandra. “Being friends with you comes with all sorts of advantages, doesn’t it?”

Arnold thought of the two old ‘sisters’ being carted off in handcuffs and his entire body surged with anger.

“I totally have a death-wish for letting you stay here,” added the girl. “If I had half a brain, I’d take the $125,000 and turn you in.”

Cassandra was right: Arnold did have a lot of time to think about what had happened at the baseball game. During the initial phase of his captivity—for during the workday, when the girl was gone, her tiny, nearly
plant-less
apartment did feel like a prison—Arnold thought principally of Judith. He wondered what his wife was doing, what she was thinking. In moments of weakness, he contemplated surreptitious ways to contact her. He could ask Cassandra to act as an emissary, at least to let Judith know that he was safe. Or he could have the girl post a letter for him. Or, if he felt particularly daring, he might even telephone the townhouse from a nearby payphone during the middle of the night. But all of these plans came with substantial risks. Moreover, he wasn’t sure what he would say to Judith. She’d held a press conference two days after his disappearance, in which she begged him to return home. Gilbert Card had stood behind her, sober and erect. The pair didn’t look at all like lovers—but looks meant nothing. Many couples who appeared happily married stood on the brink of divorce. Moreover, Judith was still Judith. She’d still want him to apologize and to raise a
child. It was difficult to see the point of risking his neck for a conversation that would change nothing. Better to lay low. He reconsidered only once, when they arrested his wife as “an accessory after the fact,” but the authorities quickly released her to home confinement, pending trial. Arnold doubted she’d ever face a jury. Or that the elderly transvestites would remain in custody much longer. This was just the police-version of the hard sell: They were harassing his loved ones in the hope of pressuring him into surrender.

Unfortunately, Guillermo’s fate was another matter. The Venezuelan appeared on the front page of the
Times
, the morning after his arrest, wearing a restraining belt and an orange jump suit. He appeared wan and disoriented. On public radio, family members of the plane-crash victims expressed their relief and gratitude at his capture. The Cuban government issued a statement accusing the United States of a double-standard when it came to terrorism—but Havana offered nothing that might exonerate Arnold’s office manager. Within days, he’d been turned over to the Peruvian authorities for trial. When Arnold heard the news, he sat on the fire escape and wept. He’d have done anything to help the Venezuelan—even have turned himself in—but, in this case, there was nothing to be done. Guillermo Zambrano
was
Willie Vargas. He
had
blown up all of those innocent people. Producing a fugitive botanist as a character witness wasn’t going to do the poor man
any good and the NPR story on the plane bombing had shaken Arnold. It crossed his mind that his friend had done something horrific, something that
did
deserve to be punished. Bonnie Card could say all she wanted about “one man’s terrorism being another man’s freedom-fighting,” but at the end of the day, one hundred forty-two innocent people had died. That was the heart of the problem: every choice made sense from some vantage point. Like butchering Spitford. Several nights Arnold woke in a cold sweat, having dreamed that he was squeezing shut the clergyman’s windpipe.

The botanist’s first days at Cassandra’s were marked by an intense interest in the world outside the apartment. Denied access to the city, he longed for its bustle. He suffered cravings for vegetarian paella and crepe suzette and oven-hot anchovy pizza from Sal & Joe’s—in short, for anything that would be difficult to bring back to his isolated quarters. But what he longed for most was news, the details of the daily life that he’d abandoned. He sent the girl to check out the nursery, in the wake of Willie’s deportation, and he’d suffered acutely when she reported that the Plant Centre had been closed indefinitely “Due to Unforeseen Circumstances.” He endured another blow when Spitford announced a boycott of “All Things Brinkman,” and several major retailers responded with immediate announcements that they were pulling his books from their shelves. Arnold stewed over this treachery and ranted about suing them
from absentia. But then his entire “business empire”—as the media called it—was seized by the government. According to the F.B.I., their HAZMAT team had discovered traces of castor beans at Arnold’s office. These plants were the principal ingredient in the bio-toxin ricin. The authorities described their find as “a weapons-grade cache” that “could be transformed into a mass poison in a matter of weeks.” Which applied to all castor beans. And to every nursery and green grocer in the country that carried them. All through Arnold’s childhood the Baroness had hand-made her own castor oil—and had tortured Arnold with its properties in the name of digestive health—but nobody had ever accused
her
of being a terrorist. “Next thing you know they’ll brand me a terrorist for growing water lilies,” he told Cassandra. “People can drown in water, you know.”