The Woman Who Wasn’t There (26 page)

“How could you do this to me, Angelo?” she cried.

“Tania,” I said, calmly, “this is what you’ve always wanted. You were the one who wanted a survivors’ movie. I started it for you, and the others want it finished.”

She was furious. She huffed and seethed and threatened me with repercussions. I struggled with the pity I felt for her. It was tough. I promised I wouldn’t demonize her.

“And how will you do that?” she asked, her voice now engaged and curious.

“By telling the truth,” I said. “But also showing all the good that you did, too.”

I encouraged Tania to come clean. No matter how ugly the truth might be. I truly believed that a public telling of her side of the story, and an apology to the people she’d betrayed, if that was what was called for, would help her. She wouldn’t hear of it.

“I want the footage,” she said.

“It’s not my footage to give,” I said. “It belongs to the Survivors’ Network. You know that.”

She flew into a rage. “One day the truth will come out, and you’ll all feel terrible and apologize to me,” she said.

I wanted so much to believe that the story would turn out that way, but the person I saw after the story broke wasn’t the Tania I had known and cared for. She was harder, calculating, and bitter. I wanted the old Tania back. But even more than that, I wanted to know her the way she knew me. I wanted her to be as revealing as she had been on camera when I interviewed her for the original survivors’ documentary—before her real identity was revealed. Only this time, she would be telling the truth. But that was not to be. Finally, I realized that if I were ever going to get answers, I would have to find them on my own.

In order to flush out the end of the story, I had to start at the beginning. My search took me to Spain, where I spent the entire month of July talking to anyone who could help me figure out who the real Tania was. Working with local professionals—a detective, a producer, and a reporter from the Spanish newspaper
La Vanguardia
—I collected many pieces to the puzzle.

Tania’s lies began with her name. It is Alicia Esteve Head. Her mother, Acacia Head Ledeveze, the granddaughter of the British consulate to the Canary Islands, was working as a flight attendant for British Airways when she met Francisco Esteve Corbella, a wealthy Spanish businessman thirteen years her senior. They married and had five children. Alicia, born on July 31, 1973, is the youngest and the only girl. The family lived a prosperous life, traversing among their
sprawling Barcelona apartment on the Calle dels Vergós, a three-story villa in Majorca with a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, and a country estate they named
El Campesino
. Their social circle included powerful politicians and European royalty, and family life revolved around yachting and horses and tennis at exclusive country clubs.

It was no surprise to me that Tania/Alicia grew up in lavish surroundings. Driving a rented Vespa through the neighborhoods of her childhood in Barcelona, I recalled conversations where she described the places I was seeing. The city was filled with Antonio Gaudi’s magnificent architecture. It occurred to me that Gaudi’s creations had the same dimensions of her imagination: epic in scale and a perspective all its own.

Many of the people I met with in Barcelona were wary of talking at first. After the story broke, Alicia’s mother, who owns a haberdashery shop in the city, appealed to friends not to speak to anyone about her daughter. Those who did eventually open up about what they knew did so only on the condition that their names wouldn’t be used. They said they did not want to be associated with such a sad story. Sonia Humet was an exception. We flew to Slovakia to film her. Alicia’s best friend from childhood spoke openly, she said, because she wanted people to know there was more to Alicia than what was written in the media.

Sonia met Alicia when both were six or seven and attending the Canigó School, a rich and conservative Opus Dei Catholic school in Barcelona. She said that even back then, Alicia idolized Americans and hung a huge American flag in her bedroom in Barcelona. Alicia “always had a problem with her imagination,” Sonia said. When she was frustrated or bored with the direction of her life, she simply made up stories to accommodate her fantasy existence. Her tales, usually about boyfriends and dating, were harmless enough and not atypical for a teenage girl. But she earned a reputation as a storyteller and was sometimes subject to the cruelties of other adolescents who laughed at her tall tales and also chided her about being overweight. When Sonia accused her of telling fairy tales, Alicia would become angry and shut
down. Sonia eventually allowed her imaginary lapses, never again questioning her stories, and they remained the best of friends until Alicia left for Switzerland to attend high school at an exclusive private boarding school.

It was after she returned to Barcelona to study at European University that Alicia’s life took a vicious twist. She was eighteen and traveling in a car with a group of friends along the Valencia coast when the driver, fiddling with a music cassette tape, according to Sonia, lost control of the car. The vehicle crashed into a wall and rolled over several times before finally coming to a stop. Alicia was the most seriously hurt. Her right arm was severed and thrown from the vehicle. The story that her family told, which is hard to imagine, was that when help arrived, she was found holding the arm. The extremity was sewn back on, and, in the following months, Alicia underwent multiple surgeries at the famous Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, eventually regaining some use of the limb.

Her hard luck continued when, in the summer of 1992, her father and oldest brother, Francisco Javier Esteve Head were accused of embezzlement in the infamous and highly publicized ₤24 million Planasdemunt financial scandal in Catalonia and served short prison terms, spilling shame on the Esteve family name. Her parents’ marriage fell apart, and Alicia and her mother grew estranged from her father and brothers. The unraveling of what she portrayed as her perfect home life seemed to be her undoing. It is around that time, after those life-changing events, and especially after her family unit fractured following her parents’ contentious divorce, that Alicia started living in make-believe worlds.

The young woman had just begun her second and final year in the MBA program at the business school Esade when the World Trade Center was attacked. The school was closed on September 11, 2001, when Catalonia celebrated La Diada, its national independence day. But Alicia was back with her classmates when school resumed in mid-September. After speaking to people from Esade, I realized that there was no way she could have been in New York on 9/11, much less in the towers. A representative from Esade business school said
that Alicia did not take a leave of absence from school that month. Her classmates said she never mentioned being involved in the attack, and they saw no evidence of injuries. Indeed, on a day when she claimed to be still in a coma in a New York City hospital burn unit, with Lauren Manning as her roommate, Alicia was in a classroom in Barcelona, taking a mandatory test for school. Lauren said neither she nor her husband have ever met or even heard of Tania Head or an Alicia Esteve Head.

In May 2002, Alicia graduated from business school with her MBA. She told classmates that Barcelona wasn’t big enough for her dreams and she was going to New York City to start a new life. One year later, having studied everything that was written about September 11, Alicia Esteve Head became Tania Head. Three months after that, she was on her way to becoming America’s most famous survivor.

September 11, 2008, was a turning point for the survivors. With Tania gone, Linda did most of the planning for the seventh anniversary in 2008, and everything went seamlessly. I stood from a distance with my camera and, for the first time, rather than focus all of their emotions on Tania, I saw that the survivors were free to feel their own feelings, as poignant and painful as those feelings were. Still, after all that had transpired, after all of the heartache she had caused them, Tania was never far from their thoughts.

Through the enormous crowd of mourners, I glanced over at Linda and Elia, walking up the ramp from the footprints of the towers, locking arms, wiping away tears. I knew they were tears for Tania. “Why do I feel this way?” Linda asked Elia. “It’s not fair. I miss her!” Elia smiled. “Me too,” she said.

Later, Elia summed up what we were all feeling: “Part of the sadness I feel was that someone who I got to love was no longer with us,” she said. “And it hurt, even though I don’t want that person around anymore. I hated the feeling. Because I don’t want to miss her. But she became a part of our lives.”

The World Trade Center Survivors’ Network continues to advocate for the people whose lives were spared on September 11. Linda, Elia, and Janice all serve on the board. Richard Zimbler is president. Gerry Bogacz is cochairman of the group 9/11 Community for Common Ground Initiative, an organization formed to heal the divisions between religious and ethnic groups that have arisen from or been exacerbated by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Alicia continues to travel between New York City and Barcelona, trying to keep a low profile. She has not had any contact with the survivors since they expelled her from the network, but they are suspicious of the origins of mysterious posts on the forum admonishing the survivors for not forgiving their former leader and for claiming that she had killed herself. The survivors believe those anonymous posts were from Tania. She did continue to correspond with her friends from the Oklahoma City survivors’ group for two years afterward. She wrote to Richard Williams to say that she was moving to a new apartment in the city, had a new job, and was working with a different therapist.

I was probably the last person in the group to let go of the fantasy persona she created. Until I began working on this book, I still insisted to myself and to others that Tania’s altruism was legitimate—even if her story was fabricated. I continued to believe that her heart was good and even considered that we might reestablish our friendship someday.

That all changed after I ran into her, not once, but twice last year. What are the chances of that happening in a city of eight million people?

On December 23, 2010, in the midst of the holiday rush, I was walking up West Forty-Eighth Street when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a familiar silhouette crossing Broadway. The woman looked like Tania. I caught up to her and noticed the familiar scent of Aromatics Elixir, Tania’s fragrance. Three years had passed since I last saw her. Her hair was darker, but otherwise she hadn’t changed. I reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder.

“Tania,” I said softly. She jumped back, clearly startled.

“Get away from me!” she shouted. “Don’t speak to me!” Her face twisted with rage and, defiantly, she thrust her middle finger at me, and then ran into the street.

I was in total shock. What had I expected? I think I thought that we would get a coffee at Starbucks, the way we used to, and talk over old times. I think I was expecting Tania, my dear friend. Concerned for her safety, I headed in the opposite direction, toward the subway. But before I descended the staircase, I looked back and saw her standing there, watching me. I realized then that I was looking at a stranger.

I punished myself for months afterward for having given up so easily. I should have persisted, I told myself. I should have followed her. I still had so many questions I wanted to ask her, and so many festering feelings about this woman I’d once thought of as one of my closest friends. I was certain I would never receive another chance to get the answers I needed to sort out my feelings. To figure out what was real and what wasn’t.

I was wrong.

Nine months later, against impossible odds, I saw her again. It was Wednesday, September 14, 2011, three days after the tenth anniversary of 9/11. I was walking toward an animal shelter to adopt a kitten when Tania and her mother walked past me. She didn’t notice me, but I recognized her instantly. I was shaking when I grabbed my camera out of my backpack and began to follow them down the FDR Drive. My goal was to find out where she was living now. I didn’t want her to get away. I was intent on talking to Tania or Alicia or any combination. I was finishing up the documentary and wanted to give her one last chance to tell her side of the story.

I watched as they stopped along the East River to take in the sunset, and I couldn’t help but notice how carefree and happy she looked. It reminded me of Tania, and I was overcome with wistful memories of our friendship. I fought the urge to run up and hug her. Then it occurred to me how much power she still had over me, and how difficult it was for me to break through the illusion of the person I wanted her to be.

I continued to follow them as they walked along the river, then up East Thirty-Fourth Street to a chic boutique hotel a block from Park Avenue. There was apparently no apartment in the city anymore. When they went inside, I sat down at a nearby bus stop, wondering what my next move should be. My mind was racing. Had she come to town for the anniversary? Had she been there somewhere at ground zero? Holding a red bandanna in tribute to Welles Crowther? Tracing David
’s name that was etched into the stone borders of the reflection pool onto her program, as I had done? I thought about Gerry and Linda and Janice and Brendan and Elia, and how, years later, they continued to be haunted by her betrayal.