Backward-Facing Man (32 page)

Eric Dodson motioned to the waitress. This, too, all of it, was in the file.

“When we called the Chicago office, the investigation shifted into high gear. Agents started collecting records of one-time purchases of aluminum and iron oxide by private individuals, industrial-welding contractors, even high school and college labs in the preceding months. There were only a dozen weld shops in New England that would have had anything to do with exothermic reactions, and we visited them all, asking about irregularities in workforce, workers who'd quit, customers with seditious tendencies, and chemicals that might have mysteriously disappeared from their inventories. Nobody'd been ripped off. None of them had fired any employees.

“Out of a couple hundred high school and college labs, only about sixty were large enough to have these three chemicals in sufficient quantities, and, of those, only a handful allowed students access. For the most part, students told teachers when they were ready to conduct experiments, and teachers gave them what they needed. Of all the labs I talked to, only a couple thought it possible their labs could've been ripped off. When I asked about radicals, I got nothing, except from this one graduate student at MIT who said he thought it would be worth our while to come over for a visit.”

“So he gave you Keane?”

“Not exactly.” A waitress approached and asked them what they wanted. “He told us there was a guy who'd left school the year before under questionable circumstances. The graduate student didn't remember the guy's name, but he put us onto an undergrad who'd been asking about him a few months earlier.” The waitress brought them drinks. Dodson narrowed his eyes. There was nothing about this in the file.

“What was his name?”

“I don't remember. The Chicago office was under pressure from D.C. Nobody had claimed responsibility for Oneonta, and Hoover was having a fit. My boss—a guy named Lou D'Mitri and I—we decided to pay this kid a visit.” Russell took a sip of bourbon and closed his eyes. “We let ourselves into his room, which was a mess—balled-up blanket, stained mattress, standard-issue desk and chair, piles of dirty clothes all over. Under the bed were some porn magazines, a couple of pipes, some rolling papers, and a laboratory scale.

“D'Mitri's's theory was that everybody has a secret—some blemish or indiscretion, an embarrassment. It doesn't have to be illegal. Our job is to guess and then mention it, stand next to it or refer to it obliquely, and then threaten to reveal it. The kid came in a couple hours later, hauling a suitcase. I started questioning him. “‘Did you ever know a guy who went to school here? A big talker, radical, may have stolen shit from the lab?' At first, he said nothing. ‘Never heard of the guy.' I kept pressing him, while D'Mitri just stared at the suitcase, which was getting pretty fragrant.” Russell smiled. “Some guys'll piss themselves if you get the pressure just right. After a while, the kid couldn't even see straight.” Russell started giggling. “It was the three of us in this tiny little room.” Russell was talking in falsetto now. “It was shameful!” He put his palms down on the table and let his shoulders heave. He pulled his handkerchief out and put it to his face.

“What happened?”

John Russell wiped the tears from his eyes and emptied his drink. “The kid gave us a physical description: twenty-three or twenty-four years old, about six feet, reddish brown hair, mustache, freckles, glasses. The funny thing is,” Russell said, turning serious, “we didn't really need it. We already had a list of Fenway employees we were in the process of crossing with kids that dropped out of MIT.

“The registrar had something like six students named Fred or Frederick enrolled during the four prior academic years. Four were in good standing; and two had graduated. There was nobody named Frederick on the Red Sox payroll, but the guy who fit the description had worked the day of the incident. Fergus was his name. Fergus Keane. The address on his W-2 was a house in Worcester.

“We went out there one day, D'Mitri and me. In those days, we wore the dark suits and dress shoes. When his mother came to the door, she thought we were undertakers. Mom said she hadn't seen her boy in months. We tested the chemicals we found in barrels in the backyard, but they turned out to be motor oil and transmission fluid. A couple of us watched the house for a few days and talked to the neighbors. Fergus was a smart kid who didn't have much of a childhood. His dad ran booze down from Canada—part of Joseph Kennedy's operation. The old man became pretty fond of the stuff himself. One night, Fergus came home and heard his mother wailing. Turns out mom and dad were going at it pretty good. Rough sex or something. I don't know. Whatever it was he saw, Fergus took off.”

 

“Within a week, the U.S. attorney issued a warrant for Keane's arrest. Keane's high school picture was copied, distributed, and posted in police stations, FBI branches, and U.S. Post Offices from Boston to L.A. By late November, he was on the most-wanted list, which is when I heard from the MIT kid again. He said he'd seen Keane in Harvard Yard with some people who were selling copies of
The Mission,
an underground magazine with anarchistic leanings published by a commune in North Cambridge. He had the feeling Keane and his girl were crashing there.

“We knew about the Highest Choice, a commune where drug addicts, drifters, and dropouts loyal to a self-styled guru Leland Medvec lived. The place had marathon acid parties, group sex, and long rap sessions where people sat in a circle, picking away at each other's faults until Medvec interceded, usually by making a speech and then suggesting that to demonstrate their liberation, somebody's girlfriend come upstairs and fuck him.

“We had an informant at the time—a nursing student named Anna—with long brown hair and granny glasses.” Russell's eyes sparkled. He was in his element now. “We had her warm up to a couple of the guys out there, and she wound up getting pretty close to Medvec. When she found out they were expecting Keane and his old lady to show up soon, we started watching the place.

“It was a Monday night—late November 1968. Anna called just before midnight. She said Keane and his girl had just gotten back from a road trip and they were really wired. Somebody gave them a couple of reds, and Anna guessed they'd be asleep within the hour. We told her to clear out. When she left the house, Keane was babbling like a baby. One hour before dawn, we had sodium lights up, agents all over the place, and both ends of the street sealed off. It would've been suicide for them to fight.”

Russell took a sip of his drink and grimaced. “When we got inside, the house was a shithole. We searched it for four hours, looking in closets, crawl spaces, tunnels, and trapdoors. There was all kinds of drug paraphernalia, pornography, and seditious materials, but no weapons and no explosives. We rounded up sixteen people that morning, including Lorraine Nadia, Keane's girlfriend. But Keane was gone.”

Eric Dodson considered the possibilities. “Scribbled on meth, somebody can stay awake seventy-two, ninety-six hours straight. It sucks the nutrients out at a metabolically accelerated rate,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” Russell asked.

“I'm just saying, some people think they're invincible; others get paranoid. If you're a fugitive, paranoia can work for you.”

Russell leaned back against the booth and closed his eyes. “Medvec found a liberal lawyer from Harvard to defend them. Lorraine claimed she knew nothing about Fenway or Oneonta. We wanted to hold her, but she was pregnant. Eventually, Medvec's lawyer got the prosecutor to back off.”

“That's it?” Dodson said. “That's the closest we've come in thirty years?”

Russell was exhausted. Between the radiation treatments and work, he didn't have the stamina he used to have. “A couple weeks later we found an old school bus with stripper from a hair dye kit and some cigarette butts with Keane's prints on them. In the spring, police picked up a guy in New Orleans who said he'd met Keane washing dishes, but by the time we showed up, he was gone.” Russell's face was sagging. “Since then, we've watched his kin; we've tried to send messages to him through other radicals; we've even tried baiting him over the Internet, but the trail went cold.”

“Ever doubt he did it?” Dodson asked quietly. If there was going to be a moment when John Russell let his guard down, this was it.

Russell shook his head, and reached into his shirt pocket. “Nah,” he said softly. “A few days after Keane disappeared, somebody sent me this.” Carefully, Russell unfolded a withered piece of paper, folded over many times. It was a place mat—the one from the diner—with Frederick's scribblings.

Dodson put some money down on the table and followed the older agent outside. Russell took a seat behind the wheel and rolled down his window. As he did, his eyelids fluttered, and he took air in through his nose. It was late afternoon, dusk. A streetlight spilled through the windshield, casting a shadow over his face. “I've had my successes, Agent Dodson,” Russell said. “A couple citations, a promotion or two. You could say I've had a pretty good run.” Russell's shoulders slumped against the upholstery. There was a long silence. “Why don't you watch the house yourself tomorrow? Can call me if you need to.”

 

Eric Dodson laid his jacket on a table in the foyer and opened the refrigerator. He took out a stack of deli meats, cheese, and three different kinds of mustards and set them on a large serving plate—the only dish he owned. With a bread knife, he slathered mustard on the meat and wrapped it in a piece of cheese. Still standing, he opened the Keane file to a page he'd marked and began reading.

In 1971, a farmer in Indiana hired a kid from the east who took off with a hundred bucks in cash, his 1963 red Rambler, and his eldest daughter. There was a photograph of the guy bending over—long, reddish brown hair, glasses, handlebar mustache, his face partially visible. It may or may not have been Keane. The car showed up clean of prints in Denver.

In the mid-seventies, there were Keane sightings at truck stops, state parks, and in small towns from Northern California to Maine. People said they'd seen him doing everything from splitting wood outside a ranger station to counting change in a tollbooth, which of course no fugitive would do. In early 1980, the U.S. prosecutor in Rochester charged Fergus Keane with the Oneonta bombing.

Dodson made himself another lunch meat roll and riffled through the rest of the file. In thirty years, there'd been nine case agents, two reenactments of the Oneonta bombing on
America's Most Wanted,
dozens of bulletins dispatching cops and marshals to remote locations where special agents had received tips or hunches that Keane was about to come forward for an event; everything from Frederick's mother's funeral to the big moments in Lorraine Nadia's daughter's life. Every once in a while, a U.S. attorney somewhere would hear from some lawyer asking what would happen if his client, a radical from the sixties, surrendered, but it was never Keane, or, if it was, he never materialized. Dodson put a piece of Lebanon bologna and a chunk of Italian table cheese in his mouth.

 

By the time Russell got home, it was raining hard. His throat felt like someone lit a wad of paper and shoved it in there, and his head hurt. Over the course of a career, a law enforcement officer becomes identified with a case by the amount of time he puts into it, the progress he makes, how badly he screws it up, or, in some cases, the notoriety it gets. Some agents develop specialized knowledge or skills—the former art student who breaks up a counterfeiting ring, the Italian kid who goes undercover in the Mob, the former CPA who traps an embezzler.

The Volcano Bomber was John Russell's baby. It spanned his career. It facilitated his learning things that became his specialty—explosives, sixties' radicalism, and fugitive behavior. Unfortunately, with the exception of his linking the Fenway prank and the Oneonta explosions by the ingredients of the bomb—no small accomplishment—Russell had little else to show for himself as he neared retirement. Maybe it was the same for men in corporations, he thought, putting a lozenge in his mouth. All these years, he'd kept his nose clean. There may not have been many promotions, but there weren't any scandals either, something pretty rare in this day and age. He poured himself another bourbon and turned the radio on low.

It was slow at the bank, which meant Lorraine Nadia was contacting delinquent safe deposit box holders, a task she despised, when a coworker slid a postcard across her desk. On one side was a picture of Niagara Falls. On the other, a long-distance phone number and 8
PM
written in block letters. The man who answered had a high-pitched voice and talked like a sports announcer. He told Lorraine that a certain individual would like to see her and gave her directions to a turnoff near the Scranton exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Lorraine left work early on Friday, stopped home, threw some clothes and toiletries in one bag—toys and coloring books into another—and picked her daughter up from day care. To be sure she wasn't being followed, she took a circuitous route north—309 North to the Northeast Extension to Route 6 East to a turnoff near Steene, where she pulled over, rolled down the windows, and let the smell of hay and horseshit soak into her clothes. About an hour after sunset, a woman with long black hair in a pickup truck pulled alongside her and waved, indicating Lorraine should follow. Ten minutes later, the pickup turned onto a dirt road.

After the raid on the Highest Choice Commune, Frederick disappeared. It had been the plan all along. He would hitchhike to the cape or take a bus to Ann Arbor or Providence—it didn't matter—as long as he avoided his old haunts and didn't contact anybody from his past for a while. Lorraine would return to Philadelphia. She had expected this even before the incident in Oneonta. Remembering this, she shuddered.

The truck stopped, and an Asian woman got out, thin and attractive, with a deep summer tan. “Joan,” she said, sticking her hand out. “Keep your hands where they can see them and answer their questions, however ridiculous. These people have no sense of humor.” Lorraine hooked the bag with their clothes around her shoulder and lifted her daughter, who was asleep. The white clapboard house was dark, almost deserted-looking, except for a dim light on the first-floor porch.

“Nobody said there'd be a fucking kid,” a man said, shining a light in her face. Behind him, a group of people began a discussion about whether Lorraine should be allowed in the house with a child. It was typical communal bullshit, Lorraine thought—uptight utopians having an argument that could last all night long.

“I don't see a problem,” somebody said. He sounded nasal, like the man she'd talked to on the phone. “You guys want to raise the next generation right, don't you?”

Lorraine listened to the crickets and slowed her breathing to match the girls. She'd expected something like this, and she wasn't worried. If necessary, she and her daughter would get a motel room in Scranton and wait for Frederick to contact them. The one the others called Alan stepped forward. He was short and twitchy, with a mustache and aviator glasses. He had a flashlight in one hand and a large silver pistol in the other.

“She's just a child,” Lorraine said quietly.

Alan eyed Lorraine up and down, closer than was comfortable. “She's already seen too much,” he answered.

A woman with a rifle came up behind him and whispered something. Alan continued staring at Lorraine as if he was trying to make a decision. “Take them upstairs, Pearl,” he said, finally.

The house looked as if it had been empty for a long time. There was no TV, no stereo, no books on shelves, no lamps, no carpet, no wall hangings. What looked like old newspapers and empty food wrappers were scattered across the floor, and a stuffed chair and two couches were pushed against the windows. Beside the steps were several boxes filled with bullets and an array of pistols; there were automatic weapons leaning against the banister. Lorraine noticed a faint odor of mildew, rotting particleboard, and body odor.

The girl they called Pearl was wearing a curly red wig that looked like a shag rug and a man's dress shirt. Under her dark eyes were two groupings of perfectly round red freckles that could've been painted on. Her arms were rail thin, but muscular. Although she appeared to be five or six months pregnant, she had a starved look about her, and she reminded Lorraine of a cat trapped in a tree. Pearl led them to a bedroom that was empty except for an old mattress that had been pushed up against the wall, then stood in the doorway and watched as Lorraine took the girl's shoes off and started preparing her for bed.

Lorraine must have fallen asleep herself, because the next thing she knew, Pearl had disappeared and Lorraine could hear grunting and shuffling from downstairs. She tiptoed to the top of the landing. “Who'll drive her?” a woman said angrily. “As soon as possible,” Alan said. Somebody said something about finishing a book. “We need to deliver it to someone we trust.” It sounded like the woman who'd been holding the rifle. Then, out of nowhere, someone started upstairs.

Lorraine dropped to her butt and slid along the wall like a crab, hoping the floor joists would absorb her weight. Quickly, she turned the corner of the bedroom and slid onto the mattress beside her daughter, who exhaled sleepily. A second later, she saw Pearl standing in the doorway, her wig off, her brown hair tied back, wearing a T-shirt and no longer pregnant. She had thin, birdlike features and pale skin, and she looked familiar. Hollow eyes, a gash of a mouth, pencil-thin eyebrows—it was a face Lorraine had seen thousands of times—in newspapers, on magazine covers, and in television specials. Pearl, aka Patty Hearst, the FBI's most-wanted radical, was here in Pennsylvania with the remaining members of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Patty tossed her a blanket. “It's for the girl,” she said.

 

The next morning, Lorraine was awakened by the sound of a truck and a guy yelling “Northeast Propane.” She scrambled to a window in the front of the house. The driver looked to be in his thirties, short brown hair, flannel hunting shirt, beer belly.

“What do you want?” Alan said from downstairs.

The man squinted. “I delivered to you guys earlier this summer.” Lorraine heard footsteps.

“I don't care what you did when. Get back in the truck.”

The driver smiled, uncertain whether he was being teased.

“Be cool, Alan,” someone said. Lorraine heard someone giggle and then metal clicking and sliding.

“It gets pretty cold up here some winters,” he said warily.

“Fuck off, man,” Alan said.

“Whatever you say, boss.” The driver put his hands out in front of him and started climbing back in his cab.

Lorraine woke her daughter and carried her downstairs. Out back, behind the house, a pond with lily pads glistened in the slanted morning sun, and behind that, a large white windmill spun lazily in the breeze. The three Symbionese Liberation Army soldiers carried their weapons through the kitchen. With the others watching from inside, Alan led his comrades in push-ups, jumping jacks, and sprints, and then Patty set up beer cans for target practice. The man Lorraine had talked to on the phone, Jack, walked into the kitchen, his hair sprouting in all directions. He took a large cardboard box out of the refrigerator and lifted a stiff slice of pizza. “They don't eat pizza, you know,” he said. “Too bourgeois.” Behind him, a tall woman named Mikki said something about going into town to get groceries. Lorraine asked Jack when he thought Frederick would arrive. “You mean Jim, sweetie,” he said, correcting her. “This is the underground. The trains don't run on schedules, and we don't use people's real names.” He had a nervous tic that made him look like he was flinching for no reason.

When they finished training, Alan announced that Joan, Jack, Judy, and Mikki would accompany him downtown to get hardware and supplies while Patty, Lorraine, and the girl stayed behind. “Gimme your keys,” Alan said to Lorraine. “You can wander the grounds. Just don't talk to anybody.” And for the next few hours, the three of them played tag on the trails, picked blueberries, threw pebbles at the windmill, and skinny-dipped in the pond. When the rest of them returned, they all had lunch and, after that, relaxed while Alan and Judy interviewed Patty out on the porch.

The book they were working on was to be a compendium of SLA military history and a political manifesto, loosely modeled after
Prairie Fire,
the Weather Underground's primer, except it would include reflections by the now-famous urban guerrillas. “They just want a recording so they don't get nailed for kidnapping her,” Joan whispered to Lorraine. “Even though they write out the answers in advance, Pearl wanders. When she drifts from the party line, they turn off the tape machine. They've wasted dozens of hours, and they still haven't gotten what they want.”

Over the next couple hours, Lorraine listened as Patty Hearst, media heiress, described her transformation into Tania, urban guerrilla. By her account, Cinque, the leader of the SLA, simply let her true personality appear the way a photograph develops in the darkroom. Patty made it sound as though Tania was her real identity and Patty was a rich, naïve, selfish little girl who'd been brainwashed by her upbringing.

“How do you feel about your parents?” Judy asked.

“They have no regard for me, and I have none for them,” Patty said in monotone. “There is no doubt in my mind that if the Feds were lucky enough to find me, I would get it,” she said softly. “They have no intention of letting me live.”

For Lorraine, who sat braiding her daughter's hair in the other room, it was like watching a sci-fi movie where enemy combatants infiltrate someone's mind, forcing her words, her body, her entire being, to take up arms against friends and family. If Stardust hadn't become restless, Lorraine would've sat there and listened to America's most-wanted fugitive ramble all day.

While Alan, Judy, and Patty talked on the porch, Lorraine led her little girl out the back door and around front toward the Duster. She was thinking how odd it was that people still talked this way—railing against their parents and the Establishment—and about how she, too, was once preoccupied in this way. She remembered Frederick on their last night together in Cambridge. It'd been days since he'd had a good night's sleep, and he was talking in circles. Haunted by Oneonta and his ineffectiveness in the movement, Frederick had been visited with ulcers and agonizing toothaches, in addition to chronic back pain, insomnia, and impotence that had hobbled him for years. What ailed him may have saved him, she thought. If he hadn't been addicted to crystal meth, he might've been in the house when the Feds came. Lorraine lifted the bag of toys from the backseat and led her daughter to the porch.

As she mounted the steps, Judy crouched down and Patty rolled over onto her stomach, their nostrils flaring and their eyes glowing, peering down the barrels of their guns. “Drop it!” Alan screamed, pressing his pistol against Stardust's forehead. Stardust held still, holding her breath, her eyes wide open, her mouth a perfect O. Nobody breathed. Before anyone could move again, Judy grabbed the bag from Lorraine and turned it upside down, spilling crayons, coloring books, and magazines with word games onto the rickety floorboards.

“You should be more careful,” Judy said, exhaling.

 

Lorraine and Stardust spent the rest of the afternoon upstairs reading, coloring, and trying to restore their breathing to normal. As the sun set, the soldiers drilled and then ate dinner downstairs. The atmosphere was even edgier than it had been earlier in the day. Just after eight o'clock, Judy heard a car wheezing in the distance. Wariness had turned to weariness, and with a mixture of embarrassment and tension, the others watched Alan extinguish the single bulb on the porch, while Patty and Judy loaded their weapons and took their positions.

Lorraine crouched behind a window upstairs, watching as a pair of headlights crept slowly toward the house. When it was about a hundred feet away, the lights went off, and they heard the door open and close. Lorraine held her breath. After what felt like forever, a man's voice, low and relaxed, called out, “Anybody home?”

From inside, a flashlight panned the yard, highlighting a lean figure with his arm shielding his eyes. There must have been some discussion, because a few seconds later, Jack was dispatched to greet him. “Jimbo, it's me, Jack.” The two men embraced, slapping each other vigorously. Lorraine hurried down the steps as Alan, Judy, and Pearl put their weapons down.

The first thing Frederick said, dropping his duffel by the front door, was, “Who did the decorating here?” His New England accent had faded and he was wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and squarish tinted glasses. His upper lip, which had always been covered in a mustache, looked puffy without one, and his hair was shorter than Lorraine had ever seen it, except when he'd been swimming or had just gotten out of the shower. He was lean and sinewy, and his hands were coarse and tan. Gone was the smirk. Handsome and settled even, in a plain-looking midwestern prairie kind of way, Frederick looked smaller than Lorraine remembered him. Mikki, Jack's wife, stepped forward and gave him a hug.

“Here's the deal,” Alan announced so that everyone could hear him. “Judy and I will be making our own travel arrangements. You're responsible for Pearl—”

“Hold on a minute,” Frederick interrupted, speaking to Jack. “The car ain't much, but it's mine for the next two weeks. The registration's clean, and I took the backseats out, which is where she'll ride,
if
she rides with me.” Then he turned to Alan. “We leave when I say we leave. We travel a route I decide. Two weeks, give or take, and I'll deliver her to the Bay Area, to a spot of my choosing. After that, I'm gone. You dig?”

“Fuck that. You're here as my guest,” Alan said, all eyes on him now. “You go when I say you go.” Although he was several inches shorter than Frederick, he stuck his chin in Frederick's chest.

“Let's be very clear about this,” Frederick said. He was grinning, and his eyes seemed lit from behind. “I'm here because I volunteered to drive the girl home. I'm not interested in you, your plans, or your cause, which, as far as I can see, isn't really a cause at all.”