Carthage (28 page)

In 1979, this had occurred. Not until seven years later would the Intern be born.

Of course, already in high school she’d heard about the
SHAME!
series, which eventually included nine books, each a blunt, shocking, and meticulously researched diarist account by the individual who called himself “the Investigator”; on book covers, the author remained “J. Swift.” Over the years, J. Swift’s biographical information scarcely expanded except to include an ever-growing list of awards—National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Anisfield-Wolf Award, Pulitzer Prize. The Investigator/J. Swift seemed to have no private life—no wife, no family, no fixed place of residence. And no photo.

The zealous Investigator had gone undercover to visit horrendous factory farms in the Midwest, and dispiritingly understaffed V.A. hospitals in New England; he’d infiltrated slaughterhouses supplying fast-food chains—(in forthright homage to one of his heroes, Upton Sinclair, of
The Jungle
); he’d infiltrated medical research laboratories experimenting on chimpanzees, dogs, and cats—(managing to take terrifying photographs, released on the Internet to much protest and outrage). Under a name other than “J. Swift” he’d been arrested in San Francisco as an animal rights activist—(“terrorist” was the official charge)—and as an “eco-terrorist”—but charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence. (The Intern would learn, when going through the Investigator’s finances, that he’d been a generous donor to such animal rights organizations as PETA, Animal Rights Liberation Front, and Animal Rights Militia, as he’d been a generous donor to leftist-activist organizations like Code Pink and feminist organizations like Females Without Borders.) The Investigator’s most recent best-selling book was
SHAME! YOUR (DIS)HONOR,
published in 2009, a harrowing exposé of several corrupt family court judges in Nassau County, Long Island, who’d accepted more than two million dollars in bribes since 2005, to send as many as three thousand first-time offenders to privately owned correctional facilities. Most of the first-time offenses had been misdemeanors and not felonies, which would have resulted in probation if the judges hadn’t shunted the youthful offenders into the prison system; the defendants had had no lawyers, since their parents had been talked into signing away their legal rights by family court officers who were also receiving bribes. In one of the notorious boot-camp facilities, a squalid barracks in the Poconos, young inmates had been harassed, beaten, and sexually abused by corrections officers and fellow inmates, resulting in the suicide of a seventeen-year-old girl who’d been arrested for having shoplifted less than twenty-five dollars’ worth of merchandise from a Rite Aid store—her first offense! The Investigator had gathered his sordid material by posing as “Hank Carpenter,” a representative of the privately-run correctional service PioneerAmerica Corrections, Inc., who’d bluntly offered the Nassau County family court judges “five thousand a head” for each youthful offender they sent to the facility; he’d recorded their astonishing conversations, to be replicated verbatim in
SHAME! YOUR (DIS)HONOR.

Before the book was officially published, the Investigator had turned his findings over to the Nassau County prosecutor and the New York State federal attorney general; excerpts published in
The New Yorker
had stirred a national firestorm of protest and outrage.

Eventually, the corrupt judges pleaded guilty to charges of accepting bribes, lost their positions and were sentenced to prison terms varying from seven to fifteen years.

Seven to fifteen years!
With time out for “good behavior,” in moderate-security (state-run) prisons, the ex-judges would serve just a fraction of their sentences.

With the bribes from the private-prison facilities they’d bought expensive cars, a yacht, new homes; they’d built swimming pools, taken luxury cruises to the Bahamas, sent their children to expensive private schools. (None of the bribe-money had been returned.)

So far, the private-prison facilities hadn’t been charged with any wrongdoing.

In totalitarian China, government officials like the corrupt judges might have been executed.

Out of disgust with the Nassau County judiciary, the Investigator was turning his attention to capital punishment in the United States in the past several years following the highly publicized successes of the Innocence Project—specifically, to those states in which the frequency of executions had not slowed despite revelations of wrongly convicted individuals on Death Row, through DNA testing. While states like Illinois, New York, and New Jersey had acted immediately to suspend all executions pending further investigations, such states as Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida had hardly reacted to the disclosures of the Innocence Project at all. “It’s as if they don’t give a damn, whether a convicted person is ‘guilty’—once he’s been found ‘guilty’ by a jury or a judge. Whether a person is
innocent
isn’t a factor in whether the state kills him.” The Investigator was incensed, indignant.

It was for this project that the Investigator had hired the Intern.

He’d warned her that it could be “stomach-turning”—“possibly even dangerous.” They would try to be admitted into maximum-security Death Row prisons in disguise as lawyers, criminologists, or university professors in sociology, psychology; if prison officials knew who the Investigator was, the muckraking author of the notorious
SHAME!
series, he would never be granted admittance. The Intern would be less carefully scrutinized, he was sure—“As my assistant, you can go virtually anywhere I can go. No one will look at
you
.”

“MCSWAIN! DEAL WITH THESE.”

A stack of envelopes, not-yet-opened.

It was one of the Intern’s tasks to cash the Investigator’s checks and to pay the Investigator’s bills for him, for the Investigator had a fastidious dislike of what he called
finances.

Envelopes containing the Investigator’s royalty checks—(to “J. Swift” as well as “Cornelius Hinton” and several others)—he could not bring himself to open, or, if he did, he could not bring himself to glance at the figures, as if to see the extent of his income might be an act of immodesty. Even “Cornelius Hinton’s” monthly checks from the Institute, he could barely bring himself to examine.

Such tasks, as well as paying bills, the Investigator gave over entirely to the Intern, surprisingly soon after the Intern came to work for him. (Not at the Institute but in the Investigator’s stucco town house on the Rio Vista Canal connecting Temple Park with Fort Lauderdale, which the Investigator was leasing from a colleague on leave at the university. As if incidentally, the town house had a two-storey living room mostly glass-walled, with a view, dazzling in the morning, of the Atlantic Ocean and the misty sky above the ocean a mile and a half to the east.)

So this is what
bestseller
means!—the Intern whistled thinly through her teeth.

“He’s rich! Money spilling out of bank accounts, he doesn’t know what to do with.”

And there were translations and foreign sales, reissued paperback editions of old titles, as well as new titles; adaptations of several of the
SHAME!
titles into TV and film documentaries, in Europe; even, in Sweden, a proposed stage adaptation of
SHAME! YOUR (DIS)HONOR
to be produced by a major Stockholm theater.

The Investigator dressed well, in a gentlemanly fashion, when he wanted
Professor Cornelius Hinton
to present a convincing image to the public; but overall, so far as the Intern could determine, the Investigator lived well within his means, owned no property and only grudgingly leased a high-end vehicle, in the late winter of 2012 a steel-colored Acura MDX, of practical use for his trips by car to Death Row prisons.

(The Intern had not been misleading when she’d assured the Investigator that she had a driver’s license—somewhere. Since she’d been hired by him, she had managed to acquire, through a Fort Lauderdale acquaintance with a contact in the Broward County Motor Vehicle Department, a laminated driver’s license with a photo ID issued to
Sabbath McSwain
born 8/15/86.
For the Investigator would not drive any vehicle, for any purpose, if he could avoid it.) Along with routine bills—gas, electricity, insurance—the Intern paid bills to a number of services each month, one of them a long-term-care hospital in Minneapolis called Mount Saint Joseph. Also, a check for fifteen hundred dollars went out each month to
F. J. Mackie,
of St. Paul; another, for a slightly lower sum, to
Denise Delaney,
of Chicago; still others, for varying amounts of money, to a dozen individuals of whom most lived in the Midwest. (Relatives, former spouses, children?
Did the Investigator have children? Grandchildren?)
One of the accounts, to which the Investigator had paid more than thirty-five thousand dollars between 2005 and 2011, to a party named
Hollis Whittaker,
resident of White Plains, New York, had been closed in 2011; in red pencil, the Investigator had written F I N I across the name in his handwritten bank account record.

At several colleges and universities including the University of Minnesota, Wake Forest College, Ithaca College, Loyola College of Chicago, and the College of Arts and Sciences at Temple Park, Florida, the Investigator had established scholarship funds for undergraduates with endowments ranging from $500,000 to $900,000. At Cornell University, in addition, there had been established, in 2007, the
J. Swift Fellowship in Bioethics and Investigative Reportage,
with an endowment of $900,000, for graduate and post-doc students.

Which meant, as the Intern rapidly calculated, that the Investigator had given away several million dollars within the past decade—a fact no one else could know since no one had tabulated and made a note of it and very likely, the Investigator couldn’t have named the numerous scholarships he’d endowed.

In a spare room of the rented town house, on a white Parsons table that stretched the length of the room, were accordion-files of letters: typed and even handwritten letters. Hundreds of these dating back to the late 1960s. (A note from a previous intern, on a Post-it, stated
Sorting & filing to 1991. Incomplete.
)

And there were files of more recent, email letters. Most of these were from editors, some were from readers, a scattering were from friends and acquaintances, former academic associates of the Investigator, students. Salutations were to
J. Swift, Cornelius Hinton, “Andy.”
(Could “Andy” be an affectionate diminutive of “Andrew Edgar Mackie Jr.” who’d disappeared decades ago?) The Intern skimmed this miscellany, alert to such phrases as
Love, Much love, Love always
.

Mixed with letters were cards. Savage-beautiful art postcards, reproductions of paintings by Matisse, Derain, Rousseau . . . The most gorgeously gaudy cards appeared to have been sent by the same individual whose scrawled name might have been
Isabel,
or
Inez.

The last of these cards was dated 2/22/08 and the postmark was Brussels, Belgium.

The Intern had been instructed to “tidy things up”—“identify, with labels”—“dispose of duplicate books, galleys, etc.” in the rented stucco town house. Less than a year’s lease remained on the town house and the Investigator hadn’t given a thought—of course—to where he might move next. (The Investigator was notoriously careless about planning for an immediate, domestic future: his concentration was focused upon the current project.)

Previous interns had sorted, filed and labeled much of the Investigator’s materials. The Intern discovered, in cardboard boxes neatly labeled by years—(1970–1980; 1980–1990, etc.) –publications in which the Investigator’s work had appeared,
New York Review of Books, The
Nation, The New Yorker,
Harper’s
and
TLS;
copyedited manuscript pages and galleys for the
SHAME!
books; print interviews with the Investigator, under the name
J. Swift;
swatches of reviews, some laudatory and some not. In a folder marked SUMMER 1981/ASPEN were photographs of a festive outdoor wedding in which the Investigator, in his early forties, didn’t appear to be the groom but—possibly—the best man. He was wearing a tie-dyed suit of some eccentric material like burlap; on his feet were sandals, and on his head dark bristling snaky braids like dreadlocks; his beard wasn’t close-trimmed as it was now but wide, dark, and curly. He didn’t look so much like
himself
—rather more like a ruddy American-simulacrum of the revolutionary Che Guevara.

The wedding photos were haphazard. The camera was scarcely in focus. On a mountainside in the background were wildflowers in vivid bloom, as in a fauve painting. The Intern smiled to think—
They are all stoned. They are all so happy! What has become of them now, three decades later?

There was the girl-bride—in white tattered-silk, long silky blond hair, barefoot. And there was the groom—a young guy in his thirties, with a sunburnt face, hair in a ponytail—clean-shaven, and barefoot also.

How handsome the Investigator was, in the summer of 1981! In that long-ago time when he’d been young, still. When he’d been amid a circle of celebrating friends, with whom he was, you could see, emotionally close.

The Intern hadn’t yet been born, in 1981. She felt a stab of jealousy seeing in several photographs the Investigator standing with a young woman: not a beautiful young woman but attractive, snub-nosed, with wavy chestnut-colored hair, in a long lacy skirt to her ankles. The two were laughing together, relaxed. There was—you could see it—a sexual ease between them, a physical radiance.

The Intern brought these photographs to a window, to examine them more closely. She thought
I have never had a life. What would it be, to have a life?

The Intern felt no bitterness, only curiosity. An almost scientific curiosity.