Man of the Hour (32 page)

What do I care? he told himself. I’ve got my dad’s old army surplus tent, a cooler full of beer and cold cuts, and a beautiful autumn day ahead of me. At noon, he set off in a white Ford Tempo, trailed by a convoy of agents in three unmarked cars, plus the regular ragtag band of reporters in secondhand import cars. They followed him up the Henry Hudson and onto the Saw Mill. At the exit for the Taconic Parkway, two television broadcast vans fell in line behind them.

As he reached the edge of the campground and parked, he noticed roughly a dozen agents and a dozen reporters keeping a respectful distance but definitely still trailing him. The beautiful autumn day was fading, the air was getting unusually chilly for mid-October, and he realized he should have brought a jacket. Nearby, the reporters looked comfortable in stylish barn jackets from Orvis and Land’s End, while the agents had more pragmatic department-store coats.

Apparently, they were all under the impression that he was heading for some arsenal in the woods where he might have buried additional evidence. Though why he would lead them to it so blatantly was not clear to him.

He followed the line of pine trees out past a scummy frog pond and up over a steep hill until he settled on a tall gray rock overlooking a gulch full of brown leaves. The ground nearby was hard and cold with wide, vein-shaped cracks in the black soil. A hawk flew by overhead. With the agents and reporters watching him from behind the trees some 150 yards away he felt like an animal being stalked by hunters and
National Geographic
photographers, but to hell with them. He decided to tough it out and ignore them. He started trying to figure out how to set up his tent poles without the long-lost instruction book.

As the temperature fell into the low forties and the bleak white sky turned gray and then navy, the news people finally departed, realizing nothing much was going to happen here. He cooked his hot dogs over the little hibachi and retreated into his tent just before eight, to drink Rolling Rocks and read Emerson by flashlight. He felt himself settling in, becoming part of the natural order of things, a man in his element. Why hadn’t he done this before?

Then the rains came. There was no light drizzle beforehand, no heavy moisture in the air. A curtain in the sky just seemed to part and the water came straight down, through the trees, through the loosely rigged olive canvas of David’s tent, through his clothes and into his skin. Within two minutes he was soaked to the bone and shivering. The wonders of the natural world. He moved around the tent frantically, trying to reset the poles, but everything he did just let in more water.

Eventually, he stumbled out of the tent with his flashlight, dripping and sneezing, and found himself surrounded by the wild darkness of the woods, with no idea where his car might be. The rain was coming down in walls, not sheets, and the only light he could see was from a tent a football field and a half away on the right. He staggered toward it like Frankenstein’s monster pursued by mad villagers, trying to avoid the precipice of the leafy gulch.

It was a good five minutes before he finally reached the edge of the light-filled tent and took hold of one of its flaps.

“Excuse me,” he called out. “Can I come in and get dry a minute?”

“Sure thing.”

He lifted the flap and stepped inside, feeling a breath of hot air move through his clothes. The tent had been assembled with a kind of manly assurance, imposing a comfortable living space—a kind of instant apartment—on the rough landscape. Six perfectly dry people were sitting around a portable heater and a radio, listening to a Rangers hockey game. Donald Sippes, the FBI agent who’d led the raid on his apartment, half-stood and offered David a steaming mug with
I SUPPORT OUR TROOPS
written on the side.

“Glad you could make it,” said Sippes. “You want some hot chocolate?”

David took it gratefully, as well as a plaid blanket offered by a blond female agent.

Sippes knelt down next to him, looking doleful. “I don’t suppose you want to make some kind of a statement, do you?”

David hoisted the blanket over his shoulders as he sniffed and shook his head no.

“Then we should just turn him out in the rain again,” said a man sitting in the corner, whom David now recognized as the pumpkin-headed agent who’d taken his son’s baseball mitt.

“Chris?” Sippes furrowed his brow.

“What did I say wrong?” The pumpkin-head flexed his thick neck. “We’re not in the business of coddling suspects, are we?”

“Come on, Chris,” Sippes said, the reproach in his voice unmistakable. “He’s just going to stay until the rain lets up. Right?”

“Right.” David crouched near the opening of the tent, facing away from Pumpkin-Head Chris.

“Besides, he’s not a suspect yet. Officially.”

The crowd roared on the radio and the announcer began babbling excitedly. Sippes picked up a mug with a picture of Snoopy on it and gestured at David. “You like hockey?”

“No, not much.” He almost felt like apologizing.

“Suit yourself.” Sippes went back to his sleeping bag in front of the radio.

David remained crouched by the opening, watching the hard rain make a mist rise from the earth. His thoughts fell into the relentless rhythm: I can take this, I can take this, I can take this. If this is as bad as it gets, I can take this.

39

“PULL THE TRIGGER, LOVE.”

A few minutes before eleven o’clock that night, Judy Mandel sat at her computer terminal with her finger poised on the send button, listening to Nazi bark orders over the phone. He was actually standing less than twenty yards away, behind his office glass, but somehow it made him feel more powerful, more omnipotent, more like the image of an American tabloid editor, to growl into the phone instead of coming over to speak to her directly.

“What’s the holdup, doll?” he said with the exaggerated New York accent he put on when he’d been drinking too much. “We’ve got the story, we’ve got the edge. We’ve been holding the front page for five hours for you.”

“I just want to try him one more time. This is a very big deal, Robert. It’s much more damaging than all the other stories we’ve had put together.”

“How many messages have you left already?”

“Three. But he’s been out in the woods all day and all night. We can’t just run this without any comment from him, can we?”

Amazing. The further ahead she got on the story, the more she worried. It was like a rabid animal chasing her.

From across the newsroom, she saw Robert do a little skip-hop and pirouette with a Scotch glass, as if he was remembering being a lithe young boy from Perth trying to pick up girls at a posh London party. It was a bizarrely private scene; he must have forgotten people could see him through the glass.

“Come on, lover,” he crooned into the receiver. “You’ve given him every goddamn chance to answer back and he hasn’t done it. You’ve got the comment from his lawyers. This is going to be your biggest story yet. If we don’t do it, one of these other fucking bastards will and then we’ll have to kill ourselves. Pull the trigger.”

“Give me a minute, Robert.”

She was having
a moment
. She’d thought she wouldn’t have them anymore, now that she was sure of her role in life. But here it was again. The confusion boiling up in her. The whole world was chasing her story and she wasn’t sure how she could stay ahead.

How had she gotten this far? Were they about to find out she was a fraud? Who was she supposed to be anyway? When she was fourteen, she’d looked through her mother’s
Vogue
and thought she should starve herself and become a super-model. But then she’d gone off to Vassar and the lesbian separatists had convinced her she should stop shaving her legs and be one of them for a while. And just lately she was trying to walk the walk and talk the talk to impress Robert and all these Neanderthal cops. What she still didn’t have was a full sense of who she should be in these little in-between moments when no one was watching her.

She looked around for Bill Ryan, but he wasn’t there. So she put Nazi on hold and tried David Fitzgerald’s number one last time. After the fourth ring, the answering machine kicked on again and that was that. David Fitzgerald’s life would never be quite the same. She switched back to Nazi.

“Happy now?” he said, tipping back his glass.

She watched the drink go down and heard the ice clack against his teeth at the same time. “I gave him every chance.”

“That you did, love. That you did. Now pull the fucking trigger.”

She hit the send button and the green letters on her screen jumped. Words flew out on fired electrodes and fiberoptic wires, making their way to Robert and the copy editors, who’d eventually send them on to the plant in New Jersey, where a half million papers would be printed up and sent out on trucks in time for the morning edition. Within hours, the story would be picked up by radio, television, and Internet providers around the world.

Thrilling and frightening to consider, what was beginning at the end of her finger. It could be the start of a new role for her. They’d have her on television news shows to talk about the story. And if she made a good impression, maybe they’d make her appearances a regular thing. Eventually, she’d have her own program, her own web page, she’d become the kind of personality other people wrote about and chased after. They’d write wonderful things and then awful things about her. Building her up and tearing her down. She felt exhilarated and ashamed at the same time. Is this what she wanted?

She looked across the newsroom and saw that Robert had settled down in front of a terminal and was reading her story. It was too late to take it back, and she felt a tiny spark of apprehension.

She wondered if somewhere out in the dark, wet woods David Fitzgerald was feeling that spark too.

40

DAVID DROPPED THE CAR
back at Hertz just before two o’clock the next afternoon and took the subway uptown, feeling sore and still slightly chilled. Yes, the camping trip would be a fair addition to his ever-expanding collection of personal disasters, but at least he hadn’t had to read or listen to any stories about himself for the last twenty-four hours.

When he came around the corner of 112th Street and Broadway, though, they were waiting for him. Except instead of the motley band of thirty, there were at least a hundred and fifty press people gathered outside his building. Where did they all come from and why were they so angry all of a sudden? Up to this point, there’d been a certain collegiality among them. Now they’d turned vicious. They were baiting him like an animal. The photographers stood on car hoods, braying at him. The attractive female reporters, who’d once looked on him with openmouthed interest, were plainly sneering. And the TV camera crews at the back were cursing him out loud.

“Fuckin’ degenerate lowlife!” an enormous bull moose of a sound man called out, hocking phlegm into David’s path.

“They ought to lock you up forever, you piece of shit!” shouted a cameraman.

“What did I do?” David struggled through the group, looking for a friendly face. “What’s going on?”

Sara Kidreaux thrust a microphone at him. She’d always seemed kind and attentive when she’d interviewed him before. But as she drew closer, he saw her face was a mask of indignation.

“David,” she said. “What do you have to say in response to these newest allegations?”

“What are they? I’ve been in the woods since yesterday afternoon.”

The crowd pressed in around him and everyone began talking at once. Jeering, shouting questions, repeating accusations, asking him what he was going to do next. It was all furious and indistinct. A boom mike smacked him on the ear and a camera lens caught the end of his nose. Someone pulled the back of his shirt. It was like a gang initiation. None of these people would be so wanton and cruel on their own, but together they’d conjured a toxic atmosphere. David couldn’t breathe. He had to get away before they accidentally strangled him with their cables and wires.

He bolted from the group and started to run for the building’s entrance, almost colliding with Judy Mandel.

“Where have you been?” She stared at him strangely, as if he’d caused her great concern. “I called you four times yesterday.”

He was about to ask why when the rest of the mob came storming across the sidewalk after him, knocking aside an old woman with a cart full of secondhand vegetables from upscale Dumpsters. He pushed through the front door and into the building’s narrow alcove with the rain of voices at his back.

He could still hear them when he reached the second floor and brought the morning papers into his apartment. They were calling up from the street.

“Hey, David, why’d you do it?!”

“Hey, creep, show your face!”

And then he saw it. The “exclusive” on the front page of the
Trib
by Judy Mandel.

TERROR TEACHER WAS ABUSIVE, SEZ EX.

He staggered into the living room, tearing off the plastic and reading:

In an exclusive interview with the
Trib
yesterday, the former wife of alleged school bus bomber David Brian Fitzgerald described her ex-husband as an erratic, unpredictable personality who once gave her a black eye and may have touched their seven-year-old son “inappropriately.”

He fell back on the couch and read the sentence twice, realizing that he had reached the final destination on the road to sorrow.

He forced himself to go on to the end of the piece, where the denial from his lawyers sat like an irrelevant footnote. The rest of the story was just too devastating. It described someone familiar, yet completely strange. Renee described his father’s war record, his own interest in the literature and mythology of heroism, his dark moods, his occasional intemperate drinking, his youthful arrest in Atlantic Beach, and his inability to communicate with her. She even mentioned his unpublished novel,
The Firebug
, neglecting to explain that the title was a metaphor for the unreliability of memory and not a reference to pyromania. Pulled together in print, the plainest and most mundane of details seemed sinister and incriminating. Especially “the inappropriate touching,” which clearly referred to his tickling of Arthur, and the mysterious black eye, which occurred when he tried to break down the bathroom door.