The Middleman Page 4

  “Oh,” Bill said. He’d never heard her speak so critically of David before.

  “His failures are turning him sour. He’s probably told you about my ultimatum?”

  “I think I heard something about that.”

  “It’s not about the money. It’s because he’s a misery to live with. He can’t feel happy about his friends’ successes, because they’re just more of a reminder of his own shortcomings. He snaps at me. He disappears into the back room to drink and reread Paris Review interviews. I don’t think he’s really writing anything.” She turned back to the kids, unconsciously covering her belly with her forearm. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Bill considered pressing for more, but as a lawyer he’d learned how to read intent in clients’ faces. He could tell when they intended to open up and when they didn’t. When they didn’t, posing questions was a waste of breath. So he said, “What’s your take on Martin Bishop?”

  She watched the children, eyes alighting on sudden movement, on leaps and swerves. She said, “He’s the first person I’ve met in years who actually cares.”

  “About what?”

  “Everything. All of us. You’d think he’d be livid with David. I am. But not Martin. He told me not to hate him, because David’s been twisted by consumer society so many different ways that he’s no longer able to see what’s real and what’s not. There’s truth in that.”

  “But Bishop advocates murder, Ingrid.”

  “No, he doesn’t. He advocates the threat of murder. There’s a difference.”

  “Not much.”

  “He knows,” she explained, “that without the threat of extreme action, politicians won’t listen. Anything less than that, and the only thing they’ll hear is big money. We all know this—you do, I do—but Martin’s the only one who sees how sick it is and is willing to say it aloud. He’s the only one who hasn’t forgotten how to be horrified. There’s nothing cynical about him.”

  Bill wasn’t sure how to answer this, so he essentially repeated himself. “Not just murder but terrorism. The man is advocating terrorism. That’s the worst kind of cynicism.”

  She shook her head. “Terrorism is an attempt to terrorize the masses. Martin’s only interested in terrorizing the elite by giving the power back to the masses. He wants…” She hesitated, looking for the words. “He wants to take the fight directly to the perpetrators. He wants people to realize how easy it is. All you need is the will.”

  Bill had the urge—an extremely rare thing—to slap this woman out of her adoration.

  She said, “Last week I was in Newark, with a few hundred others. Maybe a thousand. We were telling the DA’s office that Jerome Brown mattered. A cop kills someone, he should pay. You know the answer we got—tear gas and clubs. So I come home and try to talk to David about it, but he’s just … I don’t know, pissed off. All he can see is himself. It’s something Martin told me, and it’s true—back in the seventies, the progressives turned off, put down their weapons, abandoned politics, and became navel-gazers. Their excuse? They would change the world through art, get people to see themselves differently. And for the next forty years this terrible world just kept hardening. Martin gets that. Eventually, people are going to have to pull a trigger, just to be heard.”

  “Is this world really so terrible, Ingrid?”

  “For LaTanya, Jerome’s five-year-old daughter? Yes, it is.” She looked at Bill with a convert’s intensity. “I’m no virgin, Bill. I’ve known Martin’s type; I know just how wrong they can be. But he’s different. Really, you should spend some time with him. You’ll see what I see.”

  When she turned back to the children, the look had slipped away, but Bill kept thinking of that expression. It was more than blind conversion to a dangerous faith; it was clarity. In Ingrid’s face and in her words Bill realized that she now saw the world with a clarity that David hadn’t possessed for years, if ever.

  They found him inside, sitting with Gina beneath a Jackson Pollock in the lounge. A beer in his hand, eyes hollow, a slur to every fifth word. But David was too exhausted to make trouble. “Come on,” said Ingrid. “Let’s go.”

  Like the most submissive animal on earth, David got to his feet and wandered in the general direction of the front door, through a cloud of See-yas and Drive-safes. Bill and Gina shepherded them down to their car. David was straight enough to give up the keys to Ingrid, and then he gave his hosts bear hugs, on the verge of tears. “Thanks, you two.” Ingrid watched from the driver’s seat, as if it were a scene she saw every day. David climbed in beside her and waved, then closed his eyes. As if he were completely alone in that car. Then they were gone.

  Bill and Gina stared at the lingering dust cloud of their exit. “And you wonder why I want to move south,” Gina said.

  They’d climbed the front steps again when a police car rolled up the drive and parked where David and Ingrid’s car had been. “Goddam neighbors complaining,” Bill said as he headed back to the two uniforms climbing out of their car, donning caps. Gina waited by the front door, watching along with a few others. At the far end of the front porch, an actor from Provincetown spat curses, trying to figure out what to do with his smoldering joint.

  The police talked for a while to Bill, who shook his head, then spoke at length. It went on too long to be a complaint about the noise, so Gina headed down the stairs and introduced herself. That was when she learned that they were here for Martin Bishop and Benjamin Mittag—Mittag, the gorilla who had thrown David off the porch. Finally, it seemed, the two leaders of the Massive Brigade had broken the letter of the law, though the officers wouldn’t tell them which law. It didn’t matter, though, for Bishop and Mittag had already disappeared.

  AFTER THE PARTY

  SUNDAY, JUNE 18, TO SATURDAY, JULY 8, 2017

  1

  AS SHE walked through the mess that a dozen caterers were working to set right again, Jersey cops questioning still-drunk financiers and stoned artists, Special Agent Rachel Proulx could see that it had been an excellent party, the kind that you can only have in this America, the America people thought of as the land of plenty. Hot dogs and veggie burgers for the kids, salmon for the ladies, steak for the fellas. Scattered bowls of nuts, chips, salsa and guacamole, and sembei of a variety of shapes and spices. Heineken and Foster’s and Shiner Bock, Cuervo Gold, Bombay Sapphire, Tito’s, Jim Beam, Glenfiddich, and many shades of wine. All this and seventy-five friends in a three-story Victorian on an acre of parklike land in the estate section of Montclair, New Jersey.

  On another Sunday, she would have missed this entirely. Arlington was four hours away, but her mother had fallen again on Friday, and so she’d spent the weekend at the condo in Croton-on-Hudson, just over the New York border, feeding her mother soup, finding her favorite weekend TV shows, and listening to her stories about a childhood Rachel could no longer clearly remember. So when the call came in, it wasn’t much to set her mother up with the remote, cross the Tappan Zee, and take the hour’s drive south to Montclair.

  “I’m off to bust someone famous,” she’d told her mother as she gathered her keys.

  “The president?” her mother asked, a twinkle in her eye.

  “Martin Bishop.”

  “Who?”

  That morning, an anonymous female had called the Bureau field office on Federal Plaza from one of the dwindling number of Manhattan pay phones, down by Stuyvesant Town. The caller had directed the FBI operator to a particular storage garage near the Jersey Shore, because “the Massive Brigade’s hiding some scary shit there.” When the operator asked for clarification, she hung up.

  The caller—whoever she was—knew that these days all one had to do was say “Martin Bishop” or “Benjamin Mittag” or “Massive Brigade” for the Bureau to sit up and take notice. An agent was dispatched to Jersey, where the storage facility’s owner unlocked unit number 394. The agent was patched through to Rachel Proulx, presently with her mother in Croton-on-Hudson. “We’ve got those fuckers now,�
� he told her.

  Locating Mittag and Bishop had taken a little longer—some phone calls to contacts and then a more useful, though possibly illegal, favor called in to a friend at the NSA who tracked the two men’s phones to a party in New Jersey. The Montclair police were sent in to assess and take the two men into custody, but by the time they arrived the suspects were in the wind, their phones no longer visible in the cellular firmament.

  By that point, Rachel was cruising down the Garden State Parkway, and while the news was disappointing she didn’t slow down. If she’d learned anything during twenty years in the Bureau, it was that the key to success was neither genius nor brute force but persistence.

  A mustached officer in a too-tight uniform approached and shook her hand. “Best we got is they left together, about a half hour before we arrived.”

  “And the hosts?”

  “In the kitchen,” he said, a thumb over his shoulder. As she started in that direction, he said, “What did they find?”

  Rachel looked back at him.

  “In the storage space. No one told us.”

  “An FIM-92 Stinger missile and shoulder-mounted launcher,” she said.

  He shook his head and whistled as her phone beeped an incoming message from Sam Schumer: “Is it true about Bishop and Mittag? Call me.” She put the phone away with a sigh and went back to examining the premises.

  She found more caterers in the kitchen, furiously washing soiled glasses. At the small dining table, a sweet-faced detective sat with Bill and Gina Ferris, early sixties. Introductions were made, and once Rachel began questioning the Ferrises it became apparent to the detective that he wasn’t needed, so he made himself useful elsewhere.

  “How did you come to know Martin Bishop?”

  “We didn’t come to know him at all,” Gina told her. “I’m not even sure who invited him.”

  “Harry,” said Bill. “I think Harry White invited him.”

  “Did he?” asked Gina. “Last time we ask him over.”

  Gina Ferris’s comments were more pointed and direct than her husband’s. With Rachel’s encouragement, she recalled the political discussion that had been interrupted by the piñata. “All of us have gripes,” she said. “I’ll bet you do, too. But, come on. That kind of violence hasn’t been in vogue since 1975.”

  “Are you sure about that?” asked Rachel. Over the last couple of years the country had looked to her a lot like the early seventies: polarization, weekly demonstrations, occasional ruptures of violence. The Massive Brigade was only one incarnation of the rage infecting every end of the political spectrum.

  “Well,” Gina said, “not among my friends.”

  “What about you?” Rachel turned to Bill. “You’re a lawyer. You could be useful to someone like Bishop.”

  Bill leaned back, a man as comfortable with his newfound retirement as he was with a kitchen full of caterers. “Bishop never asked for my representation. I don’t even think I spoke to him.”

  “We heard there was a fight between Bishop and someone,” Rachel said. “A David Parker.”

  “The novelist,” Gina said as she stood up.

  “I wouldn’t call it a fight,” said Bill. “A sucker punch. But David’s been going through some rough times. He thought Bishop was coming on to his wife.”

  “That man is a mess,” Gina confided.

  “Really?”

  They started in about David and Ingrid, and soon they had shared more about the state of the Parkers’ marriage than, Rachel suspected, they had planned to. She scribbled it all down in a notepad with a mechanical pencil. “And when Bishop and Mittag left, they left together?”

  Gina had seen Bishop in the living room, drinking with Harry White. He’d answered his phone and looked concerned. That was when he patted Harry’s arm and went to Mittag. They left the room together, but Gina couldn’t say whether or not they’d gotten in the same car.

  Rachel straightened and smiled to put them at ease. But she could tell that it didn’t work—both Bill and Gina tensed visibly. “What do you think?” she asked conversationally. “Bishop walks out of here and … what? Any idea what his next step would be?”

  Gina answered first. “He’s going to hide away until someone like you tracks him down.”

  “So you’re not worried about his revolutionary talk?”

  “Should I be?”

  Rachel shrugged.

  “He didn’t move,” Bill said.

  Both women looked at him.

  “Bishop. When David hit him. He just stood there. David swung, and Bishop didn’t move. He saw it coming—we all did. But … he didn’t care.”

  “What do you think that means?”

  Bill thought about this, his silence a heavy thing as they waited for some wisdom, but all he said was “I suppose it means he’s reckless.”

  Rachel spoke to a handful of guests—most had made their exits soon after the police arrived. From what she gathered, it had been like most parties, full of small cliques that were careful not to mix. She’d been to enough of them herself, Washington shindigs where she stuck close to others from her office, and the conversation inevitably turned to Hoover Building gossip. In a back room, she called Harry White, but he claimed not to have invited Bishop after all.

  Had Bishop and Mittag known from the start that the police were heading toward them? Or had that phone call to Bishop alerted them that they should disappear? She had no idea. The Montclair cops promised reports from their interviews, yet she knew from their expressions that she could expect little.

  2

  IT WAS nearly ten when she got back to Croton-on-Hudson and found her mother dozing in front of the Food Network. Rachel poured herself a glass of rosé, changed the channel to catch the tail end of Schumer Says, and settled in with Sam’s particular brand of American populist venom. Schumer wiped at his curly mustache and told his audience that things were about to become a lot more dangerous in America, because Martin Bishop had gone AWOL. Schumer’s “inside sources” had informed him about the missile launcher and the sudden disappearing act. “Public enemy number one has just gone off the grid. And he’s armed to the teeth.”

  Two years ago, before Sam Schumer moved his show from YouTube to Fox and dialed up the apocalyptic talk, he had been the kind of independent journalist Rachel Proulx could talk to and know that what she wanted to share with the public would make it out relatively unscathed. It was a relationship that served them both: She gained access to an audience that avoided the so-called mainstream media, and Sam Schumer could claim to have a bona fide source within the Bureau. This tit-for-tat had been approved by the then-assistant director in large part because Rachel had argued her case so eloquently, and the upper echelons grew to appreciate the gung ho patriot who always spun the story in their favor. Then Schumer moved to television, and the sudden national exposure did something to him. He still defended the Bureau, but he discovered that the loudest of his competitors, the ones who kicked up the dirt of their audiences’ fears, always beat his numbers.

  The shift became apparent nine months ago, when the breaking story on Schumer Says was called “Invasion from the South”—an exposé on the future of illegal immigration. “By 2028, the southern half of the United States will for all practical purposes be Mexico’s northern states. Expect secession. Expect war.”

  Schumer Says became Sunday night’s most-watched news program.

  Given her role in bringing him on, the irony was lost on no one when, three months ago, Rachel asked to terminate the relationship with Schumer. The new assistant director, Mark Paulson, threw her old arguments right back at her as he turned her down. Now that Schumer’s audience reached a half million each Sunday night in the treasured 25–54 demographic, no one in the Bureau wanted to throw away a megaphone of that size, even if Sam Schumer occasionally went off script.

  Rachel wasn’t going to make it easy, though, which was why, when Schumer’s second text message—On air soon. What’s the scoop?—came
minutes after she left Bill and Gina’s house, she’d ignored it. Schumer wanted the scoop on Martin Bishop’s disappearing act, but as yet there was no scoop. But Schumer had found another source—probably the Montclair cop she’d told about the missile launcher.

  He brought on a retired CIA officer who said that if they wanted to predict the Massive Brigade’s next move, it would be best to look at the Berlin terrorist group Bishop had been inspired by, the Kommando Rosa Luxemburg. “They were mad bombers, and the Germans were lucky they blew themselves up. But there’s no reason to think Bishop is going to be that stupid. We’ll need to ramp up security at all major transit hubs.”

  “Americans need to stay vigilant,” Schumer suggested.

  His guest nodded seriously. “Everybody needs to stay vigilant.”

  Rachel poured herself a second glass and watched as Schumer and his guests investigated security weaknesses in America’s infrastructure and spun through all the potential terrorist acts the Massive Brigade could be planning. They cherry-picked quotes from The Propaganda Ministry and considered which lines to fear most. By the time he signed off, Schumer was in a somber mood, telling his audience to stay strong and not hide at home—“Go out, do some shopping. Otherwise the terrorists win.”

  “Doing your part for the economy,” Rachel said, toasting Schumer as her mother stirred. Rachel got up to help her. “Let’s get you to bed. I’m going to have to leave early.”

  “Did you get him?”

  “Who?”

  “The president?”

  As Rachel guided her mother through her nighttime routine, she gave her a rundown of the situation. “But you’ll find them?”

  “Of course I will,” she said, because in that moment she believed it. It was more than the faith that all FBI agents share in the methodologies of the Bureau; it was a personal conviction. Back in 2009, she’d first watched Martin Bishop speak in San Francisco while on an extended research project, looking into the depth and breadth of the radical left and its security implications. Standing before a sparse Berkeley crowd, he hadn’t been the orator he would become, but in his conviction and clear, simple logic Rachel had been able to read the promise of his future: crowds. She’d duly put him into her report as someone to watch, an assessment that many in the Bureau now considered prophetic. She’d predicted his rise; therefore, she would be the one to hasten his fall.