Smoke Harvey had handwriting that was a distant cousin of Dad’s, minuscule script blustered by a cruel northeasterly. THE NOCTURNAL CONSPIRACY, the man had written in caps in the top right corner of every page. The first few papers detailed the history of The Nightwatchmen, the many names and apparent methodology (I wondered where he’d gotten his information, because he referenced neither Dad’s article nor the Littleton book), followed by thirty pages or so on Gracey, most of it barely readable (Ada had used a photocopier that printed tire treads across the page): “Greek in origin, not Turkish,” “Born February 12, 1944, in Athens, mother Greek, father American,” “Reasons for radicalism unknown.” I continued on. There were photocopies of old West Virginia and Texas newspaper articles detailing the two known bombings, “Senator Killed, Peace Freaks Suspected,” “Oxico Bombing, 4 Killed, Nightwatchmen Sought,” an article from Life magazine dated December 1978, “The End of Activism,” about the dissolution of the Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society and other dissident political organizations, a few papers about COINTELPRO and other FBI maneuverings, a tiny California article, “Radical Sighted at Drugstore,” and then, a newsletter. It was dated November 15, 1987, Daily Bulletin, Houston Police Department, Confidential, For Police Use Only, WANTED BY LOCAL AND FEDERAL AUTHORITIES, Warrants on file at Harris County Sheriff Warrant Section, Bell 432-6329—
My heart stopped.
Staring back at me, above “Gracey, George. I.R. 329573. Male, White, 43, 220, Heavy build. Fed. Warrant #78-3298. Tattoos on right chest. Walks with limp. Subjects should be considered armed and dangerous”—was Baba au Rhum (Visual Aid 35.0).
VISUAL AID 35.0
Granted, in the police photo, Servo sported a dense steel-wool beard and mustache, both doing their best to scrub out his oval face, and the photograph (a still taken from a security camera) was in sloppy black and white. Yet Servo’s burning eyes, his lipless mouth reminiscent of the plastic gap in a Kleenex box with no Kleenex, the way his small head stood up against his bullying shoulders — it was unmistakable.
“He always hobbled,” Dad had said to me in Paris. “Even when we were at Harvard.”
I grabbed the paper, which also featured the sketch of Catherine Baker, the one I’d seen on the Internet. (“Federal Authorities and the Harris County Sheriff’s Department are asking for public assistance in obtaining information leading to the Grand Jury indictment of these persons…” it read on the second page.) I ran upstairs to my room, yanked open my desk drawers, and dug through my old homework papers and notebooks and Unit Tests, until I found the Air France boarding passes, some Ritz stationery, and then, the small piece of graph paper on which Dad had scribbled Servo’s home and mobile telephone numbers the day they’d left me and gone to La Sorbonne.
After some confusion — country codes, reversing ones and zeros — I managed to correctly dial the mobile number. Instantly, I was met with the hisses and heckling of a number no longer in service. When I called the home number, after a great deal of “Como?” and “Qué?” a patient Spanish woman informed me that the apartment wasn’t a private residence, no, it was available for weeklong lettings via Go Chateaux, Inc. She pointed me toward the vacation Web site and an 800-number (see “ILE-297,” www.gochateaux.com). I called the Reservations line and was curtly told by a man that the apartment hadn’t been a private residence since the company’s inception in 1981. I then tried to wrench free whatever info he had on the individual who’d leased the unit the week of December 26, but was informed Go Chateaux wasn’t authorized to disclose their client’s personal records.
“Have I done what I could to assist you on this call?”
“This is a matter of life and death. People are being killed.”
“Have I satisfied all of your questions?”
“No.”
“Thank you for calling Go Chateaux.”
I hung up and did nothing but sit on the edge of my bed, stunned by the blasé response of the afternoon. Surely, the sky should have split open like plumber’s pants; at the very least, smoke should be unraveling from the trees, their topmost branches singed — but no, the afternoon was a dead-eyed teenager, a weathered broad hanging around a dive bar, old tinsel. My revelation was my problem; it had nothing whatsoever to do with the bedroom, with the light like drunk wallflowers in shapeless gold dresses slouching along the radiator and bookshelf, the windowpane shadows like idiot sunbathers sprawled all over the floor. I remembered picking up Servo’s cane after it had toppled off the edge of a boulangerie counter, rapping a woman standing behind him directly on her black shoe making her gasp and light up red like she was a twenty-five-cent theme park game of sledgehammer and bell, and the top of the walking stick, a bald eagle head, had been hot and sticky from Servo’s steak-fat palm. As I returned the cane to the spot by his elbow, he’d tossed words over his left shoulder, hastily, like he’d spilled salt: “Mmmm, merci beaucoup. Need a leash for that thing, don’t I?” I supposed it was no use berating myself for not quilting together, in a more timely fashion, these obviously well-matched scraps of life (How many men had I ever known with hip trouble? None but Servo was the pitiful answer) and naturally (though I resisted) I thought of something Dad had said: “A surprise is rarely a stranger, but a faceless patient who’s been reading across from you in the waiting room the entire time, his head hidden by a magazine but his orange socks in plain view, as well as his gold pocket watch and frayed trousers.”
But if Servo was George Gracey, what did that make Dad?
Servo is to Gracey as Dad is to—suddenly, the answer came lurching out of hiding, hands up, throwing itself to the ground, begging for forgiveness, praying I wouldn’t flay it alive.
I raced to my desk, seized my CASE NOTES, scoured the pages for those odd little nicknames I’d taken such haphazard note of, eventually finding them cowering at the bottom of Page 4: Nero, Bull’s-Eye, Mohave, Socrates and Franklin. It was farcically obvious now. Dad was Socrates, otherwise known as The Thinker according to www.looseyourrevolutioncherry.net — of course, he’d be Socrates — who else would Dad be? Marx, Hume, Descartes, Sartre, none of those nicknames were good enough for Dad (“out-of-date, blubbering scribblers”), and he wouldn’t be caught dead going by Plato (“hugely overhyped as a logician”). I wondered if one of The Nightwatchmen had dreamt up the nickname; no, it was more likely Dad himself had casually suggested it in private to Servo before a meeting. Dad didn’t do well with subtlety, with off the cuff; when it came to All Things Gareth, Dad wore indifference like a socialite thin as a cheese cracker forced to lunch in a football jersey. My eyes were staggering down the page now, through my own neatly written words: “January 1974 marked a change in tactics for the group from evident to invisible.” In January 1974, Dad had been enrolled in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; in March 1974, “police had come close to raiding one of The Nightwatchmen’s gatherings in an abandoned Braintree, Massachusetts, warehouse” Braintree was less than thirty minutes from Cambridge, and thus The Nightwatchmen had been less than thirty minutes from Dad — a highly likely intersection of two moving bodies across Space and Time.