“Did you drive up from Boston?” Clarke asked as he knelt by the fireplace, balling up old newspaper.
“I did. I had no way of reaching you first. Dad’s unable to speak, you might have heard-”
Clarke turned around, nodded. “Awful thing.”
“And the phone number he had from twenty years ago didn’t work.”
“I understand. I’m not easy to find, and that’s no accident.”
Clarke seemed to be implying something, but Rick didn’t probe. In a few minutes, Clarke had lit the newspaper, and the kindling had caught fire, and before long a fire was roaring.
“What can I get you to drink?” Clarke said. “Coffee? Tea? Scotch?”
“Scotch would be good.” He wanted Clarke lubricated and voluble.
Clarke nodded and left the room, and then Rick heard the sound of water running from the nearby kitchen. He returned with two freshly washed tumblers of Scotch over ice. Clarke handed one to Rick. “I should have asked, you prefer it neat?”
“This is fine, thanks.” It was not long after noon. He’d have to drive back this afternoon, which would now entail stopping at the Town Grounds and getting a couple of hits of caffeine to help him through the drive home. “I have some good memories of visiting you here when Dad took us. Do you still make maple syrup?”
“Oh, yes. Still a sugar maker. I’ve still got the old sugar shack. It’s gotten a little fancier than it was when you kids used to come here, I’m sure-tubing and reverse osmosis and such. I only have about fifty acres here, so I’m a small-time producer. But it pays the bills, which aren’t big.”
Rick sat at one end of a sofa, and Clarke sat in an overstuffed armchair next to the sofa. The chair’s upholstery was shabby and threadbare, and tufts of white stuffing stuck out of the holes in the arms. Clarke had taken off his green plaid overshirt. He was wearing green wide-wale corduroy pants and a muted brown plaid flannel shirt, and his silver hair looked freshly barbered.
“Were you aiming at me?” Rick said as he took a sip of Scotch.
“If I were aiming at you, Rick, I would have hit you. No, I was aiming for just over your head and a few inches to the right. Close enough to put the fear of God into you. And again, I’m sorry about that. I was too impulsive.”
Rick smiled. “My fault for showing up unannounced. But I need to talk to you. You were, I think, one of Dad’s closest friends. Maybe the closest. And I know he came to see you the week before his stroke.”
Clarke nodded. Joan had called him “one of the scruffy people,” but he could hardly have been less scruffy. He could have been a country gentleman in a Ralph Lauren magazine ad.
“His doctors now think he was hit-beaten, badly. They suspect his stroke was likely brought on by traumatic brain injury.”
Clarke winced, ducked his head, then put a hand over his eyes. “Oh, dear. I’m not surprised. I’m just surprised they let him live. He expected to be killed.”
“He did? Why?”
“Because your father had had a crisis of conscience. He wanted out of the life he’d fallen into. He couldn’t go on anymore.”
You didn’t play by the rules…
“Why not?”
“Something disturbed him deeply. Something he was told to do.”
“What was that?”
Clarke shook his head slowly. “He wanted to protect me. Keep me ignorant of the details. He thought the less I knew, the safer I’d be. He was a thoughtful man, your father was. All he’d say was that some people had been killed and he’d been ordered to cover something up about their deaths.”
Rick thought of the little girl at the piano recital and knew his father had been moved as much as he had. Lenny had been told to pay off the surviving family members. It must have been part of a cover-up.
“Why did he drive up here? Did he come to talk it over with you, was that why he came?”
“I think that was part of it, yes. But I think it was mostly to get my help.”
“In what?”
“He wanted my help in doing what he helped me do, back in the day.” Clarke gave him an intent look.
Rick shook his head. “To do what?”
“He never told you… about me?”
“What about you?”
“Oh, Lordy. He wanted to disappear. Same way I did.”
43
Lenny was ordered to cover something up, and he couldn’t go through with it. So he knew he had no choice but to get out, to quit his life and set up a new one. I’m sorry, I thought he’d told you and your sister. He was planning to. Maybe he never got a chance.”
“How was he planning to ‘quit’ his life? What does that mean, exactly?”
“He’d begun to accumulate his assets-to gather cash, enough to buy him a new identity and a new life, and leave some for you and-your sister’s name was Wendy, perhaps?”
Rick nodded. He wondered how much Clarke knew about the cash, how much there was. “But where’d he get the cash?”
“He was paid very well by one of his clients-the one he’d become fearful of-and he always lived modestly. And on top of that, to be honest, I think he skimmed money off of the cash he’d amassed for this client. He wasn’t troubled by the morality of it, I have to say. He called it ‘stealing from thieves.’”
“How could he disappear?”
“The same way I did. You do know that Clarke isn’t my real name, don’t you?”
“No.”
“So you don’t know… Your dad stood by me when no one else would.”
“Stood by you how?”
“Lenny was a hero. Back in the day, he’d take cases no other lawyer would take. Like mine. My real name is Herbert Antholis. You might have heard the name…?”
Rick shook his head. “I don’t think so. Should I know who you are?”
Clarke-Antholis?-tipped his head and gave that crooked half smile that Rick remembered well. “Those days are long gone, I guess, and just as well. I used to be a member of the Weather Underground. Back in the days before that was a weather website. We were student radicals. We all had copies of Mao’s little red book, and we were convinced that old Chairman Mao was right, that political power grows out of a gun.
“Well, we were protesting the US bombing of Hanoi in 1972-we were planning to break into an army recruiting center in downtown Boston and steal records. But I was the low man on the totem pole, and what I didn’t know, what they didn’t tell me, was that my comrades were actually planning to set off a pipe bomb there. I was driving the car, and my job was to wait for my comrades to come back and then hightail it out of there. Only later did I find out that an army sergeant, the guy who ran the recruiting center, was killed when the bomb went off. A father of four kids. That wasn’t part of the plan at all. No one told me. But after we were arrested and charged, it didn’t make a difference that I was at the bottom of the totem pole. A grand jury indicted me, and the district attorney was going for the maximum sentence he could get-life in prison. I mean, I drove the getaway car, so I knew I was culpable. I deserved some kind of prison sentence. But not life. Your father took my case and he believed in me. He worked his butt off. But he knew I could never get a fair trial. I said to your dad, ‘What are my odds?’ and he said, ‘Frankly, they’re bad.’ I told him I’d have to make a run for it, go underground like some of my Weather Underground comrades did. He said, ‘Do you know what kind of position that puts me in?’ But he helped me anyway. It was a lot easier to disappear back in the early seventies. I got some fake papers made and moved to rural New Hampshire and set up a new life. No one knows, not my neighbors or my friends in town. They just know me as a sugar maker.”