Part Two: Chapter 4

IV

I deal with my fear of the unknown, after checking into the hotel, by denying its existence: I spend the next two hours pampering myself, Charles Hotel style, with a swim in the pool, some time on the rowing machine, and a slow, satisfying process of decompression in the steam room. I watch the television news for the first time in several days and I am happy to observe that there is no mention of my name. I am sure that it is good to be out of prison, but I am not in touch with any special comfort as a result. I find myself wondering if there is anything on point in Gustav Winegarden’s armchair psychiatric examination of me: have I somehow brought this situation upon myself out of discomfort with, for lack of a better way of putting it, my own perceived moral stature? I feel forsaken now by almost everyone in my life, and this makes me feel bad, of course. But I then feel doubly bad at the guilty knowledge of how ready I am to return the favor.

Of course it is not precisely that I am ready to abandon Sam or Rachel or even Diana. I am not. It is just that I am finding it very difficult to imagine or concoct any believable future in which I will be able to re-enter their lives. And my terror of the pain that is associated with this incapacity is like a firewall past which my mind and my heart will not venture.

It is almost ten o’clock when I am finally ready to make a telephone call to begin to connect the dots. I am sitting at a ridiculously spacious wooden desk looking down on the Charles River. I am wearing a ridiculously plush white terrycloth bathrobe that comes with the seven hundred dollar suite. I haven’t eaten dinner. I’m hungry, but I half expected Amy Tuckerman to show up here at any moment and my good manners have thus kept me from dining alone, so far at least. Not to mention that I have only twenty dollars to my name now and no clear prospects for getting more. I am fascinated by the prospect that my credit cards may be active again, but since they have all been confiscated from me as evidence of the crimes with which I have been charged, I don’t really have a plan for taking advantage of whatever available credit may have been restored to me. I am only a block from the Harvard Square Kinko’s and for the morning I have a vaguely formed plan to walk over there to see what will come up for my accounts, although I know I should speak with Amy first: it does not require rocket science to figure out that any step in the direction of my online accounts, the accounts that have been used to frame me, may be used against me as evidence.

I call Amy’s number. It has almost been as if I was playing along with some sort of romantic set-up devised by Amy, one that commenced with her bailing me out of prison, but the more I consider it the less it makes any sense: she does not have a hundred thousand bucks to bail me out, she would never spring for the most expensive accommodations in an upscale hotel, and she is not, first or foremost, precisely a romantic.

“Hello.”

“It’s me.”

“Then why does my Caller ID say the Charles Hotel?”

“I was hoping you could tell me the answer to that.”

“No clue, Branford. Are you making a three-way call or something?”

“No. I am at the Charles Hotel. Somebody bailed me out. It wasn’t you?”

“No. You’re really out?”

“Out and ensconced in a very cushy suite at the Charles Hotel with a beautiful view of the River, the B-School, the Stadium, and night falling over the Boston skyline.”

“Sounds lovely, but I don’t understand why you went there.”

“I don’t either, except that all that was waiting for me at the prison lobby when I got bailed out was a room confirmation slip for this suite and cab fare into Harvard Square. I thought there was a chance that you were setting me up so I figured I would play along.”

“Jesus, you know me better than that, Branford. Sorry to disappoint you, but it’s not really my style.”

“I guess at some level I knew that. I’m just sitting here trying to figure out what I should do next.”

“Have you eaten dinner yet?”

“No.”

“Meet me at the Forest Café in half an hour, my treat. That’s a little more within my budget.”

Harvard Square is one of those places that are rich with meaning for many people, but there are different meanings for different people. When Mary Kate and I were kids, well over a year before we eloped, we drove into Harvard Square one night to see a double feature at the Brattle Theater, which was a repertory theater before such things existed: The Battle of Algiers and If. Both movies were about some concept of revolutionary action, and in the strange alchemy that my young mind made of what was going on in the world, I found both movies to be plausible representations of some future history that could occur in some as yet unperfected America. If anything the fantasy, If, seemed more real to me than the quasi-documentary Algiers.

When we came out of the theater the lines were further blurred. There had been a huge anti-war demonstration on the Boston Common that day, and a large contingent of demonstrators had marched back across the River toward Harvard Square with hopes in their hearts for some probably undefined further chapter in the day’s events. The sour searing odor of tear gas was everywhere and there were shockingly few people walking casually about. Instead we saw black swarming lines of police in full tactical gear sweeping up and down streets and across the Cambridge Common. Less organized were the wispy, malleable little mobs of young people who ran everywhere around and through the rigid phalanxes of authority. The cops were like an onrushing wave, even a tide, that one knows will prevail no matter what the designs of the children molding sand into little castles and moats on the sandbar.

Eventually I came to appreciate and respect and contribute my own energies to this earnest movement that wanted so desperately to impose a caring, humanistic vision on the world, but it was hard to see a vision in Harvard Square that night. I didn’t know how these little mobs had gathered: had they self-selected spontaneously from among the roughly hundred thousand people who had participated in the anti-war demonstration back in Boston that afternoon? Were some critical cadre of them committed revolutionaries who had begun the day with a tight plan to end it by taking Cambridge Common through armed struggle? How many were merely commuters who had just taken a ride on the Red Line into Harvard Square and walked up the steps to be swept into marauding affinity groups? Were some of them young theatergoers like Mary Kate and me, kids drawing closer to the revolutionary flame after being romanced by Malcolm McDowell or the savvy urban guerillas of Algiers?

To simply walk casually back to where we had parked my car at a meter along the Mass. Ave. side of the Common just did not fit with the pungent ambience of the night. It was approaching midnight, and we broke at first into a light run if only because it felt right to jog toward our car, then Mary Kate gasped and said “Look at that!” and we both realized that all around the Common there were trash barrels set ablaze, cars being rocked and rolled over, and tear gas canisters being picked up and thrown back at the advancing police lines. My first instinct was a protective fear: Should I do whatever was necessary to spirit Mary Kate out of harm’s way? Should we give up the car, which had been free in the first place, as a hand-me-down from an uncle, and had at least two threadbare tires?

Mary Kate would have none of it. The scene thrilled her. She wanted at the very least to take it all in, and perhaps, I feared, to choose sides and join in. There was of course no real choosing to be done: it was a time when we had already heard many times over that you were either part of the solution or part of the problem, and all politics had a terrible tendency to steamroll past tactical finer points and roll all things together into an overwhelming ball, at least to those of us who were very young and less politically sophisticated than we would soon realize.

“I want to watch this for a while,” Mary Kate told me. There was a flared-nostril doe-eyed excitement to her that told me that her engagement was not an intellectual or a theoretical thing. It was total and full-bodied, and it was at around this time that I began to understand that political engagement could be a kind of all-consuming experience for a woman or for a man, in a way that had less to do with Marx or Hegel than with the participatory thrills of locking arms rebelliously and engaging an adult, authoritarian enemy or locking loins and keeping exquisite sexual rhythm to Mick Jagger singing “Street Fighting Man.”

There was attractive purity in both modalities, just as there were flaws that could be analyzed and parsed, but the existence of the full-bodied revolutionary required less reading and drew more naturally on elements of life that were especially appealing to healthy young kids like Mary Kate and me.

A female cousin of Mary Kate’s was a graduate student who was living that year in a very non-descript redbrick dorm across Mass. Ave. near the Law School and the Epworth Church. Mary Kate made a quick phone call that resulted fifteen minutes later in us sitting in lawn chairs on Leslee’s dormitory roof toking on a fat joint as we watched the mostly unarmed stragglers setting fire to one car after another in between rushes and occasional nightstick beatings from the tactical police.

From where we sat on high, we could see a lot of what the demonstrators probably missed. Along Broadway and Cambridge streets northeast of Harvard Yard there were many busloads of police, presumably in full tactical gear themselves, waiting and possibly hoping to be deployed. While the street fighters swarmed angrily around like ants stripped of their ability to pick up the pheromone signals that might better direct them toward actions for the greater benefit of their larger colony, Mary Kate and Leslee and I began to see another pattern that was undeniable. The cops were doing absolutely nothing to protect dozens of cars from being burnt to total worthlessness. More likely, it seemed to the three of us, the angles at which the cops charged and hemmed in the kids were intended to force them back again and again among the cars, as if the cops knew that this mob vandalism would alienate the propertied liberals of Cambridge.

As soon as the first car had been set afire, the setting of cars became the signature revolutionary act of the night. Who would dare to torch the next car after each successive blaze? What were the limits of the “property is theft” mantra that we could hear some of the kids shouting from four stories below us, on the street? The first car to go had been a sleek Jaguar sedan, but soon there were Buicks and Plymouths aflame as well. The stink of burning tires and upholstery did not mix nicely with the tear gas. Eventually there were Fords and Chevys burning, but a VW van appeared to be safe. Tires blew and from our rooftop perches we could not distinguish them from what gunshots would sound like. Surely somewhere on Hilliard Street or Chauncy Street there were sleepy houses where gentle older people must have awakened in the night convinced that they were hearing the first sharp reports of some sort of frightening guerilla warfare.

Indeed, if this was the revolution, it was a thrilling mélange of sensory overload where sounds and smells and fear and the inability of anyone to slow time down again and engage events with any intelligence or care all conspired and crossed one another’s boundaries so as to press us forward intensely as if we inhabited new bodies and moved to new drumbeats. My car was one of the last to go before the crowd finally and invisibly dispersed. Did they just get tired? Did they go to the all-night Hayes-Bickford for apple pie and coffee? When would they come back?

It did not appear to me then that many people were arrested, but on the news the next day I was surprised to learn that there had been 32 arrests, many of them for vandalism of automobiles, some for setting fire to trash cans or breaking store windows in the Square Proper, one for smoking a marijuana cigarette, and two for lewd and lascivious behavior. Inspired by the wonderland around us, Mary Kate and I had most in common with this last couple. We noticed them almost from the beginning of their little dance together. It seemed as if they had just met on this wild evening and while a parody of rebellion swirled all around them they began to reach out to one another in a wonderful pagan dance around a trash can bonfire, a dance that became progressively more feral until the woman escalated events by removing her white peasant blouse and the man began to involve her breasts and ultimately the rest of both their bodies in what did not remain just a dance for long. The young man had initially been wearing a backpack, and from it he removed and laid out a sleeping bag that soon became a stage for their sweet performance.

They were a pretty pair and they were allowed to perform for a good long while before several of their observers moved in to arrest them. The fact that they had inspired a kind of union of voyeurism between two groups that were otherwise adversaries, and probably even slowed the momentum of the vandalous crowd for a brief while, was not quite enough to persuade the cops to leave them alone. Perhaps there were hopes for a command performance back at the station. In any case they inspired Mary Kate and I to go far beyond any past stopping points with one another, almost as if by exploring each other’s bodies on the dormitory rooftop that night we were locking arms in solidarity with our brother and sister who were eventually herded half-dressed into the back of a paddy wagon. Leslee smoked a joint and sat watching us and the street scene alternately for a while. Only when she tried to pass the joint back to us and we demurred did she take our preoccupation with each other as a cue to head downstairs to her room.

Until that night my approach to being Mary Kate’s would-be teenaged lover had always been careful and considerate, leading the way whenever I could without pressing too hard for any specific desired result. Mary Kate had generally followed, and although I never doubted her pleasure or her interest in roughly similar desired results, she nonetheless accepted the more traditional female role as the Defender of Our Virginity, the one who kept us from being totally carried away with sexual abandon. Things changed that night. Mary Kate’s increasingly evident sexual hunger was itself a force of nature, driven I think by her organic connection with the total theater of that night. I followed her lead, and I connected with the events occurring below us, to the extent that I could connect at all, by connecting with Mary Kate. It was a night that turned the tables in our relationship forever, a night when I was shocked (as perhaps she was, too) to discover that Mary Kate liked her lovemaking a little on the rough side, a night that probably made our eventual elopement inevitable, a night that was well worth not only the burning around our eyes the next morning but the $160 I had to spend to replace my first car.

A new and carnal Mary Kate was revealed to me that night, and rather some fluke or pose it turned out that this was the essential Mary Kate, Mary Kate of the Mountains, Mary Kate of the Movement, Mary Kate who eloped with me and became my life partner, Mary Kate the marathoner, Mary Kate the mother of my beloved Rachel, Mary Kate who was never satisfied merely to defend the downtrodden but had almost always to befriend them as well, Mary Kate who refused to shave her legs, Mary Kate my love who ceased that night to be younger or more innocent or more fragile than me, Mary Kate for whom I am and forever will be deeply grateful.

On this evening there is no whiff of tear gas as I cut through Appian Way and across the Cambridge Common, but something equally rare for Harvard Square in the evening: a thick evening fog that would be perfectly normal on the Cape, or even over near Savin Hill where both the Transcript and the Globe have their buildings on opposite sides of Morrissey Boulevard. The fog fits me so well this evening that I am stunned to experience it: it suits both my sensibility and the fact that rather than apply my full consciousness to what is problematic and unsolved in my current situation, I am focused far more dreamily on a vague sense of pleasure that I associate with the meal I am about to eat and the beer I am about to drink and the company I am about to keep with Amy Tuckerman.

The Forest Café is a neighborhood bar on Mass. Ave. north of Harvard Square. It has been around for decades, and even when they started attracting more yuppies and students with a pretty good Mexican food menu in the 80s, they still managed to maintain a decent balance with the other clientele who come in to drink Buds and watch the Sox and the Bruins on the television sets above either end of the bar or drink Coronas and Sams and play the excellent jukebox that does not scrimp on B sides from artists as diverse as Muddy Waters, Bonnie Raitt, David Alan Coe, and Smokey Bill Robinson.

From where I sit facing the door in the booth nearest the jukebox, Amy’s entrance reveals to me that even in four days I was beginning to be affected by the deprivations of prison life. It is not that I have gone four days without seeing a woman or almost twice that long without sex. That’s nothing. Instead, what has devastated me more than anything has been the stigma of being in prison, of being treated as a guilty man, of being lumped together with the Christopher Reardons of the world not only by the prison guards and the other inmates but by the Herald and its readers and even, my heart screams with pain to admit, by my own wife and daughter.

That stigma is wiped away in an instant when Amy comes though the front door, spots me, and rushes toward me with arms extended: she is the perfect embodiment of warm, loving approval. Her embrace is all encompassing, her head-to-toe grip as complete as Sam’s and as full of need as if she had been the one imprisoned. We do not kiss, but I can feel Amy’s animal breath warm on my neck and under my collar and the effect is the same. I feel loved, appreciated, even adored: prison is behind me, and I am becoming Stanley Branford again.

“Let’s play detective,” she says once we have placed our orders. She’s sipping on a Dos Equis, but the need for gradual re-entry dictates a Rolling Rock for me. “Let me ask you: aside from your automatic payroll deposits, do you and Diana ever transfer money into your bank accounts electronically?

“Never. I mean, I suppose we could, but we don’t. Never have.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“And?”

“Well, subtracting out your payroll deposits, it looks like you stole a little over $13 million in the week before you were arrested.”

“The other Stanley.”

“Yes. The other Stanley stole $13 million.”

“From whom?

“From about 500 different victims, it looks like.”

“Where’s the money now?”

“I’m sorry, but I’m just an amateur at this. I don’t have a clue. The money came in whenever he made a hit and was swept out of the account several times a day.”

“He?”

“He, she, it, they. I don’t know. I’m sure the government could begin to get a handle on where the money went when it left your account, like the first stop, but I’ll bet there were so many stops after that first stop that it would make your head spin. The money probably never stopped moving.”

“I also wouldn’t be surprised if it moved off-shore pretty quickly and stayed out of the reach of any government here,” I surmise. “Any idea who the victims were?”

“The AG’s office says that it is developing that information, but it appears to me that they are just your average middle-class Janes and Joes, people with a little bit of money and a decent slice of equity in their homes.”

“Equity?”

Amy’s enchiladas arrive, followed by favorite dish here, shrimp in a cilantro sauce with rice and black beans. The first crunchy taste is heavenly.

“What he does is to pose as other people. He gets a little information on their identities and he uses that to impersonate them on the web and get more information. Sooner or later he is able to log onto computer systems as his victims, and from there he starts moving their money around, selling their stock and liquidating their 401(k)s if they have them, getting second mortgages and new credit cards in their name, and buying whatever strikes his fancy or just backing a truck up to load with all the cash he can squeeze out of them. Of course they don’t even know they are being squeezed. He is a digital chameleon, but more than any of his other victims he seems to enjoy being you. A lot of what he is able to do is possible because people are so careless. They use obvious passwords, or the same passwords for all their accounts. They have cutesy little web pages like the Branford Family Page that puts all their information in a single, fairly accessible place.”

“Oops.”

“Well, that just made it easy for him, but it still doesn’t explain why he chose to frame you for the whole thing.”

“No.”

“And that’s what we have to focus on, because I think that will lead us to who he is.”

“Maybe.”

“There’s a brother who works in the AG’s office who wants desperately to show me his moves, and I worked him over a little bit this morning. You don’t know any of this, right?”

“Right.”

“He says they see you as a pretty big fish, so if we want them to look in some other direction we better be able to bait the hook with a real live person. Unless they have a very good reason to back off you it would just look like they were going easy on you and returning past political favors.”

“God forbid anybody should do me a favor.”

“You mean anybody but me.”

“Yeah. Anybody but you. You know I appreciate you, Amy.”

“But you are feeling a little overwhelmed. Christ, who wouldn’t?”

“I just don’t know where to start. I guess I need a really good lawyer. But for that I need money.”

“You don’t have any money. Neither do I. Neither does Diana, if that even matters any more.”

“She must be shell-shocked.”

There is a moment’s pause while each of us filters out all the loose ends of things it would be better to leave unsaid here. I pull out the room confirmation slip that shows the hotel suite being charged to my credit card.

“Look at this.”

Amy studies it.

“H’mm. I don’t think it’s legit.”

“What do you mean? The hotel honored it.”

“Well, if you mean that they checked the confirmation number and checked you into your room, sure. But this reference to your credit card number looks to me like it could easily have been added by a second printer, after the fact. These days you seldom see a computer spit out somebody’s entire 16-digit credit card number intentionally. Usually you get 12 X’s or asterisks with the last four actual numbers, for security’s sake.”

“Why would somebody bother to add my credit card number after the fact?”

“Aside from messing with your head, I have no idea. But I do know that the activity with that card ceased on Thursday evening shortly before you were arrested, when the card was maxed out, and it has been frozen since then with no money in or out.”

“It makes no sense.”

“Except as another mindfuck.”

“Yeah, I guess it works pretty well for that.”

“He’s trying to lure you again.”

“Meaning?”

“Just like he was trying to lure you to the strip club the other night. Now he wants you in that hotel suite. I have no idea why, but he wants you there, and I have to admit I’m kind of curious.”

“Me, too.”