3
A couple of days later—on Friday of that week, according to my notes—I had another meeting with Parker. The common feature in all the attacks was a letter bomb addressed to a scholar or researcher from the scientific and academic world. Based on the features of the attacks and the places they’d occurred, it would have been difficult for a single individual to have carried them all out. The FBI postulates the existence of an anarchist group, possibly an eco-terrorist cell. They didn’t believe Ida’s case belonged to that series, even though her death was very suspicious. Unless, he added, she was part of the group and had died while activating a bomb that she intended to deploy (or transport). All of the bombs had inscriptions in the metal with the initials FC. They’d searched unsuccessfully for similar names or initials in workshops, factories, and hardware suppliers. These were homemade bombs, made with recycled materials, very difficult to trace, and for this reason people were starting to call the presumed attacker Mr. Recycler. They’d been unable to find digital traces or trails after any of the attacks that could lead them toward determining an identity. The packages were always tied up with sisal twine and sealed with a nickel, but their origin couldn’t be pinpointed, and it was thought that this Recycler might be manufacturing them personally. They all had a one-dollar Eugene O’Neill stamp. Did that mean anything to me? “O’Neill, well, he was a bit of an anarchist, he’d spent a long time in Argentina at the turn of the century, living in Berisso, a working-class neighborhood near La Plata.” It all seemed very strange. “It is very strange,” said Parker. The attacks were all the same, letter bombs addressed to figures in the scientific world; they were all homemade devices made out of scrap materials and surplus from industrial elements, and they all had the Eugene O’Neill stamp. Only the targets, the repetition of the stamps, and the inscrutable metal plates with the letters FC indicated that it was a series. Menéndez was attempting to decipher the physical evidence recovered from among the remains of the explosions. There were no traces, no clear trails, and he initially deduced that the suspect was an airplane mechanic who worked in a home studio in the basement of his house. The sophisticated use of certain metal alloys similar to those employed in aviation caused him to order an inspection of hangars, airplane factories, junkyards with aeronautic material, but with no results.
Their guess was that it could be a cell with five or six members; they’d made no public statement, and the pacing of the attacks was very erratic. Everyone believed it was a group except for Menéndez, who maintained that it was a single individual. For that reason, he’d started interviewing serial killers locked up in prisons around the country, trying to grasp some common logic in the acts he was investigating. There wasn’t much that could be deduced from those conversations: essentially, they acted on impulses they couldn’t control, which led them to stalk their victims in parks, in schools, in public bathrooms. Usually, “the serials” (as they were called) tended to increase the pace of their hunting and demand some excessive or ridiculous compensation in order to stop committing their crimes, and they usually got caught because they would always return to their crime scene; that is, they repeated so faithfully that it was possible to guess the place where they would carry out their next act.
He didn’t believe it was a group or a cell because, according to him, all groups disintegrate sooner or later and spawn their own informers, and even secret cults were infiltrated by the police. Menéndez himself had acted undercover in a Mexican narco group from Tijuana when he was an advanced Political Science student at the Hoover Institution on War and Revolution in Stanford, California. He was Chicano and lived in two worlds, Mexican like his father and American like his mother, and he knew how to cross from one reality to another.
I went out for a drink with Parker at a bar facing Washington Square; the place was annexed onto his office and he usually received his clients there. Everyone greeted him when they saw him come in, and he set to arguing with the bartender about the outcome of the basketball playoffs. They were Knicks fans but paid no attention to their preferences when it was game time. That year Michael Jordan and the Bulls were winning the series, so betting on them was like knowing the lottery number before the drawing. All the same, Parker put himself down for $500 against Chicago (30 to 1 odds) and in favor of the Philadelphia 76ers.
We sat down at a table by the window that looked out onto Washington Square. A woman with a megaphone in the small central square was talking at a small group of homeless people about the need to quit drugs and alcohol and, at the same, promoting an anti-drug tonic called Soul Coke.
Sports is the primary industry in this country, according to Parker, and Jordan, who’d returned to the NBA after several months’ retirement, had more power than General Motors. But, for Parker, race-car drivers were the real sports idols. They make a lot of money because they live in perpetual danger, and audiences go to Indianapolis or Daytona to see accidents. He paused, pensive, as though imagining that this should have been his life. When you get into one of those machines, you don’t know if in two hours you’ll come out alive or in a pulp.
They brought orange juice for Parker and whiskey for me; they also gave
