The Way Out

us peanuts and French fries. Then, as though delivering information to a husband who was having his unfaithful wife followed, Parker started laying out the information on Ida from the FBI files. She had no stable habits, and if someone wanted to kill her, they would’ve had a problem due to her irregularity. She often walked from her house to campus along Prospect Avenue. But sometimes she drove there and sometimes she waited for the university shuttle on the corner of Nassau and Harrison Street. She always carried the trash out to the dumpster in the driveway of her house in the professors’ neighborhood; sometimes she got into her car and took the trash away, leaving it in the bins at the edge of the soccer stadium. Of course, they knew that trash is a starting point for an investigation as there are always traces: calendars, medical prescriptions, handwritten notes. If I was interested, he had a list of the drugs she took, legal or illegal. A list of her phone calls. A selection of her most personal emails, of the places she visited most frequently. The times when she walked along the avenue to the campus entrance on Washington Road and then went to the library (always, every morning) to devote several hours to research or classwork. In the afternoons she was in her office. She’d used her pension funds to buy an apartment in the Village. She’d attended a conference in China and met privately with professors and students from Peking University. The FBI had a summary of their conversation. She had inadvisable sexual habits, frequenting dark rooms, swingers’ clubs, and S/M spots. So they had the complete blueprint of Ida’s life, as if they’d taken an X-ray. Did they have this information about all citizens? But it wasn’t information; only the bones are visible in X-rays. She couldn’t travel to Cuba because the State Department denied her permission. Sometimes she ate at the university bar, chicken sandwiches. They had a list of the films she’d rented from the video store over the last two years, the list of books she’d requested at the library, the list of her purchases from the supermarket, her bank statements. They had a record of her outgoing phone calls and the faxes she sent. She’d participated in demonstrations for peace, for abortion rights, for racial equality, for Latino access to legal documentation, for lifting the Cuban embargo. She’d been a member of the groups that protested against the war in Iraq. In the last few months of the year 1994, she’d been seen once a week in the Hyatt Hotel on Route One with Don D’Amato. He himself had revealed that fact to the police.

I finished my whiskey and ordered another. What sort of jealousy was this retrospective jealousy, tied to a woman who was dead? And D’Amato with his wooden leg, his boundless appetites… He would leave the leg leaning against a wall and stretch out on the bed with his stump exposed… “Why all of those details?”

“Routine,” said Parker. “They call it a profile, but it’s hard to deduce actions and decisions based on that alone; it’s just the framework, the map of a life. Ida was a classic rebellious student during her years at Berkeley, flirting with the Black Panthers, visiting the Puerto Rican Macheteros in jail, but there was no evidence of clandestine activities. To the FBI, that might be proof that she really was part of an anarchist group that carried out illegal activities.”

“Of course, a lack of evidence can be a kind of evidence,” I said.

“Terrorists,” said Parker, “lead much more normal lives than all of the normal men who think of them as obvious bloodthirsty monsters. In short,” he added, “Ida Brown may be guilty or may be a victim, and the FBI prefers to play it as if nothing has happened, in order to catch the attacker or an accomplice off guard.”

Maybe she was part of the peripheral support around the alleged terrorist organization and died while handling a bomb that she intended to send (even if she didn’t know it was a bomb). It might also have been an accident; there was evidence that she sometimes carried a can of gasoline in her car because she was afraid of running out of gas in the middle of the road, and it could have exploded with a spark from the car’s electrical system. Strange, isn’t it? But there were glass shards on the car floor, and the FBI was basically sticking to the theory that is was an accident. The investigation into Ida was on standby and depended on whatever information might be found as the fence was tightening in around Recycler. If it really was tightening. The FBI had already spent two million dollars and had questioned more than five thousand people. The fifty or sixty suspects, arrested rather blindly, had been set free after “severe” interrogation. The anonymous tips were revealed to be false or slanderous at the point of verification. The phone calls placed on the day after each attack, attempting to claim responsibility, had originated from unstable people or agitators or pranksters. And the two or three pale youths—binge watchers of TV shows about scientists who mysteriously disappeared (The Big Secret) or about murderers who terrorized small country towns (Twin Peaks)—who had spontaneously appointed themselves prisoners received no punishment for their imaginary crimes except the psychiatric wing of federal prison.

The investigation was in a deadlock. They were waiting for the terrorists to make a move. It seemed impossible to them that a group—or an isolated individual—could keep going for all those years with no support or contacts on the surface. Maybe that’s what they were attempting to do with Ida. Maybe they recruited her to work on secondary tasks; it could even be that she didn’t know about the consequences of the relationship. They asked her to take a package to the post office and she did it. Menéndez maintained