The semester was quite far along, and the students were already proposing topics for their final projects. Rachel, with an intuition that I later learned to value and consider almost magical, was developing a theory about drifters in Hudson. There were many of them, the most notorious being the Hermit, a half-crazed horseman who roamed the countryside, talking to himself and begging.
Hudson admired that free life, which made a show of disdain for money and profits. The gauchos and Indians in Hudson’s books belong to that category, but the bums—or los crotos, as they call them in the country—express those values even more clearly. “There was something of that in Tolstoy and the Russian startsy who traveled across the plains as beggars. Beggars had always existed,” Rachel said. “They’re right there in the Bible. Most of the Psalms are the canticles of beggars sounding off their litanies. And in the Odyssey, Ulysses—disguised as a tramp so as not to be recognized—is forced into combat with Irus, a beggar who loiters around the doors of the palace in Ithaca.”
Drifters and beggars, sitting by the side of the road, have seen centuries of history pass before them: empires fall, wars break out, political forms and economic systems change, but there’s always someone begging and wandering the streets wrapped in rags. Rachel, the daughter of a Cincinnati entrepreneur, had gone to the finest schools, quoted Simone Weil, and prized a way of life bound to poverty and solidarity.
When class ended I walked the students out and said goodbye to them at the edge of campus. To one side, as was usual at this hour, Orion was resting beneath the trees on one of the benches that lined the street. He looked like the representation of what we’d been discussing in class, but no one saw him now. As Orion liked to say, who would want to look at what I am? A black spot in the sand. They did approach, he said, to find out what it was, but when they saw that the object was alive, in isolation and tatters, they would turn their backs on him. He was the survivor of a shipwreck washed up on shore by the tempest. He spoke in metaphors all the time, as though living on the street affected his language and drew him toward allegory. Lying on the bench with his face in his hand and his body propped up on one elbow, he was listening to the radio. He didn’t believe his ears. Had he understood that right? The New York Times had received a letter from an anarchist group, signed Freedom Club. The name corresponded to the initials FC that had appeared on the metal plates inside the bombs. “Who doesn’t want to make the world fly?” said Orion, fiddling with the radio.
Indeed, it was the first time Recycler had made contact. The letter had been sent from the same location in Illinois and at the same time and date he’d sent the letter bombs that killed a computer scientist in Silicon Valley and injured a receptionist who worked for a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Additionally, hidden in the letter was a barely legible line, which seemed to be a message left involuntarily while writing with a pencil on top of the letter’s paper. Analyzed under infrared light, it read: Call Nathan R.—Wed. 7 pm. The FBI searched for someone with that name, but once again it was a joke by the amusing Recycler (they couldn’t trace it to anyone with that first name and last initial). It included a code number to identify his future communications. The number matched the Social Security number of an inmate from the penitentiary in Sonora, California. Menéndez and four of his agents went to the prison and burst in on one of the cells. The detainee was a black man, accused of murder, who’d been a forest ranger in Montana and had killed several tourists who were camping in the mountains and then started a fire that endangered the area. He’d killed them and buried them in the hollows of the northern hills. He didn’t know anything, didn’t understand what they were talking about. They took him to a special room to interrogate him, turned on the spotlights, made him strip naked, and then, stupefied, the agents discovered that, on his chest, the man had a tattoo that said Pure Wood. Whoever sent the letter was laughing at them.
After that, according to Parker, Menéndez shut himself away in his Washington D.C. bunker with a special FBI team as if he was playing a diabolical chess game against a genius and was turning to the finest analysts available to study the game and guess Recycler’s next move. Amid the hum of the air-conditioning, under the white light of fluorescent tubes, drinking coffee and smoking, the group set to work with maps, diagrams, and numerical series. Now Menéndez knew him better: his rival was a jokester, a spoiled kid who dedicated himself to random killing, but nothing is really random; he had to establish contact with the murderer’s mind, to think like him, to get to know the precautions that the
