Each piece of mail included the word wood: in the addresses (Wood Street), in the names of the senders (Doctor Harold Wood) or the recipients (John Wood). But reading clues without any defined code could lead a person to insanity. For example, in Old Saxon, wood meant “lunatic” but could mean “superior intellect” as well. In Chaucer, the word wood meant “hard,” “erect.”
Menéndez was searching for a pattern, an order, a sign that might allow him to follow its trail. Recycler, as though he could read his thoughts or had someone tipping him off, began making his references more complicated, in what seemed to be a challenge. On one occasion, the experts had detected a reference to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. A bomb that killed a researcher in New Jersey working on organ transplants had been sent with the name H. C. Ear Wicker. In Old Saxon, Wicker means wood. But H. C. Earwicker was the protagonist of Joyce’s novel, a character who often assumed the identity of the Norse god Odin, who invoked the wood spirits in Scandinavian mythology. Menéndez was furious. It was impossible to guess what that erudite nonsense meant unless they interpreted all of the signs as a message. Then Flem Argand, the delicate and timid agent who was an expert in literature, remembered that some physicists and mathematicians were great readers of Finnegans Wake and that quark, the name of the invisible particle at the origin of the cosmos, had been named in homage to Joyce because the scientists had taken the word from the novel. Mathematicians are sophisticated, and they grow bored because they usually lose their creativity before age twenty-five and are out of the game, overtaken by the adolescent young genii who invent the formulas and solve the enigmas while the veterans remain there like dinosaurs or ex-fighters, sometimes coming back to teach a course but dedicating most of their time to reading Joyce.
Menéndez was perplexed. He had a map of the United States with red dots indicating the places where attacks had been carried out: Iowa, Colorado, California, New Jersey, Texas, North Carolina. Impossible for a single man to cover all of those areas. Difficult, yes, Menéndez had answered them, according to Parker, but not impossible. He was convinced that he was up against a kind of Professor Moriarty, the great rival that Sherlock Holmes bests in a struggle to the death. He decided to change his profile of the terrorist and was now describing him as a man of above-average intellect with some academic background. And he also included a political description for the first time, identifying the man he was pursuing as an environmentalist and neo-Luddite. Like the Luddites, who had destroyed machinery during the industrial revolution, Recycler—based on his targets and victims—seemed to oppose technological advancement and, like radical eco-warriors, made constant references to the forests and their preservation. Menéndez ordered infiltrations of activist groups that boycotted the initiatives to turn large parks into suburbs and trees into newspaper stock.
Nina immediately favored the theory that it was a solo terrorist. You had to imagine a man being sought by the most effective investigative machine in the world; a prowling wolf, isolated, with no contacts, no relationships. In Russia, before the Bolsheviks, the revolutionaries acted on their own, not wanting to compromise anyone, and they often abandoned their friends and their children. For example, Vera Zasulich, who shot at the czar and placed a bomb in the office of the Okhrana (the secret police), moved alone through the city, valiant and determined. Marx, in 1881, had written to that extraordinary woman, saying that the method of terrorism was specifically Russian and historically inevitable, something about which there was no reason to moralize, either for or against. The Russian populist Sergey Nechayev had published the Catechism of a Revolutionary, which stated in its famous first paragraph: “The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion—the revolution.”
The corrosive belief that history is governed according to its own laws had made political crimes legal. When Nina left Paris, the dispute between Sartre and Camus centered around that problem. Camus refused to accept the sophism that history—such an abstraction—could justify any action. Sartre, on the other hand, maintained that capitalist violence justified itself whereas anyone who confronted it had to find reasons to defend themselves.
“The denier, the destroyer sets out to reduce the world to ashes so that a noble and pure phoenix will rise from the ashes. But where the hell is the phoenix?” said Nina.
“There’s no need for a phoenix: the terrorist doesn’t kill out of personal interest or vengeance but kills for a reason, in the way of a Platonic philosopher.”
“You’re getting paler and paler, dear, and more confused. Best if you go to bed,” said Nina.
She seemed worried about me, and she took me by the arm and walked me out. We said goodbye in the garden of her house amid a breeze announcing spring.
I left by the back way and went to the Pakistani liquor store on Nassau Street, bought a couple of bottles of Verdejo, and looped back along Prospect Avenue. Nina thought that Tolstoy’s position on nonviolence and nonresistance toward evil was a direct response to the way that terrorism had started to impose its methods in the fight against czarism.
I was turning these ideas over as I walked, but when I entered the house, I was surprised that the cat didn’t appear on seeing me enter. And so I started calling: Michi, michi, michi. He would usually approach and rub up against my leg, his tail raised elegantly, and I would stroke his head and listen to him purring. But the cat wasn’t there. I went out and looked for him around the park like an idiot, calling for him in every way I could, until
