T: Yes, yes. I see, I see—
A: You sound impatient. I’m sorry. Am I going into too much detail? I thought you wanted me to discover everything about myself.
T: Yes, of course I do. I apologize for my seeming impatience. We have such a long way to go together.
(5-second interval.)
A: What do you really want to know about me? What’s this questioning really about?
T: Must we discuss motive again? We have agreed that these sessions are journeys to discover your past. And I am willing to serve as your guide.
A: But I sometimes wonder what’s more important—what I find out about myself or what you find out about me.
T: You must avoid these needless doubts—they could only delay the process of discovery and you are then left with those terrifying blanks.
(6-second interval.)
A: All right, then. I’m sorry. Guide me, like you said you would.
T: Then let us get on with it. Let’s explore what happened to send your family from that idyllic existence in Blount out into the night on that bus …
He could still remember his father’s voice in the cellar that day, and the Ping-Pong ball like a small planet suspended in space, his father’s voice holding him captive, enthralled—and yet a small part of him was isolated and alone, a part that was not Adam Farmer any longer but Paul Delmonte. I am Paul Delmonte, a voice whispered inside him. Paul Delmon-tee. Then who is Adam Farmer? Where did he come from? And, finally, his father told him that Adam Farmer had come into being a long time before, when the reporter who was Anthony Delmonte—and would someday be David Farmer—had uncovered certain documents, obtained certain information at the State House in Albany, information that would change a lot of lives irrevocably …
T: What kind of information?
A: He wasn’t precise about it. But I know this much—it involved corruption in government.
T: At what level of government—state, federal?
A: Both. And there was more than government involved. There were links.
T: What were these links?
A: Between crime—he spoke about the organizations, the syndicates—and government, from the local ward right up to Washington, D.C.
T: Was he specific about these links?
A: Now you’re sounding like an investigator again—as if you’re looking for specific information that has nothing to do with me as a person.
T: Everything has to do with you as a person. We have to be specific. Haven’t you dealt in generalities, vaguenesses, long enough? Lack of specifics—isn’t that what gives you nightmares at two o’clock in the morning?
(5-second interval.)
A: I’m sorry. Anyway, he said the information he found, information that took him a year to uncover, made it necessary for him to become a witness. To testify, in Washington. Before a special Senate committee. Behind closed doors. No television cameras. No reporters. Later, there would be indictments, arrests. But the testimony had to be given in secret. Otherwise—
T: Otherwise what?
A: I remember his exact words. He said that otherwise his life wouldn’t be worth a plugged nickel. That was an expression I had never heard before. But I knew what it meant as soon as I heard it.
(5-second interval.)
T: Go on.
A: He went to Washington, he testified, he gave evidence for investigators to follow up on. They said he would be protected, his identity kept a secret. He trusted them. He was away for almost a year, hiding in hotel rooms, coming home once in a while to visit my mother and me, while guards stood around the house, inconspicuous, in the shadows. I was just a baby—two or three years old. He said he was riddled with guilt during all that time. But it was his duty, he said. He said he was an old-fashioned citizen who believed in doing the right thing for his country, to provide as much information as possible.
T: Earlier, you said that he told you almost everything. What did you mean by that?
A: He said that there was a lot of information he couldn’t give me. For my protection.
T: And how would this provide protection for you?
A: He said that if I was ever questioned about certain topics, certain information, I couldn’t possibly give away the information if I didn’t have it to begin with. He said I’d be able to pass lie-detector tests or any other tests. In other words, I could always tell the truth, even if some fancy truth serums were used, and I’d never betray anything.
T: What do you think you would have betrayed?
(6-second interval.)
A: That’s a funny question.
T: In what way is this question of mine, as you say, funny?
A: It’s as if your question about betrayal is trying to make me betray something. I don’t know—I’m confused.
T: Of course you’re confused. May I make a suggestion? I suggest that this particular reasoning of yours, these doubts of yours, are a defense on your part. Whenever you are on the edge of revealing something important in your past, you stall, voicing suspicions of my questions because you are afraid, because you are reluctant to face your past.
A: I’m not afraid. I want to know.
T: Then let’s go forward, not sideways, not backward.
A: All right …
(5-second interval.)
A: Where were we?
T: The testimony in Washington …
A: Well, finally it was over. He came back to Blount, returned to his job. Mr. Campbell had given my father a leave of absence. He thought he had been researching a book in Washington. The government had paid my father’s salary. Anyway, it was all over. Done with. Indictments were issued. Quiet arrests made, sudden resignations in Washington. But no heroics—my father didn’t want any. He only wanted to resume his life again, be with his family. And then it happened …
The bomb. Planted in the car. Waiting for his father to turn the key in the lock. But the explosion never occurred because a local policeman had observed two strangers lurking near the Delmonte household. A telephone call from police headquarters warned his father to stay in the house. A crew of bomb experts appeared at the scene and towed the car away. A later report disclosed that a bomb capable of destroying the car and everything within a ten-foot radius had been located, attached to the accelerator.
The next attempt came three nights later. His father had worked late at the newspaper. He had felt nervous and edgy as he typed away but he refused to give in to his feeling of uneasiness. Anyway, there was a police officer on duty at the entrance of the building, assigned by the police chief at the insistence of Roscoe Campbell. His father finished writing—a three-part series on a possible scandal in the municipal purchasing department. No kickbacks this time but rental fees paid for equipment that did not, in fact, exist. His father walked down the stairs. The sight of the police officer provided a touch of comfort. The police officer turned toward him—a gun in his hand. His father froze. The gun was raised and his father saw the face, the expressionless eyes—the look of the hired killer, the hit man. A terrible sadness flooded him; he had let his wife down, his son—they would be left alone, abandoned. A pistol shot rang out, echoing as loudly as the detonation of a bomb. His father braced himself and then saw, in slow motion, the policeman crumpling up, mouth agape, eyes bulging from their sockets. He fell forward, the gun loosed from his hand, dropping to the sidewalk.
That was the night Mr. Grey entered their lives …
T: More specifics now, although you seem to dislike the word. Who, finally, was this Mr. Grey of yours? Until now, you have made him seem like a phantom flickering in and out of your lives.
A: He worked for the government, the federal government. My father said that Mr. Grey had been involved from the beginning, from the time my father first gave testimony. He’d been on the sidelines, watching, waiting …
T: A bodyguard?
A: No. More than a bodyguard. My father said he was one of the original men involved in a new government department.
> T: What was this department?
A: Let me think a moment.
(5-second interval.)
A: I remember the title now—the U.S. Department of Re-Identification. It was supposed to protect people. To provide people with new identities. So that they could hide.
T: Hide from what?
A: From those they testified against.
T: I am afraid it is not entirely clear to me.
A: Let me try to remember exactly what my father told me.
(5-second interval.)
A: My head is beginning to hurt. To pound.
T: Do you wish a pill?
A: No. I don’t trust pills anymore.
T: Does that mean you do not trust me anymore?
A: I am not sure of anything right now—give me a minute to think—to think about all the things my father told me—all the things we talked about …
How they talked. Or, rather, his father talked and Adam listened. But Adam also asked questions, a hundred, a thousand it seemed. During those first few days after the discovery of his identity and the lives they led, he and his father talked incessantly, the terrible silence finally broken. Sometimes they talked in the paneled room in the cellar and at other times outside, walking the streets, sitting in a restaurant, lounging on a park bench. His father explained why they covered so much territory. The paneled room was a Safe Room; it had been searched for “bugs”—listening devices—by Grey’s men and given clearance. If they didn’t talk in that room, it was best to conduct their conversations while they were on the move, coming and going, in public places, when the chances of being overheard or eavesdropped on were negligible. It was during these conversations that his father brought him up to date, told him how they had become involved in this new life of theirs.
“In the final analysis,” his father said, “we really had no choice. Grey spelled out the options, the alternatives. He had helped to develop the Department of Re-Identification. The department had grown out of a sudden need as people began to testify against organized crime. The first people to give testimony were criminals themselves, members of the organizations and syndicates who, for one reason or another, decided to turn against their own kind. In exchange, they asked protection. The early cases were provided with bodyguards, nothing else. Some of the first witnesses were convicts and they had to be transferred to prisons where they couldn’t be reached by the organizations. In some instances, new identities were created for witnesses who weren’t in jail. They began new lives under assumed names.”
Adam and his father were walking by a schoolyard where some kids, mostly girls, were playing hopscotch and other games, their shouts and laughter innocent on the afternoon air. Adam suddenly felt like an alien.
“Grey explained the situation,” his father continued, unaware of the children and the sunshine, head down, his eyes cruising the sidewalk. “My life as I had known it, he said, was ended. It was a matter of time before a bullet or a bomb or some other weapon finished me off. He had been my watchdog from the beginning. He and his men had alerted the police department when the bomb was placed in the car. One of Grey’s men had shot the assassin who had impersonated the cop outside the newspaper office. Grey said that sooner or later the assassins would succeed. I couldn’t be allowed to live—for a lot of reasons, the least of which was revenge. I had to be made an example to other people who might want to become witnesses. And they still didn’t know how much I had really learned during the investigation, how much I could still tell the authorities. Or how much I knew then that wasn’t worth much but might become important if later disclosures were made.”
His father kicked at a stone, watched it roll into the gutter. “I’m not the hero type—I get scared too easily—but I tried to reason with Grey. I told him that I would take my chances, that this was still a free country, a country of laws, and that a citizen shouldn’t have to go into hiding for his own protection. But Grey pointed out the clincher—he said that the bomb in the car hadn’t been aimed at me alone but at whoever happened to be in the car when it exploded, and most likely that would be my family. He said that you and your mother weren’t any safer than I was. Not as long as I continued to be Anthony Delmonte, resident of Blount, New York. I remained unconvinced—feeling that there was something wrong somehow with our entire system—until I returned home after Grey’s visit with me at the office and learned that your mother had received a phone call. A simple and brief phone call in which someone quietly informed her that two funeral masses would be reserved in the next week at St. Joseph’s Church. For her husband and son. Her punishment was that she would be allowed to live …”
The sun had no right to be so bright, the shouts of the playing children so happy.
“That night, I called Grey, using a special number he had given me.”
T: Thus, your family came under the protection of this Department of Re-Identification
A: Yes. But it was different in those days. My father said they were amateurs at that kind of thing. Today, there’s an official Witness Re-Establishment Program—that’s the official name now—with authority handed down by Congress. It’s all smooth and cool and streamlined. Entire families are relocated, provided not only with new identities but with complete family histories, all documented, official. It’s almost foolproof. But in those days the program was new. We were one of the first families involved. There was money enough—in fact, my father said a trust fund was established to finance my college education—but there were a lot of rough edges. Grey and his people had to improvise and sometimes they goofed.
T: How did they, as you say, “goof”?
A: Well, the birth certificates, for instance. When Mr. Grey brought us our new certificates, my birthdate had been changed from February 14 to July 14. Mr. Grey was furious, my father said. He wanted us to keep our original birthdates so there’d be less confusion, less chance of slipping up accidentally and giving the wrong date in the future. My mother was upset, too—she said a mother simply couldn’t accept a change in the birthdate of her son. So Mr. Grey arranged for another certificate.
T: But your father kept both, you said.
A: He was afraid of another goof, that the July 14 date might have become recorded somewhere and that I might need it in the future. So he didn’t destroy it. He said it might have been a mistake on his part but that he, too, had to improvise in those days.
And the names. Adam could still hear his father’s voice, a mixture of anger and disgust when he talked about their new names.
“Farmer, for God’s sake. Grey and his bunch come up with Farmer. White, American, Protestant. WASP. And here I am Italian, and your mother Irish. And both us of Catholic, your mother a devout Catholic who never misses mass on Sunday or on holy days.”
Grey resorted to more improvisation, suggesting that the Farmer family be converts to Catholicism. This meant baptismal certificates, confirmation papers.
“We were like puppets, you, your mother, and I,” his father said. “As if we had no control over our lives. And we didn’t, of course. Others pulled the strings and we jumped. Sometimes, I think someone with a terrible sense of humor was toying with us. Look at the name they selected for you—Adam. Somebody’s whim, maybe. Adam: new birth, first man. I don’t know. Your mother and I felt helpless but the thought of that bomb and that phone call made me go along. And so we found ourselves in Monument, Massachusetts.”
T: Why Monument, why this city out of so many others?
A: You sound bored.
T: Please, no more judgments on me.
A: As if you’ve heard all this before and you’re only going through the motions.
T: Time is too valuable to hear banal information repeated. If I knew why your Mr. Grey chose Monument as your new home, would there be any logical reason why I would ask you about it?
(10-second interval.)
A: I guess you’re right. As usual. As far as Monument was concerned, my mother insisted on staying somewhere in the Nort
heast, my father said. Mr. Grey agreed but not for sentimental reasons. He said it was a matter of lifestyle, of blending in with our surroundings. We’d have been conspicuous, say, suddenly turning up in Texas. So Mr. Grey arranged for us to settle in Massachusetts. Actually, distance wasn’t a problem, he said. Even without all the elaborate arrangements, there was little chance of anyone tracing us back to Blount …
T: What is the matter? You have suddenly grown pale.
(7-second interval.)
A: Let me take it easy for a minute or two …
(23-second interval.)
T: What has upset you?
A: Something I remembered as I was talking. The reason why Mr. Grey wasn’t worried about anyone tracing us back to Blount …
The cellar again. With his father. His mother upstairs. His father reached inside his jacket and pulled out an envelope. A narrow manila envelope, slightly larger than letter size. He held the envelope in the palm of his hand for a moment, as if his hand were a scale and he was trying to determine its weight, its value, its importance. Finally, he unsealed the envelope, carefully lifting up the Scotch tape that crisscrossed it. He withdrew something that looked like a newspaper clipping. Yellowed, fragile. He handed it to Adam.
“This was the insurance Grey said he was providing us with,” his father said, his voice filled with a bitterness Adam had never heard in his father’s voice before.