My father's parents had a restaurant in Addis Ababa, but in those disastrous years nobody could afford to eat in it, so they got out and went to Greece.
"At some point in '81, Mom realized she was being watched and had probably been found out and was likely going to be arrested and shot. So my parents got out of bed one night and disguised themselves as peasants and 234
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commenced to walk to Khartoum, six hundred miles away.
They nearly died from starvation and exposure and exhaustion, but they made it. My Uncle Getachew took the same route a month later. Thanks to a Baptist Church organization, they all ended up in Washington, where my parents now work for the Marriott Corporation. I was born in 1985 and my sister Yarukanesh two years later. She's quite respectable. Went to Brown and is a research scientist at the NIH. Don, what do you think? Am I unworthy of that amazing family history? Should I be embarrassed?"
"No, I think you just like living on the edge. You've found your own dangerous way of living among secrets."
He nodded. "I think you got me on that one."
"But aren't there less morally ambiguous ways of living this kind of life?"
"Like what?"
"I don't know. Cybersecurity?"
"What? For banks? For Wall Street greed pits?"
"What about antiterrorism? That's not so morally unclear."
"No, not usually. I could actually see myself doing that under the right circumstances. If antiterrorism meant more than just the police work end of it. Anyway, are you really the man to be lecturing me on questions of professional moral ambiguity? I know as much about the way you operate as you know about me, don't forget."
I thought about that. "I'm not sure what my excuse is. My mother only walked as far as Safeway. Generally of course she drove."
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"There you go. You stand naked in your casual means-to-an-end-ism."
"God, Bud, you sound just like my boyfriend."
"Well, you were starting to sound just like my girlfriend."
"Then I'll stop. One more question, though, about these files. Is the Sam who is so busy behind the scenes orchestrating the election outcome for the Wall Street titans a man named Sam Krupa?"
"Yes, his name comes up in a couple of spots. My sense was that he was trying to keep his last name out of it. But some of the CEOs on a few occasions do refer to his full name. Who is that? The name sounds familiar."
"Years ago he was a political dirty trickster for Richard Nixon. More recently, he's believed by the political cognoscenti to be the man who—working for the same Wall Street gang trying to control the current gubernatorial election outcome—brought about the downfall of the bankers'
archenemy, the crusading reformer Eliot Spitzer.
* * * *
[Back to Table of Contents]
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Chapter Twenty-eight
I left word on Timmy's voice mail that I would be out late.
I said I'd leave a key card for my motel room at the front desk, and he should come on in and not wait up for me.
I drove over to Staples and bought four large padded envelopes. Then to Target for a cheap wash cloth. At ampm, I bought a bottle of Snapple iced tea, then went into the men's room and flushed the contents—way too sweet for me—down the toilet. When I topped off my rented Honda's tank, I also filled the Snapple jar with gasoline and capped it. Something was missing, so I went back inside and asked for some matches with the pack of Lucky Strikes I purchased, and then tossed the cigarettes in the trash and kept the matches.
The Honda came equipped with an excellent Garmin GPS. I had looked up the address online, and I keyed in the Belgrade Grotto in Hummerston, New Jersey. The driving time was given as three hours, ten minutes.
I left Colonie at nine and was actually in Hummerston by eleven forty-five—traffic was light—and I drove in and out of the parking lot of the Belgrade Grotto. A few cars were still there, although it looked as if closing time was probably going to be twelve. Among the vehicles was a black Lincoln Navigator with a green dump sticker on a rear side window.
The club was a featureless single-story cinder block rectangle with a couple of blacked-out windows about seven feet up.
Some grotto.
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I picked up a coffee at an all-night 7-Eleven and then sat in the car and sipped it and read the Hummerston Courier from cover to cover. The health department had warned Mikey's Eats about reusing its cooking oil more often than the department recommended, and the Tarantella twins had just turned three.
Just after one, I drove back over to Belgrade Grotto. All the cars were gone and the place was quiet. There were a couple of security lights blazing out in front, but the rear of the building was dark. I parked down the road at a disused gas station that had been turned into a used car lot. The place was deserted, so there was no chance anybody would be making an offer on my rented Honda in the next ten minutes.
I made my way in the darkness behind a muffler dealer and a porn shop back to the Belgrade Grotto. A few cars drove by out on the highway, but none slowed down or stopped.
The Grotto had a mailbox next to the road. I flipped it open and inserted an envelope containing one of Bud's four disks. On the front of the envelope, I had written From Sam Krupa. Copy to USCIS, the immigration service . Handwriting?
Fingerprints? I didn't think either was going to be a problem in this particular situation.
A car approached and I sank back behind a portable sign that said KARAOKE THURSDAY . After the car went by, I made my way to the rear of the Grotto. I assembled my petrol bomb—a bottle of gasoline with a gas-soaked rag as a wick—
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bar that lay nearby. An alarm went off— whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop! I ignited the bomb and tossed it through the window, and it exploded with a frightful ka-bang!
I trotted back behind the porn and muffler shops to my car, tripping once but catching my balance, and got into the Honda and drove off.
By the time I hit the Garden State Parkway, I was no longer shaking, and after I got on the Thruway, with Albany a straight shot north, I stopped at a service area and left with a large bottle of cold water and a slice of pizza. The pizza smelled of gasoline, however, from my hands, and as I pulled back onto the highway I tossed it out the car window.
Littering! That, I was ashamed of, and I almost went back and picked up my garbage. But the pizza was biodegradable, after all, and I was bone tired.
Timmy stirred but didn't awaken when I came in at four thirty-five. I showered and crawled into the second bed in the room. I lay awake for fifteen or more minutes, and then I was far away from it all.
* * * *
Just after nine Wednesday morning, Timmy brought some coffee back to the room, and I woke up.
"Donald, I think I heard you when you came in. What time was it?"
"Late. After midnight."
"Where were you?"
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