American Spy Read online

  Aisha was my favorite snitch. She was a member of the Patrice Lumumba Coalition, a Pan-African organization based in Harlem with about a thousand members on its roster. Although the PLC’s activities mostly revolved around protesting apartheid, we had them under investigation for two reasons. The first was because of their ties to the Communist Party USA. At the time, the CPUSA was receiving three million dollars annually from the USSR, so any organization with Communist members, no matter the size, was under our investigation.

  The second was because its director, Aisha’s uncle, had once been a Black Panther. More troublingly, he’d also briefly been associated with the Black Liberation Army—a violent, underground offshoot of the Panthers that had been active throughout the seventies. Before the FBI systematically disbanded the group, the BLA had been a domestic terrorist network responsible for the theft of millions of dollars and the murder of more than a dozen police officers.

  When Aisha finally arrived, she was carrying a purse on her arm, a giant clear umbrella, a folded stroller, and her son, Marlon, who was two. As she dropped onto the bolted stool beside me, I said hello to Marlon, who promptly turned away from me and began to whine, pushing his face into the acne-scarred swath of skin exposed by Aisha’s V-neck.

  “He’s tired,” she said as an apology.

  Aisha looked much younger than twenty. And like she’d dressed quickly, wearing a headscarf, a wrinkled white T-shirt, and jeans. I glanced up at the clock near the stainless steel order-up counter. “You’re twenty minutes late.”

  She nodded and said she was sorry. I suppressed my irritation, not wanting it to be a contentious meeting because—as I’d already warned her—it would be our last. When the waitress came over, Aisha ordered an enormous amount of food: the chicken and waffles the restaurant was famous for, with a side of Georgia sausage. Once the waitress had gone, Aisha reached into her purse and handed me a sheaf of papers folded into thirds. As I looked over the first page of the report, she spoke sharply to Marlon, who was still whimpering.

  I recognized her handwriting from my own youth. Some of the girls I’d passed notes with wrote their a’s and o’s in the same fat way, their i’s with large bubble dots. If there are regional variations in speech, I think it stands to reason that they also exist in handwriting, and I thought of Aisha’s handwriting as the most prominent dialect of New York’s black public schools. My own, as you’ve surely noticed by now, is quite sharp. I wonder what that says about my personality.

  “Is it okay?” She was peering at me, insecure as usual about the quality of her writing.

  “It’s fine.” The first page summarized the three PLC meetings she’d gone to over the last couple of months; what had happened and who had attended. The second detailed a protest they were planning in front of city hall. The group was hoping to put pressure on city government to divest from South Africa.

  Her meal arrived, the waffles on a separate plate with a pat of Technicolor oleo on top. As she cut one into wedges, she said to Marlon, “You hungry?”

  She held a wedge out toward him, but when he tried to snatch it, moved it out of his reach. “You gonna be good?”

  He remained silent, passively resisting her terms. She sighed and put the waffle wedge in his fat hand anyway.

  “How’s his dad doing?” I asked.

  “He’s good.”

  A couple of years earlier, Marlon’s father had gone up to Otisville on an assault charge. I didn’t know the details, but something had compelled him to visit a comprehensive beating on a fellow inmate, which was technically a federal crime, Otisville being a federal prison. That second assault would’ve extended his bid by a few years, but I’d got those charges against him dropped. In exchange Aisha gave me intel. And on top of that I paid her. I thought she was getting the better end of the deal.

  “Got his parole hearing coming up soon,” she added, looking at me cannily. “But you knew that, didn’t you.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got no reason to be keepings tabs on him.”

  Of course we both knew that was a lie, as his status was my source of leverage with her. But recruiting and running informants was about cultivating their trust. To do that I found it worked best to lie frequently to them.

  As Aisha ate, I asked her a few questions about the report she’d given me. Then I tried pressing her for information about the group’s funding, but she said she hadn’t seen the books lately. I valued this highly about her, the fact that if she didn’t know something she said so directly. That was rarely the case with my male informants.

  The waitress approached again. She spoke to Marlon and patted him on the head before beginning to clear Aisha’s dishes. “You need anything else?”

  “Just the bill,” I said. She wrote quickly on the guest check, pulled it off the pad, and put it on the counter before strolling over to another customer.

  I asked Aisha the same thing I always did to cap our meetings: “Is there anything else I should know that you haven’t told me?”

  She thought for a moment then shook her head. “No, ma’am.”

  She was telling the truth. At Quantico they’d taught us the so-called classic signals that someone was lying: if they glance up to the right before they speak, or if they won’t look you in the eye. None of what I’d learned worked as well as listening to my instincts. I’ve always been good at ferreting out deception. I’m not entirely sure what my ability to detect a liar is based on—subtle cues maybe, subconscious awareness, an intuitive talent for reading microexpressions. I don’t know, and I’ve found that the more I try to understand it the less effective I am. My ASAC in Indianapolis had taken full advantage of my skill and used me on a lot of cases. He called me his lie detector. Gold and I had never worked closely enough for him to have noticed my talent.

  I fished a receipt from my purse and watched as she carefully signed her code name to it. She asked, “You really don’t need me no more?”

  I shook my head as I held a clean white envelope out to her. Inside were her usual bimonthly payment and a termination bonus: $350 in seven crisp $50 bills.

  “Too bad. I got used to the extra cash.” She was gathering her purse, her umbrella, her son.

  “Well. See you around.” I felt strangely sad, and it took me by surprise.

  “Yeah.” She hesitated, and then in a show of formality extended her hand to shake my own. It was such an uncharacteristic gesture that we both started to laugh.

  I was nervous about firing her as I had, because I’d done so without my ASAC’s permission, which meant the move was technically against bureau policy. But I couldn’t continue to waste my career on developing informants. Participating in high-profile operations was the only way to get the recognition and promotion I wanted.

  As Aisha left the restaurant, I gathered my own things. At the cashier stand I glanced out through the wall of windows into the rainy afternoon and saw Aisha under her clear umbrella, struggling to snap the stroller harness around Marlon, who was bawling. She was displaying Herculean patience in the face of his tantrum and in the bad weather. I felt a surge of fondness for her.

  What I actually did for a living had long since inoculated me against any of the romantic ideas I’d once had about spies. Most of the ones I knew personally, or knew about, fell into one of two categories—they were either traitors like Scranage or snitches like my informants.

  But she was the one informant for whom my contempt was mixed with something a little kinder. After all, she was snitching out of loyalty to her man, which was admirable from a certain perspective. My other informants only did it for the cash.

  Plus, I could see something of myself in her. When I was just a little bit younger than she was, I started dating my first boyfriend, Robbie Young, whom I’d known since I was a kid. We’d go on to have an on-again, off-again relationship throughout my twenties.

 
Like Marlon’s father, when Robbie was young, he’d been a guest of the state a few times (back then, to hear him tell it, a crime against property wasn’t a real crime). I’d visit him occasionally, even during times when, strictly speaking, we weren’t a couple.

  Once, when he was up at Wallkill, he’d asked me to marry him. I remember looking around before I answered. The visitors’ room had a distinctly family oriented atmosphere—there was a mural of the Manhattan skyline on one of the walls and a guard was gamely taking a photograph of a large family in front of it. An elderly inmate in a green jumpsuit and too-large, too-white dentures was at the very center and grinning for the camera.

  I’d looked back at Robbie and shook my head. What would it have earned me to build a life and a family around a visitor’s schedule? What would he have been to me but an albatross around my neck? I could never have made the choice Aisha did.

  It’s not romantic to be so loyal that you compromise your sense of yourself. I’ve been a lot of things, boys, including a spy, but I know who I am. And I’m not no snitch.

  3

  NEW YORK, 1962

  WHEN YOUR GRANDMOTHER WAS TWELVE, HER mother died suddenly, and she went to Saint-Pierre to live with her sister, Sido. A year passed before their father, Leon, got it into his head to send her to New York. His own sister, Agathe’s aunt, had married an American serviceman in Paris and moved with him after the war. Leon was white. Agathe’s in her sixties now and is still hearing rumors that so-and-so is probably a half sibling of hers. Aunt Sido is the only one with whom she shares both parents, out of maybe a dozen or so of his children. Sido believes that Leon loved Agathe the most because of her beauty and complexion, and that is why he sent her to New York. While that seems overly simple, I have no better explanation to offer.

  Agathe’s aunt strong-armed her into passing for white; I don’t even think her uncle knew she was black until she married my father. Your grandmother characterizes her teenage years in New York as “nervous ones” (there’s no one on this planet with her knack for understatement). She moved in and out of the New York places where Negroes were interdits, gathering her intelligence on the world that white people inhabited, always feeling like she was about to be made.

  I can’t say for certain what I would’ve done in Agathe’s position, but most likely what I’d been told to. The thought alone is frightening. The privileges wouldn’t have mitigated the risk, or the constant fear of a very dangerous type of exposure. Had I been subjected to that as an adolescent, I would’ve been permanently warped. In many ways, Agathe is much stronger than me.

  I think Helene would’ve enjoyed tricking people she considered too stupid to really see her. She would’ve found pleasure in deceiving a particular type of fool: the one who looks at you and sees, not you, but whom he wants to see. As much as I loved her, she could be a little duplicitous.

  My great-aunt’s big oversight was letting your grandmother go to an integrated high school in Brooklyn, which was where she met your grandfather. One day, she left her lunch bag unattended for a moment and he scratched his name with a toothpick on the banana. When the scratches darkened into writing, the mystery of it and the cleverness made her ask around about who Bill was.

  Pop had grown up in Harlem; his family had only recently moved to Brooklyn. He was the youngest of four siblings, and his father was a grocer. Color was the linchpin of my parents’ relationship: My mother liked my father because he was dark, and my father liked my mother because she was light. He was Agathe’s first and only boyfriend; their relationship was easy to keep secret because he was enlisted for much of it. They got married a few months after Pop returned from Korea. Agathe was eighteen. Helene was born seven months later. It still amuses me, the picture of this unknown white great-aunt furiously spluttering at the news of Agathe’s marriage, the world she’d so carefully constructed for your grandmother falling down around them both.

  Your grandfather started out as a beat cop, worked his way past sergeant then lieutenant, and eventually became deputy commissioner of community affairs. He was forced to retire a few years before you were born. Your grandmother is one of the few people I know who’s never been impressed by his professional accomplishments.

  My parents had nothing but their children in common. I’ve never known two people who were more poorly suited. They argued constantly, but what was even more oppressive were the lethally hostile silences that stretched between them for days, only occasionally punctuated by passive-aggressive sniping. Like once when Helene was nine and I was seven, and our family was planning to go somewhere—maybe to our grandfather’s house for dinner. Pop noticed that Agathe was dressed smartly but wasn’t wearing makeup. He’d frowned and commented on it.

  “I don’t feel like it,” she said.

  “See, that’s your whole problem,” he shot back. “You think you’re fine the way you are.”

  I can understand what he thought he was saying. He was a person who believed you should never be satisfied with yourself. He thought there was always room for improvement. I can also understand what she heard, and why she muttered under her breath in French as she slipped on her wool coat.

  “What’s that?” he’d asked her, and when she didn’t respond, he turned to Helene and me. “That’s your mother for you. A beatnik right down to her core.”

  He spoke with a strained smile on his face, like he was joking, but we knew he wasn’t. He’d first started calling her a beatnik after she got her hands on a copy of Les Damnés de la Terre—Frantz Fanon was Martinican too. The word became a catchall for all the things he didn’t like about her. Then it became a way of commenting on—rejecting—who she was fundamentally, and once you get to that point in a marriage, it seems like there’s little chance of bouncing back.

  It was a tame enough insult for him to say in front of his kids, but I see now that there was brutality behind it. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he called her much unkinder things when they were alone, but in the language of our family, “beatnik” was uniquely cruel.

  If these were the people I was supposed to model my own relationships after, it’s no wonder that I’ve never been particularly interested in getting married. Your father was married when I met him. I loved him, but never wanted to replace his wife.

  * * *

  —

  I THINK I MUST’VE learned my contempt for the snitch from Agathe. I can picture her now, a few months after that makeup argument, bent at the waist, rooting around in the closet that Helene and I shared. Our bedroom was the only room on the half story of our house; the effort Agathe had put into decorating it was a daily reminder of how much she loved us. She’d spent weeks picking out white furniture from stores all over the city: our beds, the dressers, and even a small rocking chair, which held the balding teddy that had been her most cherished possession as a child. She’d given the same attention to the festive rug—Bunny was lying on it now like a log—the drapes, the other furnishings. And on top of all that, she’d made the matching floral quilts that covered our beds herself.

  She’d been looking for the powder-blue suitcase my sister and I took with us when our family went on vacation to one of the black resorts in the Catskills. Having found it, she sat on Helene’s bed and opened the window.

  “Helene, get me a cigarette,” she said, speaking in French as she generally did when Pop wasn’t around. Her dress and purse were hanging over our desk chair; she’d slept in our bedroom the night before.

  I watched as Agathe took a drag. She was in her Formfit Rogers Dress-Shapers, a pair of girdle panties and a pointy black bra, the kind of heavy-duty foundational garments that you could’ve shot her in and she wouldn’t even have felt it. In that moment, hers was an indecorous beauty.

  My sister curled up next to her. I thought she was our mother’s favorite. They were similar, both of them independent and intensely analytical, so they understood each
other.

  I got out of bed and crossed to our mother. Tried to get closer to her than my sister was. She kissed us both on our temples, then said, “Marie, is your sister good to you? Does she take care of you?”

  I leaned forward to look at Helene. We had the same curls, which our mother dutifully pressed for us. Her eyes were dark brown, and suggested a certain craftiness, even when she was a kid—she was always extremely vigilant, in a way that could make you feel like she was waiting for you to let your guard down.

  “Before I came to New York my sister took care of me,” she continued. “She was a few years older and already married.”

  “Is she nice?” I asked.

  “Yes. I hope you’ll meet her someday. You might not see it now, but you’re lucky to have each other. A sister is one of the few people in this world you can really trust.”

  “So why did your dad make you leave Martinique?” Helene asked.

  “He said it wasn’t proper, me living with Sido.” She stuck her arm out the window and stamped her cigarette on the brick exterior.

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because he was a fool. And fools like him always think they know what’s best for everybody.” I’ve met a handful of my aunts and uncles down here. Agathe’s the only one who’s straightforward with me about how much she resented Leon. The others treat his memory with a deference that boggles my mind.

  “I would rather have stayed with my sister,” she added, then fell quiet for a moment, probably thinking about the implications of what she’d just said. If she’d stayed in Martinique we would never have been born.

  “What about Daddy?” Helene asked, slicing through the tension.

  Agathe sounded exasperated. “A man is a reflection of the company he keeps. Look at your father’s friends. They’re snitches. All of them.” Snitches. She’d said the word in English. Agathe looked into Helene’s face then down into mine, searching it for some acknowledgment that I understood what she was telling us. I didn’t understand.