The Company You Keep by Neil Gordon

Author:Neil Gordon [Gordon, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101651360
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2004-06-29T04:00:00+00:00

3.

By 8:45 the entrance to Union Station was thick with people, a line of taxis perhaps fifteen long dropping off and picking up in front, buses arriving down the street on both sides, sidewalks full of commuters from the suburban trains both coming out and going in. There was of course no way to be sure what surveillance there was, but there was no obvious sign. I left the restaurant now and bought an “I Love Chicago” sweatshirt and a White Sox baseball cap at a little tourist storefront, then wandered into the crowd in front of the station and into the entrance.

The seconds of my transaction to buy the ticket, crossing the interior of the station, boarding the train, were as if in time lapse. As if I were watching each event pass seconds after it had in fact happened, and that from a slight distance. Whereas everything I’d done since leaving New York had been with a nearly suicidal abandon, unable to care if I were caught or not, now I found myself caring nearly too much. With the caring, with the fear, came its inverse, tiny bursts of excitement in my stomach. I recognized the feeling as that which came in the center of an action; stealing guns, planting a bomb: each second free opened a vista of another second, and another, and another, until you found yourself, despite all, believing in the possibility of success, and that that belief feels so good it hurts.

There were police in two sets of three toward the center of the hall; I kept to the side by crossing first to a newsagent for a paper, then to a Starbucks. When I started a trajectory toward my gate, I tried to visualize their focus, predicting what in the crowd might attract it—two businessmen laughing, a beautiful woman—and keeping away. An impossible task, I knew, though I also knew that there was the movement of a policeman’s optic muscle between freedom and failure for me, and that every tiny advantage I could give myself could make all the difference. And in fact my luck held, because I was sunk in my seat behind the paper before I noticed that my picture—bearded and surprisingly bald—was again on the front page under the headline: “Sixties Radical Fugitive Thought to Be in the U.S.,” and the subhead, “FBI Thinks Flight to Canada Was a Ruse.”

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