Back Story

9

Hawk and I were running intervals on the red composite track in back of Harvard Stadium. The sun was shining. The temperature was about 65. I was wearing a cutoff sweatshirt that was black with sweat. Hawk seemed calm. We would do a couple 220s, a couple 440s, and a couple 880s, and then walk a 440. We were walking again.

"Maybe we should walk an extra two-twenty," I said.

"Ain't two-twenties anymore," Hawk said. "I keep telling you. They two hundred meters, four hundred meters, and eight hundred meters."

"How do you know," I said.

"Ah is an African-American," Hawk said. "We know shit like that. You see a lot of European Americans running those races?"

"European Americans?" I said. Hawk grinned.

"I can always tell," I said, "when you're sleeping with some theorist from one of the colleges."

"Abby," Hawk said. "She teach at Brandeis."

"I'll bet she does," I said.

"She a feminist, too," Hawk said.

"Of course she is," I said. "You want to walk another two-twenty."

"Sure," Hawk said. "I know you need it."

"I was thinking of you," I said.

Some of the Harvard track kids flashed by us, running their own training sprints. I was glad we were walking. I had the feeling they'd have flashed past us even if we'd been running. Some of them were women.

"You ever hear of a group back in the seventies," I said, "called itself the Dread Scott Brigade?

"Nope."

"Part of the radical movement," I said. "They held up a bank in Audubon Circle in 1974, killed a woman."

"I remember that," Hawk said. "I believe there was a brother in on it."

"Yes."

"Lotta brothers in radical movements then," Hawk said.

"Ungrateful bastards," I said. "We rescue their ancestors from ignorance, teach them to chop cotton. And that's the thanks we get?"

"Good works don't always get rewarded," Hawk said, without any hint of a ghetto accent. His speech flowed in and out of Standard English for reasons known only to him. Most things about Hawk were known only to him.

"How come you weren't a radical?" I said.

"I was into crime?"

"Oh yeah."

"So how come you interested?"

I told him about Paul and Daryl and the missing FBI report. Then we ran some 220s and some 440s and some 880s. I kept up pretty well for a European American.

When we were walking again, Hawk said, "Quirk know about this missing report?"

"Uh-huh."

"And the FBI guy?"

"Epstein," I said. "Yeah, he knows."

"But neither one of them can find it."

"They haven't yet."

Both of us paused to watch a pair of young Harvard women jog past. As we watched them I said to Hawk, "You think staring at them is sexist behavior?"

"Yes," Hawk said.

I nodded.

"That's what I thought," I said.

Hawk was silent for maybe twenty yards. The Harvard women were halfway around the turn.

Then he said, "Quirk wants to find something, he usually do."

"Yes," I said.

"Don't know Epstein. But he don't get to be SAC 'cause he a good old Irish Catholic boy."

"No."

"So he might be pretty good, too."

"Be my guess," I said.

Hawk was wearing black satiny polyester running pants and a sleeveless mesh shirt. From the far turn the two Harvard women looked back at him.

"We think he good. We know Quirk be good," Hawk said.

"So there a reason they don't find this report?" I shrugged.

"Maybe there's a reason they can't look," I said. "And maybe they hoping you'll do the looking for them."

"That occurred to me," I said.

Hawk looked at me for a minute. His expression was as unfathomable as it always was. "Good," Hawk said.