The Fixer

43

Lenny was ordered to cover something up, and he couldn’t go through with it. So he knew he had no choice but to get out, to quit his life and set up a new one. I’m sorry, I thought he’d told you and your sister. He was planning to. Maybe he never got a chance.”

“How was he planning to ‘quit’ his life? What does that mean, exactly?”

“He’d begun to accumulate his assets-to gather cash, enough to buy him a new identity and a new life, and leave some for you and-your sister’s name was Wendy, perhaps?”

Rick nodded. He wondered how much Clarke knew about the cash, how much there was. “But where’d he get the cash?”

“He was paid very well by one of his clients-the one he’d become fearful of-and he always lived modestly. And on top of that, to be honest, I think he skimmed money off of the cash he’d amassed for this client. He wasn’t troubled by the morality of it, I have to say. He called it ‘stealing from thieves.’”

“How could he disappear?”

“The same way I did. You do know that Clarke isn’t my real name, don’t you?”

“No.”

“So you don’t know… Your dad stood by me when no one else would.”

“Stood by you how?”

“Lenny was a hero. Back in the day, he’d take cases no other lawyer would take. Like mine. My real name is Herbert Antholis. You might have heard the name…?”

Rick shook his head. “I don’t think so. Should I know who you are?”

Clarke-Antholis?-tipped his head and gave that crooked half smile that Rick remembered well. “Those days are long gone, I guess, and just as well. I used to be a member of the Weather Underground. Back in the days before that was a weather website. We were student radicals. We all had copies of Mao’s little red book, and we were convinced that old Chairman Mao was right, that political power grows out of a gun.

“Well, we were protesting the US bombing of Hanoi in 1972-we were planning to break into an army recruiting center in downtown Boston and steal records. But I was the low man on the totem pole, and what I didn’t know, what they didn’t tell me, was that my comrades were actually planning to set off a pipe bomb there. I was driving the car, and my job was to wait for my comrades to come back and then hightail it out of there. Only later did I find out that an army sergeant, the guy who ran the recruiting center, was killed when the bomb went off. A father of four kids. That wasn’t part of the plan at all. No one told me. But after we were arrested and charged, it didn’t make a difference that I was at the bottom of the totem pole. A grand jury indicted me, and the district attorney was going for the maximum sentence he could get-life in prison. I mean, I drove the getaway car, so I knew I was culpable. I deserved some kind of prison sentence. But not life. Your father took my case and he believed in me. He worked his butt off. But he knew I could never get a fair trial. I said to your dad, ‘What are my odds?’ and he said, ‘Frankly, they’re bad.’ I told him I’d have to make a run for it, go underground like some of my Weather Underground comrades did. He said, ‘Do you know what kind of position that puts me in?’ But he helped me anyway. It was a lot easier to disappear back in the early seventies. I got some fake papers made and moved to rural New Hampshire and set up a new life. No one knows, not my neighbors or my friends in town. They just know me as a sugar maker.”

“I had no idea about any of this.”

“It was a lot more complicated for your father to disappear back in-1995, was it? ’96?”

“’96.” Rick was astonished at Antholis’s account. This was a Lenny Hoffman he didn’t recognize.

“He had to set up a ghost address, and I think he was working on getting a driver’s license in another name. But mostly, the thing is, you have to live on cash. Which is surprisingly not all that hard to do.”

“Who did he tell? Just you? Or did he tell Joan as well?”

“Joan, his secretary? No way. Joan was always a problem for him. I don’t know why he never fired her.”

“What? She seems as loyal as they come.”

“He never told you? Remember during the busing crisis in Boston when there was all that violence? The courts ordered that black kids be bused to white schools and white kids be bused to black schools… There was this black teenager who was charged with stoning cars. Lenny represented him pro bono. He didn’t think the kid was guilty. Well, Joan’s uncle was badly hurt during all that madness-he was hit with a cinder block or some such outside a housing project in Roxbury. Wielded by another black teenager. I think Joan never forgave him for agreeing to represent that black kid.”

“But I don’t understand,” he said. “I thought Dad represented strip clubs and such. His clients all came out of the Combat Zone.”

“That’s how he ended up, sure. But that wasn’t how he started. That wasn’t what Lenny wanted to be. Your father saw himself as a First Amendment lawyer. That was something he deeply cared about. I mean, this wasn’t the sort of pro bono work that partners at big law firms get points for taking on. This was a cause for him. A life. But then he had kids and he knew he needed a reliable way to make a living.”

Rick couldn’t help but marvel at the old Leonard Hoffman, the man he never knew. “So what changed?” he said. “How could someone like that become someone like, well, my dad?” But he knew what Antholis was going to say, and he dreaded it.

“Look in the mirror, Rick,” Antholis said.