I don’t remember being told that he’d been arrested. I should remember. I can walk around the house of my memories, as if twenty years haven’t passed since I stepped through that door, and yet this moment, this moment when someone must have told me my dad was going to prison, is gone.
They say when we forget, the synapses which connect the neurons that make up that memory decay from disuse; they’re recruited for a new memory, which makes me think of holding a bunch of slowly deflating balloons, and each time we reach for a fresh new balloon, we neglect to notice that one balloon has slipped from our grip and is slowly receding away behind us, a red dot in a wide blue sky.
I know now that Dad was arrested on February 8, 1996. He called Lana first, still in Saint Lucia, and he asked her to tell his sister in Florida. My aunt called his mother and mine to pass on the news. I try to build it up, how it might have been, in case that helps: Mom probably sat Caitlin and me down after school to tell us, probably at the long wooden kitchen table or in the never-ending bed one morning, and we were probably drinking tea, and she probably made it sound as straightforward as possible, but none of us can remember.
* * *
Back then Dad didn’t share what he had been through since we had last seen him. But it was one of the chapters in the autobiography he wrote painstakingly on a typewriter in the prison library with notations and corrections in his black chicken-track scrawl. This would eventually become a staggering 300,000-word document testifying to the minutiae of his life and crimes. He joked that it wasn’t like he was short on time.
When I read his account, it was hard to believe it happened to the dad I know, and not to one of the other men he pretended to be over the years. When Scotland Yard found us in Saint Lucia, Dad switched identities again, this time to Simon Parker. He slipped onto a boat bound for the neighboring island of Martinique from where he could easily fly to Paris, since it is an overseas region of France. At the airport he still expected to be stopped. While making a phone call in a call box, he found a wallet with several thousand dollars inside. He was short on cash, having spent a significant amount on our flights and having left too quickly to gather more funds. He decided he couldn’t afford the karma of theft, so he handed the wallet in to the airline and was annoyed when the drunken tourist who claimed it didn’t offer a reward or say thank you.
He arrived in Paris wearing the same swim shorts, baseball cap, and flip-flops we had last seen him in. He remembers being terribly cold, holed up in a cheap motel, waiting. He bought a coat from a secondhand shop. It smelled of another man’s problems, preferable to his own. He passed the time by walking the city, trying not to despair, but the sidewalks of the Seine were steeped in memories of those early months he was on the run with Lana, when they were wildly in love. Lana wouldn’t fly out to meet him this time. The hotel in Saint Lucia was under surveillance, two federal agents posted there at all times, questioning the guests and the workers. It was bad for business.
Andrew Sloane had been furious to find Lana there. When he first interrogated her back in London, he told her that Dad was a dangerous man, that his actions had caused the deaths of children, and asked her if Dad beat her or performed perverse acts on her. She had cried, genuinely harrowed by the interview, and perhaps Sloane had interpreted those tears as innocence, believing her when she said she would call him if Dad made contact. With the innocence card already played, she had little room for maneuver.
Dad traveled to Amsterdam to stay with another fugitive he knew living there. Christmas came and went. He tried to negotiate a deal for his surrender, but they had already won—he just couldn’t see it. He didn’t have the energy to start again, to develop a new life as Simon Parker. He couldn’t ask us to believe in him again.
By January, he decided he couldn’t bear the cold any longer and, like a lost child, returned to where the sun still shone, to a place he could make believe he had something left to run for. Lana begged him not to come back, but he argued that maybe Saint Lucia was the last place they expected him to go, and if he couldn’t be there, he no longer wanted to be anywhere.
The ferryman showed no surprise at his return, greeting Dad with the same friendly banter they shared every time, allowing his safe passage back to paradise.
Some time passed.
Each sunset was a surprise.
He began to believe it might be possible, maybe he could be this man again, Paul Ricci, a man in possession of a future, shining.
Five whole weeks fortune gave him on the island, before they came.
It was February. He was out on the boat returning from a dive. Lana was waiting for him on the pier, panic in her pale blue eyes. This time it was too late to escape by land, as they were already coming down the one road into the bay, so Dad handed the boat driver a hundred dollars and asked him to turn the boat around. Lana watched him go from where she was standing. They didn’t wave goodbye. The boat bashed against the water, and just as it rounded the corner, Dad saw the police car pulling up to the ferry.
* * *
He spent five days in hiding in a secluded motel with Lana bringing him supplies by night, making her way through the woods behind the building. They conducted a sorry picnic on the bedspread: cheese slices in plastic, crackers, and tears.
For five days he was suspended in a state of anxiety. He ventured to reception, hungry and bored in his confinement, and the kindly owner offered him a pack of cards and a bag of potato chips for three dollars. He was grateful, though nervous.
With the help of his lawyer and a contact he had in the police, he found a way off the island. He started building a plan and building a future from nothing and for nothing except not to give in, when there was a knock on the door. For once, in his manic state, he opened it without checking.
Four men looked back at him. They seemed surprised that he had opened the door. He looked back at them, surprised also, and yet he had known from the moment he stepped off the plane and drowned in the island’s sweet heat that they would come.
They wore no uniforms and carried no guns.
“Paul Ricci?” the man at the front asked.
The name gave him some hope, as if whatever they wanted pertained to his fake life as Paul Ricci, not his criminal life as Ben Glaser. They do this, I know now, so as not to spook the fugitive and cause a scene.
They told him there had been a series of robberies in the bay, and his name had come up during the investigation. They asked him to come down to the station to answer some questions. Dad protested, but he knew his protestations were futile. As the FBI didn’t have jurisdiction on the island, the Saint Lucian police would have to bring him in on a fake charge. The policemen gathered his belongings from the room and marched him down the corridor, two men in front, two men behind.
After a brief show of an interview with the police captain about the supposed robberies, which they both knew to be a ruse, Dad was taken by a relaxed and cheerful guard to be fingerprinted and booked. They exited the main station into a grassy area between police buildings. The guard asked him to wait a moment while he collected some paperwork from inside, leaving Dad completely alone, uncuffed. Dad took in his surroundings. In front of him was another police building: a closed, unmarked door, no windows. But to his left was the main entrance, not twenty feet away, the gate wide open. It led straight onto the street in Castries, and in a few steps, he could disappear into the crowds beyond.
But his feet would not move.
He had no fight left.
The guard returned. And Dad followed. His feet took him instead through the closed door in the shadow of a man in uniform, the first of many men in uniform he would follow in the coming years.
He was fingerprinted and booked as Benjamin Glaser.
Eleven years on the run had ended.
He was driven to the local jail, an old wooden building nearby. He was locked in a twenty-by-forty-foot concrete cell with no windows, no toilet, no beds, just one long ledge against the wall and twenty other inmates. He was the only white man, the only foreigner, and was immediately harangued about how he had ended up there. It was good-humored enough, amused curiosity, until one prisoner stepped through the group to confront him, demanding his watch, an expensive Swiss Ebel. Dad held his ground, having nothing else to lose. “You can do what you want with me, but you’re not having my watch.” The man looked down at Dad, this middle-aged, by-no-means big guy, and then broke into a wide grin, patted him on the back, and walked away.
That night Dad paid the guards for a bucket of fried chicken with the last of his dollars and handed it out to the rest of the cell, two pieces per head. The group shared their cigarettes too. The prisoners took turns resting, as there wasn’t enough room for everyone to lie down. An older man told Dad to sleep with his shirt folded on the ground beneath him to protect himself from the chill of the concrete floor. That first night he barely slept for the mosquitoes bombing his eardrums and the cockroaches scampering up the walls, but mainly for the feeling of despair, of how his life had fallen so far from what it once was.
In the morning, he was given a bread roll and a glass of water. The prisoners lined up to piss through the bars into a red bucket or requested to be escorted down the corridor to the pit latrine, overflowing and foul. On the walk, Dad saw three men serving life sentences in a cell of the same size; they heckled and joked as he passed, and Dad would think of these men often in the difficult years ahead, how they kept up their humor despite everything.
When the FBI arrived three days later, he agreed to extradition on one condition: he was to be transferred out of this prison immediately.
Leaving the station, he was confronted with the flash of cameras, making him wince, as he was led, handcuffed, into a waiting car. Lana later told him that the same image was played on the news for the entire week: Dad’s face bearded, pale, red-eyed and broken, looking like the type of sinister criminal who warranted his Most Wanted title.
He spent a few more days in a solitary cell elsewhere on the island, where the guard’s wife cooked him stew for dinner, and he was grateful for the few pieces of unidentified meat. He woke to the sound of children playing in the yard outside his window.
The US Marshals arrived to escort him back. They hid his handcuffs under his sweater because passengers don’t like to know they’re traveling with a criminal. Before being transferred to California, he was flown to Puerto Rico, where Dad had taken Mom on her first-ever holiday back in 1967. It was shortly after they had fallen in love. She had walked down the beach in a cloud of pink chiffon and a wide-brimmed sun hat, smacking his arm excitedly, saying “People do this? People actually get to do this?” Dad saw that same beach pass beneath the window of the plane, and when he disembarked he was shackled at the ankles.