When Dad described life on the run to me during those prison conversations, I remember feeling glad that we had been happy at the beginning, the Midas touch of the Yellow House still with us. I was looking to balance the scales of our family history so the good outweighed the bad.
We moved first to Rome (house #2), where both of Dad’s partners had set up with their respective families, until Mom threw a fork at one of the men after he suggested I was traumatized by the move because I wouldn’t stop crying, and she refused to stay a minute longer—him, Dad, the police, the case, everyone be damned.
We moved on. We traveled to Pisa to see the tower leaning and then drove through Tuscany, us kids singing along to Fiddler on the Roof in the backseat, while Mom tried to point out the beauty that was passing us by. Fiddler had been Evan’s favorite musical as a little boy, and Tevye was the reason he called his dad Papa, so we all called him Papa too. Before we left, Mom had asked Papa’s permission to take Evan with us to Europe, and Papa had agreed. She couldn’t tell him exactly where we were going, but she would ensure that Evan stayed in regular contact and would visit as soon as it was safe.
We reached Forte dei Marmi, where we lived atop the white marble cliffs Michelangelo once chipped into. The family from whom we rented our villa (house #3) was living secretly in the basement beneath us, tiptoeing through the corridors by night, and we only discovered them by accident, when Dad spotted the other father from the world beneath us stowing away through a trapdoor for the evening.
Mom couldn’t shake the sensation this was one long holiday, and any day now we would pack up our bags and go home. She found herself making mental notes about what needed to be done—like painting the spare room or making apricot jam in the style she had tasted while in Venice, where she and Dad had taken a second honeymoon—and then she would remember with a start: that life wasn’t there anymore.
But while the illusion lasted that we were just on sabbatical from our very lovely daily lives, this European sojourn felt like an adventure—though perhaps it didn’t feel so adventurous for Mom, lugging three small children around Europe from city to city.
We kept moving; after a month we left Forte dei Marmi and flew to London, where we found an apartment in Chelsea (house #4). Dad needed to develop, or “season,” his fake identity. Dad had traveled to Rome on his real passport, because he knew we wouldn’t settle there, and he wanted to create a false lead for the FBI to follow, hoping they would scour the Italian countryside for a man who no longer existed. After London he switched to his fake ID, and Benjamin Glaser effectively disappeared.
He had purchased two passports for $10,000 each. He decided to be British, as he would be hiding out in Europe and he hoped his documentation would be less scrutinized at border crossings. Being born in 1943, he was a good candidate, as the deaths of infants during WWII were often unrecorded, but their birth certificates could be procured from hospitals with a little bit of work. Once in possession of a birth certificate, it was easy to resurrect these dead babies in an act of criminal black magic.
His first two identities were Martin Kane and Paul Ricci. I think about these babies sometimes, Martin and Paul, and wonder at the lives they could have led had they not died. Perhaps Dad once passed their parents in the street, and they would never know.
While in London, Dad practiced being Martin Kane, the name he felt more affinity with, Kane being potentially Jewish. What does Martin eat for breakfast? he thought to himself. What sort of clothes does Martin wear? What is Martin’s story? During this month in London, Martin joined a gym, got a credit card, and took a driving test, a test that over the years Dad would take on three more occasions, each time under a different identity. Martin Kane had been reborn and was now busy creating the paper trail that legitimizes us all. Eventually Dad felt like a Martin. If someone calls out the name to this day, Dad turns around. He kept his second identity, Paul Ricci, stowed away in a hidden compartment in his specially designed attaché case—for emergencies.
Mom attempted to teach Dad to speak with a British accent, practicing “tuh-MAH-toh” and having him recite “The Rain in Spain Stays Mainly in the Plain,” but the rounded vowels imparted by his Long Island childhood would not flatten out to resemble the narrow-lipped British intonation, so they invented a new story, one that fit the things he knew and the way he spoke: he had been born in England, but after his father died in the war, his mother sent him to American relatives, and he had lived there ever since. This was the story he would tell anyone he met as Martin from now on.
After a month of summer rain, we packed up, despite Mom’s pleas to stay in England. Dad said it was too dangerous for him to be in a country from which he could be extradited if he were found. Mom said he just didn’t like the weather. We gathered ourselves back into our five suitcases and prepared for the next leg of our journey.
We took a train to Southampton for the ferry over the Channel to France; from there we took another train first to Paris and then to Santander in northern Spain, where we bought tickets for the sleeper train to Lisbon, Portugal, an eighteen-hour journey.
Before we left America, Dad had drawn up a list of countries without an extradition treaty with the US. Once we arrived, he wanted to live legally as Ben Glaser again—if he didn’t break the law within that country, the government would have no basis on which to extradite him. The short list included Brazil, Australia, the Congo, and Portugal. Brazil had a certain daydream charm, but Mom didn’t think there would be good schools, and we were all to be sent to American schools so when we returned home we could slip straight back into the education system without struggling. The Congo was too dangerous and Australia was too far away. Dad also said it was full of criminals and no place to bring up kids, to which Mom raised her eyebrows at him. “Not like us,” he said. “Real criminals.”
There’s a story Dad tells about the train station in Santander, a chaotic place, full of people pushing in every direction. The train pulled up twenty minutes late and was so crowded that people were hanging out the windows and squeezed into the doorways. Our only hope was to run to the end of the platform where it might be less full. With just minutes to board, we left our five suitcases in a pile, while Mom and Dad tried to reach the farthest end of the narrow-gauge train—with me bouncing on Mom’s hip and Dad leading Cait and Evan by the hand. Dad loaded us onto the last carriage and told Mom to look up our real estate agent in Lisbon if we became separated while he ran back for our luggage.
We worked our way to our sleeper carriage, as Mom kept losing one or another of us in between strange legs. As the whistle sounded and the train pulled out of the station, we all looked out the window for Dad, wondering if we had lost him in Spain and if we had, how we would find him again.
After nearly two hours, Dad burst through the doors of the carriage, dripping in sweat and out of breath but, astonishingly, wielding our bags. He had gone back for them and handed each one to the people crowded in the doorway, motioning for them to pass them down the train, before jumping on himself at the last minute. It had taken him two hours to work his way along the four carriages, back and forth with five bags through the crowds to our seats. His face broke into a grin.
“Made it!” he cried, and we gave him a round of applause.
“Can we go home now?” Mom joked, and at that moment Dad remembers feeling a sense of peace in the decision they’d made, that it didn’t matter where we went, as long as we stuck together.
* * *
We arrived in the Quinta da Marinha, the Farm by the Sea, a sprinkler-heavy development populated by expats and the dubiously wealthy. Beyond the clipped green grass of the Quinta, with its club sandwiches and membership fees, were the rugged hills of the Portuguese countryside crisscrossed with treacherous dirt roads and the occasional rural village—just a cluster of stone houses on a crossroads. Dad said the landscape reminded him of a more grizzled and ancient California.
We moved into a small cabin in the middle of the Quinta’s golf course (house #5), and balls would intermittently fly overhead, occasionally landing in our yard. Evan collected them into bags of three to sell back to the tourists—Dad was proud of his ingenuity. Our real estate broker, a rambunctious delight of a woman called Hazel, soon found us a bigger house to settle in called Casa das Bruxas, house of the witches (house #6), hidden in the shade of a pine forest. The whole area was circled by grand mansions now crumbling at the edges, once home to Russian royalty who had fled the revolution with jewels tied in their corsets and memories of bloodshed.
For the first few weeks after we arrived we only ate from cans, packets, and Mom’s imagination. The grocery store in the local town had no fresh vegetables apart from the occasional limp, brown lettuce, and Mom had watched the butcher swatting flies from the carcasses in the window display. She braved it, but the meat tasted like he’d slaughtered one of the stray dogs out back for the stupid English family who didn’t speak Portuguese.
Mom called Hazel, the only local she knew who spoke English, and asked how people fed themselves in this funny little place. Hazel’s delicious cackle crackled down the line as she told Mom to be ready at 7 am the following day.
Hazel and her daughter Alexa took us to the market, where the stalls overflowed with fresh produce from faraway farms, guarded by stocky women with only a handful of teeth between them. Alexa was a year younger than Evan and took charge of me from the moment we met, joining our ragtag sibling crowd, along with her big brother Sean, a junior golfing pro who had grown up on the courses of the Quinta.
Alexa dragged Mom and me around pointing at lettuces and oranges and getting Mom to repeat the words in Portuguese for next time, while Hazel chuckled. Alface. Laranjas. Repolho. Espinafre. Mom rolled them around on her tongue like new tastes, and Alexa would throw her hands up despairingly, saying in perfect English, “Ah, Senhora Sarah, your Portuguese is terrible.”
They were our first new friends, and from them our circle grew, as Dad joined the tennis club and Cait and Evan took riding lessons at the local stable. Mom began learning Portuguese in earnest, and she followed our maid, Antonia, around the house with a notebook, pointing at objects and writing down Antonia’s words. Árvores. Telefone. Marido. Antonia waggled her cheeks and muttered words she did not teach under her breath, as if these language classes were the most absurd task an employer had ever asked of her.
The other women at the Quinta shunned Mom for paying Antonia too well when all the other maids began demanding higher wages. The diamond-ring brigade insisted Mom pay Antonia less, chided and ostracized her, but Mom refused to back down, saying a woman who was her cleaner, her nanny, her language tutor, and her friend deserved not an escudo less. When her Portuguese was good enough, she took Antonia out for lunch at the clubhouse to say thank you, and the other women stared disapprovingly.
I don’t remember Portugal, really: just the geometric patterns of leaves on the pool where Dad taught me to swim, one hand beneath my belly as he coaxed me away from the edge. But everyone else remembers it fondly. Mom dug a small vegetable patch in our yard because it would be nice to watch things grow, even for a short while. She had decided it wouldn’t be a terrible thing to stay a few years before going Back Home, or maybe Back Home could be here.
* * *
Dad was the only one who suffered. A month after arriving in Portugal, we watched a news report of a hijacking in Egypt on TV. Grandma was on a cruise liner traveling the Mediterranean at the time, but Dad assumed it was a different ship. When it turned out that seven men from the Palestinian Liberation Front had commandeered Grandma’s boat, the Achille Lauro, Dad hoped she was one of the hundreds of passengers who had disembarked at Alexandria to see the pyramids that day. It was only after he managed to have a call discreetly put through to his sister that he learned his mother was among the hostages. Grandma had a pacemaker and high blood pressure, and there were fears for her health. The hijackers were holding the hostages up on deck at gunpoint, and later it was discovered that a wheelchair-bound Jewish man, Leon Klinghoffer, had been shot and thrown overboard. Dad spent two days unable to eat or sleep as he waited for news about whether his mother was next. When he heard that the terrorists had made a deal to abandon the Achille Lauro for safe passage back to Tunisia, Dad broke down in Mom’s arms and wept. There was little he could have done anyway, but the ordeal compounded his sense of helplessness and isolation.
Every day, Dad would drive to a hotel in Cascais to use the pay phones, talking endlessly, hoping there was some magic series of words that could fix what he had broken. He used the same phone in the corner and had a man at the hotel help him put the calls through, because the international dialing codes were troublesome. Those calls were the only thing that connected us to our past, to the people and problems we had left behind. And yet he was unable to give them up.
He was determined to support the other members of his group also implicated. Five were on the run, nine had surrendered and were going through the grand jury process, and two had cut loose. Aaron’s and Dad’s expenditures had already spiraled into the millions. The legal costs at least were predictable, but fugitive life carried unforeseen expenses. George, one of the pot cleaners, was struck down with prostate cancer, so they financed his private medical bills, but once he was cured, the man tried to extort them for more money and was cut off. The bookkeepers, a married couple, who would be the most damaging of the group to be subpoenaed, as they were the key to the accounting ledger’s code, had broken up due to the stress of being on the run. Divorce was too complex, so Dad furnished them both with a new identity, and they went their separate ways.
Each piece of bad news concentrated his sense of failure. He stopped sharing these incremental losses with Mom. He tried to leave them in the lobby of the hotel, toss them out the window as he drove home, drop them in the wrinkled brown hands of the beggar women along with his loose change, but they stayed with him, making him distant and sad. His only solace was in our home, a microcosm of the world he was trying to save.
In March 1986, after nine months in Portugal, the indictments came out and were worse than Dad had feared. One of his group had cracked, telling the Feds everything he knew. He had been with Dad from the beginning and gave them details of deals that had been tied up years ago, deals that the authorities hadn’t even known about. Dad and his two partners were charged with running a Continuing Criminal Enterprise, the Kingpin Statute, the same charge as Al Capone, which under new laws now carried a twenty-year minimum to life sentence. He was officially a Wanted Man.
Dad’s name appeared in the papers across San Francisco as one of three ringleaders. He asked a friend to read the article to him over the phone. “Eighteen people were indicted yesterday on charges of smuggling one hundred tons of marijuana worth nearly a half billion dollars from Thailand to the United States between 1976 and 1983,” he read. The Assistant US Attorney was quoted saying all three ringleaders are now fugitives believed to be living in Europe, which really spooked Dad.
He also learned he had been ill advised by his lawyer, who was trying to eke out Dad’s legal case for his own financial benefit; the government wouldn’t negotiate with him back then or now, not unless he cooperated. Dad wanted to offer his surrender in exchange for them dropping the CCE charge. But they wouldn’t enter into a dialogue with him until he gave himself up.
The final straw was when he discovered that Portugal’s extradition exemption didn’t apply to drug offenders. He had registered us all at the American embassy in order to get legal residency. The upshot was if the FBI looked for us here, they could find us, and if they found us, they could extradite Dad after all.
Suddenly he didn’t feel safe in Portugal living as Ben Glaser. He decided we were going to have to move on again and this time all change our names.
At first Mom refused. She said if she broke the law as well, they’d both wind up in jail, and then who would look after us kids? Dad put pressure on her, saying that she was placing the whole family in danger and that her concerns were unfounded, which infuriated her. Mom felt we were lucky to have found another corner of the world that could be home and she didn’t want to uproot us so soon, especially as we had no evidence that the FBI knew where we were. The authorities were so ineffectual here, she argued, that the computers in the airports weren’t even plugged in. But Mom also felt she couldn’t insist on staying; she wasn’t at risk of being imprisoned—Dad was. She argued her position all the same, hoping Dad would come around to her way of thinking, and continued the argument in her head long after they had stopped talking.
In the end, Dad proposed a compromise: he wouldn’t purchase any illegal documentation for her, so she wouldn’t be breaking the law, but once we left, we would live under false names and do our paperwork with them so we weren’t traceable. This way she could choose any name she wanted, and she chose Samantha—a name she’d always hated.
As part of the compromise, Dad agreed to move back to England, the only place Mom could muster sufficient enthusiasm for to undertake the process of relocating the family again. Mom began to get excited about introducing us to our English family, and told us about our aunties and uncles and cousins, some of whom we’d never met. She found an English cottage in the countryside and good schools for us all to attend.
Evan was old enough at nine to pick up threads of arguments that traveled to the backseat of the car or up the stairs, words slipping carelessly beneath his bedroom door. He was big enough to ask questions and to be asked by anyone suspicious of our circumstances, and he was big enough to miss the life we had left behind in California—his papa and his baseball team and his school friends. Dad sat Evan down in the midst of this crisis and told him everything. That he had smuggled marijuana for many years; that it wasn’t a bad drug but it was illegal; and that now the police were looking for him. He said that he was sorry he had separated Evan from his papa, and he entrusted Evan with this secret, to help protect us from it as our big brother. Evan felt the weight of this secret and accepted it like a stone in his pocket, something to be kept and gently turned over in his palm when alone.
Dad left Casa das Bruxas immediately, too paranoid to stay any longer, and went to Annecy in France, where we’d taken a villa for the summer (house #7). During this time he traveled down to Saint-Tropez to visit the other fugitives who had settled there, and when he came back, he decided we weren’t going to England after all, despite our English family, despite the good schools and the house that Mom had found for us, despite his promised compromise. We were moving to the South of France instead. He had fallen in love with a town called Mougins—where Picasso once lived, he kept saying, as if that mattered—and he thought Mom would love it too. He argued that it was safer to settle where he knew other fugitives had already established themselves and we would have friends to support us. But Mom didn’t want to live in France; she didn’t want to live within a community of fugitives; she wanted Dad to keep his promise. He asked her to give it a chance, and if she wasn’t happy we could all move to the UK next. He was sure it would be the right thing for all of us, when really it was only the right thing for him.
That was the last thing Dad did that Mom could not forgive.
Before we left Portugal, Mom went to the hairdresser and cut her long blond locks into a short crop, dyed bright orange. She looked in the mirror and saw a different woman than she had been before; this woman was called Samantha Kane. When we drove away, we left the Glaser family behind. They stayed on in the Casa das Bruxas like ghosts, living the lives we could have led, and once we crossed the border into France, we became the Kanes.