HE LOOKED different from his photo in Rolling Stone, and as he talked Ingrid was surprised, in a way, by his ignorance. “All I know is there’s something wrong,” he said. After days of well-spoken and well-educated pundits filling the airwaves, the famous Martin Bishop, radical provocateur, was underwhelming.
She said, “I thought you and your people had contingencies for all this. Didn’t you say in some article that you supported rioting as a way of fighting back?”
He rocked his head, noncommittal. “What I support is an honest expression of emotion. I support voices being heard.”
“And smashing store windows?”
“Depends.”
“On?”
“On how pure the emotion is.”
She laughed. “Do you even know what you’re saying?”
He smiled. “Want me to grab you a drink?”
Ingrid hesitated, for some reason not wanting to admit that she was pregnant, and only said, “Get me a water, will you?”
By the time he’d returned with a beer and a glass of tap, she’d recalled more of the Rolling Stone piece, and as they spoke of Newark she reassessed him. It wasn’t ignorance. He was just open to being wrong, a trait she hadn’t seen in a very long time. Which wasn’t to say he didn’t believe in anything—his beliefs were hardwired—but his beliefs were built on a foundation of self-criticism that was unfamiliar to most everyone she knew.
Ingrid shared far more than she thought she would, simply because Martin asked. She began with her employer, the Starling Trust. Founded in 1972 by the hippie child of a hotel magnate, its mission was to spread freedom of thought to the darkest corners of the world and bring about a new age of wisdom. But over the decades, Ingrid confessed, it had gone from idealism to pragmatism, and by the time she came on board in the early aughts, the foundation had fallen prey to the conviction that only under a stable government could free thought flourish. Which meant that they, and Ingrid, spent as much time helping regimes stay in power as they did engaged in their original mission.
“Time rots,” Bishop told her, but his tone was sympathetic, not cynical. “The most beautiful things are like a proper punk band—a blast of energy that quickly self-destructs.”
A couple of hipsters squatted around them and started a discussion about the dysfunction of democracy in America. Eventually Gina arrived and joined in, then David, and Ingrid watched how Martin dealt with resistance, drawing back into the realm of what was provable. “Unlike all your friends, David, I don’t presume to know. I’m not smart enough. Few people are that smart, least of all—and no insult meant—your smart friends.” Ingrid kept thinking about how David had reacted to Jerome Brown’s murder: Hey, the guy was reaching for a gun, right? Now he was acting as if he had put a lot of thought into social justice. It was excruciating to watch.
After David left, Martin confided that before finding himself in the service of political justice he had barely been living. “I clocked in and clocked out every day. I drank myself to sleep. All my friendships were surface. The problem was that it was always about me. I, I, I. They say I’m converting people. Not true. I’m the convert. Everyone out there—the miserable and wretched and oppressed—they converted me.” He smiled, gentle. “Know what I mean?”
“Yeah.” She told him about her college obsession—the West German Red Army Faction, or Baader-Meinhof Gang. To prove her knowledge, she rattled off the names of its major members, its acts of arson, robbery, kidnapping, and murder, and then quoted at length from its manifesto, “The Urban Guerrilla Concept.”
“Wow,” he said, impressed. “I never would have guessed.”
“Of course you wouldn’t have,” she said. “Why would you?”
He shook his head, as if he were going to dispute this, but instead he came out with his own quote from “The Urban Guerrilla Concept,” which was in fact a quote Baader-Meinhof had borrowed from Eldridge Cleaver, minister of information for the Black Panther Party. He said, “‘Either you’re part of the problem or you’re part of the solution. There is nothing in between. This shit has been examined and analyzed for decades and generations from every angle. My opinion is that most of what happens in this country does not need to be analyzed any further.’”
They shared a warm moment of mutual recognition, and he talked about the Plains Capital–IfW scandal, and how he wanted to be optimistic but knew from history that the investigation would lead to nothing. “They’ll find a way to shut it down. They always do.”
Then Ingrid remembered something from the Rolling Stone article. “We were in Berlin at the same time.”
A look crossed his face, his smile quickly disintegrating, and he said, “What?”
“I lived there for ten years. Prenzlauer Berg. I miss it. Where were you?”
“Friedrichshain,” he said, almost reluctantly. “Left in ’09.”
“Oh-nine…” It was coming back to her. “That group—Kommando Rosa Luxemburg. Did you know they were going to bomb the train station?”
Martin opened his mouth, then closed it. As if he couldn’t find any air. Then: “The Kommando wasn’t going to bomb anything. They weren’t violent.”
“I read in the—”
“The newspapers were wrong,” he said with finality, and she felt stupid, as if by having bought the line of the mainstream media she had lost all the credibility she’d spent their conversation building up. But he showed no sign of contempt, only smiled and shook his head. “They always get it wrong. This is the world we live in. Listen,” he said, reaching into his pocket. He took out a notepad and a short pencil, the kind that littered IKEA stores, and wrote down four numbers separated by periods—an IP address. He handed it to her. “If you ever want to talk more. Here’s a way to do it without anyone listening.”
Then they walked out to the patio, and David marched up through the grass and said, “Hey, you!”