It felt like a noble gesture at the time, and I was in the mood for an adventure. The summer my wife was pregnant with our first child and President Clinton was slipping toward impeachment, I volunteered to drive a crippled dog, a female Gordon setter, from my home in Montana, where it was being cared for by patrons of our small-town animal shelter, to the New York City apartment of a rich young man, a Rockefeller, who had adopted it on the Internet.
His first name was Clark. We met over the phone. The animal-shelter people thought that I had the right background to play the middleman and make arrangements with him. My work as a writer often sent me East. I’d gone to Princeton and, afterward, to Oxford. In Montana, this practically made me a Rockefeller myself.
The call lasted more than an hour and derailed my morning. Perhaps intent on establishing himself as a trustworthy dog owner, Clark told me a lot about himself, rarely in response to any specific question. He told me that he lived down the hall from Tony Bennett and one floor up from New York City’s “leading canine acupuncturist.” He told me that he had gone to Harvard and M.I.T., where he had studied economics and mathematics. He told me that he could sing the words to any song I might name to the tune of the theme from “Gilligan’s Island,” and demonstrated with a Cole Porter lyric. He told me that he owned another Gordon setter, on which he lavished three-course meals, listed on printed menus, that were prepared from fresh ingredients by his private chef. He asked for my fax number so that he could send me a menu.
While I waited for it, drinking cold coffee in my messy office above a Western-clothing store, I asked Clark what he did for work. My professional hunch was that he did nothing at all, which is how I was thinking by that point, as a novelist who was currently stranded between books and was far too caught up in that other fiction, life.
“At present, I’m a freelance central banker,” he said.
I asked him to explain.
“Think of a country’s money supply as a lake or a river behind a dam,” he said. “Think of me as the keeper of that dam. I decide how much water flows over its lip at what velocity, and for what duration. The trick is to let through sufficient water to nourish and sustain a country’s ‘crops,’ but not so much that it floods the fields and drowns them.” I later ran this metaphor past someone better equipped than I was to judge its merits, who deemed it “brilliant.”
“Which countries,” I asked Clark, “do you do this for?”
“At the moment? Thailand.”
“That’s a lot of responsibility.”
“It’s fun.”
“Which countries before Thailand?”
“That’s confidential.”
He spoke with an accent, clipped and international, and occasionally tossed in a word (“erstwhile,” “improprietous”) that tied a bow on the sentence that included it. I’d met a few people like him during college—pedigreed, boastful, overschooled eccentrics who spoke like cousins of Katharine Hepburn and always seemed to have prematurely thinning hair and delicate, intestinal-pink skin. But I was brought up in rural Minnesota, deep in manure-scented dairy country, and never succeeded in getting close to them. Their clubs wouldn’t have me; I didn’t play their sports. At Oxford, I’d mixed with their British counterparts, including Princess Diana’s younger brother, but I was just a novelty, a vulgar New World entertainment.
Clark seemed to like me, though, and to want me to like him. When the dog menu started creeping from my fax machine, it convinced me of his eagerness. I resolved to meet him in the flesh, should I get the chance. As a novelist, I’d be guilty of professional malpractice if I didn’t try.
Finally, we got down to business about the dog, who’d recently been run over by a car, resuscitated through emergency surgery, and trained to use a canine wheelchair that did the work of her paralyzed hind legs. The airlines were refusing to fly her, wary of her fragile state, and Clark had let it be known that he didn’t drive.
“I’d dispatch the family jet, but it’s hung up in China all summer with my wife,” I recall him saying. “Is there a train?”
“The train takes days. It’s endless.”
“Are we out of ideas?” he asked me.
He knew we weren’t. By the time he proposed a “handsome stipend” for anyone willing to sign on as a courier, we both understood the terms of our new friendship. Clark would delight me with comic songs and dog menus and access to a circle I’d thought closed to me, and I would repay him with the indulgent loyalty that writers reserve for their favorite characters, the ones, it’s said, we can’t make up.
The trip to New York was punishing. Three or four hours after I set out, as the heat rippled up from the long Montana highway and the wretched black dog, whose name was Shelby, lay curled beside me on an Army blanket that she kept nervously wetting and dully chewing on, I started to wonder what might befall a person who disappointed a Rockefeller. I reached Minnesota the next night and fell onto a sofa at my mother’s house. A practical-minded retired nurse who washed and reused Ziploc bags, she was unimpressed by my extravagant errand. She insisted that Shelby be put to sleep, and declared that someone who wanted such a creature must have something wrong with him. I ignored her and drove to the Minneapolis airport, where, with Shelby sedated in a crate, I talked my way onto a flight, paying four hundred dollars for a last-minute ticket.
Clark, wearing a polo shirt and a pink billed cap, met me at the LaGuardia baggage claim, and the next evening we dined together at a private club high in a midtown office tower, with a clear view of Rockefeller Center. Shafts of light picked out the details on its broad limestone escarpments. He told me about a friend of his, the admiral of the Navy’s Seventh Fleet, who’d informed him that morning of a secret treaty granting Communist China our permission to invade Taiwan at its discretion. He also told me he’d never eaten a hamburger. And he’d never tasted Coca-Cola. Perhaps I could describe its flavor for him? (This flummoxed me. Very sweet. And brown.) There was lots of talk about his time at Yale as a fourteen-year-old science prodigy; it didn’t occur to me to ask him how he had also managed to fit M.I.T. and Harvard onto his astonishing C.V.
Then he presented me with the stipend, sealed in a long white business envelope. I didn’t open it in front of him, reluctant to lower the tone. “What do you say we have some fun?” he said. He could tell I was having fun already. I was buoyed both by the relief of Shelby’s safe delivery and by the obvious pleasure he took in my company.
“What exactly are you proposing?” I asked.
“A tour of the place,” he said, indicating the monoliths. “I happen to have”—he touched his jacket—“the key.”
“You have it?” I asked. “You have the master key?” This assumed that there could be such an item, which seemed only reasonable, since there was such a thing as Clark. Somehow the tour of Rockefeller Center was forgotten in our arrangements for my first visit to Clark’s apartment.
When I arrived at his building the next day, prepared for a brush with Tony Bennett, the envelope with my check was still in my trouser pocket. Guessing at the sum was sure to be more stimulating than knowing it. The apartment seemed modest for a Rockefeller—dusty little windows, a small, dark sofa, a utilitarian kitchen with empty counters—but the art on the walls was grand. It included a Mondrian in a Lucite frame, a Motherwell, a Pollock, a Rothko. I admired them, sipping a glass of water as we awaited the visit of a restorer from the Museum of Modern Art, which Clark said hoped to secure them for its collection. I couldn’t help trying to estimate their value. Ten million? Twenty? Forty? Again, a gentleman didn’t ask such questions.
The MOMA restorer rang the bell, and Clark showed him in while I patted a trembling Shelby, who seemed more alert but also slightly disoriented. Clark’s other Gordon setter, Yates, was giving her rivalrous, superior looks. I felt a little dizzy myself. It was the summer of 1998, and unreality was in the air: a stock market buoyed by “irrational exuberance,” a President on trial for lying about oral-sex acts, and a heady profusion of new technologies with powers to reconfigure time and space. In my pocket was my first cell phone, bought to update Clark during my drive.
“How much do you know about Rothko’s death?” he asked me after the restorer (probably, I now think, an accomplice) left. He invited me to look closely at the canvas, which was standing, unframed, against a wall. He turned it around and said something like “Rothko slit his wrists. He killed himself inside his studio. On the back of this here, do you see these spots, these dribbles?”
I couldn’t, but to please him I said I could. I’d travelled a ridiculously long way on a humiliating errand, and I hoped we would be friends.
“It’s blood,” Clark said. “The artist’s blood.”
Down on the street, after I left his place, I opened the envelope. The check was drawn on his wife’s account. Five hundred dollars. It didn’t cover half of what I’d spent. Naturally, I never said a word.
The trial of Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a German immigrant of many aliases, for the 1985 murder of John Sohus, in San Marino, California, was held in March and April in Los Angeles, in the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center. I attended the proceedings every day, riding an elevator to the ninth floor, the home of the city’s highest-profile trials, and taking a seat not far from the defendant. I’d known him for almost fifteen years by then and considered him a friend for ten of them, but only once, at the start of jury selection, did he look over and acknowledge me. He scowled when he did.
He was dressed the way he had been when I knew him, as Clark Rockefeller (the name that he also used with his attorneys and had fruitlessly asked the court to recognize), in a preppy blue blazer, gray slacks, and a white shirt, every item a size too big. He still wore shoes without socks, exposing pale gaps of ankle, although he’d traded the thick black glasses I used to see him in, which looked as if they should have come with a fake mustache, for a professorial rimless pair. He’d been in prison for four years by then, the result of a prior conviction in Massachusetts for abducting his daughter, in 2008, during a supervised visit in Boston. The kidnapping had unmasked him as a fraud, and me as a fool. I had come to his trial to learn why I’d once found him so impressive.
The defendant grew up in modest circumstances in rural Bavaria. On a train, he made the acquaintance of a young backpacker from Connecticut and, in 1978, aged seventeen, showed up at his family’s door. Enrolling in a nearby high school, he told people that his father was a German industrialist, and fashioned a manner based on a pop-culture travesty of wealth: Thurston Howell III, of “Gilligan’s Island.” Next stop, Wisconsin, where he studied communications at a state university in Milwaukee. A quickie marriage and a green card later, he lit out alone for Southern California, fetching up at last in San Marino, an affluent enclave that borders Pasadena and is characterized by fanciful, grand domestic architecture.
There he lived in a guesthouse on the property of an ailing woman named Didi Sohus, audited film courses at U.S.C., and promoted himself as “Christopher Chichester,” a minor British aristocrat with movie-industry ambitions. Supposedly, he was a relative of Sir Francis Chichester, a figure of lofty nautical renown who’d circled the globe on a sailboat, alone. He joined the right church, cadged meals from his pew-mates, and pestered their single daughters. Hollywood seems to have ignored his starchy act, discerning in it nothing it needed.
It was around the time his failure became evident that, the prosecution charged, he brought down a blunt instrument at least twice, with great force, on the skull of his landlady’s son John and buried him in the yard. (Nine years after John’s death, a swimming-pool excavation crew found his remains, which had been chopped up into three sections and stuffed into a drum.) No motive for the crime was given in court, but it seems to have had to do with an inheritance destined for John Sohus that Chichester thought would be his once John was gone. He is suspected also to have killed John’s wife, Linda, who vanished at the same time that John did. (Her remains have never turned up, and he wasn’t charged with her murder.)
A few months after the alleged crime, he fled to the East Coast, where he eluded investigators for decades by adopting and shedding new identities, including the one that proved most lasting: Clark Rockefeller, dog-lover, central banker for hire.
The deputy district attorney trying the case, Habib Balian, was a gangly, sweet-faced fellow who sometimes had trouble working the computer that let him show PowerPoint projections of the evidence. He called two sorts of witnesses: specialists and laymen. The specialists were damning but uninteresting. They spoke about bloodstains in the guesthouse, the physiology of the fractured skull, the faded logos on the plastic shopping bags (one from U.S.C., one from the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin) that the culprit had unwisely used to wrap Sohus’s body parts, and the timeline of the defendant’s movements after he left California and went East in the vanished couple’s pickup truck. What they couldn’t illuminate, however, was the mysterious human talent for credulity, wishful thinking, and self-deception that had allowed him, very nearly, to get away with murder, and with so much else.
This was the job of his friends, employers, and lovers. I saw a piece of myself in nearly all of them, and each time I did I felt angrier and sadder, if a little less lonesome.
“Never once in all your relationship did he, did this allegedly wealthy guy, ever pick up a check,” Brad Bailey, the taller, fiercer, and more sarcastic of Clark’s two attorneys, said as he cross-examined one. “From what you could see, right?”
“He bought me a doughnut after we saw ‘Double Indemnity,’ ” the witness, Dana Farrar, replied.
She had studied journalism at U.S.C. and had known Clark in San Marino in his guise as the “thirteenth baronet” of something or other. One spring day, a few months after the murder, he had invited her to join him and some others in a game of Trivial Pursuit. It was played at a table near the guesthouse, and Farrar participated despite believing that her host was, in the words of her father, “as full of shit as a Christmas goose.” During the party, she spotted some loose earth outside the guesthouse; Chichester told her it was the work of plumbers.
Such dissonant testimony suggested a cross-examination strategy for Bailey and his partner, Jeffrey Denner. They wanted to argue that the defendant was nothing like the master manipulator the prosecution had described. Witnesses who had tolerated Clark’s posturing but also said they’d known it to be humbug, his defense team kept implying, had merely been humoring him back then. They tended to react much as Farrar did, testily, indignantly, allowing Bailey to glance over at the jury with theatrically raised eyebrows. The jury was a streetwise-looking bunch and included a husky, tattooed Latino who never removed his dark glasses and straw hat.
During the second week of the trial, Mihoko Manabe took the stand. A slender woman of Japanese descent who seemed pained to be there, she had known the defendant in New York from 1987 to 1994. She fell in love with him, made a life with him, and unwittingly helped him shake the cops after they linked him to the missing couple through the stolen truck. Manabe was the rare witness who didn’t get snappy or contextualize away her gullibility. In the trial’s long parade of fools, she was the soft-spoken Queen of Sorrows.
Balian made her speak up. She’d met the defendant as Christopher Crowe. He’d told others that he was the notional brother of Cameron Crowe (then best known as the writer of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”) and a former producer of the nineteen-eighties revival of the TV series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” She was working in New York as a translator at Nikko Securities, an investment bank, where Crowe was the head of the bond desk, for no clear reason. He had previously worked for the Greenwich, Connecticut, investment firm of S. N. Phelps; he went on to work for Kidder Peabody. Bankers seemed to have a weakness for monogrammed hustlers full of tea and toast; someone would meet Clark at a yacht club and he’d end up running something for the person. The fine young fugitive from California had struck out in show biz, which flaunts its phoniness, but somehow he just couldn’t miss on Wall Street.
One day in 1988, a policeman called Crowe and Manabe’s home, asking to speak to him. Crowe convinced Manabe that the lawman was actually a villain plotting to harm him in some dark intrigue. For their own protection, he would have to change his identity. He would now be Clark Rockefeller, a man whose existence she helped render plausible by providing him with a credit card bearing his new name, on her account. When he quit working, she supported him. When he quit driving, she chauffeured him. Manabe, too, had acquired a new identity. She was the woman who wasn’t there.
“And whose idea was it to walk on opposite sides of the street?” Balian asked.
“It was his idea,” Manabe said.
“Whose idea was it never to walk into your building together so no one would know you guys were together?”
“It was his idea.”
My pity for the self-effacing witness was largely self-pity, transferred. With Clark, as I knew, it was always his idea. One stopped having one’s own when in his company. What made this dynamic painful to recall was just how bad his ideas often were. Once, during a phone conversation, I mentioned to Clark that I’d recently started writing for The Atlantic. He fell silent. I told him about the magazine’s history and said that it had recently changed hands. “I should have bought it myself,” he said. “Too bad. Perhaps the new owner wants a partner?” He asked me to pass this idea on to my editor, who could send it up the chain. I did so. The publisher wasn’t interested.
A man named Patrick Rayermann was sworn in to testify the week that Manabe did. Balian called him not to talk about Clark but to humanize the murder victim, whom he’d grown up with and counted as a close friend. I was grateful for the change of subject. Rayermann, a blue-eyed retired Army colonel who served in the Space and Missile Defense Command, told the court of his days as an Explorer Scout in a post that John Sohus also belonged to. It was attached to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena.
“We discovered, early on,” Rayermann said, articulating with military precision, “a mutual interest in the future of science and space exploration and science fiction, most notably ‘Star Trek.’ And we used to enjoy, in particular, sharing, trying to stump each other on ‘Star Trek’ trivia.”
These details called me back to a weekend many years earlier that I wasn’t eager to revisit. When Rayermann finished in the courtroom, I followed him out into the hall, and told him that there were a number of topics I wanted to talk to him about, beginning with John’s and his favorite TV show. Had Chichester ever watched it with them? No. Before today, Rayermann said, he’d never even seen the guy. I asked him if he was free for dinner.
It was the summer of 2002. Clark was living in Cornish, New Hampshire, having suffered, he said, a breakdown in New York. He’d sent out an e-mail after his collapse assuring his friends that he was on the mend and was planning to take a long vacation either somewhere in Europe or in Shelby’s home state of Montana. In fact, he’d already called me with a request to stay at my farmhouse for a while. I said no, citing children and lack of space. He replied that he didn’t need much space. He’d lived in a tiny guesthouse once, he said, and had never been happier.
Then he started hounding me about a series of novels that he’d written and wanted me to edit, for a fee. Eventually, I agreed to spend a weekend at his place in New Hampshire; I was headed to Boston anyway, for a meeting with my editors. Still, Clark sniffed out a certain hesitation, and said he’d pulled strings to secure a room for me at his Boston club.
The staff there treated me like a Rockefeller, not the favor-taking guest of one. I hated the place nonetheless. Its rooms had an eerie, evacuated quality, as though the club’s departed members had inhaled all its air and energy and carried them down into their tombs. Clark loved that kind of lamp-lit, varnished desiccation, but, without him beside me, all fizzy with boasts and tattle, I felt uneasy. Princeton had had the same effect on me.
Still, I was looking forward to my visit to New Hampshire. Clark had told me that in the Cornish village barbershop he had sat next to his neighbor J. D. Salinger, and they’d chatted about old movies. This weekend, I might even meet the hermit myself, since Clark had boned up on his movements thanks to Salinger’s wife, whom he’d befriended, he said, through village “quilting circles.” He had other news, too: at some secret, insider auction, he had bought Jean-Luc Picard’s captain’s chair from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. It was in a Rhode Island warehouse now, along with Clark’s collection of non-collectible fake-wood-grain-sided Buick Roadmaster station wagons.
I set out after lunch, but traffic and poor directions slowed me down, and I reached Cornish toward evening, hours late.
Parked in front of Clark’s property, facing the main road, was an empty police car. It looked abandoned. The house was a ponderous old behemoth surrounded by messy heaps of building materials and scarred by what looked like a botched remodelling. Whole windows were gone. Clark rushed out to greet me, but instead of showing me inside he prodded me up a ladder that was leaning against a stately tree trunk. “See my hive? In the hole there, in the crotch? I’ve been harvesting wild honey.” But, like other sights with which he’d sought to impress me, the hive was undiscoverable. This was nearly maddening, especially as he continued to effuse about it.
The perceptual warping intensified by the hour. On the sloping lawn above his creek, he rued the timing of my visit. “Britney Spears was out last week,” he said. “You missed her. And it’s a shame you can’t stay longer. Chancellor Kohl is driving up.”
I started to worry that we’d be sleeping outside that night, perhaps in the bee tree, upside down, like bats, but finally, after an hour or so, Clark asked me into the house. The puny front room, which I took to be a station on the way to a more commodious inner room, was where we sat down. I asked about the empty cop car, which I’d misfiled under “Humdrum Topics for Small Talk,” not “Jarring Sights Needing Urgent Clarification.” Clark said, “Oh, that.” He said “Oh, that” a lot, but only during a recent jailhouse meeting with him did I grasp the phrase’s function. It offered him one and a half seconds to think, which is all that a brain like his requires to summon up a casual-sounding lie.
“A security measure,” he said, and offered this explanation, at least as my memory reconstructs it: “Rather weak, I know. Not much of a deterrent. The Chinese are relentless. Why even try? It’s the story of the coming century: Chinese Lebensraum. On earth, most surely, but in space? We’ll see.”
Extracting from Clark a context for these remarks took much of the weekend, but I persisted. The action item atop our formal agenda—my work on his unpublished novels, for a fee—kept not coming up, though. Once, in passing, I mentioned a small lien on my savings account for unpaid taxes. Clark asked if my tax bill was state or federal. Federal. He took out a pen and tore a strip of paper from a notebook he had with him. He wrote down a number.
“Here,” he said. “Call George.” As previously established in a long rant about his people’s troubles with the Bush clan (basically, a clash of sensibilities, and too subtle for me to grasp), “George” meant the President. The sitting one. “This isn’t the switchboard,” Clark said. “It’s his private line. He’ll answer personally.”
Eventually, he stashed me in a cold bedroom with a back-bruising mattress on the floor, one paltry blanket, and a boring book on the house’s dead former owner, Judge Learned Hand. The fearsomely potent, undialable number stayed deep in my pocket the next day and into the evening as I drove south for about an hour on narrow roads to a café that was known chiefly for its hot chocolate but that Clark insisted we try as a dinner spot. As a nondriver, Clark seemed to relish long trips; he gazed out the window like a dreamy kid. I pressed him on kidnap prevention, on Chinese Lebensraum.
“Oh, that,” he said. Then he told me about Jet Propulsion Physics, an engineering firm he had. Based in rural Quebec, it carried out research on hyperfast “interstellar” travel systems. Nothing solid yet, of course, but the firm had a lead on something big: a “quantum engine” that exploited some force created when two particles are placed infinitely close together without actually touching. And China had heard the news. Its space program, a department of its military, had a record of snatching foreign rocket scientists and installing them in its own labs, so why not be cautious? Thus the old police car. Also, I should call George Bush tomorrow. I mustn’t be shy.
The dinner disappointed. I paid, which soured me. Clark’s no-wallet act was a Wasp standard and seemed beneath him as a wizard of quirk. The return trip to his crackpot mansion felt tense and endless. My thoughts darkened. He didn’t like or respect me. I shouldn’t be here. Who was this creep? And what was the meaning of his excruciating accommodations, the unheated bedroom and the decrepit mattress—was he trying to see how much I’d take from him or, more like it, how very little I’d accept?
We drove into Cornish in the gloom. Clark’s face was turned away, but he seemed aware of my disenchantment. We slipped off to bed with rote “Good night”s. I resolved to leave before he got up. But I awoke the next morning to find him standing in my doorway with a plan. We would drive to Hanover, tour Dartmouth’s art museum before it opened (“My aunt built the place; the guard will let us in”), and then, over breakfast, talk about his novels and how I might improve them. “Please,” he said. “I’ve been waiting. I’ve been patient.”
“What are these books of yours even about?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you once we’re there.”
The guard, as predicted, unlocked the art museum, which wasn’t a guardlike move but sure was Clark-like, in that it pressured someone to betray himself so that Clark could better pass as Clark. We looked around, and then ate breakfast at a sidewalk café.
“You’re my best friend,” I recall Clark saying. “I’ll tell you why. You’re the only person in my life who doesn’t want something from me, who isn’t envious. It’s because you’re a writer, because you have your art.”
I allowed this. I was leaving in a few hours. “Tell me about these novels you want my help with.”
Clark said something like “What? Oh, those. They’re homages. Reworkings. Amusing things to write, but I can’t claim they’re original.”
“Literature’s never original,” I said. I’d got this idea at Princeton, which had got it from Yale. “The Anxiety of Influence” and all that.
“My novels are adaptations of memorable episodes from ‘Star Trek,’ ” Clark said.
“ ‘Star Trek’?”
“ ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation,’ ” he explained. “Not the first one. The first one never grabbed me.”
Over dinner, Colonel Rayermann estimated that he and John Sohus had seen each “Star Trek” episode two hundred times. As I talked with a man, an actual rocket scientist, who’d grown up to do what John had dreamed of doing and what Clark pretended he did—so proficiently that the Chinese were stalking him—a theory of his psychopathy began to emerge. There was no sign that Clark had been a Trekkie or an aficionado of jet propulsion until he killed a man who was and assumed his fantasies. Clark was worse than a murderer and dismemberer and graveside board-game player. He was a cannibal of souls.
At one point, I challenged Rayermann’s tipsy claim that “everything you need to know you can learn from ‘Star Trek.’ ” All right, then, sir: of all the monsters and villains on the series, were there any like the defendant?
The Colonel looked off for a moment, computing. “Second season. The title of the episode is ‘Wolf in the Fold.’ The crew is on Argelius II, the planet of Love. There have been killings by an entity that’s more thought and energy than a corporeal form. They beam the thing out into space. I think McCoy wonders, Can it coalesce again?”
Something of that anxiety hovered over the courtroom. On the day that Sandra Boss, Clark’s ex-wife, was set to testify, my fourteen-year-old daughter, Maisie, came to court with me; her school in Montana was on a break. Wearing a cardigan sweater to look more grownup, she sat up churchy-straight and scanned the scene. She knew what was happening at the trial. What she didn’t know, though, was that I’d brought her here not just to make a peculiar family memory but to close a loop with the defendant. Our friendship, when it last felt like a friendship, was all about our children, our kindred condition as divorced dads.
Sandra Boss met Clark Rockefeller in 1993, at a party in New York where guests dressed as characters from the board game Clue. They got married two years later, and in 2001 they had a daughter. Meanwhile, she was launched on a career at McKinsey, specializing in credit risk. Their divorce occurred in 2007, long after Cornish and the invisible bees. I’d been divorced for several years by then and saw my kids on alternating weekends, a schedule that makes a stuttering flip-card movie of fatherhood. But Clark, whose divorce was fresher, and who saw his daughter only on supervised visits, was bereft.
Sometimes he called at night, while I was reading, and I’d leave my book open in front of me while he moped and fumed. I couldn’t afford to relapse into bitterness, having survived a long funk of my own. One time, he interrupted my kids and me as we were choosing our tokens for a Monopoly game, and, for the first time, I told him I’d call him back. I enjoyed this newfound parity. I exploited it to advise him on healthy eating and to talk up the soothing powers of regular exercise.
Whenever I suggested that Clark go to court to press for more frequent visits with his daughter, he’d answer that he was broke, wiped out by legal fees, and that in any case his ex-wife had moved with her to England, beyond his legal reach. His defeatism disheartened me. What did it mean that even someone with his name and social resources could be laid so low by laws and lawyers? I feared that Clark might harm himself. He sounded isolated. Shelby was dead by then, run over by a car, and he never spoke of Yates.
I touched my daughter’s shoulder as Sandra Boss was sworn in by the bailiff. Like Mihoko Manabe, but in a stronger voice, she testified to his troubling habits and customs. He would always wear a hat when out in public. He avoided California. He kept no bank account in his name. He filled the house with phone lines associated with different area codes. My daughter, after an hour or so, grabbed my pen and wrote in my notebook, “It’s crazy to think that he’s sitting right there with all the answers.” This pretty much captured it. The murder trial of a silent defendant, especially one who has spent a lifetime lying to everyone about almost everything, can’t help but strike a child as what it is: a hugely laborious exercise in trying to read a mind. I wondered if Clark was enjoying this lopsided guessing game he’d drawn us into. Because here we were again: tantalized, off balance, and in the dark. Still, I remembered a time of seeming honesty, when misery made me feel brotherly toward him. I also remembered when he became a stranger and I learned that I didn’t know him, or know myself.
The news of the kidnapping reached me through the Internet, on a day in late July, 2008, while I was at my computer getting ready to write. My girlfriend at the time, a journalist, was working in another room. I yelled, and ran into her room with my laptop. I pointed at my screen. There was a picture of Clark, a wanted man, who had vanished from a Boston street after bundling his daughter into a chauffeured car and leaving a social worker injured on the ground. “He snapped,” I said. “He finally lost his mind.”
There had been signs that this moment was coming. “I have a plan,” he’d said to me one night, describing a vile project that another divorced father had agreed, he said, to back with money. Would I come in as a partner, too? The scheme involved building a private offshore hospital—possibly in the Philippines—where American men could impregnate local women who had sold off their legal interests in the progeny. “We won’t need these silly women then,” Clark said. I told him he should start seeing a therapist. On another occasion, he told me that Argentina—or possibly it was Chile or Peru—offered safe harbor to American fathers who escaped there with their children. Maybe he was in South America now.
I considered calling the F.B.I., but I assumed that Clark would soon reappear. Then I read that the Rockefellers, through one of those “family spokesmen” that big-shot clans always have at their disposal, were denying that he was a Rockefeller at all. This sickened me. What cowards these people were, forsaking one of their own for fear of scandal. Clark had told me once, up in New Hampshire, that his parents had died in a car wreck when he was small and that his nearest relative, a sister, was locked up in a mental hospital. He had no one, and was easy to cut adrift. I related my indignant interpretation to my girlfriend, who nodded and sighed in apparent solidarity. Then I phoned my mother. “You’re watching all this?” I said to her. “You’ve heard?”
“It sounds like he was a phony, Walt.”
I wasn’t having any of it. A couple of days later, he was captured, in Baltimore. Then a name was put out—a German name. It made no sense. Then again, with Clark nothing made sense, and in just this crazy way. His allure for me was his unpredictability, the loony romance of his jaunty toddle through life. And suddenly I saw what an easy mark I had been.
The revelations came swiftly after that, but none of them staggered me as the first ones had. It was reported that he was a suspect in a cold-case murder from the mid-eighties. Of course he was. I expected nothing less of him. My girlfriend, who lived mostly in New York, slipped back there, away from Montana, during this interlude. My kids showed up every other weekend, but I was distant.
I called my mother to apologize. She’d been right about Clark, and her son had been an idiot. All she cared about was that his daughter had been recovered and the tortured dog had found release. “I’m curious if he killed those people,” she said.
“Of course he did,” I said.
“Did you ever have suspicions?”
Did I? As an English major at Princeton, I’d learned the phrase “suspension of disbelief,” but with Clark you contributed belief, wiring it from your personal account into the joint account that you held with him. He showed you a hollow tree; you added the bees. He gave you the phone number of the President; you added the voice that would greet you if you dialled it, and the faces of the Secret Service agents who would show up at your home a few days later. He gave you an envelope with a check inside; you filled in the amount.
Getting to know an old friend through his murder trial after failing to know him through normal means is a formula for humiliation. As Balian called his last few witnesses and reporters placed their bets, anticipating a hung jury, I started replaying scenes in my mind, imagining what would have happened had I been less eager to collaborate in Clark’s fantasies and cover stories. When fresh information discredits past perceptions, the underlying memories don’t change; you’re left to construct a new puzzle from the shaken-loose pieces of the old one. It’s infuriating. And the fury wants an object that’s not yourself.
All through the trial, Clark scribbled away on a pad, a goblinlike figure with pointy ears and a diffuse, pale bald spot that I kept staring at, needing a focus for my loathing. An anthropologist took the stand, and Balian projected on a screen photographs of the excavated yard and the sectioned, jumbled skeleton. The defendant peered up and squinted through his lenses, a strenuous stage squint meant to show the jurors that Clark was doing his level best to determine if these old bones were any he ought to recognize. I’d heard he’d been writing a novel. My source, who’d read parts of it, said that it was awful, a story set after the close of the First World War that sought to explain the roots of the Second World War. It looked as if Clark might have a lifetime to revise it.
The night after Balian made his closing argument (“Yes, I said he’s a master manipulator. I have never said he was a master murderer”), I rented a movie that I’d been meaning to watch and Clark might have seen in one of his classes. Its English title is “Purple Noon.” Its original, French title is “Plein Soleil_.”_ Made in 1960, the year before Christian Gerhartsreiter was born, it is the first film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”
Alain Delon plays the social-climbing shape-shifter. He stabs rich Philippe Greenleaf (Dickie in the novel) while they’re out sailing in the Mediterranean, dumps his body in the sea, and then goes about impersonating him, concealing the crime by forging Greenleaf’s signature on some letters written on his typewriter that Ripley sends, postmarked Italy, to Greenleaf’s family. (Clark, according to the prosecution, had tried a similar trick with postcards supposedly signed by Linda Sohus, the victim’s vanished wife, which he somehow had forwarded from Paris.) Many other evasions follow, but just when Ripley thinks he’s in the clear the body turns up in a freak way, snagged on the sailboat’s anchor cable, and the game is up. This isn’t how Highsmith’s book ends. In the novel, Ripley gets away. He returns in a sequel, “Ripley Under Ground,” involved in a plot to counterfeit the work of a painter who committed suicide. I could have stayed up for hours spinning theories about Clark’s literary influences, but I didn’t have the heart. Even as a fraud, I decided, he was a fraud. He’d never had an idea of his own, not about how to speak or how to dress or which science-fiction TV show to obsess over or how to cover up a murder. He was wholly derivative.
The morning after I watched the Ripley movie, the jury reached its verdict. Clark squared his shoulders as his guilt was proclaimed. His attorneys looked distracted, but he seemed confident, genuinely confident.
I spoke with him in jail a few days later; it was the first time I’d seen him face to face in ages. The meeting started awkwardly. The heavy plastic phone receivers that allowed conversation through the glass didn’t switch on for a few minutes, forcing us to mouth inaudible greetings while gazing at each other from such close range that I could see light-colored, flecked irregularities in the iris of his left eye. The standoff became ridiculous. We smiled.
“You’re my first visitor,” he said when the phones went on. He asked after my children, a now creepy courtesy, and then, with two other prisoners crowding him from their adjacent conversation stations, he pushed his forehead up against the glass and asked for my help finding a literary agent. I lied, and said I’d look into it. What about the murder? Clark suggested that the wife did it. The Rothko and the Motherwell? Fakes. He gave me the name of a man who, he claimed, had pressed the paintings on him in the belief that their possession by a Rockefeller would provide them with “provenance” and allow them to be sold as genuine.
I scheduled another visit in a week; Clark seemed lonesome, and it was gratifying to have him finally at my mercy. In the meantime, I Googled the name of the art dealer he’d given me. Up popped several news stories in Spanish about a Canadian living in Peru who had kidnapped his young daughter the year before. Moving on in some branching way, I came across several longer stories, in English, about a scandal in the art world involving multimillion-dollar sales of counterfeit Motherwells and Rothkos. Another hollow tree; I had to stop myself. This time I didn’t want to see the bees.
On my second visit, I asked Clark why he’d run from California. “Oh, that,” I recall him saying; I wasn’t allowed to tape him in the jail. He insisted that his departure had nothing to do with murder. Instead, it had to do with a depressing meeting he’d had with Robert Wise, the director of such films as “West Side Story,” “The Sound of Music,” and “Born to Kill.” Clark sent Wise a stack of scripts he’d written. Wise returned them to him at a coffee shop, with blunt advice. “You have industry but no talent,” he said. Clark knew it was the truth and soon left town.
I gave up not long after that. I let fiction stand as fact, and I wasn’t surprised when I received a letter from Clark that seemed to confirm the central role of fiction in his life: “Few persons, especially not foreigners, have ever penetrated the Eastern Establishment to the degree I have, and all because of a novel my mother—an Americanophile—gave me at age ten so that I could learn English. What a story!” But I’d had enough of his stories by that time. I knew that, with Clark, I’d end up where I started, an object of manipulation. In Cornish, at the dinner he didn’t pay for, he’d asked me if I’d like to see a picture of his secret Canadian propulsion lab. He brought out a photograph from his jacket and laid it on the table, between our plates. It appeared to be taken from a plane and featured a dense, unbroken canopy of green deciduous treetops. I picked it up for a closer look.
“It’s right there,” Clark said. “Under all those leaves.” ♦
