Stephen Hunter: I, Sniper

The car, which was in gear and running, then eased forward under the pressure of Jack’s dead foot and hit the wall of the garage, where its progress halted. No one heard the gunshots, and indeed, the sound of gunshots in that part of Chicago was not remarkable to begin with. Jack and Mitzi lay like that for over an hour until a FedEx truck came down the alley seeking a shortcut through Hyde Park. The driver had trouble getting by, noticed the exhaust tendrils still curling from the pipe, and got out to inquire of the drivers what was going on. He discovered the carnage, called 911, and within minutes the Fellini movie starring Chicago police, FBI, and media had commenced on this site too.

It would be said that Jack and Mitzi went out together as they had lived, fought, and loved together. They were famous, not as much as Joan Flanders, but in their own world stars as well. Both tracked their pedigrees back to the decade of madness against which Joan Flanders had stood out. But it had been so long ago.

Jack, high-born (né Golden) of Jewish factory owners, well educated, passionate, handsome, had grown up in the radical tradition in Hyde Park, taken his act to Harvard, then Columbia, had been a founder of Students for Social Reform, and for a good six years was the face of the movement. At a certain point he despaired of peaceful demonstration as a means of affecting policy, much less lowering body count, and in 1971 went underground, with guns and bombs.

It was there that he met the already famous Mitzi Reilly, working-class Boston Irish, fiery of temperament and demeanor, intellectually brilliant, who had already been photographed on the sites of several bombings and two bank robberies. Redheaded with green eyes and pale, freckly skin, she was the fey Irish lass turned radical underground guerrilla woman-warrior, beloved by media and loathed by blue-collar Americans. She reveled in her status, and when Jack came aboard-it was a matter of minutes before they were in the sack together, and the fireworks there were legendary!-the team really took off, both in fame and in importance. They quickly became the number one most wanted desperadoes on J. Edgar’s famous list, and somehow, through sympathetic journalists, continued to give interviews, stand still for pictures-both had great hair, thick, luxuriant, and strong, artistic faces; they burned holes in film-and operate.

Their biggest hit was the bombing of the Pentagon. Actually, it was a three-pound bag of black powder going boom off a primitive clock fuse in a waste can that created more smoke than damage, but it was symbolic, worth more than a thousand bombs detonated at lesser targets. It closed down a concourse for a couple of hours, more because of the insane press coverage than for any actual threat to people or operations, but it made them stars of an even bigger magnitude.

Their career began to turn when they were building a bigger bomb for a bigger target, but this time the boom came in the bedroom, not the Capitol, and both fled, leaving behind a good sister who’d managed to blow herself up. They were hunted and running low on money, and a violent bank robbery may or may not have followed-the FBI said yes, it was them; the Nyackett, Massachusetts, police were split-that left two security guards dead, shot down from behind by a tail gunner. It was a bad career move, whoever did it, because the dead men had children and were nothing but working stiffs, not pigs or oppressors or goons, just two guys, one Irish, one Polish, trying to get by, with large families depending on their three jobs, and the hypocrisy of a movement dedicated to the people that shot down two of the people was not lost on the public. Jack and Mitzi were never formally tied to this event, because the bank surveillance film, recovered by the police, was stolen from a processing lab and never recovered. Otherwise, it was said, they’d be up on capital murder charges and have a one-way to the big chair with all the wires attached, as Massachusetts dispatched its bad ones in those days.

A few years passed; times changed; the war ended, or at least the American part of it. Jack and Mitzi hired a wired lawyer who brokered a deal, and then it came out that in its efforts to apprehend them, the police and federal agencies had broken nearly as many laws as the famous couple had. In the end, rather than expose their own excesses to the public, the various authorities agreed to let it all slip. They were “guilty as hell, free as a bird,” as Jack had proclaimed on the event, and able to rejoin society.

The academy beckoned. Each, with a solid academic background, found employment and ultimately tenure in Chicago higher ed. Jack taught education and achieved a professorship at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus; Mitzi, who’d graduated from the University of Michigan law school, came to rest at Northwestern’s law school. The two bought a house in Hyde Park and spent the next years preaching rather than practicing radicalism. It seemed an extraordinary American saga, yet it ended, just like Dillinger’s, in a Chi-town alley in pools of blood.

“Someone,” said Mitch Greene, holding up a copy of that day’s Plain Dealer with its blaring head police, feds hunt clues in protest slayings, “please tell Mark Felt I don’t wanna play anymore.” He got some laughter from the few before him who knew that Mark Felt had been the FBI’s black bag guy long before he became Woodward’s Deep Throat, during the wild years when Mitch Greene was running hard and starring in his own one-man show, “Mitch Greene v. America: the Comedy.” Among its brighter ideas: a wishathon by which America’s kids would will the planes full of soldiers to return to California. And the bit where he petitioned the Disney Company to open a “Vietnamland,” where you could chuck phosphorous grenades into tunnels and animatronic screaming yellow flamers would pop out and perish in the foliage? Wonderful stuff. Alas, more of his audience remained mute, these being the slack-faced, mouth-breathing tattoo and pin exhibits called “the kids” who now made up his crowds in larger and larger percentages. Forget Felt; did they even know who Mitch was? Doubtful. They just knew he wrote Uncle Mitch Explains , a series of lighthearted history essays that preached Mitch’s crazed lefto-tilt version of American history with a great deal of the ex-rad’s charm and wit and had become, astonishingly, consistent best sellers.

So here he was, another town, another gig. The town was Cleveland, the gig was The Gilded Age: Peasants for Dinner Again, Amanda? Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gould, those guys, the usual suspects, the data mined quickly for outrageous anecdotes, the dates at least right courtesy of a long-suffering research assistant (“Mitch, you can’t really say that.” “Oh yeah, watch me.”) Another mild best seller, though it annoyed him the Times BR no longer listed his books in the adult section but only in its monthly kid section.

“Mr. Felt,” he ad-libbed, “please don’t have me killed. I ain’t a-marching anymore.”

Again, the laughter was limited to those few who saw the allusion to the famous Phil Ochs anthem of the sixties protest generation. Still, it was a pretty good crowd for a weeknight in Cleveland, in a nice Borders out in the burbs. He saw faces and books and the blackness of the sheet glass window, and he had a nice hotel room, who knows, maybe he could get laid, judging by the number of women with undyed gray hair knotted into ponytails above their muumuus and their Birkenstocks, and his plane to Houston wasn’t at a brain-dead early morning hour.

But then someone hollered, “Mark Felt is dead.”

Mitch replied, “Tell this guy!” holding up the front page even higher.

That got a good laugh-even most of the kids caught it. He was quick, when he was on the road, to adapt the latest developments into his shtick. His real gift was for stand-up and he’d even tried it for a few years in the eighties, though with not much success. A typically lighthearted op-ed piece in the Daily News had attracted an editor at one of the big, classy midtown houses, and the next thing you know, he was a success again, in his second career, after the first, which consisted of overthrowing the government and stopping the war in Vietnam. The only problem with the writing, he often remarked, not originally, was the paperwork.