The Company You Keep Read Free Page B

income between the winter of 1995, when your mother went into rehab, and the spring of 1996, a year and a half later, when she sued me for custody.
    Custody, I mean, of you. Because in the summer of 1996, your mother had just announced her intention of suing me for full custody of our daughter. Bet she didn’t tell you that part, Iz, did she? That she was barely out of rehab, and already her father’s phalanx of high-powered lawyers were starting to bring legal action against me?
    Still, Billy would not be so important to my story if not for the fact that, at the worst moment possible, he got his criminal present all mixed up with his political past.
    This was on a June afternoon in, as it happened, Billy’s underground Sea of Green itself.
    3.
    Picture pitch-blackness: an absolutely lightless space, in which the sound of a steady spring rain is hissing endlessly down. It is an all-encompassingnoise, and as you listen, you can hear its depth, for it is composed of thousands of tiny little jets of water: When it stops, all of a sudden, the sound that takes its place is that of millions of drops of water falling, dripping, and gathering into little rivulets that, in their turn, run down a distant, hollow storm drain. For a time, the dripping is everything. The air is thick with moisture, nearly tropical, and a loamy smell rises in it. Then, with a sudden electric buzz, a switch is thrown, and a low ceiling of brilliant light floods the room in which a thin concrete border surrounds a lush, thick carpet of tall, lush, glistening cannabis plants, sweating resin, absolutely without seed, hydroponically planted in a sealed basement chamber, blazing with a bank of gro-lights.
    For the past three months the room has been sealed, taking in carbon dioxide from canisters, feeding oxygen out into a vent that connects with the furnace burning in the basement, getting twenty-hour days of blazing UV light and four-hour pitch-black nights, all controlled by a computer on a workbench next to the back wall. Juice for the whole thing comes from a Honda generator, off the grid so consumption can’t be detected, held in a concrete bunker so it makes no sound. If you must know, gas for the generator is supplied from Billy’s fleet of trucks, each of which is always full up when returned for the night to Billy, and somewhat less than full when taken out the next morning, a fact disguised from the drivers by a cunningly altered fuel gauge. Entry is provided by a hole in the bricked ceiling—bricked three layers thick with two layers of insulation, to obviate the possibility of airborne heat detection—through which Billy and I have climbed in for this, the single inspection of the four-month growing cycle, and which will duly be bricked in again when we climb out.
    When we came in, I took off my jacket and opened my shirt, sweat breaking out on my chest in the moist air, then sat back in a vinyl string lawn chair, briefcase in lap, at the side of the Sea of Green while Billy pinched off a hairy bud from one of the plants and dried it in a little toaster oven hardwired—like the computer—into a circuit breaker, and rolled it into a joint. Then Billy joined me in the second deck chair, and we passed the J back and forth while I told him where his criminal case was at.
    Now, if you wonder how I remember the conversation that ensued so exactly, it’s not a mystery. The fact is, virtually the entirety of Billy Cusimano’s life was bugged that year—the FBI turned out to know all about the Sea of Green—and virtually every conversation he had—in his car, in his kitchen, in his bed—was recorded. That, for the record, is how Billy was ultimately acquitted: all of the wiretaps were ruled illegal, and made inadmissible the existing evidence. To that extent, the bugs were very useful to us. And they were useful to me again, when I started putting together this story. Which is all by way of saying that my reconstruction, I assure you, is pretty