My Visit With The Fugitive
Robert Robertson invited me to his room in the UMass Hotel on the evening of November 10th. When I arrived at his door on the fifteenth floor, I noticed a small camera glued under the peephole. My phone buzzed. I had received a text from an unknown number.
202-555-0148: “Dump it, they know.”
Then, ten seconds later, a second number.
01632 960275: “Disregard previous message. Proceed to the Blue Wall. I will meet you there with the package. Beware the Frenchman.”
I started down the hall, but not a second later my phone buzzed again.
+36 55 454 158: “Disregard previous two messages. The Frenchman is with us.”
And a last message, from the first number.
202-555-0148: “Thank you. This has thrown off both the good Hungarians and the bad Hungarians. That oughta teach them a lesson. The Swiss don’t have this number. Regard the second message. I’m in Blue Wall.”
I made my way to the elevator and hit the ground floor. I had heard interviewing The Fugitive (who is currently going by the name Robert Robertson) would be tough. I had heard that his answers would be vague, and that he would try to involve me in his schemes. But I knew what I wanted out of him.
I wanted to know who he was running from.
“Moe?” said a man in a high chair by Tamales. He was wearing a tweed professor type jacket, adidas track pants, a Cleveland Indians ball cap and large womens sunglasses.
“Moe, it’s me, Richard Wang.”
“Robert Robertson?” I asked.
“No,” the man said, “Richard Wang. You asked me to help you with your tax returns?”
“Oh,” I said, and sat down.
He had a briefcase open in front of him with at least fifteen passports. He was cutting some of them open with a small triangle blade and tweezers.
“What they do,” he said as he worked, “Is put microchips in the passports. So what I like to do is cut the microchips out and swap them around. That really throws them off. Especially the Swedes. They hate that shit.”
“Isn’t it a bit public to be doing this?” I asked. We were surrounded by undergrads. There was a young man eating a burrito right next to him.
The Fugitive chuckled. “That’s the point exactly. What this game is about, this whole thing, is getting caught correctly. You want your prints in some databases. But you also want to have a different set of prints for your left hand.”
“And you have that?” I asked.
“I can’t answer that,” the Fugitive said.
The Fugitive dropped a microchip. He swore, then turned to me and said, “Looks like the Panamanian passport gets no chip.”
“Where are you going next?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“How did this all start? What are you running from?”
“Fraud in Venice. It was hard to dodge the cops there, they caught me with a fake gondola license, which I had acquired from my connection in Hanoi. That’s why the Swiss are after me. But you’ve also got these fraudulent charges from Shanghai when my prints man burned me - those guys are bastards, they’re really after me there, because I passed through Beijing with a cooked passport, except the passport I was carrying actually belonged to one Sven Gunderson, who was wanted for arms trafficking, except the microchip in that passport - see - that was also from Hanoi. And this is all last month. It never ends”
He didn’t want to give me it. I tried again.
“Who is really after you?”
“Well, like I said, you’ve got the Good Hungarians and the Bad Hungarians. The Swiss, the Swedes, Interpol, Intrapol - not many people know about them - you’ve got the Feds, the CIA, you’ve got the remnants of the Stazi, boy do they hold a grudge, you’ve got the UN, the M.P.A.A. Mothers Against Drunk Driving is actually on my side in all this. Then you’ve got the basics, the Italians, the French, the Germans, they all want me for this and that - passing into the country illegally, having bad forms, wire fraud.”
He put the tools down and leaned back, cracking a little smile.
“And these are just the ones I can tell you right now.”
I asked him what he did to start all this off. He told me that it started a long time ago, then he took that back and told me it actually started only two months ago. He told me that he couldn’t tell me the details, but then told me that it was the Swiss out to get him. As he was telling me that the Swiss were out to get him, he showed me his phone, which had an unsent txt message: “I’M WEARING A WIRE FOR THE SWISS.” After he showed me the phone he told me that he had been running as long as he could remember, and that he was getting very tired of it, but he couldn’t possibly stop this deep into the game. Besides, he said, he had a new angle with a counterfeiter in Prague.
After a few more minutes of rambling, he told me that he had to go. As he closed his briefcase, he tapped the man next to him on the shoulder.
“Did you get all that, Juan?”
The man nodded. The Fugitive leaned in close and whispered in my ear: “Juan is my connection in India. He’s helping me with those Belgian bastards.”
Moe "Tiny" Schlemiel can be reached at schlemiel.moe@surrealtimes.net.
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