My Father and Other Strangers (2)
Well, I made it back. Sorry I look a mess, I was up night going through what was in the box. You'll think I'm crazy but I keep thinking I'm being watched - I took 3 cabs to get here, just in case. How's that for paranoia?
Sure, I got the box easy enough – showed the death certificate and the bank was fine about it. It had a lot of Dad's diaries and notebooks in it, going back years, before I was born even. There was a letter in it for me too: told me to destroy everything and on no account read any of it. Said it could put me in danger. It's like I'm in a movie – one of the old fashioned ones with real human actors. Diaries and notebooks are old time too but Dad was an old school guy. Me, I'd keep all this on a hologram drive. Anyway I didn't take any notice of the letter.
Maybe I shoulda done, reading the stuff was a helluva shock. My old man had a whole secret life, well secret lives actually: I'll be straight with you; for a long time Lionel Fusco, my father, was a bad cop. When I say bad cop I mean he did bad things - stole, killed, took bribes, the whole shebang. He was a member of a secret organisation inside the NYPD called HR that I vaguely remember – lots of guys resigned, were fired, or did jail time when it got broken up. Dad had a change of heart and helped to bring it down, even arrested the No. 2 guy. This guy had killed Carter, Dad's partner at the time, and Dad always spoke highly of her – said she was a damn good cop and a better person – so I guess it got personal with him. How the hell he never got dragged into the court cases afterwards I don't know. I think maybe he was protected, you'll see what I mean later.
Anyway, and here it's a bit confusing, towards the end, at the same time, he was working with Reese and Finch in their secret organisation as well. Carter was involved too, they were the inside guys feeding info to the other 2. Shaw and Groves got involved later on although Dad was always a bit wary of Groves – he wrote that she was crazy and violence prone. Funny, she looks real cute in that photo, not that I'll tell my wife that.
Now for the interesting bit – what did Finch's organisation (he seemed to be the leader) actually do? According to Dad it was pretty simple; they stopped crimes. I can see you're puzzled – how is that different from the NYPD and Dad's regular job? Ah, well, if you think about it, the police don't stop crimes – they find out afterwards who did the crime in the first place. Finch and the others had a way of knowing that a crime would happen in the future.
They never knew the details; just that a particular person would be involved and they had to figure out if that person was the perpetrator or the victim. This is where my Dad and Carter came in; they could pass information to the others but also be on hand to arrest the bad guys when Reese and Finch figured out who was who. As you can imagine real criminal types were often involved so Reese and, later, Shaw as well, provided the muscle if there was any trouble. These criminals weren't just street corner punks – they could be real heavyweights like Mafia types or terrorists, very dangerous people to go up against.
Oddly enough, though, they seem to have had a working relationship with one of the major underworld figures of the day, guy called Elias. Quite a few times he did them favours and they helped him out in return – saved his life a couple of times at least. It sounds strange but remember: they weren't interested in all criminal activities, just the ones they'd been told about. Incidentally it seems Elias got killed in the same series of events as Reese and Groves.
Looks like Dad got a great deal of job satisfaction from this – "protect and serve" and all that - though he says that sometimes it was difficult to sympathise with the victim but that was no different to his police work. Dad also writes that, like the police, they didn't always manage to save the day, especially if they had a long list of names to get through. Again that was like his regular job so he was philosophical about it too.
After Reese and Groves got killed, Finch must've retired as Dad doesn't mention him much after that, apart from 10 or so years later when he died and Dad and Shaw went to the funeral at that family plot in the cemetery.
Anyhow, Dad and Shaw carried on the work for the next 20-odd years until they both got too old for the physical stuff. They didn't recruit anyone else to replace the others, I don't think. To be frank, I'm not sure how successful they were compared to before; 2 people are too few for a city the size of New York.
Once Dad retired I guess it would've been more difficult to get the information needed on people anyway. Even so they still tackled the odd case, I guess ones that two senior citizens like them could handle.
What's interesting is that Dad mentions other teams like theirs that are based in other cities and he talks about the current NYC one too so I guess there's a second generation, maybe a third by now. Reese and Groves show that it's a dangerous line of work to be in and I'm guessing that this second team worked in parallel with Dad and Shaw.
It's frustrating, but understandable, that Dad only uses initials and not names in the documents. I imagine they must still have people in the NYPD helping them but they've spread to the federal level too – Dad mentions "friends" in the FBI - and it looks like they have contacts in the CIA too as Dad writes about "G", who seems to be high-up in their Russian department.
I know what you want to ask – how did they know about the future? Was it ESP, magic, the Force, or something else? Ok it wasn't the first three, I don't think anyway.
Dad refers to "M" as the source of the information and I assume that this "M" recruited and set up all the other teams too. All these initials are a bit James Bond-ish (that's an old time series of films that show up late night on TV sometimes, characters in them have initials instead of names).
What Dad doesn't say is whether the organisation is international – do other countries have a similar set-up? If it is, it must be a huge network of people, how on earth does it remain hidden? Even if it's just the USA there must be a large group of people involved.
Hmm, remember I said that it was hard to find information on Dad, Shaw, and the others? I reckon everyone involved gets treated like that. These days not showing up in a search results page means you're practically invisible, for good or bad, which must be a large part of it. Which begs the question of how they fix the web to do that? I mean Dad is on the web but you can't find him unless you know where.
Excuse me, there's a phone call; probably the office wanting to know when I'm back. Won't be a minute.
"CAN. YOU. HEAR. ME?"
oooooooooo
Late news: Police continue to investigate the death of Lee Fusco, a resident of Los Angeles. Friends report that Mr. Fusco had recently returned from New York and complained that he was "being watched all the time". Suicide has not been ruled out.