Exiles Read Online Free

to speak. He told her his name.
    “Listen, I thought . . . Jesus,” Iris said. “I mean, do you know why you’re here?”
    “A bunch of cops,” he looked around to make sure that they were alone, “beat the shit out of me.”
    “They booked you, too.”
    “For what? Resisting arrest?”
    “They think you smashed up the draft board.”
    “They what?” Spiegel said. “Why would I do that? I’m going to be four-F.”
    “They thought you were someone else. The thing is, and I think I can tell this, even with that stuff wrapped half around your skull, you look just like this other guy.”
    “Like who?” Spiegel was having trouble focusing. Maybe they had given him some drugs. Maybe he needed some. “Are you a nurse?” he said.
    “I’m a lawyer. Well, a law student, actually. But, as they say, you don’t need a weatherman . . . I mean, you’ve been screwed. And we’ve got to figure how to get you out of here.”
    It was clear right away to Iris—Iris Mandel—that the cops had arrested the wrong guy. She knew, through a series of frantic, heavily coded calls from her best friend, Tracy, that Aaronson had trashed the downtown draft board and then crossed the bridge to Canada. Tracy had followed with a trunkful of Aaronson’s clothes and books. Their plan was to head for Toronto and try to put together enough gas money to go west. They had friends who owned a bookstore in Vancouver.
    But meanwhile the cops, acting on some bad information supplied by a mole the dean must have placed among the student left—they would have to get to the root of that one, unearth the bastard—had learned almost immediately that it was Aaronson who had trashed the draft board, and they got a federal warrant for his arrest. But then, with typical pig ineptitude, using a photo ID supplied by stoolies from the university registrar, they went off and nailed the wrong guy, Aaronson’s exact look-alike, his double.
    Iris looked closely at Spiegel. Yes, anyone could mistake him for Aaronson. Perhaps, in the past, she had done so herself. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I can get you off.”
    She did, and it was terribly embarrassing for the feds and the police. Once they realized that they had the wrong guy, they threatened to book Spiegel anyway, on the theory that, as an out-of-state student enrolled at the university, even if he hadn’t ripped up the draft board he was probably violating some sort of federal law: conspiracy? Unlawful assembly? Flight to avoid arrest? Who cares. But no, Spiegel was clean, anonymous, uninteresting— until, at Iris’s urging, he threatened to sue for false arrest, police brutality, violation of his rights to due process and protection against unreasonable search and seizure, the works. Then, he got really interesting, and the feds suggested that he had conked two of the city cops; they had it on video from one of the TV stations (how they had gotten the video without a subpoena would be a damn good question, Iris realized), and if Spiegel so much as filed a motion for discovery in regard to any civil suit, they warned, the criminal case against him might find its way directly to the next session of the federal grand jury.
    Fuck them, Iris counseled. She was beginning to like Spiegel. True, he had no political history and he showed serious tendencies toward bourgeois individualism. She would have a lot of education to take on with this guy, a real project. But still—he was cute. And he was courageous. He’d fought those pigs, he held out, wouldn’t tell them a goddamn thing about who really hit up the draft board, what he knew about Aaronson’s whereabouts— which was, frankly, nothing, although the feds didn’t believe that—how he came to have in his possession numerous documents that advocated the overthrow of the United States government, anything. How had he gotten those leaflets?
    “You gave them to me,” Spiegel told her. “Of course you don’t remember.” Now he understood