The Fugitive

“Snookie, is that you?” Shakespearean aside, stage whisper.

“Yeah, where are you?”

“In here.” I opened the door to my bedroom closet and there was my sister, crouched on the floor with her hand over my dog’s snout.

“Was he in the hallway?”

“Who?”

“David. He called and I didn’t answer. Somehow he got upstairs even though I didn’t buzz him in and he was fooling around with our door knob and you know he was a Navy SEAL and I’m sure he was trying to break in and somebody’s DOG wouldn’t shut the fuck up.”

I met David Silbergeld in New York. Newly arrived from Europe, I got a job working for a real estate developer on East 60th street, sharp intake breaths away from the mothership, Bloomingdales. He came into our office with his supermodel wife Mel Harris, who in 1989 was named one of America’s ten most beautiful women by Harper’s Bazaar. She tossed her fur coat into the window well in the front of our office. Threw it as if it was a burden she could no longer afford to carry. I’d never seen a coat like it up close and only knew it wasn’t mink. It was sable. You don’t see sable coats outside of New York and Paris. Or Dubai if they had a winter.

The couple bought a co-op from my boss. I was the finisher and walked through the apartment with them, updating my punch list: Change bathroom fixture, reset master bedroom electrical outlet, touch-up bad paint job. Normal stuff. She did all the talking, he did all the agreeing, I did all the writing.

Months later, my sister arrived from Europe and moved in with me. One day she said she met a terrific divorced man named David Silbergeld. I didn’t think it could be my David Silbergeld but it was. He and Mel had only stayed married a year.

A few years passed and I read an article in The New York Post about a small plane flying into Teeterboro Airport in New Jersey with its lights off. The pilot was David Silbergeld. I didn’t think it could be my David Silbergeld but it was.

The Feds arrested him upon touchdown. He had an arsenal of weapons in his waiting car and went to prison for possession of 610 pounds of cocaine worth $200 million. At that time, The New York Times reported it as the largest drug-smuggling bust in the northeastern United States.
 
 Lindy had moved to Los Angeles when I got a call from David. I assumed he was looking for her but he wasn’t. He wanted me to meet him and some of his friends for dinner. We had a lovely meal, a lively conversation, a great time. I wanted to know about his stint in prison. He didn’t want to talk about it. I pulled out a gold pen and wrote down my phone number in a leather notebook for one of his friends, who asked me out. He didn’t look like a criminal. But then again, neither did David.

“You’re broke yet have a gold pen,” David said, laughing. I laughed too. I was an actress, of course I was broke. It wasn’t a real gold pen, and the pad was leather but someone gave it to me. Like David, my appearance deceived.

Within days, he disappeared off the grid. 
 
 I didn’t know much about the SEALS until 1997, when the movie G.I. Jane was released. I had no idea they were, along with the Rangers, Green Berets, and Delta Force, considered the elite of the military branches. They’re the people I want to rescue me if I’m ever caught by pirates off the coast of Somalia. I watched the movie and thought of David, wondered what had become of him.
 
 A few years ago I Googled him and found this: 
 
 “Silbergeld’s fictional SEAL war record, which earned him full disability pay of more than $2,300 per month, along with a prison-earned doctorate from a diploma mill allowed him to become a Pennsylvania community-college history professor and contributor to National Defense magazine. He also set up a business that defrauded the U.S. government through sales of night-vision equipment. At his sentencing, he pleaded for leniency — by pointing to his bogus military record.”
 
 By now, the Internet was closing in on the thousands of fake elite Special Forces that had sprung up around the world. David was investigated and subsequently fired from the university in Pennsylvania. He must have known the trail of felonies would follow him wherever he went. I’m sure he had run out of plans. And dinners with old friends.

They found him in a town square in Delaware sitting on a bench, a bullet through his brain and the gun dangling from his hand.

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