A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

  ‘He strangles these women, correct?’ Robey asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No weapon,’ Robey said.

  ‘That’s right, no weapon.’

  ‘The closer you get the more professional you have to be.’

  Miller frowned.

  ‘Killing people. You start with a rifle. You graduate to a handgun, then a knife, then strangulation. The better you are the closer you can get.’

  Miller frowned. ‘This is something you know because-?’

  Robey laughed. ‘Because I watch Luc Besson films, no other reason than that.’ He shook his head. ‘I still don’t understand why you’re here, Detective Miller. I appreciate that you think you have something . . .’

  ‘I have a picture of you with Catherine Sheridan. I have three pictures of you with this woman, and on the back of one of them is written “Christmas ’82”. Does that mean anything to you?’

  Robey was silent for a time, and then he looked up and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it means nothing of any significance to me.’

  ‘Where were you in Christmas of 1982?’

  ‘God, that’s what? Twenty-four years ago?’

  ‘Right,’ Miller said. ‘Twenty-four years ago . . . where were you then?’

  ‘Let me think . . . ’82, ’82 . . . I was still in New York around Christmas of ’82. I took a temporary job in New York in the summer of ’81, and then it became something more than temporary, and I ended up staying there until the summer of ’83.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Same thing I’m doing now. I was much younger.’ Robey laughed. ‘It seems like a different life.’

  ‘You were teaching?’

  ‘Yes, teaching, lecturing. Lecturer’s assistant was the job title, but the lecturer was sick much of the time so I ended up taking most of the classes myself.’ Robey smiled nostalgically. ‘It was a good time in my life. I enjoyed New York, not enough to want to live there, but it was good. I met some good people there, people that helped me find myself so to speak.’

  ‘And you left in the summer of ’83?’

  ‘I did, yes . . . what is this? This is becoming something of an interrogation.’

  ‘Hardly an interrogation, professor.’

  ‘So I was in New York when this photograph was taken. Perhaps the picture was taken without my being aware of it. Perhaps this woman was a student there, a fellow teacher. God, I don’t know. Like I said before, there could be a hundred reasons for someone winding up in a picture and not remembering it, not even being aware of it.’

  Miller nodded. ‘You’re right, professor. I’m not questioning such a possibility. The thing I’m questioning is that it could have happened three times.’

  Robey didn’t respond.

  ‘And the fact that I took those pictures down to this woman’s house, this Natasha Joyce, and she didn’t hesitate for a second in identifying you as the man that came down to the projects with Catherine Sheridan. She looked at your face and she said, “That’s him. That’s the man”, and there wasn’t the slightest doubt in her mind about who you were.’

  ‘That is something I can’t explain,’ Robey said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Nor me, professor. I simply cannot explain how she could have been so certain. There was no maybe in it. And she was not a stupid woman. She was very quick indeed.’

  ‘It seems these killings are becoming more frequent,’ Robey said. ‘Unfortunately, I believe that we are responsible for creating these things.’

  Miller frowned.

  ‘The French have an expression. Monstre sacré. It means, literally, the sacred monster. It refers to something created that the creator wishes he had not.’

  ‘Your book,’ Miller said.

  Robey waved his hand dismissively as if mention of his book was unimportant. ‘We have anesthetized ourselves, detective. We have anesthetized our sensibilities to such things. It becomes the norm to expect such atrocities on an almost daily basis. Of course, an element of it is generated by the free press, to give them their chosen title. They are free to exclude the good and promote the bad. They tell us exactly what they want us to hear, and I’m not talking about a single case, detective. I’m talking about confusing and misdirecting an entire nation, even the population of the planet itself.’

  ‘I don’t know that I’m that cynical or suspicious, professor. ’

  ‘Is that so, detective? You think you’re not affected by these things?’

  ‘I’m not saying that I’m not affected by these things, but—’

  ‘But what? Tell me how much of the difficulty you run into in your day-to-day work is influenced by drugs - like this Natasha Joyce woman. You say she had a boyfriend, the father of the little girl? He was into drugs?’

  Miller nodded.

  ‘That’s what I’m talking about. How much of your day-to-day work is directly or indirectly connected to the illicit drug trade here in Washington?’

  ‘A lot,’ Miller said.

  ‘How much? Ten, twenty, thirty percent?’

  ‘More than that. I’d say, God I don’t know . . . maybe fifty, sixty percent.’

  ‘Fifty, sixty percent. And the bulk of that is what? Cocaine?’

  Miller nodded. ‘Sure. Cocaine. Crack cocaine predominantly. ’

  Robey’s eyes lit up. ‘Perfect. Absolutely perfect. Crack cocaine. The crack cocaine epidemic which has ravaged Washington, Baltimore, L.A., New York, Miami, right? This is a big deal, yes? This is something that has directly affected the lives of millions of Americans, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘No question about it.’

  For the first time Robey seemed actually alive. His eyes were animated, his hand gestures emphatic. ‘So who created the monster?’ he asked. ‘Who created the crack cocaine epidemic that is now a monster in our midst?’

  Miller shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Most of it comes from Colombia, South America . . . the drug cartels out there. They bring it in and—’

  Robey was shaking his head. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘We created it ourselves.’

  ‘We created it? I don’t understand what you mean.’

  ‘We created it. We did. We Americans. The taxpayers, the homeowners, the people with jobs and mortgages, the ones with bank accounts and private schools for their kids. The ones who read the newspapers and watch TV. We created the crack epidemic.’

  Miller was beginning to feel agitated. He didn’t get what Robey was talking about.

  ‘You know where the vast majority of cocaine came from in the ’80s? The cocaine that kick-started the crack cocaine business?’

  Miller shook his head.

  ‘Nicaragua.’

  Miller flinched noticeably.

  Robey looked at him. ‘What?’

  ‘Nicaragua?’ Miller asked.

  ‘Sure, Nicaragua. You seem very surprised.’

  ‘No, it’s just that . . . it’s just a coincidence, that’s all. I was reading something about Nicaragua the other day.’

  ‘The fact that Daniel Ortega has surfaced once more? Now that’s a coincidence if ever there was one.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Bush is struggling. He loses the mid-terms. He puts Rumsfeld out to pasture, and who do they bring in but Robert M. Gates. You know who he was?’

  ‘Can’t say I do.’

  ‘Bush Senior’s CIA director. He held the position of deputy director for central intelligence under William Casey in the Iran-Contra affair, and now we go full circle back to Nicaragua. Ortega has gotten himself voted back in, the Sandinistas are in power once more, and we are still blissfully unaware of what happened out there, and how we - in our ignorance and fear - allowed them to do what they did.’

  ‘Allowed who to do what?’

  ‘The select few. The government. Those responsible for the welfare and care of the American people. The Nicaraguan war was supposed to be in the name of protecting the American people from a communist presence in our backyard. Was it,
hell. They wanted the supply line all the way from South America kept free of interference. It was a fiasco from day one.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean. You’re telling me that the war in Nicaragua . . . the whole Oliver North thing, right? That war was started because the American government wanted to keep cocaine supply lines from South America uninterrupted?’

  ‘Amongst other things, yes. That was one of the main reasons. Not the only one, but the main one.’

  ‘I find that very hard to believe, professor.’

  Robey smiled. ‘You know John Kerry, right? Ran against George W. Bush?’

  ‘Sure I know of him.’

  ‘Back in the Spring of ’86 there was a guy named John Mattes. He was a public defender from Miami. Kerry was a senator at the time, and Mattes started working with him on an investigation into the Contra drug connection. You know who the Contras were, right?’

  ‘The American-backed rebels . . . they were trying to take out the Sandinista government.’

  ‘Right. Well, Mattes said a very interesting thing. He said that what they investigated and uncovered was the very infrastructure of the CIA operations out there. He said the whole thing had a veil of national security protecting it. People were loading cannons in broad daylight, in public airports, on flights going to Ilopango airport, and then the very same people were bringing narcotics back into the U.S. unimpeded. John Kerry, running an office under the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, worked for two years and produced a report totalling eleven hundred and sixty-six pages. The three major news networks ignored it. Out of something in the region of half a million words, the stories that ran in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times totalled less than two thousand words.’

  ‘And this report? This report said that Americans were out in Nicaragua shipping cocaine back into the United States?’

  Robey laughed. ‘You sound so shocked, Detective Miller. I find it difficult to believe that something such as this is even a surprise.’

  ‘A surprise? I can’t even begin to grasp what it means.’

  Robey smiled resignedly. ‘This is nothing compared to what really happened out there. United States officials involved in Central America could not even look at the drug issue. Anything that could jeopardize the war effort in Nicaragua had to be curtailed. America’s senior policy makers knew that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contras’ funding problems. There was another guy, a man named Jack Blum. He was former chief counsel to Kerry’s subcommittee. You want to know what he said before the 1996 Senate hearings?’ Robey didn’t wait for Miller to reply. He got up, crossed the room, and from a drawer in the desk near the window he took a sheaf of papers and started leafing through them.

  ‘Here,’ he said, and sat down again. ‘Jack Blum, 1996 Senate Hearings for the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, quote: “We don’t need to investigate the CIA’s role in Contra drug trafficking. We already know. The evidence is there. Criminal organizations are perfect allies in covert operations. The two go together like love and marriage. The problem is that they then get empowered by the fact that they work with us. There was a judgement call here. We looked the other way. That judgement call erred so far on the wrong side of where judgement should have been that we wound up with a terrible problem.” ’

  Robey looked up and smiled at Miller. ‘That’s what he said before the Senate. And you know what they did?’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Precisely, detective.’

  Robey leafed through more pages. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘An article in the San Jose Mercury News, August 18th, 1996 . . .’ Robey leaned forward and handed the photocopied headline to Miller:

  Roots Of Crack Plague Exist In Nicaraguan War.

  ‘You know what a Memorandum of Understanding is?’

  Miller looked up from the newspaper clipping. ‘A what?’

  ‘A Memorandum of Understanding.’

  ‘No, I’ve not heard of that.’

  ‘In 1981 the CIA and the Department of Justice made an agreement. That’s what it was called, a Memorandum of Understanding. It specifically stated that the CIA was released from any requirement to report drug-related activities by its agents to representatives or agents of the Department of Justice.’

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ Miller said.

  Robey laughed. ‘I’m not serious, no. There’s no point in being serious about it. In fact it’s probably better to laugh at the sheer idiocy of what we have created here. Jack Blum couldn’t have said it better.’ Robey turned to his papers again. ‘ “In the process of fighting a war against the Sandinistas, did people connected with the U.S. government open up channels which allowed drug traffickers to move drugs to the United States, did they know the drug traffickers were doing it, and did they protect them from law enforcement? The answer to all those questions is yes.” And he went on to say that he believed a decision was made by those in power at the time. The decision related to the sacrifice, and he actually used the word sacrifice . . . he said that the American government made a conscious decision to sacrifice a percentage of the American population in order to raise the money to fight the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. That sacrifice was considered acceptable, because the people who would die as a result of cocaine coming into the U.S. were people that were considered acceptably expendable.’

  Miller shook his head slowly and leaned back in his chair. Robey held up another sheet of paper. ‘This is a Senate Committee memorandum. It says, “A number of individuals who supported the Contras and who participated in Contra activity in Texas, Louisiana, California and Florida, have suggested that cocaine is being smuggled into the U.S. through the same infrastructure which is procuring, storing and transporting weapons, explosives, ammunition and military equipment for the Contras from the United States.” Another piece here: “Investigation further revealed that the Contras had direct supply lines into black gangs such as the Crips and the Bloods in L.A., and this huge supply of cocaine kick-started the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. Efforts by the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Customs, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement to identify and prosecute the three men believed to be responsible for the huge influx of coke into L.A. have been inhibited and railroaded by the CIA.”

  Robey smiled again, that same expression that said everything and nothing simultaneously. ‘That, Detective Miller, is one of the very few monsters we have created. And your killer, your Ribbon Killer . . . well, he’s just another product of the same society that allows things like this to go unchecked. It’s a slow deterioration of liberties, a gradual war of attrition . . .’ Robey smiled. ‘You know what Machiavelli said about war?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said, “War cannot be avoided. It can only be postponed to the advantage of your enemy.” So that’s what we did in Nicaragua. We did not postpone the war and give the Sandinistas the advantage. We took the war to them.’

  Miller’s head had started to hurt. ‘We have gotten off the subject,’ he said. ‘It’s getting late—’

  ‘I am sorry, Detective Miller. Sometimes I get a little heated about such issues.’

  ‘Might I use your bathroom before I go, professor?’

  ‘Of course. Out the door, turn right, end of the hallway.’

  Miller left the room, stopped for a moment in the dimly-lit corridor to look back the way he’d come, and for a moment he felt like a thief, an outsider. He was tired, no doubt about it, but he felt as if Robey had battered him with information - things he did not want to know, things that were not relevant to the questions he’d asked. More than an hour he’d been there, and he was leaving none the wiser.

  He stepped into the bathroom and closed the door.

  Moments later, standing at the washbasin, he was compelled to open the mirror-fronted cabinet in front of him. For some reason he shuddered. The fine
hairs on the nape of his neck stood to attention. He felt a bead of sweat break free from his hairline and start down his brow. It reached the bridge of his nose and he wiped it away. He felt disembodied, as if he was watching someone else as he hesitated before his own reflection.

  He knew he shouldn’t, but there was something within, something deep that drove him to open that cabinet and look inside. His fingertips touched the cold surface of the handle. He tugged lightly. The door popped open with an almost indiscernible sound.

  With his left hand he inched the door ajar and peered inside.

  Anacin. Excedrin. A tube of Ben-Gay. One-A-Day Multiples. A bottle of Formula 44. A pack of Sucrets. Chloraseptic mouthwash. A tube of toothpaste.

  And then right at the back, second shelf up, a brown plastic hairbrush. He reached in and gently lifted it out by one of its bristles. He stood there with the brush in his hand. He didn’t want to look. Had to look. Felt as if here he was committing the worst sin of all. He rotated the brush by its head, slowly, until the handle was clearly visible beneath the light above him. There was no question. A clear partial, in fact several of them, were right there on the smooth handle of the brush.

  Miller’s breath caught in his chest. He dropped the brush into the sink and it clattered noisily around the drain and came to rest. He reached out suddenly and flushed the toilet handle. The sudden rush of water startled him. Miller hesitated for a moment, and then he took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, and once again lifting the brush by its bristles, he wrapped it in the handkerchief and tucked it into his inner pocket. He stood there for a moment, his heart thundering, his nerves like taut wires. A sense of nausea invaded his chest. He believed he might be sick right then and there. He washed his hands, dried them furiously on a towel hanging on the rail beside the sink, and then he opened the door.

  ‘You okay?’

  Miller jumped suddenly.

  Robey was standing right against the door, almost as if he’d been caught pressing his ear against it and stepped back suddenly for fear of being discovered.