Judas Horse

by April Smith

  “He accomplished the mission. Calm down. I got Salvador Molly’s.” Donnato opens a fragrant bag of Caribbean takeout. “Have an empanada.”

  I do not calm down. “What’s going on? You look wasted.”

  There are bruised dark circles beneath his eyes, sweat stains on his white shirt. We have met in a neighborhood of unreconstructed streets, dotted with bakeries and thrift stores, in a working-class part of Portland. The Econo Lodge, situated on a gritty avenue of easy-credit used-car lots, is a stucco relic of the sixties weathered to the color of a strawberry milk shake, a couple of salesmen’s hatchbacks parked outside.

  You always have to worry about countersurveillance, so I trudged to the top floor carrying an empty suitcase, and casually unlocked room 224. Using an old FBI maneuver, Donnato was set up two doors down in 228. That way, nobody could put us as meeting together. The average bonehead would not realize the rooms were adjoining, because the Bureau had rented all three.

  The connecting doors are still open, creating a triplet of empty cubes identically stocked and sanitized, down to the crispy tissue-wrapped plastic cups. Even the daylight looks dry-cleaned.

  “My father-in-law threw a blood clot and had another stroke.”

  “I’m really sorry, Mike. How is he?”

  “Back in the hospital. It’s touch and go. We’ve been up all night.”

  He draws the curtains to discourage telephoto lenses from neighboring rooftops, and turns the clock radio to NPR. Not because he likes their politics but because at this hour they provide a screen of background jabber so nobody can hear us through the walls. With the curtains closed, the place is dark as a theater. Weak pools of light drop from the table lamps like halos.

  “I don’t know if we’ve got a cult here, or what,” I tell him. “The female was wearing a triangular silver necklace called a valknot.”

  “Asatrú,” says Donnato.

  “God bless you.”

  “Don’t push it,” he warns.

  “What’d I say?”

  “Asatrú is a modern-day religion based on ancient Norse beliefs.” He reaches for a habanero and cheese fritter. “Its adherents practice a pagan philosophy that talks about preserving nature. The white supremacists have adapted a form of it and switched it around to justify their views.”

  “There were neo-Nazis at the bar.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “One of them was eating an ashtray.”

  This doesn’t register as anything strange.

  “Barriers are coming down,” Donnato muses without missing a beat. “Interesting alliances are starting to form between terrorist groups. Right there you have a potential affinity between environmentalists and right-wing thinking. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that these groups could get together. ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’”

  “You have blood enemies at Omar’s who should be tearing each other’s throats out.”

  “It’s called business.”

  “You can buy anything there. Hookers, dope, hazelnut brittle—”

  “Hazelnut brittle? Pretty damn subversive. That’s it. Now I’m hooked.” He rolls his eyes.

  “Shut up. Megan Tewksbury is our way in. She will lead us to FAN.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s accessible. Funny. Openhearted. I liked her.”

  “She is not supposed to be your mom.”

  “I know that.”

  “It’s my job to remind you that in isolation the bad guys can start looking pretty good.”

  “That’s not it. Look.”

  I flash him the latest issue of Willamette Week, a liberal throwaway I snagged at the vegan Cosmic Café. There were piles of it near the bulletin board, underneath an unpleasant chart of a side of beef. The whole front page of the newspaper is a poster in the style of the Old West: WANTED—FOR GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER, with a photo of BLM’s deputy state director, Herbert Laumann.

  “Megan gave me the heads-up that FAN would break the story, and here it is. Laumann has been illegally adopting mustangs under his relatives’ names and selling them to a slaughterhouse in Illinois.”

  Donnato studies the paper.

  “She rescues animals on a farm; she’s hooked in. They don’t like visitors, which is an excellent reason for me to get my butt out there and see what’s going down.”

  He still doesn’t like it.

  “Sounds weak. We commit the resources, and your friend Megan turns out to be a housewife who likes cat calendars.”

  Donnato brushes his tie of crumbs. He is maddeningly fastidious about his Calvin Klein suits and fine tasseled loafers, even in a sleazoid motel. But today his meticulous mannerisms are pissing me off.

  “What would be solid enough for you?”

  “Give me Bill Fontana.”

  Bill Fontana is a leader in the movement who did two years in prison for setting fire to 250 tons of hay in an animal-husbandry building at UC Davis. Fontana is a scrawny, bright-eyed kid, still winning hearts and minds with his “fearless saboteur” shtick. The prison sentence only added to the mythology.

  “Wonder Boy Fontana is speaking here at a big animal rights convention. I met with the Portland task force that has been assigned to FAN—”

  “Wait a minute,” I say stubbornly, interrupting him. “Can we go back to Megan? We’re looking for me to make my bones. This is a legit way in. Megan is a can-do person, the type who gets things done. I’m telling you, she’s good.”

  “She may be good, but Angelo will say she’s weak.”

  I don’t like the innuendo. Weak because we’re talking about the two of us establishing a female relationship? Weak because she doesn’t fit the prototype of the male junkie informant guys like Angelo understand?

  I lift my chin. “I’ve identified a true believer and I’m getting close to her. That’s procedure, absolutely! I need your help to find a way of getting out to that farm.”

  Donnato stands, thoroughly irritated.

  “Tell me something, Ana. Why is it always your agenda?”

  I am dumbfounded. “My agenda?”

  “You are fixated on this woman, and I know why. Not because it’s a knockout idea, but because it’s yours. Yours against mine. You against the badass bureaucracy. It’s been that way as long as I’ve known you.”

  My fastidious partner has never attacked me like this before. “What is wrong with you? I thought I was the one with the hormones. You’ve been touchy since I walked in the door.”

  Men hate it when you use the word hormones.

  “Omar’s Roadhouse was Steve Crawford’s last known location,” Donnato insists. “And we still don’t know why he was there, and why he was not following procedure.”

  “Who said he wasn’t?”

  “Marvin Gladstone.”

  “You believe that? Marvin’s just covering his ass.”

  “Why wasn’t Steve checking in?”

  I shrug. “He was running his own game. The old-timer couldn’t keep up.”

  “What game?”

  I snort slowly through my nose. I become aware of afternoon traffic. I wish we had some beer. Okay, I’ll be the one to say it.

  “Maybe he was meeting a woman.”

  Now Donnato is incensed. “Steve was a good father and a good man! What on earth would make you say something like that?”

  “It’s an idea,” I protest. “I don’t like the implications, either, but I throw it out for discussion, like any other case, and you go off on me. We all love Tina and Steve. Nobody’s trying to stir something up. Him getting it on with someone else—it’s just a theory. Why does it bug you so much?”

  The two of us arguing about Steve’s marriage in a sterile box in the middle of a strange city is suddenly absurd and strangely familiar. It reminds me of undercover school, and the dead-serious games they forced us to play. It is almost as if, against our wills, Donnato and I have been cast as a pair of ridiculous personages—I a naïf named Darcy, and he all buttoned up in
the Bureau uniform.

  Or is it failure of will that has ignited Donnato? Could the true source of his distress be the unbearable frisson (God knows, I’m feeling it) of a man and woman who have worked together twelve years, alone in the late afternoon, in not one but three empty motel rooms? No, no—of course we have a lid on it. Donnato is back with his wife after yet another separation. Isn’t he?

  If we continue to look at each other in this pleading way a minute longer, one of us will drift over the line, and that will tick off the obsession, and then we will be back in that sweet morass. We have been successful in avoiding it for years now, clean and sober despite the ache. It happened only once, and for good reason, in a wet field of strawberries, beneath the shuddering bellies of helicopters patrolling a military base—the kind of memory you can put on the wall and be happy just to look at for the rest of your life. He was going to leave his wife; then he wasn’t. Finally, we had to put an end to the possibility and soldier on. It is an adjustment we have learned to make, swiftly and silently, a dozen times a day, often right under the noses of our instinctively suspicious FBI colleagues. Nobody is watching us now, which makes it imperative that I sit down in a chair as far away as possible.

  “I take it back,” I say, crossing my legs primly. “Steve was not meeting a woman.”

  Donnato accepts the move without a blink. “Steve was meeting someone, but he misjudged them badly and—”

  His Nextel buzzes. It is Special Agent Jason Ripley, calling from L.A. Odd to look at, because his strikingly milky skin and white-blond coloring are like some kind of an albino rose, Jason remains to the bone the lanky son of a Midwest farmer who was raised to behave deferentially around his elders yet give no ground to wickedness or sin. He is, in the FBI garden of belief, a perennial.

  Donnato and I are both patched in on our cells to L.A.

  I start the debrief. “Julius Emerson Phelps was born in Ohio—”

  Donnato: “Based on what evidence?”

  “There was a flying ear of corn on his cap. I learned in uc school that when you see a flying ear of corn, ask.”

  “Was it red and yellow, with wings?” Jason pipes up.

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s an old barn sign. The DeKalb Company is a big seed grower. The flying corn is the logo; it used to be on barns all over when I was growing up. But DeKalb is based in Illinois.”

  “No,” I say patiently. “The subject plainly stated that he was born in DeKalb, Ohio, and picked corn when he was in high school. He provided a detailed description of lying on a mattress on a contraption with wheels—”

  This being his first counterterrorism case, Jason is anxious to make everything right on the status report he will send to headquarters in Washington, D.C.

  “Sorry, ma’am, but it doesn’t track.”

  “Which doesn’t?”

  “He might have picked corn in Ohio, but the DeKalb Company is based in Illinois. They have a corn festival every year. I won the Diaper Derby when I was two years old.”

  Donnato and I exchange a look and say nothing.

  Jason fumbles. “I know. The Diaper Derby. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

  Another pause.

  “Ana?” Donnato asks finally. “Are you sure you heard Mr. Phelps correctly?”

  I glare at him.

  “I heard it right.”

  “Run Megan Tewksbury and Julius Emerson Phelps through NCIC,” Donnato instructs the kid. “Search the databases for birth certificates, Social Security numbers, driving records, military records, and arrests for Phelps in Illinois and Ohio.”

  We hang up and sit in silence in the motel room, where the once-savory remains of Caribbean takeout are starting to smell like a back street in the Yucatán.

  “I need you to trust me,” I say after a while. “Why do you second-guess me in front of a rookie?”

  “I’m not second-guessing you.”

  “You are. Not only on Megan as a source but on a simple piece of intel, too. Did the subject say Ohio or Illinois?”

  My voice is rising. My heart is beating fast.

  “Look—” He takes off his reading glasses and rubs his forehead.

  “Here’s the thing—”

  “I know the thing. You shot a guy. A lot of people didn’t share that judgment call, or the way it worked out with OPR. So you’re feeling…scrutinized.”

  “But not by you?”

  “Not by me,” says my partner, and his eyes are soft.

  Eight

  Against a wash of middle-aged do-gooders perking along through the lobby of the convention hotel, with their important name tags and goodie bags of giveaways, radical leader Bill Fontana stands out like a gangsta hit man.

  He has shaved his head since our most recent surveillance photos, which makes his cheekbones seem wider, and ears, with multiple earrings, stick out like a Chihuahua’s. Tall and muscle-bound, he is dressed in black, with heavy work boots meant to rip the shit out of laboratory doors. Despite a throng of groupies, he looks less like a media star and more of what he really is—an ex-con. You can spot it a mile away. He’s got what they call a “joint body”—the overdeveloped torso, the bullying prison strut.

  I am not here alone. Undercover detectives from the Portland police department have mixed with the crowd, some posing as reporters to document the faces. You can bet if these good liberals knew they were being covertly photographed, they’d scream violation of civil rights. To protect my identity, the local cops do not know I exist; if my face surfaces in their reports, we’re doing something right. Donnato, disguised by a couple of days’ worth of beard, gold-rimmed glasses, and a beat-up denim jacket, is somewhere nearby.

  This is not one of your great moments in espionage. All we did was walk through the door. The hotel is on a strip near the airport. You go up the escalator to the convention suite and buy a ticket for thirty bucks. If it’s easy for us, it is easy for FAN, whose members, you can bet, are also working the room.

  These people—excuse the expression—are sitting ducks for recruitment by terrorists. The affable retirees with big bellies and gray beards are not likely to be fashioning Molotov cocktails in their home entertainment centers during the commercial breaks, but the young guard, the lean and hungry male youth who gather around Fontana, with thin grasping fingers, and tattoos, and “I’ve-been-up-on-speed-for-thirty-six-hours” hair, just want to be bad—any kind of bad. Well, so does Darcy DeGuzman in her ratty purple parka.

  “I’m a great admirer of yours,” I tell Fontana, shaking his hand. “Going to prison, that was really brave.”

  “It isn’t brave. It’s the only choice. The earth is our only home and fighting for its constituency is a sacred war.”

  I give him a bedazzled smile and hold his brown eyes. “Bill, tell me how to fight and I’ll do it.”

  “Create chaos,” he advises. “On the edge of chaos, that’s where change begins.”

  I’m glad that I am close enough to get a good look. His eyes are at once vacant and hostile.

  “Radical resistance comes in lots of ways,” he says. “Walk through these halls.” He indicates the booths for farm sanctuaries, and organizations that save ducks from having their livers turned into foie gras. “You’ll find your path.”

  Not surprisingly, given his glib style, Bill Fontana has a handler, a pretty Asian woman in a nice suit, who maneuvers him toward a couple of print reporters who ask about the story in Willamette Weekly about corruption at the BLM.

  “Our wild horses are not for sale for the personal profit of government drones,” Fontana says as their pens fly. “We refuse to allow free spirits of nature to become pawns in an elitist scheme to benefit the corporate ranching interests.”

  Donnato must be watching, because my cell vibrates.

  “Fontana’s on in fifteen minutes and the ballroom’s packed,” he reports.

  “How’s the crowd?”

  “Tense. Something’s up. I’m hearing Herbert Laumann
from the BLM is going to show.”

  “Why?”

  “He wants to debate. About the wild horses.”

  “That’s not smart.”

  “Your hazelnut friends are in the food aisle,” Donnato says, and we click off.

  In spite of myself, the fragrance of rice soup and fried lentil crackers draws me to the food concessions. Among them is a booth for Willamette Hazelnut Farm, and sitting at the table behind golden piles of hazelnut brittle is Megan Tewksbury, stacking flyers.

  “Megan! It’s Darcy!”

  She glances up and breaks into a smile. Then a big warm hug.

  “You were awesome at Omar’s the other night,” she gushes. “That was thinking on your feet. You liberated over three hundred dollars.”

  “Hey, the cash register was open.”

  “The mustangs will benefit, I promise you that.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Organizing. Julius is too impatient for this kind of stuff.”

  Megan is more fluffed up than she was at the bar, wearing her business attire: a white shirt with an Indian vest embroidered with tiny mirrors, her hair loose and frizzy, lots of chunky silver jewelry.

  I pick up a flyer. “Save Our Western Heritage” appears above a photograph of the most stirring animal I have ever seen, “Mesteno, legendary Kiger stallion.” His ears are erect, his neck strong, and he has a fine muzzle and intelligent eyes. He is dun-colored, with darker legs, and the musculature of his body is athletic. His long flying mane and tail remind me of a children’s book illustration.

  “This is a mustang? He is stunningly beautiful.”

  “That’s because he’s free.”

  I have fallen in love with a horse. It is peculiar as hell.

  “We’ve forgotten what freedom is,” Megan goes on. “Mesteno is saying, This is the way it’s supposed to be.”

  Something inside me melts. “It breaks your heart,” I say, not quite understanding why.

  “It softens your heart,” Megan replies, correcting me. Her moist green eyes hold mine. “Will you come to our rally? We want to call attention to the deputy state director of the BLM slaughtering these animals. And profiting from it.”