Carnival of Shadows

by R.J. Ellory

There were many things in Michael Travis’s life that he did not wish to remember. Some of them were recent, and some of them went right back to the furthest horizon of his memory. For those few minutes, as he sat in his Bureau-assigned late-model Ford Fairlane, he focused his attention on what he had learned, how it could assist him to progress the investigation.

  In truth, he had learned very little. The devil was in the detail, however. The connection between Madeline Jarvis and Anthony Scarapetto had been a detail. A dead Hungarian and his connection to this Fekete Kutya was important. Possessive of his nationality, identification was a narrower task, but not a great deal narrower. Maybe Bishop would come back to him with something. Maybe the man was known, already on the run from the federal authorities. As a non-national, there would be records of his entering the country, unless he had entered illegally. Then? Well, then it would be the proverbial needle in a haystack.

  So where had this Hungarian come from, where was he going, and why did he stop at the carnival? Had he made arrangements to meet someone in Seneca Falls? From the look of his clothes and personal effects, he was definitely not a wealthy man, but he was not a hobo. Simple and inexpensive his suit and shoes might have been, but they were neither dirty nor worn-out. This—to all intents and purposes—was a man with a life, and that life had ended. However, the mere fact that there was no driver’s license, no billfold, no wallet containing business cards, snapshots of kids, a picture of his wife, right down to the fact that manufacturer’s labels had been removed from his jacket and pants, was beyond unusual. Either he intended to carry nothing, or everything had been removed from his person before the body was dumped.

  It was a mystery, for sure, and that—in and of itself—was sufficient reason to remain.

  In essence, what had happened here was an example of why Travis had joined the FBI in the first place. That thirst for knowledge, that need to know, just as Valeria Mironescu had pointed out. Those few empty months between Esther’s death and Travis’s enrollment in the Bureau had perhaps been the strangest of his life. He’d felt as if he’d had no life. That was the only way to describe the sense of purposelessness and mental apathy he’d experienced. What reason had there been to get up? He’d had enough money left over from his army salary to support himself for another six months, another year perhaps, but doing nothing was anathema to him. And why had he chosen the Bureau? Because of the sense of order and predictability it would impose upon his thoughts, his mind, his own personality? The army had demonstrated all too clearly that a disciplined and structured environment best suited him. The ideas he had, the doubts he possessed about himself—who he was, why he was here, what would happen to him, whether he carried some diluted strain of his father’s violence in his blood—did not plague his mind when his mind was full. It was in the quiet times, the moments of aloneness when there was nothing specific to consider, that he felt those dark shadows come to life in the back of his mind. Given free rein to truly be himself, who would he be, and of what would he be capable? There were fears there, real fears, but only with the death of his father had they been sufficiently energized to impinge upon him. Was he, in essence, two people? Was he what they called schizophrenic? He did not believe so, but even the word unsettled him.

  Regardless of rationale, the actual motivation for joining the Bureau, the force majeure, happened in a diner in Kearney just three weeks after Esther Franklin’s death. Travis had barely gathered his thoughts together after the trauma of that time, the way Esther had faded so inevitably, the words they had shared, those they had not, the certainty that the cancer that had invaded her body would never take her on any other route than to her grave, and all of this while Travis felt so impotent, so insignificant, so meaningless.

  Travis was still wrestling with so much when he crossed paths with a man called Donald Gerritty on the afternoon of Thursday, February 23, 1950. Travis did not believe in coincidence, but he did believe in the power of external factors. In actuality, the entire subject of what was now being termed situational dynamics was under study in his own Bureau unit. There appeared to be a native and inherent personality in all people, and yet beyond this there were familial, social, environmental, cultural, and educational factors that prompted reactions and responses. What happened in Kearney was an environmental influence, the power of which could not now be underestimated. Indirectly, it was as a result of that occurrence that he was now in Seneca Falls.

  Travis had never been to Kearney before, and only as a result of Esther’s dying wishes had there been any reason to go. For much of the two weeks following her death, Travis had been involved without pause in the funeral arrangements, the memorial service, attended by a mere handful of those who knew her, the burial, the resolution of Esther’s notinsubstantial debts, one of which was to a man in Kearney, just fifty or sixty miles southwest of Grand Island. Esther’s house had sold within days, literally, and the proceeds raised, once her overdue mortgage payments had been settled, were barely enough to cover her outstanding liabilities. On the face of it, it had appeared that Esther possessed no money worries at all. In reality, it had been an entirely different story. And so, following instructions that had been left with her lawyer, Michael attended to those matters in a straightforward and businesslike manner, passing on news of her death to those who needed to know, delivering checks and quantities of cash to those who were owed. There was no explanation as to why Esther Franklin owed two hundred and fifty dollars to a man in Kearney, but she did. The man’s name was Clarence Brent. Michael had spoken with him on the telephone, arranged a suitable time to visit, and had agreed to bring the money in cash. That Thursday morning, the twenty-third, Michael boarded the bus from Grand Island to Kearney with an understanding that Brent would meet him at the station, the money would exchange hands, and Michael would get on the next bus back to Grand Island. There would be a couple of hours’ wait, but the Kearney bus station was right there at the end of the main drag, and Michael could take an early lunch. And so it went as agreed. Michael arrived, met Brent, and handed over the money.

  Michael had asked him one question about Esther.

  “Did you know her well, sir?”

  “Well enough to wait five years to get my money back,” was all Brent said, and that was that. He was neither impolite nor brusque, but he did not smile, and it seemed clear that he did not wish to discuss the matter with Michael Travis. After all, Travis was a stranger, and what business was it of his?

  The delivery made, Travis left the station and headed up the main drag. He entered the first diner he saw, took a seat at the counter, ordered a cup of coffee and the blue plate special, and sat down with the intention of doing little beyond minding his own business.

  Don Gerritty arrived ten minutes later. He arrived at the same time as Travis’s food. He asked if the adjacent seat was free, how the special was, ordered the same. He sat in silence, but there was just something about the man that bothered Travis enormously. Travis wouldn’t have thought twice about upping and moving to a table, but the diner was full with early lunch traffic, and there was no room. First of all, the man had a Zippo lighter, and he kept opening and snapping it shut. He did not use it to light a cigarette. He just opened it, shut it, opened it, shut it. Click. Click. Click. Click. Such things did not ordinarily bother Travis. No, it was not what the man was doing, but how he was doing it. It was as if he were trying to be as annoying as possible.

  Eventually Travis asked him if he wouldn’t mind stopping.

  “Bothering you?” the man said. “I am so sorry. I wasn’t even aware I was doing it. Have a lot on my mind, see? You know how it is.”

  Travis understood then. The man was soliciting conversation. The man wanted to draw him into something. More than likely a con man. Next would come a line. Hey, kid, if you don’t mind me asking, what line of work you in, and how’d you like to make a few extra bucks? And then, later, if Travis questioned the motives of the man,
he’d say, But you were the one who started talking to me, kid. I was just minding my own business and you struck up a conversation with me, remember?

  But no, there was no such line. In fact, the man just set down the lighter and went back to his own thoughts.

  That, in all honesty, was somehow worse.

  “Some difficulty you’re in?” Travis asked, unable to restrain himself. There it was again—the need to know, the compulsion to find out.

  The man smiled, sort of half laughed. “Nothing that should trouble you, son, and certainly nothing you could help with.”

  The man was perspiring. Travis hadn’t noticed that before. His brow was varnished with sweat, and the routine with the lighter had not been simple distraction at all, but nervousness. The man looked at Travis, and there was a real flash of fear in his eyes.

  “You sure you’re okay, mister?” Travis asked.

  The man turned back to the counter as his food arrived. He looked at it as if he couldn’t even remember ordering it, and he nodded his head.

  “I’m fine, kid. I’m fine. You just go on with your lunch, okay? Don’t let me interrupt your meal.”

  But the meal was interrupted, and there seemed to be no going back to it.

  “If there’s something you need help with…” Travis said, leaving the statement unfinished.

  “Look, kid, I don’t know what the deal is here, but there really is nothing you can do. I don’t mean to be rude, but this isn’t something you should be getting involved in, okay?”

  And then whatever anxiety might have been present in the man’s face became something akin to abject terror. He appeared frantic and yet unable to move.

  A car had pulled up outside the diner, and from it emerged two men, both suited, both wearing hats, and they paused for just a moment before approaching the building.

  “Oh no,” the man said, and he came down off the stool and headed for the diner restrooms.

  The first of the two suited men came through the front door and flashed a badge.

  “Please remain calm, ladies and gentlemen. There is no need to panic. We are federal agents, and we are looking for a man who was reported as having entered this building.”

  Travis stood up.

  The first agent looked at him. “You have something to say, sir?”

  “Restroom,” Michael said.

  The first agent nodded, indicated for the second to follow him. As they passed the lunch counter, the first agent asked for Travis’s name.

  Travis told him.

  “I want you to get these people out of here, Michael. You think you can do that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Orderly, calmly, get them all out of here and over to the other side of the street, all right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Get going.”

  The two agents headed for the corridor that led back down to the restrooms while Travis corralled the diners and directed them out and across the street as quickly and quietly as possible.

  He waited with them while the federal agents dealt with the man they were looking for.

  It was little more than five minutes before a shot was fired.

  It was a single shot, unmistakable as anything else, and the gathered diners started asking Travis questions as if there were something he knew beyond the immediately evident facts.

  After another minute, the first agent came out of the diner and waved Travis over.

  “Son, I need you to assist the owner of this establishment. I need you to help him bring everyone’s coats and hats out of the diner and over to them on the sidewalk. Tell them they will not able to return to their meals.”

  Travis complied without further questions. He and the owner started gathering up peoples’ hats and coats and bags and ferrying them over the street.

  On the first trip back, the owner of the diner asked if Travis knew anything about the guy in the restroom.

  “No idea,” Travis replied.

  “He shot himself in the freakin’ head in my restroom. Can you believe that?”

  “Really?”

  “Sure thing. Those two Feds show up, he goes out back, they ask him to come on out, and he shoots himself in the head. Crazy, huh? Wonder what he did.”

  That was it then.

  That was the moment.

  Later, years ahead, after his move to Kansas and those first few months of tentative research into a field that was termed behavioral science, they started to use that phrase: situational dynamics. Why did one man want to help and another want to harm? Why did two people—ostensibly from almost identical backgrounds and personal circumstances—become wildly different people?

  Crazy, huh? Wonder what he did.

  After Travis and the owner had returned all the coats and bags and hats and scarves, those same diners did not want to leave. They wanted to know too.

  Travis listened to them.

  Maybe he was a gangster. Maybe he was on the run. Maybe he killed someone.

  To Travis, that nervous and frightened man did not seem to be a gangster at all. He was terrified, and if what the diner owner had said was true, if the man had actually shot himself, then dying right then and there in a restroom must have seemed an awful lot more appealing than whatever fate he believed awaited him at the hands of the Feds.

  Travis stayed back across the road and he just observed.

  More Feds arrived, then the coroner. At last the dead man was stretchered out and put into the back of the coroner’s wagon. The agent who had first spoken to Travis crossed the street and told the hangers-on that it was all over, that there was nothing further to see, that they should all go home.

  He did stop to share a few words with Travis and thanked him for his assistance.

  “You kept your head,” the agent said. “Most people panic in such situations.”

  “Did a couple of years in the army,” Travis said.

  “I thought it might be something like that,” the agent said.

  “So, what was the deal with the guy? I was sat right beside him. He seemed very nervous, and then he got mighty scared when you pulled up outside the diner.”

  “You’ll read about it in the papers tomorrow, I’m sure,” the agent said.

  And with that, he shook Travis’s hand, thanked him once more for his assistance, and left.

  Travis made a point of finding out what happened the following day.

  The man’s name was Donald Gerritty. He hailed from Sterling, Colorado. He’d killed his wife. Strangled her and then tried to make it look like she’d hung herself. Soon as questions started being asked by the Sterling Police Department, Donald Gerritty took off. He just got in his car, hit I-76, and headed northeast. The moment he crossed the Nebraska state line at Julesburg, it became a federal matter, and Special Agents Norman Hiscox and Dennis Whyte had taken up the pursuit. Gerritty had made it all of two hundred miles, all the way to Kearney, and whether he was aware of having been followed for all of those two hundred miles was not clear from the small article that the newspaper had afforded his flight. Regardless, Hiscox and Whyte had found him in that diner, and rather than face the consequences of what he had done, Gerritty had decided to end his own life. How he had been in possession of a gun was not reported, but he had shot himself in the restroom of that diner and that was the end of that.

  Hiscox knew what had really happened. So did Whyte. Michael Travis did not know which agent was which, and there was no picture of them. There was just a small, grainy monochrome image of Donald Gerritty looking considerably younger and less afraid than he had the day before.

  But Travis’s curiosity went beyond the immediate whys and wherefores of the death of Gerritty. He wanted to know about the death of the wife. Why had Gerritty killed her? What had been his reasoning? Was it premeditated or spur of the moment?
Did he honestly believe he could get away with killing her, or had the murder been nothing more than a sudden and inexplicable response to some stimuli?

  On the subsequent Monday morning, February 27, Michael Travis took a bus to Lincoln. He located the FBI office and introduced himself. He said he wished to apply. They took his application, but informed him that the minimum age for acceptance into the training program was twenty-three. He would have to wait until the tenth of May for his answer.

  Travis did wait until the tenth of May, and he did receive his answer. It was the answer he’d hoped for, and within a week he had begun a career that had—so far—lasted eight years.

  At the start, those first few weeks in the newly established Kansas City unit, there were merely four or five of them, each pulled from different offices across the States. The meetings, the discussions, the initial debates regarding their purpose there, did serve to establish one thing: that the Bureau was looking at something very new.

  There were angles and perspectives to all things, and the Bureau’s attitude—as expressed by the head of the training program, Section Chief Frank Gale—was that the failure to appreciate every single one of those angles and perspectives was the primary reason for the failure of a case.

  Frank Gale was a man of certainty, both in what he said and what he did. Physically, he was no taller than Travis, but he seemed taller. He carried himself with authority, and though he smiled often, he nevertheless managed to instill respect and a sense of unquestioning compliance in his charges. Never one to say something unless it needed to be said, Gale was a very experienced Bureau veteran, and immediately Travis had no doubt that he could trust what he said.

  “You are here as the devil’s advocate, Mr. Travis,” Gale said on their first day together. “You are here, very simply, because you challenge everything that is put in front of you, even those things we take for granted, even those things we know are true. I know you see yourself as a realist, but you are more the unrealist.”

  Travis had not responded, nor asked questions. He believed that everything would unfold in its own good time.