A Criminal to Remember (A Monty Haaviko Thriller)

by Van Rooy, Michael

  “Good morning, this is Cornelius Devanter. Are my books in?”

  “Let me check, sir. Address, please?”

  I gave it and there was a pause.

  “No sir, we have nothing listed for you.”

  I hung up and called the McNally Robinson bookstore and did the same thing. They admitted they were still waiting for my copy of The Book of 5 Rings. I thanked them and hung up gently.

  Then I drank some more coffee. The Book of 5 Rings was a book on philosophy and war by a Japanese swordsman from about 500 years ago. It was required reading by movers and shakers in the business world. They believed the strategies of war applied to business.

  That fit in with the way Devanter talked and acted. I finished my coffee and went to the library and waited for it to open. Then I went in and used the Internet to search out the pattern of his tie—he had worn it twice and once it had gone with the shirt and the second time it hadn’t. A blue tie with tiny designs that looked like tridents.

  On an English site I found it, an SAS regimental tie. The Special Air Services, British commandos and killers. Out of curiosity I kept looking for the tie clip, the little knives, and found those too, an emblem of Gurkhas, Nepalese mercenaries renowned for their use of the kukri knife.

  I leaned back. So. Devanter carried a pistol and he had gotten training. And he quoted military truisms and he wore military mementoes.

  All that screamed that he was a fetishist. A new insight into his mind but not one that was of much use to me.

  I ran a search for ”Peligroso” and found it meant danger in Spanish. Also that it was an unmanned drone built by one of Devanter’s companies capable of carrying four guided missiles and circling the world on a single load of hydrogen peroxide fuel. It was his best seller.

  In a two-year-old Jane’s Intelligence Review there was an article about Devanter’s company building a micro rigid airship for military/security work. Information was sketchy about statistics and possible sales but the ship was described as being two-man, unarmed and very reliable. A snippet from a sales promotion read, “Perfect for Counter Insurgency!”

  Frankly, it sounded very much like what I’d seen in Devanter’s office.

  I called Claire and found she was at home and working. She answered very coldly and I asked her if anything was wrong. “No honey, I just got an obscene phone call.”

  “Ouch. Bad?”

  “Pretty filthy. I’ve called the phone company and the cops. The cops are sending someone down, is that normal?”

  It wasn’t. “Maybe they got a lot of calls recently.”

  “Maybe.”

  I read between the lines, must have been the Shy Man. The cops would have the number then but I wondered if it would make any difference.

  “Love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  At an Alamo rental location I used Claire’s credit card to pay for a Ford Mustang convertible and started up to Goodson’s place.

  It was a nice drive and, despite myself, I enjoyed it.

  #42

  The old man was on the cedar porch when I arrived. Still in the rocker made of antlers and still with the red blanket on his lap. I walked up from the parked car and saw his right hand under the blanket and realized again how old Goodson was. His face was calm and he wore the dark red wool long-sleeved shirt buttoned to his neck with yellowed bone buttons and faded jeans that ended above his ugly, twisted toes sticking out of a pair of battered leather sandals. The red of the shirt clashed with the blanket.

  “Mr. Goodson.”

  “Mr. Haaviko.” He spat loudly off his porch onto the ground and turned his deep-set brown eyes back to me. “And how are you?”

  “Good.”

  “And how is our dummy, Mr. McDonald, working? Oh, sit down.”

  The other antler rocking chair had been replaced with a canvas and aluminum director’s chair. I sat down and stretched out my feet.

  “Thank you. Long ride. Mr. McDonald is working just fine.” I looked around the clearing and the porch and smiled. “I kind of like this kind of plotting, I don’t have to be terribly subtle about meeting with you or Devanter.”

  “And what is our dummy supposed to do?”

  “Bleed off support from Illyanovitch. Nothing else.”

  “I see. You attack from the front and McDonald attacks from the flank?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Did you hear about Reynolds?”

  “Yes.”

  The old man closed one eye and stared at me hard with the other deep-set brown orb. “And did you have anything to do with that? The mass email accusations and the child pornography?”

  “Nothing whatsoever … child pornography?”

  His eye was unwavering. “Child pornography. Reynolds contested his cease and desist and a judge signed off on a search of his computer records. The cops found he did send the original emails from his own computer, it still held copies of the forms he had used; the cops also found he liked to look at kiddy-diddling stuff as well.”

  It had worked. I shook my head. “Nope. Not me.”

  The old man grunted non-committally and went back to watching the trees. I stared at him and didn’t say anything. He was old and he was looking it. His face was still thin and sharp with patchy white hair but someone had combed it for him.

  “Well? Virgil said you wanted to talk.”

  “I did. Why does Devanter have such a hard-on for you? And why do you have such a hard-on for him?”

  “I told you.”

  “You told me shit and lies. You’re laying out forty grand plus for me and Devanter’s doing that and a lot more for Illyanovitch. You’re both risking money and imprisonment and for what?”

  Goodson leaned his chin against his hand and stared with clear eyes. For a long time there was silence.

  “Mr. Goodson, notice that I’m not bringing a threat here. I think you have the same attitude towards blackmail and threats that I do.”

  He nodded. “Probably.”

  I went on like he hadn’t said anything. “I bite off the hand that threatens me and rub salt in the wound.”

  He smiled and I saw he had either very good teeth or very good dentures. “Pretty much.”

  “So tell me why.”

  Goodson nodded. “All right. Is that why you didn’t bring Virgil?”

  “Yes.”

  The old man brought his hand out from under the blanket. It held an old brass handbell that he rang twice. A young woman, plain-faced, freckled and smiling, came out and said, “Yes, master?”

  He snorted. “Wiseass.”

  “Too young for wisdom, maybe a smartass. What do you need?”

  “Rye for me.” He looked at me and I added, “Lemonade, ice tea, anything cold.”

  The woman nodded and bent down to kiss Goodson’s head. “On its way.”

  He cursed and watched her go with pride. “Never marry ’em. Take my advice. Never marry pretty women.”

  I looked at the door she had used and shook my head, “Never make a handsome woman your wife. But she’s not handsome, she’s beautiful.”

  Goodson’s eyes flicked to me in surprise. “Beautiful?”

  “Yep.”

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  I twisted in my chair. “I dated the prettiest girl in the world once. Slept with her too. She acted like she was giving me the best thing in the world and that I should be grateful. Afterwards I realized that her tits were real but that her smile was fake.”

  The old man laughed and asked, “What else?”

  “She was a dead lay and had bad breath and she never learned to value anything up until the day she died.”

  “In other words?”

  “Be happy with what you’ve got. Appearances can be deceiving. Don’t judge a book by its cover. Pick an aphorism.”

  The woman brought out a full bottle of whiskey and a small glass for him and a pitcher of lemonade with a glass full of ice for me. “Here you go. Ring if you requir
e service, oh most illustrious master.”

  She left smiling and the old man grinned back at her like he was about twelve and then turned back to me. “In school I learned that Roman emperors had a slave ride behind them in their chariots. The slave whispered, ‘this too shall pass,’ during parades. That’s the function that girl plays for me—she reminds me I’m full of shit sometimes.”

  The lemonade was fresh and real and I drank two glasses before the old man poured his first.

  He held it up. “Cheers.”

  “Cheers.”

  Then he started. “What’s the worst thing you ever did?”

  #43

  None of your business.” I remembered flames and screams and shut it all away back where it belonged. The power of the reaction scared me and I filed it away to think about later.

  Goodson looked at me intently and then finished his drink and poured more. While I collected myself he lit a cigarette.

  “I don’t like to think of it much either but sometimes I think of the worst thing I never did. That helps.”

  He stared off into the distance and tapped ash onto the planks of the porch. “I was born in Germany, in the Black Forest. When I was very young I joined the local glider club. We flew off a little airfield a long walk from home but I went there every chance I could get. I’d leave at 4:00 a.m. every Saturday to watch the launch and later I got to go up. And when I was older I joined the flying corps—the Luftwaffe. I loved to fly and it got me away from my father and mother who lived in a cottage in the middle of a giant copse of oaks and from which I almost never saw the sky or the sun.”

  He drank and filled his glass again.

  “When the war started I was too young, by ’41 I was flying a Junkers tri-motor and soon we invaded Russia and there I was. By September I was flying a Messerschmitt Bf 110 out of an airbase outside of Leningrad. We were there to support our troops during the siege of the city and I was there from the beginning to the end—872 days, September 1941 to the end of January 1944. I was a member of a Zerstörerwaffe, a destroyer force with thirty-two planes, and I started as a fighter pilot but Bf’s were slow and I became a fighter-bomber and later a night fighter, a Nachtjagdgeschwader.”

  “So Goodson is not your name?”

  “It is. I changed it legally in Canada in 1952.”

  I drank some more lemonade and watched the long shadows and listened as Goodson went on.

  “Nachtjagdgeschwader. It sounds so brave but it wasn’t. Up in the clouds with radar and my victims couldn’t even see me. So cold I drank vodka the Ukrainian auxiliaries brewed up straight just to keep awake.”

  “Is that where you got the drilling?”

  “No. I had one but it got left behind with the plane. I bought the gun at auction last year. As a reminder.”

  He reached out to touch the cased weapon behind his chair and smiled. “So we flew and I shot down Russian transports bringing food to the starving city. And I strafed convoys of trucks on the ice bringing in coal and blankets. And I dropped bombs on barges carrying away the wounded. And my comrades died—shot, burned, suicided, cut up by partisans, slaughtered by typhus and the flu. In April of 1942 we were brought up to full strength and involved in Operation Ice Impact, an attempt to sink the Soviet ships in the Lenningrad harbour. It failed completely.”

  The old man rested his hands on his knees and then lit another cigarette.

  “Mostly we just bled. The planes were considered obsolete but they weren’t. They were just not as good as the best. Our squad had some models that carried up to two tons of bombs along with machine guns and automatic cannons. And the planes were reliable, like clockwork all the time except when they didn’t work.”

  I laughed and so did he.

  “The Spanish Blue division was stationed nearby and we’d trade schnapps for brandy and trade stories for news. But they were cold men, good comrades but cold men. I learned about the difference between a Castilian and a Catalan there on that cold patch of bog. I thought I knew tough soldiers until I saw them and then I understood why the Spanish empire had lasted as long as it did. Small men, tough, tireless and never smiling. As cold as the winter.”

  Goodson drank from his glass and shivered. “There was a priest or a monk. The others called him Fra, brother, I think, Fra Santiago; he was a handsome young man, a lieutenant. He and I used to talk and once or twice I took him up to show him the widening gyre, what he called it. He spoke English and loved Irish poets and he’d make me recite them while I flew. That’s how I started to learn English with him teach me Yeats and Shelley.

  “Santiago was the one who told me the greatest mistake the Spanish had ever made was converting and killing all the Jews in the 1500’s. They were the ones who understood money; they had learned it to help them survive over the years. So when the money from the Indies started to come in the Spanish didn’t know what to do with it and so they pissed it all away in great golden streams feeding wars in Flanders and burning the English in towns like Mousehole and Penzance.”

  A deer, a doe, stepped out from between two trees just past my car and snuffled the air. Her head twisted from side to side and she turned back into the darkness. The old man just kept talking.

  “The prick dictator Franco had sent the Spanish Blues north to kill communists and that’s what they did. They had their own hangers on, Kozzaki and Lithuanians, and they did not take many prisoners. Or so I heard but it was a hard war—Stalin didn’t want Leningrad to survive, he was focussed on his namesake city Stalingrad. And for us the high command kept changing their mind, first to take Leningrad at all costs and join up with the Finns and cut the Murmansk supply line that fed Ford trucks into Russian hands. The next month it was to attack Moscow in the centre and kill Stalin. Then it was to station battleships in Norway to cut the supply line to Archangel where Allied aid was fattening the Soviets. Then it was to concentrate all the forces on Stalingrad far to the south and capture the Baku oil fields. No one took too many prisoners, not then. It was a different time. So we flew and bombed and shot. And in the city they were eating their dead.”

  He said it quietly.

  “Eventually Franco bowed to political pressure and called his soldiers back but they surely did not want to go—they had gone through the Spanish Civil War and saw their beloved enemies in every Russian face. When the Blues left the last thing the Fra said was that God writes straight in crooked lines. I thought about that for a long time. And I had time waiting for more fuel to come up so I could fly again, learning to fix the engines and clean the guns, anything to keep out of the lines where it was a real meat grinder.”

  It was a beautiful afternoon, hot but bearable under the trees and the old man’s voice went on, “One day in the early winter of ’43 I got special orders and a full load of gas—rare things indeed. And a team of specialists took my baby apart and stripped out the machine guns and the cannons until she was naked, and then they put on these two fat dachshund bellies, one under each wing. Long aluminum containers specially built and shipped out when the front was screaming for ammunition and the soldiers were praying for food. Those got loaded under tarps while I sat in my dugout and crushed lice crawling through my beard.”

  The woman brought more lemonade and pills for Goodson and never looked me in the eye. She went inside and Aerosmith started to waft out under the door, “Dude (Looks Like a Lady),” I think, and that made me think of lost opportunities from childhood.

  The old man kept talking.

  “My orders were given to me by a tightarse, a civilian member of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda direct from the Ordenpalais in Berlin. He was escorted by an SS Major from the Reich Security Main Office—they were badasses amongst badasses and, if I hadn’t been completely drunk at the time, they probably would have scared the piss right out of me. My orders were to fly over Leningrad on headings this and that at a height of 1,000 metres and open my dachshund bellies while travelling at a stalling speed.”

&nb
sp; A fly landed on the old man’s face, just under his left eye, and he brushed it away.

  “The orders were suicidal considering the flak over the city and the Yakovlev fighters and the Sturmovick ground attack planes but I listened anyway. Before supper I checked the plane out for one last time with a mechanic. While he was distracting two RSHA guards I undid the housing of one of the dachshunds and found it full of little booklets of cheap paper. I took one, tidied up and went and ate my potato soup. While I ate I read the booklet under the table. It was just a bunch of slips of paper glued into place. I could read Russian a little, we all could by then, and it said, ‘A week’s worth of Rations Book for Leningrad.’ And I knew that my cargo was counterfeit ration books.”

  The music inside changed to “Everybody Loves Me Baby” by Don Maclean.

  “After soup there was vodka and I wrote on a corner of a scrap of newspaper while I drank. The major had told me I was carrying 2,600 kilos of extra weight—maybe 1,000 would be the containers, the rest the ration books themselves. By my calculations I had perhaps 80,000 of the damn things. I would drop them; the citizens would pick them up and think such a blessing. And they would go to the kitchens and there would not be enough food and they would riot and the army guns would come out and they’d massacre their own.”

  The old man rubbed his chin. “We knew that the citizens still in the city were living on 500 calories a day. Enough to let you die slowly. Enough to make you hurt. We knew the army had set up special teams to fight cannibalism. And the major and the bureaucrat wanted me to drop hope on them—I was amazed. I would have dropped white phosphorous or high explosive or delayed charges loaded to go off at nearby movement or anything else without blinking. I could have fired explosive incendiaries into a school or strafed a line of old women lining up to trade for fuel oil, but I could not drop hope. My mind rebelled.”

  I was afraid to move and shake Goodson from his reverie. His voice went on, “There were six or eight million Soviets in the city when we started and we killed more than a million and a half through guns and bombs but mostly through starvation and disease. When the rivers were free of ice you could walk from one side to the other on bloated corpses and there were a lot of rivers. So off I flew, the weight had been calculated precisely and so I went solo, no radio man, no radar operator, and no rear gunner. Just me.”