Geistmann

by Singer, Ron

  For some reason of which he was not, himself, certain, Geistmann exercised particular caution in John Robinson’s apartment. Even though his system insured that he had nothing to fear from fingerprints, he did not remove the gloves. There was no alarm to turn off, and no need to turn any lights on. As anticipated, he felt completely comfortable inside his new antagonist’s habitat. What a pleasant, sunny home this librarian occupied! Geistmann wondered if Robinson loved winter light as much as he, himself, did. With immense concentration and quiet pleasure, he moved silently through the small rooms, trying to filter them through the mind and nerves of a gifted, methodical research librarian. Robinson was so neat, his possessions so … unobtrusive.

  Something about him carried Geistmann back almost twenty years, to the period right before what he still thought of as (courtesy of St. John of the Cross, that excellent poet and mystic of the Catholic Reformation) his own “dark night of the soul.” At that crossroads in life, during two years of absolute self-imposed isolation, The Supreme Insult had been absorbed. From this fallow period had emerged the Grand Scheme, the specific planning for which had taken until 1999 to germinate.

  The little researcher worked in the Rare Books Division of the Columbia University Library. Geistmann pictured the University’s grassy lawn, where, on a sunny day during his previous trip to the city, he had lolled on the lawn among the innocent students. If he was not mistaken, the Rare Books Division was housed in a library building at the south end of campus. That memory swept Geistmann back to another, more distant one, to the time beyond all this turmoil, his own school days, which he had come to regard as the halcyon period of his life. Yes, while they lasted, these were the golden days when clever, moderately talented schoolboys like John Robinson found their supreme happiness in being allowed to run at Geistmann’s heels.

  He sincerely hoped he would not have to damage or, God forbid, kill this man, whose name he even liked. John Robinson. He liked the phonemes, he liked the meter, a spondee and an anapest. As he got ready to leave the apartment and to take the subway back down to Penn Station, Geistmann could not resist leaving a small calling card. Still wearing the gloves, he drew a large “G” in the dust on the rear left corner of the desk right next to where Robinson’s computer slept, the same desk where the man must perform his nocturnal labors for the Library. Grinning, Geistmann left the apartment.

  Weatherbee: Uh, oh, he just killed someone right here in New York State.

  Peter: Here come the Feds. I bet it will be that ball buster, Scott Peters.

  Weatherbee: Yes, your namesake.

  GEISTMANN: Episode Four

  GEISTMANN, EPISODE FOUR.

  Saturday, March 1, 2008. New York, NY; and aboard the AMTRAC to Washington, DC.

  When John Robinson returned to his apartment Saturday evening, he did not notice the big “G” on his desk, perhaps because he was determined not to clean the apartment. He had spent the whole day in his office in the bowels of the library, putting some final touches on the Jeanne d’Arc catalogue and on his memo to Arnold Weatherbee. Tomorrow, like the Judeo-Christian deity, he would rest.

  But he did check his e-mail. In addition to the usual flotsam were two faxes that had been forwarded by Arnold Weatherbee. They had also, presumably, been forwarded to the membership of JOLETAF and to other relevant law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI.

  The first came from Albany, New York. Initially re-routed from the Division of State Police, Warren County, it announced the murder of a man named Orville Johnson. The corpse had been found by the victim’s wife at around five p.m. on Friday, fully clothed and face down in the snow in the woods about two-hundred yards behind their vacation home, which was right outside the hamlet of Blue Mountain Lake. A thick-pointed needle had been inserted into the victim’s neck and rammed up into his brain stem. It was still there when the local police arrived, sticking out just below the corpse’s hairline.

  The second fax came from a second police department, the Surete’ du Quebec. This one had been initially sent to Interpol’s Washington D.C. office, where it had been translated and forwarded to Weatherbee in New York. Using the name, “Tomaz Goncalves,” Subject had bought a round-trip ticket between Montreal and Glens Falls, New York, US. According to a prostitute who eavesdropped on the ticket purchase from her usual post in front of the rest rooms about thirty feet from the counter, the man spoke fluent French, but it was certainly not, she thought, Quebecois. Nor was it precisely le français véritable [“‘true’ French”], which she heard all the time from tourist johns. But it was closer to le français véritable. When asked by the Surete’ officer what had made her notice these details, she had looked at him as if he were crazy, then replied, in Quebecois, “Dans mes affaires, vous voulez rester vivant, vous notez.” [In my trade, if you want to stay alive, you notice.] The fax concluded with the prostitute’s detailed physical description of Subject.

  This new information mostly confirmed a few points Robinson had already made in the memo to Weatherbee, which he now re-read for the fourth and final time. He pressed SEND.

  Weatherbee stared at his computer monitor, which rested on a big antique desk in the big high-ceilinged room JOLETAF had borrowed from the NYPD in the Manhattan Municipal Building at 1 Centre Street in lower Manhattan. The desk was an island of chaos buried beneath a blizzard of loose paper. On its one clear corner sat an old-fashioned black Bakelite telephone. The desk backed onto a picture window with a calendar view of the Brooklyn Bridge, then south to New York harbor. The plaque teetering on the front edge of the desk read:

  Arnold M. Weatherbee

  Coordinator, Joint Law Enforcement Task Force (JOLETAF)

  Assistant Director, Special Projects,

  The International Criminal Police Organization

  (INTERPOL)

  National Central Bureau, U.S.A.

  Although a radiator was clanking, it was cold in the room. Weatherbee’s face had a hectic, unhealthy color. He wore dark corduroy pants and a charcoal gray crew-neck sweater that magnified his portliness. His sparse hair stood almost straight up, and his round trademark spectacles glittered. Weatherbee’s backdrop was a huge NYPD banner, complete with motto: “Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect.”

  In the center of the room stood eight folding tables, seven of them also stacked with files and loose papers. Randomly scattered around some of the tables were about a dozen folding chairs. The eighth table was laden with a mass of machinery and wires. Even a casual browser among the computer blogs and e-zines (Imagineering, Giz Biz) might have recognized a Sun Ultra 40 M2 work station with a 24.1 inch TFT LCD color monitor and UNIX-style keyboard. The Sun was packed with 16 Gigs of extra memory and a supplemental 300 Gig drive bay.

  The only other person in the room was Wetherbee’s Personal Assistant, general factotum, and techie, Peter Dykstra. Peter was seated at his own workstation, a gray metal ensemble catty cornered to his boss’s desk. Peter was a tall, tow-headed, rail thin young man wearing a black turtleneck shirt and blue jeans. He was reading a copy of the same email his boss was reading, an email that had just been sent by John Robinson. The only sounds in the room were the older man’s wheezing, the squeak of the younger one’s chair, and the non-stop spewing and clacking of a state-of-the-art combination printer-fax, which also stood on the eighth table. Alongside the rest of the equipment was a multi-line telephone with answering machine, which silently blinked like the lights on a Christmas tree.

  Weatherbee looked up from his screen. “This damn thing is long,” he complained.

  “Mm,” muttered Peter. “What did you expect from an incunabulist?”

  After lunch, which he washed down with a cold bottle of mineral water in the pathetic club car, about half an hour south of Camden, New Jersey, Geistmann ensconced himself in a window seat next to a sleeping (but un-snoring) senior citizen (male), on the not-so-speeding train. There had been no signs of heightened surveillance at Penn Station, so presumably they had not yet cottoned on
to his “Penn Name,” Donald Warburton. Well, there was always Washington to look forward to. But, even if the young suburban Suit were to be stopped, his papers were in order, including the second train ticket, which had been purchased online in his name a month before.

  Geistmann once again busied himself with his BlackBerry. This time, he transferred about one hundred and twenty thousand dollars from three credit cards in the name of Mr. Gold, who turned out to be a venture capitalist. Had Geistmann really wanted to bleed the man, he could have set up a dummy credit card account, perhaps even using one of his many oranges to skim off some serious money for his own use. But the little he knew against Mr. Gold did not justify this course, and he was not interested enough to bother finding out more. After all, what had the man done, cut a line at a supermarket? One needed to keep a sense of proportion, even –or especially-- if you lived as Geistmann did. Besides, he was in the middle of a major campaign, during which one of his many rules was not to allow himself to be sidetracked. Not only would that have been stupid; it would have been inelegant, ugly, breaking a carefully designed pattern just for the sake of petty avarice. In fact, had he needed this three-hour train ride to focus on more important tasks, or had the credit-card sleight of hand not been so simple and amusing, he would probably not have even bothered doing this much to Mr. Alles Geld.

  The payments, in sums from ten to ten thousand dollars, all went to charities, about twenty of them, an odd assortment. All of these moneys were given in Mr. Gold’s name, rather than anonymously. For example:

  Save the Chimps: $10,000

  Retired NFL Players Pension Fund: $5,000

  National Democratic Party: $10

  And so on.

  What dictated the pattern of Mr. Gold’s philanthropy? As usual, a Geistmann joke. The moneys all went to causes particularly loathed by Mr. Gold. Pace his look-alike, he detested football; during a safari twenty years ago, his vehicle had been attacked by chimpanzees; und so weiter.

  One of Geistmann’s aims in life was to amuse himself. When he had finished authorizing the payments, he imagined Mr. Glitter idly scanning his credit card statements at the end of the month. When he spotted the donations, at first he would be puzzled, and then he would possibly think of starting proceedings to stop payment. But he would quickly realize how annoying and time-consuming getting past the prodigious red tape might prove. For 120 K? “Chump change,” as the Americans called it. And could he even prove that trying to cancel the charges was not motivated by a Scroogean change of heart? Of course, he could turn the matter over to his accountant, but how long would it take him? And, at four seventy-five an hour ... good money after bad. Better to just let whatever asshole had done this have his laugh. And, to avoid a surcharge of ridicule and possibly even some professional embarrassment, Mr. Gold would never tell a soul about the little scam. In his business, you learned to eat your losses.

  Geistmann looked up from the pleasant reverie. The computer had reverted to screen server, which, as usual, he now changed, this time to Curious George, grinning back over his shoulder while he shook his hind parts at the viewer. A big smile crossed his (Geistmann’s) face as the new joke-message-clue he would send to Weatherbee from Virginia fired across the synopses of his high-end pinball machine of a brain:

  THIS MAY BE CHIMP CHANGE TO HIM,

  BUT HE SHOULD HAVE STAYED ON LINE.

  From: John Robinson.

  Subject: PRELIMINARY REPORT, GEISTMANN IN AMERICA: GOOD NEWS AND BAD.

  Date: March 1st, 2008, 8:47:13 p.m.

  To: Arnold Weatherbee:.

  Introduction: Here’s what I think so far, Arnold. As we consider how best to deal with his presence on our shores, we already know a lot of things, maybe even too many. It depends how you look at it.

  Weatherbee’s eyebrows shot up.

  1, Aggression: It’s very hard to characterize Geistmann’s aggression. He’s wrought a great deal of havoc, killed, maimed, or otherwise ruined so many lives. That part is off the charts. But so is his degree of control. His humiliating pranks are all controlled, joking, elaborate acts of aggression. As the bodyguard ‘Mike 666’ asked, after the Oxford berry caper, what kind of person would die for a joke?

  2. Skills/background: Factor in his fighting skills –marksmanship, mastery of diverse weaponry, frightening prowess at manual killing– and add the twenty-four hour clock with the nanosecond hand. Conclusion: Geistmann has an elite military background. The motivation for all this may even be similar to what drives all those rogue Green Berets of whom Hollywood never seems to tire. He is also as tech-savvy as a fifteen-year old wizard. This may be why there is nothing in your dossier about the army of forgers, gunsmiths, oranges, etc. that he must employ.

  “This guy is good,” Peter commented, without taking his eyes from his screen.

  3. Profiling: A cardinal feature of the dossier you sent me Thursday night is the inconclusiveness of the profiling. This is true whichever method your analysts use – the FBI’s organized/ disorganized rubric, Canter’s Investigative Psychology, Brent Turvey’s work in U.K. I read their reports, the ones I just mentioned, plus the others that study criminal ‘signatures,’ the predictors -- all of them.

  The FBI logic stinks --good old American dualism. Not many people fit that either-or nonsense, “organized” versus “disorganized.” Here is a mental list that combines material from the dossier with a few of my own inferences.

  He fits the “organized” category, as follows: intelligent, high birth order status, father’s work life stable, follows his own crimes, presumably in the media, controlled mood during the acts, geographical mobility (and how!), social competence, rigid time cycles (a spree about every three years), outstanding skills.

  “Disorganized”: subjected to harsh discipline as a child, minimum use of alcohol (none, I bet), lives alone.

  “Holy mackerel!” declared Weatherbee.

  And, finally, there are one or two big unknowns that keep him out of either category: Neither I, nor any of your profilers, can tell whether he’s sexually competent –or sexual, at all. Take the murder, of Donduceni. The sexual implications depend on your reading of chivalric romances. (Were all those white knights sublimating, or did they actually bed their Liege Ladies?)

  As Weatherbee and Peter both knew, of course, Robinson referred to the first, and still most flamboyant, crime in the entire dossier: the torture/murder, in 1999, of a Moldovan human trafficker.

  Another cardinal point from the profiling, which may be a major reason for a lot of your confusion: Geistmann is a retaliator. His signature comes straight out of Dante, the contrepasso, tit-for-tat. However, organizeds who are into retaliation act like disorganizeds. So you’d think that this –his retaliation motive- would lead to disorganized crime scenes. On the contrary, Geistmann’s crime scenes are meticulously organized, even stage-managed.

  4. Miscellaneous: A few final points, none of which is in the dossier, but all of which can be inferred.

  He’s lived in places, probably over a dozen, where he had to speak the indigenous language, because no one spoke whatever his first language is.

  He does his research both online and in libraries: a combined techy and book lover, which makes him an interesting mix of modern and conservative.

  He seems to be completely indifferent to blowback. Why? Mike 666, again: he’s certain he’s invincible. He’s been playing a dangerous game with JOLETAF ... us. You could say he’s taken on all of the police forces in Interpol, hasn’t he? And when he killed Donduceni, he must have realized he was inviting some really nasty villains to come after him. Given what he did to their man, I don’t even want to imagine what they would do to him.

  Yet he completely avoids collateral damage. No innocent bystanders have ever been so much as injured during his operations. This suggests what I can only call a kind streak, perhaps indicative of a chivalric tendency.

  And, finally, the dossier repeatedly uses the word ‘culture’ (107 times). Now that he’s
graced our shores with his lethal presence, he may be about to take us on a roller-coaster ride through several American cultures. If we can manage to guess which one he’s headed for before he gets there, we might have a puncher’s chance of heading him off at the pass (to mix metaphors).

  Conclusion: I have one specific suggestion: I’m not sure why I think this, but I bet the models for his upcoming escapades will be tricksters from different cultures, like Herge’ and Tintin, or Wiley Coyote. So we could –your cultural anthropologists could (and perhaps I could help)— try to figure out which American trickster he’s most likely to mimic.

  Without so much as a salutation, the long e-mail ended. Peter and Weatherbee finished reading almost simultaneously. For a few moments, they looked at each other in silence.

  “Whew,” said Weatherbee, yawning and stretching,

  “Very methodical.” Using his right hand, Peter cracked the knuckles on his left.