Geistmann

by Singer, Ron

  “I’ve read about that appalling business. The police are sometimes involved, aren’t they?”

  “Often,” Weatherbee acknowledged, “and at both ends of the transactions. Actually, there’s another photograph, of one of these bent policeman, an ethnic Russian who worked in Chisinau. Geistmann killed him around the same time he killed Donduceni. But you don’t want to see those pictures, they’re worse than the Donduceni ones.”

  Robinson took a deep breath. “The symbolism. What does the placard say? My Ukrainian is rudimentary.”

  “It says, ‘He who lives by the penis...’ “

  “Another stupid joke! How did you get the pictures?”

  “He emailed them to us as J-PEGS.”

  “What!

  “That’s right. So far, he’s ‘closed’ four of our cases

  --that we know of. But there probably aren’t any more. As you’ve seen, one of his MO’s is to trumpet his kills. The bent Russian policeman wasn’t even on our list, we only suspected him. But we were right: Geistmann enclosed a signed confession, chapter and verse.”

  How, Robinson wondered, could people fail to feel a measure of sympathy toward someone who killed bastards like these? Of course, the ways he killed them…

  Geistmann, Episodes Six and Seven

  GEISTMANN, Episode Six.

  Friday, March 21, 2008. Charlottesville, Virginia.

  “To know a man, know his heroes.” Geistmann was proud of having invented (as far as he knew) this aphorism. As he drove northeast on Virginia Route 20, already looking for the exit that would bring him to the sanctum sanctorum of the Jeffersonophile, his thoughts turned to their shared passion for that supreme poet, John Milton, and to the notion that he, Geistmann, was one of four “soul brothers”: himself, Jefferson, Milton, and not Satan, but Lucifer. As he glided through the fragrant early spring countryside, into his head popped the Miltonic lines that constituted one of his mantras. Back in his school days, Geistmann had committed Books One and Two of Paradise Lost to memory. If he got to choose his own epitaph, it would be from Book Two, lines 822-828, in which his altar ego describes his new mission:

  I come no enemie, but to set free

  From out this dark and dismal house of pain,

  Both him and thee, and all the heav'nly Host

  Of Spirits that in our just pretenses arm'd

  Fell with us from on high: from them I go

  This uncouth errand sole, and one for all

  My self expose.

  Geistmann felt himself blush with pleasure. What a day this would be!

  Just before dusk, he broke into the famous Rotunda at the University of Virginia. Pulling a chair over to the center window of the dome room on the top floor, the third, he sat in silence. He knew, of course, the guards’ schedule of rounds and the locations of the cameras and laser trajectories. The window faced south, looking down the lawn of the “Academical Village.” The first official visitor to the still-unfinished Rotunda had been the Marquis de Lafayette.

  Geistmann tried to see the campus as Jefferson had seen it, when in June 1826, shortly before his death, he, too, had spent an hour sitting before this window. Geistmann was even dressed like his hero –or a reasonable modern facsimile. His hair was down, unadorned, and the dye had been removed. He also wore a modern gray lightweight wool suit and neither makeup nor any other facial disguise. As a precaution, however, he had entered the building masked by a black balaclava, which he now carried in a jacket pocket.

  What must the old man have felt as he gazed down upon what he had wrought: pride, exhaustion, anxiety, perhaps even some kind of closure? A fellow unbeliever, Geistmann often wondered what he would feel when death stared him in the face –when, finally, he knew there could be no further extrications. Calm, stoic acceptance, he imagined Jefferson having felt, and he hoped he would be capable of the same.

  Looking south, he tried to see what Jefferson had seen, the long lawn cupped by the pavilions with their arcades and colonnades, and on out into open space, with the blue mountains in the distance. To Jefferson, this view had symbolized freedom. That the view was now cut off by pollution and by several buildings at the bottom of what had come to be called the “central grounds” symbolized something very different to Geistmann. But he had come here today not in fury, but in reverence.

  After about an hour, he looked at his watch, slowly got up, put the balaclava back on, and retraced his steps through the building, again making use of his detailed security information. Momentarily pausing at the last camera before the unalarmed window, he mouthed two words. By now, the sky had turned to that crepuscular blue-black color without a name, which he so loved.

  Hopping from the window like a bird, he meandered over to the gardens and strolled from one to the next, following the lovely serpentine design of the low brick walls. As he wandered, in his mind’s ear, he waxed rhapsodic about these walls, which even now reflected so much light. He also marveled –with mixed feelings-- at the way a stranger could just walk from garden to garden.

  “They really ought to get serious about security,” he thought. “I mean, all those little ‘hidden’ cameras!”

  In a particularly isolated spot, he used a penknife to dig a tiny chink from the mortar between two bricks, silently praying for forgiveness for this act of petty desecration. He then inserted a single-word message on a slip of paper. That, plus the image they would see on the glider Tuesday morning, should be sufficient meat for Arnold’s hounds.

  Monday, March 24, 2008 & Tuesday, March 25, 2008. Shenandoah National Park, Virginia.

  Just after ten p.m., “Martin Meade” rolled into the parking lot of the Blue Ridge Lodge in Shenandoah National Park. A two-minute stretch under the bright stars rid him of his mild stiffness. The drive had been uneventful. Taking his time and stopping on the New Jersey Turnpike to urinate and, as Judy had liked to joke, “eat and get gas,” he had reached the Beltway at eight.

  While he waited on the check-in line, Robinson –Meade-- inventoried the huge lobby. It took about a minute to read the sad story of protracted decline: tattered carpets and couches, crumbling stones in the massive fireplace, and so on. The website of the sub-contractor for this park, a global conglomerate whose initial business had been laundering uniforms for hospitals and restaurants, had not exactly lied, it had just prettied things up. That was the way things went these days -and not just these days, of course. He could have been Cicero lamenting the decline of the Republic. He could also practically hear Geistmann ranting: “And what are those dollars used for now? Corporate welfare? Grease for the war machine?” He imagined him spitting out the words in English, with an almost-French inflection.

  Five more minutes passed. Robinson had just moved into second place on line when he sensed someone at his right shoulder. For a few moments, this someone neither cleared his throat, nor touched him, or did anything else to announce his presence. Yet Robinson sensed that his space had been entered.

  “Hey, Marty!” the intruder finally said, smiling and extending a calloused hand. “Great to see you again, buddy!” In addition to blue jeans and running shoes, although the night was cold and damp, the man wore a thin black windbreaker half-zipped over a green t-shirt and a black baseball cap, no logo.

  “Hello there, Rocker. Good to see you, too. How long has it been, four, five years? You haven’t changed much. You still look terrific.” The last part was true: the man looked exceptionally fit.

  “You, too, buddy.”

  “When did you get in?”

  The next day, John Rocker and John Robinson were having breakfast, or waiting for it, in the Lodge’s dining room, which was located to the right of the lobby. The rooms and cabins were all to the right of the main building, and the reception desk was at the left end of the lobby. Outside the exit behind the desk sat the parking lot. Behind the main building were the woods, crisscrossed with trails. Rocker, who did not make small talk, was apparently immersed in a Patrick White sea adventure. Both me
n were suitably decked out in worn jeans, flannel shirts, and boots, but Rocker’s boots had more gravitas.

  Awakened at six-thirty by his little traveling alarm clock, Robinson had crossed to the picture window, opened the curtains, and been surprised to see about four inches of snow on the railing of the deck. After a shower and some stretches, he was reconciled to the idea that the coming day would most likely prove uneventful. Since Easter had passed without incident, Geistmann would presumably wait until April Fools Day to carry out whatever he had in mind. So Robinson and Rocker were only there “just in case.” How many other agents lurked in the woods surrounding the Lodge? The F.B.I. was famous for thoroughness. When things went wrong, they were notorious for missing the forest for the trees.

  At eight o’clock, half an hour after breakfast service had begun, the capacious dining room was about half full. The huge picture windows looked out over the escarpment, showcasing the same Pisgah view Robinson had seen from his room. Waiting for his food, he returned to his lament over the decline of the national parks. Back in their graduate school days, when he and Judy had been intrepid campers, the parks had been run by the Park Service, not by venial subcontractors. When you drove the excellent roads into and out of the parks, you would not spot clear cuts behind transparent curtains of trees. Nor did your car bounce in and out of potholes. “Market Forces.”

  Ten more minutes passed, and their food still refused to emerge from the kitchen, which was to the right of the dining room. Once or twice, Rocker looked up from his book, scanned the room, frowned, and shook his head, as if he were getting annoyed.

  The idea of Geistmann kept slipping into unreality. Maybe, JOLETAF had failed to catch him for a decade because no one believed in him. Robinson began to play an idle game: Geistmann-Spotting. The premise was that almost anyone he had seen at the Lodge was a possibility. He knew, in other words, that he was as likely to see and recognize Geistmann in the big dining room as he would have been to spot a Pterodactyl or Saltoposuchus.

  Most of the tables were two-or-four seat-ers, wrapped around the windows, which spanned 270 degrees –the view. At these tables sat several pairs of young lovers, possibly even a honeymoon tandem or two; and somewhat more numerous older, more affluent-looking couples and foursomes. Robinson and his minder belonged to a third group, which comprised about fifteen single-sex couples, trios and quartets, more female than male, a few of them possibly gay.

  In the middle of the room were twenty or thirty larger tables, to which the families had been consigned. The Lodge was apparently a magnet for big, corn flake-box families. In many cases, every family member sported very blond hair, rare in the over-five gene pool of New York City. He wondered what color Geistmann’s (real) hair was. Red, he stupidly imagined.

  The extremely long wait was no mystery. The management had blatantly skimped on what had to be their largest expense: staff. While she had been making them wait ten minutes to be seated, the flustered hostess had provided the reason, or pretext, for the delay. Dressed as a semi-peasant, she was one of those large, ruddy-faced women often described as “blowzy.”

  “I’m sorry, gents,” she said, in the conspicuous Virginia Piedmont dialect, flicking one of the big leatherette menus with a crimson fingernail. “We just don’t have staff to service the room. Since Easter came so early this year, they didn’t think they’d need to hire so many people.”

  When they had been waiting a full half hour, Rocker finally broke his silence. ”Un-fucking-believable!!” he spat. “This place is true-blue Fed, must be the only goddamned hotel in the whole goddamned country without any fucking illegals!” He went back to his novel.

  What staff there was, about a half dozen, was a motley assortment. There were two rawboned men and one frowsy woman who looked as if they had come straight from rehab. They fumbled with their order pads and carried whatever food emerged from the kitchen in blatantly inefficient ways. There was only one serious pro, a slim, tidy, self-contained looking woman who Robinson thought might be Nicaraguan or Costa Rican. She had been assigned several of the family tables. Robinson admired the way she took the complex orders, serviced the refills for multiple beverages, then eventually brought out and distributed the abundant food, all without a false move.

  “Green card,” Rocker pronounced.

  The last two waitpersons, a man and woman, demonstrated compliance with Federal anti-discrimination laws: both were handicapped. The man, who had a serious limp, was sadistically stationed farthest from the kitchen, so that each trip became a Special Olympics marathon.

  The final server was the one who had fallen to Robinson and Rocker’s lot: a big, hard-bitten woman with chopped black hair and bright green hearing aids in both ears. She also had a severe speech impediment, and she supplemented the hearing aids with obvious lip reading.

  Their orders, taken ten minutes into the waiting period, had been in character: a three-egg-white omelet for the fastidious intellectual; the Blue Plate Cholesterol Special, including the renowned local ham, for the buff outdoorsman. There were no visible bus boys, and, after the initial dose, the waitperson had not re-filled their coffee cups.

  By the time they had reached the forty-minute mark, Robinson was light-headed. For the twentieth time, he re-played the fax from the New York State Police Department. When the corpse had been discovered, and the murder reported, they had immediately issued an all-points alert, with a two-hundred square mile radius, the center of which was State Thruway H.Q. at Hudson, NY, approximately midway between Glens Falls and New York City. But the searchers had come up empty. This was no surprise, given that Geistmann was an assiduous transportation shifter. He had driven from Glens Falls to Blue Mountain Lake, and then ... whatever vehicle he had wound up driving was probably sitting, completely stripped, in an obscure alley in one of the poorer neighborhoods of New York City. Maybe, it was right in front of Robinson’s building.

  By the time their food came –-miraculously, it was hot and tasty— almost an hour had elapsed. About a dozen other parties had finished their meals, signed their chits, and been replaced by a dozen new parties. Halfway through their speed eating, Robinson drew what he would remember as his first useful inference in the eleven-plus hours he had now spent at the Lodge. He finished chewing what was in his mouth.

  “Assuming he’s here, he’s not a guest, Rocker, he’s staff. I’m sure of it.”

  Rocker looked at him in a way that suggested he was not raising his eyebrows. With no other indication of interest, he returned to his food, and they resumed eating in silence, finishing in about three minutes, which turned out to be fortunate –and not.

  For, as they were beginning to strategize ways to obtain the chit quickly and get out of there, there was an enormous explosion. It sounded as if it came from just beyond the wall at the kitchen end of the dining room. The solid building trembled, glassware tinkled, people screamed, and, almost immediately, a plume of black smoke drifted slowly across the wide expanse of the picture windows. Even before the echo had subsided and the smoke had appeared, Rocker, abandoning Patrick White, was on his feet slaloming across the room between the tables.

  ““Buzz me if anyone leaves!” he shouted.

  GEISTMANN, Episode Seven.

  Tuesday, March 25th, 2008. Shenandoah National Park; Luray, Sperryville, and Richmond, Virginia.

  Before Robinson could react, Rocker was past the hostess’ desk. He took the three steps with a quick hop. Without getting up, Robinson did as he had been told: he watched. Everyone, of course, looked startled. Parents were comforting those children who were upset, and shushing those who were amused or delighted. The old couple was still at the table to his left, the woman hurriedly bringing from her big purse a small plastic pill container, and tapping into the man’s hand what must have been a nitroglycerin tablet. Her pale husband, whose water glass was fortunately half-full, swallowed the pill, his Adam’s apple bobbing twice.

  Then, a large man clutching a two-way radio and wearing a d
ark suit, a buzz cut, and a conspicuous little white button in his ear with a cord disappearing down the back of the suit jacket, dramatically appeared at the entrance to the room, He was followed by the distraught hostess, still clutching a big menu.

  “Please stay where you are, folks,” he announced. “You’re safest here.” How did he know that? But the fifty or so diners all complied. Robinson kept on watching.

  The efficient Latina stood beside the kitchen door at the end of the room where the explosion had sounded. Her fist was pressed to her mouth, and a similar-looking young man in white dishwasher togs was speaking to her excitedly. The three servers from rehab, who had been joined by the man with the limp, looked on in silence from the side of the room across from the windows. And their hearing-impaired wait ... was gone! Robinson groped for his own small radio.