Geistmann

by Singer, Ron

The priest arrived, and they both took Communion and returned to their seats, which were on opposite sides of the church. The ceremony proceeded for another thirty minutes, after which Robinson was unable to reach Aunt Sadie in the lobby before a long, slow line had formed, on which he vaguely recognized several other relatives. Luckily, however, he was able to make eye contact with Sadie. He blew her a kiss, ostentatiously tapped his watch, ducked out a side door, and caught a cab back to the station.

  In the cab and then in the Washington-bound train, he had an exciting new idea about what he would do in the event that he ever actually had to sojourn in Yerevan. Instead of the incunabula, he would study an early 20th-century Armenian poet and feminist he liked, Shushanik Kurghinian. He anticipated that this research might cast some interesting light on Tolstoy, who was writing Hadji Murad around the same time Kurghinian was hiding from the Czarist authorities in the same area, Rostov on Don. He also remembered that, when the Bolsheviks came to power, Kurghinian had returned to Soviet Armenia, where she was one of the leading lights in both the Socialist and feminist poetry movements. Tolstoy had been a shared youthful passion with Judy, During their halcyon student days, every night for several months, she had read chapters aloud to him in bed from Anna Karenina.

  A fake Fulbright in Yerevan! The lies that seemed to be taking over his life were starting to bother him. Robinson had always proudly worn a single face. Among his post-medieval culture heroes was Jean Latour, the eponymous 19th-century missionary priest in a favorite modern novel, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. In the novel, Latour’s Navajo servant, Jacinto, observes that, whomever he is talking with, his master never changes faces.

  Just north of Baltimore, the penny dropped. The bald executive’s eyes had “riveted” into his. Ed Hartley, Edgar Hoover, Ed-Ted. Geistmann had tendered a personal goodbye before leaving the country. Was this his belated April Fools joke, or was it some kind of final warning?

  Robinson immediately phoned Scott Peters, described “Hartley,” and told Peters what had happened. Peters said he’d get SWAT teams right out to JFK, Newark, LaGuardia, and all the small local airports, including the seaplane bases. But he sounded as if he knew that, once again, even with the mole, Peter, gone, they would be too late.

  After he had put the phone back in the left side pocket of his jacket, Robinson killed some time by emptying the inside pockets onto the seat beside him. Checking the contents, he found a small slip of paper. He read the fourteen-point bold face message:

  A Navajo Prayer (for John)

  Walk on a rainbow trail, walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty.

  There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.

  He knew the prayer was also a proverb. Then, he realized with alarm that the prayer/proverb had been substituted for Weatherbee’s contact list. Taking a few moments to recover, he put the slip of paper into a zip-lock bag that happened to be in the same pocket, most likely left over from some forgotten snack. He waited to calm down, then called Peters again and told him about the substitution. A courier would meet him on the platform at Union Station to take charge of the zip-lock bag.

  As the train inched through Washington’s northern suburbs, he called Mauro Baltazar, whose number he also remembered from the list. Disappointingly, he got a machine, which he told about the slip of paper. Lost in thought, not seeing any of what was flashing past the window, he proceeded to Washington without further incident. The courier, a young female suit with a severe haircut, was waiting. Recognizing Robinson, she showed him her credentials and took charge of the bag.

  By 10:30, he was back in his room. There was only one new email, Baltazar’s reply to his phone message:

  John,

  Sorry about your encounter. We’re about to lift prints from the “prayer” --well done. Odds are, though, these will be fakes, as usual, what we call “gummy bears.” If you don’t know already, I’ll explain the term when we talk, which I hope will be soon.

  Cheers, Mauro

  That reminded him of something on his “to do” list. He googled youth winners of European squash tournaments between 1980 and 1990, and scrolled for Geistmann possibles. But the records were spotty, and what he did find was about what he had expected: lots of Brits and their erstwhile colonial minions. Could Geistmann be a Brit --a Scot, say? No, he was something French.

  Monday, April 7 – Tuesday, April 8. Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.

  He realized that the contact in the church had been silly, but he had enjoyed feeling the man’s grip. It was not bad, a smallish palm, but broad, fairly strong, longish fingers. The contact had been Piet’s idea --sort of. Piet had leapfrogged, so to speak, onto Geistmann’s own initiative with the photo and the rubber frog.

  Now, as the plane began to climb through the night sky above the Atlantic, he could feel the time zone changing. By tiny degrees, he would slip backwards. He would arrive in Chisinau twenty-four hours, by the clock, after leaving New York, but only seventeen hours would actually have elapsed. With everything else he would be facing, he did not need time disorientation, so he adjusted his internal clock to move ahead twenty-four minutes and twenty seconds per hour. Was he frightened? He was never frightened, but, more urgently than he could remember since Toularelle, one part of his brain was telling him he should be frightened. He was on his way back to Moldova, perhaps even to Tiraspol. But, as dangerous as this prospect was, he was able to think with his usual glacial clarity.

  He had asked why they had encouraged him to make the contact in the church. “The personal touch,” Piet quipped, with his usual schoolboy smugness. “He already likes you. If they do catch you, God forbid, he may be able to help.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, he’ll get the FBI to save you from the Moldovans.”

  That, presumably, was a joke. When Geistmann asked further questions, he had been put off by more baragouin-enorme [mumbo jumbo]. Substituting the document at the Communion altar was supposedly meant to be double-edged, another threat, but softened by good wishes. The Navajo saying had been the Ukrainian cop’s idea. Geistmann could not always follow the Byzantine logic of his helpers. He had scared Robinson with the frog and photograph to make him a less efficient pursuer –and for fun. But the others had been the ones who had brought Robinson into the chase, in the first place, so why did they now want him, Geistmann, both to frighten and to please the man? What was he, Geistmann, supposed to do, repel and entice, entice and repel, like a coy lycee’ girl? Oh, they were such brilliant psychologists! Yet he had enjoyed his personal contact with the clever librarian, which he hoped might somehow turn out to be the prelude to better acquaintance.

  He wondered if Robinson played at any sport. Geistmann liked toying with people, but not during competitive sports. That whole stupid business at school had been caused by a classmate’s failure to grasp this point. They had been on the football pitch, and the other boy, a very adroit, swift attacker, had dribbled past him twice. The second time, as Geistmann momentarily lost his footing, the fool had laughed, presumably thinking his antagonist would take it in good “sport.” Geistmann had recovered from the feint, sped after the boy, and on the pretext of stealing the ball from behind, administered a direct, ferocious kick that snapped the boy’s right hamstring. He was right-footed –had been right-footed.

  The only problem was that no one really believed the maiming had been accidental. The school authorities put him on “social probation” for a month. Well, that was a slap on the wrist, but later, when Toularelle brought up the incident during the fatal (to Toularelle) interview, Geistmann realized the authorities had apparently neither forgotten nor forgiven. At that precise juncture, he had felt his chances of making ENA dissolve into the smoke-filled air of the interview room. Later, of course, he had learned the real reason. And Toularelle had paid the real price.

  By now, that FBI scientist, Baltazar, would be drooling over the new fingerprints. This time, he had to admit, Piet had
been droll. The Agency’s biometric equipment would spot the gummy-bears on the document in two seconds, but Baltazar’s heart rate would already have accelerated. By now, he would also presumably have realized that the new prints came from a different “hand” than the ones he had “worn” in Arizona. It was a good joke to play on those proud technocrats.

  Tuesday, April 8, 3 p.m. (Bucharest time)

  As the plane touched down on the smooth asphalt runway at Bucharest’s Henru Coanda airport (which had been “Otopeni,” in 1999), Geistmann once again realized that risk-taking was both a great asset and a great liability. At least as far back as adolescence, he had vibrated to the pleasures of life on the edge. This time, however, he knew he should be afraid of falling off completely, perhaps permanently. They would catch him now. It was that simple. And then?

  The Moldovan thugs were using a powerful old trap that had been sprung, in this day and age, via email. Having already read Elica’s message, in Russian, twice since it had arrived two days before, as he pushed his way past the other passengers and through the door out the front of the plane, he remembered every word of it:

  [“My Darling A,

  This afternoon, only two hours ago, outside the school, they shot Alexandru through both knees and took our Iosub. Alexandru is in hospital, where they say he will live, but will never again walk unassisted. An hour later, an hour ago, those heartless bastards sent me a message wrapped around a small box. When I opened it, I discovered that it contained the end joint from the boy’s left little finger. Every twelve hours, they said, I should expect another joint, each time a more important one. And when he has no more fingers or toes … those heartless, dirty, fucking, monster bastards! Unless you meet them --that’s their condition. There was also a terrible joke: they warned me not to alert the police. They said you should come here, to my office, and await further instructions. I don’t know what to say, A., my love. I’m dying of fear. I replied to their message, begging them to leave the boy alone, and promising you would come right away. Forgive me, dearest, if I have done wrong.

  Your,

  Elica.”]

  Geistmann did not even smile at the irony that “Alexandru” meant “defender of mankind” in Romanian. Carrying only the backpack with a change of clothes, he sauntered through the terminal to the bar, where Piet would be waiting. The connecting TAROM flight to Chisinau was not for three hours, but there was elaborate planning to be done, and they would also, presumably, eat something. As he passed a newspaper kiosk, he spotted the local FBI man, an American, pretending to read a Romanian magazine.

  “Cum esti tu, astazi, tampitule?” he asked, with a smile. [How are you today, Asshole?]

  “Bine, multumesc,” the fool smiled back. [Fine, thanks.] As per instructions, contact had been established.

  “Mea est vindicta,” he told himself as he moved ahead, but for once, the magic words rang hollow. As often as he had made this vow –and he had kept it every time—it now felt dull and trite. Then, he laughed so loud that the scrum of people hurrying through the terminal parted before him. He had realized that they were now the ones who might be saying, Mea est vindicta. Or perhaps, after ten years, they would be saying, “Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.” (Wasn’t it the admirable Bismarck who had coined this saying? Or was he, too, only quoting?) As he slalomed along the corridor, Geistmann, as usual, felt nothing.

  Tuesday, April 8, ten-twenty p.m. (Washington time)

  His back to the window, Robinson stood in the middle of the room on Prospect Street. Then, he began to get ready for bed –to get into bed, that is, since he knew that, after the idle, anxious day of waiting and wandering around the neighborhood, sleep was a distant prospect. When he had brushed his teeth, he checked his phone again –nothing—then made his last email check of the day. As he was hoping, there was a new message from Peters:

  Caveat emptor, John. F.G. died in a car crash in 1973 just outside Neuilly. We are checking names of classmates, etc. As you predicted yesterday morning, G. confirmed in Chisinau. But DF told you at least one other lie: he (DF) wasn’t going anywhere Sunday night: the last flight to Bucharest was at 10:25. Not the shuttle to JFK, either –last flight from there to Bucharest was at 11. He must have holed up somewhere and planned to leave yesterday, so we’ll try to find tracks from Reagan or Union Station, and hope they also lead us to Subject. But since we’ve probably missed DF already, or if he drove somewhere first, then flew, we’ll have Bucharest meet him. If he gets past Bucharest, he’ll take their airline, Tarom, into Chisinau, and we’ll pick up the trail there. (We operate out of the embassies in both cities.) This is big, John, well done. SP

  That gave him a lot to think about, two hours worth, as it turned out. Note: SP is careful, even in his “secure” emails. Yes, with the FBI hot on his trail, Fedoruk was probably on his way to join Peter/Piet, his fellow mole, in Moldova. (“Two blind moles, three …”) But why was Fedoruk going to Chisinau? Because, as he said, Peter could now blackmail him? Are P. and F. going to Moldova to help G. or to kill him?

  What about the rest of the “facts” F. had “divulged”? Did he know that “Garzon” was not Geistmann’s real identity? He must. Why did he tell that particular lie? Could he have thought the FBI had already discovered –unearthed—Garzon, or that they were about to? Was the revised account of the Donduceni murder true? Probably: what purpose would a new fabrication serve? Was Weatherbee really not part of G’s support system? Maybe, or maybe not. A lie on that score would keep open the possibility that Robinson would inadvertently keep feeding W. information as it became available.

  In Charlottesville, F. had warned R. that W. was very clever, but Sunday night he had dismissed him as a mediocrity. Even if there were no contradiction, mediocrity was a good cloak for duplicity. Robinson concluded that he should reply to SP’s email immediately, asking what to do if W. contacted him again. For instance, if W. were to email him asking for “an update,” would SP want AW to know that F’s lie that G. was FG –if it really was a lie, and not F’s own ignorance-- had already been smoked out? And, while he was at it, he would ask P. to clarify his, R’s, itinerary.

  He returned to the desk, emailed SP with the questions, and got an instantaneous reply:

  Be ready to go early Thursday morning, John. And, again, good point. Forward any AW emails to me, and we’ll send him replies that seem to come from you. If he calls again, play dumb.

  Unable to think of anything else he should be doing, Robinson got into bed, where he spun the information around and around, inanely hoping that everything might be sorted out in the near future. At about one-thirty, he began to feel drowsy. As soon as he had set the alarm and started his little mental exercises, he was gone.

  Episode 17

  Thursday, April 10, 2008 (ten a.m. (Chisinau time)

  As anticipated, they were waiting in Elica’s office, the Centrul de prevenire a traficului de femei, at B-dul Stefan cel Mare 142. This was where it had all begun, almost a decade ago. Unarmed, he climbed the steep wooden stairs, rapped twice on the opaque glass door, then strode right in, with his hands high above his head. “He came like a lamb to the slaughter,” he sang to himself.

  He was no longer wearing the backpack, which he had abandoned, stuffed with his discarded clothing, in a locker at the central bus station on Str. Ismail, where Bus 65 from the airport had left him the previous evening, fourteen hours ago. He had even visited an ATM, so that he would be carrying some local currency for them to steal. Who could tell, it might soothe the savage beasts for a moment or two. In the small room up an unnamed alley off Str. Bulgara that Piet had procured, he had showered, mentally rehearsed the plan, then spent the night in untroubled sleep. Waking automatically at six, he had shaved, showered again, and dressed again in the clothes he had put on in the Men’s room at the airport. Then, sitting on the bed, he had eaten the light breakfast Piet had left for him on the bureau, on a nice old green plate under a paper napkin: fruit, bread, and cold black coffee --l
ess to vomit up, or otherwise excrete, later. After using the toilet in the hall and brushing his teeth, still having some time to “kill,” he had wandered through the winding, run-down streets on the western side of the city, until he reached Str. Cosmonautilor, the location of one of the city’s two Jewish memorials. This one was dedicated to ”the murdered population of the ghetto.”

  The first time he was in Chisinau, he had not done any sightseeing. This time, from a guidebook and websites, he had chosen the Cosmonautilor memorial for two reasons. First, in this “nation,” with its more than seven centuries of constant wars, invasions, betrayals, genocides, local massacres, ethnic and religious strife, “resettlement” of populations, redrawing of borders, and forced political marriages and divorces, the Jews had been perhaps the purest victims. Certainly, he would not have chosen to visit a Soviet memorial. Second, this was the only site he could reach on foot without having to pass through the central city. He did not want to be taken on the street before he had had a chance to see Elica and, he hoped, his son.

  For over an hour, he stood on the gravel path beside the small, un-weeded memorial, gazing in turn at the modernistic figure of what might have been a grieving mother, and an also-modernistic, inscribed anvil, which was split in half so that it looked like two faces standing nose to nose, either arguing or about to bite each other. The few passersby took no overt notice of him, and he knew they must think he was a Jew.