Geistmann

by Singer, Ron

  To his knowledge, he had never killed a Jew. Although there were plenty of thieving bastards among their ranks, both legal and illegal, the pages of history were already sticky with Jewish blood, so he would not add –what was it, four or five liters?-- no, not even the blood of Jewish evildoers.

  After a while, it was time to go to the office. As promised, he arrived precisely at ten. When he opened the door, poor Elica was at her desk, sobbing and wringing her hands, an aghast expression on her face. Without a word, five burly thugs, all wearing the airline-pilot uniforms of the metropolitan police, swarmed over him. Of course, there was no way of telling whether these were official thugs or gangsters in costume, but what difference did it make? He did not resist, and in a moment they had him on the floor, hands cuffed behind him. He was glad he had had the foresight not to wear his good clothes. Instead, he had on running shoes, an old pair of navy blue worker’s pants, and a work shirt, also worn, also dark blue. He had even anticipated that these garments would absorb the blood fairly well, at least until it really started to flow. But the thugs did not hit him yet.

  “Ei bine, sa convoace pentru ca baiatul sa fie eliberata,” he said matter-of-factly in Romanian, which he knew to be virtually the same as Moldovan. [“Let her telephone for the boy to be released.”] The chief thug, the one who was obviously in charge, laughed, then signaled to an under-thug, who walked behind the desk to a supply closet, opened the door, and pulled out the pale, weeping boy, whose damaged finger had been bandaged. Elica did not seem surprised, but she looked at their son with relief and then, with anguish, at Geistmann.

  “Never mind, my love,” he said, in English now, “you did what you had to. Now I’ll do …” He shrugged. “…the same.” Without a word, they hooded him and hustled him from the office, down the stairs, and into the waiting Panda. If they saw the tall, slender, tow-headed man apparently window-shopping in the shadows across the wide street, they gave no indication. The crowd of real shoppers and other pedestrians walking past in the mid-morning sun knew better than to react to what was going on.

  As Geistmann had anticipated, it was a very short drive to the prison. He felt the Panda turn right on Ismail, then shoot west. Thirty seconds later, they were there. The prison was conveniently located, only a stone’s throw from the Memorial cemetery, with its eternal flame to the Soviet heroes of World War Two. If he were unlucky, soon it might burn for a different kind of heroic martyr.

  Wednesday, April 9, 2008. (9 p.m. (Washington time)

  Robinson caught his phone on the first ring. It was Mauro Baltazar.

  “Okay, John, I confess, I’ve been holding out on you. We have DNA.”

  “Really!”

  “Just one sample, from the first murder, when he was still a beginner. We took it off the bands he used to secure Donduceni to the table. He must have scraped his hands. Amazingly, no gloves. No prints, but … do you know anything about DNA forensics?”

  “Just what I’ve read in the papers, the thirteen loci, that stuff.”

  “We got eleven. Ten is the Agency’s minimum standard –a high standard. We don’t have DNA from any of his other crimes, but we’ve started working on the rope, shovel, baling wire, and some of the other stuff from the Billings murder. At this stage, we’re thinking in terms of evidence for a trial, if –when—we catch him. Not that evidence will be much of a problem, with all those ridiculous signed confessions.”

  “So Peter didn’t destroy all the evidence?”

  “This stuff, he couldn’t get his grubby paws on, apparently. Speaking of which, Scott authorized me to show you something else. Check your mail now.”

  On the already open laptop, Robinson found a message that had just been sent by Baltazar. In a jpg attachment were two drawings, front and side color pencil sketches of a man who looked something like Ed Hartley, but with vaguely aquiline features and shoulder-length, iron gray hair. The sketches looked nothing like an old Navajo woman, an old New York shopper, or a hearing-impaired waitperson. They looked like Geistmann –or, at least, like the man Robinson had come to imagine, even to the thousand-yard stare.

  “So that’s what he looks like.”

  “Pretty much. Of course, they’re just composites, head shape and width from the Rotunda video, back of the head from Shenandoah, plus descriptions from two prostitutes, Montreal and Albuquerque. Our best source is the second, actually, not the Montreal one, because, at the bus station, he was all bundled up in warm weather gear. The second woman was someone he apparently stayed with the night before he killed Billings. You’ll excuse me, John, but if it would do any good, from what this woman told us, we could draw a 100% accurate sketch of his penis, his dick. She was amazed at what our artist produced, said it was him, for sure. She also seemed surprised when we gave her an inkling of who –what—he was. So …” At that moment, Robinson’s phone beeped. He had another call.

  “Sorry, Mauro, can I put you on hold? I know it’s bad manners to …”

  “Don’t worry, John, nowadays it’s bad manners not to have bad manners, it makes the rest of us look bad. Go ahead, answer it, it may be important.”

  Robinson shrugged and put the phone on speaker: Scott Peters.

  “John, ready to go to Moldova? Hi, Mauro.”

  “Scott. Whoa! Moldova?” said Baltazar.

  “Couple of hours?” suggested Robinson.

  “Do you need me to stay on the line?” asked Baltazar.

  “Not really,” Peters replied. Mauro said goodbye to both men and got off the line. “How about one-forty tomorrow afternoon, John, from Reagan to Bucharest. That’s the next plane. You’ll be in Chisinau by eight.”

  “Okay. Eight our time, or theirs? Oh, that’s dumb --theirs, of course. I can be ready.”

  “He was spotted yesterday afternoon at the airport in Bucharest, and again last night at the Chisinau airport. We followed him into town --he took the bus— then lost him. But we have an idea where he is now: in a deep, isolated cell at the Chisinau prison. We also received an intercept of an email exchange that suggested he was knowingly walking into a trap. It was the damnedest thing. We had no idea who the interceptor was –not us. We’ll need to extricate him before they kill him. That’s ‘extricate,’ not ‘extradite.’ Extradition would be too slow. That’s where you come in. If you … but I’ll give you the details later.” Robinson tried to process all this information. Peters paused for a moment, then raced on.

  ”Meanwhile, pack, expect about the same weather as here, but include a jacket and tie, if you have them. No, forget that, I’ll get you an official windbreaker to wear –we have your size, 38R, right? And one of our more obvious caps. Try to relax tonight, get some sleep. I’ll come for you in a car tomorrow at ten. We’ll brief you on the way to the airport and on the flight over. I’m going, too. Personally. And Fred Neugeborn will be flying with us.”

  “Huh.” Robinson felt as if he were in brain lock.

  “You’ll think of a lot of questions later, John, and if they can’t wait till tomorrow, call me back. I read your new profile, by the way, just a quick once-over. Brilliant, really good.” He paused for a moment. “Here’s the answer to one question that must be on your mind: why are we sending you to Chisinau?”

  “Yes. Why me?”

  “We’re going to send you into the prison first, before the rest of the team. You’ll be traveling as Martin Meade, and you’ll have a letter from Mike Dodrescu, our ambassador there, demanding that you be allowed to see the prisoner, for whose extradition the embassy lawyers are already filing paper, in the matter of the murders of two U.S. citizens, blah blah blah. Meanwhile, we’ll try to snatch him.”

  “But that doesn’t answer the question: why me?” “The question” seemed to have become a mantra.

  “Please don’t take this wrong, John. Because you’re unthreatening, and because you have a completely unofficial manner.” Peters waited a beat. “Frankly, you’re going to be the steer. We -the bulls- will be right behind you.” />
  Robinson remembered Fedoruk’s parting remark that he hoped Robinson would never have to meet “the bad guys.” Was this really about to happen?

  “Thanks,” Robinson said. “It’s okay, I’ll do it.” Then, before Peters could hang up, he had a new idea. “Scott? Hold on. I have a condition, a demand.”

  “Oh, dear, a demand! Okay, shoot.” He sounded amused.

  “I want you to give me some time alone with him before your guys come in. I think he’ll tell me things you might not find out after he’s in custody –your custody.”

  Peters thought for a moment. “Huh! That’s not a bad idea. Okay, yes, we can do that. But it’ll have to be quick, before they smell a rat. Say, thirty minutes, at most.”

  “Agreed. And years later, I’ll be able to tell my grandchildren about my big adventure, with its climax in a Chisinau dungeon.”

  “Unless, of course, he, uh … just kidding.”

  Two lines from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” popped into Robinson’s head:

  Fear at my heart, as at a cup

  My life-blood seemed to sip!”

  He told himself he wasn’t very frightened –yet.

  Friday, April 11, 2008, 8 a.m. (Chisinau time)

  Almost a full day after they had taken him, still hooded and wearing the workman’s clothes, Geistmann still knew the exact time. As he had stepped into the office, he had set his inner clock, and it now announced that it was 8 a.m. Friday. Twenty-two hours had passed since they had bound him with wire to a wooden straight chair in a large, chilly basement cell, also leaving the locked handcuffs on his wrists. His legs, they had left free, so he could more easily tip the chair if he were stupid enough to choose to increase his own discomfort. Laughing and promising to return very soon, they had slammed the iron door shut behind them.

  But they had not returned. No one had even come into the cell, or within hearing distance. No food, no water, no sound or light, and no means of decently relieving himself. So far he had managed, by putting his needs into shutdown mode. Perhaps, they were squabbling over the rights to him, or playing a marathon game of poker to determine who would get to make the first cut. More likely, they thought the waiting would produce in him the accelerating terror they knew they would themselves have been feeling in his position.

  As soon as they did start in, he realized, the massed choruses of his nerves would sing in full voice. He hoped his brain would know well enough neither to attend to the dies irae nor to cravenly pray for the miserere. On numerous occasions in the past, he had undergone great hardship and pain, but in every case he had kept an iron wall between his sensations and the consciousness of what was happening, on the one hand, and his feelings, on the other. He –the center of his consciousness-- had always remained unmoved, a dispassionate observer of his own sufferings and indignities. This time would be different in degree, but not, he hoped, in kind. Of course, if he were lucky … He slammed the door shut on that hope.

  Episode 18

  Wednesday, April 9, 2008, 1:40 p.m. (Washington time) - Thursday, April 10, 2008, 8 p.m. (Chisinau time)

  They flew Coach on commercial airlines for both the long and short legs of the trip, which made Robinson infer that either the mission was less urgent than he had been led to believe, or that these days even the FBI was forced to pinch pennies. From New York to Bucharest, besides the usual bad food, good drink, so-so movie, dead time, and futile attempts to nap, the long flight included a fascinating briefing, not by Peters, but by Fred Neugeborn. Since they occupied all three seats in a row that was beyond eavesdropping distance from the other passengers on the half-empty 747, Neugeborn spoke softly, but freely, while Peters, in the window seat, alternately dozed and worked away on his laptop.

  Although Robinson had last (and first) seen Neugeborn across the conference table in Charlottesville ten days ago, that meeting felt as if it had taken place during a previous existence. After they had exchanged a few pleasantries, Neugeborn cut to the chase, referring to copious notes from a file in his laptop, which was sitting on his tray table. All three men had plastic glasses of mineral water on their tables. Robinson worried that Neugeborn might knock his onto his keyboard.

  “Thanks to you, John, on Tuesday night we were able to set out on the trail of ‘Francois Garzon.’ There are at least three people we’ve been tracking, Peter, or Piet, whose full name is Piet-Marcus Dykstra; Fedoruk, whose real name is, well, Fedoruk; and …” Dr. Fred was not above pausing a moment for suspense…. “… and we’re pretty sure now, Monsieur Armande Amrouche, a.k.a. Francois Garzon, a.k.a. Geistmann. Many of the excellent points in the mini-dossier you sent Scott the other day fit perfectly with what we’ve learned so far about Monsieur Am…rouche. I keep wanting to call him ‘Armouche.’ “

  Robinson interrupted. “Why hadn’t the F.B.I. ever followed the Toularelle path before? Surely, you knew about it.”

  Neugeborn shrugged. “Not our bailiwick, John. Once the Surete’ dropped out of the Task Force, in late 2006, the investigation seems to have fallen into a black hole, thanks, presumably, to Mynheer Dykstra. It must have been relegated to their --the Surete‘s-- inactive file. Before our time, anyway. I mean there had been that prank with the developer in 2002, but NYPD never invited us in on that. They’re as territorial as we are. And JOLETAF? Ha!”

  He shrugged again. “So. Who is he? Well, he’s an Algerian whose parents migrated to France in 1965, about three years after Independence.” Neugeborn paused, scrolling through the file. “Sorry. We’ve learned quite a bit about him, I’ll have to tell it to you helter-skelter, the way it is in my notes. Armande, born in Marseilles, June 12, 1970, was the only child of a rich, older businessman and his beautiful young wife. Although the family was nominally Muslim, the boy was raised in the best tradition of French secular atheism. In fact, if you wanted to characterize his ideology as an adult, a murderous adult, you might even call him a Voltairiste, although not, of course, the kind who stoically tends his own garden.

  “From what we’ve gathered so far, Armande’s parents were stereotypical breeders of troubled offspring: the father, distant, always working, a perfectionist, probably more than a bit of a brute; the mother, recessive, much younger, very beautiful, probably chronically depressed, and unable to defend her dear boy from Papa’s rages.

  “As you guessed, John, perhaps spurred by fear of the parental lash, Armande grew up an exceptional student, superb athlete, and, initially, a true believer in la mission civilatrice. We even got hold of a prize-winning lycee’ essay he wrote on that tried-and-true topic. By the way, it was not the same lycee’ Garzon attended, a different one, in a different city, Toulouse. Their paths might have crossed –both athletes, for instance—but we haven’t pinned that down yet. Oh, in 1983, Geist …Amrouche won the under-fourteen French junior open squash championship.” (How had he missed this?) Neugeborn shook his head with an apologetic smile. “I really am sorry for this jumble, John. I’ve only just discovered a lot of the stuff, myself, within the last twenty-four hours.”

  “Don’t worry,” Robinson said. “By the way, since I’ve already interrupted, do you mind if I ask you a question about Professor Podgorny? Ever since I began getting involved in this business, he seems to have been my stealth mentor. I’ve read some of his stuff, very useful. Have you seen that review he wrote of the book on Chicano street gangs?”

  “Yeah, I read it, and the book too, both very interesting. ‘Deep Profiling.’ You can’t make the stuff up.!”

  “Last Friday, Arnold gave me contact information for every Task Force member and consultant except Podgorny. He said Podgorny had told him he was too busy to be bothered. So I looked him up, myself, in a faculty directory, and sent him an email. He replied –almost immediately-- but all he said was, ‘Sorry, no longer working for AW.’ Oh, and he made a stupid joke. What’s that about, Fred?”

  “Well, actually, I had the same idea you did, about a year ago. I thought I’d contact Podgorny to see if I could pick
his brain about Geistmann and, while I was at it, about a few other cases we -–the F.B.I.-- were working on, where we were also having trouble developing profiles. But I thought I’d run the idea past Arnold first, and he kept stalling. He finally explained that Podgorny had no security clearance, couldn’t be told anything, because they suspected he was ‘one of the few remaining unreconstructed Communist intellectuals of eastern and middle European origin.’ Something like that, anyway.”

  “Huh! Are you serious?”

  “Anyway…” Neugeborn sighed and got back to the story. “Amrouche pere emigrated for complicated reasons, mostly because it was becoming impossible to do business in Algeria. He ran a trading conglomerate between the Mahgreb and Europe, mainly France. Natural gas, phosphates, uranium, et cetera, in return for airplanes, munitions, wine, fancy cheese, designer shoes … you get the idea, family business, three generations. Another reason was the education of his boy –the unborn son he anticipated fathering. He wanted him to have a French education, and in the 1960’s the Algerian schools were already switching to Arabic. Amrouche pere was a planner, too.