Seven Silent Men

by Behn, Noel;

  Yates, while attending the FBI Academy during 1968, was almost as equal a person as there was. And then some. Academically no one else made the marks he did. Athletically, he had only one rival in the whole institution, Vance Daughter, who ranked second to him scholastically. Daughter was a member of Trask’s private seminar, the members of which had a keen dislike for anyone in Amory’s seminar. Yates was the star in the tiara of Amory’s seminar, a group whose feelings toward the Traskians brought new dimensions to the word loathing.

  The two seminars, in the time Yates was at the academy, had both evolved into ultra-exclusive cliques, ones in which the subjects being taught were often secondary to the philosophy of the instructor. Trask’s penchant for uniformity and precision resulted in his selecting young men who were brainy, aristocratic and disciplined. His students’ belief and trust in him neared adoration if not fanaticism. Trask didn’t discourage such fervor and obedience. Nor did he discourage clannish isolation. The Traskians ate together at the same table in the academy dining room, studied together, weekended together … kept together whenever else possible.

  If Trask’s seminar students appeared religious in their approach, then those of Barrett Amory were definitely irreligious. Amory believed in individuality, picked as his yearly four candidates brainy loners and iconoclasts. Amory, unlike Trask, kept pretty much to the two subjects his seminar was supposed to explore … didn’t overly fraternize with his students, except for Billy Yates.

  Still, whatever else, when Yates was at the academy the three Traskian seminar students were gentlemen and polite. Southern gentlemen. Regardless of their feelings, they at least treated Yates with outer politeness. Billy did not always return the favor. He good-naturedly taunted them with his Judaic origin. No one at the academy mentioned the word Jew out loud except Billy Yates. Yates was distinctly unreligious, quite ignorant of his people’s history and ritual, but on the Jewish New Year, Daughter and each of the other Traskians had received a commemorative card from Yates in Hebrew, a language Billy didn’t understand a word of. In the gymnasium, with boxing gloves on, Yates and Daughter had at one another in a war that needed no language to comprehend.

  Yates, with Barrett Amory, was forever the acolyte. He respected everything about Barrett. Because of Barrett he even grew tolerant of Patricia, though she did not reciprocate. Barrett took to Yates. Was proud of him. They spent hours alone talking, very often to the displeasure of Patricia.

  … It had been two years now since pupil and teacher had seen one another as seventy-five-year-old Barrett entered the side room.

  “You look hale, young Yates, hale indeed.” The old man never shook hands, only slapped people on the shoulder. He slapped Yates. “Where they have you these days?”

  “Prairie Port, Missouri.”

  “Ed Grafton country.”

  “He’s not there any more.”

  “Grafton not at Prairie Port?”

  “He was replaced over the Mormon State robbery investigation, or at least that’s how I see it.”

  “… Yes, seem to remember hearing something about that,” Amory recalled. “Probably better he’s gone. He did his time. We all do our time. See the Lady Pat?”

  “When I came in.”

  “She doesn’t like you, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Come along and eat. Whatever you have to say, you’ll say over supper and wine. Come, come.”

  As they were crossing the marble foyer, Amory asked, “How’s that religion of yours doing?”

  “What a weird question!”

  “You have weird habits. Joining the FBI was one of them. Still doesn’t give you leave to use that religion like a cultural cap pistol when it suits you. Have us reaching for the sky one moment. Next moment you forget Jehovah ever was and ask us why our hands are up. Unbecoming trait for a fellow with your stuff. Hear you got married.”

  “Yes.”

  “Against sending announcements, are you?”

  “I apologize.”

  “I would have liked an announcement. It was the least you could do.”

  The beams and wood paneling of the dining hall had come from a medieval Flemish church. The leaded windows faced out on a private lake. A banquet table ran parallel to the windows and was set with three places, two of which were taken by Yates and Amory.

  “Doubtful Lady Pat will join us.” Amory indicated the empty chair to his right and the setting before it. “Heard about her troubles, have you?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. She’s happy where she is. Gets to visit a lot of old friends, size up the territory.”

  A waiter appeared, placed a bowl of asparagus soup in front of Yates, then another in front of Amory.

  “What’s on your mind, young Yates?”

  “First, tell me about you.”

  “Nothing to tell,” Amory said. “They disbanded the seminars the year after you left the academy, which was fine with me. Had enough work to do over at Johns Hopkins. Needed to get to the book I’m on too. Still keep an office at the academy and help out on curriculum problems from time to time.”

  “What’s the book you’re writing?”

  “Some sort of history.”

  “Nothing more specific?”

  “The Punic Wars. I’ve returned to the Punic Wars. Always wanted to. Probably discover Lady Pat poking about one of the battlefields. Now to you, Billy Yates. You’ve come for a reason.”

  Billy moved aside the soup. “Have you been following the Mormon State investigation?”

  “Matters like that don’t interest me now.”

  “But you’re aware of it.”

  “More aware than unaware. Can’t avoid the ruddy thing.”

  “Does Mormon State remind you of any other FBI investigation?”

  “Not that I recall. Of course, the memory isn’t what it once was.”

  “It was a case you described in this very room.”

  “I did?”

  “One evening when I was at the academy,” Yates began, “you had four of us to dinner here. Four of us from your seminar. It was just before Christmas. The Christmas tree was up, over there. We sat at this table, and your wife was with us. So were two instructors from the academy and a friend of yours from Europe. After dinner we stayed at the table and several simultaneous discussions began. I was listening to one discussion at my end of the table but overheard parts of yours. You were at the other end of the table talking about a San Francisco bank robbery that had been perpetrated in a spectacular fashion. There was confusion over how the robbers had both perpetrated the crime and made their escape. They had made their getaway by boat through tunnels nobody knew existed. Do you remember that?”

  Amory concentrated. “No.”

  Yates said, “The aspect being emphasized by you was the spectacular method of perpetration. How spectacular it had been. Immediately after the theft there was confusion about how much money had been stolen. No one could come up with a correct count. The press exploited hell out of this. Varying figures were leaked or rumored until it was finally learned that a record amount of money was taken. Once this happened the media began calling the perpetrator the cream of the crime world.”

  “… Sounds like Brink’s to me,” Amory said. “Brink’s in Boston back in the fifties. Masked bandits walked into a money room and held up the cashiers and vanished with millions—”

  “Brink’s was an armed robbery, a group of men marching in and taking money at gunpoint,” Yates said. “San Francisco was a theft. A vault was burned through over a weekend. The perpetrators entered and escaped the premises through tunnels. Their timing in all of this had been superb.”

  Amory tried to recall, couldn’t … shook his head to indicate as much.

  “Perhaps I might assist you, Mister Yates?” Back arched and gown aswirl, Patricia Amory came forth from the doorway behind Billy. Barrett Amory got up and pulled out a chair. She enthroned herself. Jutted her chin in Yates’s direct
ion. “I clearly recall the evening to which you refer. And the discussion. It occurred right where I’m presently seated. Many investigations were spoken of. Tell me more of the one you overheard?”

  A servant appeared with a bowl of soup. She waved him off.

  “A great deal of suspense was created by the media and continued to be created over the San Francisco matter,” Yates said to her. “First there was suspense because the amount of money stolen couldn’t be fixed and later because each rumor of what was actually gone hinted that a new record for missing cash was about to be established. The greatest suspense was involved in tracking down the unknown perpetrators. Reward money kept escalating, and that turned the public’s search for clues into something of a national treasure hunt. There was a holiday, a carnival spirit. Public sympathy seemed to be with the criminals. People were openly rooting for the criminals to evade detection and arrest. The FBI was becoming the ogre, a villain for just trying to do its job. After a time the criminals were apprehended. The evidence against them appeared overwhelming. A conviction was certain, but the media and public went on treating them like national heroes. The Bureau was receiving hate mail for having arrested them. Just before going to trial a second group of suspects was apprehended. As they confessed, it became clear that they, not the first group, had perpetrated the theft. The media and public wasted no time in forgetting the first group and embracing the second group … making bigger celebrities out of them than their predecessors.

  “The trial for the second group got under way, and suddenly a piece of information is discovered. It’s learned that the second gang had killed a bank guard during the course of the robbery. A guard nobody knew was there. A guard who had gotten his work schedule wrong and turned up for work without anyone knowing it just before the robbery. He was killed but his body wasn’t found until the trial began. But I never heard why that was, why no one knew he was missing until then.”

  “What else, Mister Yates,” Patricia began, “did you overhear?”

  “That was about it. I got back into the conversation at my end of the table. I was aware the San Francisco robbery was still being talked about at the other end but I didn’t hear the specifics.

  “What’s been driving me crazy is that I can’t zero in on the robbery,” Yates said. “Part of it seemed as familiar as my own name. But I can’t locate it … in San Francisco or anywhere. I went to the library and the newspaper morgues, and there was nothing on it there, and nowhere else that I could find. So I came here.”

  Patricia stood facing the dark lake beyond the leaded glass. “You are quite correct, Mister Yates, nothing like it happened … as a whole. Only in parts. There never was such a robbery in San Francisco or elsewhere. But there was a robbery in Boston and one in New York and others in Illinois and Wisconsin from which incidents were taken. What you overheard Barrett explain that evening was a teaching device developed by my late cousin Orin Trask. I shouldn’t say device. It was more an exercise meant to illustrate the pitfalls of practical investigation to aspiring law-enforcement agents. My cousin simply took pieces of actual crimes which the FBI had either failed to solve or in solving was humiliated, and reassembled them into an overall scenario. Into a make-believe perfect crime. His phrase for it was, in fact, model crime. Orin theorized that if a student could solve a model crime, it would be far easier for him subsequently to solve the real thing.”

  She was on her feet looking down at Billy. “So good to have seen you, Mister Yates. Do come by again when you have a problem of magnitude.”

  Glancing toward the leaded windows that framed her past, she swept from the room.

  “That answer your question?” asked Amory.

  “I suppose so.”

  “Suppose? I don’t understand you, Yates. You ask a question. You receive a comprehensive explanation. You end up supposing and glum.”

  “It’s hard to accept the idea that a classroom exercise, a teaching aid pasted together from bits and pieces of real crimes, somehow happened three years later.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You heard the woman. Accept it.”

  “That crime was copied,” Yates said quietly. “Mormon State is that crime.”

  “A coincidence, Yates, and you better accept it. Perpetrations aren’t shaped out of silly putty. Opportunity dictates theft, you know that. A boy of five knows that. You don’t scamper out and perpetrate because a maiden aunt leaves you a set of old blueprints. Blueprints, plans, action come second. Opportunity comes first. Opportunity dictates plans and action.”

  Amory watched Billy staring down at the table. “Unconvinced, are you, young Yates? You’ll go to your grave unconvinced you’ve died someday. Lady Pat could have it wrong, ever think of that? Who’s to say her gray matter’s functioning any better than mine? She and me, we’re nearly a century and a half old between us. Never believe anyone over a hundred.”

  An entree of thinly sliced roast beef, mashed potatoes and peas was placed before each man. Amory dug in. Yates played with his fork.

  “Did Orin Trask record any of these model crimes?”

  “Leave it be, Yates, leave it be.”

  “Did he?”

  “He did. Wrote down everything. Left it all to the new FBI Academy, whenever the dratted thing gets finished. Orin donated a library so his works and others could be permanently available.”

  “Is it available?”

  “You mean are copies of the model crimes available?”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose they are.”

  “Where?”

  “My office.”

  “Yours?”

  “My office at the academy. Orin left a lot of his papers in my office. Never got around to packing it up till recently. I saw the model crimes among the material.”

  “And it’s still there, in your office?”

  “In packing crates.”

  “When can we go to your office?”

  Amory took a sip of wine, threw his napkin on the table. “Now. If we don’t you’ll be stuffing potatoes in your ears trying to get rid of them fast. Can’t abide the wanton wasting of food.”

  The drive through the United States Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia, ended at the solitary building which housed the entire FBI Academy, a red-brick, two-story-high former barracks. Amory led Yates along the first-floor corridor and into his small cluttered office. Two packing cases were stacked on the floor.

  “It’s the bottom one,” Amory said. “Top one’s my extra baggage. There’s a hammer on that shelf.”

  Yates strained lifting the heavy top crate onto the floor. Stenciled on the wood slats of the crate below was the name “Trask.” Billy pried off its cover. The crate was empty.

  “… Could be I got them mixed up, young Yates. Try the other crate.”

  Billy thought he detected a faint note of alarm in the old man’s voice. He pried off the second cover. A crunch of tightly packed books and manuscripts was revealed below. Yates started sorting through. The material was Amory’s. Not a page of Trask’s work could be found.

  “Could be they got put down in the basement.” Amory didn’t sound convinced. “The academy keeps the bulk of Orin’s stuff downstairs.”

  Eight wire-fronted storage bins stood in the basement room beyond the small gymnasium. Amory walked up to the bin marked with Trask’s name. A padlock hung open from a ring in the wire door. Like the crate, the bin was empty.

  Amory’s expression darkened.

  A noise echoed. Amory beckoned they leave in silence. He stayed with his thoughts until outside and walking down a barracks-lined street.

  “… You could be right, young Yates. Right about Mormon State. Have you ever heard the name ‘Gents’? I mean a group calling itself the Gents?”

  Yates recalled reading a transcript in which Otto Pinkny had told Strom: “I’m a friend of gents.” He said now, “No, I never heard of it as an organization.”

  “What about the Silent Men, that name ring a bell?”<
br />
  “No.”

  They were at the corner now, and Amory glanced about. Across the street, beyond unshaded windows, marines were preparing for sleep. “This is between you and myself, young Yates, is that clear? This is a matter of your well-being and nothing else. And anyway, what I’m about to tell you might not be so.”

  Amory moved to a stone bench under a tree and sat down. Yates sat beside him.

  “I’m not trying to vindicate or damn Orin Trask. He was who he was,” Amory said. “The single relevant fact to remember, for our purpose, is that people like Orin are given to great passions and obsessions in their life and work. With Orin his life was his work. Whatever work happened to interest him at the time. He was changeable about that but not in the least less passionate or less obsessive. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that these passions, these obsessions, often went beyond reasonable limits … that for a period of time Orin, in his pursuits, was possibly delusional. Knowing this, I often ignored what he was saying. I thoroughly ignored, for example, his talk about the Silent Men.

  “Orin had one overriding interest in life few people were aware of: the psychology of secrecy. He would quote you whole segments from Freud’s Totem and Taboo and from anyone else who’d written on the subject. The books didn’t always have to be by scientists. He knew Aleister Crowley as well as he did Margaret Mead. I agreed with Trask that secrecy is individuality, the only means by which to protect our individual self when our privacy is challenged … that privacy, the greenhouse of individuality, is forever challenged and in peril.

  “Orin began with that premise thirty years ago, and on and off followed it logically forward. For him secrecy in groups was conspiracy, and he studied such groups as they had never been studied before—from the Knights Templar to the Rosicrucians to the Freemasons and Tong and Black Hand and KKK and Mau Mau, no one knew secret societies better than Orin. And secret rites and rituals. He had even detailed an honorary and secret group within the Boy Scouts, for God’s sake. Something called the Order of the Arrow, first and second class. It didn’t have to be bad to be secret … take AA. But it usually was bad.”