Even more puzzled, I followed Garth out of my office and into the larger office in front of it that served as our reception area. Garth nodded to Francisco, who quickly rose from where he sat before his computer terminal and walked out into the hallway, closing the door behind him.
"I should kick your ass," Garth said as he turned to me. His voice had become soft and even, the tone he used when he was seriously upset about something. "In fact, I think I'm going to. Definitely. I don't see how I can stop myself."
"Huh?"
"What have we got to do that's more important than putting a stop to the theft of a man's soul?"
"Uh. . helping to bury the CIA? You know how I hate these trick questions."
"You've been spending too much time taking fifteen hundred dollars a day of the taxpayers' money, Brother. It's made you arrogant and insensitive. You'd better run your own soul check. I remember a time not so long ago, when I was still a cop and you were a college professor your colleagues laughed at for trying to moonlight as a private investigator, when you'd have slobbered with gratitude over anybody who walked through that door to offer you some business."
"Garth, this is no time to get squirrelly on me. We're involved in the most important investigation of our lives, and we've got less than three weeks to wrap it all up and submit a comprehensive report."
"The CIA business is important, but it's not important. It's only important because we've chosen to make it seem so."
"Well, thank you, Carlos Castaneda."
"Not Carlos Castaneda-Mongo Frederickson. And you got the notion from our mother. Who was it who always used to say that, finally, the only thing an individual can do to make the world a better place is to lead a life of honesty and good deeds? Remember Mom telling us how failing to do the right thing at the moment it must be done puts a little crack in the world where good leaks out and evil seeps in? There was a time when you understood that. It's not some outfit called the CIA that's a problem, but certain people in the CIA. How many of those people do you really think we're going to nail? Even if the CIA were completely demolished, most of the bad folks over there are just going to end up doing bad things someplace else. Take the last election."
"You take the last election."
Garth ignored the remark and stepped closer. "If a significant number of Americans keep kicking over rocks and electing to office whatever crawls out from under, what do you think you're going to do about it? The people we have now in Washington have managed to poison the atmosphere in this country, and the change could be permanent-CIA or no CIA. It wasn't the CIA that elected those creeps."
"It was CIA money that helped elect a lot of them."
"It was ordinary Americans who pulled the levers in their voting booths. But who knows? Maybe the changes aren't permanent. Before those fools totally dismantle the government, people may get tired of their right-wing bullshit and elect people to office who'll give us the kind of left-wing bullshit you and I love to hear. The point is that there's nothing you can really do about it, which means it's not important. Thomas Dickens' problem, however, is important, because it matters, and because there is something you can do about it. There's a great white whale, of sorts, sitting back there in your office, and you'd best not let it swim away with its wounds unattended."
"Jesus, you're really pulling out all the oratorical stops. That's outrageous."
"It's true."
"Dickens' problem really is important to you, isn't it?"
"You noticed. It should also be important to you."
"Garth, do you really think our role in the CIA investigation is so unimportant that we should risk missing a tight deadline to go off chasing after some poem-robber?"
"Hey, the company has fucked me over every bit as much as it has you-maybe more. And, in the final analysis, I still say Dickens' problem is more important. But it doesn't have to be that complicated. What's the big deal? Call a couple of his editors and see if one of them has a submission envelope with this Jefferson Kelly's return address on it, and we proceed from there. Francisco can do it."
I thought about it for a few seconds, shrugged. "Hey, when you're right, you're right."
"Damn right I'm right. You wouldn't have needed me to explain it to you if you hadn't become such a self-important little prick whose ass I'm probably still going to have to kick."
"Garth, I really hope this doesn't mean you're losing enthusiasm for our other little task at hand."
Garth smiled thinly. "Not in the least. Now that we've addressed Moby Dickens' concerns, serious thumping on the CIA suddenly seems very important to me again. It's what Mr. Castaneda would call 'controlled folly.' Among other things, I still owe them for costing me a career I wasn't ready to give up at the time, and almost getting the both of us killed on more than a few occasions. Now go do some good before I thump on you."
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
I went back into my office and found Moby Dickens sitting on the edge of the couch staring at the floor, nervously rubbing his enormous hands together. I walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. "We're going to,see what we can do for you, Moby."
"Thank you," he rumbled, then got to his feet and reached for his wallet.
"You don't have to give us any money now, Moby. We'll bill you for our hours after we get the job done. Here's what you can do for us. Give me copies of all the poems you've written that you know Kelly has plagiarized, along with the magazines that have his versions in them. I need the dates each poem appeared."
"I've already done that, Dr. Frederickson," he said quickly, picking up his portfolio from the couch and holding it open for me to see. "It's all in here. I've catalogued and cross-referenced everything."
"Good. Then I want the names and addresses-and telephone numbers, if you have them-of every editor who's ever published your work, and the same for the editors who've published Kelly's smudge jobs. I'm particularly interested in the editors you've communicated with and who might help us track down Kelly. The editor who first put you on to Kelly should be at the top of the list."
"I've done that too, sir," he said, hefting the leather pouch in his hands. "It's all in here, along with a copy of Poet's Market. That lists the names of editors and addresses of all the magazines that publish poetry. I've highlighted the editors I've dealt with, and cross-indexed them with my poems and Kelly's plagiarisms."
"Outstanding."
"If you can just find this man, talk to him and make him see how important my work is to me. I'm afraid that, someday, people who've read both my work and his versions will look at me and believe I plagiarized his poems, not the other way around. All I want is for him to stop doing it, sir."
"You've got it. And accomplished poets like yourself get to call me Mongo-in fact, it's required."
For the first time since he'd entered my office, Moby Dickens smiled. He must have received reasonably good dental care in prison, because his teeth were white and even, with a gap between the two front ones. "Okay, Mongo. This means a great deal to me."
"Drop your portfolio off with Francisco at the front desk on your way out, along with your address and a telephone number where we can reach you. I'll be in touch."
He shook my hand again, then, still grinning, turned and walked out. I went back to my computer to call back up the notes and data I had been working on, then went out into the hallway to look for Garth. He must have gone back up to his apartment to work, because there was no sign of him. I went into the front office, and Francisco looked up from his computer terminal. Moby Dickens' worn leather portfolio was on the desk beside him.
"Francisco," I said, walking over to him and putting a hand on one of his frail shoulders, "give Margaret a call and see what she's up to. If she's not working, see if she can come in and handle the office for a few days. Otherwise, call in a temp. Make sure he or she is good, because he'll be doing your job."
My secretary frowned slightly. "You're firing me, sir?"
"Hardly. I'm t
emporarily promoting you to the rank of Associate Investigator."
Now he grinned. "Really? What do you want me to do, sir?"
"Find me a plagiarist."
Chapter 4
I had green tea and cold sesame noodles for lunch at my desk, working my way through the reams of notes and data. Most of the "records" we had obtained from the Aristide government-everything from military and police payrolls to the sundry contents of government filing cabinets-were written in longhand, and it had taken the combined, full-time efforts of three translators just to decipher what we had. Next had come the not inconsiderable task of transcribing it all into computerese so that the information could be sorted and analyzed and finally called forth to form charts and graphs which we hoped, in the end, would paint a very damning portrait of an entire, brutalized country essentially owned and operated by the CIA, the poorest of nations serving as a mysterious conduit for billions of dollars which could not be accounted for in any CIA budget. This phase wasn't the most stimulating work, but it had to be done, for if the CIA was to be brought down, it had to be accomplished with numbers and the irrefutable testimony of witnesses, not the Frederickson brothers jumping up and down and screaming hysterically about the bloody deeds of a bunch of savage killers, many of whom seemed to be monumentally stupid, whose salaries were paid by the American people. The blade of the saber with which we hoped to decapitate the company had to be ice cold.
Garth entered the office in late afternoon. He was carrying a large manila envelope which he was in the process of opening. "Just arrived by messenger," he said, tearing open the envelope. "Figured we'd check it out together."
I watched as he spread the edges of the envelope and peered inside. "Well?"
His answer was to take out the contents and hand them to me. They were two enlarged copies of photographs. One was a duplicate of the head-and-shoulders shot of the triangular-faced man with the piercing eyes that had been displayed on the altar in the basement of General Vilair Michel's house, and the other was a wide-angle shot of the altar itself, as it had appeared when we'd first discovered it. A note clipped to one of the photos read:
Good hunting. Hope you nail the bastards.
Carl Beauvil
"Voila," I said, glancing back up at Garth.
"Yeah," Garth replied with a shrug. "Nice of Beauvil to come through for us like this, but we probably should have told him that our curiosity was a lot bigger than our capacity to try to do anything with this stuff. We've got no time to try to track down this guy. We've got all we can do to organize and tie together the information we've already got."
"You're right," I said, reluctantly tossing the photographs onto my desk.
"Let's go get something to eat."
"I figured I'd have Francisco call out for a pizza before he goes home."
Garth shook his head, then grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me up out of my chair. "Come on. I'll buy you a steak. We both need a break. There's nothing our company friends would like better than for one or the both of us to keel over from exhaustion and malnutrition before we can finish this thing."
"In that case, I'll take you up on your offer of a steak. But only for medicinal purposes."
Over drinks and dinner we discussed literary strategy, the actual form of our report, and the order of its contents. I wanted to start off with what I considered the good stuff, offering up front a lurid account of the voodoo-style ritual murders that had thwarted our interrogation of six key witnesses to CIA-sponsored atrocities in Haiti and elsewhere. Garth was against that approach, pointing out that we could prove no link whatsoever between the voodoo hit squad and the CIA, and arguing that such an approach would only give the CIA's allies an opportunity to start shouting "preposterous" and "sensationalism" at the outset, charging that we were not serious people if we were willing to make such unsubstantiated charges, and therefore nothing we had to say could be trusted. Calling the meeting to order with entrails, he argued, would only serve to undermine the scant and precious hard proof we did have.
My resistance was feeble, because I knew all along he was right. We agreed we would start with a brief and dry introduction, vaguely outlining what we hoped to show, then immediately offer up our hard data, progressively working our way through the anecdotal portions of our investigation results where the leads were tantalizing but the evidence as yet unsubstantiated, awaiting the attention of congressional committees with subpoena powers, and then give them a boffo ending, serving up the blood and gore in an appendix, nicely bracketed by financial charts and tables listing all the suspected dummy corporations that were bastard children of the CIA.
When we arrived back at the brownstone I was startled to see a very well-known figure sitting on our stoop, casually smoking a cigarette. Lucas Tremayne was the Academy Award-winning writer and director of one of the highest-grossing films of the past decade, and a very high-profile social activist. The lean, handsome man with the graying crew cut was anything but a Hollywood type. He was rarely seen in public, and when he was it was usually because he was lending his celebrity to promote one of his favorite causes, such as increased funding for AIDS research, or some charity event. In the news clips and photos I had seen of him, he was usually dressed as he was now, in faded jeans, soft leather boots, denim shirt, and Mets baseball cap.
Garth appeared slightly unsettled but not surprised at the film director's presence. "Hello, Lucas," my brother said as the man ground out his cigarette and stood up.
"Good to see you, Garth," Tremayne said, stepping down onto the sidewalk and shaking my brother's hand. "Now I know where you've been hiding out for the past few months."
"Lucas Tremayne, this is my brother, Mongo."
"A pleasure," the director said, extending his hand and removing his cap. In the glow from the streetlight I could see that his gray eyes almost perfectly matched his hair, and his smile was easy and friendly. "I've heard a great deal about you."
"Likewise, and likewise."
Garth said, "Lucas is a friend and neighbor."
Lucas Tremayne released my hand, then turned to my brother. When he spoke again, there was a slightly accusatory tone to his voice. "I haven't seen you around Cairn in a while."
Garth shrugged. "Yeah, well, Mary's been off on an extended tour promoting her new album, so I've been staying here at the brownstone to save myself the commute."
"I've been keeping an eye on your house."
"I appreciate that, Lucas."
"I also notice that the Cairn police have been patrolling past there pretty often. I guess they know the house is empty most of the time."
Garth merely shrugged again. He seemed increasingly uncomfortable, as if he knew Tremayne was leading up to something he didn't want to talk about.
"Garth, can I have a few words with you?"
"Of course," my brother said, motioning for Tremayne to precede us up the steps. "Come on up to my apartment and we'll have a drink."
I walked up the stairs after the two men, and when we reached the door to Garth's apartment on the third-floor landing I paused and held out my hand to the film director. "I'll say good night, folks. Lucas, keep up the good work."
"Mongo, I'd like to talk to you too."
"Sure," I said, and followed him in as Garth held the door open.
We went into the living room. Tremayne and I sat at opposite ends of the sofa while Garth made drinks at the bar and brought them to us. Tremayne set his aside untouched. "I was talking to Carl Beauvil this afternoon, Garth," he said quietly. The vaguely accusatory tone had returned to his voice. "We were together at a fund-raising event for Haitian refugees. He told me what happened in Spring Valley, and he told me what the two of you are up to."
Garth grunted. "That detective certainly is a talkative chap. The last thing he mentioned to us was that we shouldn't even admit to ever being in Spring Valley, much less discuss what happened while we were there."
"Carl is Haitian, you know," Tremayne said, turning
to me and fixing me with his gray eyes. His expression was now somber.
"I'd assumed as much."
"He and I go back a ways, ever since I moved to Cairn with my family a few years ago. We've worked together closely on a number of projects. He trusts me, which is why he told me what he did. He knows what he said would be held in confidence. He didn't know your brother and I are friends. What you told him disturbed him a great deal."
Garth turned in his chair to look at me. "Lucas is extremely active in the Haitian community on behalf of refugees, Mongo. He lends his name and prestige to their cause. He's also a noted collector of Haitian art."
"I see," I said in a neutral tone. I was beginning to understand why the film director's sudden appearance on our stoop had made my brother uncomfortable.
Tremayne cleared his throat, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, and clasped his hands together. "Garth, Carl tells me you and Mongo have been working on this Haiti investigation for months. I can't believe you didn't mention it to me."
"There are a number of very good reasons, Lucas," my brother replied evenly.
"You know how I feel about Haiti and Haitians, and the oppression they've suffered for so long. You also know how hard I've worked on their behalf. I've always suspected the CIA was involved in things over there right up to their slimy eyeballs, all the way back to Papa Doc and his Ton-ton Macoutes. Christ, I never dreamed anybody would ever actually try to prove it and do something about it. I want to help."
"There's nothing for you to do, Lucas."
"No? I'll bet I know a hell of a lot more Haitians than you do."
"That's one of the reasons I didn't say anything to you. Mongo and I don't want what we're doing to be widely advertised."
"I can be discreet."
"It's dangerous business, Lucas."
"Do I come off as a coward to you?"
"Hardly. But that's not the point. No matter how discreet you may be, asking questions about the CIA and the former rulers of Haiti would be sure to attract the attention of the wrong people. You have more than yourself to worry about. Your wife and children live in Cairn, and you have a very busy career to attend to. These people we're after take no prisoners. The man who was murdered in Spring Valley was a potential informer. The CIA knew that, and their people got to him one step ahead of us. He was killed not only to silence him, but also to send out a message to other Haitians who might be willing to give us information. There's a kind of voodoo hit squad out there, and the Spring Valley man was their sixth victim. Part of the idea is to spread terror in the Haitian community. If you get into the act, these people would be delighted to kill you. Murdering a famous Hollywood director well known for his commitment to Haitian causes would be a perfect way to permanently scare off remaining potential witnesses who otherwise might be persuaded to testify before any congressional committees that may decide to hold hearings as a result of our report. If Detective Beauvil provided you with any details about this murder, then you know these people do bad things to the bodies of their victims, before and after death. It would haunt your wife and kids for the rest of their lives. I didn't say anything to you because I knew what your reaction would be, and there was-is-no reason to put you in harm's way."
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