Текст книги "Strachey's Folly "

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

"Sometimes real life is," Suter said, "but less and less so every day. Ludlum and Oliver Stone aren't just melodramatic entertainers. They are prophets, and they are manufacturers of self-fulfilling prophecies. Anyway, in the corporatized global economy, you don't call what happens conspiracies anymore. You call it integrated strategies."

"Someone else said nearly the same thing to me just last night. She called it synergy."

"All those guys on airplanes reading John Grisham might or might not share Grisham's moral disapproval of his worst characters' treacherous behavior. But mostly they read him because he describes the business and government world they know, or that they see coming and that they want a piece of. Human folly is still human folly, Strachey. It's just better organized and more efficient than it used to be."

"So what's the big difference between Big Brother Joe Stalin and Big Brother whatever it is you're endorsing here, Suter?"

"Much higher standard of living. Infinitely more personal freedom. Are you kidding, Strachey? There's no comparison."

"It's still Big Brother—Conglomerates and the Governments They Buy Big Brother—making people's decisions for them about the ways they'll live the only lives they'll ever have."

"Oh? So who's complaining?" Suter said dismissively, and opened another bottle of beer.

I said, "So. Did Alan McChesney have Bryant Ulmer killed?"

Suter nodded once.

"Why?"

"Because Ulmer, a bit of a wuss who couldn't be trusted, wasn't in on the Rarnos-McChesney plan to fix NAFTA. And when Ulmer found out—Ian Williamson got drunk one night and let it slip—Bryant went to Burton Olds and threatened to go to the FBI if Burton didn't go himself. That wasn't going to happen, since Olds had been part of the scheme from the beginning and knew where all the bodies were buried. Olds warned Alan that Ulmer was about to stray from the reservation, and Alan had the Ramoses' drug people kill Ulmer on the street and make it look like a mugging."

Suter lay quietly, looking up at the stars. I said, "Did you know this at the time?"

"No. Jorge told me a few days later. It's part of what he had over me." Suter still did not look at me.

"And it was McChesney who ordered the murders of Nelson Krumfutz, Tammy Pam Jameson, and Hugh Myers just so they couldn't tell me that your big, elaborate diversionary tale about drug smuggling in Central Pennsylvania wasn't true?"

"You'll have to ask Jorge—or Alan. But that would be my guess."

I thought about everything Suter had just told me, and of his plans for us to make our way to Havana, and from there by air to Mexico City and on to Washington and directly to the Justice Department.

"Are you certain," I asked Suter, "that when we get back to Washington, you'll be able to make anybody important believe that this bizarre story of yours is true?"

"Oh, sure. Or if I don't, you will." I didn't know at the time what Suter meant by that. I should have asked, but—yet another botched job on my part—I didn't.

Chapter 28

When I went belowdecks at eleven, Suter said he had some more letters to write—to his mother and to a couple other people he said would be concerned about his disappearance—and he said he would come down to his bunk in another hour or two. I had my own small cabin, and with the door securely locked from the inside, I went straight to sleep, body and soul depleted.

I awoke the next morning just after seven with the boat rolling this way and that way, and my stomach trying to keep up. Out my single porthole I could see low clouds and a choppy sea. In the distance, a palmy shoreline was visible, and green hills.

I shaved, washed up, dressed, and went in search of coffee. The galley was deserted—no steak and eggs sizzling on the grill, no conch fritters even—so I guessed Suter was still asleep. Up above, the second-youngest crew member was at the boat's wheel. The captain, seated nearby reading a Spanish-language edition of the Miami Herald, looked up impassively and said, "Buenos dias."

I returned his greeting, and when he went abruptly back to his newspaper, I returned to the galley and found my own Nescafe and a couple of mushy pldtanos. Nor was I optimistic about stumbling on an IHOP near the harbor in La Coloma.

By eight-thirty, with still no sign of Suter, I went up to the captain, who was back at the wheel as the Leona Vicario moved even closer to land. It was now evident, in fact, that a midsize harbor lay dead ahead.

"Donde esta  Senor Suter?" I asked.

"No hay."

"No hay?"

The captain shook his head and retrieved a business-size envelope, folded in half, from his jacket pocket. He handed it to me and did not react in any way when I muttered, under my breath, "Hell."

I made my way to the aft deck, took a seat, and looked at the front of the envelope, which was addressed to "Married Man Donald Strachey, barricaded in his chambers." I opened the envelope and removed four handwritten, legal-size, yellow sheets of paper, taking care that they did not get away from me in the stiff breeze. The letter from Suter read:

Dear Strachey,

Sorry, my friend, but the plan I described to you– no can do. Oh, can—but won't. There's a better way for both of us.

You go ahead and round up the bad guys. They're all yours. Be a moral hero—a role I seem destined not to play. I guess I've just got too many "issues"—or whatever you choose to call them.

Enclosed herewith please find a list of the seventeen congressional out-and-out crooks, along with descriptions of their rewards for their NAFTA votes and the means by which these transactions were conducted and concealed by Alan McChesney. I'm not sure how exactly to nail McChesney for Bryant Ulmer's murder. But my guess is, once you nail McChesney on the NAFTA scam and tie him to the Ramoses, he'll go all blubbery and begin to name names—or Ian Williamson will, or better yet Jorge will, in order to strike a deal. Let's just hope that none of them implicates Hillary! Hey, just kidding about that.

As for moi—what to do? I have no intention of putting myself at the mercy of pointy-headed bureaucrats, especially Clinton-administration pointy-headed bureaucrats, who'll want to resettle me as a forest-fire-tower maintenance crew chief in Coeur d'Alene. I like the tropics. Washington? Los Pajaros? Havana? There's not much difference for me. So, by the time you read this, Strachey, I will have been picked up by an associate of Captain Munoz off Cabo Corrientes and deposited there along with my ample grubstake.

You might reasonably ask, Strachey, why it's going to be socialist Cuba for a capitalist pig—weasel?—such as myself. Because, my friend, Cuba is nothing if not the future of capitalism in the Caribbean. Latin America knows this, and Europe, and Asia—they're all doing deals ten miles a minute with the socialist Cuban officials who will instantly metamorphose, I can assure you, into capitalist Cuban officials mere seconds after Fidel's last cigar finally explodes. Only Jesse Helms-ridden Washington—O! A principled man in the Congress!—is failing to prepare for that delicious, highly remunerative moment when Fidel croaks, and within days a thousand resorts and casinos and sneaker factories blossom!

But I'll be there—have, in fact, already made elaborate arrangements to establish myself quite soon under a new identity, the name on my passport of another country—my flag of convenience, as it were. I can't be the golden boy forever, Strachey, but I can be the man that the other golden boys wish to get to know better. We all do what we must in life, or, failing that, what we can. Am I right? What this all means is, finally I'll have the time and the wherewithal to write my novel.

I am honestly sorry to have fucked you over in this way, Strachey—even though you are, I have to say, one of the smuggest men I have ever known. Talk about attitude. And naive? Less so than you were just a week ago, I think. Still, you've got your simple charms. There's a part of me that wi\ always remember fondly our fifteen minutes of love—rather a lengthy commitment, really, for a man as emotionally unreliable as I'm alleged to be by some. And, of course, I'll always grow sentimental whenever I think of the little viral souvenir I may or may not have left on your fetching upper lip.

Captain Munoz lias arranged for another associate of his to drive you the hundred miles from La Coloma to Havana airport, when: a .seat on a flight to Mexico City has been booked in your name and the ticket paid for. After that you're on your own.

Please extend my regrets once again to Maynard. Tell him I loved him more than any other man in Washington whom I ever made briefly happy. He's a real prize for whoever wins him.

So long, Strachey. Come for a visit in post-Millennium Havana. Bring your wise boyfriend—a man who obviously knows a lot about the nature of human folly, past, present, and future.

Altogether sincerely this time, Jim Snler

I glanced at the pages with the names and details of the NAFTA scam, then refolded the papers and placed them back in the envelope. This I stuffed deep in my pants pocket as the Leona Vicario cruised into the harbor of a port town that looked as if not a single thing in it had changed in thirty-five years.

Chapter 29

Twelve hours later, back in Washington, I found Timmy, as I hoped and expected I would, at Maynard's bedside. Timmy had now been at GW, either in Maynard's room or in the nearby lounge, for over forty-eight hours. Timmy wasn't his freshest. He was rumpled, needed airing, and had a two-day growth of beard. But he was as happy to see me intact as I was to find him safe and unharmed by the Ramos gang.

I ran through the entire story once for Timmy and May-nard. They listened, rapt—all but goggle-eyed—and they rarely interrupted me until I got to the part about my half-day transit through Cuba, about which Maynard wanted to know every last detail.

"I've got to track Jim down," Maynard said. "Jeez, what a story!"

"I think he'll be elusive."

"Oh, I can do it. I'll find him."

Timmy said to me, "So?"

"Uh-huh. I hear what you're thinking."

"Not to rub it in or anything."

"No, it would be unlike you to do that."

"But ... I guess I was right about the conspiracy. Donald, you did have me wondering a few times if I wasn't just conjuring this stuff up—wild imaginings fed by my early historically suspect religious education. But I wasn't imagining much of it, was I?"

"No, Timothy, you were basically on the mark, conspiracy-theory-wise. I was wrong, and I apologize for ... for living in the past. The recent past, but still the past. But now, as people keep explaining to me—Chondelle Dolan, then Suter—everything old is new again, in certain depressing ways."

"This plot does sound sixteenth-century Italian," Timmy said, "despite the contemporary terminology. I can almost imagine Machiavelli urging princes to maximize their possibilities for interface."

"So, what," Maynard asked, "are you going to do with the incriminating evidence Suter gave you? Incriminating, that is, if Jim didn't make all that stuff up about McChesney and Burton Olds and the Ramos family. And, of course, incriminating if the pe'( >ple making the big bucks off NAFTA don't immediately hatch an even more insidious plot to cover up the original one, and none of this ever comes out."

"At the airport," I said, "I made photocopies of the documents, as well as Jim's letter to me, minus personal references. I also phoned several interested parties, official and unofficial, and asked them to meet us here in this room at ten o'clock. Since it's a police matter and you're feeling so fit, Maynard, the head nurse said she thought that would be okay. I wasn't able to reach Bud Hively at the Blade, but Dana Mosel is coming, Chondelle Dolan, and of course the inevitable Ray Craig."

"Craig isn't a part of the conspiracy?" Timmy asked nervously.

"No, I think he likes to follow us around because he's in love with us. He doesn't know it yet, but it's either that or he's simply incompetent. Anyway, the Ramoses' man in the MPD is this Captain Milton Kingsley."

With that, Craig appeared in the doorway of Maynard's loom, reeking, and fifteen minutes early. He must have heard what I said, but he did not react and just flopped onto the empty bed next to Maynard's and glared at me.

Chondelle Dolan soon arrived, then Dana Mosel from the I'osl. They all listened with fierce concentration and copious eyebrow-raising and jaw-dropping as I retold the story of the conspiracy to fix the NAFTA vote and the murders and the attempted murders it had led to directly and indirectly. Mosel took several pages of notes.

After I finished my narrative and passed out copies of Suter's annotated lists, Mosel asked for clarification on a number of points, to which Craig, in a surly tone, objected each time. "This is a matter for law enforcement," he snapped, "not for the media."

I ignored these pro forma protests and said to Mosel, after she'd run out of questions, "I believe, Dana, if I'm not mistaken, that you've got reporters and editors over at the Post with long experience in following money and paper trails. True?"

"We sure do."

"Well, I now offer this material from Jim Suter to you and to your paper free of charge."

"We couldn't accept it any other way. Thank you."

"What about the  U.S.   attorney's  office?"  Dolan  asked. "Shouldn't they get a copy, too? A lot of the violations here are federal."

I asked, "Would you mind, Chondelle, providing copies of these papers to the feds first thing in the morning?"

"I surely will do that," she said.

Craig snorted, "This is not Lieutenant Dolan's case! Lieutenant Dolan has no official connection with this case, and if anybody goes to the U.S. attorney's office tomorrow, I’ll do it!"

"Will you?" I asked.

"You're goddamn right I will. I'd love to nail Milton Kings-ley to the wall. I've never understood how a man on a captain's salary can drive a Ferrari. I've had my suspicions about that man for years. I'll be on the feds' doorstep with this at eight a.m."

Dolan shrugged. "That's okay with me, Lieutenant."

I suggested that Craig might also try to serve as the MPD liaison to the Log Heaven and Engineville, Pennsylvania, police departments, and that way he would get a free trip somewhere nice, too. I didn't offer to accompany Craig to Central Pennsylvania, but I did plan to make one more trip there myself. This was to reassure Betty Krumfutz that whatever front-page news stories included her and hei late husband's names in the coming months, none would mention her role-playing variations on Mayan ritual .sacrifices. Only I knew about that—now that Nelson Krimilutz's photo album had presumably gone up in flames with his I'lujjineville house—and I planned on 100 percent discretion when it came to certain noncriminal but nonetheless prohlc'MiMlical matters that had cropped up inadvertently in re-crni weeks, including some of rny own.

Alter Mosel left to catch a couple of Post editors before they retired lor the night, and Dolan went to meet the date she'd left downstairs in the hospital lobby, and Ray Craig went off to arrange for a guard—instead of a tail—so that Timmy and I could safely return to our hotel room for the night, we said so long to Maynard.

"Thanks for clearing all this up, Don," he said, "and for giving me an incentive to go to Cuba. I've been wanting to write about Cuba for years, but I couldn't think of anything to say about it that hasn't already been written. Maybe I'll go down there and the story will turn out to be different—you always have to be ready to let that happen. But it sure sounds as if the Cuban story is, it's the next Cancun."

Tiinmy said, "Don't eat too many black beans while you're down I here," and the two of them yukkeel it up over that.

We left Maynard for the night, met Craig at the nurses' station, and accompanied him down to his MPD car, parked, naturally, in the fire lane. Timmy and I held hands because we were happy lo be reunited, and also because I wanted to show Craig how much we meant to each other, and to let him know that if he was in love with us, he was going to have to quit smoking mid have all his clothes dry-cleaned before we would ever consider having him move in with us. I explained this to Timmy after we were back in our hotel room on Capitol Hill, and he said he understood that I was trying to be funny.

I told Timmy again how gratified and relieved I was to be back with him, and to be alone with him for the first time in days. I said I actually liked his two-day growth of beard—I'd never known Timmy to go this long without shaving—and he gave me a funny look and said, "I had a razor with me at the hospital, but I decided not to shave."

"You did? How come?"

"I'm growing a mustache."

"You? A mustache?"

He just kept giving me such an odd look, not entirely friendly either, and I thought, Oh hell.