Pete set up their laptop in a carrel and Celine asked the librarian at the front desk where she might find thirty-year-old National Geographics. The woman wore a turtleneck and turquoise earrings and rimless hexagonal reading glasses. Her long gray hair was in a ponytail. Her blue eyes came up and settled on Celine with a certain recognition, the way one blue heron might look at another in a marsh. She was probably raised in Connecticut. “You know,” she said, “I’m old enough to remember when young boys would ask the same question. And they weren’t at all interested in tectonic plates or cave paintings.”
“Well, I’m actually terribly interested in both of those subjects, how did you know?” Celine said. The woman came from behind the counter—she was wearing Danish clogs—and Celine knew she had an instant ally. “What year?” the librarian said over her shoulder. “Actually,” said Celine, “it’s five issues. March 1973, January 1974, February 1975, September and October 1977.”
There was the spread. He was not in the other magazines, but he had a huge feature in January 1974. Oh, he was good. He was very very good. This was another, later, story on Chile, but this time entirely shot in the Manso River valley in Patagonia. The one Gabriela had mentioned. The place must have made an impression on Lamont the first time around. More shots of huasos on horseback in their signature flat hats, the farms along the river linked by horse trails and shrouded in low clouds, women sharing a cup of maté at an outdoor fire, one of a cowboy pushing horses up into the treeless saddle of a mountain pass with nothing but a storm-black sky as backdrop. Stunning. And there he was, Paul Lamont, his picture on the contributors’ page, hatless in the sun, handsome and solidly built in a black T-shirt. The short graph said he had spent the entire previous Chilean winter photographing in the Manso valley. That is not the only place he had been, Celine thought. I’d bet my hat. There was no mention at all of the political upheaval in the country that had taken place at the end of September.
She brought the magazine back to Pete who began a search on Chile in the winter and spring (Southern Hemisphere) of 1973. He quickly selected and saved a score of articles. On the morning of September 11th, General Augusto Pinochet ordered an infantry and armor assault on La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago. Pinochet would dislodge, once and for all, the socialist government of the democratically elected President Salvador Allende. In the afternoon, when the palace’s defenders finally surrendered, the sixty-five-year-old Allende was found dead in the Independence Salon—the official version of events being that he committed suicide with an AK-47 given to him by Fidel Castro. The coup installed a military junta of which Pinochet soon became the sole leader, and he launched one of the darkest periods in the history of any modern nation: a regime of torture, disappearances, and political murders that inflicted tens of thousands of casualties.
The U.S. government had been implicated in laying the groundwork of Allende’s overthrow, and a report directed by the National Intelligence Council in 2000 concluded that while the CIA did not “assist Pinochet to assume the presidency,” it had “ongoing intelligence-collection relationships with some plotters, and—because the CIA did not discourage the takeover and had sought to instigate a coup in 1970—probably appeared to condone it.”
“Appeared to condone it,” Celine repeated dryly. She swiftly scanned the rest of the articles. “Lamont saw something he shouldn’t have seen. Or recorded it. Call Gabriela,” she said, finally. “I’ll call her. We need to know if her father had access to La Moneda. If he ever mentioned it. Jesus.” She coughed, loud and long, holding her arm up to her face. Some kids and parents on beanbags in the Kids’ Corner looked over.
“Sorry,” she breathed. “Will you call her now?”
“What about the ta—”
Celine nodded, her hand still covering her mouth. She caught her breath, barely, and got out, “Maybe ask her to call you back using the phone of a nearby coffee shop. Have her call the library number. Maybe offer them twenty dollars. They couldn’t set up a tap—wait, yes they could. Hmm—” She gasped for breath, coughed again. “Look,” she said. “The Chile link is the key to this whole thing. He was there. Those rumors about his sideline work. It makes sense. Explains our friend, young Mr. Tanner. Wow. Wow, Pete. You couldn’t make this stuff up.”
Pete smiled. Wow is what she said when she was really impressed. She was really impressed. So was he. Pete lay his hand gently on her back and let the convulsions pass. He was used to this. When she could breathe easily again he rubbed her back and said, “Maybe we don’t need to call her and put her under more scrutiny, or danger. What more can she tell us now?”
Celine breathed. She stood unsteadily and looked over the carrel around the rest of the library. The kids and mothers had gone back to their reading aloud. There was a mountain-man type checking out a book at the desk, an elderly woman carrying some quilting magazines to the counter, and the stoned hippie couple from outside was now on one of the desktop computers at the front of the large open room. That was it.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “There are no secrets. Not anymore, not by now. Who really cares? Everybody kind of knows what the CIA did down there.”
“Maybe not.”
She raised an eyebrow. She was swift. Pete could almost hear the finely tuned gears—Swiss watchmaker gears—ticking. She said, “All these stories point to funding for disruption of the socialists, encouragement of the plotters, intelligence. What if there was more? Something even more… shameful?”
“More direct,” Pete said. “You think Lamont was involved?”
“Seems to be heading that way. Or he was there. He was a photographer. He had a photograph. I’d bet my hat. Oh, Pete.” She sucked in a few more breaths. She was too excited.
“But it’s all supposition,” she said. “All bits of hearsay, coincidental timing. There must have been thousands of Americans in Chile in the winter of ’73, many with reactionary political inclinations.”
“Sure,” Pete murmured. “But young William Tanner is real. And he seems to have gone dark.”
They checked for Tanner on the tracking screen and there was no pulse, nothing. Well. He may have parked in a narrow canyon, or in a structure, underground. It was easy to temporarily lose a signal. They took a walk. Something in the library, maybe a cleaning solvent, was aggravating Celine’s breathing, and at this point in their discussions it would be good to clear the air. Take a fresh look. They needed a plan of action and they didn’t have one.
They had always found that walking together was an excellent stimulator. Often at home they walked up along the East River, around the River Café, by the old brick spice warehouses, and into the cobbled streets of Dumbo. They’d walk past the little stone beach and up into the Navy Yard and back. Sometimes they’d stop for a thick hot cocoa at the chocolate shop on Water Street. And more times than not these ambles brought them a fresh perspective on a case.
So they walked up Red Lodge’s main street, slowly, past Gents Barber Shop, and the Butte Diner, and Faye’s Taxidermy, and Ben’s Sporting Goods, and they turned right down Elk Street and walked to the banks of Rock Creek. The cottonwoods and alders were every shade of fire-orange and pumpkin and yellow squash. The sky was clearing, showing blue, and sunlight swept the trees of the far bank like wind, and the wind smelled sweet of falling leaves. Celine thought that sometimes it was sheer wonder to be alive. What more could there be than this?