"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 temporarily 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."