Where had I—quite recently—seen that reference?
I pulled my jeep off the road, yanked out my iPad, powered it up, stuffed Palo’s stinky, fish-smelling digital card into the port, and clicked it open. There it was, it had been staring me in the face all this time, even before I’d ever left New Mexico: A jingle!
I clicked the black box with the cheery musical quarter-notes on the front, and out blared the opening bars of one of the oldest, and at one time, most famous advertising jingles. Hearing it now made my blood run cold:
I turned it off at once, before I got to the end. I knew that in this newer version of the jingle, they’d modernized the lyrics to stress nutrition and heath, but I still remembered how the jingle used to go, back in the old days. Mom liked it so much that she used to sing it to us when we were little.
That memory was what Palo was counting on.
And I knew where my sister had hidden the goods that she needed me to find.
I found the critical mass—the bunch of bananas. Naturally, they were tucked into the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator in my sister’s abandoned cabin. Inside a single banana that still had its symbolic label affixed to it, I located the digital chip that Palo had buried there.
Once again, smelly fish and browning bananas seemed to have triumphed over state-of-the-art security forces (or whoever they were) and their much vaunted superiority in data harvesting through space-age digital technology.
Now that I’d gotten back inside my Jeep with the loot, and I’d powered up my iPad again, I could begin to connect the previous links she’d sent me (in the fish) with the conclusions she had drawn from them (in the banana). It didn’t take as long as I thought it might, for me to piece together the following:
1. What Palo had found out that had lit up somebody’s mega-Bunsen burner.
2. What it all had to do with Ernest Hemingway’s rapport with icebergs, fish, bananas, Cuba.
And more importantly:
3. Where my sister was hiding out—which, if my intuition was correct, was not very far away.
Now that I knew, though, I needed to get to the Horse’s Mouth and let him know that I knew. I pulled out my Company-issued satellite phone and dialed the personal private number I’d learned by heart.
It didn’t take long to get the Director himself on the line. Word must have gotten out pretty fast, that I was asking strange questions for a bereaved guy whose sister was in an accidental drowning. The first words out of the Director’s mouth confirmed this.
“Sorry about your sister, Leo,” he said. “But you’re supposed to be on leave. Now I hear you’re mucking about in Idaho, crossing swords with our close compatriots in the FBI—even trying to dig into your sister’s attempt to resuscitate the image of late Nobel laureates. While others, as you know, might prefer to leave the past under the ground.”
“You got a false report on me, sir,” I said. “Exhumation from the grave, even for noted writers, would seem tasteless, especially this near to Easter. But as I recall, that Nobel guy did dub those compatriots of ours in the Bureau: ‘Franco’s Bastard Irish’ for their support of the right-wing Spanish fascists who’d infiltrated the Americas, all throughout World War II.”
The Director sighed.
The message: he was a nice guy with a tough job, and I—the loose cannon—was making it tougher.
“Leo, you’re an analyst, and a good one,” he informed me. “But what you’re regurgitating here, that was all in the Dark Ages. Long before even the Cold War. May I ask you, what is the purpose of this call?”
“Well gee, let me bring things more up-to-date for you then, sir,” I said. “I have a proposal I’d like you to consider…”
“A proposal?” the Director cut in, with ice in his voice. “Your tone makes it sound more like an ultimatum. Leo, may I remind you I have a pretty full plate right now. Please don’t try to yank my chain.”
“Far be it, sir,” I said. “I’ll get to my point at once. But first, I wanted us to discuss that second fish.”
The Director had the grace to be silent.
So I pressed my full court advantage:
“You remember,” I told him. “The fish with the ‘note’ attached? The fish that poor, innocent Professor Livia Madachy received in Santa Fe? Paloma didn’t send that one, did she? You knew I’d go there first. You sent it yourself, to use as bait and trawl me in. That was right after you trawled for my sister Paloma—luring her into that spurious ‘Freedom of Information Act’ website; and then you turned around and used her ‘blunder’ as an excuse to send me on leave from my job.”
“And your point would be?” asked the Director. Though his tone now was more guarded than icy.
“It’s not a point,” I said. “It’s just an observation: but it appears that ‘Homeland Security’ is not quite as chummy between agencies as it’s supposed to be. You set me up, and you endangered my sister’s life—you used us as bait—just so you could find out exactly how much the FBI knows about what’s about to happen down there.”
After a long pause, the Director said, “All right, granted. But tell me, Leo: if you’re not our analyst or working undercover for the Bureau, then who are you working for?”
“It’s ‘whom,’ sir,” I corrected him. “I’m working ‘for whom’ I have always worked. If you want to know the truth, I’m working for my tribe.”
“Tribe?” said the Director, as if he’d never heard the term.
“The locals—the Indians, the Hopi, Zuni, Apache, Navajo—the Mestizo, whatever you call us: the natives, the indigenous, the peasants. Your Cold War means nothing to us. Whether communism or capitalism is better is something of a moot point to folks who’ve been used as fodder for your ongoing battles, these past fifty or sixty years. That’s really what it’s all about—that’s what is just about to happen—isn’t it?”
The Director was silent again; after awhile, he sighed.
“Yes, that’s what it is all about, Leo. And you’ve demonstrated that the Bureau does not yet know as much as they’d wish to: that’s clear. Otherwise they would hardly have been watching your sister and appropriating her files the moment she vanished—before we could get at them. So tell me, Leo: what’s this proposal of yours?”
I was relieved that he couldn’t see my smile from two thousand miles away.
“I think the Company needs to fund an important fellowship program,” I told him. “One that would encourage young scholars to share their research. Not a surfing exercise or ‘leaks’-type thing, but something officially sponsored by us, along with others. It would aid the State Department by consolidating our historical wisdom to help focus on specific events, even dangerous events, that are about to repeat themselves.
“And,” I added casually, “I believe I know just where to begin, and who might write the first of such reports, based on events set in motion more than one hundred years ago…”