"Bill Keck," I said. "A Jimmy Carter appointee who always struck me as a reasonable man. I never knew just how reasonable."
Welch was looking at me intently. He said, "Lyle described you as some kind of anarchist. A hippie without the incense and the love beads. But it sounds as if you knew exactly what you were doing, and you were nimble as hell."
Anarchist? Hippie? Were? "I've managed to right a few wrongs over the years in a borderline sort of way and still stay out of Leavenworth. I've also wronged a few rights, but we don't need to get into those."
Barner snorted and said, "I'll say."
"What else is in the FBI report on the FFF?" I asked. "I'd like to see it."
"Stop by the precinct and I'll make you a copy," Barner said. "But overall it's the same names Diefendorfer gave us, and not even as up-to-date. The file is fun to read, though.
I wish I had the cojones to pull off some of the stunts the old FFF guys got away with."
We both looked at Welch, who I guessed we all knew had a similar wish for Barner.
But Welch just said, "I'd like to read the report, too, but later. I've gotta be somewhere at eight-thirty."
Barner tensed, and I guessed I knew what that meant. While we had burgers, Barner told stories of some of the old FFF's more daring exploits as described in the FBI files, and then Welch departed. As I left with Barner for his office and then my train back to Albany, I asked Barner if Welch had a date with someone else.
"There are two of them," Barner said. "Dave asked me to come along, but I'm not into that. He's asked me several times, even though he knows that's not what I want in a relationship. They're constantly doing poppers and shit like that. The three of them also use other substances, Dave admitted to me one time, that no police officer should get anywhere near, personally speaking. This isn't for me, Stra-chey. I want Dave, I go for Dave, but this is not who I am."
I wondered if Barner had figured out that, since Welch repeatedly offered things that were repugnant to Barner, the offer was either a cruel taunt or perhaps not sincerely meant. Now I was feeling sorry for Barner and guilty all over again.
Chapter 11
Timmy said, "If you'd join the twenty-first century and carry a cellphone, I could have reached you."
"You could have located me through Lyle, through NYPD. I was with Lyle at a bar in the Village, and you could have had him paged. What you've come up with is terrifi-cally important. Of course, it is better that Lyle not know about Zinsser just yet. I want to check this llama-farm thing out on my own first, along with Thad Diefendorfer."
"Right," Timmy said. "You and Thad, the Mennonite middle-aged caper artist. The Lavender Hill mob rises again."
We were seated on the glider out on our back deck under the summer stars, which were just barely visible through the blaze of Friday-night light from nearby Lark Street, Albany's Via Veneto. Timmy had made some of his superb guacamole, a skill he had mastered, inexplicably, during his Peace Corps tour in India. He had also brought out a Molson for me, and for himself a chardonnay selected for its fluty tone and delightfully twee outlook, as well as for its reasonable cost at the Delaware Avenue Price Chopper.
I said, "When they decided to rob the Bank of England, the Lavender Hill mob were mostly over-the-hill has-beens, whereas I am an accomplished professional investigator at the peak of my powers. So the has-been description certainly doesn't apply to me."
"Of course not."
"And when you meet him, you'll see that while Thad's guerrilla-activity skills might be rusty from disuse, he's as keen and fit as ever."
"Fit and keen. Sounds good."
"Of course, I didn't know him way back when."
"Explain to me again," Timmy said, "why you're pairing up with Diefendorfer to work ahead of Barner and the police instead of with them. I still don't quite get that."
"Oh?"
"What it sounds like is, you've resumed your twenty-year-old head games with Lyle, where you two play out your sexual attraction to each other-which for practical and personality reasons is futile-with complex little rituals of mutual psychological abuse. I used to be the not-directly-involved third party in the ritual, but now it's Thad Diefendorfer. Having Diefendorfer involved instead of me adds an extra charge, because however uninterested you are in him on a conscious level, he sounds like he's just enough of a turn-on to get you radiating little testosteronal vibrations that Lyle picks up and which drive him up the wall.
"Which is what nature apparently intended for you and Lyle to do to each other now and unto eternity. Plus, of course, Diefendorfer does sound like an interesting guy to be around, so I'll envy you that. If, that is, you decide to proceed with this plan to free Leo Moyle on your own, ostensibly to save the neo-FFFers from their own wretched excesses. But I have to say that the whole thing sounds pretty wacky to me."
Almost from the moment we met, Timmy had a way of explaining me to me with such thoroughness and stark plausibility that it threatened to use up all the analytical oxygen in the room. It was one of the reasons I was in awe of him, and when he did it, it filled me with love and terror. My conflicting impulses were always to adore him unabashedly, or to get my revolver out of the bedroom closet and pump him full of hot lead.
I said, "There may be a certain amount of truth in what you say."
"Uh-huh."
"But one part you're leaving out is, Lyle is far more dis-combobulated by me than I am by him."
"I'll take your word for that."
"So my working closely alongside Lyle, as opposed to in approximate tandem with him, would actually hurt the investigation. Lyle going around unhinged would not be good for Leo Moyle, for Jay Plankton, or for Lyle himself."
"Surely not, no."
"And, as for Thad Diefendorfer's playing out recover-your-youth adventure fantasies-or, should you choose to think of such a thing as being my own motivation here, laughable as that diagnosis is-if either of us actually happened to be so motivated, so what? It's for a good cause, halting dangerous criminal activity. And, if we succeed, we'll be well-armed with both influence and knowledge in case we decide to chasten or just dilute the influence of the ghastly Jay Plankton-or even, if we can, ruin him for life."
"Well then," Timmy said, "it looks like you're going to do it. Whatever 'it' is."
"You bet."
"In for a penny, in for a pound."
"There comes your Georgetown education again."
"I'll wager you were exposed to similar thinking at Rutgers."
The starlight reflected off Timmy's pale Gaelic half-profile, which I never tired of viewing from different angles, and off his wineglass, which he raised in a salute to the inevitable, more dubious surprises from me.
I said, "I'm amazed you tracked down Kurt Zinsser so fast."
"It was easy. Billy Blount, though, is long gone from Albany. He works for the Bank of America's office in Singapore, where he's got a Chinese boyfriend. The senior Blounts are still here in Albany, but Billy has as little contact with them as he can get away with. I learned all this from Christine Porterfield, who still runs Here 'n' There 'n'
Everywhere Travel with Margarita Mayes out at Stuyvesant Plaza. They visited Billy in Singapore last fall, where they celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of their rescue by Kurt Zinsser and the FFF."
I said, "The FFF has such a noble history, it really is a shame that the name has been tainted by-whoever."
"Billy, Chris and Margarita had not been in touch with Zinsser himself for many years,"
Timmy said. "But they knew where he was, because a friend of Chris's in the Berkshires got interested in llamas, visited Zinsser's farm last summer, and recognized the name. When the friend mentioned Chris and Billy to Zinsser, though, he cooled off, Chris said, and showed no interest in reestablishing contact. So the friend dropped the subject and stuck to discussing raising llamas."