I watched Timmy and Diefendorfer disappear into the visitors' entrance to the barn, then turned back toward the dozen or so llamas. The two nearest peered my way while the others continued to graze. With their big soft eyes and alert pointed ears, the llamas looked like friendly storybook animals, maybe from A. A. Milne. I half expected them to be holding toy buckets and shovels, or even to speak: "Pleasant day, amigo."
Unsure of what to do next-approaching the farmhouse made no sense-I was about to join Timmy and Diefendorfer in the barn, when the screen door to the farmhouse opened and a stout, middle-aged man clomped across the porch and down the steps.
His head was shaved, and he wore jeans, work boots and a sweat-stained T-shirt.
The shirt had a picture of a llama on the front, and the lower half of the animal, stretched across the man's ample belly, was distorted, as if the llama had been blown up like a balloon.
I didn't recognize him at first, but Kurt Zinsser looked my way and did a double take.
"Denver?" he said, coming over to me. "Nineteen- what? Seventy-nine? Eighty?"
"I'm not sure," I said, struggling to look blank. "I've only been to Denver once. It was around that time that I was there, as I recall. Wait a minute. You're not… uh… uh?"
"Kurt Zinsser. And you're a private investigator. Bill Straithwaite?"
"Don Strachey. I didn't recognize you at first. You had a big, bushy beard back then, like Alexander Pushkin or the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi."
Cordial enough and definitely curious at first, Zinsser now began to look suspicious.
"What are you doing here? Are you looking for me?"
"No, I'm with some friends, just poking around the Berkshires. Is this your farm? Are you the Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese tycoon?"
Zinsser glanced toward the barn, noted Timmy's Honda, and said, "I'm on my way into Barrington. Sorry I can't show you around. But Darren's in the shop and he can help you out. Have you had our cheese?"
"Not yet. I'm looking forward to trying it. It's unusual."
"I learned to make it from an old woman I met in Cuzco. That's where I went after I left Denver in eighty-five. I heard it was going to be the high-tech center of the Andes, which turned out to be not quite true. But I found my health there, physical and spiritual."
"And your livelihood. I hear Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese is catching on."
"You'll understand why once you've tried it. Eat it every day for a month and you'll be a different person."
Since Thad Diefendorfer was not present, I asked the question I knew he would ask.
"Why would I want to be a different person?"
Zinsser smiled a smile that I guessed he thought of as enigmatic. He said, "If you have to ask, you may never find out. But read my chapbook-you can pick one up in the visitors' center-and perhaps then you'll begin to understand what I learned in the mountains. And if you choose not to open yourself up to the wholeness of being, it's no skin off my ass."
I said, "I heard Billy Blount has done some traveling, too. Someone in Albany told me recently that he's in Singapore. Are you two still in touch?"
I could see the lightbulb go on inside Zinsser's head, and he looked at me hard. "Are you part of the investigation?" he said.
"Which investigation?"
"The investigation of Leo Moyle's kidnapping."
"I might be."
Zinsser snorted. "What horseshit. What a lying sack of bull puke you are, Strachey.
Good Christ Almighty!" Zinsser shook his head, which glistened with sweat in the afternoon sun. His more spiritual self was not in the ascendancy.
"Are you a Jay Plankton fan?" I asked.
"You're friggin' right I am."
"You talk like him."
"I'm flattered."
"Aren't you gay anymore? Have you become one of those ex-gays?"
"No, but I no longer parade myself around the American landscape wearing a big sign that says Victim. Instead of whining about how oppressed I am, I lead a life of dignified self-sufficiency."
"If you're a Plankton fan," I said, "you must have as much wool in your brain as you've got in your teeth. His loathing for you and me and other gay people is vast and unadulterated. Plankton could care less if you've turned into some kind of neoconservative twit. To him, to be gay is contemptible. And you still admire him?"
Zinsser, the former Marxist, SDSer, FFFer, et cetera, sniffed and said, "Plankton is not antigay; he is anti-politically correct. That's something the J-Bird and I very much have in common."
"Cut the crap, Zinsser. Eight times out of ten, people who use that term are bigots and creeps. Anti-PCism is the current last refuge of the incorrigibly narrow and mean-spirited. So, is the FFF just more political correctness run amok? Is that what it was when you were part of it in the seventies?"
"I am neither ashamed of nor embarrassed by my years in the FFF. But if that's why you're here-which appears to be the case-let me assure you I have had no association whatsoever with the Forces of Free Faggotry since 1977. And I know for a fact that the organization fell apart soon after I left it. These people who are hassling Plankton and who kidnapped Leo Moyle are not FFFers. I am certain of that because whatever we were, we were never violent and we were never childish."
I looked at him helplessly. This was not the Kurt Zinsser I was hoping or expecting to find. After a moment, I said, "You've done quite a one-eighty over the last twenty years, Zinsser."
Looking smug, he said, "Oh, I have at that."
"Do you remember Thad Diefendorfer?"
"Sure, the Mennonite-farmboy-turned-cat-burglar. I once had a crush on him for about ten minutes. But he was joined at the hip at the time to Sammy Day, another member of the organization. Why do you ask?"
"He's over in the barn."
"Thad is? What's he doing here, with you?"
"We're looking for Leo Moyle. Thad wants to help clear the FFF's good name, and I'm working for… a client."
"Which client? Who is it?"
"My client prefers to retain his privacy."
Zinsser's eyes got bright. "It's Jay Plankton, isn't it? You're accepting the filthy lucre of this man you malign behind his back. Ha! I love it!"
"I malign Plankton to his face, and he maligns me right back. You've heard his show.
You know how these J-Bird people communicate with one another."
"Trading insults is how certain types of heterosexual men show affection for one another," Zinsser said. "Many gay men do too, in their own way. But you really mean it.
You hate your employer. What a duplicitous asshole you are."
"Actually, Plankton's not too crazy about me either, and says so sincerely. In any case, I've taken the job mainly as a favor to an old acquaintance, a New York City cop who once saved my life. He thinks my contacts with the old FFF might help me sort out this current thing."
Zinsser laughed. "And so you've come over here thinking I might have Leo Moyle trussed up in a dungeon behind my root cellar. Is that it?"
"You were not selected as a suspect randomly, Zinsser. The neo-FFFers, as you may know, have been harassing Jay Plankton for several weeks with insults and rude items sent to him through the mail. One of the substances, labeled 'excrement for the execrable,' has been identified under scientific analysis as llama shit. Any idea where it might have come from? I'm sure your supply here is ample."
He hesitated just perceptibly as something seemed to go through his mind. Then he said quickly, "If that's somebody's idea of advancing the cause of gay rights, it sounds ineffective to me. I can certainly assure you I had nothing to do with anything so juvenile, and so perfectly lame. As I said, I've got to be in Great Barrington in twenty minutes. But you're welcome to scour the premises here in search of Leo Moyle bound and gagged, if that's what you've come all this way for. Feel free to turn the place inside out."