by Ted Bernard
Redlaw studied Zach with a mix of caprice and fascination. He told me the thoughts going through his mind at the time were: Isn’t this bourgeois complacency business quaint? Where did he get that? But he calmly asked, “Zachary, where did you go to high school?”
“Sandusky, sir. Saint Michaels Boys Prep.”
“Ah,” said Redlaw. “I wish I had had your critical turn of mind when I was your age. Don’t you ever let it lapse. About the only things on my mind back then were hitting shots on the court, drinking shots in the bars, and finding the girls and the pizza.”
“These are a few of my favorite things!” Zach sang, his clarion baritone, belting out the line from The Sound of Music.
Everyone, including the president, spontaneously broke out in laughter and applause. Astrid whispered to me, “The bastard steals the show. Again!”
Zach, straight faced throughout and still staring at the president, pressed forward. “Seriously, sir, what do you think about such a campaign?”
“Well, Zachary,” he began, again calling on the gravelly voice, “I think it makes a great deal of sense, providing we had enough time. Unfortunately, in this case, I fear our string has run out. A campaign like this should have been waged and sustained back in the 1990s before Morse and the economics of coal and the fracking revolution got us backed into a corner. Don’t get me wrong, I’d be much in favor of the coalition you describe if we were not in the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour. When you’re, say, fifteen points down in a basketball game with twenty seconds on the clock, no miracle of any sort can win you the game. As for your prediction of what? Apocalypse? I must say I’m more sanguine.”
As the meeting wound down and all the above-board options had been explored, some with white-hot intensity, Katherine spoke. “Mr. President, we know our time with you has more than expired. On behalf of our two organizations, I want to thank you for your openness and the extra time you’ve given us. From our side, I cannot say what will happen next; in all likelihood, I would expect more rallies, more resistance. All I can promise now is that we will present to our membership the facts as you have explained them to us and we shall continue to advocate peace and non-violence. Finally, I would ask for permission to call you or someone on your staff in the next day or two. In the interest of keeping lines of communication open, I would want you to know of our organizations’ reactions to the news and of any further developments.”
“I would greatly appreciate that,” he replied. He wrote a number on the back of his business card. “Here’s a number, Katherine. You can call it any hour of the day or night. Thank you all,” he said as he rose. With Beth Samuels in the lead, he left the room.
We all stood. I gazed again at the Quilp portrait. I winked and whispered, “Come to our aid, oh great Ebenezer,” then thought to myself: Bonkersville.
SIX
Occupy
The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power
in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous
who represent or control capital.
Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures
are in the interest of these men
and against the interests of workingmen.
This is a government of the people, by the people,
and for the people no longer.
It is a government of corporations,
by corporations, and for corporations.
— Rutherford B. Haysx
1
THAT OCTOBER, following our meeting with the President, we rabble rousers, intent on protecting a forest we deemed to be sacred, became even more nuts. We had no choice but to continue to pressure the university and this would surely involve risk. Two unexpected revelations shifted our campaign into high gear. The first I gathered in my interview with President Redlaw almost three decades ago. For the second, fortunately a hard copy survived.
Helen Flintwinch set down her phone and stared blankly at her closed office door. It was seven-thirty on the Friday morning of the worst weekend of fall semester, a weekend when every staff person, every police officer, every executive of Gilligan University of Ohio would be on high alert to prevent Halloween shenanigans from getting out of hand. But what had just been transmitted by her colleague, Grace Battersby, the Vice-President for University Advancement, had nothing to do with Halloween, and it at once answered questions that had puzzled her (and us) and raised countless others.
The provost picked up the phone and caught President Redlaw on his way to his Lake Erie cottage for what he described as a well-earned breather. Not great timing, she told him, for the sixth year in a row.
“Go ahead, I’m on speaker phone,” he cheerily assured her.
“Guess who just called me with news I believe you may already know?”
The president, driving along the freeway, smirked to himself. He knew the correct answer, but acting the rascal on this getaway morning, he decided to goad his provost a few miles more. “Haven’t a clue, Helen.”
“Well, it’s one of your vice-presidents and what I heard stumped me. As I’m minding the store in your absence this weekend, I have little time to delve into matters not relating to Halloween.”
“Vice-President, eh?” He ignored her jab. “Was it Harry Phillips complaining about the boilers again?”
“Okay, Mitch, cut the crap. I’m not in the mood for what substitutes as humor this morning. What am I supposed to do with Tulkinghorn’s Chair?”
“Oh that.”
“Yeah, that. Who in hell is behind Larnaca Venture Capital? And why have they donated twelve million toward a Chair in petroleum and innovative fossil fuel sciences? What does that euphemism imply? And how do they know Dr. Truman Tulkinghorn, whom they decree to be the first holder of this Chair?”
The President cut in. “Hang on a minute, Helen. Let me take another call.”
She took this to be a deliberate extension of his pretense. But the call was real. After five long minutes, during which she could do nothing but stew, he returned with what sounded like a genuine apology.
“Lottie there,” he said referring to the Director of Legal Affairs. “She’s been in conversation with Payne Orlick. Payne’s thrilled about the donation because two million dollars are slated toward improvement of lab facilities and equipment in his college. He says having to live with Tulkinghorn is a small price to pay for those upgrades and it will bring notoriety to the School of Conservation and Natural Resource Development as a center dedicated to making shale oil and gas more environmentally acceptable. Lottie says she can find no legal stumbling blocks to the appointment, not even in the faculty handbook. Donors have called the shots for most of our named Chairs. And to answer your question about Larnaca Venture Capital, I honestly know nothing of them. Lottie’s making sure they are legitimate.”
“Shit!” swore the provost. “There’s no way shale oil and gas will ever be environmentally acceptable to those protesters and that man Tulkinghorn is my nemesis. Half his faculty detest him.” Good grief! The provost just put forward our main objection to fracking beneath the forest and our suspicions about Dr. T..
“These are lean times, Helen.”
“Bottom line, then? Big bucks trump reason and Tulkinghorn gets last laugh. For what it’s worth, my recommendation is to reject this gift along with its strings. This firm, or whatever it is, has no connection to Gilligan.”
“While I cannot ignore your recommendation, Helen, you know full-well that my job is to raise money for this university. Put yourself in my shoes. I mean, this is as easy a take as I’ve ever seen. We run with it. And we don’t make a big thing out of checking the teeth of this gift horse. Unless Lottie puts up red flags, this is a done deal.”
“Well, I hope I’ll be out of here long before this horse gets caught fixing a race.”
“Me too. Bye Helen.”
Mitchell Redlaw switched off his phone and inserted a disc into the player on his dashboard. He loved this old technology, did not o
wn an iPod or MP3, had hardly heard of them. Old technology. New technology: all irrelevant now except for the typewriter beneath my fingers. For a jock, the president’s musical preferences surprised me. On that day, his choice was St. Martin-in-the-Field’s rendition of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. As if in the concert hall, he tapped his hands on the wheel and occasionally swirled his right hand in arcs directing the orchestra. Off on his annual autumn escape, unplugged and relaxed, he told me his spirits soared.
2
“Yeen talmbout shit?” José asked Astrid.
“No way,” she replied, shaking her head vigorously, tangling the wire for her earbuds into her thicket of dreads. She fished out the offending wire. “My colleagues and I are one-hundred percent certain of the source, just not the proportion of the income of this spider web empire. And the revenue-generating activities au courant all point to one of his enterprises as well.”
“Au courant. That mean now?” José inquired, straight-faced.
“Si.”
The rest of us seemed too dazed to chuckle or comment, as if Astrid had finally revealed unequivocal evidence for the existence of both Sasquatch and aliens in Area 51. Her revelations raised thorny decisions we could never have imagined when, three weeks earlier, we chased Dr. Tulkinghorn around southern Ohio.
Nick finally came alive. “Astrid, I don’t get why you and your hacker buddies have such confidence when, by all rights, if what you say is true, the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, and Europol ought to have entrapped the man long ago and rendered him off to some black site in Slovakia.”
“We’re smarter than they are, as Kevin Mitnick and Alberto Gonzalez have resoundingly shown.”
“Are those guys in the hacking hall of fame or something?”
“Yeah, and now they’re joined by Edward Snowden and dozens, if not hundreds of unsung heroes, many of them brassy women like me.”
“Hmm”, said Nick, tap dancing around her description of herself. “Okay, what do we do with this?”
Lara offered a cautionary note. “We’ve got to be very careful here.”
“No shit!” rejoined Astrid without humor. “If not, my ass is grass.”
“Don’t want that,” offered José with what could have been taken as snarky humor. It wasn’t. I noticed that José had developed heartfelt respect for his Canadian classmate, the high priestess of the brainies.
Katherine then calmly attempted to shed more light on our predicament. “Right,” she began. “Based on Astrid’s research, we know that Morse is connected to, if not pulling the strings for a far-flung thing called Gruppo Crogiolo. We’ve heard that his dealings rank his assets right up there with David Koch.”
“Koch is a mastadonic stretch,” interrupted Astrid, frowning. “Actually, by orders of magnitude.”
Who else could spin out sentences like these?
“Okay I grant you that,” replied Katherine. “My point is that his wealth is phenomenally more than one would derive from a smallish firm mining coal and exploring for oil and gas.”
“That is for sure,” agreed Astrid.
Katherine pressed on. “We know nothing of partners, but you believe he must have them. And now you tell us that this expanding organism was built largely on trading in Iranian oil during the long embargo!”
“This is what scares me more than anything,” Sean interjected. “If Morse has been doing this right under the nose of the State and Justice Departments, I mean, if this is so and we reveal it to the press, we’ll be dragged through unbelievable scrutiny, and, yeah, Nick, we’ll probably be rendered not to one of those black sites but instead to a sausage factory.”
“Sean!” Astrid exclaimed. “Aren’t you the guy who got queasy in the human anatomy lab? How could you even imagine a rendition so gross?”
“You can’t imagine the depravity of my imagination,” Sean replied. “But what about Morse’s blatancy. Is this man totally above the law?”
“Appears so,” Astrid answered.
“Okay, if I may continue,” Katherine said. “Astrid also revealed that Morse’s organization is shifting to or is being augmented by hacking into international banks. How incredible is that? Then, José and Nick informed us that over the years Morse has dodged federal prosecution for violations that have led to deaths, and injuries in his mines and that his Gilligan grudge may have its origins in a failed sophomore class in geology followed by a dispute with the professor that made it into The Press in May 1967.”
“Yeah, and to rub salt in his wound, the grievance was denied by the university,” added Nick.
“Finally,” Katherine said, “we read on Gilligan’s website this morning that Larnaca Venture Capital, a shale oil and gas investment firm, will fund a chair in the School of Conservation and Natural Resource Development. Isn’t Larnaca the place where Gruppo Crogiolo is registered?”
“It is,” confirmed Astrid. “But I could find no connection between Larnaca Venture Capital and Gruppo Crogiolo.”
“Dr. Tulkinghorn was not mentioned in the announcement,” Katherine continued. “But he’s the only petro prof in our school, so this must be the outcome of a deal cut between Tulkinghorn and Morse in Henry Falls.”
Our group shut down again, overwhelmed by the facts and speculations Katherine had just spun out: a story more the plot of a Le Carré thriller than something unfolding in the backwaters of southern Ohio. The room began to shrink. The emerging picture was simply staggering. Should Morse discover what we knew about him, his wrath was at least as awful a prospect as that of the NSA. Mulling over this, I gazed through the folds of the sheer curtains covering the windows of the meeting room in the Josiah Brownlow Library: pale light spilling across the table where my twelve conspirators sat, bewildered and frightened. It was late afternoon on Friday of the Halloween weekend. A warm, hazy late autumn day waned toward a mini-skirt-sheer-blouse kind of evening to launch the festivities that would propel uptown Argolis into a southern Ohio version of Bourbon Street at Mardi Gras.
Rubbing his neck and rolling his head round and round, Nick said, “How to make best use of our intelligence is going to be difficult. If we’re too vague, we won’t be taken seriously. If we’re too specific, we’ll have the law seizing us and our computers before you can say au courant, especially if people in high places also know what we know — the governor, for example. Yeah, we probably would be sequestered for years in some dark prison in Bratislava.”
“Man, you’ve got Slovakia on the brain today,” Astrid said. “But that’s a better outcome than a sausage factory.”
“Leave it to Astrid to know where Bratislava is,” chided José. “And Nick, aren’t you bordering on paranoia here?”
“Okay, some paranoia, yeah. But, bro, this predicament is one tricky mine field.”
“Mine field, sausage factory, what next?” inquired Sean without the faintest hint of irony.
“Les énigmes!” exclaimed Em out of nowhere.
“What?” asked Zachary.
“A mine field of enigmas,” explained Nick.
“And there are others, I hate to tell you,” added Lara who had patiently waited to reveal the letter she found in her mailbox that morning. “Remember that I told you that I believed I had recruited Adrienne to implant some misinformation during her next liaison with Morse? Well, I received a letter from her this morning, postmarked October 17th from Charlotte Amalie, U.S. Virgin Islands; that is, two days after we saw her at that unruly meeting eight days ago. Let me read it to you.”
After she had finished, Zachary blurted, “Holy fuck! Was Adrienne banging that old man for intelligence?”
“Yeah, if one were to put it crudely,” Lara responded.
“It seems like Adrienne directed us to look further into Morse’s history and motivations,” Sean calmly observed. “Perhaps that would yield something important.”
“I agree,” Lara replied. “So, I phoned Malcolm Barstow. You remember him?”
“Yeah, the caretaker of Blackwood,” I of
fered.
“Right. Malcolm and I have had many cups of coffee in his kitchen. Over the years he’s been kind to me. He once told me he did not care for Morse. He said that Morse is not a nice person. In my call this morning, I asked him point-blank what happened in 1964. With a great deal of hesitation and reluctance, Malcolm revealed that Morse had been sweet on his younger sister, Belinda, but that another ‘suitor’, his word, ‘came into the picture’, again, his words, and Belinda and that other guy got married, leaving Morse jilted. That was the long and short of it. Malcolm believes Morse still holds a grudge against the family, which now comprises only him and his daughter and granddaughter in San Diego.”
“Is Belinda still alive?” asked Sean.
“No. She died a few years ago of complications from open heart surgery.”
“Too bad,” said Katherine. “Okay, this, together with his failed course, could explain his obsession with Blackwood. It’s a human-interest aspect of the story, let’s say, not something legal, right?”
“Yes, that’s so,” agreed Lara. “But I need to tell you something else. I’ve had a chilling premonition since Adrienne and I talked outside The Jenny. I got the sense that night she might be over her head with Morse. She said something hideous was driving the man; that he was a serious head case. I asked if she were in danger. She told me she could handle him.”