“Sure enough,” I said, and broke into laughter. Unaffected joy radiated from my brother like fever heat, and it was impossible not to be affected by and share in it. “What, did you think I was bullshitting you?”
“Holy shit.”
I watched him reverently place the one tape down on a folded towel on the bench, then reach into the bag and take out another one. “Are you ready for the bad news?”
“Huh?” he said in a distinctly absent tone of voice. “Yeah, sure.”
“The bad news is that your fly is open, your dong is hanging out, and the tip is covered with a thick, green fungus. It looks like New York City jungle rot to me, incurable. I’d say the whole thing is going to fall off in three or four days.”
Garth glanced up from the tape, blinked slowly, shook his head slightly. “I’m sorry, brother. What did you say?”
I threw a heavy sigh at him and rolled my eyes toward the ceiling. “That was just a test to see if you were paying attention. You’re not. How the hell am I supposed to give you bad news when you’re not paying attention?”
Garth grinned, then picked up the tape off the towel and carefully placed it back into the plastic bag. He rose, put one hand on the back of my neck, kissed me wetly and loudly on the forehead. “Fuck the bad news,” he said as he stepped around me and headed for the door. “As long as you’re not seriously hurting, you can handle the bad news. I’ve got some serious music listening to attend to.”
Okay.
I spent the rest of the afternoon attending to my paperwork, analyzing and condensing crude private intelligence reports on some Arab potentates that a client of ours, an oil company, was thinking of trying to cut a deal with. Through all the hours, the music of Mary Tree wafted up from Garth’s apartment on the floor below; the floorboards tended to wipe out the treble and boost the bass, but the music still sounded excellent, and by the third run-through of the tapes I found myself singing along with half the songs.
At seven I took a break, went out, and walked a few blocks in an effort to try to loosen up my stiff knee. I stopped at a deli for a roast beef sandwich and some salad, then returned to my desk.
Mary Tree called at 10:45. She apologized for the lateness of the hour, but said she thought that I would want to know right away that Harry Peal would be happy to meet with me the next day and had suggested that I come up around 11:30 for brunch. She gave me directions. I thanked her, told her that Garth was ecstatic over her gift, said I’d be in touch, and hung up.
I wanted to fill Garth in on what was happening, but the silence from the apartment below told me that he was surely sleeping, and I didn’t think it was important enough to wake him. I set my alarm for eight, took two aspirin, and went to bed.
I stopped in Garth’s apartment on my way out, found that he had already left for the softball games. I left a note explaining that I was going back upstate to take care of some unfinished business, and asking him to check with his NYPD buddies for impressions of and information on one Daniel Mosely, former NYPD cop, and now Cairn’s chief of police. Then I rolled Beloved Too out of the garage and headed for the West Side Highway.
A lot of people, it seemed, were out for a little Sunday day-tripping. Traffic was heavy and slow-moving, and it gave me a lot of time to think; what I thought about mostly was the man I was going to see.
I’d lost a lot of heroes over the years, but two remained. The first was my brother. Garth had, both literally and figuratively, carried his dwarf brother on his broad shoulders throughout said dwarf brother’s tormented childhood and adolescence, had, along with our mother and father, tenderly nurtured the fairly bright mind of a child and young man who could not understand, deep down in that part of him where rational thought ceases and explanations are useless, why his body would not grow as other people’s bodies grew. As a child I learned a thing or two about human cruelty, and it was only because of the love and understanding of my parents and Garth that I reached adulthood and took control of my own life with mind and heart, if not exactly unscathed, at least not hopelessly crippled.
Harry Peal was a hero of another sort. In my opinion, he was a quintessential American, and he had carried the conscience and best ideals of an entire nation on his frail shoulders for more than five decades. A communist at a time when a good many decent people thought that communism offered the best hope for a nation being crushed in the coils of a merciless economic depression, Harry Peal had traveled the Dust Bowl with Woody Guthrie, gone down into the Pennsylvania coal mines with men who were dying of black-lung disease, stood on picket lines in teeming rain and freezing cold—all the while singing, and capturing in his songs not only pride in a magnificent land and its people, but also crying the need for social and economic change.
No pacifist, Harry Peal; he had fought in the Lincoln Brigade in Spain and was a combat veteran of World War II, having volunteered for the Marine Corps. When Stalin crawled into bed with Hitler, and news of the massive purges and the Gulag began to leak out of the East, Harry promptly and forthrightly severed his ties with the American Communist party. If his dream of a better America and a better world through communism had been shattered and brutally betrayed by Mother Russia, he would not betray his own ideals or his friends or his onetime political comrades; he cheerfully but firmly refused to cooperate with the HUAC and later refused to cooperate with the McCarthy committee, both times explaining that if he had a taste for trials, witch-hunts—even for real witches—and purges, he would have remained a communist. He’d said that he was not afraid of them, because they couldn’t make him stop writing and singing songs, and that he didn’t have much to lose because he never made that much money doing what he did anyway. And so this combat veteran, winner of two Silver Stars, had been sent to prison twice.
Harry Peal was one of the first to protest against the war in Vietnam, had laid his body as well as his songs on the line in the struggle for civil rights, and had been in the forefront of the fight for better working conditions for migrant workers. He was still tossed into jail on occasion in connection with some demonstration or another, but for the past fifteen years he had been devoting all his time, royalties, performance fees, and growing prestige to the problem of cleaning up America’s polluted lakes, rivers, and landscapes.
At least a dozen of his songs had become classics; he had become a classic. The right wing, of course, still hated him almost as much as they hated Roosevelt, but this was perfectly understandable and only served to put Harry Peal in good company; along with Pete Seeger, who had made cleaning up the Hudson River his own personal crusade, Harry Peal had proved to be a durable thorn in the sides of the kinds of “conservative” businessmen and factory owners who considered it their God-given right, if not their patriotic duty, to pour acid over the face of America in the pursuit of greater profits. Garth and I had been at the White House dinner where President Kevin Shannon presented Harry Peal with the Medal of Freedom for his work in leading the fight to clean up the environment. Harry Peal’s was a ferocious integrity. If, to my mind, his politics and loyalties had always tended just a bit toward the mushy-minded, he was still, to my mind, a great American patriot who loved the land of his birth far more than most of his detractors, with their star-spangled invective.
Following Mary Tree’s precise directions, I turned off Route 9W about ten miles north of Cairn and drove down a winding dirt road that led toward the river. Virtually at the end of the road, there was a mailbox with the name PEAL scrawled on it in red paint. I turned in the driveway, came to a stop beside a modest, freshly painted clapboard house with an enormous screened-in porch that rested on a ledge overlooking the Hudson, three hundred feet below.
As soon as I got out of the car, Harry Peal emerged from the house and hurried across a small expanse of lawn toward me. Age had bowed his back slightly, but had not reached his legs; although he was close to eighty years old, his gait was springy, lithe. He had a full head of white hair that nicely complemented his pale blue eyes;
as he rushed to greet me, his face was wreathed in the simple smile that always made him look to me like Santa Claus on a diet. He was dressed in a variation of what I thought of as his “uniform”—clothes he wore everywhere, whether singing for a group of migrant workers in a dusty field or on the stage of Carnegie Hall, eating a potluck supper with striking union workers or being honored with a state dinner at the White House. He wore baggy jeans, fine boots of supple Spanish leather, and a worn, faded flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up just past his elbows. A hand-carved wooden flute stuck out of his shirt pocket. As he reached me, I extended my hand; he shook it, then gripped both my shoulders.
“Mongo Frederickson,” Harry Peal said, his smile growing even broader. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“And it’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Peal.”
The old man with the heart and spirit of a child laughed loudly and shook me by the shoulders; pain shot down through my left arm, but I tried my best not to show it. “Mr. Peal? Do I look like a banker? My name’s Harry.”
“Okay, Harry,” I said, suppressing a sigh of relief when he finally released his grip on my shoulders. “I appreciate your willingness to see me. I know you just got back from Europe, and you must be suffering from jet lag.”
He dismissed the suggestion with a wave of one liver-spotted hand. “I’ve got no time for jet lag; I leave for Africa in the morning. Come on, we’ll have something to eat on the porch.”
I followed him across the narrow expanse of lawn between the house and driveway, entered the porch through a screen door that he held open for me. A wooden table set flush against the screening had been covered with a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth. On the table were a basket of fruit, a wooden board displaying a variety of cheeses, a loaf of bread that smelled as if it had just come from the oven, a large earthenware jug, and two place settings. Harry Peal motioned for me to sit in the chair on his left, and I did. He poured me a glassful of an amber, sparkling liquid from the jug. It turned out to be hard—very hard—cider, tangy and aromatic, with a pleasant little kick.
“Good,” I said, raising the glass in salute. “I assume you make it yourself?”
“Yep,” he said proudly, sitting down beside me and pouring himself a glass. “I store it in an underground herb cellar at the side of the house. It sits there through the winter and spring and starts tasting pretty good about this time of year.” He pushed the loaf of bread and cheeseboard in front of me. “Mary give you good directions?”
“Perfect,” I replied, helping myself to a piece of Gruyère. I tore off a chunk of bread, put the cheese and bread down on my plate, turned to face the other man. “Harry, did she tell you why I wanted to see you?”
He sipped at his cider, then pointed to his left ear. “My hearing isn’t what it used to be, and I’m not sure I got all of it clear. She said it had something to do with the death of that nice FBI fellow who came to visit me.”
“Michael Burana. He was a friend of mine.”
Harry Peal shook his head. “I didn’t know about it until Mary told me. Drowned in the river, I think she said. That’s a real tragedy. Like I said, I thought he was a real nice fellow. The FBI could use more nice fellows like him.”
“Harry,” I said carefully, watching his seamed face, “did Mary tell you that I think Michael was murdered?”
He had raised a cheese-topped hunk of bread halfway to his mouth; now he put the bread down on the plate, looked at me with pale blue eyes that reflected shock and what I was certain was fear. He had gone pale. “Murdered?”
“Yes. I’m certain somebody killed him.”
“Oh, boy,” he said, passing a hand that had begun to tremble across his forehead. He took the wooden flute from his pocket and began to absently roll it back and forth between his fingers. “Boy, oh boy.”
I’d definitely struck a deep and responsive chord in Harry Peal, but I wasn’t at all sure just what that chord was. To hear that a man he’d met and liked had been murdered had to be shocking, to a degree, but I read the man’s reaction as considerably more than that. Still trembling, he abruptly rose, walked around the table, and stood at the screen, looking down at the river. He raised the flute to his lips, began to play. The tune was melancholy and haunting, and I recognized it from one of his many albums as a Russian folk song. The sense of fear radiating from the other man was even stronger now. Harry Peal was not a man easily frightened, and it suddenly struck me that he could be afraid for someone, or something, other than himself.
“Harry?”
The old man finished the tune, put the flute back into his shirt pocket, and turned to face me. He still looked deeply shaken. “I’m sorry, Mongo,” he said quietly. “I didn’t mean to be rude. What you said kind of shook me up; when I get shook up, I just naturally take a dose of music to calm me down.”
“What is it, Harry? What’s the matter?”
He shook his head. “Mongo, I … You’re sure this FBI fellow was murdered?”
“In my own mind, yes. I have no doubt.”
“And you think this … killing … could have something to do with me?”
That was it, I thought. What Harry Peal feared was the possibility that he might be responsible for another man’s death. “It might have something to do with something you said to him when he came to visit you, Harry. I’m not sure.” I paused as he again took his flute from his pocket and began to play, then continued, raising my voice slightly so as to be heard above the soft, lilting, breathy notes issuing from the instrument. “Michael Burana was killed sometime in the evening of the day he came to visit you, Harry, which was a week ago today. Mary told me he seemed very distracted when he came back from seeing you. She said he’d used the word unbelievable in describing the conversation he’d had with you, but he never told her what that conversation was about. I know it’s none of my business, but I’d like you to tell me just what it was you talked about. It may have nothing at all to do with Michael’s murder, but I’d like to hear about it so that I can try to judge.”
Harry Peal returned to the table, slumped in his chair, placed the flute on the table next to his plate, and absently rolled it back and forth beneath his palm. “That FBI fellow and I had ourselves quite a chat,” he said after a time, in a soft voice. “Back in the sixties, he used to spend a lot of time following me around, listening to my phone conversations, and opening my mail.”
“I know,” I replied evenly. I felt a rising impatience, but knew that I had to let the folksinger and peace activist tell his story in his own way, in his own time.
“He told me he was sick and tired of that kind of work—spying on people just because they don’t like government policy, and say so. He told me he thought the FBI was wasting a lot of time, money, and manpower doing that sort of thing and that he’d prefer they just chase after crooks, spies, terrorists, and neo-Nazis. He also didn’t care much for the Bureau’s personnel policies, and he even suggested that sometimes it almost seemed like some people at the Bureau were intentionally hiring racists, doing things to lower morale and spread their forces thin.”
“Michael had grown a little bitter, Harry. Why on earth would anyone at the FBI do that? Did you ask him?”
The old man shrugged. “He couldn’t think of a reason; he was just fed up. The last straw was when he was assigned to spy on Mary’s people down there in Cairn. He said it was just another waste of time and that he was tired of throwing away the taxpayers’ money. He felt humiliated, and he said he was quitting the FBI. He didn’t sound like much of a pacifist to me, but he said he wanted to go to work for the Community of Conciliation. It was the damnedest thing, Mongo. I found myself in the position of saying some kind words about the FBI, arguing that just because they sometimes picked the wrong targets didn’t mean that they weren’t needed. It was pretty strange. By this time we’d both had a pretty good ration of that cider, and here was Harry Peal, not exactly the darling of federal agencies, defending the FBI, while this FBI agent was
telling me in no uncertain terms that the Bureau was nothing but a fascist outfit. I reminded him that I had been a communist, and so I knew what I was talking about when I said that the Russians, at least at the time when I was a party member, fully expected to set up a world government that they would control, and they hadn’t much cared what means they used to create it. I never wanted to blow anything up, but at that time I was meeting a lot of fellow party members who did. Anyway, I’d had something on my mind for a time, and … I’m thinking now that I should have kept it to myself.”
“Harry,” I prompted gently, “what did you say to Michael that he might later have described as ‘unbelievable’?”
The old man shook his head, picked up the bread and cheese he had set aside, and began nibbling at it as he stared off into space. I waited, and finally my patience was rewarded. He finished the food, took a long swallow of the cider, and then began speaking in a low voice.
“Back in the thirties, when I was still in the party, the Russians sent over a cadre officer, a woman, to help us reorganize our New York cell. Supposedly she was to help us to become more effective in recruiting, but she was really there to make sure we understood the Russian Communist party line and toed it. She was a propaganda and indoctrination specialist, and her job was to constantly remind us that we were communists first and foremost, and Americans second. Her name was Olga Koussevitsky.” He paused, looked at me, and smiled tightly. “She may have been an ideologue, Mongo, and she was most certainly KGB, but she was a beautiful ideologue. Spoke perfect English, and she was one tough cookie. She and I ended up spending a lot of time together, probably because she felt I was in particular need of ideological guidance; I was always questioning the need for the Russians to be in charge of everything. I’d tell her I was an American communist, and then she’d take me for long walks so she could tell me how misguided and deviant I was. Anyway, damned if we didn’t fall in love. We even moved into an apartment together. She got pregnant, and I asked her to marry me. She agreed, on the condition that the party give her permission. They didn’t; her Russian bosses told her that she was too important to the movement to marry anyone and that they’d received reports that I was a suspect communist to boot. She was ordered to return to Russia, and she obeyed. She was eight months pregnant when she left. I never saw or heard from her again.”
The Language of Cannibals Page 10