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Copyright © 2013 by Frank Freudberg
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This book is a work of the author’s imagination. It is fiction. All incidents and dialogue, with the exception of some well-known real-life figures, products and businesses, are not to be taken as real. Where real-life figures, businesses and products appear, the situations, incidents and dialogue referring to those persons are wholly fictional and are not intended to portray authentic events or to change the completely fictional nature of this book. In all other respects, any similarity to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
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Inside Job Media
473 Sharon Drive
Wayne, PA 19087
Published in the United States
ISBN–13: 978-0-9845945-9-7
www.findvirgil.com
Cover design by Postertoaster
eBook design by MC Writing
Find Virgil is based on Freudberg’s underground classic, Gasp (1996, Barricade Books, New York).
FIND VIRGIL
A THRILLER
FRANK FREUDBERG
To my mother and father
Revenge! That feral justice,
Suited more to beast than man,
Yet it furies through the human heart,
And knows no other clan.
— Herman R. J. Franck, The Beast Within, 1899
PART ONE
1995
Gas prices average $1.09 per gallon
Forrest Gump wins Best Picture at the Academy Awards
Google, eBay and DVDs do not yet exist
O.J. Simpson is tried for murder
Bill Clinton is President of the United States
232-day-long Major League Baseball strike ends
Journalist Martin Muntor is diagnosed with lung cancer
1
Friday, September 29, 1995
Martin Muntor’s row house
Philadelphia
For a man with less than a year to live, seven days had been too much time to lose.
Martin Muntor took two weeks to prepare everything, twice as long as he had intended.
Now, all that was behind him. He was ready.
Despite the dull, relentless pain in his chest that radiated down into his lower back, he felt good. He felt great. He hadn’t felt this good in months. Maybe years. Maybe ever. He believed the Lord helped those who helped themselves, and this was the proof.
In a matter of days, Muntor would be assuming a permanent place in the history of the world. Then, no one would ignore him. No one would ever again succeed in pretending he didn’t exist.
But Muntor couldn’t rest quite yet, and so he rose wearily from the worktable in his living room and stretched. He paced. He opened dusty blinds and leaned against a window to see the sky.
A perfect day, he thought when he saw the slate-gray clouds. Dark and ominous. God is the best set designer you could want.
Muntor sat down once more, anxious to complete his task.
He needed to seal another twenty or thirty envelopes, and then that would be it. All seven hundred packages would be finished.
Twenty minutes later, he was finished. He got up from his chair and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror that hung on the wall over the living room sofa. Drawn, nearly emaciated. Older than his fifty-six years. Not a handsome sight. It enraged him to see it. He had taken care of himself. The body was a temple, a belief he had taken to heart at a young age. A lifetime of maintaining his temple, and now this.
One thing was missing from the reflected image, he realized. There was no evidence of absolute evil. I don’t think I look like the monster they’re going to say I am.
Each morning for nearly two weeks, the dying man had been getting up before dawn to seat himself at the worktable. Nothing was more important to him than this project. The early hours had proven the best. He was strongest then. He’d make coffee and have high hopes of how many packages he’d be able to finish that day.
But most mornings, after only a few hours of effort, he’d lose steam. The dexterity left his fingers. The muscles in his back stabbed at him. And then, his eyes quit focusing on the close, exacting work despite the assistance of the illuminated magnifying glass mounted on a swivel arm and clamped to the edge of the table.
On those few mornings, Muntor felt he was able to work through the pain and discomfort. His body resisted him with another barrage of difficulties. Catching his breath required more and more effort, the dull pain in his chest tightened its grip, and the coughing fits became increasingly violent. Some days, Muntor would find the strength to work three or four hours, but that was his maximum. Then, he’d have to quit. Getting to the sofa a few feet from the worktable seemed like crossing the Serengeti, but he’d get there, ease himself down, pull up a blanket, and sleep for hours.
Now that Muntor had finally finished the most taxing part of the project, the assembly work, he felt better. The physical troubles had less impact on him. The tedium was over, and there, on the floor next to the worktable, was the fruit of his labor—six large cardboard boxes holding seven hundred FedEx envelopes. Each one stuffed and sealed with a form attached that would direct the envelopes to addresses all over the United States.
Once more, Muntor did the mental calculation he’d done many times before. Thirteen dollars to ship each package. Times seven hundred packages. Nine thousand, one hundred dollars. That was going to be the most money he’d ever spent at one time. In his pocket, in the wallet with the fake identification, he had a cashier’s check for the exact amount of the shipping charges. He had called FedEx. No, he had been told, he wouldn’t need to set up an account. No, the seven hundred envelopes all at once weren’t a problem. Sure, they’d accept a cashier’s check from a local bank.
I am going to go through with this, he kept telling himself. Nothing was going to stop him, although he had good reason to give up. He’d been in pain, extreme pain, but he had a way around that. Muntor would give himself an injection—a homemade combination of prescription painkiller and amphetamine crushed together by a mortar and pestle in his kitchen, mixed with water and injected into his arm.
But he felt that was cheating. He had never used drugs—they defiled the temple. And if he started giving himself injections now, what would he do when his physical condition deteriorated even more and he really needed them?
For the first time in his life, he found himself obsessively committed to something. All throughout his school years, they had called him a quitter and a loser. And they had been right.
He grew up in a run-down Philadelphia suburb. He kept his few friends at a distance. His family had no money and his father was a loudmouthed, chain-smoking drunk. The house was shabby and reeked of the stale smoke that caused Muntor to cough himself to sleep most nights. Who needed the other kids to know about all that?
Muntor’s father worked as a pipefitter in an oil refinery, commuting by bus. A neighborhood church sometimes dropped off grocery bags of food at the house, but nothing very good. Almost-stale bread, cans of beans and vegetables, Jell-O mix. Most of his father’s paycheck went for Marlboros, Budweiser and lottery tickets.
Muntor’s mother cleaned house for a neighbor
every Saturday morning so that she could have a little cash to take her only son to the toy store or get him a birthday gift. She’d hide her small stash of neatly folded bills in a sock tucked in the back of a dresser drawer. If Muntor’s father found the money, he’d piss it away by the end of the night.
And there were arguments. Muntor’s mother would beg for her husband to stop drinking, smoking and gambling. She didn’t mention his pushing and shoving and cursing. That would be too much to ask. She made her pleas almost daily, and almost daily he’d curse her and storm out. Muntor felt relief when he’d hear the door slam. Children need consistency and Muntor had it. The day before payday—when his father had no ready cash left—had always been hellish.
That all ended one afternoon when he was eight. Muntor came home from school to find his mother laying face up on the couch, barely breathing, foam collecting at the corners of her mouth. An empty vial of prescription medicine had fallen to the floor near her dangling arm.
“Mom? You okay?” he said. She did not respond.
The child walked past his mother’s near-lifeless body, went to his bedroom, grabbed a yo-yo and six marbles—the only ones he owned—and spent the next couple of hours playing with them out front, alone on the sidewalk. Within minutes of his father arriving home, an ambulance and police cars arrived. As dusk settled in, the boy stood with the neighbors, watching as his mother’s body-bagged corpse was carried out.
Later that week, the official autopsy report indicated the cause of Mrs. Muntor’s death was suicide and that she had died of a barbiturate overdose. Muntor never understood why she’d intentionally leave him so alone. And another thing troubled him. His mother had taught him many things from the Bible, including the idea that suicide was a sin. Muntor blamed his father. From that day on, he referred to his father only as “her husband.” He never again thought of the man as his father, only as “her husband.”
You loser, his father had said, you didn’t know enough to pick up the phone and call someone, didn’t have enough sense to run for help? You could have saved her life, but look what you’ve done. What kind of little fool are you? You sat and played with those damn marbles while your mother lay in the house dying. You could have saved your mother’s life. I’m ashamed of you, and so is everyone else. You’re nothing. You don’t exist.
Muntor thought of those words as he slipped the last pack into its envelope and struggled with each heavy box, carrying them one by one and piling them by the front door. He wanted nothing more than to get to that sofa, to sleep, to rest his burning eyes, if even for only a few minutes.
But he had learned in almost six decades that if he couldn’t exorcise his father’s voice from his head, he could at least answer it back. Go to hell, old man. I am what you made me, what the world made me. I spent my life pushing back against the way you programmed me. I worked, and I was good at my job, even if those shitheads in management never appreciated me. I had a family and took care of them. I took care of myself. And where I am today is despite the life that I was born into. I don’t deserve to die, not from cancer, but others do, and I’m going to take them with me.
Muntor loved the story of Jesus throwing the moneychangers out of the temple. His mother would read it to him often. He liked to imagine that not all the priests were corrupt, that there might have been at least one who understood the temple was a holy place.
He was fond of thinking he was like that too.
He wanted to rest, but he couldn’t.
Not now, not today. Not quite yet.
Martin Muntor had one more thing to do.
2
The Executive Suite
Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc., World Headquarters
Asheville, North Carolina
A telephone rang on an immense mahogany desk in the Executive Suite of Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc., the world’s fourth-largest cigarette company. Without looking up from the quarterly financial reports he was studying, W. Nicholas Pratt, president and CEO, switched on his speakerphone.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Pratt?”
Recognizing the voice, Pratt grimaced, cut off the speaker, and picked up the receiver.
“Why aren’t you calling on my scrambled line?” It wasn’t a question. Pratt’s voice was icy. Valzmann should know better.
“I’m at a pay phone up in Pennsylvania, sir, in the mountains, looking for a site, and my cell phone won’t work up here. Your private number is on the cell phone’s autodial, and so, I had to call…”
Pratt silenced him with a derisive laugh. “You commit that number to memory.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now what do you want?”
“It’s about Tom Rhoads. I’ve just gotten a report from one of my men. He’s gone three days without a drink. Been to two AA meetings.”
Pratt pursed his lips, exhaled, and thought. He leaned back and ran a finger between the tight shirt collar and his neck. Even on Saturdays, Pratt wore a suit.
“That won’t do,” Pratt said. “I need him out of control, acting wild. We need a ready-made chump. Eventually someone’s going to come up short one research scientist. If Rhoads straightens up and flies right, we won’t be able to use him.” Pratt paused, fishing for an idea. A moment later, he found one. He sat up straight and snapped his fingers. “I know what. I want you to start in on him, wear him down. Aggravate him. Drive him to distraction. Chase him back into the bottle. It won’t be difficult. What’s that piss he drinks?”
“One-hundred and fifty-one proof Bacardi rum,” Valzmann said. “Straight. It’s like drinking rubbing alcohol, just not as flavorful.”
“Put the Pennsylvania project on hold and come back. I want you to see to it that Rhoads’s life here in Asheville becomes one big unbearable cesspool of frustration. Think about how you’re going to do it and call me back. On my secure line, Valzmann. And I do not want Rhoads to know someone’s dicking with him. Everything you do has to be subtle, plausible. Things that could happen to anybody on any day. Understand?”
Pratt knew Valzmann enjoyed the dirty-tricks assignments. They provided a break from the other illicit things Pratt had him do. Valzmann had told him the dirty tricks brought back memories of his days as a CIA man in Brazil when he served as liaison with the military regime that came into power there in 1964. He’d think of something good to do to Rhoads, something to help justify the two or three hundred thousand in cash he managed to get out of what Pratt called his “special projects” slush fund every year.
“I’ll call you back,” Valzmann said to his boss.
Later that day, a different telephone rang in the Executive Suite. This one sat inside a locked drawer in Pratt’s desk.
Pratt put a gold Mont Blanc fountain pen down on top of a stack of proposed magazine ads. At Pratt’s request, Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc.’s ad agency had prepared a campaign to attract first-time smokers. The telephone rang again and he unlocked the drawer, pulled it open, and picked it up. “Yeah?”
“I’ve got it,” Valzmann said.
“I’m listening.” There was no hint of forgiveness in the CEO’s voice for the earlier error of calling in on the wrong line. The demerit would remain on the books Pratt kept in his head, and Pratt knew Valzmann would know that.
Pratt had been an army officer in Vietnam. He had been captured and kept in a river, hunched over in a partially submerged bamboo tiger cage, for fifteen months. About once a month, he had once told Valzmann, the VC commanders would come around and announce he was to be executed the next day. Sometimes, to amuse themselves, they’d bring in an interpreter and have him dictate a farewell letter to his family. Then early the following day, they’d drag him screaming out of the cage, put a pistol to his head, and pull the trigger, or tie a grenade around his neck and pull the pin. Then they’d laugh and spit and urinate on him.
Occasionally they’d put the cadaver of another America
n in the cage with him and leave it there for weeks. The only visible scar Vietnam left on Pratt was an upper lip tic that, when active, bared his canines like a dog about to attack. Pratt was a private man, but he knew sharing this part of his past with Valzmann had convinced him that he was not someone to be toyed with. He knew people thought of him the same way they thought of John McCain, a man he admired. People might not like his style or the plans he came up with, but most of them wouldn’t push back because they knew he had been a P.O.W. People figured there was no way he could be cowed, and on some level they feared what he might do if he were pushed.
“Next time Rhoads eats in a restaurant,” Valzmann began, “which is just about every meal, we’ll slip something into his food. Visine works great. Puking, violent diarrhea, the whole mess. That’ll lay him up for a few days. When he finally feels that he can get more than ten feet away from a toilet, he’ll want to go somewhere. But then, his car won’t start.”
Pratt thought about this.
“No flat tire,” Valzmann said. “Too obvious. Something electrical.”
“Okay. What else?”
“The gastrointestinal thing will have kept him up nights. He’ll be exhausted. He’ll need sleep. A little trash fire on his floor around three in the morning to set off the fire alarm. Wake him up. Maybe even cause a building evacuation.”
“Good,” said Pratt. “He’ll be inching closer to a drink by then.”
“That’s not all. Eventually he’ll get his car fixed, and when he’s ready to return to work, on his way to his office, what if someone rear-ends him?”
Pratt laughed.
“Cockroach infestation in his kitchen,” Valzmann continued. “We know he’s scared of them, so where will he go to hang out while he waits for the exterminator? A bar, probably. And to add to his misery, we’ll also be loading a bunch of unauthorized charges on all his credit cards, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Texaco, the department stores, his long distance company.”
Find Virgil (A Novel of Revenge) Page 1