Find Virgil (A Novel of Revenge)

by Frank Freudberg

  “Anyway, your little budget increase was turned into cash through a variety of transactions. One way or another, all two hundred thousand wound up in the pocket of a fellow by the name of Thomas Rhoads. Rhoads went to Denver, officially to meet with a security alarm contractor to write up specs for the Old Carolina facility in Denver. But he had something else he was going to do for you, didn’t he? Right around that time, Benedict disappeared. That must be a coincidence.”

  Trichina closed the notebook as if it was the last page in a bedtime story and turned to face Pratt. “The End,” she said.

  Pratt glared and said nothing.

  “Now, Nick,” Trichina said softly, “if you’re innocent, why don’t you just walk out right now? Otherwise, we are going to go over the list of my new job benefits, the conditions for my silence.” Trichina swallowed hard. “Don’t look so sour, Nick,” she said, her tone dripping like warm honey. “I’m a reasonable woman. I can be had.”

  “I’ll admit no guilt, Anna Maria. What I admit to is being curious to hear about the rest of this… this delirium. So I’ll remain seated.”

  Trichina smiled.” “Call it what you will, Nick. Nevertheless,” she said, holding up her hand and raising one finger as she ticked off each demand, “I am to be promoted to position of Executive Vice President of Marketing, named an officer of the corporation, and given the compensation that goes with that rank. All retro to the first of the year.”

  “Anna Maria? Have you any idea what an executive vice presidency at a company like Old Carolina pays? In excess of a quarter million dollars a year.”

  “As a matter of fact, I did know that, Nick.”

  “Even if this whole conversation weren’t ludicrous, your demands are impossible. I have a board of directors and shareholders to report to. Executive vice presidencies aren’t handed out on the basis of long legs and…”

  Pratt crudely put his thumb in his mouth.

  “You can explain it to the board any lying way you want,” she said. “And thanks for reminding me. That’s another change. You will never lay your leathery hands on me again.”

  Pratt rose. “Anna Maria, I’m leaving now. By virtue of this very conversation, you’ve proven yourself to be reckless and irresponsible. Perhaps you’re under too much pressure, I don’t know. I had big plans for you. They’re dead now. And although you may imagine in some girlish fantasy that you have me at some disadvantage, I assure you, you do not. I encourage you, for your own good, not to expose yourself to… to legal action, Anna Maria.”

  “Save the euphemisms, Nick. I don’t need to tape record you. I have you by the nuts already. You have a week to set it up and announce my promotion. After that, I go directly to the Justice Department. And if I wind up dead before then, I’ll see your raggedy ass in hell.”

  “Why are you doing this, Anna Maria?”

  “Lots of reasons, Nick. But I’ll give you one for starters. Remember the marketing awards trip to Acapulco? Your lie about a vasectomy? How’d you phrase it? Oh, yeah. Don’t worry, beautiful, all the little swimmers have been cut off at the pass? Nice, and I wind up pregnant. Then that other… incident, the…”

  “Oh for crying out loud, Anna Maria. I paid for the goddamned abortion. It didn’t cost you a dime. I saw to it you had two weeks’ vacation to recover from a twenty-minute procedure. I…”

  “You sad, pathetic sack of shit, Nick. Is that all you got from that episode? That you saved me a few bucks for the surgery? I didn’t realize it at the time, Nick, but that child that I got rid of…” She broke off. She was not going to let herself get emotional, not now. She took a deep breath and a different tactic. “…don’t you underestimate the power of the maternal instinct, Nick? You’d be a lot better off if you did.”

  At that, Pratt laughed and started for the door. Another idea was forming. Trichina, he realized, could be helpful in retrieving all the runaway Midas documents and computer disks. If she were properly motivated.

  Pratt faked a slump of shoulders, as if he was beaten, resigning to see it her way. He walked back and sat down on the leather sofa.

  “I don’t mind helping you, Anna Maria,” he said. “But why wouldn’t you think to discuss this idea with me? Why this irrational attack out of left field?”

  Pratt’s conciliatory tone succeeded in leading Trichina to think she had won. At least this battle. She moved toward him.

  “I’m so glad we don’t have to leave this on an unpleasant note,” she said. She stepped closer and looked Pratt in the face. Thirty years ago, he was probably damn good-looking, kind of a Sean Connery type, she thought.

  She took one more step closer and sat slowly on the sofa, separated from Pratt only by a white pillow. He inhaled her musky perfume. She looked straight ahead, not at the CEO. Her hand moved toward him and stopped, resting on the pillow. Her deep maroon fingernails dug into the soft leather. She picked up the pillow and put it carefully on the floor in front of her. Her knees parted ever so slightly.

  “Mr. Pratt,” she said softly, caressing her thigh through the skirt’s material. “I’ve got a very sensitive situation here, and it’s fairly crying out for the skill of a man of experience.”

  She continued looking straight ahead but could feel Pratt watching her.

  “You said you wouldn’t mind helping me, Nick.”

  Trichina closed her eyes and leaned back. It was Pratt’s turn.

  67

  Chicago Sun-Times headline

  Tuesday October 17

  CIGARETTE REFUNDS COULD REACH $200 MILLION

  ALL BIG 8 TOBACCO FIRMS IN NATIONWIDE

  MONEY-BACK REFUND PROGRAM

  Execs Acknowledge Move Is “Virgil-Inspired”

  68

  Bucks County, Pennsylvania

  Wednesday, October 18

  Muntor needed a remote place to stage a dress rehearsal for the grand finale, and he knew a realtor could help him find one. He loved hiding behind real estate agents. The way they preferred to control the relationship by insisting that they drove you in their cars while you sat back and enjoyed the view, the way they lead you about, as if you had a ring through your nose. The whole routine served as a perfect cover.

  Muntor dressed as a country gentleman in a good seersucker jacket he had found in the closet. He bought a wide-brimmed sky-blue hat, cordovan wing tips and cotton pants to imitate the wardrobe he had seen in an ancient copy of an Esquire Fall Fashion Review.

  At the realtor’s office in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Muntor misrepresented himself as a serious prospect. He told her he was interested in farmland, preferably with an old farmhouse and a barn or stable. Something he could convert into an office. A spring or pond would be a plus. They spent hours Wednesday afternoon looking at properties.

  Working from a list she had compiled, the agent eventually drove by a property with an old school building on it. They went up and around the long driveway. Muntor said he didn’t like the looks of it. As they drove away, the realtor told him how the county had tried to sell the school at auction, but none of the bidders offered the minimum, and the sale was canceled.

  “Interesting,” was all he remarked. He tried to seem bored.

  At about 3:30 p.m., after driving to two other properties, Muntor announced that he had seen enough for the day. On the ride to be dropped off at his car, he made a careful mental note of how to return to the school.

  Now that he knew where he could practice for the big event, Muntor drove to a diner and killed time reading and drinking coffee until 4:30 p.m. That would give him an hour or so of light—more than enough time for a quick dress rehearsal.

  He returned to the school. The vacant building was more than secluded enough for Muntor’s purposes.

  He proceeded up the gravel driveway to the sprawling 1930s-era fieldstone schoolhouse. The wall on the north side had caved in winters ago, the realtor had said, and p
art of the roof had rotted through and was ready to collapse. Every pane of glass, hundreds of them, had been broken.

  Muntor, confident that no one was around, stood in the driveway next to his car and changed from his prospect’s costume, carefully putting the slacks and shirt and jacket onto the wooden hangers he had brought. He changed into jeans and a flannel shirt, yanked a heavy duffel bag from the floor behind the driver’s seat, another from the trunk, and took two trips to half-drag, half-carry them into what remained of the school. In his exhausted state, the effort required was extreme.

  Muntor set the duffel bags down. He walked through the crumbling halls until he found the giant auditorium. Wrecked and mostly empty, the high-arched ceilings seemed more fitting for an airplane hangar than an assembly hall. It was exactly as he had imagined.

  The pain in his chest ripped at him, sharp and steady. He didn’t have enough strength to get the equipment from the duffel bags. He leaned back against a dusty tile wall, reached into his shirt pocket, and withdrew a small brown envelope containing a syringe. He removed his jacket, took off his belt, and rolled up his sleeve.

  Invigorated and recharged, in both mood and energy, Muntor walked briskly and retrieved the duffel bags. He brought them into the auditorium. From one bag, he removed bright yellow fire-department hazardous-materials protective clothing, boots, suspendered-trousers, a full, knee-length tent-style overcoat, and a special helmet with a hood that protected the entire face, the kind firemen use when responding to chemical fires or encountering heavy smoke. Muntor laid all these articles out on the dusty floor that had once been gleaming tile and waxed hardwood.

  Then, using both hands, he removed another article from the second bag. Out came an orchard-fogger, a green-and-white-striped steel cylinder designed to generate thick clouds of insecticide, and an oversized fire extinguisher whose hose was attached to a long, curved, black gunmetal trigger nozzle. Liquid sloshed around inside the cylinder.

  Muntor put on the protective clothing, all but the hooded helmet, carefully and quickly. He had practiced this part. As usual, he struggled a bit, wriggling the tank and its cobweb of straps into position on his back, but finally positioned it snugly without too much delay. He was getting faster at putting it on.

  Then he took his video camera and tripod from the duffel bag. He attached the camera to the tripod’s mount and set it up in a far corner of the huge room. He looked around at the hundreds of broken, splintered wooden auditorium seats that had been screwed into the floor. He imagined them filled with the movers and shakers of the tobacco industry.

  There was still enough light left for what he needed to do, but he had to work fast.

  He was nearly out of breath and had almost forgotten a critical part of the drill. Muntor set the orchard-fogger down and removed a folded piece of paper from his pants pocket. He looked at the diagram he had drawn. Referring to it, he measured off a large rectangular area, sixty paces up, forty-five to the right, sixty paces down, and forty-five more, back to the spot from which he had begun. At each corner, to show him the rectangle’s perimeter, he had stopped and marked an X into the dusty floor with the tip of his yellow rubber boot.

  Muntor noticed a dozen wrens perched high on a rotting beam above him. He stooped and picked up a broken wooden seat leg and threw it toward the birds. He aimed wide, not wanting to hit them. The splintered wood crashed into the wall behind the birds and sent them scattering in a wild flutter of wings. A few feathers spun lazily to the floor.

  “No need to get you guys involved,” he said as they flew out of the auditorium through the missing roof slats. He hadn’t spoken in hours. His voice was a croak.

  Next, Muntor retrieved a bath towel wrapped around two small wire cages, each containing a young white laboratory rat, from the second duffel. Muntor walked the rats to the two farthest corners and set them down. An old joke popped into his head—laboratory rats are the primary cause of statistics.

  He walked back to the duffel bags and orchard-fogger. One wren had returned to the beam above. Muntor picked up another piece of wood and tossed it toward the bird.

  “Last chance,” he shouted to it. “Get out of town.”

  Muntor pulled on the hooded helmet.

  Later, Muntor would watch the video.

  The sequence would open with billows of white-gray, like threatening storm clouds. Then the image of a man. And for the end of the sequence, a long shot, starting from the driveway, encompassing the entire building, the white-gray fog rising from holes in the roof and through the glassless windows.

  69

  Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

  Saturday, October 21

  Outside, it was cold enough to snow.

  Inside, Muntor sat at a booth in Bob Diner in Harrisburg.

  Bob Diner? That can’t be a typo, Muntor thought, sitting under fluorescent lighting that was too bright, amid the noisy people and the clatter of dishes, waiting for the waitress to bring the coffee he ordered. A previous customer had left a newspaper folded open to the stock quotes. He nudged the paper into a position so he could see the Old Carolina Tobacco, Inc. price.

  The stock was down another three dollars.

  Beautiful! he thought. Then the pain in his chest distracted him and killed his appetite, and nothing on the menu interested him except the restaurant’s name. Bob Diner? Didn’t someone forget the apostrophe and the “s” somewhere along the line? But no, that’s what it said on the menu, that’s what it said on the paper placemats, and that’s what it said on the illuminated blue letters atop the brick-and-chrome restaurant.

  He wanted to ask the waitress about the diner’s name, but he could not afford to draw any attention to himself. He missed small talk with strangers. It was true he had no close friends, but he loved to engage people in conversation on topics in the news, upon which he could be impressively authoritative.

  Now, though, he was cold and tired and he wanted strong, hot coffee.

  The waitress brought the cup. He sipped it. Tepid, damn it. He tried to get her attention, but she had disappeared into the back.

  Muntor looked around and reluctantly sipped more from the cup while he stole glimpses of the patrons.

  He held a pack of Winstons in his hand. He was waiting for the all-clear moment when he could wedge the trick-pack between the seat cushion and booth back. He had looked in the crevice earlier and noticed the crust of a slice of rye bread and several small squares of the wax paper that comes on pats of butter. Muntor knew that even in good restaurants, not that this place was one, all you have to do to find something disgusting is to look.

  In this planting, Muntor chose to remove most of the cigarettes from the pack and leave the ace inside with the remaining ones. That method, he reasoned, suggested a bona fide pack left behind by chance by an inattentive customer. He’d used the ploy, successfully, several times before.

  Just after wedging the pack in the cushion behind him, Muntor looked up. A man and woman, the female facing Muntor, sat several booths away. Blue-collaresque features in business garb. They didn’t seem to be husband and wife, or brother and sister, or casual acquaintances. They looked more like colleagues.

  But they could be the cops.

  Muntor tried to make a slight furrow of worry creep across his brow. He was acting now, psyching himself for what he was going to do. I have this damned briefcase full of cyanided cigarettes, he said to himself, almost as if reading from a script.

  The thin line between paranoia and faking paranoia blurred. To Muntor, it was possible that the man in the booth could be looking at him out of the corner of his eye.

  I’m getting out of here, and I have to get rid of this briefcase. But not too quickly, not too slowly. This has to be handled subtly. This has to look good. Take it easy.

  Muntor left two quarters on the table and took his check to the cashier. She was a bosomy woman about sixty who wore
the kind of sequin-decorated eyeglasses that opticians should be prohibited from selling. A copy of the Harrisburg Patriot-News lay spread out on the rubber counter-mat used by cashiers to drop change. A front-page headline described the latest activity of “The Tobacco Terrorist.” An FBI composite sketch, vague enough to fit ten million men, was displayed in a black-bordered box. The cashier moved the paper in order to accept Muntor’s check and money.

  “Everything all right?” she asked. She did not await a substantive answer but instead squinted at the waitress’s penmanship and began to make change for the crumpled five Muntor handed her.

  To stifle the urge to cough, Muntor took a deep breath. A musical wheeze issued from his chest. The woman looked up, aimed her squint at him, held it for a beat, and then returned to her change-making task.

  He swallowed hard and looked around toward the couple whose demeanor could be that of undercover police. Was the male turning away from him at that instant or just engaged in animated conversation?

  Muntor left Bob Diner, walked fast but paced himself and got into his car. A young couple walked past his car as he drove off. They didn’t seem to notice me, though they may have. Muntor didn’t like that possibility. And now, should a police cruiser come down the street or around the corner and ask them if a guy walked by in the past few minutes, theoretically, they could describe me and my car.

  Muntor drove for several blocks and then turned into an alley. He saw what he had been looking for. The dumpster, green-gray in the poor light, one of its two steel lids raised and beckoning. To make it easier to find at night, he had used reflective spray-paint earlier to draw a yellow smiley face on it. Muntor lowered his window as he inched his car close to the dumpster and, without stopping, tossed in the briefcase.

  He drove out of the alley onto the street and accelerated steadily.

  70

  FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION SECURED TELEX TRANSMISSION