by Paul Heald
“Hello, Brenda,” she murmured to herself, “could you please tell me everything you know about Jacob Granville?”
The posts about the cotton litigation revealed how obsessed Granville had become with the WTO case. He described Congress’s subsidies of cotton growers in Texas and the Mississippi Delta as nothing less than acts of murder. The evidence showed that even though the subsidy was a disaster for US taxpayers ($18 billion handed out to farmers who created a crop worth $11 billion), it had succeeded in making US growers the number one exporters of cheap cotton in the world, driving down the world price for cotton and ruining poor farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. It was impossible to calculate the number of deaths caused by US agricultural policy, but it was clear that poor African farming families suffered and starved as a direct result. To make matters worse, according to a later post, the beneficiaries of the subsidies were not small US cotton farmers, themselves barely scraping by, but rather, huge industrial farms owned by a small number of incredibly wealthy landowners. The icing on the cake was that much of the US cotton crop was sold cheaply to garment-manufacturing maquiladoras in Mexico that exploited their laborers and reaped a huge profit themselves.
The connection to Granville’s Mexican YouTube video was not lost on her.
He repeated these facts over several posts, becoming increasingly strident when his friends seemed uninterested or took issue with his characterization of Congress and wealthy growers as intentional murderers.
Melanie got up from the table and walked into the kitchen. Sunlight was streaming through the skylight onto her green quartz countertops, and she put on a kettle for some tea. Although Atlanta as a whole failed to charm her, she loved her tidy townhouse in Buckhead, especially the bright kitchen space that looked over her backyard. She really should have a dinner party, but socializing with her subordinates seemed like a bad idea, and the small peer group at the top of the office hierarchy was too busy hauling kids to soccer practice and school plays. She flicked the spent tea bag into the trash with a sigh. She really needed to get a life.
After a quick check of her mail, she sat back down and reconsidered Jacob Granville. What had he hoped to learn on a trip to Geneva that he could not glean from the myriad of online and in-print sources? The directory portion of the WTO website provided names and pictures of only a select number of figures running the Secretariat, which did not include Brenda. Melanie did learn to her astonishment, however, that the entire World Trade Organization employed fewer than six hundred people. Brenda Harvey, entered into the WTO website search function, returned two hits, both listing her tersely as a collaborator in the Subsidies and Countervailing Duties working group.
She knew from the Justice Department website that many search engines were not designed to crawl through documents that were scanned and uploaded as PDFs, and sometimes searches refused to generate results from PDFs at all. To test the WTO site, she found archived PDF reports related to subsidies and clicked on the first one retrieved. It was written by a researcher identified as Gert Hydriks and included his email address and phone number. She then ran a general search on the site using his name and got several hits, none of which were the document she had opened. Bingo. She would not be wasting her time if she trolled manually through the PDF archives of the Subsidies working group. And since the department had only fifteen employees, she figured it would not take too much time to find something authored or coauthored by Brenda Harvey. Sure enough, an hour later, she had found five reports coauthored by Harvey, each listing the same contact information and all dated 2009 or before.
She emailed Harvey from her Gmail account and leaned back in her chair wondering if she should also call the contact number. She looked at her watch. It was three o’clock in Atlanta and eight o’clock in Geneva, well after working hours. She would call in the morning if she received no response to her message.
* * *
The central operator at the WTO spoke perfect English, and probably a dozen other languages, and she took a moment to check the WTO directory and records.
“I’m sorry, but Ms. Harvey no longer works here.”
Melanie put her coffee down. “Do you have current contact information?”
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, “but there’s no further information listed.”
Melanie thanked her and yelled Shit, and then resorted to conventional Internet searching, but Brenda Harvey was too common a name and generated too many disparate hits. She was in no mood for needle searching in digital haystacks.
It was six o’clock in the morning, and she had time to follow one more lead before heading into work. Brenda’s companion, named Elisa in both photos she had seen, had dressed similarly and even carried the same sort of business satchel. It was possible that they both worked at the WTO, so she searched for the name on the website and learned that seven Elisas worked there, none of whom seemed to be associated with the division of Subsidies and Countervailing Duties. She wrote down all the last names and decided to take a shot in the dark. She signed on to Facebook and searched for each of the seven. Six of the WTO Elisas were on the social network, and three of those six had multiple pages, because their last names were fairly common. All told, she had almost two dozen potential Elisas. Six of those completely blocked the public from accessing any information from their profile. The rest allowed limited access to basic information, including their photo avatar. In less than fifteen minutes, she was staring at the small photo of a young blond woman named Elisa van der Vaart, employed by the Intellectual Property Division of the World Trade Organization. Brenda’s friend.
She called the WTO once again and was cheerfully connected to a voice mailbox, where a pleasantly accented voice explained in English that Elisa was taking a short vacation and would be back on Monday. Melanie smiled as she imagined the look on James Murphy’s chiseled face when she revealed the identities of the Cotton Queen and her IP sidekick.
* * *
James awoke on Sunday morning with hot asphalt for a brain and the sour taste of bile in his mouth. He might have survived the dozen beers if he had not topped them off with two stiff tumblers of Four Roses bourbon. He tried to remember the last time he had drunk himself sick—talking to God on the big white telephone, his son called it. Maybe at his brother’s wedding, fifteen years earlier? He crawled out of bed, made his way unsteadily to the kitchen, and shook two extra-strength ibuprofen into his hand. A glass of milk seemed safest, so he chased down the pills with some two-percent and then mixed a second glass with some Hershey’s syrup to sip on the living room couch. Two hours, a shower, and a bowl of oatmeal later, and James could walk about without dizziness, but he still felt nauseous and crusty around the edges.
The previous day had started well. His son, Robert, had arrived back from the University of Georgia in the late morning, and after loading his car up with a number of items deemed essential to his college career, they had tried a new seafood place on the edge of town. As James was wiping a spot of drawn butter from his chin, he heard his son whisper in a tentative voice, “Is that Mom by the door?”
James looked up and saw his wife, looking very sharp in a new skirt, being escorted into the restaurant by Pastor Neville Armstrong, youth minister and slugging first baseman for the First Baptist softball team. Sondra had cut and dyed her hair in a way that accentuated her high cheekbones and lovely complexion. She looked achingly beautiful. The restaurant was large enough, and the father and son far enough away in the corner, for them to remain undetected by the smiling pair. James and Robert watched without speaking as the newcomers sat down across the room and studied the menu together, holding hands and talking animatedly.
“What’s she doing with Pastor Dumbass?” Robert asked in a voice that suggested he guessed the answer. “You guys are just separated, not divorced.”
James had no answer for that; long habit had suppressed his ability to criticize Sondra in front of their children. He just stared in horror as each brush of the hand, to
uch of the shoulder, and guilt-free burst of laughter told him that his wife would not be coming back home. Ever.
A wave of anger surged through him. Had Pastor Armstrong told her the whole story behind his resignation as a deacon and his abandonment of First Baptist? What if she thought he was some sort of pedophile, and she had found a solid rock of the church to cling to in the stormy seas of his perversion? He stood up and took a step toward the couple but found his son blocking the way.
“It’s not worth it.” Robert’s grip was as firm as his whisper, and James looked with surprise into his son’s eyes. For the first time he saw a man.
“Let’s just pay the bill and get out of here, Dad.”
He barely remembered being led out to the car, but he did recall the odd comfort Robert had provided as James began pounding down the first of the beers back at the house while his son sipped on a Coke. If Robert were to be believed, neither of his two children understood why their parents had stayed married for so long. Events James had dismissed, as the occasional round of bickering and subsequent sulk, were seen from the outside as evidence of profound incompatibility. He was stunned to learn that the kids had expected a divorce long ago and wondered how their intellectual and rather quiet father had ever married their mercurial, materialistic mother. Robert was kind enough to add that he loved his mom. She was vibrant and funny, but she was so unhappy, so unable to enjoy to life in Clarkeston. Then he dropped the biggest bombshell of all. During at least one of her prior “vacations” from the marriage, she had an affair with the divorced father of one of his friends.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I talked with Sis about it, but we figured you guys were getting divorced anyway and then it would all come out.” Robert looked apologetically at his father, who was sinking ever deeper into the chair in the corner of his study. “Then, you guys got back together and it seemed like a really bad idea to bring it up. I’m sorry if we did the wrong thing.”
“No,” James conceded, still trying to process the inevitability of the end of his marriage, “you did the right thing.”
“Are you going to be okay? I’ve got to head back.”
“Maybe.” James got up and shrugged. “Eventually. Yeah.”
He embraced his son as he stood by the car.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to stay?”
The offer was generous, but James knew the last thing his son needed was to see his father drink himself shit-faced in despair. “No,” he replied grimly, “but thanks for asking. Kiss your sister for me.” Then, he returned to his study, turned up his stereo, drank, turned off his stereo, drank, watched Love Actually twice, and then finished the entire supply of Budweiser in his refrigerator.
* * *
The reporter looked at his watch and saw that it was still two and a half hours until the planned meeting with Melanie, Thor, and Miriam at St. James church. He had not attended any services since his abrupt departure from First Baptist and had felt the disruption in his weekly routine. His wife’s church had never satisfied him spiritually, but he had plenty of friends there and he had found the Sunday morning routine pleasant, especially when the hymns were familiar and they went to the local pancake house for lunch immediately after the service.
He checked on the St. James website and saw that he had time to shave and still make the ten thirty service there. The last twenty-four hours had given him plenty of reason to seek divine intervention, so he splashed some cold water on his mottled face and put on a suit that might satisfy the sartorial norms of the famously formal crowd at the downtown Episcopal church.
The last bit of throbbing in his head faded soon after he entered the cool stone sanctuary of the church. The light coming through the stained glass windows was muted, and the organ played a Bach prelude quietly as the rather elderly congregation filed in. Rather than process into the sanctuary, the choir arranged itself on either side of the altar and offered an exquisitely delicate version of the Duruflé Ubi Caritas before Father Carter stood up and gave the opening prayer.
Until the sermon, James did not carefully attend to the liturgy, happy to float along with the prayers, Bible readings, and beautifully chanted psalm. His brain was not prepared to do any work, but when Thor took the pulpit, he caught the attention of the fallen-away Baptist, if only because the priest seemed so anxious about the message he was about to deliver. He cleared his throat, took a quick sip from a glass of water, and began.
“I was on a plane last year and found myself sitting next to one of our Pentecostal brethren, one of the kind who enjoys talking about religion on long plane flights.” This elicited a chuckle from a couple of congregants, and the priest seemed to take heart as he continued. “We talked about our backgrounds and he eventually asked me if I were saved.” He paused. “I said yes, and he smiled broadly at me and asked me when. He wanted my story and probably wanted to tell me his too. Well, as you might imagine, I told him the truth: ‘I was saved the exact same day that you were,’ I said. ‘When Jesus died on the cross.’”
He took another sip of water. “Now, this is not what he wanted to hear, because in his mind, salvation is something earned through right belief and tithing, perhaps by good deeds or through a charismatic revelation. For some reason, as wonderful as the story of the cross should be, he did not want to hear it, possibly because any notion of universal salvation would necessarily include Muslims, Hindus, Jews, atheists, and inveterate Christian sinners. That’s not the kind of crowd that he wanted to hang out with for eternity.”
James listened carefully as the priest summarized various arguments over the nature of salvation that he had had with friends, family, spiritual advisors, and fellow seminarians. His delivery was awkward on occasion but his sincerity was compelling as he mixed theological history and personal anecdote. It had been a long time since James had heard a sermon where the specter of hell, by implication or assertion, did not pervade the message from the pulpit.
“In the end,” Thor concluded, “the only argument that ever made complete sense to me was that God does not fail. And he wants to save and redeem the world. He cannot fail … by definition. Everyone agrees with that, and quite frankly, I find it very difficult to talk to people who imply that God is a failure. That he wants to save people but cannot. That his will to save can be thwarted by mere mortals.”
He leaned forward over the pulpit and surveyed his congregation. “So, this is the key to the parable of the rich man and the difficulty of passing a heavily laden camel through the eye of the needle. The rich man is getting through, his camel is getting through, and so are his servant, his enemies, and the band of lepers dogging his steps asking him for alms. Everyone is getting through, and it is so fantastically difficult to comprehend that we tend to sit outside, waiting for an invitation that we fear will never come.”
A long pause as he prepared to drop one final bomb on the congregation. “I’ll finish with something one of my teachers once told me long ago, and I hope that you don’t take it the wrong way: You’re all saved … now start acting like it.”
James felt an absurd impulse to give the brave young priest a standing ovation or at least a loud amen, but nothing could have been more out of place among the sober audience that sat as if it had not heard the sermon at all, a message that at First Baptist would have caused a riot. It was a relief, therefore, when everyone stood to sing and he could offer his appreciation in a rich, but sadly under-pitch, baritone voice.
* * *
Melanie was the last to enter the priest’s study after the service, and James introduced her to Father Thorsten Carter and Miriam Rodgers. The earnest, ginger-haired priest took her hand warmly and offered her a seat on the sofa next to James. Melanie took a second look at Miriam and tried to remember where she had seen the face before. Maybe on a prior trip to Clarkeston? Then, with a lurch, she remembered the interview in Vidalia and the wistful sentiments of Jacob Granville’s mother. Miriam had been dating Jacob before he met Di
ana Cavendish, and Jacob’s mother had lamented the substitution of the young dancer for the pretty, immaculately groomed woman sitting in front of Melanie.
“Let me start,” James began, after everyone had turned down Thor’s offer to bring in some coffee. “As you already know, I came across new pictures of Diana Cavendish on the Internet a while ago and contacted the Justice Department with the information.” He nodded to the federal prosecutor. “Since then, Melanie’s been trying to track down the source of the photos, and together we’ve been reinterviewing people like Jacob’s and Diana’s parents.”
He smiled at Thor and Miriam. “You two got dragged into this when I brought Father Rodgers’s papers back to my house and they were stolen shortly thereafter. I’ve mentioned already to Melanie that you two have been trying to determine whether Miriam’s father and his friends may have obstructed the initial search for Jacob and whether anyone might still be interested in doing so.
“I thought,” he continued, “it would be a good idea for all of us to get together and talk about what we’ve found.”
From long experience, Melanie knew the power of speaking last, so she sat back in her chair and waited for someone else to pipe up. She needed to gauge the trustworthiness of her two new companions before she revealed what she knew about Granville’s trip to Geneva.
“Well,” Miriam broke the short silence, “I’ve been trying to track down anyone that my father might have known who would have had the power to influence the FBI’s investigation—”