Geistmann

by Singer, Ron

  Dead, and strapped to a gurney about to be loaded into a Navajo Nation ambulance, Gordon Billings still got no love. As they retraced their route to Window Rock, Hank and Robinson speculated about the implications of Peter’s choosing to break cover when and where he had. Hank had a theory.

  “Peter wouldn’t have made that long speech in Charlottesville, unless he was getting ready to cut and run, himself. From what you said, all the speech accomplished was to focus everyone’s attention on him.” Robinson thought the idea made sense. But so had the treacherous Fedoruk’s ideas.

  From Window Rock, where they said their goodbyes, Robinson drove his rented car the rest of the way to the Albuquerque Sunport. There he rejoined Weatherbee, and they flew to Reagan in adjoining business-class seats. An hour passed, and they were somewhere in the clouds high above the heartland before he spoke for the first time.

  “I know you need to get back at the Library one of these days, John, but would you mind spending the weekend in Washington --still working for us?” He sounded tired and distracted. He did not make eye contact.

  “Doing what?”

  “Oh, research, more research. You can continue developing the profile. There’s a lot of new material, isn’t there?”

  Despite the Coordinator’s weary tone, Robinson welcomed the offer. He was feeling too unsettled to make a sharp U-turn back into the dusty world of eleventh century manuscripts. He was also feeling less threatened now. Whatever his motive, Fedoruk’s prediction had been correct: Geistmann had not tried to kill Robinson at the sing. But he resisted the impulse to tell Weatherbee what Fedoruk had done to Hank. Peter’s defection did not inspire trust in his erstwhile master. Robinson needed time to think. He had just been offered three days.

  “Sure,” he replied. “Why not?”

  “Good.”

  Another hour passed in silence. While Weatherbee was plugged into a Navajo site on the Internet, Robinson caught up with his email. Notable among the twenty-six unread messages that had accumulated since he had left New York the day before –could that be right, only one day?-- was a pithy message from his rich uncle Ted’s wife, Sadie, in New York, informing him that Ted was in the hospital dying of cancer. The rest were mostly spam, peppered by petty business communications, such as his bank balance, which included the usual direct deposit from the University. There was also a short message from Ian Bostridge, wishing him well and looking forward to his return. Bostridge did not mention Weatherbee.

  Not for the first time, Robinson noted without regret the slenderness of his personal life. He knew that, while he was a friendly person and not shy, he did not have many real friends. Although he had worked at the Library for over a decade, he only had acquaintances there, colleagues he thought of as “Coffee Mates.” Was he a cold person, a warm one? Organized? Disorganized? Well, he was organized –very—or, at least, he had been. Maybe he needed more friends. But, of his two new promising acquaintances, one had immediately proven treacherous, and the other was a member of an ethnic group for whom making friends with a biligaana could take decades.

  “Huh!” Weatherbee exclaimed, a minute later. “Are you still in touch with your ex-wife’s family, John? Listen to this.” He read from the laptop screen on his table tray.

  According to the western worldview, the end of March symbolizes the beginning of warmer weather, yet sometimes it may not feel like spring. And we cannot control or predict the power of Mother Nature. Not surprisingly, there are times when it may snow in late April or early May – this in Navajo culture is called an ‘In-Law Chaser.’ Navajo teaching says if an in-law has a weak mind, that individual will state he or she can’t work outside because it’s snowing. Moreover, an in-law may also be afraid to travel when it snows this time of the year. It is therefore a form of teasing in-laws, yet a way of building character.

  “How do you like that!” he said.

  “In our culture, I don’t think it would be a good way to build character. And, no, I’m not in touch with my ex’s family. I was never close to them.” But his words belied a sense of excitement at the prospect of eating lunch with Judy.

  “The cheery blossom festival starts Wednesday,” Weatherbee quipped. They had just flown over some mountains, presumably in Kentucky or West Virginia, and were beginning their descent. Weatherbee read on in silence. Robinson heard in the “cheery” joke a palpable bitterness over the defection of his assistant. Robinson resumed his spam deletion. He caught a glimpse of a slew of incoming emails on the Coordinator’s screen.

  Shortly after ten p.m., they sped away from the airport. They had both been awake about seventeen hours. In a normal, bland car, a new driver was ferrying them onto a cloverleaf of unfamiliar roads.

  “I’m taking you to a nice little B & B, a hidey-hole we use in Georgetown, John.” Weatherbee seemed to be making a visible effort to snap out of his funk. “I’ll be going on to Quantico Marine Base, which is our --JOLETAF’s--Washington ‘squat.’ Oh, yes, here’s another copy of the dossier --a more complete one.” Opening his lawyer’s briefcase, which sat next to Robinson’s attache’ case on the seat between them, he handed Robinson a thick blue file. “Every time you leave the B & B, be sure to deposit it with the manager or her husband. They’ll keep it in the safe. Oh, here’s something else.“ He took a folded sheet of paper from the briefcase and passed it across. “Feel free to contact anyone on this list. I think I can say now that they’re your colleagues, the JOLETAF crew, including our consultants –shrinks, techies, other academics, what have you. The only notable omission, you’ll find, is Sandy Podgorny. He asked to be excluded, too busy.” (Now it was “Sandy.”) “The list should also be kept in the safe when you go out.” He added another lame joke. “Now that you’ve had your tires shot out, it seems only fair that we’re ratcheting up your security clearance.” Robinson glanced at the names, put everything in the attaché case, and returned it to its place next to Weatherbee’s musty old brown briefcase. His father had owned one just like it.

  Lapsing into silence, they headed west along the Beltway in the light late-evening traffic. The leak had now presumably been plugged, so would Geistmann go to ground or, if not, would it finally be possible to catch him? Willy-nilly, Robinson seemed to have become a full-fledged member of the team.

  His thoughts turned to the book he had been reading, about the Parma Ildefonsus. An idea for an article was germinating that would involve looking at a related text, a philosophical fragment. But the text could wait; it was not about to disappear. Nor, for that matter, since he had tenure at the Library, was he.

  PART THREE

  Saturday, April 5 – Sunday, April 6, 2008. Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

  With his curiosity in jubilee mode, Robinson made full use of the weekend interlude. Pausing only to send and receive a few relevant emails, all day Saturday, and again Sunday morning, he combed the new dossier in light of what he knew. He only paused for two nights, seven hours each, of dreamless and restorative sleep; two long early morning jogs; and three big meals: Saturday dinner out, and two breakfasts –brunches, really-- sent up by his hosts.

  They were a jovial, bland couple a few years older than he was, and they had obviously been schooled to ask no questions and to chat only upon request. Although they presumably lived right above him, he heard nothing, not even footsteps. For that matter, as far as he could tell, he was the only current tenant.

  He spent most of his working hours in a sturdy little chintz-covered armchair between the desk and the bed in his big, comfortable ground-floor room. Occasionally, he would move to the desk to use his laptop. As he scrutinized the blue file, Robinson collated the information with what he already knew from the original dossier, the Red Notices, the Charlottesville post-mortem, the tumultuous escapades of Geistmann’s American odyssey, and several quick email exchanges with Weatherbee. It was the kind of complex mental task he loved.

  On Sunday afternoon, he drafted a long email in which he created a new Geistmann profile.<
br />
  From: John Robinson

  To: (blank)

  Subject: Geistmann Profile

  April 5, 2008

  The criminal fugitive known as Geistmann [he could not bring himself to call him “Subject”] is a polyglot: fluent in English; at least proficient in French, Portuguese, and Ukrainian; possessed of smatterings of Tagalog and Navajo; and possibly also possessed of considerable facility in several other Romance and Slavic languages. Where did he learn all these languages? Although some of his knowledge is undoubtedly osmotic, acquired during sojourns in various countries, it is also probable that he was raised in a home that was at least bi-lingual. His languages, coupled with great discipline and method, and with the military precision of his timing, all suggest that he may subsequently have attended an elite boarding school, perhaps in France or one of her former colonies. Nor should a post-school military stint be ruled out.

  Next come all the tendentious puns and assumed names, always playful, and extremely significant. I am sure that, if we were ever in a position to perform an MRI on him, we would find that, like other psychopaths, Geistmann stores horrors not in the emotional, but in the language, centers of his brain. For his American odyssey, he has used three known pseudonyms, all loose variants of “Thomas Jefferson”: “Tomas Goncalves,” ”Jeffrey Thomaston,” and “Jeffrey Rotunda.” These pseudonyms may have two functions: to apply a patina of honor to his crimes, and to serve as an outlet for his surprising obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

  Of the nine or ten murders Geistmann is known to have committed, one may offer uniquely important clues to his background and, hence, his identity: the 2005 assassination of Dr. Armande Toularelle. This murder has several features that differentiate it from the other eight or nine (depending on whether we count the lethal prank against the New York developer). First, both the target and exact method in the Toularelle killing were advertised to JOLETAF in advance. Since we now know that Geistmann had an inside accomplice, the mole “Peter,” this advance notice was not as risky as it must then have seemed to his pursuers, but it was still an act of extreme bravado. One might speculate that he chose to underline the event. Second, the choice of victim and method of execution, a single long-range gunshot to the head, mark this as the only one of Geistmann’s “assassinations” in which there was no physical contact with the victim, no touching. Nor was there any obvious Dantean contrepasso, another of his trademarks.

  Suppose that, just this once, the motive was personal. Dr. Toularelle worked for a large governmental organization in Paris, the Direction Générale de l'Administration et de la Fonction Publique (DGAFP). Since its inception at the end of the Second World War, this organization has performed many important tasks, including codification of national labor practices, coordination of human resources among various ministries, and so on. In other words, like Interpol, DGAFP greases the wheels for numerous other public agencies. This complex mandate might have made it difficult for us to determine exactly what Geistmann had against Dr. Toularelle. However, through a recent email exchange with officers of DGAFP, I have learned Dr. Toularelle’s specific job in the era leading to his death, which suggests a hypothetical motive for his murder.

  One of the agencies for which DGAFP provides personnel services is ENA, the École Nationale d'Administration. Since Charles de Gaulle established it in 1945, ENA has been the world-famous training school for France’s political elite. DGAFP is responsible for the vetting and formal examination of candidates for admission to ENA. From 1970 until 1991, when he retired, Dr. Toularelle was DGAFP’s Chef d’Examens, or Chief Examiner.

  Consider how many applicants, most of them graduates of preeminent lycees, must, over the years, have failed to make the ENA grade. Imagine one of these failed applicants, in particular. This would have been a young man whose qualifications must, in most respects, have been stellar, and who could, I presume, have passed all the written and physical entrance tests avec mention (“with flying colors”). Would such a humiliating episode also account for Geistmann’s Manichean worldview? Alternatively, or additionally, did he have an influential teacher with a similar philosophical outlook –say, an unregenerate Marxist? These, of course, are all back speculations from things we now know about Geistmann.

  A final observation, or question: why was the Toularelle murder not the first? If it had been first, one could have seen a pattern whereby, in the initial act of killing this mortal, personal enemy, Geistmann discovered in himself a taste for swift, draconian “justice.” But there could also be several explanations for the actual sequence. Perhaps, he did not even think of killing Toularelle until his psychopathy had blossomed, until it had enjoyed free rein for two periods over at least six years, and until he had had enough “practice” honing the skills, precision, and confidence he needed for this particularly difficult and arrogant public act. Alternatively, perhaps he wanted the Toularelle murder to be buried among the others because he knew that (Peter’s complicity notwithstanding) this one could possibly have led his pursuers directly to him. Of course, the advance notice apparently belies this last hypothesis, but, like many of his actions on the recent American “odyssey,” the contradiction is resolved by the narcissistic message, “Oh, I’m so brilliant and invulnerable, I just can’t resist rubbing it in your stupid faces.”

  A clear path to Geistmann’s identity emerges. First, if DGAFP keeps records of rejected applicants from the late 1980’s and early 90’s, and if we can obtain access to these records (perhaps through an official request from INTERPOL) we could search for someone who fits the above profile. Second, did this “someone” graduate from an elite lycee during the same period? And, shortly thereafter, did he completely drop off the school’s radar- a student whom the administration had anticipated would become eminent, but who instead disappeared?

  As part of our approach to DGAFP and/or the schools, forensic evidence can be used for corroboration. Since I have not been given access to this evidence, and since I understand that much of this evidence has disappeared (thanks, presumably, to Peter), I am only speculating when I suggest the use of items such as shoe size, DNA, fingerprints (if available), and certain other physical factors, like head shape and distance between the eyes, features which I understand are virtually impossible to disguise. Even if all or most of this forensic evidence turns out to be missing, as long as some of my inferences about Geistmann’s age, nationality, skill set, and connection with Toularelle are correct, it should not be all that difficult to trace him.

  “Need to know”: Armande Toularelle. From the get-go, this was what Robinson had needed to know. It struck him as possible that, if not for this omission in the first dossier, presumably Peter’s doing, at least one life, that of Nelson Billings, might have been spared. He looked forward to the day when he would watch as Peter was led away in handcuffs. The mole’s face would probably be expressionless, but perhaps he would permit himself to sneer in Robinson’s direction.

  With a sense of having given it his best shot, he put the laptop into sleep mode, stood up, and stretched. He knew it was time to pack, but told himself that job would take only a few minutes. In the amber glow of a street light outside his window, he watched the rain, which had started to fall steadily while he was working on the profile. For a minute or two, he refreshed himself by gazing vacantly at the shimmering buds and leaves on the big tree in front of the building. He looked at his watch. It was just six, so he still had time to relax before dinner. He flopped onto the bed and closed his eyes for a few minutes.

  When he sensed that a quarter of an hour had passed, Robinson stood up and looked across the desk to the window. The rain continued to fall steadily. He also noticed a not unpleasant Sunday evening traffic hum. After he had used the toilet and drunk a glass of water, he sat down again and googled “Sandor Podgorny.” Finding an email address in the faculty directory of the U. of California, Eureka, he sent an exploratory note to “Associate Professor S.V. Podgorny”:

  I hear you’v
e done some work for AW on the G. profile. I’m doing same. Shall we share? John Robinson (I work in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia.)

  A reply, of sorts, arrived almost instantaneously.

  Dear JR, Sorry, but no longer wking for AW. Rots o’ ruck, SP.

  If anything concerning Podgorny’s mysterious role in this investigation could still surprise Robinson, the laconic reply, with its whiff of archaic racism, did. He placed the reply, along with Weatherbee’s “too busy,” in his mental Podgorny file. Then, he reached across the desk for his cell and hit a pre-set number.

  “No packages today,” he said, when the phone clicked. It did not ring.

  Fedoruk picked up. “What’s new, John?” His tone was cool. Did he suspect that he was suspected?

  “Diodor? Just thought I’d touch base.” Robinson, who never used expressions like that, realized he was mimicking Fedoruk’s American argot. “When did you get back from Arizona?”

  “Yesterday. Weatherbee sent me to Kayenta to work with the FBI guys.” He sounded tired and wary. “When Geistmann wasn’t there, we traced him to Pinon, another metropolis, south of Chilchinbito. This time, he used a motorcycle. He doubled back to fool us, and in Pinon, a small plane was waiting, a Piper Cherokee Archer. We saw the skid marks on the runway. The pilot, presumably, was our young friend Peter, Arnold says he has a license. All the way back to Kayenta, Scott gave me a graphic account of what he would do to his almost namesake if –he said ‘when’—he caught him. It was disgusting, but funny.”