A Tax in Blood

by Benjamin M. Schutz

  I called Samantha and got her answering machine. I told it to say hello to sleepy head, that I hoped she’d had a nice time with Sandra and that I’d call her later. I dropped the film with Josh and told him that I’d pick up the cropped enlargements later this evening.

  I had lunch at Las Pampas, which for my money, is the best steakhouse in town. With someone else’s money I might give Morton’s the nod.

  From there it took me twenty minutes of circling the block to find a parking spot with a good view of the front and side of Gutierrez’s house. Once I had set up shop behind the Camaro’s smoked glass, the first thing to do was make sure that Gutierrez was home. I stuffed my cheeks with a handkerchief and dialed his number. The cellular car phone is the greatest boon to surveillance since the widemouthed mason jar.

  “Hello,” he said.

  I pinched my nostrils shut and said, “Ith Doloreth there?”

  “I’m sorry, you have the wrong number.”

  “Thorry.” I hung up.

  So Rolando was home. There was nothing to do but wait. It was one slow day in Georgetown. No one had come to his house by noon, and he hadn’t gone anywhere. I worked diligently at a crossword pun-zle. By three I had solved only three items. A church pamphlet on the dangers of masturbation was “Onan the destroyer”; the Greek demolition firm that blew itself up was “Edifice Wrecks”; and the review of the book Hitler Never Died was “Sure to raise a furor.” Marty Fernandez was a no-show so far. I decided to try to force things a little bit.

  What I really wanted was a typing sample from Gutierrez’s machine. If he saw me for a second session he’d have to bill me and I could ask for a statement. I called Gutierrez again.

  “Hello, Dr. Gutierrez. This is Francis Jerome. I was wondering if I could see you again. That session we had really unhinged me. Could I see you today maybe?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Jerome. I do not have weekend office hours. Perhaps something early next week. Would that be all right?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been having some really weird dreams since we talked. Even when I’m awake I feel like I’m in a dream. You know what I mean? I mean, I’m worrying that I’m going crazy.”

  “This sometimes occurs when there has been a breakthrough of long-repressed material. It can be quite uncomfortable, but I assure you, Mr. Jerome, you are not going crazy. Our first session showed that your defenses are functioning very well. If you feel it’s an emergency, I suggest you admit yourself to the local hospital emergency room for observation.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even trust myself to drive, the way I’m feeling right now.”

  “All right. I’ll tell you what. I have a meeting to attend at four-thirty. I’ll be back at five o’clock. Call me here at that time. If you aren’t feeling any better I’ll send a cab over to pick you up and I’ll meet you at the hospital.”

  “Thanks, Dr. Gutierrez. I really wouldn’t feel comfortable talking to anyone else but you.”

  “I understand, Mr. Jerome. Call here at five.”

  I settled back into waiting. I wasn’t doing very well with the pun-zle, so I picked up the brochure I’d taken from federation building yesterday. I flipped through the history and statement of purpose sections and unfolded the map in the back. After orienting myself, I tried to visualize the great hall, the formal gardens, and the other rooms I had seen. Each country’s office was identified by its flag. There was a dotted line connecting the main building to the new library. I couldn’t remember seeing a path or walkway when I’d looked out the back windows of the great hall. Maybe it was just “proposed.” I folded up the map and slipped it inside my jacket pocket.

  As four-thirty approached, I made up my mind to use the opportunity to get a typing sample and maybe a peek at the files, if there were any, on Malcolm Donnelly and Marty Fernandez.

  I called Samantha. “Hello.” she said.

  “Samantha, I’ve made another appointment with Gutierrez. I don’t expect any trouble, but just in case, if you don’t hear from me by five o’clock, call the police. Tell them anything to get them over here. Okay?”

  “Where are you?”

  I gave her the address. “Thanks.”

  “Do you have to do this? Why not let the cops do it? That’s their job.”

  “There’s nothing for them to do. That is, unless I don’t come out at five o’clock. I’m at the end of this one. This is the last straw to grasp at. If it doesn’t pan out, I’ll put it to rest. We can take those few days off you wanted to.”

  “Leo, be careful. That last straw is the one that broke the camel’s back.”

  I had the feeling she was talking about herself. “I will. Remember, if I don’t call you at five o’clock sharp, call the cavalry, pronto.”

  “Will do.”

  As I put the phone down, the same BMW I’d seen yesterday pulled up. Gutierrez appeared, walked over to the car and climbed in. When it had gone around the corner, I got out of my car, stretched out my kinks and sauntered across the street. I patted my pockets to make sure that I had everything I needed. At the back door, I took out my set of picks, selected one and slipped it in as delicately as I had with my first girlfriend when we were but sixteen. This lock gave way as easily as she had. I put the pick back in my case, turned the knob and walked in.

  I hurried down to Gutierrez’s office and found it unlocked. I walked over to the desk and flipped on the table lamp. There were some charts on the desk. The top one was for Martin Gregorio Fernandez. I flipped it open. The first page was covered with notes from the therapy sessions. The last note had today’s date. I read it first.

  11/16/86 Martin very disturbed today, quite agitated. Anger at father mounting. Feels he cannot do anything to impress him, to validate his sense of self-worth. Feels inferior to brother Ralph, who he thinks died a hero, and is seen as such by father. Fantasies of violence abound. I am concerned about breakdown of repression barrier and psychotic decompensation. No explicit threats or plans mentioned. Denies that he has access to any weapons. Has agreed to phone check-in if he feels he is losing control.

  I read all the previous entries. There was an orderly progression of mounting concern about the sanity and self-control of one Martin G. Fernandez. A variety of precautionary actions taken by Dr. Gutierrez were carefully documented. It was a model of medical record keeping. Only one thing was missing. There wasn’t a single federal research form in the chart. No statement of patients’ rights, no informed consent form, nothing. If you’re going to spend Uncle Sam’s money, there’s one thing you can count on: you’re going to have to document everything. The toilet paper the government uses is three ply. Two for permission to wipe your ass and one to do it with. There was nothing like that here. No, this chart was all fiction.

  I closed the file and slid it aside to see who else’s records were out. Perhaps it was another of the good doctor’s “subjects.” I read the name on the file. It was the case record for one Samuel T. Miller.

  I stared at the file and blinked my eyes, but the title didn’t change. It was definitely time to leave. My neck hairs prickled with an animal awareness of the hunter’s gaze. One instant you’re quiet and small, invisible. The next second, you’re frozen, stark naked in a cold hard glare. It was getting hard to swallow. The light flipping on didn’t help.

  Chapter 30

  “Good evening, Mr. Miller.”

  I turned slowly, already certain of what I’d see. Gutierrez was in the doorway with a pistol in his hand and a big, ugly dog on a short lead. Marty Fernandez stood next to him, grinning idiotically. The driver of the BMW appeared behind them. I finally realized where I’d seen him before. We’d had breakfast together the last two days. He’d been on page one of The Post.

  “Martin,” Gutierrez said, “you’ve done us a great service by exposing this enemy of our cause. Go upstairs now. I’ll be up in a minute.”

  When Marty had gone, Gutierrez spoke to the other man. “Search him, Jesus.” Jesus crossed to me, neve
r once getting into Gutierrez’s line of fire, and expertly patted me down. Good-bye lock picks, microrecorder, and Colt .45. Jesus showed Gutierrez his loot. The doctor said, “Go upstairs with Martin. I’ll call you if I need you.”

  Gutierrez looked at me and shook his head. “What are we to do with you, Mr. Miller? Or is it Mr. Jerome? Or something else altogether?” He chuckled. “I need to know what you know, Mr. Miller, and I need to know it quickly. We’ve invested too much and come too far to be thwarted now.”

  “Hey, no sweat, man. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. Let’s deal. I mean, I ain’t sticking my neck out for anybody.” I nicked a look at Gutierrez’s clock. If I could keep napping my gums for fifteen minutes or so the boys in blue would be here.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Miller. My experience tells me not to trust people who tell their secrets too easily. I trust what I can buy with blood. I don’t have time to take you apart right now and I won’t move until I know what you know. You’ve created a number of problems for me.”

  I decided to start singing before he decided that a .38 in the head was the best solution to his problems. Maybe I could buy some time by keeping my story very hazy and letting him fill in the details.

  I let fly with a high, hard one. “We know about your plans for the boy.”

  “Oh, you do. Then why are you in here rifling my records? No, I think not. You may suspect but you do not know.”

  He hit that one out of the park. I threw him a change up. “How’d you kill him?”

  “Kill who?” Gutierrez frowned.

  “Malcolm Donnelly.”

  “Malcolm Donnelly? Are you really here because of Malcolm Donnelly? That wasn’t simply a cover story?” Gutierrez shook his head in wonderment.

  “I know you killed Donnelly and you’ve got something planned for that boy, something to do with the InterAmerican Federation.”

  “You’ve just solved a lot of my problems, Mr. Miller. If it’s Malcolm Donnelly that you’re concerned about, our discussion is over. This has nothing to do with him.”

  “Yeah, that may be true but you can’t kill me. My partners know about everything.”

  “Mr. Miller, I doubt that. I’m not surprised that you tried that ploy. Believe me, I’m an expert on what people do under duress. But your first move you phrased as ‘we know.’ When that failed, you fell back to ‘I know.’ No, I think that there is no one else but you, Mr. Miller. And besides, there’s no need to kill you.”

  “You can’t let me walk out of here.” Why was I so intent on digging my own grave?

  “That’s precisely what I intend to do, Mr. Miller. However, you won’t walk out the same man who walked in.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Keep him talking.

  “You did not read your file?”

  “Sorry, I didn’t get to it.”

  “Well, Mr. Miller, the file reveals that your paranoid delusions, memory losses and flattened affect were due to the frontal lobotomy that had been performed on you.”

  “You’re kidding. You can’t mean that.”

  “Oh, indeed I do, Mr. Miller.” Gutierrez stepped closer. “A tranquilizer dart in the chest to sedate you. Curare perhaps. You’ll feel everything but be unable to resist. A favorite of mine. Then I apply enough pressure with my thumbs to pop out your left eye, and then, while it hangs down on your cheek, a blade is inserted under the optic ridge into the bundle of nerve fibers that connect your brain’s frontal lobes. Back and forth with the blade like a windshield wiper and you are erased, Mr. Miller. We’ll pop your eye back in and from the outside you’re the same man. But all you have been, all you have known, loved or remembered, will be lost to you. You’ll be picked up wandering the streets. We’ll drop you near a hospital. Not here in Washington, perhaps Baltimore or Richmond. They’ll mistake you for a schizophrenic. Eventually, a halfway smart psychiatrist will put together your symptom picture and run a brain scan on you and figure out what has happened to you. You won’t be able to tell them who your friends are because you won’t remember them. I doubt that they’d think to look for you in the turnip bins of a mental hospital, especially of one in another city.”

  I thought to myself, that’s not the way Arnie would go looking for me. It was little consolation, but if Gutierrez didn’t get himself out of town, he was in for a rougher time than me. I peeked at the clock. I’d bought myself eight minutes. Seven to go. They say the truth will set you free. Time to give it a chance.

  “If I’m no threat to you, then you can’t have any fears about telling me what’s going on here.” I was hoping he would enjoy rubbing my face in his superiority. I wasn’t wrong.

  “True enough, Mr. Miller.”

  “Let’s cut the crap then, I’m not Mr. Miller. My name is Leo Haggerty. And you are?”

  “Colonel Bernardo Schmidt.”

  “Colonel? Aren’t you even a doctor?”

  “Oh, I am that too. I was in charge of the psychological torture unit of the Argentine secret police.”

  “So that’s where Malcolm Donnelly knew you from.”

  “Yes. He recognized me at the clinic one day. He knew that I couldn’t be in the United States legally. He threatened to expose me and have me deported back for trial if I didn’t help him get custody of his children.”

  “Which you agreed to do.”

  “Of course. What a pathetic man. I told him to get off the medication he was on because it wouldn’t look good in court.”

  “Which triggered a rebound effect.”

  “Very good, Mr. Haggerty. You’ve done your homework. I left a number for Malcolm to call day or night if his symptoms flared up. Of course they did. When he called me he was quite agitated and confused. I told him to take a drink or two to calm down and that I’d be right over. He was so desperate to stop the anxiety that he forgot that the combination was lethal.”

  “Death by suggestion. You brought the suicide note because you knew he’d be dead.”

  “Not exactly. I sent Jesus with the note and instructions on how to make Malcolm dead if he wasn’t already dead when he got there. Very neat, don’t you think?”

  “Tidiness is next to godliness, I always say.”

  “Don’t mock me, Mr. Haggerty. You will wish that your end was as swift and clean.”

  “Quite right. You are holding all the cards. My apologies.”

  There was a knock on the door. Gutierrez said, “Sí?”

  Jesus stuck his head in the room. “There is someone at the front door. What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Has Ernesto arrived yet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps it is our ‘observers.’ I know what they look like. I’ll be right up to check on it.” Gutierrez looked back at me. “Make yourself comfortable, Mr. Haggerty. Hansi here is a Pit Bull, a trained attack dog. Please understand that his instinctive ferocity has been tempered by diligent training. Unlike you or I, he has no doubts about what he is supposed to do. If you make any attempt to leave, Hansi will subdue you instantly. With a bite pressure of over a thousand pounds per square inch he can shatter your bones. If you are lucky you will pass out from the pain. You may yell all you want for help. The walls and ceiling are completely soundproofed. But then again, you already know that.” He stroked the dog’s neck and removed its collar. “Hansi, hold,” he said. With that he smiled and left.

  I smiled at the dog. It growled back. I knew the breed and this one was a giant, probably seventy pounds. They were bred for pit fighting and had the enormous jaws and chests of their cousins the bulldog but with enough leg under them to run down their victims.

  We had a staring contest and Hansi with his black button eyes was the winner hands down. His breathing was a harsh panting sound and his retracted muzzle revealed a row of teeth that Bruce the Shark would have admired. Ever so slowly, I turned my head and looked at the clock. Five-o-three. The police should be here any minute.

  The door opened. I looked up, smiling. It was Gutierrez.
He stepped into the room and ordered the dog to sit. “Idiot. What is a grown man doing delivering pizzas for a living? And not even the right block.”

  I let out a slow exhalation of air. Hope exits with a bad smell on your breath. Would Samantha have forgotten to call? Was she lost in some reverie? I hoped her next book was a fucking best seller, but I probably wouldn’t remember who she was to congratulate when I left here anyway.

  “As long as we’re having no secrets here, Colonel, how did you tumble on to me?” I was zero for two with this guy. Maybe I was out of my league.

  “That was easy enough. I had placed a post-hypnotic suggestion into Martin’s unconscious that compels him to tell me if anyone questions him about our relationship. He called me late last night. The square patch on your face that he described matched the bandaged area that I had seen. When you called, as I expected you would, I baited you by telling you that I’d be out for a while. I went with Jesus to pick up Hansi in case we would need him and returned after you’d let yourself in.”

  “What are you going to do with the boy? He thinks you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

  “You might say I’m helping him become his heart’s desire, or as your army slogan puts it, to ‘be all you can be.’ He wants to be a hero, like his brother. I am helping him achieve that dream.” Gutierrez sat in his chair. His gun never wavered from the center of my chest.

  “Doesn’t sound like therapy to me.”

  “It isn’t, although I doubt that Martin understands that, and I have been very helpful to him. He is no longer depressed or guilt-ridden. I’ve helped him free up all that energy for other uses.”