A whole section was devoted to their day of freedom; Bob ran his infrared over the framed newspaper front pages, with its famous picture of Jack and Mitzi in midleap, full of the joy of freedom, as the famous radical lawyer Milton Tigermann had just checkmated the Justice Department into dropping all charges against them because the means used by pursuing detectives over the years, from FBI to Massachusetts State Police, were so flagrantly illegal. “Guilty as hell, free as a bird,” Jack’s comment; it made the two even more famous. Swagger’s eyes ran through the coverage, including the bitter sidebar interview with a Mrs. Samuel Bronkowsky, mother of four, identified as the widow of one of the two bank guards slain by robbers—robbers thought to be Jack and Mitzi but uncaught and made more unindictable when the bank’s surveillance film was stolen from the evidence closet of the Nyackett Police. And thus Mrs. Bronkowsky left history, her cause unmourned, her husband forgotten, her economic situation unsettled.
History turned on the next wall to great men, big men, giant men. These were the portraits Bob didn’t recognize, but they were helpfully identified as if in a hall of fame, people with names like Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Che and Fidel of course, W. E. B. Du Bois, Emma Goldman, Eugene V. Debs, Gavrilo Princip, and of course Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and some other big commie boys. Ho was there, and so were Chou and Mao, and someone called La Pasionaria.
The infrared gave the history a special green hue, as brought to life in the AN/PVS-7 goggles. He was a frogman swimming the bottom of the murky bay of radical America, 1969 to 1975.
Bill and Mitzi were everywhere in those days. Beautiful radical children, with wild piles and tendrils of hair and eyes wide as pie plates, elves, stars, charismatics, leprechauns of mischief. A hundred shots showed them with megaphone or loudspeaker, leading or addressing the masses. They were always sexy, in raffish war surplus cast-offs, with Indian bands about their heads, gaudy scarves, tight jeans that showed off their leanness, combat boots, sharp cheekbones, and everywhere they appeared they fronted rows and rows of hand-painted signs, like medieval kings leading an army of banners: stop the war now, stop the bombing, no more napalm, get out now, bring the boys home, legalize pot, lsd now and forever, and he realized that while they were painting, he’d been crawling through the bush, hoping not to get his belly blown open.
He checked for signs of search and came up with ambiguous possibilities. Yes, the cabinet locks in Jack’s office appeared uniformly scarred. But that could have been Jack’s own clumsiness with keys as easily as a professional burglar’s pick. There had indeed been an open window that allowed him to squeeze into the basement, and that lock too bore signs of picking—or of a careless window washer banging it with a squeegee.
He himself picked each cabinet, and inside, besides Jack’s secret stash of porno (he was a Penthouse guy), a pound of very nice hash, some prescription meds, there seemed to be nothing suspicious, certainly no obvious sign of something having been removed. But what would that be? A blank space on a shelf? An opening in a row of books? There wasn’t much.
He went over the office top to bottom, opening each cabinet, rifling through each book, looking in each drawer, searching for computer code words (and finding none). He’d wait to turn the machine on in the light, so that its glow wouldn’t radiate through the windows into the night. He thumped the walls for evidence of a safe hiding behind the bookshelves, but no safe seemed to present itself.
Nothing, nothing at least on a first pass.
He tried all the obvious hiding places, feeling under the drawers for tape strands that might indicate something had been secretly affixed in an out-of-the-way site, opening the battery casings of all the portable tape recorders, the cameras, the iPods that lay around, finally, laboriously—it took hours—opening each CD jacket, running from jazz to classics to heavy metal to songs of the Spanish Civil War, and in each finding nothing but a CD. He went to the bathroom, took the lid off the toilet for a waterproof bag—yep, but full of grass, not diamonds or other contraband—opened all the folded towels and washcloths in the closet. Went through the laundry hampers, the pile of folded clothes, the kitchen with its abundance of spices and herbs and exotic condiments from overseas; Mitzi was evidently quite the chef. Again, nothing, just life, lived by aging baby-boomer haute bourgeoisie with fading memories of the glory of the struggle, so long ago, when they were young and bold. It was a kind of counterbiography: for each demonstration they’d led, he’d been on a deep jungle mission; for each cop they’d confronted, he’d dropped a man with an AK-47; for each time they’d fled gas, he’d fled napalm or heavy bomber ordnance or some such. Same coin, different sides, and now the years have passed and what’s gone around has come around, and who’s the only one who cares why you assholes got your brains blown out but me, the guy you thought was a war criminal, a psycho kid killer. Ain’t it a strange fucking world, though?
He went upstairs and spent the rest of the night in the bedroom, the slow, methodical search, unfolding each item of clothing, paging through each volume—the house was stacked, crammed, jammed with books—emptying the wastebaskets and uncrumpling each wad of paper. Nothing, just the detritus of an involved professional life—notes on meetings, calendars, appointment books, nothing at all out of the ordinary. One of them spoke French and one spoke Spanish; there were many, many books in either language, and he went through them too, page by page, looking for notes either written in the margins (frequent and meaningless) or tucked between the pages. Nothing.
He worked through the morning, going to his low crawl during the daylight hours so that nobody walking by might catch a glimpse of shadowy movement and call the police.
He slept for two hours in the spare bedroom, then got up with enough light remaining, turned on Jack’s computer terminal, and didn’t get much beyond the desktop full of icons, because a code was required. He’d found no code; obviously Jack had committed it to memory. He tried number sequences based on obvious dates—Jack and Mitzi’s birthdays, the dates of big demonstrations, the date they almost got blown up in the house in New York, the date of the Pentagon bombing, the date they were freed from prosecution, that sort of thing. Nothing.
When it got dark, he reverted to the photos on the wall. He took each one down, carefully probed it for hidden documents folded between the photos and the matte backing, and that was more tedious than anything. He looked at each one for scrawled notes or something. This went on and on, as the Strongs literally had hundreds of photos. It seemed their every second was subject to a photo, some with celebs, most on the glorious ramparts. He even found one of the two of them with fists upraised after some sort of dinner with T. T. Constable and his then-wife, the beautiful Joan Flanders, four extremely beautiful human beings caught in a circle of love and adoration, all celebrating the smugness of the moral righteousness that made them so perfect for each other, maybe early nineties, when everyone was in from the cold.
He felt a momentary spasm of rage and had an urge to smash the picture, but what would that prove? Really, what would that prove? He hung it back up and continued with the thankless task, picture after picture, again coming up with nothing.
What am I missing? What is here that I don’t see? I’m too stupid to see, of course, because I’m the redneck marine from Arkansas and these people are so much smarter, so much more insightful, so much more penetrating. Bob Lee, Earl’s son, was just a grunt who followed orders, almost got killed, and killed too much. They knew better. They were above that. With their airs, their sophistication—the wine cellar was amazing, and clearly Jack knew his vintages, while Mitzi’s kitchen was the most complex room in the house, still full of life from the dinners she’d cooked for their many friends, the many joyous nights of camaraderie here in the old castle in Hyde Park. He’d seen the pictures, for many had been taken; Jack more or less holding court, lots of young, beautiful kids, lots of earnest intellectual types with the bushy hair, the wire-frame glasses, the women all with straight, undyed hair, in tight
jeans, all of them so goddamned happy.
It was like they were some kind of European royalty, Bob thought. It had nothing to do with—
European.
That was something, yeah. Yeah, they really didn’t see themselves as American, did they? There was nothing anywhere in the house that was, strictly speaking, American. No pictures of landscape, nothing celebratory of American themes like farms, mountains, plains, no flag; instead it was all European in tone and texture. From the food to the books to the photos on the white walls, to the slick, hardwood floors, to tapestries of multitextured, usually African or Afro-Cuban tonalities, all of it belonged in a house in Paris.
What does this mean? Practically, not philosophically. They don’t shower enough. They have affairs, Jack a mistress? They drink espresso? They have wine with dinner? They won’t eat sliced bread? Hmm, among other things, it meant they put little lines through the letter Z and the number 7, after the European fashion, an idiosyncracy that he’d noted that meant absolutely nothing.
But it did mean something. It meant they were European.
He tried to think of other ways that—
And for some reason he thought of the computer, how he’d tried to run the famous dates of the glorious Strong-Reilly history as a way through the code. But Americans wrote dates month/day/year, as in March 25, 1946, 03/25/46. But Europeans wrote them day first, as in day/month/year, and put periods between them, so that March 25, 1946, came out 25.03.46.
Bob first drew shades so that its dead glare wouldn’t leak into the night, then flicked the computer on, watching it stir lazily to life, clicking mysteriously.
The blinking demand for an access code stared at him. He was an expert; he’d read Radical Romantics: The True Story of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly, by O. Z. Harris.
He remembered the date they got married.
He remembered the date of the bank robbery in Nyacett.
He remembered the date they got pardoned.
He remembered the date they blew up the Pentagon.
He remembered the date they blew up a judge’s house in Connecticut, during a Black Panther trial.
He remembered the date the bomb had gone off accidentally in their Greenwich Village townhouse, killing its poor builder and sending Jack and Mitzi into the streets.
No, nothing.
Then he remembered the date Saigon fell. He’d never forget that one; it had sent him off on a three-day drunk and he ended up in a jail in Alabama with his real estate business totally trashed and his first wife filing a missing persons report.
He typed it in, European style: 25.04.75.
And thus he entered the secret world of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly.
20
They met at Soleil, a tapas restaurant popular with the lunch crowd in the redeveloped sector of SE. It was a gaudy, mock-peasant place, full of young government workers and journalists and others who considered themselves quite fascinating. David Banjax was evidently well known enough here to command a table in the window, and Nick and Phil Price were escorted into the great man’s presence.
Banjax, about thirty-five, with a goatee and otherwise short hair, in a suit without a tie and a pair of Italian architect glasses, rose and put out a hand as Price handled the intros. Then they sat, and it turned out that thankfully Banjax was not one for small talk, didn’t offer an opinion on the Redskins or the new president or the war in Afghanistan or any other topic of the day. He commenced immediately with his sucking up.
“So, Agent Memphis, I hear you’re quite the hero. You shot it out with those bad guys in Tennessee last year or so. Is that why you limp?”
“That is why I limp, Mr. Banjax. But I wasn’t quite the hero. I was with a very skilled undercover officer who handled the gunfight. My only contribution was that I stopped a bullet that might have hit him, and I did manage to shoot a car twice in the right rear fender, which cost the Bureau over seven thousand in repair costs. But I think we’re countersuing now. Don’t mess with the Bureau.”
“Nick is known for his modesty,” Phil said smoothly, showing some minimal gift for the job. “Nick ran the team that broke up what could have been an eight-million-dollar heist and put seven men in prison for the rest of their lives.”
“Wow,” said Banjax. “No wonder everyone I talk to thinks so highly of you.”
“They’re a resilient mob. I’m sure they’ll have escaped and be drinking Jax beer and sporting with the gals this time next year. You can’t keep the Grumley boys down,” Nick said.
Banjax laughed, as if he got Bureau humor, or knew who the Grumleys were.
“Nick’s a kidder,” said Phil. “He has a lot of fans in the Bureau. Nick’s integrity and honesty are treasured in the Bureau, but it’s his sense of humor that makes him beloved.”
“I guess it’s not a laff-riot kind of place,” Banjax said.
“Not much shtick, no,” said Nick. “In fact there hasn’t been a good pie fight in years. But I’m not that beloved. Phil exaggerates, which is his job. I’m loved and I’m hated and I try to do my job and I wish I were smarter and I’m glad I’m not dumber. So, I know why we’re here, Mr. Banjax. Would you do me the favor of fast-forwarding to the hard part of the conversation? I have heard the word ‘Tulsa’ mentioned.”
“Oh, that,” said Banjax, smiling easily. “It was just something that came up. You know, what you do and what I do, it’s similar. You’re investigating a killer. I’m investigating a man investigating a killer. An agency, I should say, but that agency happens to be represented by a man. I’m very sorry for what happened in Tulsa, and I’m not here to make noises about it. It’s just that I’m in a very competitive news situation, and in my bureau there’s a lot of pressure to produce. There’s an awful lot of smart people there and we all want to do well. So I ask as many questions as I can and I throw out a very broad net, and somehow, this stuff about Tulsa came in.”
“Phil, help me, I’m not clear on the rules here. Is it fair for me to ask him how he found out about it? I mean it wasn’t part of any official release, so he had to hear about it from someone. Can I ask him who?”
“Probably not a good idea, Nick. The press values its right of confidentiality and feels that if it gives up sources to law enforcement inquiries, it becomes an arm of the Bureau. Nobody wants that.”
“Agent Memphis, if you must know, and I hope you’ll appreciate my candor here, it was a guy I know, one of those gray elder types; he knows everybody and everything. I’d prefer not to give you his name, but he said he heard about this from someone he knew.”
“You don’t have to give me Bill Fedders’s name, Mr. Banjax. I already know it quite well.”
“Well, there you go. Anyway, ‘someone’ forwarded through ‘my friend’ an envelope with a set of Tulsa front pages and the unidentified FBI sniper marked heavily in highlighter, with question marks. Crude, but effective. Anyhow, I called the reporter who wrote the story fifteen years ago and he knew your name, even if he didn’t release it then. I don’t think he was sworn to any confidentiality agreement, and I don’t think I’ve skirted any confidentiality issues. I got it fair and square, nothing dubious. I take it you’re not denying it.”
“Is this off the record?”
“Of course. Sorry, I should have said that earlier. I’ll let you know when we go on.”
“Well, obviously, I can’t deny it. Yeah, I took that shot and missed and all sorts of terrible things happened. And some good things: I got seven years with Myra.”
“I heard that part too. Extraordinary.”
“Anyhow, it’s not going to do the Bureau any good to get this all mixed in with the ongoing investigation. It’ll cloud matters. I’ll tell you, man to man, that I have no beef with snipers, as the implication seems to be, based on my unfortunate tour as one. My job is not to find the sniper innocent by some trick, it’s to find out who’s guilty and put him away or prove the case so totally that even if he’s dead, there can be no doubt he was the guilty
party, sniper or not. But it’s more complex than it seems. We have to be diligent. We can’t be nervous about media pressures or outside political pressures. If you look at the Kennedy thing, you’ll see that Warren was rushed, made mistakes, and there was hell to pay for it. I don’t want that happening here. That’s my only concern, not my career in the Bureau, my next promotion, the book contract I’ll get when I go, how 60 Minutes will handle it. If I have to leave the Bureau because doubts are raised about me, then that’s what I’ll do. It happens in Washington all the time.”
“I haven’t published yet. I don’t know that I will.”
“What is it that you want? I mean, exactly.”
“Well, look, we’re not kids here. We’re all professionals and we’re all under great pressure from management to produce. Now, I have to come up with something. I have to publish something. I can’t go in and say, ‘Oh, I spent three weeks and I came up with nothing.’ That’s just not good. So if I have to, I suppose I could go with the Tulsa episode. It does seem like legitimate information that the public needs to have. There is a great deal of interest in this case, and you folks did such a good job and worked so fast and got there in time to prevent any other killings, but it seems to have come off the tracks since then. We thought we’d get that report in a couple of weeks. Now I hear that as of last week, you came up with a whole new area of investigation and that you’ve sent a lot more people into the field. If that’s true, maybe we could put it on the record, explain it, put it in some kind of context, and get it into the paper. Get it into the paper the way you want it, not picked up thirdhand from a variety of other sources.”
“See,” said Nick, “from a PR point of view and a career point of view, that would be the right thing to do. But the direction and thrust of our investigation has to remain confidential. In fact, details may alert some people we have to look at. They act differently when they know they’re being looked at, and it clouds the issue. We have to make preliminary inquiries confidentially to see if this is even worth pursuing. I’m not saying there are other persons of interest than Carl Hitchcock, but I have a duty to be diligent. Is that all right, Phil, what I said to him?”
A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai Page 78