“Honestly, I think the less you know about this, the better. I don’t have any good answers anyway.”
She nodded. “Come on back. I have to show you something.”
Every wall of the back room was covered in bookshelves, and every available shelf was stacked with art books. A series of large tables held different canvases in various states of restoration. Mine was laid out flat.
“This is your basic late twentieth-century oil-on-canvas painting,” she explained. “The canvas is nothing special, basically the kind of thing you buy prestretched at any art supply store. The oil is the same—standard, run-of-the-mill oil paint. It’s in excellent condition, and I’d say that the date at the bottom is probably accurate—this painting was definitely completed within the last year. Either way, it’s not special.”
“So you didn’t find anything out of the ordinary?”
“Not at first. But I went down to the Fine Arts Museum this morning, just to have a look. You said you wanted to know about anything . . . hidden. When I looked with a better pair of eyes, I did find something.”
She flipped on a photographer’s light box and slid an X-ray onto it. “This,” she said, pointing to an oblong shape toward the top right corner of the painting, maybe two inches by a half-inch. It jumped out of the otherwise unvaried X-ray—something totally different than the rest of the painting.
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure. At first it reminded me of a Chinese seal—you know, a signature stamp, as if the artist had used a stamp to mark the signature, or maybe the studio. It would almost make sense, since there’s no signature on the painting.” She shook her head. “But that’s just my brain thinking aesthetically. This is so visible in the X-ray . . . it has to be something foreign, something buried beneath layers of paint. Whatever it is, it’s an addition—it’s not paint, and it’s not part of the canvas. Perhaps the artist used some sort of found object as part of the composition, and then later decided against it and painted over it rather than going through the trouble of removing it. Judging by the density, it could be plastic, or a light metal. But it almost looks like a computer chip.” She was right. If you really squinted, you could see intricate traces that could be some kind of circuitry.
“Can you take it out?”
She made a face. “I can’t promise you that I won’t damage the painting. I’d have to lift the top layers of paint away—it’s a beautiful portrait, David. I could ruin it at worst, or at best decrease its value.”
“Do it.”
She nodded and flipped the lights on and moved to her worktable, selecting a few sharp stainless-steel instruments like a dental hygienist at a cleaning. She worked at the painting with surgical precision, positioning a goose-neck lamp over the area in question, gently making incisions and lifting layers of paint. After only a few minutes she had worked her way under the foreign object and suddenly gasped.
“What is it?”
“I—I don’t know. But . . . look.” She lifted with a small, flat knife. “It just comes right off.” She was holding a small, thin rectangle of paint, and the place she had removed it from looked almost exactly the same.
“It was meant to be removed?”
“It would appear that way. You can’t even tell anything’s been taken out.”
It was true. Apart from a slight unevenness in the thickness of the paint, the image was unaltered. She handed me the object. It looked like aluminum, but was encased in a rubbery sheath. One end slipped right off, revealing a USB plug. It was some kind of computer gadget.
“That’s really weird,” Katie said. “Maybe it was an accident.”
“Let’s find out.” I grabbed the Chinatown painting and put it on the table.
Katie swung her lamp around, blasting the painting as if it were under interrogation, and squatted down to look at the topography of the canvas from eye level. It didn’t take more than a minute. “Yes, right here. Top right corner again. Once you know what you’re looking for, it’s easy. The paint is just a little too thick, compositionally.” She looked up at me, blinking rapidly. “Should I?”
I nodded.
In moments she handed me another object, the same exact thing as the first.
“This is really weird, David. I don’t know what—”
“Exactly. You don’t know. And I think that’s best. I’m paying you in cash, and I’ll throw in a little extra. I was never here, understand?”
“Are you . . . in some kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know. But I want to make sure you’re not. Just forget all about this.” I pocketed the devices, knowing where my next stop would be. “Listen, I’ve got like twelve other errands to run today. Can you just ship the paintings back to me? No rush.”
“Of course.”
Katie stopped me on my way out. “If you do get to the bottom of all this, dude, come by. I’d like to hear about it.”
“I’ll do that.”
13
“All right, all right, I’m comin’.”
I didn’t stop banging on the door.
“All RIGHT already.”
The house was a big Victorian facing Alamo Square—a much nicer place than one would expect guys like these to live in, but they’d been renting the top floor for years. A typical San Francisco arrangement—an older lesbian couple had the main floor, a straight couple had the lower apartment, and two weird computer freaks and their machines occupied the four bedrooms of the top floor. I turned toward the park to admire the view, then finally heard soft, quick footsteps coming down the stairs. That would be Rider. The door opened, and Rider stuck his head out and blinked behind his wire-rimmed glasses.
“Holy shit! Itchy Crane!” He lurched out, a tall, gangly piece of work, and gave me a bear hug.
“Ooph,” I mocked. “You been working out?”
“Yeah, yeah, I have,” he said, without a trace of guile. “Thanks for noticing. Come in, come in, Sobczyk will be hella psyched to see you.”
I followed him up the stairs. Rider and Sobczyk had both worked in the IT department at the Chronicle at one time or another, though they generally made more money freelancing. They were geeks, good guys, albeit a little crackers. Rider was from Kansas, and had moved to San Jose straight out of high school and worked for a series of Silicon Valley firms before relocating to the City. He was quick, fairly social for his type, and with a last name like Rider no one ever used his first name. Sobczyk had a similar affliction—he looked 100 percent Chinese, and you’d never guess his father was Polish if it weren’t for the last name. He was a native San Franciscan, heavyset, moody, paranoid, and a genius. They were both incredibly young.
I’d been to the house a dozen times and still couldn’t figure out where either of them slept—every room was a labyrinth of computers, hardware, and textbooks. The two of them seemed to wander from room to room, each taking turns lending his particular skills to various projects. I often wondered if they slept at all. We found Sobczyk in the kitchen, the one room that was always immaculate, intensely focused on moving a toasted peanut butter and jelly sandwich from a wooden cutting board to a plate. He didn’t glance over when we came in.
“Sobczyk—check it out, it’s Itchy Crane,” Rider announced.
Sobczyk looked up at me, gave the slightest of smiles from the corners of his mouth, gently raised his eyebrows—twice—and took a bite out of his sandwich.
“Told you he’d be psyched,” Rider said. “I haven’t see him this excited since we beat that virus last month for Skywalker. Come on in—lay it on me.” I followed him into one of the rooms and he cleared a stack of books from a piano bench so that I could sit next to his wheeled office chair, which was pulled up to a desk with exactly enough free space on it to harbor a keyboard and a flat-screen monitor. As soon as his ass hit the chair he began clicking into several different windows at once, working the mouse which was set on a doorstop of a technical manual ramped at a forty-five-degree angle to the desk. “Go ahead,
talk to me, I just gotta finish this one thing.” You had to focus to talk to Rider—he was deftly capable of doing six things at once, and it was difficult to keep track of your own thoughts without being distracted by his activity.
“I’m into some shit, Rider. Some bad shit. So I just want to say, first thing”—I heard a crunch behind me, and realized Sobczyk had come in with his sandwich—“to both of you. I was not here today. And anything I show you, anything I tell you, you can’t tell anybody.”
“Ooo, sounds spooky.” Rider’s hands came off the keyboard just long enough for him to wiggle his fingers like a villain from a Scooby-Doo cartoon.
“No bullshit. I need you to promise.”
“Of course, Itchy. You know we work on top secret shit all the time. You can trust us.”
“Okay. What is this?” I tossed one of the strange devices from Ashley’s paintings onto Rider’s keyboard. He actually stopped working.
“Where did you get that?” Sobczyk asked. He put down his sandwich.
Instead of answering, I handed Sobczyk the other device. The two of them turned the devices around in their hands.
“It’s so beautiful,” Sobczyk said.
“Totally . . . it’s even cooler than I thought it would be.”
“Where did you get these?” Sobczyk asked again.
“Wouldn’t help if I told you. What are they?”
“I can’t fucking believe you have these!” Rider almost yelled. “Holy crap, these aren’t even supposed to exist yet! I heard these wouldn’t come out until . . . like, 2000 or something.”
“They’ve been working on them in Singapore,” Sobczyk added. “But . . . what he said.”
“What is it? And please remember I’m not a computer guy—I just want to know what it is and what it’s used for.”
“It’s a flash memory storage device,” Rider said. “It’s for storing shit, just like a floppy disk.”
“So what’s so cool about it?”
“Well . . . they’re not out yet. No one’s seen ’em—it’s like this crazy rumor that we’ll have these in a couple of years—and you have two of them. These must have come from somewhere on high, or from someone with some serious connections.”
“That’s why we think they’re cool,” Sobczyk chimed in, “but everyone will think so if they ever get released. See, a floppy disk only holds two megabytes of information—1.44, for all intents and purposes. The promise of the flash drive is that it can hold more data. Much more.”
“Data storage. Okay. So what’s on it?”
Rider’s eyes went wild with excitement. “Let’s find out!” He plugged the USB into his machine and started clicking the mouse. “That’s the other cool thing. These are supposed to pop right up, none of that grinding, waiting around like with floppies—see? It’s there already.” He opened a window. “Holy crap!”
“I don’t believe it,” Sobczyk said.
“What is it?”
Rider leveled his gaze at me and dropped his voice. “It’s eight megabytes. That’s like five floppy disks!”
“I don’t believe it,” Sobczyk said again.
“I know we’re all very excited here, but I need to know what’s on it.”
“Just give me a few minutes,” Rider said.
I got up and Sobczyk picked up his plate. “You want a sandwich?” he asked.
“Love one.”
Watching Sobczyk make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was an exercise in Zen. He was so serious, so methodical, he took a mundane sandwich and raised it to a level of high art. It was clear that he found the act deeply relaxing.
“Sobczyk,” I said, as he stood over his toaster watching the bread like a mama bird. I hesitated. He’d give me the full Funk & Wagnalls, but I needed to know, and Sobczyk would know.
“Yes?”
“What do you know about Guatemala?”
“A little,” he said. “In terms of what?”
“In terms of a guy from Guatemala who might be a killer.”
“No news there,” he said. “Guatemala has been in the midst of a civil war for thirty, thirty-five years. A lot of Guatemalans are killers.”
“A thirty-five-year civil war?”
“You don’t read the paper much, do you?” He shrugged. “Wouldn’t matter. They don’t print much about it in American papers, since the whole thing is basically our fault.”
It was impossible to get cranky with a guy for acting superior when his knowledge was, beyond a doubt, superior. “Tell me about it.”
“You ever heard of United Fruit?”
“No.”
“It’s bananas.”
“Crazy?”
“No. Bananas. It all started with bananas. A couple hundred years ago, no one in the States had ever seen a banana. Within a century, they started to sell like—well, bananas. So a company in Boston goes into business with a railroad entrepreneur and they form United Fruit, which buys up a bunch of land in Guatemala and corners the market. Send bananas to the coast by rail, ship them to the States, make a ton of money. Everything is great for fifty years.” The toaster popped and Sobczyk took out the bread and laid it on a cutting board. He opened a jar of peanut butter and rummaged in a drawer for a butter knife.
“In 1951, Jacobo Árbenz gets elected president of Guatemala—arguably, the most democratically elected president to date. But he’s progressive. He realizes that the biggest landowner in his country is a foreign corporation, and it doesn’t pay any taxes. So Árbenz decides he’s going to expropriate land from United Fruit and give it back to the indigenous population so they can farm their own land. Rich white men don’t like this.” He was drawing the peanut butter across the bread in long, even strokes, leaving a nice striation from the serrated edge of the knife.
“United Fruit’s lobbyists start talking to Washington. They tell everyone that Árbenz has communist seats in his congress—which was true, but it was a tiny minority. No big deal. But it’s the fifties, people are freaked out, and Secretary of State John Dulles and his brother Allen—the director of the CIA—convince Eisenhower that having communists so close to our borders is no good. The whole thing goes down Black Ops.” He got a clean knife from the drawer and started in on the grape jelly, slathering it onto the clean slice of toast.
“It’s 1953. The CIA handpicks Castillo Armas, an exiled fucking furniture salesman living in Honduras, to be the next president. They start a massive propaganda campaign, running a radio broadcast out of Honduras, flying over the capital and dropping flyers—calling for Árbenz to step down or be overthrown. Armas has an army of about two hundred other exiles, and they cross the Honduran border and camp out at the Church of the Black Christ in Esquipulas. There are a few skirmishes along the way, and Armas isn’t doing that well, but the propaganda machine is making the army sound bigger than it is, and the international press is picking it up. It was a hoax of War of the Worlds proportions, with just enough reality thrown in to sell it. The CIA brings in pilots to strafe a couple towns, do some fly-bys, even blowing up some gas tanks at the Guatemala City airport.” He tossed the two butter knives in the sink. “You don’t want to know all this. I always do this—I’m way off topic.”
“No, please. This is fascinating.”
“Well, short version: The people are panicking, no one is backing Árbenz, the American ambassador is whispering in his ear . . . Árbenz abdicates the presidency to Armas, who gives United Fruit everything they want. Coups beget coups, it’s one junta after another. Armas gets assassinated in ’57. Anyway, the coup was so successful, the CIA thought they’d try it again in Cuba. Remember Bay of Pigs?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I could go on, but it’s all death squads, assassinations . . . in the eighties it got even worse, what with the Reagan administration encouraging military leaders to fight insurgents. Something like a million people fled to Mexico and the US. If you didn’t run fast enough, you were dead. Anyway, the point is, Guatemala has been basically fucked since the fifties.
And it’s all our fault.” Sobczyk put the sandwich together, sliced it in half with a single downstroke of a carving knife, set it on a plate, and handed it to me.
“Did you see that thing, what, two years ago?” Sobczyk asked. “How they were finally asking questions about that American who got murdered?
“Can’t say I did.” I picked up a half and took a bite.
“Michael DeVine. Lived in Guatemala since the seventies, owned an inn with his wife. In 1990 they found him on his ranch with his hands tied and his head nearly cut off. They eventually convicted a military officer of the killing, but there was a colonel who was implicated as being involved. He never cooperated, he hindered the investigation—probably did some cover-up. Two years ago it comes out that he was a paid informant of the CIA. And he stayed on the CIA’s payroll for two years after the DeVine murder. Paid by the CIA, and harboring death squads who are killing Americans. It was on Charlie Rose, man. I know it sounds unrelated, but you’re asking about a Guatemalan killer? In the world of conspiracies, there’s nothing more natural. This isn’t ancient history. This is now.”
“And the civil war?”
“Officially, it’s over. The government and the guerillas signed a peace accord last December. We’ll see how that goes.”
“Sobczyk,” I said, “I have to admit, this is the best PB&J I’ve ever eaten.”
“Itchy.” It was Rider, and he looked like he’d seen a ghost. “You need to see this.”
He brought a series of color photographs up on his computer screen that appeared to be taken from a vantage point somewhere in the ceiling of my kitchen. They were all of me, and each image had a time-and-date stamp on the bottom. The date was 8/18/97—the same date as on Ashley’s painting—and the time began just before noon and ended just after three in the afternoon. Rider flipped from one image to the next, about two dozen in total, telling the story of my afternoon that day: my barber comes in, cuts my hair, and leaves. I spend the next two hours making an idle lunch—soup and a sandwich—and reading the paper. A typically boring afternoon for me, and Ashley had picked the most interesting aspect to paint.
The Painted Gun Page 8