Lincoln's Briefs

by Wayne, Michael

  Hugh and Charles clapped in acknowledgment of the President’s courage while the midshipmen cheered and threw their hats in the air, as instructed by the television prompter.

  When they finished their tour of the ranch and arrived back at the house, the President was just concluding his negotiations with Vito. “I’m afraid $12 million is all the money I have on hand,” they heard the President say, as he handed Vito a large suitcase.

  “Dat’s a okay, Boss. I make sure da professore, he no a complain.”

  The President smiled. “You and I understand each other perfectly, Don Pugliese.” Then he dropped his voice and added, “And after you have possession of the documents, feel free to take whatever measures you think necessary to see that the professor represents no further threat to the nation.”

  “Ey, Boss, you can count on me,” said Vito, and he slammed his right fist into the palm of his left hand. This filled the President with delight. “As I said, Don Pugliese, you and I understand each other perfectly.”

  Then the President turned to the Executive Assistant to the Assistant Undersecretary of Transportation. “Don Pugliese is going to fly to Toronto on a commercial flight so as not to arouse suspicion. Have the limousine take him and the boys back to Dallas. Oh, and be sure to give the boys a little something to remember their visit to the ranch.”

  So the Executive Assistant to the Assistant Undersecretary of Transportation went to a cabinet where he removed a couple of autographed photographs of the President riding his rocking horse on top of the imitation San Juan Hill. In the picture the President was wearing thick spectacles and held a Rough Rider hat, pinned up on one side, which he was waving high over his head, just like Teddy Roosevelt.

  XXXIV

  After they left Je-me-souviens, Yale Templeton and Bobbi Jo Jackson spent two weeks scouring northeastern Ontario in search of the Great White Moose. They first drove south along the Ottawa River as far as Petawawa, then retraced their steps and headed north, in the direction of Cochrane. Had they turned west at Earlton, they would have eventually come to the forest where the Great White Moose was spending his summer in idle contemplation. But instead they continued on to Englehart and Kirkland Lake, eventually arriving at the shores of the Abitibi River. At every gas station, diner, and country store, they would stop and ask if anyone had seen a white moose. But no one had. Not ever. And so the hopefulness they had brought with them from Je-me-souviens started to dissipate.

  Perhaps inevitably, then, their thoughts turned elsewhere. For Yale Templeton, to the prospect of resolving the disparities in casualty figures for all the battles of the Civil War. Being very systematic in his approach to work (“plodding” as he was described by more than one colleague), he decided that first he would have to complete his article on the incidence of poisonous snake bites at Confederate military hospitals. He was satisfied that he had now collected virtually all the available evidence. Allowing himself three weeks to write the body of the paper, then another three months to get the footnotes in proper order, he could expect to send the article off—he had decided to submit it to the Journal of American History—by Remembrance Day. If Felicia Butterworth continued to bar him from the classroom, an early October start for the new project was not out of the question.

  As for Bobbi Jo Jackson, with each passing hour she became more determined to find out why the CIA had sent her to James Bay. After several days of trying to puzzle it out for herself, she decided to ask Yale Templeton for advice. This was during one of those rare occasions when he was not playing his kazoo out the car window. “What would you do if you were me?” was the way she put it.

  He thought for a moment. “I should begin by learning something about the history of northern Quebec,” he replied. Then he paused, his mind going back to their recent experiences with Louis Montcalm and his brother. “Of course,” he added, “I would only consult works written by respected scholars.”

  “Of course,” she replied. And did he have any books to recommend? Indeed, he did. His colleague Arlen Green had written a work called The People of Quebec that he understood to be very respected by specialists in the field. “No doubt that would be a good place to begin. Or perhaps,” he added on further reflection, “it might be simpler to go directly to Arlen himself. Even if, in my opinion, he would be well advised to take a little more care with his footnotes—they at times seem rather untidy, if you know what I mean—still, he is quite a gracious fellow. He spent his last sabbatical at Cambridge. Clare Hall, I believe.”

  So when they returned to Toronto, Bobbi Jo Jackson arranged a meeting with Arlen Green. He was, as Yale Templeton had told her, very gracious, every bit the gentleman. Although his own writing concentrated on relations (theological and otherwise) between Jesuit missionaries and Native women in New France, he shared with her what he knew about the history of James Bay and provided her with a copy of the reading list he gave to graduate students preparing for their comprehensive examinations on the history of French Canada. She immediately went to the library, checked out as many books as she could carry, and returned to the little apartment near Dunbar Road to begin her research.

  Her training at the CIA had included a course in speed reading. In her first class, one of the other recruits had leaned over and whispered to her, “You know what Woody Allen said about speed reading, don’t you?”

  “No,” she replied.

  “He said, ‘I took a speed reading course. Afterward I was able to read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It’s about Russia.’”

  That evening she had gone to a bookstore near her apartment and bought a copy of War and Peace. It took her the better part of the evening to finish it, almost three hours, leaving her quite dismayed about her inability to read as quickly as this Woody Allen character. Nonetheless she was determined and practiced hard, and by the end of her training program, she could get through the book in an hour and a half. “Still not as fast as Woody Allen,” she said to herself with disappointment. But then again, with her photographic memory, she could absorb a good deal more of the narrative than he apparently did. Months later she was still able to provide a summary of each chapter in the book, including quotations by the most obscure of characters.

  It did not take her long, then, to read all the works Arlen Green had recommended. She discovered that quite a few of the authors went well beyond mere facts and statistics, and slipped into the kind of speculation and imaginative interpretation that Yale Templeton had warned her against. It was hard to escape the conclusion that most historians lacked his principled devotion to craft. All the same it was precisely the speculation and imaginative interpretation that engaged her most (as she admitted to herself with some embarrassment). And while she at first was confused by the fact that the various authors produced views of the French Canadian past that were, in some cases, seemingly almost as irreconcilable as those held by Louis Montcalm and René Purelaine, in the end she found that she very much enjoyed the competitive thrust and parry of scholarly debate. She even had moments where she mused about one day producing a historical work of her own.

  Here I am digressing, however (although for the perfectly legitimate literary purpose of foreshadowing). The fact is, when she was reading about the history of Quebec, Bobbi Jo Jackson only occasionally slipped into reflections on the nature of historical inquiry. Mostly she was concerned with determining what it was about James Bay that had attracted the interest of the CIA. And after getting through all the books on the list Arlen Green had given her, she decided that she had reached something of a dead end.

  “I’m not sure I understand much more now than I did when I started,” she told Yale Templeton over dinner one evening.

  “Perhaps,” he replied, “you need to broaden your research.”

  “Broaden my research?”

  “Well, to this point you have concentrated on Quebec. Maybe now is the time to do some reading in American diplomatic history.” And he went to his bookshelf and pulled down a number of
books he had collected on the subject. As you might imagine, except for a handful of works on the War of 1812, they all dealt in one way or another with the Civil War. The problem was, the question she was seeking to answer really required knowledge of the more recent past. “Not my area of expertise, the twentieth century,” he conceded. However, he was acquainted with an authority on diplomatic matters, a former colleague in the History department now retired, who might well be able to give her some useful guidance. “From what I hear, he is still deeply involved in scholarly pursuits and very active in the life of the campus. He received his education at Oxford but otherwise is quite respectable. A very regal looking man, in fact. Furthermore, I can assure you that his footnotes are beyond criticism.” And so it was that Bobbi Jo Jackson went off to consult with St. Clair Russell Hill.

  XXXV

  Conspiracy theories abound in American diplomatic history. There are those who will tell you that James Madison declared war on Britain in 1812, during the last months of his administration, because he feared he was in danger of losing the forthcoming election and wanted to deflect attention from his disastrous trade policies. There are those who will tell you that James Polk provoked a boundary dispute with Mexico in 1846 simply to create an excuse for seizing the vast territory that became California and the American Southwest. There are those who will tell you that William McKinley annexed the Philippines in 1899 to ensure that the American Sugar Refining Company could acquire cane from the islands without paying a tariff. There are those who will tell you that Lyndon Johnson misrepresented reports of an attack on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 so that he could justify massive American air strikes against the North Vietnamese. And there are those who will tell you that George W. Bush purposely withheld evidence disproving the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so that he could mount an invasion whose main objective was ensuring American control of Middle Eastern oil.

  St. Clair Russell Hill believed in all of these conspiracies and, indeed, had produced summaries of each and every one, which he kept locked in a safe in his bedroom. And Bobbi Jo Jackson, being young and innocent, was prepared to believe in all of them as well. Emblazoned on the front page of one of the manuals she had received during her training at the CIA was the following aphorism attributed to Richard Nixon: “Deceit by politicians is one of the fundamental safeguards of a democratic society.” It took no great leap of faith for her to accept that James Madison and James Polk had deliberately provoked wars, or that William McKinley, Lyndon Johnson, and George W. Bush had wilfully lied to justify military ventures abroad.

  Not that she took everything St. Clair Russell Hill said at face value. “His allegations about the squirrels, I found those hard to swallow,” she confessed to Yale Templeton. “I mean, if squirrels had control over American foreign policy, I think my instructors at the CIA would have mentioned something about it, don’t you?”

  “I have to agree,” he responded. “It always seemed to me that St. Clair exaggerated the squirrel threat a little bit. In all my years as commander in chief for defence of the Edifice Building perimeter, the squirrels did not mount more than five or six offensives that suggested anything other than a most rudimentary understanding of military tactics.” He paused, then added, “Granted they show a certain sophistication in their approach to guerrilla warfare.”

  But Bobbi Jo Jackson was no longer thinking about the squirrels. Something had occurred to her when she was reciting the list of conspiracies enumerated by St. Clair Russell Hill, something that she dimly perceived might be of importance.

  “What about this?” she said. “If it’s true that the United States invaded Iraq to get control of the oil fields, well, maybe that explains why the CIA sent me to James Bay. Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with the Cree Indians.”

  “Is there oil in James Bay?”

  “Well, no. I mean, I don’t know. I guess there could be. But oil is used to create power, right? And hydroelectric plants are used to create power, too. I’m pretty sure about that. So maybe, you know, maybe the CIA sent me because of the hydroelectric plants.”

  Yale Templeton mulled over her suggestion. She was relying on inference here, not his strong point. Still, what she said had a certain logic to it, even he could see that. And being a trained historian, he knew what her next step must be.

  “You will have to locate some primary source evidence,” he said.

  “Primary source evidence? What’s that?”

  “Original documents. Something that shows a link between the CIA and the hydroelectric facilities on James Bay.”

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘original documents’?”

  “Well in my own work I have made very good use of newspapers. Many American dailies—some weeklies, too—have been copied onto microfilm and can be found at the university library. There is even an index for the New York Times. Then there are the published government records. Congressional debates, for example. You can find them at the library as well. Of course, to prove that there was some sort of conspiracy, for that you would need to get your hands on internal CIA documents: classified memos and such.”

  “And where can I find those?”

  “Classified memos? You can’t. Those are secret, not open to the public. Eventually most of them will be destroyed. However, not to worry. In all likelihood a few will survive. Someday—a hundred years from now, maybe two—a historian will stumble upon them. Then the whole story will come out.”

  “A hundred years! But I can’t wait a hundred years!”

  Her impatience took him by surprise. “I suppose some documents might become available before then. Maybe in seventy-five years. No earlier than that, I should think, however. Not in the case of classified information.”

  Bobbi Jo Jackson frowned. “Well where would these records be kept now?” she asked.

  “I have no idea. Some storage facility at CIA headquarters, I imagine.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “At CIA headquarters?”

  “Yes. Probably. But no one except a handful of officials would be allowed access to them.”

  “Hmm …” she murmured. And then, “Hmm …” again.

  The growth of the antlers of the bull moose, and the brief season of mating, are physiologically closely associated.

  XXXVI

  The growth of the antlers of the bull moose, and the brief season of mating, are physiologically closely associated. With antlers fully grown, the bull sets out to find a mate, manifesting a variety of emotions and qualities in his encounters with moose and men which are doubtless as little understood by himself as by any hunter who may chance to observe him.

  SAMUEL MERRILL, THE MOOSE BOOK

  A male moose sheds his antlers between December and March. He will produce a new set in the spring, their growth triggered by hormones that are themselves triggered by the now advancing sunlight. They will be covered at first by a coat of linty velvet, but that will die off over the course of the summer, the moose finally and completely removing any last vestiges by rubbing the antlers against the trunks and stumps of trees. Once the entire process is complete—this will be in August or September—he will start to journey about the countryside in search of a mate.

  It is the female, in fact, who initiates the mating ritual. She emits a loud beckoning cry to indicate where she can be found, the male responding with an extended series of repetitive grunts as he searches for her. The two will continue this amorous call and response until he arrives at the corner of the forest where she stands waiting, after which he will position himself sideways directly in front of her. If she for some reason decides to amble off, he will accompany her, adopting the same pose once she comes to a halt.

  This bawdy behaviour may well continue for days. Eventually the pair will come upon a spot that, for moose, bespeaks romance. Here the male will urinate and, if the mood suits him, defecate. He will paw and scrape at the ground for some considerable length of time until he has created a
large, odoriferous, muddy pit known to biologists as a wallow. (What term moose use when thinking about it remains unknown.) He will lie down in the muck and begin to roll around in a manner so inviting that the female is soon captured by an irresistible urge to hurl herself into the wallow alongside him. Once covered in the fetid compound of his affection, she is overtaken by passion and emits a slow, erotic moan. He responds by laying his head tenderly against her back. Love is in the air. It is time to consummate their relationship. And so they do. In five seconds (give or take a second).

  By the end of August—and here I mean the particular August at which we now arrive in our story—the Great White Moose had grown a magnificent set of antlers, more than five feet across, which he had honed to a glistening sheen in the old growth forest near Elk Lake. Still, any discussion about the link between antler growth and sex drive would have to be pretty much hypothetical in his case, since the Great White Moose had been neutered at birth. Granted, he took unalloyed delight in rolling about in a wallow. But other intuitive aspects of the mating ritual were effectively unknown to him, a circumstance exacerbated by the fact that almost all of his instincts had for years been overridden by his fixation on the haunting image of the spectre.

  In that regard, however, the past summer had proven therapeutic. The quiet calm near Elk Lake had reduced his obsessiveness to the point that an observer familiar with his troubled history might well have concluded that he had stumbled across a cache of Paxil. And so, as the last shreds of velvet dropped from his antlers, he felt a stirring within himself, an imperative to search. But for what? The intimations of sexual desire were so muted and unfamiliar to him that he had no means to comprehend them. All he knew was that the time for idle contemplation had come to an end. He must be on the move.