by Mark Ellis
Three days from this moment, Hundtruk would have a singular shipmate when he boarded the Northstar, none other than the man of a thousand affiliates himself, a man that millions of Americans would vote in as president in a heartbeat.
Hundtruk got it. Government did move ponderously—and so inefficiently at times as to make the process seem burlesque. There was incredible waste, mismanagement, and cronyism. But there was also the sheer gigantism and exorability, like a force of nature—in his mind a testament to America’s greatness as a nation.
Again, it was totally secondary to Hundtruk that when the Northstar, and by extension the conservative elite walked the plank of fiscal review, every government worker who’d ever been wounded by the characterizations of the rightwing media would get a chuckle and some incentive to be evermore inexorable.
Looking up from the Svenko case file, he saw that an associate had emailed him a Fox News video clip. He clicked and listened as soft-spoken neo hawk Charles Krauthammer waxed portentously about continuing the Bush tax cuts for everyone, not just the middle class. These guys just didn’t get it. Like Japanese cave fighters in the Philippines or the last freezing Nazi on the steppes outside Stalingrad, they didn’t know they were licked. Their allusions to behemoth incompetence in government came from a virtual fringe, now out of power.
His primary mission was to find out what the conservatives were up to. Be the guy inside, hear things, and gather impressions. Pretend that on behalf of the new administration he was looking into the death of a female reporter. Exorability was about to catch up with the luxury cruise industry.
The Seattle miniscraper his superiors had ensconced him in was the spitting image of 9/11’s Building 7, the minimalist cube a few blocks over from Ground Zero, which conspiracy theorists were convinced had fallen in a controlled demolition.
Nut cases, thought Hundtruk.
They’d flown him out of Washington on a Navy transport over the Memorial Day holiday, at a moment’s notice and with no explanation, but that wasn’t unusual. The flight had been personally arranged by Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Soon after Hundtruk’s initial closed-door meeting with Scrimshaw at the Charon offices, some local operatives whisked him to this makeshift desk in a conspicuously dusty government office. Sniffing mold, he filled out the postal form that would hold the mail on his DC condo during the time he was on the cruise. While waiting to embark, he had the use of another, much more accommodating, government building. Until the Northstar sailed, he would enjoy the comforts of an apartment near Safeco Field which housed the ghostly emanations of a constant parade of undercover operatives headed to undisclosed locations. They’d even supplied him with tickets to a Mariners-Senators doubleheader. Hundtruk was enjoying his first visit to the land of active volcanoes and Democrat intractability.
His catbird position in Obama’s new hierarchy had been achieved over a lifetime of stealth. As a youngster he was driven to exert discreet oversight of his siblings and friends. In college he had sought the position of, and been unanimously voted in as, dorm nark. He spent his rookie year in public service during the Clinton administration running down welfare cheats before he got his big break—an opening at the FBI Internal Affairs Unit. From there it was increasingly low-profile, high-impact operations. The penultimate promotion came with his appointment to Hillary Clinton’s corps of vast right-wing conspiracy detectives. Few knew he was attached to the War Room. After the Republican Congress impeached Bill, Hundtruk had been instrumental in uncovering a series of revelations that ensured Newt Gingrich’s resignation would follow. It had been MAD—mutually assured destruction—in those days. And it had only gotten worse.
He disappeared into the bowels of the federal beast during Bush Junior, working to determine the fates of people living like worms in the underbelly of right-wing corruption. With 2008’s triumph in the books, and Hundtruk’s bona fides as solid as Yankee concrete, his years of service had been favorably assessed.
And now he was close, very close.
The Rainier Policy Institute assignment marked the first time he’d been on a luxury liner since the Cook Island cruise he’d taken with Shirley right before Clinton won his second term. It wasn’t quite a honeymoon—they’d been hitched for over a year. But it was the first time he’d been able to get away, and it was the closest thing they’d had to a vacation in four years of marriage. Shirley got miserably seasick over the rough patches, and they never sailed again. With the advent of the Hillary appointment, Shirley confessed to him that she’d realized that hers would forever be a lonely life, with only a part-time spouse and an upscale standard of living to show for her entrapment. In 1996, just as the man from Hope was giving his second inaugural address, she broke her marriage vows. A closet righty-tighty after all, she’d remarried—a Reagan Republican who’d made his considerable fortune in Texas fast food.
Without children in the mix, the divorce was easy. Shirley—in her best moments the spitting image of Lawrence Welk star Mary Lou Metzger—vanished with her conservative breadwinner into the swells of Gulf Coast big-oil center-right elitism. Stan’s income was paltry compared to his, and thankfully Shirley had seen the absurdity of asking for alimony. The most money he’d ever made was the money he was making now, high five figures. She took her half of their DC colonial in cash. Every year since, Hundtruk had peeked at his marital successor’s tax returns, and there were irregularities, but in the end, it was too close to home, too in-house, and too beneath his dignity to launch an inquiry.
He was also too professional to ever let his wound over the breakup connect with his
loathing for the Republicans. He’d always loathed them. Her apostasy fostered in Stan merely a secondary stratum of resolve to avenge everything that had ever been taken from the people.
Since his spilt with Shirley, his life-long liberal mother was the only family he had left. He brought his calendar up on the screen and made a notation to drop a note via classified messenger to Mother Hundtruk, letting her know that he was alive.
A haircut and a baseball game. His docket was essentially cleared by the Democrats’ triumph, and his prospects had gone through the roof.
Closing the case file, he chuckled at more irony. His core mission was the tax compliance equivalent of Lara Svenko’s never-to-be-written hit piece. The unfortunate Imbroglio wordsmith was but another casualty of the revolution. Solving her death was almost ridiculously moot, but his second-tier directive was clear: under no circumstances could anyone other than Democrat-run Homeland Security claim to have delivered justice to the dead progressive.
No, it wasn’t about Shirley, though had it stung when she deserted him and, as the evangelicals might say, cleaved unto a Republican junk food magnate. But his mother had raised a good progressive boy, and aloneness was part of an offstage partisan operative’s existence. Despite a series of affairs with reliably liberal women since his divorce, none had found a way into his battle-hardened heart. Hundtruk suppressed a chuckle; a haircut and a baseball game. He had become priest-like, and since Obama’s election actually celibate, in his devotion to the cause. Stranger things had happened to men approaching the exact midpoint of middle age.
Apparently, Melissa Blythe was in the same boat, for whatever reason. Her dossier contained nothing contemporary about a love interest, and the NSA would know. The last man in her life was named Jimmy, an individual so “vanilla” that no dossier existed.
Blythe was on her own with this belated Svenko investigation. His unattached fellow investigator would likely prove to be diligent in digging up the secondary answers they were looking for and might even prove unknowingly indispensible. Nevertheless, Stan Hundtruk would be relentlessly on hand to make sure the US Government got credit for anything she unearthed or solved. The future Trans Oceanic audit was meat on the table. Putting a scare into the hearts of public employee bashers like Sharpe was a tasty reheat of yesterday’s mashed potatoes. Finding the Russian’s killer—if she had been murdered--
was the dessert.
Chapter Seven
Arriving at work the Tuesday morning after getting the Rainier Policy Institute assignment, Melissa was shocked to see that yesterday’s shark-eyed job applicant was slumped over a pile of documents in a formerly unoccupied mini- office. He looked up as she passed but did not nod, and she couldn’t help staring back. Bronze centurion curls splayed appealingly over his white collar, and his lips were drawn into a territorial grimace as he flipped the page he’d been reading, his left hand sturdy, manicured, and ring-less. He’d obviously gotten the job.
Melissa averted her eyes but not before noting a name on the freshly fabricated placard on his desk: Jeff Griffin. The new hire had opted for the staring-down-the-doorway office configuration, known to be preferred by Scorpios and Leos of both sexes.
The various implications of Mr. Griffin’s arrival percolated as Melissa walked down the hall to her own office. Her desk was set facing the plate-glass window, understood by workplace sociologists as the choice of more socially oriented types.
She had gotten the memo about how women who choose male-dominated fields did well to avoid butting heads directly with the masculine way of doing things, especially if those things seemed to be working. There were smarter ways to advance—circuitous, perhaps, but also time-tested. One of her methods, to emulate a female laboratory assistant in a 1950s sci-fi flick, had served her well when dealing with people caught up in the betrayals of passion. It was about knowing enough to be effective without coming across to people whose personal lives were imploding as a seen-it-all, know-it-all. Now, however, dealing with the falling fortunes of the new economic normal, such reticence and tact was seen as bluff amateurism by the captains of industry. The kind of investigatory work coming into the Charon shop was all cattle, to flip a phrase popular with her late father, Dennis, and you didn’t need a hat.
She missed her father. With him still around, his Reaganesque charm and abiding love, she was honest enough with herself to know that the problem of not having a significant male other would float more easily on the tremulous waters of her life.
Melissa looked out the skinny rectangle of her window and down at the mostly deserted streets. Her lip had fully split open and, despite constant applications of balm, seemed not to have benefited much from a night worth of Advil PM–enabled sleep. It was time to stop pining and plunge into the short life Lara Svenko.
A web search on the late reporter yielded a wealth of information, most of it to do with her untimely end. For three hours Melissa followed twenty-nine-year-old Lara’s life trajectory: modest-means Russian immigrant, mother deceased prior to the family’s legal immigration, father and daughter precariously surviving in a new land, specifically in a forgotten apartment complex across the channel from Manhattan Island. After coming to America, the only child did well at Eastborough High School, with a demonstrated aptitude for journalism, but the transplanted family’s means precluded any thought of going on to college. Instead, she picked up some small-time newspaper work around the neighborhood. Some of the features she wrote were still online, all pseudo-socialistic and hitting the proper progressive notes. She went on freelancing for a time and then suddenly, in 2007, announced to her father that she was leaving the Big Apple for a new life on the West Coast. Once in Seattle she freelanced for a weekly alternative paper in a similar vein, but within months of her bicoastal journey, an offer came from Imbroglio. What followed was remarkable for a scribe with high school credentials. The magazine enrolled her in University of Washington journalism courses and facilitated her acceptance as a journalistic intern on the 2008 Rainier Policy Institute cruise. Her story ended in the arctic depths of a fjord that sliced into the Passage coast north of Juneau like a blue crescent moon.
An autopsy confirmed that she’d first sunk sixty feet to the bottom and then lay in the darkness for days before slowly rising to the surface. She’d rolled ashore in waves created by passing Jet Skis in the calm of a waxing summer. There were no drugs in her system or signs of blunt trauma other than the graying belly-flop contusion that ran the length of her torso. The state closed its books on the case, citing an autopsy that showed alcohol in the bloodstream and theorizing that she had possibly fallen while in a state of intoxication. While everything in her stateroom appeared otherwise normal, her laptop computer was not found, and it was assumed she had been carrying it with her.
It was further revealed that the night she died, the evening of July 6, she had used her credit card to purchase two mixed drinks, White Russians, at an informal Rainier Policy Institute cocktail presser. The local authorities had looked into all of this and had found no compelling reason to go beyond accidental misfortune. The federal investigation was brief, a rubber-stamped nod to the jurisdictional probe by a bureaucracy inundated with the unforeseen challenges of the Great Recession.
Of special interest to Melissa for its humanizing aura was the Russian’s childhood photo included in a posthumously published Imbroglio memorial. Here was a motherless waif with mouse-colored hair that hinted at an incipient graying. She was cute, and she was smiling in the photo—a guarded immigrant grin, often seen in black and white, which asks both, Am I really here? and Can I be?
Those closest to her revealed that it was the ascendance of Senator Barack Obama to viable presidential contender that inspired her to relocate to the West Coast and settle in one of the centers of American progressivism.
Imbroglio had been founded on hatred for all things Bush and, by extrapolation, all things conservative. From her reading Melissa gathered that the Northstar’s Rainier Policy Institute cruise never came to a conclusion without some darkly humorous Imbroglio hit piece. With the presidential election hanging in the balance that summer, CEO Gerald Hoffman held meetings at which he decreed that this time, mean-spirited satire wouldn’t be enough. Hoffman wanted a story that only someone actually aboard the ship could deliver: Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas relocated to the Inside Passage. After Lara’s death and the inconclusive inquiries, Hoffman refused to let sleeping dogs lie. Even with Obama’s victory sealed, he and his associates nursed a healthy dread of the possibility of a Republican comeback. Talk radio was beating a drum for 2010, and grassroots citizen groups were taking up ideological pitchforks—Melissa was peripherally aware of something called the Tea Party—in defiance of Obama’s transformation.
From the magazine’s perspective, the summer of 2009 was no time to rest on laurels. Republicanism, and by association all the anachronistic reprobates who voted for it, was viewed as a stuck—but not entirely dead—pig. Keeping the theme of Lara Svenko’s death alive with a quasi-public investigation served two purposes: it showed that the magazine cared, and it kept the left’s worst fears about conservative resurgence on a front burner.
The Rainier Policy Institute was home to the crème de la crème of the Pacific Northwest’s conservative thinkers, men and women who had published on the bestseller lists and established themselves through the most seemly and unimpeachable means. Nationally known conservatives sailed with the ship each year as well. Hoffman had essentially rolled the dice, hoping that stowing this talented young immigrant aboard might somehow artfully yield some damning esoteric truth that would effectively scuttle the Great Right Hope.
Melissa paused in her research, sat back in her chair, and noticed that a fire had started somewhere along the waterfront. Blue-white smoke rose up and fanned out over the water.
When Svenko’s fate finally surfaced, to its credit the magazine did not stoop to suggesting that a hard-right wingnut had dispatched her, preferring to accept the official “accidental” line. But lots of blogosphere pundits and lefty sites had run with the more salacious possibility. To this day millions, including many in the political middle, fervently believed that Lara Svenko had been dumped overboard by a Republican.
The office was quiet this noon, as Scrimshaw had invited a number of agents on an afternoon cruise around the Port of Seattle on Ch
ris Cross, the company yacht he’d named after the singer-songwriter who’d written “Sailing.” Down the Puget Sound, he berthed a larger yacht, Christine, named for his wife, but the Chris Cross sufficed for the short runs directly related to business. Melissa had sailed on both boats, but not lately, not since the economy fell apart. It was another indication that her work had suffered from a redirection away from cheating spouses and short-fused visitation parents.
Out her window she could just see the back end of a Seattle Fire Department pump truck and the thick black hose that ran to the hydrant nearby. The smoke rising from the unseen blaze was thinning, the bluish cloud turning to a white haze. When she went out to refill her coffee cup, Melissa saw that Jeff Griffin, her new and yet to be formally introduced coworker, had moved from his desk and into the company library.
After a lunchroom meal of hummus and wheat crackers, Melissa dug back into her research. World events had clawed at the periphery of her psyche since 9/11, at which time she was twenty-one, but not quite enough to penetrate her dramatized love life and single-minded path to professional certification. One iconic moment, George W standing in the ruins of the towers promising a reckoning for evildoers, represented the abiding touchstone of her recent political consciousness. She considered herself a moderate Republican, like her parents, though quite lapsed in terms of personal engagement. After voting for Bush in the first-cast ballot of her young adulthood, she spent the years of his term immersed in her turbulent twenties.
Meanwhile events and societal evolutions had shifted what she considered her moderate political affiliation rightward without her even knowing. What had been normative Reagan Democrat positions like a strong defense, traditional family values, and free-market capitalism were now lumped in the leftist canon with abortion clinic bombings and naked imperialism.