Strachey's Folly - Stevenson Richard - Страница 32

"Not yet," Sweet snapped without looking at the waitress, who, apparently experienced in her line of work, was unruffled by bad manners, and away she flew.

Heckinger said to me, "You're not among the sizable per­centage of the American public who believe that Vince Foster was murdered at the White House and the U.S. Park Police, under Hillary Clinton's direction, dumped Foster's body in a Vir­ginia glade with a gun in his hand, and then moved a truckload of incriminating Whitewater and other documents out of Foster's office and into the Lincoln bedroom, where the papers were shredded and flushed down Mary Todd Lincoln's bidet?"

"No," I said. "I doubt anything like that happened."

"Then you're very naive," Heckinger said. "Minus the em­bellishments that I added for my own amusement, something very much like what I just described is very probably what hap­pened to the unfortunate Mr. Foster—a man who knew too much and may have been wavering in his loyalty to the ex­tremely powerful people he knew it about."

I waited for Heckinger to break into a sly grin and then maybe give me an affectionate noogie, but both he and Sweet continued to regard me gravely. They believed that hooey?

I said, "My opinion, based on the results of several federal investigations and on the thorough reporting in an excellent daily newspaper, the New York Times, is that you are incorrect."

They both snorted, dismissing both the national law en­forcement establishment and the Sulzbergers as, I guessed, either patsies or coconspirators in the Vince Foster plot.

I went on, "It's not that I believe conspiracies never happen. They do, obviously. There were all those CIA plots to overthrow governments in Guatemala and Iran and Guyana and the Congo, and of course, Hoover trying to ruin Martin Luther King or drive him to suicide. And the King assassination itself I also wonder about—James Earl Ray came out of a rat's nest of racist crazies, and King's murder could easily have been a plot hatched in the back of a Southern barroom.

"On the other hand, Sirhan Sirhan pretty clearly acted alone when he shot Bobby Kennedy. And I've never seen any really good evidence that the JFK assassination was the work of—to use your terminology—'a consortium of powerful interests,' in­cluding, in the popular Oliver Stone version, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyndon Johnson, the mob, and the board of di­rectors of the Marriott Corporation. I think Oswald did it himself because he was a pathetic schmo with some confused leftist ideas who thought he'd knock off the suave, good-looking rich guy who was the president of the capitalist United States, and damned if he didn't somehow pull it off. People can't stand to think that a dork like Oswald could turn history upside down, so they look for some larger, darker, more sensationally evil expla­nation. But there probably isn't any.

"In fact, the Lee Harvey Oswalds are the source of most of the evil in the world, I think. Individual persons who are mad at the world, or mad at their wives, or just mad, or just weak and mixed up—they gradually or suddenly lose it, and then they rape or rob or commit murder. There are criminal conspiracies, sure—mob racketeering, drug smuggling, savings-and-loan rip-offs, and other organizational crimes. Sometimes angry, disturbed people do commit their crimes in groups—I know that—ordi­narily for reasons of greed. There's violent mass folly, too, like Vietnam or Bosnia, but that's another story. By far, most of the people who inhabit the jails around the world, or ought to, are people whose folly is only personal. For reasons of their own, they are impelled to do the wrong thing, maybe a very wrong thing, and somebody else gets hurt.

"That's what I am inclined to think has happened to May-nard Sudbury. He was the victim of a few people doing the wrong thing in concert with one another, probably in order to make a fast buck. But a monstrous mass conspiracy? Something 'bigger than you are, Strachey,' as you guys so melodramatically put it? I don't think so. My question about all those people I listed is not how are they all interrelated? It's which one put Jim Suter's name in the AIDS quilt, and who's the asshole who had Maynard Sudbury shot?"

Heckinger and Sweet regarded me dully throughout this second oration of the early afternoon. When I had wound down, Heckinger sipped from his wineglass and said, "You're awfully old-fashioned, aren't you, Strachey?"

"Old-fashioned? I don't hear that one often. Can I get a signed affidavit to that effect to show to my boyfriend?"

Sweet shot me the hairy eyeball and snarled, "I'll give you an affidavit to think about!"

Then the waitress was back. "You gentlemen ready to order? Or do you need a few more minutes?"

"I'll have the ham club on wheat toast. This one," I said, in­dicating Sweet, "would probably enjoy the thumbtack salad with croutons of gypsum and a tapenade of ground glass."

The waitress chortled, then glanced at Sweet and saw the look on his face. She said, "If you'd like a little more time to think it over, I'll come back in a few minutes. Take your time." In­stantly, she was gone again.

Ignoring Sweet, I looked at Heckinger and said, "So, how about spitting it out? You're a friend of Jim's—that I know—and you say he doesn't want to talk to me. Why?"

"Because if he talks to anyone," Heckinger said mildly, "he may be killed."

"Please explain that."

"I can't."

"Why?"

"I can't tell you that."

"But he talked to you, and you're alive."

Heckinger and Sweet glanced at each other and shared a moment of amusement over this. "Yes, we are alive," Heckinger said. "Indeed we are."

"Why are you threatening me?" I said. "Are you with the people who are threatening Suter? Is that what you do? Is the consortium of interests you say you represent an organization that, as part of its normal operating procedures, routinely threat­ens people?"

Heckinger said mildly, "That pretty much describes it."

So what were they then? They came across as a couple of unemployed bad actors, hired down at the union hall for an af­ternoon of impersonating thugs. But since actual thugs, more than they used to, pick up their styles and techniques from pop­corn movies and TV series, maybe these two were authentic— what? Mobsters? CIA? KGB? Agents of the National Realtors Association?

I said, "Whoever you are, there is one question you can an­swer for me without violating your instructions. Give me this much. Is Jim, in fact, in Mexico?"

"He is, actually," Heckinger said.

"Where?"

He looked at me levelly. "I've told you all I can tell you, Strachey, and that is all the farther I can go. Don't go down there. That is Jim's wish and that is his instruction to you. If you get near him, you could get him killed. Now, there is potential folly for you, some human anger and confusion, and a resulting distinct evil."

All the farther I can go? This, I knew, was a Pennsylvania Dutch construction—German actually—meaning "as far as I can go." I hadn't heard it since my college affair at Rutgers with Kenny Womeldorf, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Kenny occasion­ally carne out with these peculiar locutions that the Amish and German Mennonites had, over the years, deposited in the oth­erwise Mid-Atlantic Standard English of rural and small-town southeastern and Central Pennsylvania.

I took a leap and said, "Look, let's quit playing games here. You seem to know a lot about me and my current activities, and the fact is, I know a lot about the two of you. I know, for ex­ample, that despite your amateurish goonish threats, you work for neither the CIA nor the Mafia. You work for one or both of the Krumfutzes."