A Simple Act of Violence (57 page)

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Authors: R.J. Ellory

BOOK: A Simple Act of Violence
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After a while I stopped thinking about myself, and I started looking.
I ran around the grounds of Shaw Howard University. I looked at young men and women carrying books, carrying bags and satchels, CD players and
iPods
and MP-3 players, carrying youth and vigor and some sort of trusting self-belief that told them they’d make something of themselves;
I ran the length of Florida Avenue as far as Seventh Street, past the line of cabs at the corner of Fourth, and saw the gang of cabbies leaning against hoods and fenders, smoking, drinking Dr Pepper, laughing at some wisecrack, falling silent one after the other, their heads turning with no subtlety or finesse as a girl walked past, each of them thinking ‘Do her? Man, would I do her . . . Jeez, give me ten minutes in the back of the cab with that one and I’d make her cry for home’ . . . but knowing that given such a chance they would feel self-conscious, foolish,
naïve
even, and awkward and apologetic, and a sense of guilt that would never give them the oomph to get it up;
I ran to the Constitution Gardens, from one end to the other, past the Federal Reserve Building, past the Veterans’ Memorial, along Ohio Drive at the edge of West Potomac Park, right round the tidal basin and along the Fourteenth Street Bridge, and figured that if this were New York I would be running through a Simon and Garfunkel song;
I ran to music; bought a CD player and listened to Sinatra and Shostakovich; I listened to Kelly Joe Phelps and Nina Simone; I listened to Gershwin and Bernstein and Billie Holliday. I listened to a CD that came free with a magazine - Sounds of the Amazon - and I hurled it from the Clara Barton Parkway into the Potomac because it was reminiscent of another time, another place, and it brought tears to my eyes and made me afraid;
I ran past pregnant women and smart-suit officials; past store-fronts and massage parlors, past tenement blocks where the sense of loneliness and desolation kind of hung in the air like cheap perfume; past factory complexes and corrugated iron garages where black-faced men, smelling of diesel and paint and oil and sweat, peered out of semi-darkness; past refrigeration units where frozen fish were unloaded by the ton and collapsing in some fluid rush out of the backs of trailers into the street and along the gutter, and were scooped up by men with shovels who knew they would never have to eat them.
And I thought: In your daydreams, your moments of absent thought, there’s always one place you return to. And I would think of such things, and remember places I had been, and always she was there - with her smile, with her warmth and humanity, and her passion for oddly colored berets.
What did Kafka say? A cage went in search of a bird.
The cage found me, and it was alluring and seductive, and everything it promised turned out to be a lie.
I ran past memories and emotion: fear and failure and frustration, and the faltering doubt of what I was doing, which in turn became a doubt about who I was.
I ran past these things, and I left them behind, and I thought: Victory has a hundred fathers, defeat is an orphan, and could not remember who had said it.
Confronting this kind of thing makes everything else in your life seem utterly unimportant.
I ran past faces - those that I shot, those I strangled, those I detonated into the afterlife with homemade incendiary devices, with grenades and letter bombs and gas; past those who looked right at me as I raised a gun and pulled the trigger; those who never saw it coming, but knew something had come when they felt the sudden brutal impact of a bullet in the chest . . . and those who didn’t even realize they were dead because the bullet hit them smack-bang in the forehead and dropped them like deadweight to an unforgiving ground.
Through late nights, the strange awkward hours before dawn - always dark, always cold - hearing footsteps somewhere and not knowing whether they were real or a dream, and for a second feeling your heart stop dead in its rhythm, and thinking that maybe, just maybe, one of them was on their way back to get you.
Ran past all of them and out the other side, and kept on going, just kept on going . . . and
I
was not so naïve to believe that I was running away from something, or to consider that the thing I was running from was myself. Such bullshit! What kind of sanctimonious, self-serving, shallow-minded, pathetic bullshit would that be? No, I was not so ignorant. But one time, just for a moment, I believed there was a possibility I was running toward something. I did not know what it was. Clemency, forgiveness, absolution . . . Peace? But then I reasoned that moving toward something was always a result of moving away from something else. A logical corollary. One could not move away from nothing. Catherine would have laughed and said that a man of my superficiality was not capable of such depth. Homespun philosophy had no place in me, neither in my heart nor in my life. People like us could never afford to be philosophical. We were doing the right thing. We knew that. We knew that so well we didn’t need to question the nature of our rightness.
I ran past the ones we bagged and tagged and stacked in rows - and doused with lavender in an effort to hold back the stench as they decayed before our eyes. But the smell got inside you, insidious and unforgiving, and that is a smell I carry in my pores, in my hair, in my nerves and sinews and synapses and muscles, a smell that is embedded in the flesh of my nostrils, and I will always smell it because - in the end - that smell represented everything.
And I know that someone will find me three days after my death, and I will smell the same.
I ran out of the past and into the present, and the dead came with me, and I saw their faces and heard their voices, and realized that I would carry that load for the rest of my life, and if Catherine was right I would carry it into my next life, and the one beyond, and the one beyond that . . .
We allowed ourselves to get played like the fools we were.
We believed in all of it so goddam hard . . . believed in it enough to kill for it.
That’s what we did. And when the war was over we believed it would stop - the guns, the drugs, the murder, the wanton greed and corruption and back-stabbing lying deceitful Machiavellian horror of everything we created. But it did not. It did not stop. We left Nicaragua and it came with us.
And what she said to me. What Catherine Sheridan said to me . . .
‘I cannot continue to live in a world that is blind and ignorant.
Blind to what we have done. Apathy is not a solution I will subscribe to, John. You see what I mean? You agree with me, don’t you, John?’
And so we brought the sacred monster home . . . big enough to devour us all.
FORTY-FIVE
‘We walk,’ Robey said. He stood on the sidewalk and looked at Miller.
‘Walk where?’ Miller asked.
‘This way,’ he replied, and turned his back on Miller.
They headed down New Jersey Avenue, Robey moving swiftly, Miller hurrying to keep up with him.
‘Where are we going?’ Miller asked, aware even as he asked it that the question would not be answered.
‘You ever hear of a man named Robert McNamara?’
‘McNamara?’ Miller asked. ‘No, should I have?’
Robey shrugged, buried his hands in the pocket of his overcoat. ‘Originally he was NSA, then he was the first CEO of Ford Motors who wasn’t actually a member of the Ford family. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968 . . . learned a great deal about covert operations, warfare, all the way through the Vietnam years. Worked under Kennedy until ’63, and then LBJ until ’68.’ Robey glanced back at Miller, still hurrying to keep up with him. ‘You know the lesson McNamara learned from those years?’
Miller shook his head.
‘Learned that you can’t control a foreign country with arms.’
Miller said nothing.
‘You know where he went after Nixon took office?’
‘No idea.’
‘President of the World Bank. Went on a committed program to control the finances of as many Third World countries as possible. Loaned in excess of seven hundred and eighty million dollars each year for the first five years of Nixon’s presidency. And he proved to Nixon, and subsequently to Ford and Carter, that there was a sequence in which you did this thing—’
‘What thing? What are you talking about?’
‘The control of a nation, Detective Miller, the control of a nation. Not by arms. Not by war until war is the last resort. You begin with economic control, and if economic control fails you employ the resources you have from within the intelligence community—’
They passed O Street and the turning for Neal Place.
‘You instigate your black ops, your assassination program . . . like they did in Chile and Ecuador. You undermine the acting government, you put your own people in, and then - only then - if these actions do not bring you control of the nation, you commit to war. If you see the United States invade a country then you know that there has been action for a year, perhaps two, and those actions have not resulted in the desired effect.’
‘You’re talking about Nicaragua again, aren’t you?’ Miller asked.
‘Nicaragua, Guatemala, Cuba, the Congo, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia . . . hell, the list is endless. And those are just the ones we told you about.’ Once again Robey smiled like there was some huge practical joke being played out for everyone’s benefit. He was smiling because Miller hadn’t got it, because he wondered whether Miller would ever get it.
Morgan Street to the left, and then they were bearing right toward the New York Avenue junction.
Miller started to wonder if they were headed towards Robey’s workplace.
‘The college . . . ?’ he started.
‘Wait and see.’
At the end of New York Avenue, the commotion of late afternoon traffic that came down from Massachusetts and K Street onto Seventh, the sudden way in which Robey rushed out into the oncoming stream of cars . . .
Miller was caught unawares, already breathless from keeping pace, and he turned away for a second, couldn’t have been any more than that, and when he turned back he saw John Robey dodging and weaving through oncoming vehicles, horns blaring, a taxicab driver leaning out of his window and hollering abuse.
‘Jesus,’ he exhaled, and turned his head as a dark blue Pontiac almost caught Robey broadside.
But Robey was fast, deceptively so, for as Miller watched it seemed that he disappeared through the oncoming rush as if he was walking between stationary objects.
It was a minute, perhaps more, before the traffic was sufficiently sparse for Miller to take the crossing at a run. He charged across to the other side of the street and started running. Robey had turned right past the corner of Mount Vernon Square, on through the trees at the edge of the park.
Then, and only then, did Miller understand where Robey had taken him.
The high façade of Carnegie Library stood before him.
Left and right, back over his shoulder; he craned to see through the stream of cars on the highway, back toward the church on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue, the Post Office behind him on the corner of I Street and Seventh.
Robey was gone. Not because Miller had missed him. Not because Miller had let him go, but because Robey had never questioned his own ability to disappear.
He had simply vanished.
Miller breathed deeply, felt his pulse return to normal.
The library. One of the very last things Catherine Sheridan had done. She’d returned the books. Returned the books . . .
Miller glanced down. He had on the same overcoat he’d been wearing on that Sunday following the Sheridan murder.
From his left outer pocket he retrieved the slip of paper given him by Julia Gibb. He had not considered the possibility that it meant anything at all. Not until now; not until the moment John Robey had returned him to the library.
Why?
To tell him something perhaps.
Miller looked down at the piece of paper, the titles written in Julia Gibb’s precise librarian script.
Ravelstein by Saul Bellow, two books by Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men and East of Eden. Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates, and Yesterdays by Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
Miller read them through several times. The he started walking, and his walking got faster and became a run.
The books. She returned the books but withdrew none.
Ravelstein. Of Mice and Men. Beasts. East of Eden. Yesterdays.
It was stupid. It was foolishly simple. The titles were his name. R-O-B-E-Y. Robey. The books had something to do with Robey.
Catherine Sheridan had returned the books in order to tell them something about Robey.
Miller pounded up the library steps and caught the door even as Julia Gibb was coming to lock it for the evening.
FORTY-SIX
‘McCullough? Sure I remember McCullough.’
Sergeant Stephen Tannahill, assigned representative from the Seventh, was seated in a back office behind the central briefing room, Roth and Metz facing him across an oval table, a window to the right overlooking the junction of Randolph and First. Tannahill carried the same world-weary look as Oliver, Riehl, Feshbach, even Lassiter. Carried something in his eyes that spoke of too many years doing this thing to ever consider doing something different. Such a shadow was not unique to policemen, but they seemed to earn it harder and wear it with greater pride. Metz and Roth had arrived just as Tannahill was leaving, but the alacrity with which he agreed to speak with them suggested that he did not have a great deal to look forward to at home. Perhaps there was no-one. Perhaps there was someone but she did not recognize the man she’d married and communicated it, silently but with everything she possessed. These were awkward and disjointed lives. Roth could see that, ever reminding himself of his own good fortune in having Amanda and the kids waiting for his return. Many of the people he met in the various precincts had a quality of life no better than the vast percentage of those they spent their time investigating, searching for, and arresting. It was a sad commentary, but nevertheless true.

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