The Brea File (12 page)

After five minutes, satisfied that on this occasion he had not been followed, Macimer retraced his steps along M Street to the brick-faced arcade. A dark tunnel led from the street to a broad inner courtyard faced with fashionable shops on two levels. Most of them were closed. Two young women with lank straight hair parted in the middle glanced out hopefully from a boutique as Macimer walked by.

On the far side of the arcade another narrow passageway tunneled through to the alley. The land here tilted downward toward the river. Standing in the gathering dusk, Macimer felt the warm, soft air of a Washington evening in June against his face. There was a smell of rain. From somewhere up the alley came the sounds of muted jazz from a small nightclub.

No one had followed Macimer through the nearly deserted arcade.

Across the alley was the rear entrance to a bar that fronted on the next street. Macimer entered through the back door. He stood for a moment near the doorway, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom.

The bar was long and narrow. There was just enough room for an old mahogany bar with a polished brass rail and a dozen or so tall stools, a narrow aisle and a row of wooden booths upholstered in cracked red vinyl. A couple of the booths and several stools were occupied.

Joseph Gerella had chosen the last booth, nearest the alley. He was sitting with his back to the room. Macimer sensed that the reporter had been watching him for a number of seconds before the FBI man spotted him.

Macimer stopped beside the booth. “Gerella?”

“Check. Sit down, Mr. Macimer. You want a beer?”

“Just coffee.”

Macimer sat opposite Gerella, conscious of a feeling of caution and a trace of hostility. The man on the other side of the table was not reassuring. Joseph Gerella wore a poor-fitting polyester suit made to resemble gray flannel. His shirt collar was unbuttoned, his tie tugged loose and to one side. There was a dark stain on the tie. His black hair came almost to his shoulders in a straight Prince Valiant cut that needed pruning. Macimer was not misled by the careless appearance. Gerella might look less like Prince Valiant than one of the Three Stooges, but there was nothing careless about his silent appraisal. According to Willa Cunningham, Gerella had a reputation as a tough, even ruthless investigative reporter. He had to be that to work for Oliver Packard. Over the years Macimer had done his own share of interrogating, and he recognized the attempted intimidation in Gerella’s stare.

A waitress wearing a tiny fluted black skirt and black mesh stockings over heavy thighs came to the booth. Gerella ordered coffee for Macimer and another beer for himself. Neither man spoke until the waitress had left them alone. Then Gerella said, “From what I hear, Mr. Macimer, you’re one of the Bureau’s straight ones.”

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”

“No offense—all I meant was, you haven’t got into anything sticky. Nobody’s suing you for violating their civil rights, and you’re not one of the appointed apologists.”

“The FBI doesn’t need any apologists,” Macimer said sharply.

Gerella smiled. It was a wolfish display of teeth that reminded Macimer of the actor Jack Nicholson; the smile did not touch his eyes. “You really believe that? Come on, Macimer—what about all those agents who were disciplined for black-bag jobs? What about Felt and Miller and the Weather Underground break-ins? What about the whole COINTELPRO? Are you defending all that?”

Macimer sighed. COINTELPRO—the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program launched in the mid-1950s and officially halted on J. Edgar Hoover’s orders in March 1971—was not one of his favorite subjects. COINTELPRO was a “covert action program,” borrowing techniques more commonly used by foreign intelligence agencies. Few law enforcement people could be found who would disagree with the program’s goals. It had approved actions designed to discredit, expose or embarrass advocates of dangerous causes who could sometimes not be reached by the law. Sanctioned actions had involved harassment of extremist groups of the Right as well as the Left, from the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party to the Black Panthers and the Weathermen. Methods had included leaking details of Klan identities and activities to the media, provoking disputes among rival factions of target groups, even, according to some stories, false accusations. Maybe the CIA had to engage in dirty tricks—Macimer’s mind was open on that question—but the FBI and its reputation had suffered when it used such tactics.

“You’re lumping a lot of things together,” he said. “I’m not here to defend any of them to you, but I will tell you what I think—off the record.” He waited for Gerella’s reluctant nod. “I think, on balance, COINTELPRO was a mistake on the Bureau’s part, even though a lot of what the program accomplished was positive. The thing you people seem to forget is that it’s possible to do some wrong while trying to do good. And sometimes what you see as good and necessary for the country comes at the expense of someone else’s good. That kind of balance isn’t as simplistic as some people like to make it. As for those black-bag jobs and break-ins, I think the people involved were acting in what they believed to be the best interests of the United States—and without the clear guidelines we have now. We were fighting fire with fire, even if that sometimes meant technical violations.”

“You call civil rights a technicality?”

Macimer shook his head. “You’re using catchwords, Gerella. The FBI isn’t in the business of violating civil rights. It’s in the business of catching criminals and protecting innocent people-including their civil rights.”

“Like you protected Martin Luther King?” Gerella said quickly.

“If you’re going to bring up that Mark Lane hysteria, you know better—if you’re any kind of reporter.”

The two men fell silent as the waitress checked their booth and was waved away. Macimer became more aware of the murmurs of sound around them, the heavy beat of music from a jukebox, the competing voice of an overhead TV set at the far end of the bar. He was glad of the confusion of sounds. Gerella had succeeded in provoking him into talking too much, and he suspected that to the reporter his words only sounded self-serving.

“You always wanted to be a hero?” Gerella asked, surprising him. “Join the FBI and save the world?”

“Something like that.”

There was amusement in Macimer’s answer, but Gerella wasn’t really far off the mark. As a boy growing up in southeast Detroit, his had been a neighborhood of heroes. Some of them in uniform, limping along the sidewalk, their war over for them, the scars permanent. Others in the darkness of the old Jefferson Theater on Saturday afternoon. He could still remember watching the G-men catch up with Dillinger on screen as the famous robber emerged from another theater in another town on another hot Saturday afternoon—the Biograph on the north side of Chicago in 1934. Long before television’s smaller-scaled heroics there had been Jimmy Cagney and Lloyd Nolan and Jimmy Stewart and others equally dedicated and determined, FBI men all. There had been few doubts then, no second-guessing about the rights of criminals. Maybe something had been gained, Macimer thought; something also had been lost.

“There are no heroes,” Gerella said.

“Maybe you’re not really looking for them,” Macimer responded quietly. “You can usually find what you’re looking for.”

Gerella wagged his head, his expression suggesting awed incredulity. He lit a cigarette and waved the pack at Macimer, who shook his head. “Save me from true believers. Don’t you know people are scared of cops, Macimer? Haven’t you seen it in their eyes? And when you’re not kept on a goddamned tight rein, when the law runs wild, you scare the hell out of me.”

Macimer wanted to say that innocent people had nothing to fear from the FBI, but he suddenly thought of the two hostages who had died with the People’s Revolutionary Committee in the terrorists’ hideout. He stared at Gerella, weighing the coincidence of his search for the Brea file and the reporter’s phone call. “What do you want, Gerella? You didn’t call me up and act mysterious just so we could get together and debate the history and policies of the FBI.”

Gerella leaned forward abruptly. “Okay, how’s this? I hear you ran into something interesting out on Highway 17 a couple weeks ago.”

Macimer took his time responding. Gerella had tried to stampede him with the sudden question, which might mean that he didn’t really know anything. “Where did you hear that?”

Gerella shrugged. “I’m supposed to hear things. That’s
my
business. I hear there were FBI men crawling all over the hillside. You were there. Want to tell me what it was about?”

How did Gerella know he had been there? The reporter had to have an inside source at the Bureau. What source? And how much did he know?

“The public doesn’t need to know what I’m working on.”

“Maybe the public has a right to know about this case.”

Macimer’s expression betrayed nothing, but he felt his internal defenses clanging into place like bars. Could Gerella know about the missing Brea file? Or was he simply casting blindly? The intensive FBI search for the youth who had stolen and abandoned an FBI vehicle would not have gone unnoticed in the Virginia countryside. There were also a number of people who might have talked about the incident—the state trooper, the truck driver, the salesman from Georgia, others who happened along that road that night. Their knowledge, however, was limited. Only the trooper knew about the documents found in the trunk of the car, and he knew no more than that.

“I have nothing for you, Gerella. And I don’t know why you wanted to talk to me.”

“I think you do.”

“What gives you that idea?”

“You’re here, Mr. Macimer.”

The FBI man smiled. “It’s not that easy, Gerella.”

The reporter was undismayed. “Can’t blame me for trying. Okay, Mr. Macimer—what do they call you around the Bureau, Mac? Yeah, it would be Mac, wouldn’t it? I’ll level with you if you’ll level with me. The way I hear it, there were some documents stolen. I hear you’re sitting on something hot—maybe too hot for you to handle.” He offered a friendly open grin for the first time. “If you’re as straight as they say, Mac, I’m offering you a way to get the facts out in the open. And no one has to know it was you I talked to.”

Resenting the deceptive grin, Macimer was also jolted by the cynical proposal. He stared at the reporter in silence, thinking of the damage to the Bureau that might come if his own suspicions about the Brea file were true.

Misreading his silence, Gerella said, “Whatever it is, I can get it, Macimer.” At least he had dropped the friendly “Mac,” quick to perceive that it had been a mistake. “Under the law you’re going to have to release it, sooner or later.”

Macimer did not point out that no law sanctioned blind fishing expeditions through the Bureau’s files. “I don’t know who gave you a bad tip, Gerella, but I don’t have anything for you. It’s true that an FBI vehicle was stolen while transporting classified documents. You probably already know the car was recovered when it was abandoned on Highway 17 after an accident. The boxes of documents were in the trunk of the car and they were recovered. There’s nothing in the story Oliver Packard would give a paragraph to.” Careful truth, Macimer thought, quickly became a lie.

Gerella stubbed out a cigarette and immediately lit another, using a Cricket lighter. His fingers were stained the color of old mustard. His hands surprised Macimer. They were stubby and callused, nicked and scarred, the hands of a laborer rather than someone who made a living pounding a typewriter. “Nothing in it, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“You wouldn’t know about any quick trip to the shredder with one of those files.”

Macimer felt his neck reddening. He hoped Gerella would attribute the reaction to anger rather than guilt. He hadn’t used a shredder, but somewhere along the line there
had
been a cover-up. He pressed anger into his voice, giving his reaction a label. “I don’t know anything about any shredding, Gerella, and you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. If you’re interested in anything in the FBI files you can request it under the Freedom of Information Act like anyone else. But you’re not using me to find out whatever it is you want to know. You sound like you’re stringing for the
National Enquirer
, not Oliver Packard. And you’ve come to the wrong source. Do your own dirty work.”

“Methinks you protest too much.”

“I don’t give a damn what you think.” Macimer dug into his pocket for a couple of quarters and dropped them onto the table as he rose. “Thanks for the coffee.”

He was turning away when Gerella said, “The car theft isn’t the story, Macimer.”

“Then why play games?” the FBI man snapped. “Say what’s on your mind.”

“I’m interested in the PRC affair.”

Macimer felt a chill slice along his spine like the cut of a surgeon’s knife. It was a moment before he answered, his voice controlled and even. “You’re a little late, Gerella. Senator Sederholm’s committee requested everything we had on the People’s Revolutionary Committee. You can read all about it in the
Congressional Record
.”

He walked out, not looking back, angry and shaken.

How much did Gerella know about the Brea file? And how did he know?

* * * *

From the alley Gerella watched the FBI agent walk quickly through the empty arcade. Macimer had the build and moves of an ex-jock, Gerella thought. Like Staubach five years or so after retirement. At the far end of the arcade Macimer hesitated for a moment before he disappeared around the corner onto M Street.

Gerella wondered why Macimer had made a quick reconnoiter of the street before leaving the arcade. Did he think he was being watched?

Macimer knew something. Gerella could feel it. And the FBI man had lied about recovering all the documents from the stolen Bureau car. Gerella knew he had lied because folded in the inside pocket of his suit coat was a copy of one of those documents. It had come to the reporter anonymously in an envelope with a Washington postmark. With a promise of more where that came from.