The Hanged Man’s Song (4 page)

“Yeah, that’s great. How much you want?”

“For you? How about a five-hundred-dollar gift certificate on Amazon?”

“I can get it to you this morning,” I said.

“Got a pencil?”

He gave me a phone number, a name, and a password, and I was good. We went down the road to another phone and I charged a $500 gift certificate to a Visa card belonging to my old invisible friend, Harry Olson of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the guy with the cleanest credit record in the United States of America. He kept it clean by not existing and by paying all bills immediately.

LuELLEN
spent most of the day screwing around. She was a jock, was quietly turning into a golf nut, and had always been a power shopper. I expected her back in the late afternoon with a sunburn and an armful of bags from the local shopping center.

As she was acquiring a burn and assuring the financial stability of Abercrombie & Fitch and the Gap, I was digging through Bobby’s DVDs. Since I didn’t have an index, I wrote a little four-line Perl script that sorted through the files on each one and eliminated all the encrypted files.

When all the encrypted files were eliminated, there wasn’t much left. I then sampled the remnant and found garbage-or if not garbage, then a pile of stuff that was simply useless unless you specifically needed it: databases from government agencies and newspapers, mostly. If, say, you needed sixteen hundred memos from the U.S. Department of the Interior written between August 1999 and January 2002, then I had them. But if you didn’t know what memos you wanted, you were wading in garbage.

Six hours in, I’d concluded that the DVDs were probably safe enough. The unencrypted stuff was all public record, as far as I could tell. I would save them to examine more thoroughly, but they didn’t feel threatening.

I HAD
done maybe sixty of the DVDs when LuEllen got back, laden with shopping bags. She dumped the bags on a bed, turned on the TV, checked the remnants of the hurricane on the Weather Channel-it had stalled as a deep low-pressure system over Tifton, Georgia, which had gotten forty-eight inches of rain in twenty-four hours, drowning out the local McDonald’s among other worthy civic monuments-and then moved to CNN, where the burning-cross incident had dropped down the play list.

The only new wrinkle was a hard-faced, disdainful rejection of racial murder and cross-burning as not only criminal, but un-American, by the presidential press secretary. He worked up a good head of steam, using words like “miserable excuse for a human being” when talking about the killers. He seemed pretty cheerful a moment later, though, when talking about a breast cancer operation on the presidential dog.

As we watched the dog story, I told LuEllen about the DVDs, and she nodded. “Told you Bobby was careful.”

“But damnit, I’d like to find that laptop,” I said. “Can’t look at the FBI until seven o’clock tonight. From the TV, it doesn’t sound like they’re doing much.”

“TV doesn’t know shit,” she said. “TV knows press releases.”

She said she’d hit six buckets of balls while she was gone, and smelled bad. “I’m gonna take a shower. Back in fifteen minutes.”

“I can tell you’re getting bored,” I said. “But if we get an idea about where the laptop is, I might need you around.”

“I’ll stick around,” she said. “Just to see how it comes out.”

I WENT
back to the final DVDs and on the last one found a single file that was smaller than anything else on the disks, and unencrypted. I opened it and found a high-res photo of John Ashcroft, apparently taken when he was a U.S. senator-there’s another well-known senator standing not far away, and they’re both in evening clothes and the other guy is holding a drink and Ashcroft is holding what appears to be a bottle of mineral water. There was no notation with the photo, which looked like any standard publicity shot, until I noticed that Ashcroft was apparently standing next to one of those chintzy, overdecorated French Baroque mirrors, the kind that Georgetown hostesses hang in their hallways. That wouldn’t mean much either-except that Ashcroft didn’t seem to have a reflection.

I was puzzling over that when LuEllen came back. She smelled good. She must have touched on a perfume counter during her shopping expedition. Coco, maybe. She asked, “Anything new?”

“More stuff. Take a look at this Ashcroft photograph.”

She looked, her left breast brushing my ear. She was wearing a silk blouse, and it felt kind of good. After a moment, she stood up, frowning, and said, “He doesn’t have a reflection.”

“Might be the angle of the shot,” I said.

“I don’t know. His shoulder’s right against the mirror.”

“Well, maybe it’s not really a mirror. Or maybe it’s curved and we can’t see it.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Huh.”

I thought for a few head-scratching minutes that it might be a clue to something in Bobby’s files. Maybe even a clue to the encryption keys. If it was, it was too subtle for me, and I reluctantly decided that it was a joke. At least, I hoped so. No reflection?

As I finished with the DVDs, LuEllen went to the clothes she’d bought. The motel room door was covered with a large mirror, and she started trying on blouses and slacks. Neither one of us is particularly body-shy and we’d spent enough time rolling around in bed together, on other occasions, when we weren’t involved with third and fourth people, that a little skin shouldn’t have been a big deal; and I’d only drawn maybe three hundred nudes starring LuEllen.

But that was drawing…

She’s basically a small woman with small breasts and a small butt. She was also wearing a small brassiere, which she really didn’t need, other than as anti-leer protection in convenience stores; but the brassiere sat under her breasts like a couple of daisies, just barely covering her nipples, and her underpants were of the low-cut Jockey variety. And she smelled good.

She changed blouses and then changed slacks and then changed blouses and into some other slacks, and the perfume was going round and round and I kept looking at more meaningless photographs and I could hear the pants coming off and see the shirts being tossed and I finally turned around and she was looking at herself in the mirror, posing in a half-open blouse and the underpants, and I shouted, “Jesus Christ, woman,” and threw her on the bed.

We didn’t get much more done that afternoon. But if LuEllen had been concerned that her brains were becoming overly tight, she no longer had anything to worry about.

GETTING YOUR LIFE BACK
on track, after an enthusiastic change of direction, isn’t always the easiest thing. There’s guilt, when you reflect on other relationships, and you’re not sure you want to look your partner in the eye. Once you do, you’ll be able to see both that what happened was not a mistake, not an incident, not a fantasy or a dream, but actually, you know,
happened
… and that there are implications.

I woke up when I felt LuEllen moving around, turned my head, cracked my eyes. I felt her stretch; and the additional weight and warmth in the bed felt pretty good, even though we’d only been in it for two hours, and it wasn’t even dark yet. Finally, as I watched out of the corner of my eye, she sat up, stretched, and yawned. She hummed. She fluffed herself up. She purred for a while. She said, “You up?”

I feigned near-sleep. “I guess,” I groaned.

“We need to get some chocolate in here.” She bounced out of bed and ran around naked, all pink and jiggly. I had the urge to draw her, as I had so many times before, but I knew where that would lead.

“Let’s do it again,” she said.

“I’m an old man,” I groaned.

“Better to wear out than to rust.”

“Let me brush my teeth… but you go first.”

We did all of that, and what seemed to be a little while later, I looked at the clock: two hours had gone somewhere. “Ah… shit.”

“What?” She was looking at her toes, wiggling them, like little piggies.

“We gotta call Washington.” I stretched and yawned. “Like right now.”

“So come on in the shower.”

“If we get in the shower together, we might not get out of the room in time to make the call,” I said.

“Naw, come on…”

WE GOT
out of the room, eventually, down to the car, still a little damp from the shower, to another pay phone. LuEllen had one of those anonymous pre-paid phone cards, and I went out to Washington.

Somewhere, in what I hoped was the locked office of a high-ranking FBI bureaucrat, a computer got busy. I’ve been into the FBI any number of times, and usually you have to work the system. This time, the guy’s desktop came up, and his files were right out front. When I popped them, I found one labeled
Jackson
. The file had last been opened two hours earlier.

“Is that too easy?” LuEllen worried. She looked up and down the street: no black helicopters; not even a black-and-white.

“Naw. It’s what my guy said it’d be. Besides, I don’t care,” I said. “We’ll be out of here before they could snap a trap even if it is one.”

The
Jackson
file contained a series of memos saying that: (a) the feds hadn’t found anybody who’d seen the cross-burners; (b) Bobby had been killed at least twelve hours before the cross-burning, according to early forensic tests, but no more than fourteen hours before, because he’d been seen alive then; (c) he’d been suffering from a degenerative nerve disease since early childhood and he’d been in a wheelchair for fifteen years; (d) he made his living writing computer code; (e) he had a caretaker named Thomas Baird who had seen him alive and well at two o’clock on the afternoon he died; and (f) the cross-burning might have been an effort to shift blame for the murder.

This last memo said that the time difference between the killing and the burning seemed to suggest that they were not part of the same act, and the motive for the act may have been computer theft, since an expensive computer was known to be missing. Huh. They had at least one perceptive guy on the job.

There was also a reference to some unwashed intelligence about the local lads of the KKK, most of which was apparently canned Jackson Office file stuff.

“LET’S GO,”
LuEllen said.

“Not yet,” I said. We were outside a convenience store, and a large man in a Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, and flip-flops, carrying a brown shopping bag, was walking toward us. His face was obscured by a pale straw hat and big sunglasses.

“Look at this guy.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Just a minute.”

I stayed online for another five minutes-the guy in the Hawaiian shirt went on by and never looked back-saving everything to my laptop. LuEllen got increasingly nervous the longer we were hooked up. The last document was saved and I unplugged.

“All done.”

“We’re gone,” LuEllen said. She put the car in gear and turned slowly onto the street, her turn signals working. LuEllen would never be caught in a routine traffic stop. She continued up the street for a hundred yards, then pulled into a strip shopping center and parked in front of a store that sold Levolor blinds and Barrister bar stools.

“What are we doing?”

“Watching.” We sat there for ten minutes, watching the phone a block away, to see if any cops showed up. None did. She backed out and turned toward the street.

“Probably watching us by satellite,” I said.

“Funny man.” She leaned over and sniffed me. “You know, we ought to fool around more often. You
really
smell good.”

I won’t tell you where she’d splashed the Coco when we finally got out of the shower, but hey: when she was right, she was right. I
did
smell pretty good.

BACK
at the motel, we read the memos again, talked about them, then, as it began to get dark, changed into some running clothes and went for a jog. We did three miles in nineteen minutes, running around the edges of a golf course. When we finished, I felt better than any time since we first walked into the
Wisteria
and started dropping coins in the slot machines.

We ate a quick dinner and then I went back to the DVDs; and a little more sex. And finally, after one of the longest days I’d had in a while, we crawled into bed.

“Would you like me better if I was more boobilicious?” LuEllen asked as I began to drift away.

I mumbled at her.

“What was that? What?”

I pushed myself up from the pillow. “I’m nowhere nearly stupid enough to answer that question,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

AS A
news service, CNN is pretty predictable: bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, weather, sports, bullshit, bullshit. The next morning, though, things were more serious. We turned on the tube a few minutes after 7:15, to a professionally cheerful guy just finishing up the sports.

The next thing up was a silent film showing a man in blackface, wearing a stovepipe hat, with an open black umbrella overhead, doing a vaudeville-style softshoe with two other guys, who were similarly dressed.

There was no commentary for a full five seconds, then one of the talking heads, speaking with his Voice of Doom, said, “You are looking at a videotape of a racially charged fraternity show in which one of the participants was National Security Advisor Lyman Bole, the man with the black umbrella. The videotape was sent to a number of news outlets this morning by a man identifying himself only as ‘Bobby,’ who said that many more such revelations would be coming in the next few weeks. CNN has learned exclusively that while Mr. Bole has yet to comment, the film is genuine, and that the fraternity party took place approximately nineteen years ago at Ohio State University, Bole’s alma mater.”

“Oh my God,” LuEllen said, goggling at the TV.

I was already rolling across the bed. I picked up my cell phone and dialed John. He came on, sounding sleepy, and I asked, “Have you seen it?”

“What?”

I told him, not using the name Bobby, and he said, softly, “Oh, no. The guy’s working the machine, whoever he is.”

“Yeah. And I’ll tell you what-I’m coming up empty on the DVDs. There’s not a thing about who might have the laptop. I’ll tell you what else: the big guys don’t know, either.”

“You got in, uh…”

“Yeah. And they don’t know.”

After a long moment of silence, he said, “I’ve been thinking…”

“You’re gonna retire to Guam.”

“No, I’m serious. Our friend was crazy about his security. There are only three ways somebody could have gotten to him. One: the asshole knew who our friend was, and where he lived, because our friend knew him and trusted him. Two: the asshole tracked him somehow, by computer. Three: it was purely local and purely random, done for money or something we don’t know about-something that doesn’t have anything to do with anything.”

He was using the “our friend” circumlocution because we’d shared an earlier difficulty involving Bobby and had learned about the government’s ability to intercept and sort meaningful phone conversations from billions of words of garbage.

“That last one’s out,” I said.

“It is now. That leaves the other two. But who knew our friend better than we did? That leaves the computer. If they tracked him by computer…”

“I know one guy who knew him better than we did,” I said. “I was looking at some information from the big guys. There’s a memo that says he had a caretaker. The caretaker lives in Jackson. I’ve got his name.”

More silence, and I heard a woman’s voice-Marvel, John’s wife-in the background saying, “It’s on right now,” and then John said, “I’m looking at the tape. We’ve got to talk to the guy in Jackson. Personally.”

“Hate to go back there,” I said.

“No choice-unless you can figure out how the asshole tracked him over the computer.”

“I
can’t
figure it out,” I said. “I tried a couple of times, really carefully, and I’m pretty good at it. Our friend called me up and told me to knock it off. I tripped some alarms I never saw. I think he was amused-he seemed amused. I bet everybody on the ring, except you, went looking for him at one time or another.”

“So either the guy who found him is a lot better than you ring guys are, or it’s somebody who knew him.”

“That would be it-and I don’t think it’s somebody who’s better than us. That’s not vanity, it’s just that there are a limited number of ways that you can track somebody online, and there’s no way to know whether you’re stepping into a trap unless you step in it. In other words, if somebody was tracking him, even if it’s like… the really big guys… they’d still set off his alarms.”

“Maybe some technological thing not having to do with computers?”

“And somehow it falls into the hands of a fruitcake who uses it to cut up government bigshots? John…”

“I know, I know. Can you get up here?”

“If we had to,” I said.

“Come on up, bag out here. You and I can go down to Jackson and talk to this friend.”

“Ah, man.”

“No choice.” Then he laughed. “I’m looking at this blackface thing. They are gonna stick this movie so far up the guy’s ass he’s gonna have videotape coming out of his nose.”

“Hang on.” I turned to LuEllen, who was sitting on the end of the bed, watching the TV, and told her what John had suggested.

She shrugged. “Always happy to see those guys.”

I put the phone back to my ear. “We’ll be up,” I said. “Call you on the way.”

WE
packed up in a half hour and I carried the luggage down to the car. A quick check of the e-mail turned up nothing. As LuEllen was shoving the last of her stuff into a bag, she said, “Before you zip up your briefcase, why don’t you try the cards?”

“Cards won’t help us,” I said.

“Just try them,” she said. “For me. So I won’t worry.”

“Or you’ll worry more,” I said.

“Just try them.”

There’s a word for what LuEllen can be, in Yiddish or Hebrew-Russian-English or whatever: the word’s
nudnik
. The best definition I’ve ever heard came from an Israeli professor of archaeology: “It’s a person who is like a woodpecker sitting on your head, all the time pecking you.”

SO I
got the cards out, my tarot cards, a Rider-Waite deck. I’m not exactly a scientist-I was trained as an engineer-but I’ve studied the philosophy of science, and I’m a true believer. The tarot, as a predictive system, is the same sort of superstitious nonsense as astrology. The deck
is
useful as a gaming device, though, and that’s how I use it.

Like this: when we are forced to deal with complicated problems, when some of the facets of the problem are unknown or unreachable, we deal with them in terms of past experience. That’s almost inescapable. But approaches that are useful with some problems don’t work with others. The tarot deck, when used as a gaming system, pushes you outside past experience and encourages you to think of new ways to deal with it.

Say, for example, you were involved in a complicated business transaction and that the group you were dealing with, the opposition, consisted of six members, five men and a woman. You begin doing tarot spreads and see a number of indications of female influence.

This does
not
mean that the deck correctly predicts female influence in the transaction, but suggests that you should sit back and think about the woman on the other side, who might otherwise seem to be just another functionary. Why is she there? What specific influences does she have? Is there some way to approach her that would help with your deal?

This has nothing to do with the supernatural-it’s simply a human way, and a fairly subtle way, to game a problem.

LuEllen doesn’t believe that. She believes that I’m tapped into the Other Side. At one time she’d hassle me for a daily reading, until finally she asked me to do a spread on how long she’d live. I did a spread, and came up with ninety-four years.

“That’s not bad,” she’d said.

“Yeah, but this card”-I’d tapped the Tower, I believe-“suggests that the last fifty years will be in the high security unit at the Valley State Prison in California.”

“Kidd,” she’d sputtered, “you, you gotta, what are you talking…”

“Made you look,” I said. She didn’t bother me so much after that.

I CARRY
a deck with me, in an old wooden box, wrapped in a piece of silk, just like the gypsies tell you to do. Because LuEllen showed signs of slipping into a nudnik state, I did two quick tarot spreads on the motel room telephone table.

Like most tarot spreads, the results were complicated. What should have been a clear outcome in both spreads, the final resolution card, was, in both cases, self-contradictory.