The Language of Cannibals Read online

  Exactly the length of time he would have been in Cairn from the starting date of his assignment. “How did he come to be living here?”

  “We invited him.”

  “Did you know he was an FBI agent?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I drained off the coffee, which had a pleasant cinnamon aftertaste, then set the mug down on the floor. “Did you know he’d been sent here to Cairn specifically to spy on you people? Did you know he was supposed to tap your phones and monitor your mail?”

  “Uh-huh,” she replied in the same matter-of-fact tone as she picked up the thermos, then leaned over to refill my mug, which she handed to me. “He told us.”

  I almost spilled my coffee. “He told you?”

  Mary held out the plate of bran muffins, and I absently shook my head. “What can I tell you, Mongo?” she said, a slight note of playfulness breaking through the sadness in her voice. “He decided he wanted to come over to work for the good guys for a change.” She set the plate back down on the chair seat, then pointed to the half-painted wall to our right. “As a matter of fact, I’m now painting the section of wall he started. He liked to paint and fix things.”

  “You’re saying Michael drove up here, knocked on your door, announced to whoever answered that he was Michael Burana, FBI agent, and that he was in town to spy on you?”

  She leaned back on the couch, crossed her legs, and folded her large hands over her knees. “As a matter of fact,” she said easily, “that’s almost exactly what happened.” She cocked her head, studying me, and obviously saw the consternation in my face. “Yeah, I know,” she continued. “We were a little taken aback, too. Some of our people were more than a little taken aback; they were convinced it was a trick. But then, we figured that if it was a trick, it was a pretty good one. And who cared if he spied on us? It certainly wouldn’t be anything new. We figured that the worst thing that could happen to us was that we’d get some work out of him while he was doing his spying. This place is really the ultimate white elephant, you know, a real bitch to maintain. But it wasn’t a trick. Michael was sincere. He was going to wait until he got his next paycheck from the FBI, then submit his resignation and apply for his pension.”

  “Still, it wasn’t as if he were coming into a houseful of strangers. You knew Michael.”

  Mary Tree shook her head. “Not before he showed up here.”

  “You told the police you were old friends.”

  This time her sad smile was tinged with a trace of bitterness, and she looked toward the ceiling in mock exasperation. “I was being facetious. I’m afraid the police aren’t into my brand of humor.”

  “I’m sorry to report that I’m as dense as the police, Mary,” I said carefully. “I don’t get it either.”

  She looked at me, raised her palms, and shrugged broadly, as if the answer was obvious. “The FBI and a barefoot, pacifist folksinger of antiwar songs, a civil rights activist and war resister, Mongo? Old friends? Get it now? The FBI had been tapping my phones, monitoring my movements, opening my mail, planting phony stories in the press about me, and harassing my friends since I was seventeen years old and first walked onto a stage to sing one of Harry Peal’s protest songs. In case you haven’t noticed, this government takes a dim view of people who don’t share its paranoid views of the world in general and communists in particular. All governments dislike citizens who protest, and different governments react in different ways. Over the years, this government has occasionally used the Gestapo and the KGB as role models for dealing with dissidents.”

  “Was Michael one of the agents who spied on you in the early days?”

  “Yes—although I didn’t know it at the time. He worked undercover then, and he told me that he traveled around the country, going to all my concerts and the protest rallies I was involved in.” She paused, laughed lightly. “He told me he knew all my songs by heart.”

  “It sounds like the two of you got to know and like each other pretty well in the few days he was here.”

  “Yes. People can become good friends, or mortal enemies, in a lot less than six days.”

  “Indeed they can. Did you tell all this to the police?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “One thing didn’t seem to have anything to do with me other. I answered their questions after they found Franz’s canoe and traced it to here, but I didn’t volunteer information. I saw no reason to tell the police anything unusual that might make it into the newspapers in addition to the stories that were already bound to appear. Michael had already had more than his share of bad publicity over that CIA defector thing—although I could never understand what all the fuss was about. I wish the whole damn Central Intelligence Agency would defect; the CIA and KGB deserve each other. With children starving and the planet virtually disintegrating under our feet, people still worry about the grown-up children who run our governments, and their children’s games. I mean, who really gives a shit if a CIA agent defects to the Russians? The way this country has been run for the past forty years, the manner in which it’s set its priorities, is enough to make you think the communists are really in charge, and constantly doing everything in their power to help us make fools of ourselves in the eyes of the world. Anyway, it seems Michael had come to share many of my views.” She paused, perhaps again reacting to something she saw in my face. She bowed her head slightly, squinted at me over the tops of her bifocals. “You don’t believe what I say about Michael, Mongo?”

  I sipped at my coffee, which had gone cold. “Of course I believe you, Mary. I think Michael’s change of heart had been coming on for a long time. I just never thought he would …”

  “Turn traitor?” Mary asked wryly.

  “Quit the FBI. Did he tell you about his troubles with his boss?”

  She shook her head. “Aside from what he told us in order to introduce himself, he didn’t talk about the FBI. He just said his spying days were over.”

  “The head of the Bureau’s counterintelligence unit is a man by the name of Edward J. Hendricks, who could be described as an unreconstructed cold warrior. He could care less about what’s happened in Russia and Eastern Europe because he’s a man who desperately needs his old, familiar enemies to give his life meaning. He’s a man with a visceral hatred of communists—and of anybody he thinks sides with the communists. That covers a pretty broad spectrum of people.”

  “I’m familiar with the type,” Mary said in the same wry tone.

  “Oh, I’m sure you are. Hendricks fancies himself a super-patriot—but super-patriots of his sort would also have been, and were, super-patriots in Nazi Germany. He finds it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the country’s critics and its enemies. Michael was probably pretty much like that in the early stages of his career; FBI recruits are chosen largely on the basis of ideology. As he told you, virtually all his assignments in the early part of his career involved surveillance of dissident groups, and there was a lot of illegal wiretapping and mail covers. Anyway, Michael mellowed, or got tired of it, whatever. He started arguing that the Bureau should stop wasting its time and manpower on peace groups, and should go after real spies as well as people in the violent right, like neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. This new attitude of Michael’s didn’t sit well with Hendricks, and their relationship deteriorated further, to say the least, when Michael became a kind of ombudsman and whistle-blower inside the Bureau regarding matters of racial discrimination in the hiring and promotion of agents. Then Michael’s surveillance team blew the CIA defector thing, and Hendricks got his first real shot at Michael. First, Michael was demoted, and then Hendricks ordered him out here to do a spy number on you people. Hendricks knew Michael would hate the assignment; it was his way of getting revenge for all the grief Michael had been giving him.”

  “You’re saying this Hendricks doesn’t really believe that the Community of Conciliation is—oh, how I love this word—‘subversive’?”

  “Oh, he thinks you�
��re subversive, all right, and he really does seem to believe that people like you pose a greater real danger to this country than the Klan or the neo-Nazis. He’d like to see just about every peace and civil rights activist in this country thrown out, or placed in some kind of internment camp, until, as he puts it, ‘this thing with Russia is really over, and they’re buried.’”

  “Is he serious?”

  “I’ve never met the man. Michael described the conversation to me, and Michael swears he was dead serious. But the point is that Hendricks has plenty of zealots under him who would have whistled ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ all the time they were spying on you. Hendricks sent Michael here to humiliate him.”

  “Fools,” Mary said tersely. “Damn fools.”

  “Did Michael tell you he hated being near water?”

  She thought about it as she reached out for another bran muffin; she hesitated, then brought her hand back to her lap. “Yes,” she said at last. “But he didn’t put it that strongly. He said he didn’t much care for water. I told him it was no problem, that he didn’t have to stay in Cairn. We have chapters, stations, all over the world. I told him that if he really wanted to work for our cause we could send him to live on the top of a mountain, in the middle of a jungle—wherever he liked.”

  “Didn’t it strike you as odd that a man who didn’t like water would go out canoeing on the Hudson River at one of its widest points?”

  “Not at the time, no,” she replied distantly, her brows knitting into a frown. “People have changes of mood, sometimes do things they wouldn’t normally do.… Mongo, do you think somebody killed Michael?”

  “I haven’t said that. I’m just trying to get a picture of what happened. I talked to the chief of police, and now I’m talking to you. Did Michael tell anyone he was going canoeing?”

  “No,” she answered in the same distant tone. “Not that I’m aware of. He didn’t tell me.”

  “What about the man who owned the canoe? I think you said his name was Franz?”

  “Franz Bauer.”

  “Did he ask Bauer’s permission to use his canoe?”

  Mary Tree slowly shook her head. “No.”

  “Building a canoe by hand must take a long time and cost some money. Each of those canoes I see down by the river would mean a lot to the man who made them.”

  “Yes. Franz made all of them.”

  “Do the people here normally take out any of the boats whenever they feel like it?”

  Again, she shook her head. “The dinghies, yes, and the sailboat belongs to all of us. But not the canoes or the kayak; they’re special.”

  “Did anybody see Michael go out in the canoe?”

  “No. It had to have been in the evening, after dark, because all of the canoes were there when I went in to supper.”

  “Did Michael come to supper?”

  “No.” Now her brows were knitted even tighter, and tight lines of tension had appeared around her mouth as she thought back and remembered. “We all just assumed …”

  “You assumed what, Mary?”

  “There was a full moon Sunday night, and the river was very still. It can be very lovely and soothing out on the river at night when it’s like that. Michael had seemed very distracted and tense after coming back from talking with Harry.”

  “Harry?”

  “Harry Peal.”

  “Harry Peal lives around here?”

  “About ten miles north of here. He has a house on a cliff overlooking the river.”

  “Did Michael tell you what he and Harry Peal talked about, or why he went to see him in the first place?”

  The corners of her mouth drew back in a thin smile. “I know why Michael went up there. Harry was another of the FBI’s ‘old friends,’ Mongo. Michael had spied on Harry, too.” She paused, and her smile, while still tinged with sadness, grew broader. “At least, with Harry, Michael had himself a real, honest-to-goodness communist to deal with. Ex-communist, anyway. Michael said he wanted to pay his respects to the man who’d spent two terms in prison, first for refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and then for telling Joseph McCarthy—on live television—to go fuck himself. Harry was leaving that evening for Hungary to accept some award as part of President Shannon’s cultural exchange program with the Russians and me Eastern Bloc countries. But he agreed to see Michael in the afternoon; if you knew Harry, you’d know what a hoot it was for him to have an FBI agent coming to visit him by the front door, as it were. Michael thought it was a real hoot, too. He was really high when he left here—but not so high when he got back. He was moody, distracted. He was in and out the rest of the day, and I know he went into town at least twice. I asked him if anything was wrong, and he said something …”

  “What did he say, Mary?”

  “Just one word: ‘Unbelievable.’ That’s what he said. ‘Unbelievable’; you know, like you say when you’re just overwhelmed by something that’s been said or done.”

  “He went into town twice?”

  “Yes. I know, because he asked permission each time to use the pickup truck. He said he was in a hurry and didn’t have the time to walk.”

  “He was in a hurry each time?”

  “He said he was, yes.”

  “Do you know what he did in town or who he talked to either of those times?”

  “No. Anyway, after we found out that he’d drowned, everyone here just assumed that he’d gone out canoeing to try to get rid of some tension.”

  “Uh-huh. Mary, is Harry Peal still out of the country?”

  “As a matter of fact, I think he’s scheduled to return sometime today.”

  “Can you get me an appointment to talk with him?”

  She shrugged. “Sure. Harry’s easy enough to see when he’s around. I’ll give him a chance to unpack and rest a little, and I’ll call him later. I’m sure he’ll be happy to talk with you.”

  I took a business card out of my wallet, wrote my unlisted apartment phone number and the number of the RestEasy Motel on the back, handed it to her. “After you speak to him, please give me a call. You should be able to reach me at one of these three numbers; if not, there’s an answering service on the office phone.”

  Mary Tree’s hand trembled slightly as she reached out and took the card. She suddenly looked very pale. “You do think somebody killed Michael, don’t you?”

  “Tell me about last night, Mary. What was that all about?”

  Her knuckles were white where they were clasped around her right knee, and her jaw was clenched tightly. She seemed now to be looking past, or through, me, at some private haunt.

  “Mary …?”

  “If Michael was killed,” she said in a low, tense voice, “they did it.”

  “Who, Mary? The death squad?”

  Mary Tree looked away, then abruptly stood and walked across the empty ballroom to the bank of windows at the east end, where she stood stiffly, her arms wrapped around her.

  There was still some coffee left in the thermos jug. I poured it into her mug, took it over to her. She glanced down at me, then took the mug in a hand that was still trembling, nodded her thanks.

  “Are you afraid, Mary?” I asked quietly.

  “No,” she replied simply.

  “Then what’s wrong?”

  “I … I don’t want to be like them.”

  “Like who, Mary?”

  She set the mug down on a small window ledge, then turned to face me. “I don’t want to be like all the terrible people who’ve made such a mess of this country, Mongo. I’ve been accused of so many terrible things. The HUAC, the McCarthy hearings … Harry was a communist, and he made no bones about it, but he wouldn’t name others he knew were communists. But so many people who weren’t communists or subversive in any way had their lives destroyed just because of accusations. I don’t want to be one of those people who just make accusations. Also, quite frankly, I don’t want you to think I’m a fool or paranoid or both.”

&n
bsp; “Are you saying you don’t really believe there’s a death squad in Cairn?”

  “I’m saying I don’t have any proof.”

  “And yet, by holding up that sign, you were, in effect, accusing the Vietnam veterans.”

  “I know,” she said in a voice so low I could hardly hear her. “I probably shouldn’t have done that. I was just frustrated. Like I said, I don’t want you to think I’m paranoid.”

  “Even paranoids have real enemies, Mary,” I said with what I hoped was a disarming smile. I wanted to hear what she had to say. “What were you frustrated about?”

  “You have to understand what’s been happening in Cairn lately.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It used to be a pretty mellow place,” she said, and shrugged. “It’s always been an ‘artsy’ community, if you will—a refuge for artists, actors, and writers, and people who like to be around people like that. Cairn was inexpensive, easygoing. Then word got around in New York City that Cairn was a ‘hot suburb.’ All of a sudden we had an influx of yuppies, nouveaux riches, and all sorts of people who could never understand what Cairn is really all about. In my opinion, at least, these people began to destroy the very atmosphere that makes this town special.”

  “People like Elysius Culhane?”

  “Yes,” she said tersely, anger humming in her voice. She picked up her mug, stared down into its depths as she stirred the cold coffee with her finger, took a deep breath, and slowly exhaled. “For almost twenty years the Community of Conciliation has tried to reach out to veterans of all wars, and to fighting men everywhere. Some of these soldiers and veterans may hate us, but we don’t hate them. They’re not the enemy, just more victims, more casualties, of the disease called war. In fact, we’ve been trying to convince the Russians that they should allow us to set up similar programs there for their Afghan veterans, who are beginning to show the same kinds of severe, post-stress emotional disorders as our Vietnam vets. They don’t think much of our setting up shop there.”

  “I hope that doesn’t surprise you.”

  “Of course not. I never said our government had a monopoly on stupidity.”