We lost some of ours. Random reprisals were inevitable and cost us dearly. El Jefe muzzled published and broadcast accounts of our actions. Word spread through printed leaflets and secret-band radio.
Many of the slaves Wayne freed have joined us. Some of them wear his picture around their necks. There have been skirmishes on the north D.R. coastline. A 6/14 demolition team blew up Tiger Kove. Many voodoo sects hold the building sites to be sacred ground. Many people refuse to walk across them. We shotgunned two Tonton Macoute leaders and three vicious bokurs on a golf course near Ville-Bonheur. Celia is lost somewhere in the D.R. or Haiti. She has been unreachable for months. I cannot find her and cannot conscionably continue my search with our work still to do. If you have seen some of this or all of this and my pictures have guided you, you should now try to sleep.
The Statler supplied guest robes. One size fits all. His fit too small, Joan’s engulfed her.
She was up first. Room service had come and gone. Dwight poured coffee. Joan examined paper stock. The room-service cart was a workbench. The couch was a study perch.
“How do we age the documents?”
“Two runs in a convection oven. You chemically treat the paper and cook it. You add the ink or type the text on later.”
“How do we differentiate the printing and cursive styles?”
“We cut stencils and print or write longhand within the boundaries.”
Joan lit a cigarette. Her eyes were red-late nights and heavy smoking.
“The diary is the big thing. It’s our basic text, so it has to be found.”
Dwight sat on the couch. “We have to be sure that he doesn’t already have a diary. We’ve got to locate it, so that we can snatch it and replace it, right before the convergence.”
“Typed, right? We don’t want to hand-forge a document of that length.”
Dwight sipped coffee. “Right. If he has a typewriter, we’ll purchase an identical one and go from there. I’ll get a typeface sample on my first B amp;E.”
Joan took his hands. “Scotty Bennett? He’s tight with Marsh now.”
Dwight shrugged. “Scotty’s a wild card. He’s a decorated cop on the one hand, a brutal fuck on the other. The important thing is that he densifies the overall text. He’s killed eighteen armed robbers and at least a dozen Panthers, and it will either come out or be stonewalled to the extent that it looks very goddamn bad for LAPD.”
Joan smiled. “How were your dreams?”
Dwight smiled. “Vivid, while you were talking. A little raw after that.”
Joan pointed to a matchbook pile. Fruit joints all. The Tradesman, the Jaguar, the Falcon’s Lair. Marsh cruises Hollywood. Marsh keeps amyl-nitrate poppers in a hidey-hole.
“He might have a lover who would contradict our profile.”
Dwight shook his head. “He’s a loner, he’s discreet, he’s especially circumspect now that he’s celebrated. He’s on the cover of Ebony magazine this month.”
Joan stubbed out her cigarette. “Who shoots?”
“A Klansman I’ve dealt with before.”
“Competent?”
“Yes.”
“The hard part will be putting them together.”
Dwight sipped coffee. It killed a headache tapping in.
“Marsh has to be secluded. It won’t work unless he fires from a distance. The shooter can fire, kill Marsh and plant the throwdown. It’s all about manipulating a proper convergence and rigging a workable line of sight.”
Joan nodded. “It’s all pretext. It’s giving Marsh a reason to be there.”
Dwight said, “Yes, and L.A. would be the best location. One, Marsh is here. Two, LAPD would be working the case full-tilt, as it tries to bury anything that might embarrass them. Jack Leahy would roll out for the Bureau, and Jack’s a mordant piece of work with a weird take on Mr. Hoover.”
Joan rubbed his temples. She kneaded a bulging vein flat.
“It’s going to take months.”
“It’s all about creating the levels of subtext. We have to layer in misinformation at the start.”
“Incoherence will inspire a more rigorous scrutiny.”
“And a greater degree of paranoia and a more desperate mass desire to make it all fit.”
Joan said, “That precipitating event. Have you thought about it?”
Dwight cracked his knuckles. “I’ve gone ahead. The Bureau has a Records Center in Media, Pennsylvania. There’s 10,000 surveillance files stored there. It’s an easy black-bagger.”
Joan smiled. “A publicized B amp;E?”
“Yes, a pre-announcement. Hopefully, it creates a public expression of outrage and becomes a primer on file work that will serve to make our event that much more accessible.”
“The more people go to the files, the more they’ll see and won’t see. They won’t really know what they’re looking for, so they’ll study harder and the process will fracture and attenuate.”
Dwight stretched. His neck hurt. He’d slept curled into Joan.
“Karen.”
Dwight said, “Yes. She’s taking the team in.”
Joan pulled her hair back. “Well, she’s very good.”
“Yes.”
“You cannot tell her what we’re doing.”
“I know that.”
“There’s two sets of ethics at work here.”
“I know.”
Joan lit a cigarette. Dwight studied her face. More stress lines. More gray hair than dark now.
“Who redacted your file?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“Tell me how things have gone wrong for you. Tell me how you got through it and how you got it up for all this.”
“I’m not telling you.”
Dwight cracked his thumbs. “You knew Tommy Narduno. He was killed at the Grapevine Tavern.”
Joan stared at him. “Yes, he was. I’m sure that you and your colleagues killed him, just as he was sure that you ran the King operation.”
Dwight stared back. “Tell me how he knew.”
“He saw you in Memphis two days before. He knew what you were to Mr. Hoover. He saw you distributing envelopes to some Memphis cops.”
Dwight blinked. Smitty’s Bar-B-Q. A cop spits tobacco juice, a cop fans C-notes, a cop wolfs burnt ends.
“What else?”
“Karen said you were in bad shape that whole spring.”
“The ‘Freedom School.’ You and Karen go back.”
Joan leaned into him. He was sweating. His robe was full wet.
“Karen and I go back further than you know.”
“And you manipulated her in order to meet me.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I just knew.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Because I sensed a shared agenda. Because I thought you might help me kill Mr. Hoover.”
Dwight stared at her. She touched his leg. Wayne smiled from somewhere. Look, Ma. No fear.
Joan said, “We came up with the same idea independently. I’ve wanted to kill him since I was a child, and I won’t tell you why.”
DOCUMENT INSERT: 12/16/70. Extract from the privately held journal of Karen Sifakis.
Los Angeles,
December 16, 1970
Of course, I’m going to do it. I’ll entrust the job to my closest and most prudent comrades; no one will be hurt in the performance of the act. Dwight has gotten me a schematic drawing of the Records Center and has convinced me that the building will be unguarded. The alarm system is outmoded and the building itself is fairly secluded. Bill K., Saul M. and Anna B.-W. have agreed to take part. Dwight calls it a “feat of explication, in and of itself.” Of course he’s being disingenuous; of course, he knows that an opportunity to fully expose the FBI’s illegal surveillance practices is too great for me to resist. He’s set the date of March 8. The Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier boxing match takes place that night. Dwight thinks the local cops will be popping into taverns to listen to it on the radio and watch it on bootleg TV, so their powers of concentration and will to proactively seek out unusual occurrences will be diverted.