MJCwriting.htm

 

THE ANNIVERSARY OF CRANE

 

 

 

 

 

PART ONE:

CHRONOLOGY

 

 

Part One

August 15, AM, Monday--2073:An Introduction.

 

I.

 

An uneventful weekend.  Went to the Bostics' house to watch football.  We watched a game between the New York Giants and the Denver Broncos.  It was played in January of 1987.  The New York Giants won; but the Broncos could have won it, if they would have been more aggressive in the first half, when they had the game going their way.

    We watch these games in their basement, in the study.  The windows are all blacked out.  The two brothers created a tape machine, to read the old tapes that were produced in the late half of the Twentieth Century.  This all came about through the discovery of a cache of memorabilia, a sort of library, in an underground shelter out toward Dexter Lake.  Someone had built the underground fortress some time during the Great Depression, before the Great War broke out, to preserve a private library and artifacts of all sorts.

    We had no memory of football of course.  The new regime, the one that came to power after the war, did not allow us to preserve the memory of the military games which flourished in this country prior to the War.  They felt the games needed to be morally elevating.  They offered us soccer; and allowed us to preserve our baseball tradition, since it was a nonviolent sport.

    We hear that football is still played some places: in the Rocky Mountains and in the South.  We get that news through the trade pipeline.  Of course there is no television connection to the world any longer.  We did not even know about television; we heard about it of course, through the legends of our grandparents, oral tales which will never totally fade away.  I had no real knowledge of it however.  Not until the Bostic brothers assembled an imager in their basement, allowing us to view old movies and sports events which we found in the cache about two years ago.

    This new knowledge has corrupted me, this much I know.  The Utopians feel that television was a great cause of evil in the old days and have banned such technology from our state.  The War, of course, broke down communications that were apparently taken for granted several centuries ago.  We do not know about Russia and China and South America any more.  We hear that generations of chaos have followed the war and that these nations have sunk into a state of feudalism and warfare.  We do not know what to believe.  The newspapers do not tell us about other countries.  The new regime believes in local news, local responsibility, regionalism.

 

We are no longer a police state, not in the real sense.  The war with the north is about five years resolved.  The invaders, who had driven as deep as Portland, were stopped in the Winter of  '67.  It took about a year to drive them back across their border.  They had plans to cede the entire West Coast, to incorporate the coastal states into their empire.  They ran into heavy resistance in the mountains.  Many people left the valley and established command centers in the Cascades.  They still exist in the mountains, new communities, independent, dedicated to a reunification of America. 

    The Utopians are losing their power.  In fact, chaos now rules our region.  On one hand, on the surface, there is a kind of order.  And there are laws designed to ensure the public good.  But there are two worlds: the Utopians are now living in the best housing, take vacations on the coast, have the pretty women as their wives.  They speak about the common good; but no one has forgotten that, after the War, it was they who petitioned the enemy for peace and accepted the terms of dismemberment of America as the price of establishing a peace.  They ruled after that with an iron hand, not so much with vengeance, but with a paternal sort of shielding.  Many people vanished, either moving into the mountains, or being sent away to prisons.

    Our history books begin at the year 2000.  It is a new beginning we are told.  The world before 2000 was evil; now we have entered the New Eden.  But it is all breaking apart.  Their control of the region was shattered during the war; and now they rule by day only; at night, the second layer of life appears; all those evils which they wished to eradicate, mass technology, rock music, night life, individual desires: they re-surface.  The government men withdraw behind their gates and guarded estates.  The police do not control the streets at night.  There is barely law at all, except, of course, for men like myself, those of us who are lawmen by choice and by calling but not officially entitled as such.

 

II.

 

By trade I am listed as an historian.  That is a great absurdity.  Official historians are given access to the sanctum sanctorum of state libraries.  They, of course, must write the history of a country and world reborn in the era 2000, ever corrupt before that apocryphal millenia, corrupt especially since the birth of Christ, for Christianity has been shown by the government to be the vehicle of decline of a world-thought, which ultimately led us in to our great debacle.  It is all very clear: an idea as sharp as glass.

    I was actually a policeman by trade.  I was a detective, and my cover was my title as historian.  This gained me access to secret government reports, which were a part of my job with the police.  I fell out of favor with the force however, about a year and a half ago, after the contents of the Dexter Cache were allowed to pass through official hands and disappear into the world.  Conspiracy was suspected.  I was suspended.  My title as historian was changed to historian-without-privilege.  I was charged with theft of government property; but, because the government feared the impact of admitting publicly that such a wealth of contraband had even existed (they do not like to admit that the past existed), let alone been siphoned into the hands of private individuals, all charges merely vanished.  There was no trial.  My suspension was merely extended, to the point that it has become a permanent state now, without review; it seems that my file has been frozen in some attempt to merely forget the embarrassing incident.

    I now have a benefactor who pays my wages.  We will not talk about this (Bostic is not a real name of course); if someone reads this journal it might endanger my benefactor, my sources, and of course my own freedom.

    I am now officially unemployed.  It is acceptable to be unemployed in the perfect state, because the state, in theory, takes care of its unfortunate children, in their moments between gainful employment.  Now, however, because the economy has not recovered from the latest war, the invasion by the Canadians, there is no money for social programs; so the unemployed fare for themselves.

 

I am a night cop, paid by an anonymous benefactor.  I do not make great money, but I am well equipped for my work, I have a trust set up with a bank in Seattle, under the auspices of a third party.  I own an automobile; I also have a computer.  It is illegal for private citizens to own computers; however tracing of computers is nearly impossible, and most families and nearly all night police have them hidden in their houses or somewhere on their property.  The government spends great quantities of wealth in the attempt to preserve the integrity of the government computer system, to keep individual 'porters' from breaking the secret code of government systems.  There is a sort of war going on between the professionals and the transporters, the illegal users, to safeguard information from illegal tapping.

    The government tolerates the private night police force.  We are not political.  The day police are political.  We work in the interest of private citizens who cannot find help for their problems in the normal hemispheres.  As such, they turn to us.  And, as long as we do not involve the ruling circle of the city (or the region in general), we are largely treated as black sheep, but still members of the fold.  During the great era of the American novel, we were called private detectives; I suppose that's what we are.

 

III.

 

The City of Eugene, as of the latest census, conducted a decade ago, before the latest war, was a city of 530,000 people.  The war has changed this somewhat; we gained many people from Washington and from the Portland area, who were driven south to escape the Canadian invaders.  Seattle and Portland had been occupied for nearly a year and a half; refugees either migrated south or joined resistance forces in the mountain passes.  Eugene became a major foci of trade from California and Mexico, and of war supplies brought in from the Central Rocky Mountain states during this time.  The city grew precipitously.

    Prior to that, after the Great War, and subsequent settlement, many Americans migrated to the Pacific Northwest, hopeful that a new world would be initiated in a climate of Utopianism promised by the new government.  Also, many people,  black, white and Asian, sought to escape the overflow of Mexicans into California.  Fear of climatic changes (especially fear of drought) led many people to migrate to the Pacific Northwest in search of a sure resource base, with plenty of water.  Many people migrated to the urban areas of the Northwest; the war with Canada, as I have said, sent many civilians fleeing the war front, many settling in Eugene.

    After the Great War, an immense public project to link Eugene and Florence, by a sixty mile canal, had been undertaken.  This, in effect, had created another port, Florence-Eugene, on the Oregon coast, to distribute goods inland, to the central Cascades and the Central Rocky Mountains.  The project was aesthetic as well as socio-economic.  A system of smaller canals wound through the city of Eugene, permitting small boat traffic, giving the city an aura of a European town; for this desire, to remake America in the likeness of Europe, was an unstated aim of the new political party, ridiculed by doubters as The Utopians.  This name became the unofficial title of the American Liberty Party, a coalition of leftists, ecologists, and isolationists dedicated to the cause of an American rebirth, a redirecting of America away from the world role it had assumed in the Twentieth Century.

    The Great Canal was the single project which gave the American Liberty Party credibility in the eyes of the new state.  Although it did not immediately challenge Seattle's or Portland's port traffic (and, in many ways, made no economic sense, in the beginning), it did help to revitalize Florence, a depressed fishing-commercial town with a population of about 30,000 people; a deep harbor was required to channel traffic inland on the vast canal system which took over 18 years to finally complete.

    The Canadian National Empire Party gained power in Toronto in the year 2150, and began solidifying its authority in a series of wars in the west, which culminated in an invasion of the American Pacific Northwest  in 2162.  The American Northwest had become so isolationist in nature, so inward in view, that the invasion by the Canadian army took the government totally by shock.  The Northwest had sought to maintain no standing army, as a part of its constitutional goals.  When civil discord became violent during the major recession of 2135 and then again in 2154, a standing army was established to help maintain public order.  Many people were leaving the cities to establish communities in the Cascade Mountains, as belief in the principles of the reformation, which was going to produce the New America, began to wither in the face of the new economic realities produced by a physically and politically divided American continent.

 

It seems that a penchant for history even now is very strong in me.  I studied history and literature at the Catholic Academy as a boy, a school tolerated by the government, although not supported and not even publicly recognized as a legitimate entity.  The government tried to close all the churches several decades ago, but the resistance to this measure caused them to back down from their intentions.

    When I was twenty-one I joined the Army.  When the war broke out with the Canadians I was sent to fight south of Seattle.  When the Canadians overran the whole of western Washington my batallion withdrew to The Dalles, Oregon.  Eventually, the survivors of our batallion fortified positions in the Columbia Gorge and fought guerilla battles against the invaders.  The rest of the old American continent sent aid to support the Northwest; they did not send soldiers to fight, however, since the Pacific Northwest had been so adamant about secession from the Union decades before, had so proudly proclaimed its divorce from the Old America, there was a continued resentment again the Northwest states.  Some fighters did come up from California and from the desert states.  Oil and resources came from Wyoming and Utah.  The states east of the Cascades were not an organized force however.  Chaos ruled in these states also, as economic depression and political instability had rendered military support of the besieged Northwest physically impossible.

    I joined a force of Christian Fundamentalists who had fortified camps in the Cascades and who made runs down into the valley to fight the Canadians and then withdraw.  The Canadians made several attempts to take the resistance points in the Cascades, but their losses were heavy; also the Canadians feared their presence in the lower American states eventually would lead to some sort of unified defense of the Northwest, and that the midwest and west of America might strike a counterblow against the overextended Canadian positions to the north.  The war was not popular in Canada.  The midwestern states of America had sent out a call for volunteers to create a standing army.  Canada eventually withdrew from the Northwest due to a combination of military standoff, political pressure at home, and fear of a counterattack from an erstwhile slumbering American beast directly south of her heart.

    When the war ended, the Fundamentalists maintained their fortified cities; their cause was to reunify America.  They did not disarm, but began a guerilla war against the American Liberty Party, whom, they believed, had betrayed America, and now stood as a barrier to their common goal, the reunification of the country.

     

IV.

 

I am not a political man by nature.  When the Fundamentalists asked me to remain with them, following the withdrawal of the Canadian army, I thought seriously about it.  I do support the reunification movement.  And I admire the self-sufficient principles of the mountain communities, the strong family orientation, the education of their children.  These communities seemed to be living what the American Liberty Party had been trying to impose upon the cities and towns throughout the valley.  One was forged by Life; the other was forced by ideology, onto an already existing human structure.  One fit, because it created itself; the other did not fit, because it was elitist, the attempt by those who considered themselves especially enlightened to reform those who were not as gifted or as insightful as themselves, the managers of reality.  The Utopians did not wish to be members of society; but they wished to create it according to their mental image of what a society should be.  They worked from books; whereas the mountain community took its impulse from life.  The city took its impulse from life also; every attempt by the government to correct the direction of life was doomed to fail, because life builds its own structures; cultures grow forms out of contact, not out of isolation from change.  Essentially, the Utopians pictured an unchanging world, perfect, a static idea, absent from Time, where the need for change did not exist, because perfection would be attained merely through compliance with the creed.  But life changes everything.  An idea, at one moment clear and relevant, becomes an old idea very quickly, no longer relevant, no longer vital.  The Utopians, although they considered themselves progressive, were essentially afraid of change.  The modern world they had hated so had been a world of change.  Their insecurity in relation to life, to the changing currents of living, made them opt for an ideology which was absolute, an ideology which explained everything, and tolerated resistance to these truths only out of a sort of paternalistic condescension toward the uninformed, the less evolved.

 

I am a man of the city.  I am also a man who loves the woods; but the lure of humanity drew me back to the city, back out of the mountains.  I was a part of neither world totally, to the exclusion of the other.  Perhaps this was my tragedy, believing no side totally, wishing to join no side, each of which appeared to me slightly ludicrous, with a tremendous capacity for seeing only its own opinions, blinding itself to any element of illogic in its own arguments.  Fanatics each.  Something good, something cruel in the name of right.  Yet all quite impossible for me to embrace, for blindness is blindness whatever its new name or virtue.

    My war experience (I had been wounded twice during the war) qualified me for police work.  My education qualified me for police work in the intelligence sector.  Hence, I gained employment as a "historian".  Initially I worked in intelligence connected to the War Department; I worked in the Narcotics Division, with special emphasis on stopping the shipping of marijuana grown in the state to other parts of the state and out through the port of Florence-Eugene. 

    When the war with Canada ended, the war in the valley did not end.  The authority of the civilian government in the valley did not extend into the mountains.  Battles were fought wherever the military intruded into the mountain communities.  And so the division of the Northwest into cities and towns governed by the American Liberty Party and the mountain communities governed individually by democratic institutions indigenous to these communities became more permanent.  The Utopians had no stomach to continue the war that had lasted half a decade and taken several hundred thousand lives.  Their attempts to control the mountains was given up.  Incursions into mountain strongholds ended.  A new policy of quiet coexistence was accepted by the rulers in the government.

    Of course, my position in the Narcotics Bureau led, inevitably, back into the mountain communities.  Marijuana was a cash crop, worth millions in trade to the agriculture of these independent communities.  It was my job to cripple the trade in marijuana; and the government, while foregoing regular military excursions into the mountains to establish civil control of the region ended, investigations (police excursions) into the regions of the Cascades and the Coastal Range in search of giant drug kingdoms did not end.  I went to war with many of the drug kingpins who were using Eugene as a clearing house of trade in every direction.

    There was a major flaw in the philosophy of the leaders of the mountain communities which enabled them to proclaim their desire for a new America and, at the same time, to profit from the drug trade and use this profit to finance their new communities.  (Not all mountain communities engaged in illegal agriculture; in fact, the drug farmers were a minority in the mountains.  Others in the mountains did tend to tolerate the illegal activity however, since it brought money into the communities and seemed, since it was opposed by the valley governments, to be an act of rebellion, an act of individual commerce.)

    I went to war against the drug farmers.  The Narcotics Bureau established a solid cadre of soldiers who regularly entered hostile terrain to damage the million dollar trade.  Then we were called off.  The government decided it would best survive, in a climate of its declining credibility, by offering peace to the communities on the periphery.  As such, the conflict in the mountains must stop.  The Narcotics Bureau was severely limited in scope; many men were laid off, or transferred to different departments.  I was transferred to the impotent Cultural Contraband Bureau, a department staffed by two full-time officers and one secretary.  It was our job to investigate the "crime" of too much memory.  This had been the strongest bureau in the police department following the re-creation of the world.  It was the law, at that time, that too much memory was punishable by imprisonment.  That was a time when foreign officials were even imported to teach the new government the techniques of forgetting.  (So much hostility eventually grew toward the foreign instruction that these valued teachers in the lost art withdrew to instruct from more elevated distances.)  In recent times, however, after the Canadian invasion especially, the issue of memory seemed less volatile than it had after World War III.  The bureau shrank from twenty-three officers  and seven secretaries (at its height) to its current position of farce force and clerical celibacy. 

    I worked nearly a year in the denizens of cultural contraband; then, in discovering the cache previously mentioned (in a sort of medieval rectory), and with the subsequent diffusion of cultural artifacts into the hands of subversive fellow historians, I was suspended, finally relieved from duty, tolerated as a private citizen, with perhaps too much knowledge of the internal life of the city to be totally trusted; yet, with the problems facing the civil authorities, civil war in the mountains, an economy without heart, concern with problem individuals was now a secondary issue; the survival of the government was very much in doubt. 

    I established contacts with private investigators who had formed a sort of civil guard whose aim was to preserve order in a world which had very little order, and to protect private individuals in a world which was being squeezed by a government in panic, on one side, a growing revolutionary sentiment, on the other, and a very nascent but powerful block of influence growing out of illegal trade in drugs.  


 

PART TWO

 

August 16, PM, Tuesday:

The Introduction of Crane

 

I. 

 

So much for history.  So much for the setting of the stage.  The drama had begun and I was being called again to expand my comfortable role as audience to also include a role upon the stage, a role within the play.  I assumed that my role would be that of the detective; perhaps there would be more to it.

 

There is a technology in this New America.  There was no telephone for years; now it has finally come back.  The illegal computers also work as a system of telephones, connected through a series of receivers, to transmit messages through our small hidden world.  I have a re-made series s computer.  It has a small colored apple on the monitor.  The Bostic brothers re-made it for me.  I don't know where it came from; but, after beginning to work for my benefactor, the computer arrived, by night, delivered by a man I had never before seen and have not seen since.  I have a hidden underground study where I work with my computer; I have a direct tie-in with the Bostics, who have, in their study, a main-frame which they can use to tap in to official government computer sources, not without some danger of course; this piracy can be dangerous but has become so widespread that the government rarely prosecutes invaders unless information is changed in their system.  They tend to allow wire-taps only if the information is read and used but not changed.

    I am not a computer expert.  I have learned to use this machine, to depend upon it; I do not write programs but depend on the Bostics to create programs which they give to me to aid me in my work.  There are less than 10 agents ("night police") working on the Bostics network, some of whom I know, some of whom are kept secret even from myself.  I work independently.  I realize that there is no backup help, when in the field, that there are no partners; I appreciate this independence, and find that the sort of solitary responsibility of my work allows me to work in a manner much more efficiently, with a sort of spontaneous leverage.

 

 

II.

 

Who is this man Crane?

    David Crane worked with me in the Narcotics Bureau after the Canadian War and was dismissed from the force shortly after the bureau was disbanded.  The official line was that he was suspected of involvement with the smuggling trade.  I did not know if this was true.  He was a silent man who did not share his personal history or ambition with others.  In the years we worked together at the bureau I did not talk with him about family or past or aspiration in terms of career.  He was a field agent, in the highest sense.  When we went in to the bush together he was a man I could count on.  So, our knowledge of one another was based on trust gained from periods of high tension together, and from the understanding that in terms of professional responsibility David Crane was above suspicion.

    He was dismissed from the bureau at a time when many men were being dismissed, a time of budget and political retrenchment.  I gave it very little thought really.  It was a bit surprising to me that I received a promotion to the Cultural History squad when so many others were being laid-off, sometimes with accompanying accusations of suspected criminality or lack of integrity.

 

I had not spoken with David Crane since then.  I never really knew him.  I saw him at times with an attractive red-haired woman named Angela Dockett who was the daughter of Paul Dockett who had made a great deal of money in trade after the creation of the great canal.  He had made money initially in trade and then in investment in a ship-building firm in Portland.  With the Canadian War, the Portland firm relocated to Eugene, ahead of the advancing Canadian troops.  The company had retained its office in Eugene after the war ended, even as it re-opened its business in the liberated Portland.  Angela Dockett had been married to a local man, Alexander Nutt by name, who had been killed in the Santiam Pass during the last year of the war. 

    David Crane and Angela Dockett apparently had two children named Marie, aged 5, and Andrew James, aged 3.  They had been married in a ceremony at the First Christian Church on Oak Street August 16, 2066.

 

This information I gained on David Crane came, of course, through the computer.  I attained it by contacting the Bostic computer and agitating the Bostic mainframe to access the government personnel file.  We scramble our access in such a way as to send a series of contacts in the computer system so as to indicate as many as eleven contact points in the system so the government can never be certain as to which information being read was the specific information which was being sought.

 

It was about 11:00 pm, Tuesday, August 16, 2073, when I received a message on my computer from the Bostics that, in their utterly charming simplicity, read:

 

    "GTR16:03.  David Crane, 2090 W. 17th Ave., found

     murdered in kitchen by wife.  Police response to

     telephone call.  Motive unknown.  Check file for

     current information.  Suggest contact with Mrs.

     Crane.  PRIORITY A.  Calling TV711square."

 

 

III.

 

There is not as much public contact in the profession as there once was--that is, the public contact is not as dominant as it once was.  The computer has become a best friend of investigators for tracing information relevant to one's work.

 

I printed the message from the Bostics for future use.  My code "GTR" is an identification print which allows my own access to the Bostic mainframe.  The number "23:03" refers to the specific message sent concerning the murder of David Crane.  "TV711square" allowed access through the mainframe to the government computer system.  Built in to the Bostic access program was the automatic random accessing of ten other key codes which gathered information from other bureaus within the state system.  A choice of repetition of all eleven codes made it possible to tap the same group consistently if access to the main key would be required consistently enough to occasion successful tracing of the access.  Also built in to the program was the Parallel Theme Access feature which allowed access of parallel information off the initial tap to be camouflaged by parallel theme access by the other ten key codes, making it impossible for the government to exclude certain key codes through unrelated parallel access.  The complexity of this scheme was much more necessary apparently before the war with Canada and the subsequent breakdown of law in the region.  Now, the government made little attempt to trace taps; however, the capacity to trace was still possible, when the government felt an especially sensitive subject was being accessed, so the camouflage scheme designed by the Bostics was still a valuable feature in the theft of information.  The Bostics' program could also ascertain if an attempt was being made to trace an access.  This could be an important consideration, in that it notified the thief if information he was accessing was considered sensitive by the government, which was itself a valuable information.

 

I accessed the Bostic computer, and, through this, accessed the government system.  The Bostic program short-circuited the check system and, essentially, thrust open 11 gates at once.  The system immediately recognized that it was being burglarized, but did not know at which point to resist the attack.  A tape record was made of each entry.  A tracing memorandum would be written back in the form of a tiny red light on each of the screen windows in which I accessed data.

    My screen was 23" wide.  I chose the 11 screen feature, which allowed me to read each entry.  I looked for the entry concerning David Crane.  The message from the Bostics had assured me that screen 7 of 11 would contain the information I sought (the code "TV711square").  The seventh screen contained a message received from a neighborhood message box:

 

    "11:23 PM.  2090 W. 17th Avenue.  Please report.  Shooting in progress.

    Send ambulance. TS21117343."

 

I accessed TS21117343.  Again 11 screens.  Screen 7:

 

    "11:44.  Response by Officer Ramos and and Detective Green to 2090 E.

    17th Avenue.  Shooting of one David Crane in head.  One shot fired.

    Found by wife.  Neighbors did not report leads to officers.  Crane

    reported dead on arrival, Sacred Heart Hospital.  TS21117344."

 

It was too early to access the officers' report; it took nearly 24 hours for crime reports to be processed.  I requested access to TS21117344ANGLE.  SQUARE was a codeword parameter describing current police reports.  ANGLE allowed access to personnel files kept either by police or by government intelligence.  Again eleven screens appeared.  Each screen requested a code number to access.  I typed: "23:03".  On each screen a relative response appeared, and eleven files were concurrently loaded.

 

Screen 7:

 

    "16:03 CRANE, DAVID HUMBOLDT.  Born March 22, 2031, Cottage Grove, OR.

    Father: Crane, Edward Parker (43:221); Mother: Hartley, Edith Ellen (271:22).

    Married: Vitale, Rebecca (222:23), 3-9-58.  Divorced 8-8-60.  No children.

    Married: Dockett, Angela (334:211), 8-16-66.  Children: Marie Laurelei (254:12)

    and Andrew James (781:55).

    Education: Harmony Elementary, Cottage Grove.  South Eugene High, Eugene.

    Military: Northwest 5th Infantry.  Service with honors.  Wounded: Portland,

    Fall '60.  Wounded: Hood River,  Spring '62.  Profession: Eugene Police,

    6-7-65.  Narcotics bureau.  Distinguished service.  Dismissed: 9-20-70. 

    Investigation # 20456.

    Hospital: #28577489.

    Finances: #8823547.

    Current:  TS21117342.  Shot.  Victim of apparent burglary.  Dead on arrival.

         8-16-73."

 

A small red light was on the top left corner of the seventh screen, indicating that, of the eleven screens being tapped, the seventh alone was sensitive enough to provoke attention by the government computer tracker.  There was no danger in my being tracked; however, the fact that this information was considered sensitive warned me that this was something more than a mere murder.  Murders were occurring regularly in Eugene, ever since the war.  A murder of a former government employee, in and of itself, would not initiate such a tracking.  A record was being kept of just how much information was being stolen, so the government would know just how much of its data had been penetrated.

 

I typed the code TS21117344SQUAREVIEW.  Although the murder report would not be processed for several hours after the crime, a video report from the scene of the crime was recorded instantaneously at the scene.  An image came on the screen.  I could rewind or fast-forward the report from my own keyboard.  The red light was still lit.  Detective Green was kneeling above the body.  Crane was slumped face down below the sink.  Detective Green was speaking to the camera: "One shot with a '44 caliber below the right ear.  The kitchen window lock has been broken.  There is blood on the window curtain; we assume this was the result of the shot, and assume from this that David Crane was in the kitchen, alone, when the assailant followed him in to the kitchen and shot him in the back of the head.  We are not certain if the kitchen window was the egress as well as the exit of the assailant.  No other locks were broken (there are Castle Locks on the back door).  Mrs. Crane did not hear the shot; she was sitting on the front porch at the time.  They had returned from dinner.  It was their anniversary.  The children were at Mrs. Crane's parents for the evening.  Mrs. Crane did not wish to talk to us; when asked about possible motives Mrs. Crane became quite upset and asked us to leave."

    The camera showed a dark room, a bedroom; the drawers were opened and contents were strewn about the floor.  Detective Green: "Approximately two hundred dollars and jewelry were taken from this bedroom.  The windows were locked.  There was no apparent forced entry in this room.  We will dust the cabinet for prints.  Also the door.  The clothes in this walk-in closet were disturbed, some thrown on the floor.  Mrs. Crane would not talk with us, other than to say that money and jewelry had disappeared."

    The camera showed the back yard, below the kitchen window.  It scanned down the side of the house.  There was blood trickling down the siding.  There was a garden directly below, and beyond the garden was an alley.  "Our assumption is that a car was waiting in the alley.  The neighbor to the south of the Crane house, Oliver Randall, says there was a beige Rambler parked in the alley through the evening.  A man was sitting in the car.  He arrived about 6:00 pm.  Mr. Randall did not see when the car left; it was gone when he came out around 11:30 to investigate the arrival of the police at the Crane house."

    Detective Green continued, again in the kitchen, standing beside the body.  "Mr. Crane's known dealings with drug figures in Eugene make us suspect the murder is drug-related.  This neighborhood is rife with drug users and manufacturers, and murder for junk is rather common.  And so our basic assumption, at this point, is that this murder was either a burglary for drug money or was an execution for some reason pertaining to the drug traffic in the city.  We will file our reports and intent to question Mrs. Crane more fully at a future date."  12:23 am, 17 August, Wednesday.

 

I re-wound the tape to show the back yard.  A close-up of the siding showed a steady dripping of blood down the white siding.  I shot it up even closer.  The blood was a regular trail of drops.  Apparently the blood was dripping from the curtain above; what it did not show was any indication of a man dropping from the window, dragging his body against the siding to let himself down from the window.  The man must have jumped from the kitchen window, and not let himself down by his hands.

    I forwarded the tape to see the camera scan the garden below the window.  I stopped the frame, blew it up.  The camera shot the ground directly below the window.  I increased the brightness of the image.  The shot had been taken with the aid of a strong light; the picture was bright.  Below the window was soft ground.  There was no indication in the ground of a man having jumped from a height and landed in the soil.  It had rained quite hard Tuesday afternoon.  The soil seemed wet.  But there was no footprint in the soil. 

    The camera scanned the backyard and garden.  If the man had walked through the backyard to a waiting car in the alley, there would be footsteps through the garden.  I blew-up the frames, one by one.  It was quite dark, away from the light.  I increased the brightness, to try to draw in the image and highlight it.  It was not possible; it was too dark.

    I went back to the image taken below the window.  The man had not lowered himself against the siding and he had not leapt from the window into the garden.  That was obvious.  There were no blood stains on the window ledge, which one would suspect if the man had lowered himself by his hands.  The drop from the kitchen window was about eight feet from the window to the ground below.

 

 

PART III

 

August 17, Wednesday, AM:

Further Investigation of the Crime

 

I.

 

You may find it rather callous of me to grieve so little for the death of my friend, David Crane.  I did not grieve really.  Death had been so much a part of my life, with the war, followed by the civil war, followed by my work in narcotics, that violence was the norm, and violent death merely a fact, like the weather.

    I had liked David Crane, trusted him.  I knew very little about him, about his private life.  I heard things, such as his working for Adam Klamus, a notorious drug czar, who lived in Portland and ran his operation out of Eugene after the siege of Portland.  I did not know if this was true.  I did not know if David Crane was working undercover for the government.  The fact that my piracy of information on Crane received a full tap led me to believe that his involvement with the government had not ended with his suspension from the force. 

    Paul Dockett, the father of David Crane's wife, was perhaps the richest man in Eugene, having made a killing in the shipping trade, especially since the Canadian War.  Dockett had ties with the drug trade; when we investigated him during my stint with the Narcotics Bureau we discovered business relations between him and Klamus, as well as between him and Boone Riley, the king of the marijuana growers homesteading outside of Mapleton.  Riley ran a lucrative wood products industry; he and Dockett shipped lumber and finished products through Florence to the California ports for export and transport to the East Coast through the Rocky Mountains and by sea through the Panama Canal.  Riley had a well-trained army of farmers whose main crop was marijuana, which was also exported through Florence to points east and north.

    I had fought Riley's army on more than one occasion.  David Crane and I had battled Riley's men on a dope plantation south of Mapleton.  The battle lasted almost two days, and took nearly thirty lives.  We eventually took the plantation and burned the crop.  Not long after this battle, the Narcotics Bureau was given new orders restricting "field activity."  What this meant was that it was no longer possible to pursue the dope trail out of Eugene; we were allowed to investigate the transportation of "agricultural contraband," but not to trace it to its source for eradication.  That was the first step toward the dismantling of the bureau.  The team shrank; officers were scattered about the force, or fired outright with allegations of suspicion of loyalty.

    David Crane had fought valiantly in the Battle of Summit Point.  He had no ties with Boone Riley's operation at that point.  Perhaps his dismissal from the force had led him to betrayal.  Perhaps he was working for a benefactor similar to my own, with an inside view of the trade. 

 

The computer would not tell me everything.  It had given me certain clues, to be sure.  First, it was anomalous that Detective Green should respond to a murder at 11:00 pm.  Detective Green was head of Internal Operations.  He was an assistant of Police Chief Marcus Rodino.  He did not work night shift, did not operate as a field detective for normal homicides.  His presence at the Crane house was not explained by ordinary events.  PROBLEM ONE.  

    PROBLEM TWO.  Motive.  Dismissal of murder as a drug hit.  Cataloging the murder as drug-related meant that its investigation would receive a Priority Rating 3 in the Department.  The only lower rating was reserved for the murder of a transient.  Priority Rating 1 was reserved for political assassination or the murder of a policeman.  Priority Rating 2 was reserved for the murder of a leading member of society.  Priority 3 indicated a murder of a felon by another felon.  Little time or expense would be devoted to its investigation; a secondary detective would be given the assignment for about two to four weeks; then the case would be closed as a "reason to believe" case, murder of felon by felon.

    PROBLEM THREE.  Problem Three would appear if Paul Dockett did not use his influence to require a serious investigation.  If Dockett did not use such influence, the logical assumption would be that he was not interested in discovering his son-in-law's murder, the father of his grandchildren.  If his daughter did not insist on her father's influence being used to expand the investigation then my conclusion would be that Mrs. Crane and her father were complicitous in the crime, and that the exit/egress problem would no longer be a problem.  The murderer had come in through the front door, with Mrs. Crane opening the door.  Either that or Mrs. Crane had, herself, killed her husband, which I was not ready to believe at the moment.

    PROBLEM FOUR.  The car in the alley.  There was no reason to assume that this was in any way connected to the murder.  People parked in alleys every day in Eugene.  Alley travel was a traditional mode of passage through West Eugene.  Alley travel was in many ways safer than street travel.  If the man had committed a murder, escaped through the kitchen window (highly doubtful), there should have been footprints through the garden to the alley.  This I would investigate myself.

    PROBLEM FIVE.  Did Mrs. Crane hear a gun shot?  Burglars or junkies did not make a habit of carrying expensive pistol silencers in their work.  Also, conviction of possession of a silencer carried with it a death sentence.  It was highly unlikely that a burglar would risk capital punishment for the crime of theft of two hundred dollars plus jewelry.  If there was no gun-shot, then death by burglary was highly unlikely, making the disappearance of money and jewelry either a ruse on the part of the killer, intending to make it seem like a burglary, or perhaps indicating that the murderer was looking for something more in the house, perhaps even having found more (such as narcotics), taking the money and jewelry at the same time; of course, Mrs. Crane could not report to police the disappearance of narcotics from her bedroom.

 

If it was, indeed, a burglary, the scenario would follow that the burglar was in the bedroom when the couple returned from their anniversary dinner.  Perhaps they sat on the front porch for a time; David Crane entered the house to go to the kitchen to get a bottle of wine or perhaps some ice cream out of the refrigerator.  Because of Mrs. Crane's presence of the porch, the burglar could not leave by the front door.  He panicked, followed David Crane into the kitchen, shot him in the back of the head, forced open the kitchen window , leaped out the kitchen window, landing in the garden, hurrying to a car which had been parked in the alley nearly six hours.

    This ruled out a burglary, in my mind.  If a burglar had been waiting in the alley since 6:00 pm for the Cranes to leave their home to rob the house would he have spent at least an hour in the house (the Cranes had gone out to dinner), allowing himself to be surprised some time later by their return?  What burglar would spend 6 hours in an alley waiting to strike a house in one of the least affluent districts in Eugene? 

    A drug-related murder almost made sense.  The murderer intended to find heroin or cocaine in the house.  He found nothing.  He waited for Crane to return.  Perhaps he had been double-crossed by Crane.  He was willing to kill both Crane and his wife, but they stopped on the porch (it was a pleasant evening, after a heavy afternoon rainstorm).  He shot Crane, escaped by the window.  But why the broken lock on the window?  He must have broken the window lock in order to enter the house.  There must have been a box or something on which he could stand in order to reach the window, because it was a small elevated window, some eight feet above the ground.  Perhaps he used a crowbar to pry open the window; he stepped down on the box when he fled; this could be why there was no foot prints in the soil.  He moved the box back to the side of the garage, or somewhere out of sight; then he walked calmly around the garden and started his car and drove off.

 

PROBLEM SIX.  Exit/egress.  The lock on the kitchen window was broken: it must have been broken from the outside, otherwise, it would have been possible for the killer merely to open the lock, raise the window and slip into the backyard.  Yet the lock could not have been broken from the outside without major damage to the window jamb; it could have been forced open with a crowbar, with enough pressure to break the lock eventually, but not without splintering the casing or breaking the glass.  The video showed the broken lock; there was no apparent damage to the window or window casing.

    It would require a great deal of imagination to believe that panic caused a killer to break a window lock from the inside, after killing David Crane, since it would take much longer and make infinitely more noise to splinter a lock which could be quietly turned to allow escape.  This, quite obviously, leads one with a normal level of insight to conclude that the broken lock was a ruse, that access to the house was through a more conventional manner, or perhaps through another opening.  Still, why the ruse, why bother with such a ploy, unless to lead an ensuing investigation to believe that the killer did not have automatic access to the Crane household.  David Crane was killed by someone who knew him, someone who broke the lock in order to portray the killing as a burglary. 

 

 

II.

 

I am not allowed entry to the City Hall building.  My suspension from the force carried with it a revocation of all privileges; current officers on the staff have been warned that to fraternize with myself or with other "suspected illegals" could adversely affect their employment.

    At this point I might find it expedient to admit that the unspecific charge issued against me of helping to funnel cultural contraband (unsanitized history) to outside parties was true.  In discovering the cache of tapes and books and microfilm in the bunker complex near Dexter Lake I discovered also a map of similar complexes scattered around the county and around the Pacific Northwest.  It informed me of a highly developed system of "ministries" (truly, types of monastic strongholds) working to restore historical documents and to develop research to clarify and expand knowledge transferred through such documents.  I had the choice of contacting the government task force to proclaim my discoveries, at which point they would perform a unilateral destruction of the treasury, or to approach the men listed in the directory I had discovered in the raid.  I will not reminisce concerning the nature of my investigation, but suffice it to say that I investigated this case alone, shared my information with no one.  When it came time to choose an outlet for exposure of my findings, I chose a man from the list of "historians."  He, eventually, became my benefactor.  He introduced me to his brain center, the Bostic brothers, others in his research center.  My knowledge of their work was limited; I was told enough to convince me that their work in attempting to reconstruct "lost" documents was preferable to the official policy of de-memorization.  I arranged for the cache to be transferred to my future benefactor; shortly thereafter I was confronted by a junior member of the bureau whose own investigation of the same network informed him of a major "dump," which, his insiders assured him, had been initiated by myself.  I denied it.  I was investigated.  The remainder of the story has already been told.

 

I drive a refashioned Toyota Corolla (circa 1978), deep chocolate in color, automatic transmission.  The Bostics said that it had been discovered in a garage outside of Bend, Oregon.  It had sat for years, protected from the weather.  They rebuilt the engine; re-conditioned the frame.  When I assented to work for the local group of historians, my first rewards (tools of the trade) were a '45 caliber pistol, a refashioned series s computer, and a circa 1978 Toyota Corolla.

    It is no longer outlawed for private individuals to own automobiles.  That law was rescinded nearly a decade ago.  A new automobile plant was opened in Cottage Grove, to be operated on a very small scale, with prices kept at such a level as to make ownership by the non-official (non-affluent) nearly impossible.

    There is a great deal of vandalism in Eugene; because of this, a system of private garages is operated around the city which provides overnight and daytime protection of private automobiles, for a fee.

    I walked several blocks from my home to such a garage, on the corner of Fifth and Lawrence.  It is a three-story structure, grey concrete; murals were painted on the garages representing our heroic struggle against the invasion.  Local artists were paid to represent the good struggle in very colorful, overblown images.

    I knew the man who kept the keys inside, Bill Sturgis, a middle-aged man with greying hair who read Old West paperbacks that were churned out by a local hack--Bill McCauley--and drank coffee all day. 

    "Good morning, Mr. Clark," he greeted me.  He greeted everyone in a formal matter.  I had instructed him for years to call me by my first name, but he insisted on a form of friendly formality.  "What are you working on today?"

    "I'm not sure myself," I replied. 

    "Are you going out riding this weekend?"

    I kept a horse in a stable out on Greenhill Road, at the western edge of the city.  "I don't know.  I might."

    "Are you working on the Shaw case?" he asked.

    I shook my head no.  "Who killed old man Shaw?" I asked.

    "On the street they say he had gambling debts."

    "If he had debts they'd never kill him.  They might break his arm or steal his daughter; if they kill him they lose their money."

    "Yeah, that's what I thought," Sturgis replied.  "How long you gonna be out?"

    "I don't know.  Most of the day."

    "Should I look for you tonight?"

    "I should be back sometime tonight."

    "How's your wife?"

    "Fine.  She's working now.  She found a job at Doctor Renko's office--you know, a dentist."

    "Good."

    "Yeah, she's happier when she's working."

    "Has Dennis come in this morning."

    "He left real early today."  He glanced at his clipboard.  "Left at 8:23."

    "Did he say where he was going?"

    "Said he had to drive to Mapleton for some reason.  Didn't want to talk much."

    Dennis was August Dennis, a sergeant detective on the Eugene Police Force.  He was an old friend; he was a major pipeline for me into the department.

    "Where you headed?"

    "Joy ride mainly."

    "Do you need gas?"

    "Yeah, I probably do."

    He pushed button on his keyboard: a voice responded on the other end.

    "What is it, Sturgis?"

    "Gas for Clark, lot 33.  Brown Corolla: the artifact."

    The radio went dead.

    The Eugene Daily Register was spread open on his desk.

    "What's in the news?"

    "Oh, you know.  They same old epiphany.  Crimes mostly.  State construction is up this month.  Lila Peterson is divorcing that black man she married last year, that guy in the Transportation Division.  What else?  More trade with Vancouver has been approved.  Although I don't know what we have that they'd want.  I mean, they don't need timber.  I guess they need our agriculture, unless they want to get it from their midwest."

    "Can I borrow it a minute?"

    "Sure."

    I glanced through the Police Report.  There was a long list of reported crimes.  The government had only recently begun again to report crimes.  There was nothing about the murder.  That made sense: it had happened too late to make today's paper.

    My car was driven up the passageway.  A teenage boy emerged and walked back out of sight, saying nothing.

    "I'll see you later this evening, Bill."

    "Take care, Mr. Clark."

    I always felt odd have a man older than myself call me mister.  I emerged from the garage driving east on Fifth Street.

    My intention was to visit the scene of the murder.  I did not intend to visit with the widow really.  It was too early to speak with her; a certain sense of propriety required that I use good judgement in such an invasion of her privacy; I would wait until after the funeral before I approached her. 

    I wished to look at the backyard however.  I was quite certain that the property would be guarded by city police.  That should not be a problem however.  "Night Police" were tolerated by the local force.  Many policemen looked at the Night System as a potential alternative employer should something unforeseen occur to require a change in aspirations.

 

I drove west on 17th Street until I reached the Crane house.  It was an old house, a bungalow, with an upstairs attic.  It was fairly well kept up, considering the neighborhood.  I had not been in the neighborhood for some time.  It was more run-down than I remembered it.  People out of work, squatters from the West Eugene Housing Project, were wandering on the street.  It was a pretty rough neighborhood, a home for many of the refugees from the war, most of whom had not yet become settled and had no work.

    I drove by the house.  I saw a cluster of policemen near the front porch, watching the idle men on the street.

    The West Eugene Housing Project had been an ambitious state-financed social program designed to provide shelter for the growing number of unemployed living on the outskirts of Eugene.  The wealthier members of the community had moved back into the heart of the city; the suburbs had fallen into poverty, and had been taken over by the unemployed and the refugees from the war.  The Crane home was situated somewhere between the core and the frontier.  It was still a neighborhood.  The Housing Project was now a series of fortresses, men bound together in a war for territory, having taken over the housing complex.  The police did not patrol the project.  It was run by gangs who sought to control ever larger chunks of the project.

    I parked on the street, a block away from the Crane house.  I walked toward the alley and was met by several men, tough-looking junkies.  They didn't try to stop me; one man muttered "Night," to his friends, under his breath.  (Short for "night cop," meaning they knew that I was armed.)  They said nothing to me as I passed them and moved down the alley.  The alley seemed quiet.  The activity on the street was due, no doubt, to the murder.  The aimless would spend they day wandering to the scene of a crime, trying to get a flavor of the violence; then they would vanish again.

    Two policemen stood at the back gate.

    "Afternoon," one said.

    I looked at his badge.  "Officer Gamble."  He was black, young, looking sharp in his uniform.

    "Hi.  I'm an old friend of David Crane." I said.

    "Yeah, what's your name?" the other officer said.  The voice was familiar.  It was Sergeant Clovis, a fat, beer-drinker who had apparently been busted back to the street.  He had been a sergeant of detectives for some time; now he was one of the many.

    "Hi, Clovis," I replied.

    "Hi, Clark.  What do you want here?"

    "We were friends."

    "Yeah, that's right.  You two worked together for awhile, didn't you?  At Culture?"

    "No, at Narcotics."

    "Yeah."

    "Who did this?" I asked.

    "God knows," Clovis replied.  "Blew his brains out in the kitchen.  Came out through the window I guess.  There was a car waiting her for him."

    "Who's doing the investigation?"

    "Detective Blanton.  A new guy from Seattle."

    "Huh.  Who else?"

    "I think that's it.  He has Ramos working with him.  Ramos took the call.  He's writing the report.  You still working the night shift?"

    "Sometimes."

    "We have orders not to let anyone in here--that applies to you too, Clark."

    "Ok."  I pointed at the back window: "The killer came out that window?"

    "That's what they say."

    "That's a long drop."

    "Yeah, I suppose."

    "That window's pretty small too.  It must have been a midget who killed him."

    "Junkie.  You saw them out front.  This neighborhoods getting the plague too.  Whole damn town's getting it."

    "Dope's the plague," Officer Gamble interjected.  Clovis shook his head, notifying Gamble of his hopeless naivety.  "Gamble here thinks you can stop it."

    Gamble said nothing.

    "Can I come in and look at the window a little closer?"

    "Nope, sorry.  We have express orders on this one: no one in!"

    "Whose orders?"

    "Blanton's."

    "Who is this Blanton--where does he work?"

    "Homicide under Queen.  They're grooming him for a major spot in the oval office, from what I hear."

    "So, why the rules--if it was just a junkie killing a dealer?"

    "Was Crane a dealer?" Clovis asked.

    "Hadn't you heard that?"

    "Yeah, but no one believed it.  You knew Crane.  He was no dealer."

    "So, who killed him?"

    "The talk is that it was a hit.  People I know say he was undercover and someone blew his lid."

    "So, is this Priority One?"

    "No.  Three.  No one's gonna admit Crane was working for them."

    "What about Mrs. Crane?"

    "What about her?"

    "What about her old man and Klamus?"

    "She broke with her old man.  They're...what do you call it?: she's disowned."  He paused, then spoke:  "She was having trouble with Crane, from what I heard.  I hear she had a boy friend."

    "Who?"

    "One of our own: a man in blue."

    "A cop.  A street cop?"

    "No.  Are you kidding.  She's got class, afterall.  No, one of our detectives.  I heard that; I don't know if it's true..."

    A man approached wearing a grey sport coat and tie, no hat, dark short-cut hair.  The two officers straightened up as he approached.  "Who's this?" he asked, pointing to me.

    "An old friend," Clovis replied.  "He used to work for the force.  Used to work with Crane in narcotics."

    "We don't want to be talking about this with anyone," the man said sternly.  He was obviously Blanton.  He looked at me with a sort of annoyance.  "Sorry, friend.  This location is closed for the time being.  What'd you say your name was?"

    "Sterling Baker," I replied.

    "We'd appreciate it if you'd move along, Mr. Baker.  We've got a lot of work to do; and the Department has given strict orders that this case is to be discussed with no one."  He looked at the two officers as though giving them an order.  They moved away from me, toward the house.

    "Where's Mrs. Crane?" I asked.  "We're old friends.  I'd like to see her."

    "She's in the hospital," he said.  "Suffering from exhaustion.  She won't be around for a while.  You could try to see her there; but I wouldn't suggest it for a while.  Give her time to grieve a bit."

    He waited for me to leave.

 

There was no damage to the window frame.  I had seen that clearly.  I saw no crowbar or box or step ladder beside the garage.  I couldn't see into the garden; any footprints that might once have existed had long since been countervened by policemen searching the garden for evidence.

    The window was small, and too high for anyone to boost themselves up for entry into the house.  There were three cars parked in the alley as I left.  A man was sitting in one.  The other two were empty.  I returned to my own car.

 

There was a time when Eugene was a small ordered city, a sort of garden in the valley.  That changed after the Great War and after the secession by the Northwest from America.  The secession was part of a general treaty, forced on America by the world.  But the Northwest had proclaimed the world great, America evil, had eagerly broken the continent into pieces, wishing to exist as a separate entity.

    For a while the city seemed to thrive.  It seemed to attract a great many noble men and women from different parts of the country, different parts of the West.  But the noble visitors were also accompanied by the idle, those eager for something free.  Squatters set up domains on the city's edge and in the older parts of the city.  The new government, a bastion of liberal principle, considered this element more victim than generator of destiny, and so taxed the more affluent to help establish what it considered an ideal social state. 

    More refugees came (refugees in the largest sense); then, with the northern war, with the depression created by the war, and with the large-scale relocation of war refugees from the north--and with the flight of Asians and blacks from California, which was becoming more and more Spanish--the city became a focal point of those wishing to find a new life or at least wishing to join and be rewarded by the ideal social state.  Things fell apart.  The city broke up into parts, some wealthy (arming itself against intruding neighborhoods), some parts utterly poor , seeking government support to ameliorate their poverty.

    West Eugene now was mainly poor.  The University Hills, to the southeast, were mainly affluent.  Downtown areas were partly affluent, a sort of buffer between the wilderness to the west and the civilization to the east.  Crime became a way of life in the west.  West Eugene was a place to avoid:  a sort of jungle culture had emerged, often motivated by drugs, ruled by tenuous alliances held together by threat and violence.

 

The street in front of the Crane House seemed empty as I approached my car.  If Crane and his wife were living off her father's connections in the drug culture, there was no evidence of their wealth in their choice of house and neighbors.  I began to wonder if Crane was working for my own benefactor; the urgency with which the Bostics instructed me to begin investigating the murder seemed to suggest some sort of vested interest.  Also, where was Detective Green?  Green had been the reporting detective, when he should not have been--now, when he should have been the chief investigator, he was no where to be found.  And the suggestion that Crane's wife Angela was having an affair with a detective in the police department: had this something to do with Green?  Could it be that Green had been visiting the Crane's at the time of the murder?

 

 

III.

 

Nothing is really so clear as it would appear to the naked eye.  Anything seen too clearly should be doubted; and anything seeming too obscure to be delineated, that is precisely the thing which must be investigated to understand it even more closely.

 

The Bostics claimed that, to their knowledge, David Crane was not a member of the sacred society.  The directive to assign myself to the case had come from above; they were not aware of the importance of the case nor of my best angle of pursuit.

    I sought to access the name of the hospital Mrs. Crane had entered, in order to visit her.  She did not appear on the registers of any hospital, private or public, in the city.  It was possible, I assumed, that her father had taken her away to either Portland or Seattle. 

    I accessed the record of Detective Steven Green.  He had been the head of the Narcotics Bureau for three years (after the bureau had been stripped of its teeth).  He had been awarded medals for valor, had been wounded in the war.  His rise through the department had been quite impressive.  There was no mention in the computer about his extramarital affairs.  He was married, had been married for 18 years, had two children; his life seemed rather normal.

    Angela Dockett had no police record, nothing to suggest any connection to her father's business.

    The official police report of the killing had not yet been computer-processed.

 

I drove to Lucky's Bar on Olive Street, the old downtown.  It was a hangout for off-duty police.  Several old faces were there; retirees and a couple of people I didn't know.

    Bill Moran was the bartender, a red-faced Irishman.  I had known him for years.  He was a chief source of information in Eugene.  Often, when information needed to be passed from one mouth to another, without evidence of direct transmission, Bill Moran was the mediator.  I had a coke and asked him about his family.  He did not wish to talk small talk.  He began asking me about David Crane: what had I heard, what did I make of it?

    Night Police had achieved a certain status of myth in the city.  Because of the nature of the organization (its ghost mechanisms), an approximation of its proportions had been exploded beyond my own recognition.  Of course, our resources made it possible for us to learn much which was not privy to ordinary citizens.  Many citizens looked upon us as a revolutionary organization; somehow, in all the chaos of the post-war world, there was some invisible entity which saved the world from total disintegration.

    "I don't know much, Bill.  I went to the house.  It's sealed off tight."

    "They're saying it was a robbery," Bill Moran scoffed.  "Like hell!  There's something rotten in this!" 

    "What do you know about Steve Green?"

    "Pet project.  He's in the Dean's hip pocket."

    "How'd he get there?"

    "Oh, I don't know.  He's from Seattle.  Apparently he did something spectacular there, in narcotics; someone big in the city wanted him dead.  So he left Seattle, came here as a sort of wonder-boy.  Why?"

    "He was at the house last night, investigating with Ramos."

    "Last night he was?"

    "Yeah, the killing was around 11:30; and he responded to the call."

    "That's interesting."

    "Now they've got a guy named Blanton on the case--but no Green."

    "What happened to Green?"

    "I don't know.  What do you know about Green's private life?"

    "Clean.  He's the kind of guy who wants to be president, you know.  He's unmarked: a politician."

    "Hmm."

    "What have you got?"

    "I don't know.  What about Mrs. Crane?"

    "What about her?  She's the baby daughter of Paul Dockett.  They had a falling out.  She found out he was running dope.  She fell in love with Crane and that was that."

    "Was she faithful to him?"

    "As far as I know.  Yeah, some people who knew Crane said they were devoted to each other."

    "How did Crane make his money after his retirement?"

    "She had a small trust--that's the story I heard."

    "You heard about him and Klamus?"

    "Oh, yeah--but no one took that serious.  He tried to break Klamus back during the raids.  You know, you were there.  The department wanted to break Crane.  You know how official stories get made."

    "Yeah, I know."

    I drank my coke. 

    "Are you seeing Amy?"

    "Yeah, sometimes."

    "Is she ok?"

    "Yeah, fine.  The boy's in high school now."

    "Yeah, I see her occasionally.  She's looking good."

    "Yeah, she's doing fine."

    "You still writing?"

    "Yep, I'm still writing.  I write every day."

    "Who do you think did it?"

    "I don't know.  Someone who knew him.  Someone who knew his wife.  They're saying the murderer escaped through the kitchen window.  They prove it by a broken lock on the window.  But it was broken from the inside.  The killer must have left by the front door.  Mrs. Crane was supposedly sitting on the front porch.  He had to pass by her to get out."

    "Why couldn't he just leave by the back door?"

    "They lived in the west.  The back door was sealed with Castle Locks.  The killer would have needed a set of keys to unlock the door and leave."

    "Huh."

    "They say Mrs. Crane didn't hear the shot.   Which means a pro must have hit him; he must have used a silencer."

    "You heard that Menotti got hit in Seattle last week, didn't you?"

    The question seemed out of proportion.

    "No," I responded.  "What do you mean?"

    "Menotti got hit by a car--hit and run.  It was reported as an accident.  Where have you been, kid?"

    "I don't know where I've been," I said.  I was silent.

 

George Menotti and I and David Crane had been members of a special field squad in the Narcotics Bureau together.  I hadn't heard from Menotti for years.  He had a big family in Seattle.  His marriage fell apart after he lost his job.  He went back to Seattle to live with his family.

 

 

IV.

 

Something has happened now in my own mind which has brought a real sense of urgency to this investigation.  I feel involved now, not as a mind sweeping the street for clues to a distant destruction.  I feel vulnerable now.  There is no real reason to assume that I have now entered this picture.  Menotti's death could be unrelated--that is possible.  But some feeling has entered me and has told me that I am not safe in my abstract predilection for truth.

    The Priority A given by the Bostics to my investigation of this murder now makes sense to me; they have some understanding that I am in danger.  The priority is not so much that I uncover the murderer of David Crane as it is that I understand that I, too, am in danger.  That my discovering the murderer of David Crane is, itself, the knowledge by which I undermine my own adversary.

 

I needed to find Angela Crane.  She was the primary link to this murder.  In my mind I saw Angela Crane and Steven Green and even Blanton orbiting around the body in the kitchen.  Yet who was orbiting around the body of George Menotti?

    I sat at my computer and loaded the government's Northwest Crime File.  I requested the report on the death of George Menotti.  I scanned the report.  Menotti had been buying meat at a corner delicatessen.  It was after one o'clock am on the Wednesday of the previous week.  A car came out of the nearby Market Street Garage.  It was an old station wagon.  The man in the delicatessen saw the car hit Menotti.  He ran out and tried to get the license plate number; but the car had sped away.  Menotti was unconscious and died shortly thereafter.  The Seattle police were considering it a hit-and-run homicide.  Menotti had been working as a swing-shift watchman at a local packing plant.  The officers investigating the scene were a Detective Anton Shafes and an Officer Delton Winnow.

    The report meant nothing to me really.  I would need to talk with the Menotti family to discover if Menotti had been in some kind of trouble, gambling or involved in drugs or some sort of contraband.  Organized crime was very powerful in Seattle.  I could not believe that this "accident" was merely that; some instinct in me recognized a pattern in the two deaths.  And one thread of this pattern was the presence of a detective at the scenes of each crime.  This detective in Seattle (Shafes) was at the scene of a traffic accident at one o'clock in the morning; this was a highly unlikely occurrence in the first case, with Crane, but more understandable in the case of a murder; it was a powerful incongruity that it should happen twice in one week, in the deaths of men who had worked together for a series of years in investigation of such an explosive and lucrative trade as northwest narcotics.

    I loaded an information file on Shafes.  He was born and raised in Seattle; he was driven south during the war, fought in the trenches at Hood River, received awards for bravery, was wounded twice.  With the end of the war he returned to Seattle and began to work with the police department.  He had worked in narcotics and rose quickly through the ranks.  A list of awards he had received in narcotics was quite impressive. 

    I loaded a file describing the cases he had worked on.  I looked for the names of Paul Dockett, Adam Klamus or Boone Riley.  These did not appear.  I looked at some of the cases.  He did special work in the oriental community.  The orientals had an especially powerful family of organized crime in Seattle.  He had become a legend in Seattle's Chinatown.  He and his partner had become a legend; his partner had been Donald Blanton, who currently headed the investigation of the murder of David Crane.

    I exited the government crime file and loaded a travel file which checked ticket sales and travel by train or by caravan.  I looked for both Blanton and Shafes on the list of travelers.  Had Blanton been in Seattle at the time of the death of Menotti--or had Shafes been in Eugene at the time of the death of David Crane?  Their names did not appear on the series of lists.  This proved nothing, of course.  Unless they were highly careless they would not register to travel under their own names.  Getting the necessary false identification would be easily done for a detective working in narcotics.  Such anonymous traveling was often part of a narcotics agent's work order.

    Perhaps it was a coincidence.  Something told me it was not however.  Why, after all these years since their involvement in the narcotics squad, at which time they undoubtedly made many enemies, would these two men become targets of a conspiracy to murder?  It did not make sense, on the surface.  There were a half-dozen other men who had worked with myself, Menotti, and Crane on the field unit in the narcotics bureau.  All but one, Detective Steven Green, had either been released or deported ('promoted') from the bureau.

 

    Rafael Sanchez.  Living in Eugene, working in sanitation.  Married, 3

         daughters.  Address: 153 W. 11th.

    Hortense Merritt.  Living in Cottage Grove.  Retired from the police

         department.  Married; divorced; re-married.  Two children attending

         the University in Eugene.

    Joseph Mastrogiovanni.  Unemployed, ship building trade.  Divorced.

         Living with his children. Address 712 Harlow Road.

    Clay Grubb.  Building trade, Portland.  Married, three children.  Selected

         to Portland Entrepreneur Society 2071.

    Armistace Nations.  Serving 5-10 year prison term for sale of drugs (crime

         report # 2070: 2322AN).  Salem Correctional Facility.  Release

         date April 10, 2081.

    Tommy Nicoletti.  Whereabouts unknown.  Formerly government

         employee, Narcotics Bureau; suspect in several narcotics invest-

         igations.  Dropped out of sight after 2068; forced to resign from

         Narcotics Bureau pending investigations.

 

I loaded the government crime file #2070:2322AN.  Armistace Nations had been arrested for selling heroin to an undercover police officer in a parking garage in Portland.  It was suspected that he had confiscated the heroin during his term of work with the Eugene Narcotics Bureau, selling it in Portland after his release from the department.  This was not proven.  The arresting officer had been a Seattle detective by the name of Donald Blanton.

 

I wished to visit Armistace Nations in his Salem prison cell.  Travel is not an easy thing any longer in our small country of the Pacific Northwest.  Solo driving is the most dangerous sport in the nation.  The countryside is dominated by bands of thieves and guerilla soldiers.  They feed off solo travelers; so, convoy travel is the practical way of travel.  A convoy of as many as 30 cars and trucks and busses depart Eugene several times a day, traveling in all directions.  The trains run; and are protected by small armies which travel in special armored cars on the train line.  One had to apply for convoy travel; sometimes travel permits were granted in minutes; sometimes days or even weeks delayed such approval.

    Armistace Nations was merely a boy when I first met him, 17 years old.  He was fighting with my cousin Will Clark's famous Troubadours late in the Canadian War.  The troubadours were a guerilla army which worked mainly behind enemy lines in the north.  Armistace Nations was a brave soldier for my cousin's army.  My cousin thought very highly of him.  I recommended him for a job in the Narcotics Bureau after the war; he got the job mainly on my recommendation and on the fact that he had fought with the Troubadours.

    When we went in to field work, Armistace Nations was a brave agent, totally trustworthy, honest, sincere.  He did not take drugs.  He was religious, very straight, an honorable man.  He was the only black man in our group.  When the unit was shattered we all drifted our separate ways.  I heard about Armistace's arrest a few years later.  I did not believe it then.  Many men were set up by the government, men who were considered or who considered themselves adversaries to the government.  Drugs were one of the easiest ways to set up such men. 

    I had the sense that Armistace Nations was in danger.  I had the sense that we were all in danger.  Why?  What knowledge had we attained, or what grudge was being enacted now, after all this time?

 

V.

 

I ate dinner at Poppy's Restaurant, chicken with lemon sauce and rice.

    I was licensed to carry a gun.  Most people did carry guns now.  There was so much crime, one really had little choice.

    I was a regular at Poppy's.  Poppy was a middle aged Greek woman, her dark hair greying; she had a sad face.  Her children helped her run the restaurant, so there was always a sense of energy in the small house which had become a restaurant many years before.

    I spoke quietly with Poppy for a few moments--pleasantries.  I ate alone.

    When I left the restaurant I sensed that I was being followed.  The senses are strong animals which have not been tamed through the mechanisms of civilized living.  Perhaps my years in the war, and, subsequently, in the wars against the drug warlords, had sharpened my instincts.  I trusted them.  I knew someone was near me.  I did not know if it was an enemy necessarily (I did not know if I was merely being followed, watched, or if I was being targeted for something).  I ducked into an alley leading toward the hospital.  The alley was dark.  I stepped into the shadows and waited for someone to approach.

    I drew my gun.

    I had learned to shoot as a small boy.  My father had taught me, first with a rifle, next with a pistol, finally with a bow and arrow.  My family, years before, had come to Oregon from Wyoming.  My mother's family had been one of the first families of Wyoming, emigrating from Illinois and Minnesota in the middle 1800's.  My father's family had emigrated to America in the 1600's, had been one of the original American families.  The Clarks had moved slowly but ineluctably from Plymouth Rock, through Connecticut, New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, making their way, in the person of my father, to Eugene, Oregon.  My sister still possessed a very exacted family genealogy, which indicated that John Clark, apparently a progenitor, had been the pilot of the Mayflower, on which the Puritans first sailed to America.

 

I heard gravel being crushed; a shadow had followed me into the shadows.  He approached.  I had learned to see in the dark.  I let him pass.  He did not see me.  I had my pistol aimed at the center of his chest.  If he had seen me I may have shot him.  I sensed that he was dangerous.  He walked slowly up the alley.  I was standing below a lilac bush, bathed in shadow.  He walked on.  The sound of his feet passed away.  I followed him.

    If he were truly an assassin he was probably being accompanied by a backup, who was probably waiting near the alley where we had both entered.  I walked more quietly than he had.  I kept to the edge of the alley, out of the lights.  As I emerged on the street there was more light.  A man was leaning against a car, smoking a cigarette.  He wore a full hat with a rounded brim, a suit coat.  He had not seen me.  He was across the street, so, while I could see him, I could not recognize his face. 

    Moments later a black sedan pulled up on the street, stopped near the man.  He entered the car; the sedan vanished.

    This was not a surprise.  Something had changed.  Something major was occurring.  I would try to visit Armistace Nations.  I wondered if he was still alive.  He was in danger.  It would be very easy to arrange a killing in a state penitentiary; it happened all the time. 

    I thought of going to visit my wife, Amy Little--we were now separated.  That would not be smart.  I would need to go some place unexpected.  If someone had been studying my patterns, accruing a databank of my friends and my habitual places of visitations, it would be quite easy for them to anticipate my movements.  I must now become non-habitual.  I would need to leave my car on the street overnight.  I had no choice.  I could pick it up in the morning perhaps; but I must check it for a bomb if I returned to it. 

    I walked through the alleys toward the west, toward St. Mark's Cathedral.  My priest from my boyhood days, Father Prado, would open his door to me.  I had not been to church for years.  I would be safe there over night.  Then I would make some decision about my next move.

    If the police department was behind the murder of David Crane and the murder of George Menotti, then something big was happening.  And the former members of the  narcotics field squad must have had access to information which made their continued existence unbearable to the perpetrators of the murders.  That meant I, too, was a target.

    It was possible that all of this was in my imagination.  I did not really have much evidence to support my suspicion.  One murder; one accident.  Small threads which related the one to the other.  My intuition was usually true, however.  Mrs. Crane had been kidnapped.  She had not entered a hospital.  She did not wish to talk with the investigators because she was not at the house; or had been taken from the house.  Perhaps her father had arranged for her abduction.

    I didn't know what was true.  I had nothing really, no motive, no real evidence.  Oftentimes, however, the understanding of a crime became apparent to one more as if the investigator were assembling a large jigsaw puzzle.  The solution of the puzzle often came before the picture was complete; the picture was built out of small jagged pieces which did not fit together with the whole until it had fit together as small pieces.  Each piece was not known until it was fastened to its context; yet the whole could be seen, in imagination, or instinct, before the second-to-last piece celebrated some conclusion.

 

I knocked on the rectory door.  Father Prado led me down a dark corridor; he carried a candle, which sent sprints of light across the stucco walls, flashing, like shadows.  In the night, blackness became the primal element; light seemed, in the night, merely the shadow produced by movement and mass.  He had opened the door and had asked: "What is it, Maximilian?" 

    "I am in trouble, father."

    He asked no more.  He led me to a staircase which led down to the basement.  He led me through the furnace room.  There was a small room to the left of the furnace, hard to see, with a sharp angle, which looked like a wall. 

    "You will be safe here.  How long do you need to stay?"

    "I don't know, father.  The night.  Maybe longer."

    "You can stay as long as you wish.  Do you need dinner?"

    "No.  I have eaten."

    "Is someone following you?"

    "I don't think so.  But it isn't safe for me to go home."

    He nodded.  "You can come and go by the door near the back."  (He pointed through the furnace room to another darkened hallway.)  "It opens in the back yard.  No one should see you.  You can leave by the alley.  I'll bring you food.  You can stay as long as you need to."

 

 

PART IV.

August 18, AM, Thursday--2073.

The Throne of Hercules

 

I.

 

I slept a fitful night's sleep.  There was a narrow cot and a small light on a desk.  There was an empty bookcase near the desk.  I was tired; I passed away quickly, but dreamt and woke often.  If I signed up for a caravan to Salem, to visit Armistace Nations, my whereabouts would be known ahead of time; if someone wished to kill me, it would be easy to single me out in a caravan.  It was not the kind of fixed location which would do me much good. 

    Still, I had to meet with Armistace Nations.  There was still a longing in me, some sense really of disbelief.  Logic told me that the occasion of a man's murder and another man's being killed by accident, and a man following me down an alley near the hospital did not necessarily add up to a conspiracy to kill a former narcotics division.  Intuitively, I knew it was true.  But it was not logically a solid understanding.  Perhaps it was merely the conclusion of a distraught mind, a twisted vision.

    My dreams were jumbled.  I woke up chilled.  The night was not cold, but I was alternately hot and cold.  I slept beneath an old army blanket on the hard cot, trying to think of nothing, trying to let my mind rest, to achieve some form of silence.

 

Religion had been persecuted under the new regime.  Religion had been blamed for many of the excesses of the earlier empire.  Churches were shut down.  A new age of enlightenment was declared.  Eastern religions were more acceptable, for their wisdom; but Christianity was declared void of truth, and churches were taken over and run as museums. 

    People came back to the churches.  When the state realized it had lost its power over the minds of ordinary citizens it gave back control of the churches to the priests and ministers.  Religion became legal again (a new law made church service permissible but encouraged the religions to turn away from the religions of old, to become involved in the new religion, that of bringing utopia to the earth).  There was no response really.  It was the old, the mysterious, that drew people to the churches. 

 

I awoke in a sweat, feeling panic, but a sort of abstract panic.  It had been a bad dream.  I could not remember the dream.  I remembered only vaguely the logical conclusions I had drawn the day before.  Perhaps it was a new day; perhaps the day-old paranoia would evaporate like the dream had.

    I left the church by the basement door and passed through the garden, into an alley.  No one had seen me.  I would get breakfast at Original Joe's (the best omelettes in town).  Then I would decide about Armistace Nations in Salem.  I could not go in a convoy, that was certain.  I felt very clearly that the less known about my intended movements the better.

 

I realized only after entering Original Joe's that I had made the first wrong move.  I had breakfast at this same restaurant nearly every morning.  I could not be habitual.  Anyone trying to find me in the morning could station himself at Original Joe's and find me in my regular spot.

    I ate a chili omelette and drank a chocolate malt.

    What was my next move?  I couldn't try the run to Salem alone.  Reports had come in recently that clans were very active in the north of Eugene.  Scum feeding off solitary travelers.  It was the Old West again.  My arsenal was back in my house.  I could feel someone there, waiting.  The lights were off.  He was sitting in my arm-chair, waiting for me.  Another man was in the bedroom.  Another waited in the car on the street, probably reading a paper.

    And perhaps it was good for me to keep my old habits.  If I panicked, changed my habits, then anyone watching me would understand my suspicions.  That would increase my danger.  Too many killings of former colleagues might create questions; perhaps they would need to space out the killings.  Perhaps I still had time to investigate Crane's killing.  My sense of urgency relaxed a bit.

 

When I finished eating, I went to the pay phone.  I hardly noticed the people in the restaurant.  It was always filled for breakfast.  A few regulars said hello.

    I looked in the directory and found the number for Thomas Crenshaw.  Thomas Crenshaw's sister, Marcia, had married Joe Mastrogiovanni when we had worked together in Narcotics.  I knew Marcia and Tom even before I had me Joe at work.  Joe and Marcia had been divorced about a year earlier.

    Tom's son answered the phone.  I had him put his dad on.

    "Tom?  It's Max Clark calling.  How's everything?"

    "Ok.  Hell, I haven't heard from you in about two years, Max.  How you doing?"

    "Ok.  You know.  How's Marcia doing?"

    "She's ok.  Why'd you call, Max?"

    "Oh, just a wild hair.  Thought I'd say hi.  Marcia still see Joe sometimes?"

    "Yeah.  They're still see each other sometimes.  Why?  You thinking about asking Marcia out, Max?  You and Amy are kaput, aren't you?  You can always ask Marcia out, my friend.  I think it would do her good."

    "Is Joe ok?"

    "Yeah, why?  Hey, what's up anyway?  Is something going on? You still working the night shift, Max?"

    "Yeah, everything's ok.  I just get lonely for the old crowd sometimes.  Thought I'd see if everything was ok."

    "Why don't you meet us at the Vet's Club Friday, pal?  We still go there every Friday.  It'd be good to see you."

    "Yeah, I might do that.  Say hello to everyone."

    "I sure will.  Glad you called, kid.  Take care of yourself."

    "Ok."

    "And drop by Friday.  It'd be good to see you again."

 

II.

 

I walked up Eleventh Street to my car.  I got in the car and pretended to try to start the car.  The engine remained quiet.  I flipped the hood-latch inside the car, got out, pretended to tighten the battery cables, tap the starter with my right hand.  There was no bomb in the engine.  I looked for wires connected to the starter or the battery  I saw nothing. 

    I started the car.  Nothing happened; the car turned over.  I drove toward my house.

    I felt a need to return to my computer.  The official murder report should be filed by now.  I might be able to see something in the report.

 

Bill Sturgis was waiting for me at the parking garage, sitting at his guard station; I guided the Toyota quietly into the entry port.

    "I wondered if you were gonna make it back," he called out.

    I turned off the engine, climbed from the car, handed him the keys.  He pushed a button on his keyboard. 

    "There were two men in here looking for you last night," Sturgis informed me.  "I don't know who they were.  Rafferty left me a note.  Said they wanted to know if you had come back in.  He said that was confidential information.  They showed him a badge.  Rafferty said the badge was a Washington tag.  Rafferty didn't like the looks of it though.  He felt you should know about it."

    "Thanks."

    "Don't mention it.  We look after our own around here."

    A teenager appeared and Sturgis threw him the keys to park the car.

    "What'd you learn about Crane?" Sturgis asked.

    "Not much.  Do you remember Armistace Nations?"

    "Sure.  Black guy.  Got in trouble a couple years back.  Why do you ask?"

    "I'm not sure.  Have you heard anything about Crane?"

    "No, not really.  I heard she was sleeping with a Detective Green and that it was a murder of passion.  I don't know who started that."

    "Where did you hear that?"

    "Oh, down at Max's.  Everybody was talking.  I didn't take it too serious."

    "You heard that Green killed Crane?"

    "Yeah, but I dont' know what it's worth."

    "You didn't hear anything about where Mrs. Crane might have been taken."

    "No.  Hell, what do you think?  She's probably out in her old man's mansion.  I don't know where else she'd be."

    "You don't know if anyone else came looking for me."

    "No.  Rafferty didn't say nothing about that.  Are you in some kind of trouble."

    "I don't know.  Did Dennis come back last night?"

    He looked on his clipboard.  "No.  Not by this he didn't.  Why are they sending dicks down from Seattle anyway?  What do you think's going on here?"

    "I don't know.  I need to get to Salem, Bill.  What do you hear about the frontier?  How's 99 these days?"

    "Don't try it alone.  That's all I know."

    "It's not smart to ride in caravans anymore, Bill.  I don't think that would be a good thing for me to do."

 

I walked home.  Shafes was near; I could feel him.  He was very clean, very precise.  I didn't know what to make of Green and Mrs. Crane.  That seemed improbable.

    I knew my gun was loaded and I knew I would enter my house through the basement.  I hadn't killed anyone in several years.  I was sure that my computer had been damaged.  My house was probably ransacked.

    I walked through the neighbors back yards to get to my tool shed, on the back of the property.  There was an entrance through the floor of the tool shed, leading to a tunnel which led into my basement.  I climbed down the ladder.  The tunnel was large enough for me to walk, stooping slightly.  I pushed open the false wall in my basement and entered the dark cool silence.  I stood for several minutes, training my ear to hear any type of noise.  Nothing.  I looked in the basement den first, where I kept my computer.  Nothing had been changed.  I pulled the false wall closed again.  I took off my shoes, and stepped lightly on the basement stairs.  No sound.  I knew where to walk.  Parts of each plank could talk; but the hard spots were known to me. 

 

There was no one in the house.  I looked from my window toward the street.  There was a car across the street, in the shade.  A man sat in the car, reading the paper.  I looked around the rest of the neighborhood.  Nothing really had changed, except the man in the car.

    I returned to the basement.  I would need to work on the computer, to try to gain more information.  Before beginning work, however, I took a jar of marbles from my work shelves; I spread the marbles across one step of the basement stairs.  There was no light on the stairs.  Anyone attempting to descend the stairs while I worked would be met with an unexpected surprise which would surely alert me.

 

It is not easy to enter the database of the Bostics.  There are many gates of entry.  Anyone discovering the machine might find it impossible even to turn on the machine, as there is a switch which must be turned on after the typing of a code.  Once the machine is activated, several codes lead one down the labyrinth, toward the reward of accessing the command module.  From here another labyrinth emerges; inside is a third labyrinth, inside of which one begins to access messages.  A fourth labyrinth allows one to make commands to tap other acres of information.  I worked with the Bostics for a full week to learn to engage their system.  I worked for months to more fully appreciate its power.  Anyone entering my room, discovering the machine, would possibly consider it broken when the "on" switch failed to respond.

    I checked my computer for messages.  The first message:

   

   

    "GTR18:01.  D.Shafes, Seattle.  Assumed name: Rick Castle.  Train ticket:

    Seattle-to-Eugene, August 15, AM.  Arrival 11:00 AM.  Traveled with

    companion Edward Stark (assumed name Oliver Gaetti).  Official

    priority.  Staying at Eugene Hilton.  Room 273.  Night clerk: Estelle

    Mangram recalls their returning night of 16 August at 1:30 AM.

    Pictures: MONUMENTHALL.  Category GREEN.  Calling TV822

    OVERSQUARE."

 

    "GTR18:02.  Meeting in Seattle, June 28.  Seventh Hill Restaurant:

    Carlo Baker, Director of Police, Seattle; Muriel Knowles, Seattle

    Governor; Dick Rosencranz, Portland Governor; Paul Dockett;

    Enrique Castor, representative of United Farmers of the Willamette

    Valley; Ross Sutherland, Eugene Governor General.  No notes of

    meeting.  Not official state meeting. 

    Pictures: MONUMENTHALL.  Category RED.  Calling TV111

    OVERSQUARE."

 

    "GTR18:02.  Subject: Tommy Nicoletti.  Government report

    BSC:ARMOR TREJ.  Lieutenant in Cory Roman's Mountain

    Army.  Leader of southwest quarter of Roman's Mile, near

    Bend.  Director of resistance against Adam Klamus's war to

    unseat Roman and take over fertile Crow area narcotics trade.

    BSC:ARMOR TREJ.  Calling TV001SQUARE."

 

The Bostics were a pair of guardian angels, working in an invisible manner, reaching through crannies to access information which they assumed would be necessary for one's case.  I was amazed to watch them in action.  Their instinct for vital information was astonishing.  They worked on the same mainframe: two workstations, relaying information to one another, discussing the relevance, each racing in different directions to unearth clues which would build, in tandem, the hologram of their mystery.

    They had read my mind.  I did not ask them for information on Shafes.  I did not request information on Nicoletti.  They tracked each agent's journey through the labyrinth, noting the directions and misdirections, amplifying this, decompressing that.

    They knew that I was in danger.  Shafes had killed Crane: I would bet money on it.  It was official business.  Blanton had probably killed Menotti.  The meeting of the power force of the Northwest had undoubtedly been a cutting of the political pie.  Some form of organizational conspiracy at which some plan of action must have been discussed.  Judging from the peoples involved, the civilian government with Dockett and Castor, some alliance was being forged between the government and the dope kings in the country.  They had been at war, and the government had lost.  There was no support for the government any longer.  It was teetering, on the verge of falling.  Now it had reached out to Dockett and Castor; Castor was the political representative of Klamus and Boone Riley.  He had been elected to the legislature by the narcotics counties.  He had served for several years, always as the mouthpiece of the marijuana and opium parties.

 

I accessed the file on Castor:

 

    "16:03 CASTOR, ENRIQUE OBLIVIO.  Born November 11, 2037, Sacramento, CA.

    Father: Unknown ( ); Mother: Garcia, Lucy Maria (773:27).

    Married: Parma, Rosa (227:14), 9-1-70.  Children: Escala (d) (924:44).

    Education: Kennedy High School, San Anselmo, CA.

    Military: unknown.  .

    Hospital: #763376.

    Finances: #151476.

    Current:  Representative of Florence County in Northwest Regional Legislature.

         Elected November 2070...."

 

He had been arrested back during my time with the Narcotics division.  I tried to access his criminal record:

 

    'NO RECORDS BY THAT CODE."

 

It had been purged.  I had been with Crane and Nations the night they arrested Castor in a housing project in West Eugene.  He had been selling automatic weapons and opium to a group of "Indians" in West Eugene.  Charges had been dropped soon thereafter.  Castor had powerful friends.  The government decided not to press the charges.

 

The reason I needed to see Armistace Nations was that he and Crane had been partners during the Narcotics years.  He and Crane had been the team which had working up indictments against Paul Dockett and Adam Klamus at the time the Narcotics Division was disbanded.  The government felt it could not afford a full-scale war against the dope kings; their armies were vast; the government had no real support, no one to stand with it.

    I accessed the caravan lists north for the next few days.  I scanned the list of names and businesses.  I recognized some names; Eugene is a pretty small town afterall; I knew most of the real residents of the city.  There was no one special on Thursday.  Friday's list was shorter.  I came to a name: Hercules Roth.  Hercules Roth and I were friends at one time.  I worked for him; helped him to find a man who was trying to blackmail his wife.  He had pictures of Roth's wife with another man, in rather compromising postures; the blackmailer threatened to expose her, to circulate the pictures throughout the town.  I found the man, lightened his authority somewhat, took from him several photographs and negatives and helped him find his way south, out of town in a caravan.

    Roth had once said that, if I were ever to need something, to let him know. 

 

    I accessed the police report of the Crane murder: 

 

    'NO RECORDS BY THAT CODE."

 

    I tried again.  The same result.  I accessed the personal file of David Crane.

 

    "16:03 CRANE, DAVID HUMBOLDT.  Born March 22, 2031, Cottage Grove, OR.

    Father: Crane, Edward Parker (43:221); Mother: Hartley, Edith Ellen (271:22).

    Married: Vitale, Rebecca (222:23), 3-9-58.  Divorced 8-8-60.  No children.

    Married: Dockett, Angela (334:211), 8-16-66.  Children: Marie Laurelei (254:12)

    and Andrew James (781:55).

    Education: Harmony Elementary, Cottage Grove.  South Eugene High, Eugene.

    Military: Northwest 5th Infantry.  Service with honors.  Wounded: Portland,

    Fall '60.  Wounded: Hood River,  Spring '62.  Profession: Eugene Police,

    6-7-65.  Narcotics bureau.  Distinguished service.  Dismissed: 9-20-70. 

    Investigation # 20456.

    Hospital: #28577489.

    Finances: #8823547.

    Current:  Unemployed."

 

So, there had been no death. 

    I accessed the daily obituaries.  Nothing about Crane.  I loaded my memory storage file disk:   

         CRANE DEATH REPORT

         CDR: VISUAL

        

My two files still existed.  I loaded the visual file and turned on the printer.  I made photographic copies of Detective Green and Mrs. Crane.  I accessed the files

 

    MONUMENTHALL.  Category GREEN.  Calling TV822

    OVERSQUARE.

 

    MONUMENTHALL.  Category RED.  Calling TV111

    OVERSQUARE.

 

I printed photographs of Shafes and Edward Stark. 

    Shafes was a thin man, sharp facial features, thin lips.  He looked very intense.  "5'8".  163 pounds.  44 years old.  Left-handed.  Martial arts expert.  Military Intelligence during the war."  Military intelligence during the war meant that Shafes had probably been an assassin.

    Stark was large, with bushy black hair and a more robust, almost laughing face.  He weighed about 280 pounds.  Looked very strong.  "Martial arts expert.  Military Intelligence during the war."

 

I printed photographs of Carlo Baker, Muriel Knowles, Dick Rosencranz, Paul Dockett, and Enrique Castor.  The photographs were all small enough to fit in my wallet.

 

I loaded the file:

 

    BSC:ARMOR TREJ.  Calling TV001SQUARE.

 

    Basic: Armor (military), Treason (Remote) Enquiry Journal. 

    Cory Roman had begun his rise to power as a lieutenant in Adam Klamus's

    army which controlled land from the Siuslaw to the Rogue.  Roman was a

    local boy, army hero, who turned to fast money after the war.  Apparently

    he never lost his taste for war or his skill at it.  He was well loved by his

    men; Klamus began to fear his power as Roman's arm of the force began

    to exert its dominance over the empire.  Klamus sent an assassin out to kill

    Roman; and the assassin's head was mailed to Klamus's residence in Medford.

    The assassin: Ricky Castor (brother of Enrique Castor).

 

    Roman's men took control of marijuana and opium plants outside of Eugene,

    to the southeast and east, in the mountains.  "Roman's Mile" was, in reality,

    a very large bite taken out of Adam Klamus's apple.  A war was fought between

    the two forces; a stalemate resulted; Roman secured his position and Klamus

    lost some prestige and a significant part of his empire.  Klamus and Boone

    Riley soon formed an alliance against Cory Roman; this alliance had not yet

    resulted in a major war between the dope kings, but one had been anticipated

    for some months.

 

I printed photographs of Cory Roman, Adam Klamus, Boone Riley and a recent combat photo of Tommy Nicoletti taken by a newsman doing a story in Roman's Mile.  The newsman was really a government intelligence officer.  Roman was being stalked; the government's attention had been turned away from Klamus and Riley, toward Roman's army of usurpers.  Nicoletti had come to Roman after being dismissed from the Narcotic's Bureau.  He apparently had a personal grudge against Klamus, and decided to work with Roman against Klamus.  Nicoletti was a soldier at heart; when the war against drugs stopped in the official circles, his war did not finish, he merely packed his bags and moved on.

    Nicoletti had worked with Crane and Nations on the investigation of the Willamette Valley narcotics racket.  He knew it in and out.  My own work with the bureau had been more of an operations manager.  I took units into the field for strikes against the plantations.  I had access to reports made by Crane and Nations; my main interest was in shutting down the opium and marijuana factories however.

    Nicoletti, in the photo, was surrounded by well-armed men.  Roman was in the background, a handsome man, younger, clean-shaven.  Nicoletti had aged, was balding; he had a very tense look in his eye.  That was not new.  He had always been intense.

 

I loaded the ID file of Hercules Roth.  He was about 6'1", an inch or so shorter than I.  He, too, had black hair, but no beard.  We were about the same age.  He weighed a bit more.  I load my own ID file.  I pasted my ID picture onto the ID of Hercules Roth.  I saved it in my database and printed the ID on my printer.  I told the printer to print it as an ID; it sealed the ID and provided the basic governmental stamp.  (That element of the ID program, written by the Bostics, was one of their proudest touches, a sub-program they worked on for months.  They even provided their agents with a new printer with a capacity for lamination.)

    I loaded the ID file of Sergeant August Dennis, my friend on the police department.  I copied my own photo on the file of August Dennis and printed out a police department ID.

 

I sent a message to the Bostics: "INSU TEK SABLE.  23-22.  BASIK.  11+Z SAC TAVIUS ORLOAD 12-22 IN COGGOCNO....." 

 

The Bostics had developed an emergency code, an alphabet based on twenty letter-sounds and on a numerical system which was flexible enough to act both as a symbol complement to the 20-sound alphabet, and to act with utter precision as a mathematical describer.

    I told the Bostics: "Send a technician in disguise.  Meet me at the corner of 11th and Olive (4 blocks west(+) of the end (Z)(Willamette being the end/beginning of the east-west organization of blocks) at 2:30 (20 being the number of letters in the alphabet, it also represents, in time, noon.  3 hours (full scale) + noon (20) - 1 number (1/2 scale when a "second" hand).  For the purpose of basic installation of computer capabilities."

    The scrambled message ran on for some time, in the same language, so that any attempt to decode the message would not stop at the first part but would linger for several paragraphs and lead into total lunacy.

 

I packed the computer and printer, and the computer cables, in travel boxes.  I would need to talk with Hercules Roth and bump him from the caravan.  I would travel as Hercules Roth and meet with Armistace Nations, first, to see if he was still living, second, to discover from him the essential nature of the investigation he and Crane had been engaged in, which, according to my own deductions, had led to the murder of Crane and probably endangered all of us.

    I packed a suitcase of clothes.  I also packed my weapons: MKZ420 automatic rifle from the military days; automatic long-range sniper rifle with illuminated scope.  Bullet-making kit.  Three handguns; two knives; canteen; boots; tent.  Essentially, all my military gear.  My makeup kit. 

    I thought of picking up the marbles on the stair, but decided to leave them.  Hostile visitors would know that I had been in the house from the fact that the computer would be gone.  (I was sure there had been visitors the night before.)

   

I left by the false wall and the tunnel, emerging in the tool shed.  It took me three trips to complete my evacuation.  My neighbor was working in his back yard.  I asked if I could borrow his car; he agreed.  I drove a long circuitous path to the alley near the church.  No one was following me.  I carried the computer boxes and the private materiel down into the church basement, to my room; I set up the system so that the technician the Bostics sent would be able to wire the system into existing house wires.  I would inform Father Prado of the new technology in his basement.

    There was much to be done.  I would not return to my home.  I had a very clear sense that my life had changed, that time was beginning to vanish.  I foresaw some odyssey ahead of myself.  I napped until about 2:30.  I met the technician (Willie O'Toole) outside the church on the corner; he had been sitting in the shade for several minutes.  I discussed the location of the door and the room; he walked toward the alley and I walked downtown.

 

III.

 

There is a difference between knowing something and discovering something.  Knowing is immediate; it takes no assembling of parts, no rational sifting of images and apparencies, the collecting and discarding of facts; knowing is as fast as light, as unrelenting as death or love or any other obsession.  Knowing requires no causal ascending the staircase of knowledge.  When one knows something, it is final; it cannot be discussed or changed by barter or even prayer.

 

I called my neighbor, informing him where I had left his car, letting him know that I would not be able to return it.

 

I visited Hercules Roth that evening at his garment store.  He saw me through his store window; his wife was working with him, and it embarrassed her to see me, so he motioned me to meet him in the alley.  It was fine with me to meet him in the alley; yet, when he opened the door to meet me I pushed him inside so as not to be visible from the street.  I told him I needed his place in the caravan; that he was not to tell the police that he needed to cancel his travel (it was the law that any cancellation must be reported).  I told him to stay home from work, to tell his wife he was sick. 

    He did not appreciate my importunity.  He said it would cost him a commission in Salem.

    I needed this favor.

    Yes, he did owe me one.

    Whatever he would do, he must not tell anyone.

    No, he would not tell anyone.

 

There were parts of Eugene which were still pleasant.  True, everyone had guns in their houses again.  There was a sort of war going on, even now, even after the peace had been declared.  But the evening fell softly sometimes; and occasionally the town lost some of its tautness.  It had been warm the past week or so; but the breeze had come up in the evening to make the summer night pleasant, almost dreamy.

   

I walked through the town, choosing routes which would not be expected, walking in parts of town which were not prone to violence by outsiders or the western fringe-dwellers.  I walked through alleys, changed my direction, waited to see if I was being followed. 

    There was a peaceful surface to everything.  Yet I felt as I had before a battle began, during my years in the army, or, afterward, during raids on the narcotics plants in the countryside.  There was a very clear, very strong peace of mind, which bordered on mania.  The nerves became fiery with anticipation; but the mind did not betray fear or confusion; it was pointed very clearly, very steadily, with an understanding of danger.

    I wondered if I would ever sleep again.  I felt so eternally wakeful, so present in my new-found condition of anxiety: it was as if the dream had merged fully with the waking state, that there was no distinction, that sleep was no longer required, as if I walked in sleep now, preparatory to some experience in the deep.

 

IV.

 

I rested until nearly 8:00 pm upon returning to the church, after my walk.  Father Prado brought my dinner down.  I did not eat it. 

    I turned on a small lamp on a mirror situated close to my bed.  I opened my bags and withdrew my make-up kit.  Years ago, when working undercover in narcotics, I had learned about disguises, about make-up, and about the benefits of passing close to suspects: the blessings of anonymity.  I did not wish to eat Father Prado's rather ordinary dinner of rice and beans.  I decided to eat a very nice dinner at the old Hilton Hotel, off Willamette Street and 6th.

    I became an affluent gentleman, with greying hair; I wore thin wire frame glasses.  A nice blue suit with a velvet handkerchief.  I cut my hair much shorter than I usually wore it.  A thin black mustache.

    I certainly looked different.

    It was not enough to look different when one assumed a false disguise; one must become that person, develop for that person a walk, a manner, a personality.  For disguise was more than surface change.  Disguise was re-creation.

 

I walked the few blocks to the Hilton Hotel.  I carried my .45 caliber pistol in a holster under my left arm (I am right-handed).  The Hilton had its own security force which kept undesirables away from the customers.  I smiled accommodatingly as I passed through the front door.  I was seated near a window, looking out on Sixth Street.

    I ordered prime rib, shrimp salad, and a glass of burgundy. 

    There were beautiful women in the dining room; and men trying to be glib.  I had not been to the Hilton for years.  An old school-mate,  Evelyn Lovato, was the cocktail waitress.  She served me the burgundy.  She did not recognize me.  We talked for several minutes: I told her I was visiting from Seattle.  That I sold an accounting system which I had created in my firm in Seattle.  That I was visiting Richardson's Apparel in order to introduce the system to Eugene. 

    The disguise apparently was effective.  She left without any apparent suspicion that I was the same shy man who had attended, with her, St. Joseph's grade school.

 

I ate the dinner quite slowly.  I waited.  At about 9:30 the two men I was hoping to see entered the dining room.  I recognized them from the photographs I had printed earlier in the day.  They sat together, across the room.  They drank wine, quietly.  I ate my prime rib, also quietly.  I read from the book of poems by Dylan Thomas which I always carried in my overcoat pocket.

    At about 10:45 the men rose from their table, paid their bill.  I followed them and paid my own bill.  Anton Shafes moved with an almost effeminate quality, rhythmical, intense.  I could feel his tension across the room.  He bought a newspaper.  He and Stark waited for the elevator. 

    I crossed the lobby to the hotel desk.  I asked for a room for two nights; I told the clerk that I had been married in Eugene, and had spent my honeymoon in room 272.  I wondered if it might be possible to have that room again.  For sentimental reasons.  He checked.  Yes, it was possible.

    Shafes and Stark had disappeared.  I walked up the stairs to room 272.  I walked by 273 on my way to my room: the door was closed.  I entered my own room.  I surveyed the room quickly; then I turned out the lights and opened my door slightly, locking it with the bronze chain.  I would bring back electronic equipment the next day: it might be possible to eavesdrop on Shafes and Gaetti.  The Bostic brothers had developed very sophisticated listening devices which worked off pipes and used water in the pipes as a conductor of sound.

    I opened the drapes and looked down on the streets of Eugene.  The town was active: people moved through the lighted streets; the guards kept the vagabonds away from the entrance to the hotel.  Across the street a group of men had gathered.  They would be scattered by the guards if they became too loud, or aggressive. 

    Eugene seemed small, looking down from the second floor.  Many of the downtown buildings were dilapidated, and had become the home to many of the homeless.  It was fairly tame downtown, because the police still operated in the downtown district: the further west you went the less the police had jurisdiction.

 

At midnight I left the hotel.  I walked back toward the church.  I would need to rise early to catch the caravan the next morning.

    I checked my computer.  The technician had done his work.  There was a message waiting for me:

 

         "GTR18:22.  CODE RED ALARM.  Personal.  Isolation requirement.

         Transmissions vacant.  Dockett in transit: Seattle, Portland, Eugene.

         Nicoletti.  We consider you in personal danger and recommend you

         apply immediately for recommission in country."

 

I could not longer visit the Bostics.  They were moving their headquarters.  They could still receive transmissions.  But I could not visit them.

    I needed help for the next day.  I made a direct transmission to the Bostic headquarters. 

 

         "ACCESS NOMINAL.  I am ate early and looked for words in the woods.

         Found TSWE doc at parlance IE early to swoon.  Hero's wrath is easily

         carted and twice Melas heard the vacant animosities of essential mirrors.

         The armored nations come forward and accord some vice-roy a carton of

         expensive cigars for his rune: poison running in the season.  Read urns

         that same day but do not write sure pension.  Help is given by the arch-

         angel alone, when time vanishes, and identities become mobil."

 

I continued:

 

         "ACCESS SCRIPT. Identify the odyssey of the white wraith.  Ask him if

         he can picture me standing over him, wearing clean cowboy boots, smiling.

         The id is twice righteous: ego perhaps twice ruined in the police mile.

         Transmission of welfare code.  Picture this: TgS.  Oddest vents in the

         car make visiting possible daily.  The armistice is signed only after the

         paradigm is discover.  And made raw.  Rations truly arrive, only for the sake

         of August tents.  Salvation has dual scripts; memories harbor the ruinous

         crypt and haunt the family, and so must not soar."

 

I had trust in the Bostics' ability to comprehend poetry.  The welfare code was a fraternal euphemism for prison.  I needed official orders passed by wire authorizing Dennis August to visit Armistice Nations in Salem.  This could be done easily through the Bostics' link with the government mainframe.  I would have used a false name, but the system automatically checked to see if the "named" was official.  I would have used Green's name, but Green was well-known in the region.  I worried that my use of Dennis August's name might harm him in some way; the Bostics' could enter the record that night and then erase all memory concerning Dennis.  The last line of the poem I sent the Bostics instructed them to discard the authorization.  (The Bostics could appreciate my poetry even if the general public considered it mainly unrecognizable gibberish.)

 

I would sleep.  I had ID's for my trip to visit Armistice Nations in Salem.  Things would be clearer in the morning.

        

   

PART V.

 

August 19, AM, Friday--2073.

First Odyssey

 

I.

 

I awoke early Friday morning.  I spent nearly an hour preparing myself to become Hercules Roth.  I had a suit of clothes (a brown suit, with a double-breasted coat) which mimicked Hercules Roth's taste.  I wore a small dress hat, with a small red feather in the band, similar to the one Roth wore. 

    I dressed and left the church with my make-up kit in a travel bag.  I had a change of clothes, for when I became Detective Sergeant August.  I wore a '45 under my left arm, and carried a '44 snub-nose in my travel bag.  I hoped I would not need them.  It was a felony to impersonate another citizen.  Night cops were allowed to commit felonies, under most circumstances.  However, if everything I seemed to believe was, in fact, true, I had lost my privileges.  If I were arrested I would be signing my death warrant.

 

Across the street from the church, parked in the shade, was a newer model Cutlass, light brown, with modified fans in back.  It would be a similar make to what Hercules Roth drove.  The license plate read NEM 111.  The Bostics had received my message of the night before, in which I asked for them to provide me with "Hero's wrath carted" (Hercules Roth's car) and "essential mirrors" (license plates), at 8 AM early.  "Twice melas heard" indicated that my destination would be Salem (melas backward), twice (round-trip); heard (herd) indicated I would be traveling by caravan.

    On the floor under the driver's seat was the eavesdropping packet I had requested in my message the night before: the Bostics called the mechanism "the Vice-Roy."

 

I drove my car to the main departure station, east of the Ferry Street Bridge.  Cars and licenses were checked.  Photographs and license numbers were projected on a screen at the access gate.  The gateman looked at the ID, the computer screen, at me, ok'd the ID.  The license plates matched.  I was allowed to proceed.

    It was Friday.  Friday was a heavy travel day, as many people would leave on Friday to spend a weekend in neighboring towns.  There were walkers at the gate.  A driver had the right to either give the walkers a lift or decline.  The walkers waited at a boarding station and asked cars as they passed.  I declined.  I counted about sixty cars, and buses and trucks in the caravan. 

    I waited for about an hour before the traffic started to unwind out of town.  The lead car was armored.  Several cars in the pack were manned by national guardsmen.  Travelers were encouraged to carry firearms for protection.  It was generally safe to travel in caravan.  It had been years since a caravan had been hit; and none had been reported hit after the war ended.

 

The drive was smooth, relatively slow.  It was nice to get out of the city again.  We passed up the old interstate through the narrow Willamette Valley, into fertile farm land which was now owned by groups of farmers who had formed collectives for the sake of protection.  Small villages were situated on the farm land.  The villages were armed, for there were many bands of robbers living in the hills, as well as political radicals bent on redistribution of plots of land to the urban poor.  One group had as its political fore-father a man named Ho Chi Minh, who had led a war against the United States in Asia in the late 1900's.  They were a small band, without much influence.

    All throughout the state, in the rural areas, these "tribes" had grown together for self-protection.  This made the countryside very dangerous, as each tribe had divided up land to itself and treated intruders with requisite rudeness. 

    We drove on.

   

The Bostics had created a computer program which automatically transposed letters in words to sift through codes sent to them.  These "decoded" messages then could be checked against the file of the agent who sent them.  So, for example, the code I sent the night before would be checked word by word:

 

    "I-am ma-ate tae eat tea-early erlya yearl leary...."

 

When each "potential" word was recast, the message was "applied" to a specific file, to look for matches.  Hence: "melas" became "salem."  IE was the file code of the case I undertook for Hercules Roth.  "Returns that same day" is obvious, of course (the Bostics understand my poetry, as I said).  TSWE: transmission sent week earlier found "Paul Dockett at parlance" with city officials in the region.  "Vacant animosities of essential mirrors": lack of license plates for my journey.  "Armistice Nations," of course.  "Identities become mobil" tells them that I have moved and am living under an assumed identity.

    Any series of words can be matched and mixed for possible reference.  Also, the program could call up "sound alikes" to any specified phrase.  Thus, "August tents" could be sound analyzed, relative to my file, to find its match: August Dennis.

   

ACCESS SCRIPT indicates that a message (or action) which must be completed by the Bostics themselves, altering exiting government documents.  ACCESS NOMINAL indicates that "names" are the key to the code.  My message earlier in the day, beginning INSU TEK SABLE indicated to them that the nature of the message was technical (TEK), installation (Install Urgent).  An alternative would be INSO: Install Options, or add to an existing system; another alternative: INSA: Install As Soon As Possible; or INSE: Install Elements, which indicates broken equipment.  SABLE, or ables, enables, merely informed the Bostics of a need to start up at new location: BASIK installation.

    "ACCESS SCRIPT. Identify" indicated to the Bostics that an official identity in the government vaults needed to be altered.  "Alter the official ID of Hercules (Odysseus) Roth (the white wraith).  The code name I gave Roth during my investigation of Roth's wife was, indeed, "the White Wraith."  This was, of course, in the Bostic file on me.  The "id is twice righteous," with whatever prophetic meaning it may contain, also informs the brothers of a second maneuvering being required: the ID of Sergeant August Dennis (Oddest vents) must also be altered to contain my face.

 

The government did not have the program which the Bostics had created.  The brothers had the only copy.  Our whole system of thought would be broken should the de-cipherer ever fall into general distribution.

 

II.

 

I drove on.  The roads were not well-treated.  Travel tended to be slow. 

 

I thought of Armistace Nations.  He had been a friend of mine.  We had been close, initially, when he began working for Narcotics.  He had been hired on my recommendation.  We worked in the same division for about a year; then, he was transferred to the northern division, to work with Nicoletti, Crane and Mastrogiovanni.

    I considered him my friend, although I hardly knew him.  He had a wife, somewhere; they had been separated by the war.  He had never found her again.  He rarely talked about himself.  He was quiet, a good listener.  He was a very good agent; when he was released from the department, he drifted north.  I lost touch with him.  I heard later that he had been arrested.  Everything had come apart after the department broke us up.

    As I drove toward Salem I pictured Armistace Nations dead.  If he were not dead, then my scenario might be incorrect.  Everything pointed to my initial reading of the Crane murder: yet, how could I see it all so quickly.  Again, the distinction between sight (or vision) and logic.  One is instantaneous, and cannot be explained.  The other is gradual: the solution of the jigsaw.

    I was not even sure why I was driving to Salem.  Perhaps to satisfy my need to know; perhaps to warn Armistace Nations if he were still living.  But what could he do: he was in a frozen world, unable to flee, unable even to defend himself.  And what if I told him that his old partners were being killed, one-by-one: what could I expect from him?  I could expect from him some insight into who might be behind this: what relation Dockett played to this, what he knew about Green or Shafes.  He must know something; he must have uncovered something incriminating to someone during his tenure with the narcotics division.  I was traveling to Salem to pick Nation's brain, before he was killed on the prison grounds.  Yes.  I could not save Armistace Nations.  Perhaps I could save myself, solve the puzzle (even I, with such quick glimpses of primary cause, even I  assembled the jigsaw, piece-by-piece).

 

We arrived in Salem at about 12:30.  Once inside the city, cars broke apart from their brethren like pearls from a necklace.  A scattering occurred.  You could almost hear it.  Chaotic ritual: something breaking.  Organization ruined.  For freedom, when restrained too long, become explosive.  Clattering across the floor of the city, the necklace broken, each pearl again freed.

    I drove to the Salem Motor Inn, near downtown.  I got a room, showered, and became Detective Dennis.

 

I drove to the prison, which was situated on the north end of town, near the river.  It was a new building, huge, built after the war and intended to house criminals from all of Oregon.  There was much crime so there was an expansive need for prisons.

    When I presented my papers to visit Armistice Nations I was not allowed entrance.  They recognized my orders, and my ID.  They did not allow me to visit with Nations however, because an A Code Standing Order did not allow Nations outside contact.  I appealed to the warden's aide (the warden was not available).  He asked me in to his office.  He quietly informed me that A Code Standing Orders could not be put aside except by government decree, with the Governor General's signature.

    I told him that Nation's testimony might be vital to my investigation: I was investigating a Mexican Government official's infiltration of the Oregon hillside communities for the purposes of drug trafficking.  He was understanding.  Could I visit with his cell-mate then?  He had no cell-mate.  What?  He had been living in isolation for about 3 months.  Was that normal procedure?  No.  Could I talk with his jailer?  No: that was also covered by the A Code Standing Order.  Could I talk with anyone who might have information about Nations--another prisoner?  Yes.  He thought that would be possible.  A Code A Standing Order did not prohibit discussion with a third party, a non-government official, about the proscribed.  I would appreciate that.  But I would need access to the government screen to access a list of prisoners.  Yes, that would be possible.  We need to support each other's work afterall.

    The warden told a sergeant to allow me a workspace at a terminal and to help with any request which would not violate the standing order.  I was given a desk.  I scanned the list of prisoners.  It was too long.

    I tried to access the record of Armistace Nations:

         "DENIED ACCESS.  Code A Standing Order."

    I tried to access the police record of Nations.  The entire narcotics file was closed.  DENIED ACCESS.  I had a thought.  I accessed the ID FILE.  I tried to access Nations' identification card.  The file loaded.  It pulled up Nations' picture: but it was not Armistace Nations.  It was a black man, about the same age as Nations.  But it was not Nations. 

    The warden had said that Nations had been placed in isolation about 3 months previous.  I accessed the monthly prison movements records.  I went back 5 months, proceeded forward.  I was looking for an announcement of Armistace Nations' movement to isolation.  Nothing.  At 4 months, also nothing.  At 3 months, nothing.  The list of movements was long: each prisoner entering, leaving, having sentences extended or shortened.  At 2 months I found Nations.  The government computers were very weak, poorly designed.  It was not possible to "impound" every document with Nations' name on it, under their system.  The Bostics could have done it. 

    I started down the list of prisoners whose "status" had changed at about the same time as Nations.  Dates were weekly.  I sorted all the dates to look at those who had moved the same time as Nations had moved.  The list was cut down significantly.  I  searched the ID's of each of the prisoners on the list.  I found nothing especially interesting.

    I had assumed, before I began my journey, that Armistace Nations was dead.  I did not expect to find him in his cell in Salem.  I would have liked to find him; but something stronger than speculation was guiding me in my quest.  Some form of coherent murder was moving in its causal certainty. 

    If Nations now had another man's face, another man's body, then that other man now had Armistace Nations' sentence perhaps.  If Nations were dead, but assumed living, then another man must be assumed dead, but living in solitary confinement: the man who wore Nations' face now.

 

I searched the medical records during the month in question.  I sorted by deaths.  Six deaths:

    Conrad Heater

    Damon Markowski

    Rickie Moore

    Howard Ruff

    Thomas Sealer

    Adam Thomas.

 

I loaded the ID file of each man.  The first man was black, but he was not the new Armistace Nations.  The next two men were white.  I loaded the ID file on Howard Ruff.  Yes: Howard Ruff was the new Armistace Nations.  I loaded the file on Howard Ruff.  Ruff had been imprisoned on attempted murder and drug smuggling charges.  I looked for arresting officers: yes, Nations, Crane, Mastrogiovanni, Menotti.  He had been sentenced to 70 years for trying to kill the arresting officers during a drug arrest.  He had wounded Menotti during the arrest.

    I remembered Menotti's being wounded.

    I asked the sergeant if I could visit with Howard Ruff, #82-737.  He looked at me and smiled.

    "Ruff died a couple of months ago."

    "What of?" I asked.

    "Brain hemorrhage, I think it was."

    "Oh."

    "He was beaten to death in the shower."

 

So, Ruff had killed Armistace Nations (beat him to death in the shower) and had received a new identity in the process.  Instead of serving seventy years (without parole: there was no parole in a crime involving violence against a police officer), he would serve Nations' sentence, probably receive parole in a matter of months.  He would be forced to leave the region perhaps; perhaps he would be given even a third identity upon release.  Identities were very easy to come by now apparently.  Even myself: I was moving in someone else's clothes, someone else's name. 

    The new regime, if it had done nothing else, had made it particularly easy for its citizens to become someone else, someone unthought of.  Maybe that was its contribution afterall.   They had spoken of individuality as being the great crime, a manner of illness.  They had been the doctor who had prescribed a cure for this sickness.  I thought: committing a murder would be more easily done while being an imposter, while dressed in another man's coat.  Yes.

   

I loaded Ruff's file and tried to find a local address.  There was none.  A wife?  Divorced: living in Seattle.  I looked for an arrest record: he had been arrested in Eugene.  I looked for accomplices: he had been arrested at the home of a Silencia Ortega in Eugene.  A love interest?  She had not been charged.

    Perhaps she had followed him here, to make it easier to visit him.

    I loaded the directory: looked up Silencia Ortega. 

    823 Chetko Lane NE.  Salem.

    It was something at least.

    "Are you finding what you need?" the sergeant asked.

    "Yes, I am.  Thanks you for your help."

    Something nagged at me.  "It would be easier to commit a murder"....the thought had entered my mind.  No thought was idle, meaningless. 

    I loaded the ID file on Angela Crane.  She was a proud woman, brown-blonde hair; yet, she was somehow tired, while still beautiful.  Something was missing.  I looked in my wallet for the photograph I had printed of Angela Crane from the video file of the Crane murder investigation.  I held the picture of Angela Crane up to the ID on the screen.  Their facial structure was different.  They had different atmospheres, different bearings.  Angela Crane was an aristocrat.  The woman at the killing was an imposter, dressed in Angela Crane's clothing.

    Angela Crane had not been with her husband when he was murdered.  And if Angela Crane had been an imposter, then might David Crane, himself, have been an imposter?  What if Crane was, indeed, working for his father-in-law--and needed to drop from sight?  What better way than to stage a murder? 

    What was true?  What was really true?

 

    "I'm going to get some coffee.  Would you care for something?" the Sergean asked.

    "No, thanks.  I think I'll go out for something to eat.  I'll probably be back in an hour or so."

    "Ok."

    That was that.

 

III.

 

I drove to 823 Chetko Lane NE.  It was in the north of Salem, in what used to be Keizer, before it was incorporated.  It once was a nice residential area.  The houses now were run-down.  It was a rough sort of barrio, with eye-sore trailer houses pushed up against each other in the open areas.  The houses in the neighborhoods once were beautiful upper-middle class homes.  That was before the blight. 

    I touched my automatic weapon under my arm as I got out of the car.  There were several middle-aged Mexican men standing near the house.  They were laughing, speaking in bastard Spanish.  They spoke rudely, the mother tongue, as I walked by.  I felt very uncomfortable leaving my car in the street.  These were rough men, prison-dwellers.  I knocked on the door at 823 Chetko Lane.  There were noises coming out of the house.

    A man opened the door, a Mexican man, with a cigarette in his mouth.  He was drinking a beer.

    "What do you want?" he asked.

    "I want to speak to Silencia Ortega," I said.

    "You and everyone else.  Take a number, man."

    I looked in the room.  Three other men were sitting in the dark living room, drinking beer.

    "Silencia's got company today," one of the men said from within the house.  The other men laughed. 

    I took my wallet out of my pocket and showed a badge to the man at the door.

    "I want you men out of here.  This is police business.  If a friend of yours is in with Silencia, I want him out too."

    "Get him out yourself!"  The man at the door was poised to fight.

    The other men got up and moved toward us.  I drew my gun from inside my coat and put the barrel against the man's forehead.  "I'd just as soon kill you as talk to you.  I could waste every one of you and the judge would give me a commendation."

    The man stared into my eyes.  He tried to see if I was serious, if I would show fear.  (There was a killer in me.  I had found him during the war.  He was a very serious person who understood preeminently that to kill another who would kill you is a high virtue.  I showed him the killer inside me.  He backed down.) 

    The man said something in Spanish.  One of the other men went into the house.  I could hear him knock on a door.  There was shouting.  More Spanish.  A man came out, undressed.  "What the fuck you want, man!"

    "Put on your clothes and and tell Silencia that I want her dressed and out here in two minutes.  If you've got a gun in there you better leave it behind, or I'll blow your friend's brains out."

    He hurried back inside.

    The man at the door stood staring at me, with hatred, Mexican hot-blooded revenge-filled hatred: this man had killed other men, not at war, but in pleasure, in passion.  It was his way.  He prided himself in his ability to cause pain in others.  I could see it in his eyes.

    Silencia appeared, dressed only in a night shirt.  "What do you want, mister?" 

    "You come with me."

    "You should know better than to come out here, gringo."  The man with the barrel of the gun against his head was becoming agitated.

    "What do you want?" Silencia demanded.

    "Police," I said to Silencia Ortega.  "I want to talk to you about Howard Ruff."

    "What about Howard!"

    "Come with me."

    "Let me get dressed."

    "Come with me now."

    She walked with me.  I put the gun in the Mexican man's back; we walked back to the street.  I kept him between myself and the other men standing in the door of the house.  The half-dressed man had not come back.  I expected that he was armed.  There was a very good chance we would be shooting before I could get out of here.  A crowd had gathered, in the street.  People called to Julio.  The man I was threatening was named Julio.  He spoke slurs in Spanish.  I told Silencia to get in the back seat.   I commanded Julio to get in the front seat, from the driver's side.  He pressed his chest against me, considering refusal.  I said: "At this range the best you could hope for would be paralysis.  How'd you like to be paralyzed for the rest of your life, Julio?  Which one of your friends would be willing to feed you and wipe your ass for you, Julio?"

    He backed down, got in the car.  We drove off.  The crowd followed us, shouting, throwing an occasional rock, for about a block and a half.  Then we were out on the main road again, out of the barrio. 

    "I'll get you for this, man," Julio said quietly.

    "I didn't want to have to threaten you, Julio.  Only I've got a job to do.  You tried to keep me from doing my job."

    "What about Howard Ruff?" Silencia asked from the back seat.

    I pulled over on the shoulder of the road.

    "Get out," I said to Julio.

    He cursed me in Spanish.  "I never forget a face," he said, through the open window.

    I drove away.  I drove for about a half-mile.  I saw a park: "Is that park safe?" I asked Silencia Ortega.

    "Yes," she answered.

    I parked the car.  We walked.

   

She met Howard Ruff after the war.  He was much older than she was.  He took care of her.  Was she a prostitute then?  She had been a prostitute since she was thirteen.  A girl has to make a living.  She didn't have a father working every day, bringing home a paycheck.  Her mother was a prostitute.  Her mother expected her to help with the "chores". 

    What did she know about Ruff now?  She didn't know anything.  They wouldn't let her visit him at the prison any longer.  They told her he had died in a prison fight.  She didn't believe it.  There was something strange about it all.

    Had he ever spoken about Paul Dockett?

    No.

    Boone Riley?

    Yes.  They had visited Riley once, in the hills outside of Detroit.  Riley had an army of men working for him.  Adam Klamus visited Riley and wanted some of his men to be with him. 

    Ruff worked for Klamus?

    He did at the time.  Was Howard Ruff really dead?

    No.  He was in solitary confinement.  How long did he work for Klamus? 

    For years.  But he didn't work for Klamus directly.  He worked for a man named Connolly, who was killed in the drug wars.  Before that he worked for a man named Crane.

    Crane?

    Yes.

    David Crane?

    Yes, David Crane.

 

We were standing beneath a series of cyprus trees in a park in suburban Salem.  She was wearing a very thin shirt, as thin as gauze.  I could see her breasts through her shirt.  She was only wearing panties, nothing on her legs, no shoes.

    I apologized for dragging her out of her house.

    "You shouldn't cross Julio.  He's crazy," she said.

    She was very attractive, black-haired, very sensuous.  Her breasts were ripe inside her shirt, almost pulsing.

    "What do you know about David Crane?"

    "Not much.  Howard worked for him right after the war."

    "Who else was with them?"

    "Cory Roman."

    "What happened to them?"

    "Howard broke with Crane and Roman.  Roman and Crane were friends.  They were breaking apart from Klamus.  Howard knew it was crazy to cross Klamus.  So he went with Klamus."

    I felt embarrassed.  "I'd buy you lunch or something, if you were dressed."

    She smiled.

    "You wouldn't let me get dressed."

    "Yes.  I'm sorry."

    "What about Howard?"

    "Howard killed a friend of mine, Armistace Nations, in prison.  As a reward, he was declared dead and given the identity of Armistace Nations and his prison sentence.  They say Nations is in isolation; actually, Ruff killed Nations in the shower, I'm certain of it.  Ruff is in isolation, waiting to be released."

    She seemed unfazed.

    "What happened to Crane after that?"

    "He went with Paul Dockett I think.  He married Dockett's wife."

    "He was a cop, wasn't he?"

    "Yeah.  A double agent.  He worked for both sides."

    "How do you know that?"

    "That's what Howard told me."

    "And what about his wife?"

    "I don't know anything about her."

 

We sat at a picnic table.

    "Did you know that Crane was killed this week, in Eugene?"

    "No.  Who killed him?"

    "I don't know.  I thought Dockett did it."

    "Why would Dockett kill him?"

    "Why not?  Wasn't he a double agent?"

    "I don't know: that's what Howard said."

    I was confused.  I wondered if it had even been Crane who had been killed.  I wondered if anyone had been killed.  Or if the whole thing was a ruse.  No, Menotti and Nations had been killed.  At least Menotti had been killed.  In an accident.  I wondered if I was seeing things clearly.

    "Did you ever visit Cory Roman?"

    She blushed.  "I used to be Cory Roman's girl," she said.  "Cory found me at my mama's house and took me away with him."

    "After the war."

    "Yes."

    "How long were you with him?"

    "Three years."

    "In the woods?"

    "Yes."

    "If I wanted to go looking for Cory Roman, how would I find him?  Could you take me to meet him?"

    "No.  We broke up.  I left him for Howard.  He didn't treat me so good."

    "So, how could I find him?"

    "I wouldn't if I were you."

    "If I did, where would I go?"

    "You could go to his fort."

    "Where is it?"

    "It's a secret."

    "Is it?"

    "Yes, even for you.  I may like you, but that doesn't mean I'll tell you everything.  Are you really a cop?"

    "A night cop.  I used to work with David Crane, in narcotics."

    "And now?"

    "Now I work for myself."

    She was silent.

    "So, how would I get there?"

    "I can't explain how to get there.  I can draw you a map, if you have some paper."

    I gave her a notebook I carried in my shirt pocket.  She drew.  She made small notes on the edges.

    "Your paper's too small."

    "Write on the next pages too."

    She continued to draw.

    She handed me the book.  "I wouldn't go there though, if I were you.  If he doesn't ask you to come you shouldn't come.  He's crazy.  He thinks he's God."

    I put the notebook back in my pocket.

    "Yeah.  That's a problem, isn't it."

 

"I should take you home.  Do you need something, some money?  Let me pay you."

    "You haven't done anything," she protested, smiling. 

    "You're very attractive.  There's no question about that.  No wonder your house is full of men."

    She laughed, and skipped to the car. 

    "Take me to my sister's house," she told me.  "Julio will be waiting for you at my house.  He and his brothers.  They're all crazy.  You don't want to get started with them."

    I took her to her sister's house.  I gave her some money.  She thanked me.  She thanked me for the information about Ruff.  "You've made me happy, what you told me about Howard.  I knew he wasn't dead."

    "Take care of yourself," I said.

    "Come see me some time," she said, looking through the window.  "If you let me know you're coming I'll be alone and we can do something together."

    "Ok," I said.  "The next time I'm in Salem...."

    She skipped up the walk to her sister's house.

 

What had I learned?  I had learned that Crane had a mysterious life, more mysterious than I had wanted to assume.  I had learned that a beautiful Mexican woman still could have a strange power over me.  I had learned nothing about Armistace Nations, nothing I could not have learned sitting at my computer.  But I did have something now: I had a map.  I had been handed a key, which I might need to use, should the puzzle I was assembling prove to lead me where I believed and feared it was leading me.

 

I drove back to the motel.  I would need to prepare to return to Eugene: the caravan left at 6:00.  I drove past the motel slowly, looking in to the courtyard to see if any activity or lack of activity might suggest some suspicious behavior.  I wondered if the police had discovered my true identity; perhaps men were waiting in my room.

    I parked the car about a half-block away and walked back to the motel.  I stopped in the alley, stood on a cinderblock to look through my bathroom window.  I could see through the bathroom window, into the main room.  The room seemed empty.  I walked in to the courtyard and entered the room by the door.  Everything was fine.  I re-became Hercules Roth and joined the entourage and began the uneventful return trip to Eugene.

 

 

IV.

 

There is some pregnancy in all of this: waiting, knowing something is about to happen.  I'm not sure that it is birth about to happen.  Yet, when one becomes too old for one world, he is pushed into the next, a child, as feeble as a child, with new rules to learn (new elements of survival), for each new world is composed of new elements which make that world distinct from its predecessor. 

    I felt as though I should be paying my bills, or selling my furniture, or at least contacting Amy, explaining what was occurring.  All I could think of was my arsenal at the church.  Would I be able to get there in time?  What about my supplies?  The map in my shirt pocket was symbolically real also: a key which was as much a set of directions as it was an abstract rendering of something remote and curiously malignant.

   

I sat in my room at the Hilton Hotel.  My lights were off, the curtains open.  I had set up the Vice-Roy in the bathroom, under the sink, to channel sounds from one room to the next, through the water in the pipes.  Shafes and Stark were gone.  The world out the window seemed essentially naked and harsh.  That was odd: it was not how I usually saw the world.  Something stark had come in, no pun intended: the photograph had been bleached of all color, and now was composed only with light and light's absence, steely sharp acceleration of polar composition.  Fear.  Perhaps it was fear coming on.  No, even more than fear.  It was danger.  Danger was coming close to me; and I was becoming dangerous also.  It was that other person in me, the one who had fought wars and had not succumbed to feelings when the battle began, but who had crushed the poet, or elevated him: I know not which.  Something (some being) rose up inside me, poet or god or demon, or man stripped to essential nakedness: ready to battle something cold and inappropriate, but fearsome and accustomed to acquisition.

    I knew a war was at hand.  I stood near the window, wearing my accountant's disguise, my small glasses and my mustache.  It was comical.  To be another man you truly must be him.  I was no longer the small man selling accounting systems.  I was a man standing alone in a dark room, unable to visit or call the woman he loved, unable to return to his home, unable to walk down the street in his own clothes and humor.  Unable to speak to friends; unable to write obscure poetry which had been received so well by the literati of Portland and Seattle, making him the most famous night cop in all of Twenty-First Century American Northwest Literature.  Everything was gone.  There was a fire in my stomach.  It was almost nausea.  I was waiting: waiting to light a fire in the night, which might consume my world: I knew not how or when or the means exactly, but something fatal was at hand, something irreversable, something moving toward me with the same resolute calm and speed as I was moving toward it.

 

 

V.

 

I slept a light sleep.  I heard Shafes and Stark come in.  I had left my door ajar, with only the chain latched, so I could hear any movement in the hallway.  Shafes came up first.  I listened at the Vice-Roy (it worked with a device similar to a doctor's stethascope, yet it contained memory chip "enhancers", and could be tuned to exclude background, or enhace it).  He turned on the water in the bathroom.  He was playing a radio.

    I listened for maybe 15 minutes.  Then the phone rang.  The water was turned off.  He must have been bathing.  I could hear him answer the phone:

    "Yes."

    "He'll be back shortly"

    "Everything looks fine."

    "Yes, we'll take our time."

    "Yah, keep in touch with us."

 

I sat with my back against the bathtub, in the dark.  I waited.  The water came on again.  About ten minutes later, Stark returned. 

    "Was he home?" Shafes asked.

    "Yeah.  All the lights are on.  The whole family's home."

    "I don't like involving the whole family."

    "Well, this will make it look like an accident.  That's what they want: an accident."

    "You've got the gas?"

    "Yeah, it's in the car.  The house'll go up like a bottle rocket.  How stupid can a man be--keeping a gas tank in the back of his house..."

    "Are you sure no one saw you there?" Shafes asked.

    "No.  No one."

    "And you're sure he's home: you're sure it's not just his family."

    "Yeah.  I saw him through his front window.  Fat Italian bastard."

 

Shafes laughed.  Stark laughed even louder.  Stark was also Italian.  It was Joe Mastrogiovanni.  He kept a underground gas tank behind his house.  He thought it was a secret.  Too many people knew.

 

"Any word on our poet?"

    "No," Stark said.  "Green can't find anything on him.  We got streamers out.  Green's convinced he's a prime suspect in Crane's murder.  He'll surface.  They all do.  Sanchez will be easy."

    "We'll wait awhile for that," Shafes said.  "We can take our time."

   

"Well, are you ready?" Shafes asked.

    "Yes.  No time like the present."

    Someone ran some water in the bathroom.  Then the door.  I could hear them walking down the hallway.

 

There was a phone in my room.  I called Joe Mastrogiovanni.  Robin, his daughter answered.

    "Robin, this is a friend of your dad's, Max Clark.  Get your dad on the phone for me."

    "Dad's in the bathroom."

    "It's an emergency, Robin.  Tell him it's an emergency.  I have to talk to him in the next 10 seconds."

    "Ok.  Just a second."

    There was noise in the background.  Nothing.  I could hear Robin calling to him through the bathroom door:  "Dad, it's Max Clark.  He says he has to talk to you in the next 10 seconds.  He says it's an emergency."

    Nothing.

    "He says he has to talk with you now, dad!"

    Nothing.

    God dammit, get your fat ass out here!

    Nothing.

    "Robin!"

    Nothing.

    "Robin!"

    Nothing

    "God dammit, you fat bastard, get your ass out here!"

    Still nothing.

    The great void.  The clock ticking.

    "Hello.  What is it Max?"

    "God dammit, Joe.  It's a goddamned emergency!  You know about Crane?"

    "Yes."

    "You heard about Menotti getting hit in Seattle.  Armistace Nations was killed in prison.  Joe, there's some stooges coming to your house to hit you right now!  It's something about our narc team.  I used the Vice-Roy on them--I'm at the Hilton.  They're gonna kill you and me and Sanchez: everyone on the narc team."

    "What's this all about, man!"

    "Get your family out of the house now!  Take them somewhere safe!  Then get your ass underground!  Do you know anyone out in the woods?"

    "I don't know."

    "They're gonna set your gas tank on fire.  But you can't stop them, Joe--because they're state-proof.  There's something strange going on with Paul Dockett.  He's involved in all of this. I heard them say that they'd hit you and Sanchez and me.  Get your ass out of there, then call Sanchez and Merritt and Grubb.  Tell them to go under.  Nicoletti's vanished.  Do you understand me, Joe.  This is goddamned serious!"

    "Ok, Max.  Ok."

    "They're willing to kill your family.  They're mean, Joe.  So get your family somewhere, then go under.  Get lost!"

    "Ok, Max.  Ok."

    "Go now!"

 

The phone went dead.

 

I grabbed my satchell, stuffed everything into it, the Vice-Roy included; I hurried down the hall and out the side door.  I took the steps down. 

    I had parked a couple of blocks away.  I would go to Mastrogiovanni's house.  I would see what they were doing--and make sure Joe was gone.

 

There were no dreams anymore.  Everything was real now.  Everything was made for serious movement and extreme concentration now.  The city wore a shroud.  And the gods would eat their children, not for pleasure; rather, because of duty.

   

 

 

VI.

 

I drove to Almedan and 6th Street, where Joe lived.  The Blair Neighborhood: run-down, but still a neighborhood.  The people were close.

    I drove by Joe's house: lights were still on.  I looked at the cars parked on the street.  About a block away there was a man sitting in a car.  I passed him.  I looked at him.  He was shielding his face.  It was Shafes.  Stark did the dirty work.  He might be in the house.  He might be in the backyard.

    I drove on, turned the corner, sped away, then stopped.  I parked the car about a half-block away from their house.  Their house was an old two-story Victorian.  The whole family had worked together to refurbish the house.  That happened several years ago, after his dismissal from the force.  He had worked doing clean-up work at the Daily Register after that: janitorial stuff.  Then he got a job driving a truck for the Eugene paper.

    I closed my door quietly.  I walked around the back side of the block.  I came through the back yard behind Mastrogiovanni's house.  I stood near the hedge and tried to focus my eyes.  Perhaps he was in Joe's house.  I couldn't see him in the back yard.  Then I heard him.  Something snapped.  I smelled gasoline.  Stark was pumping gasoline on to the back of the house.  I tried to get through the hedge, but there was a chain fence beyond the vegetation.  I'd have to find another way into the yard; or jump the fence.  If I did this Stark would hear me.

    As I turned to leave the backyard I heard something behind me.  I crouched.  There was someone in the driveway behind me.  I saw a shadow against the garage.

    I heard a match being struck: a small light.  Then the backyard exploded with light.  I fell to the ground, my gun drawn.  The man peered around the house.  The light was in his face.  It was Anton Shafes.  He raised his gun to fire at me.  I could only see half of his face, and his extended left arm.  I fired three times at his chest.  He fell.

 

The house behind me exploded with heat.  The whole house was burning.  The backyard was burning.  The garage was burning.  I moved toward Shafes, ready to fire again.  I saw his blood on the house: I realized I'd hit him.  I ran by him, toward the street.  If Stark had heard the shots (and he must have heard the shots), he would be coming toward me.  The police would be on the way.  I could see my own car.  I could walk to it.  But I felt Stark near.  I stopped by the corner of the house near to my car.

    A car pulled around the corner, lights on.  It stopped at the curb, still running.  Stark got out, stood near the front fender of the car. 

    "Pal, you alright?" he cried.

    I crouched in the shadows.  He didn't want to yell Shafe's name.

    I stood up; I walked toward Stark.

    "Are you ok?"

    I said nothing.  The gun was at my side; but I was ready to fire.  People were shouting, running toward the Mastrogiovanni house.

    "Hurry up, man!" Stark cried. 

    I stepped into the light.

    "Who are you?"

    "Max Clark," I replied.  "I heard you were looking for me."

    He tried to reach his gun.  It was in back of his belt.  I shot once, hitting him in the chest.  He fell against his car, still trying to reach his gun.  Then his huge body slowly slid down to the pavement.  He was sitting upright, leaning his back against the car.  He was still reaching for his gun, fear and anger in his face.  He was too fat to get his gun out.  But he was still dangerous.  I shot him once more as I walked by, moving toward my car.  This time I hit him in the forehead; and he stopped moving.

    The street was alive with people.  Some of them had seen me.  I didn't hurry.  I had nothing to fear.  Everything was clear. 

    I calmly started my car and drove away in the darkness. 

    Everything was done.

 

     

 

PART TWO:

THE WILDERNESS

 

Part One:

There Is No Time Here

 

I.

 

 

There is no time here.  I walk in the land of forefathers and dreams and shadows of the ancient heritage.  I have been here for weeks.  Don't ask me to explain everything.  The shooting; the passing into night, a shadow amid shadows.  The map.  The fire which lit up the world.  It is all behind me; somehow inexact; somehow foreordained.

    There is no Time here.  There is not the division of Dark and Light into Hours and into Minutes and into Seconds.  These are the colors: the divisions.  Between which stand the pillars of the two temples, the Two Giants: Day and Night.  Waking and sleeping.  Dreaming, and dreaming in a different manner.

    You know about the shooting.  I was taught by my father to shoot; as he was taught by his father; as he by his, back to John Clark, Pilot of the Mayflower, and beyond, back to Nicodemus, the first Clark, who gave to Christ his own tomb, went into exile, walked into Europe.

    You know about the shooting.  The night is very cold when you enter it for the first time.  I took the car to the southeast of Eugene, for this is the wealthy section.  Paid soldiers patrol the fringe of the southeast wilderness, keeping the heathen from entering the neighborhoods for booty and rape.  So to leave by the southeast made sense, for the envelope had been pushed back.  We drove at night with no lights.  We drove by the moon: I and my guardian angel.  We drove together.  It is a long story.  I am older now.  I have been walking in the woods for some time now: many seconds, minutes, weeks, even months.

    But there is no Time here.  There is not the sweet decoction of seasons into weeks, into months: colors again.  Today, only the twin giants: Summer and Winter, each with a backside: Autumn, Spring.  By which it shows itself soft, and deft, in a pause between extremities. 

 

I have moved into a cave.  I drove out on the back road out of southeast Eugene.  I drove with no lights and I drove for many miles by the moon.  I knew where I was going.  I met no one.  I covered the car in the daytime, on a side road: I covered it with foliage.  I drove part of another night.  I had supplies in my car.  Weapons.  Munitions.  I have lived out here before; yet, I have lived with others.  I had a map in my pocket; yet I knew not where or why the end of my journey.  Why was I traveling here?  To what end?  Only to flee my captors, my killers?

    Because I had killed two men I could not go back.  The mystery was one part of my brain, the solution of which drove me into the wilderness.  The other part of my brain had no motive, had no solution.  I had cut a cord, I had severed a civilized code.  True, the men had meant to kill me.  Still, this would not be an issue.  I had killed two policemen.  If Lieutenant Green believed I had killed Crane, then he could also believe that I had tried to kill Mastrogiovanni, and had killed Shafes and Gaetti when they attempted to capture me.  I knew how creation worked.  I knew how a lie could be made, and be made to become gigantic, almost true.

    I can walk in the jungle at night and not make noise.  I learned this in the war; earlier, I learned this from my father, when we would hunt deer in the Cascades.  I would learn to walk on air; to be like air, one had to make friends with the woods; then one could absorb it.  To not break twigs and to not scatter dust.  I sometimes walked into the enemies' camp during the war.  I walked into a Canadian captain's tent one night and found him having sex with one of his men.  I killed them both, quietly.  I was an assassin for a time.  I, with four other men, penetrated the enemy lines in southern Washington and lived in their midst, using their guns and ammunition, eating their food, killing them quietly.

    Now I am alone.  Part of me loves this loneliness.  And another part of me feels ancient, oblique.  Sometimes I feel like crying.

 

Day and night.  It is only day and night here.  I am living on the southern perimeter of the territory of the Boxer Clan.  The Boxers are a family who migrated here from California several generations ago.  They originally had come from Tennessee.  They are non-political.  They are what used to be called "white trash"--rural, uneducated, prolific.  They make whiskey and run some drugs too.  There are several hundred men in arms: family, cousins, hangers-on.  I watch them during the day, to make sure they do not walk up on me.  They are highly dangerous.  Their women are mere accessories.  They cook, garden, give their men pleasure.  They are treated with violence by their men. 

    I watched through my binoculars the other day as they brought a wanderer in to their main city.  They have six "cities" set in the valley, all connected by roads and paths.  The city structure is like a wheel.  The main city is the hub.  The sister cities radiate out in all directions, like spokes.

    They brought a man through the woods.  He had been wandering north of their territory.  They fed the man.  They brought their women out to greet him.  They had him fornicate with an older woman in the "town square" (I assume she was a captive woman, an outsider).  They all gathered to watch and to cheer.  When they were finished, they stripped the man, strung him up with ropes between two trees.  Then they ordered the woman who was raped to skin the man alive. 

    I watched this from a hill beyond their city.  I could hear the man's cries all afternoon.  They left him hanging in the trees for over a day.  Then they cut him down, and let the dogs eat him.

 

The Boxer Clan breeds horses, the finest horses in the region.  They have set up their six-city structure so as to encompass four major pasture lands and a corral complex within their city.  They have fought wars over their horses.  They supply the whole region with horses.  They have even made raids on other tribes trying to breed horses, killing their men and women, stealing their horses.  Only the Indians to the north also breed horses.  They and the Boxers have an agreement to limit their trade to specific regions.

    I need a horse.  A car is no good here: there is no gas.  Cars make noise; and noise attracts vermin.  I am watching the Boxer Clan for one reason.  I intend to steal one of their horses; and then to head southeast, to Sun River, to look for Tommy Nicoletti, who is a guard for Cory Roman.

    I have been watching the Boxers for over a week, to try to get a sense of the strengths and weaknesses, in terms of their protection of their assets.  As I said, they have built a stronghold of cities surrounding a large city, within which structure they provide for pastures and corral complexes for their horse industry.  They also have night posts, marked on this map by "ns", night sentries.  These night sentries operate out of bunkers built on hills overlooking the surrounding area.  Sentries walk regular courses throughout the night.  Each sentry position has 6 men each night.  They are not totally disciplined, as one might expect.  The war has been over for some time.  They send out day sentries on horseback into the countryside to try to flush out intruders.  They, generally speaking, are quite secure, and feel quite secure..  If one of their pastures or corrals is penetrated, a gun shot will alert the cities to the danger.  The main city is capable of very quick reponse to any other city, corral or pasture.  However, because they feel so secure, through their force of organization, they are also somewhat undisciplined; therefore, they are vulnerable.

 

 

 

   

In studying the Boxer organization, I have concluded that the weakest seam lies directly south of the territory, in the second corral, which is defended on its northeast end by the main city, and on its south end by the sentry structures, on its east by the fifth city, and on its southwest by the fourth city.  But there is a rather large gap in the defenses at the southwest corner of Corral #2.  The sentries in the south are spread out quite a distance from City #4.  Part of the reason for this is that the terrain in which I am living is very rugged, with very steep descents into the Boxer kingdom.  It would not be possible for an attack by a large force from this direction; nor would it be possible for a large number of horses to be stolen because the ascent would be too steep and the traveling too slow.  But to steal one horse, quietly, would be different.

    The terrain in this region is densely wooded, with baby hills climbing in and out of the sky.  There are small valleys, which the Boxers use for their cities and their pastureland.  The smaller cities on the outskirts are often blocked off from the other cities, by these hills.  The sentry-boxes are in the hills, looking out of the distant land, with the Boxer township to their rear.

 

I learned in the army, especially in my time as a guerilla, that one does not hurry with preparations.  One fights not on the other man's timetable; rather he creates his own timetable, which makes his own survival more probable.

 

I have not talked to another human soul for many weeks.  I hear human sounds coming out of the camps.  The smell of bacon and bread.  Bacon is the best smell.  I have not lit a fire since I came in to the Boxer territory.  I have several caves where I have stashed my weapons and my possessions.  I carry only what I need.  I catch fish and eat it raw.  I eat roots and wild berries.  The Boxers are legendary for their brutality; so I would rather not test them merely in order to experience again the pleasure of fried meat, although it is tempting.

           

 

The most difficult thing in all of this is the thought that my everyday life has ended.  I am in this wilderness now, almost without past: tabula rasa.  It is almost as if all of civilized living is a dream from which I have awakened.  My woman is not here.  My family is not here.  My friends are all gone.  The man I bought my daily paper from is gone--as if in a dream.  And I have no sense that I can get it back.  A dream.  I have the same sense of loss that I sometimes had in the other side of life, in the living dream, as opposed to the dead dream in which I now live, when I awoke from my night's sleep abruptly and was rent from a pleasurable sensation or acquaintance.  I might spend the entire day in a sense of mourning, regretting that I had been cut off from something good, from something suitable.  So I feel now.  I am little more than an animal now.  Except that I do keep my journal.  Yet, since I have lost track of the days, I cannot title each entry in the sense of chronology.  Chronology is gone here.  Weather is here.  Weather is the new chronology.  The seasons.  Time has been reduced to twos and to fours.

 

I will go tonight into the Boxer camp.  It is a new moon.  I have an automatic rifle, a shotgun, and two automatic pistols, a good knife, and a pack hand-mines which I can use if I'm followed.  I have plenty of amunition, although if I provoke a fight I am sure that I will be fighting pursuing Boxers for the rest of my days, for they are quite persistent when crossed.  They hate no one so much as a horse-thief.

    One can see by the map that we are quite close to what used to be major highways.  Vermin live along the edge of these roads, in camps, pillaging where they can, killing one another.  The strength of the Boxers is, in fact, to my advantage: I have moved as close to the chest of these white savages, the Boxers, as I can.  I am surrounded by them, and need not watch my back for the scavengers who nest along Route 58.  The vermin avoid the Boxers like death, giving them wide arc, for they are powerful and ruthless and organized.

 

II.

 

It is evening.  There is a bit of coolness in the wind now, in the evening.  It must be October.  The rains haven't really begun yet, but Winter is not far off.

    I eat my berries and fish and roots.  I think about bacon.  I feel tranquil tonight.  Preparations for violence steadies the mind.  One mistake and I am dead.  I have been here before.

 

I wrote my first poem since I have been out here.  Perhaps I am growing comfortable with my isolation again.  I called it: "There Is Something In the Wind."  I intend to include my poems in this journal.  If someone kills me and finds my journal they will understand that I was not a man-animal.  There is in my something which strives for beauty and order: a soul in me, which longs for flight. 

    Even more, my work ethic is so strong that even in my present state I cannot rest spiritually unless I have been productive in some way on a given day.

 

              *                                                  *                                                                      *

 

THERE IS SOMETHING IN THE WIND

 

There is something in the wind which makes the lion weep and makes the child fragile. 

There is something in the sun which makes the typology of thought apparent to the quizzing franchises. 

There is something in the steeples which makes the bells sound. 

Something in the woman's loins which makes the world blanch. 

There is something in the inheritance of anxieties that makes all humanity one beast of heaven. 

There is something in the lax attitude of the dancer which imperils the doctor's daughter, and entices his      son to acts of valor. 

There is something in the category of knowledge which builds bridges out of the embassy of music. 

Heart building artery building limb building forensic. 

Triplicate incendiary forethought.

And the corpulent building man who exacts a fortune from the wind. 

Although the wind inherits him, too, when the wind becomes frozen and makes snows fall upon his dominance.

 

Horticulture is not for the birds, but it improves the birds. 

Metaphysics is not for the logician, but it saves the logician. 

Sport is not for the self-conceited at learning, but without it they are not complete. 

Sex is not everything, but life without sex is only a shadow of something real.

 

There is something which makes the lion weep, in the wind, but no one who knows is telling what it is. 

For it is a knowledge quite dangerous to forecast. 

A weeping lion has no conscience, afterall. 

And a weeping lion has no need of a non-weeping city, a wind-swept committee, an understanding superior.

There is something in the wind which makes the city weep, makes the night sweep over the town and its reckoning citizens. 

Soon the night will be over. 

Soon the city again will prosper.

 

                    *                                                  *                                                                      *

 

There is no light as I descend into the valley.  I have learned to walk on eggs, I have learned to invoke gods of wind to carry me over the casual and the random.  Smoke.  Smoke in the valley.  Sounds still, even late, even sleepy.  The sentries are opposite me.  They light their pillbox with a small lantern, making a yellow glow in the hill.  I know they are not all in their sentry-boxes.  They go out by twos every half-hour or so.  I saw the last ones leave in the evening.  I am trying to time their noises as I pause.  My ears are much better out here than they were in the city.  They hear too much.  I feel as if I am standing in an orchestra of silence.  Lifting the skin of silence there is a cacophany of non-sounds.  I listen for the footfall of men.  Nothing.  I think I am on time, as I descend.  I make no noise, yet I know that a horse will make noise when it ascends with me, even if I lead it, for its has not evoked the gods of air.  It is no bird.  The sentries, unless they sleep, will hear me.

    The greatest danger to me is not in getting to the horse.  I will get to the horse.  My greatest danger will come in my return.  As if it were not always so.

    If I am heard, I will be chased.  And if I must ride to escape the Boxers I will no doubt enter the landscape of vermin.  Those who kill with random joy, those with no soul, no heritage of hope.

 

The rocks are steady shale, tables of shale, as I pass down through the trees.  It is a new moon.  It is a time to begin journeys.  Owls watch over me.  I hear them in the limbs above.  The great owl, guardian of the man of night, the hunter of night, who must pass into the king's own bedroom, sweep the king's daughter from her bed, proposing marriage.  Feet on stone, on pine-needle, soft non-sound and touch of bone to ground.  I pause, squat.  I move, then listen.  I have all night to pass through the eye of this needle-town.  If I remembered the man being eaten by the dogs I would know fear: I cast out all fear, for it makes the mind spin; a spinning mind makes noise.  There is a wooded meadow below.  There is also a clearing which leads toward the corral complex.  Hand-mines have been set in the woods before the open land.  I watched them set the mines each evening.  They are set in trees.  They have trip-strings running between the trees, at mid-calf level.  Trip the string, the bomb falls at your feel and explodes.  We used them in the war against the Canadians: small killers.  I will find them.  I have learned to smell them.

    I walk.  There is not a thought in my mind.  A picture of the small bombs.  I can smell the clearing, feels its coolness, its wind, stirring up the open air. 

    There is only one way to find the mines in the trees.  You must go very slowly, and mark your way for return.  You must feel your way, on hands and knees, if there is no light.  And so it is: I go slowly, on my knees, feeling for the wires strung between trees.  I find the first wire.  There is a safety on the mine itself, which, once found, one can easily disarm.  One need only follow the wire with his hand, across to the mother tree: there, in the crotch of the tree, is the mine.  It is only lethal if one does not know it is there.  It is disarmed.  I continue on, slowly, keeping the mine for myself.  There is a small creek running in the meadow beyond the trees, in the pasture-land.  I find another wire.  I have done this all my life.  I run my hand on the under-side of the wire, to another tree: another mine disarmed and kept.

    I doubt if there is more.  Still, I go slowly, on my knees.  Soon I am at the clearing.  The night is still.  It is rather cool--but I have a fire in my brain which keeps me warm.  I see the shadows moving in the moonlight.  But the shadows are not real, not substantive.  There is a difference between the ghost-shadows, those which do not contain substance, and the real shadows, moving felons of the air, substantive products of fear and anger.  I see none of the latter.  I move into the pastureland and move quickly, trying to stay as close to the ground as I can.  The horses are kep in a very large corral; some graze in the pasture.  But I must go beyond the corral to the shacks which hold bridles, saddles, saddle blankets, and perhaps saddle bags.  A horse with no saddle is not complete in the mountains.  I know that men sleep in these shacks.  I know that there is more danger in moving to the shack to steal the horse than in just taking a horse from the pasture.  But if I am chased over rought terrain, by men who ride every day, and I have no saddle, then I am in trouble.

    In fact, I feel much better, less exposed, when I enter the shadows of the horse-shacks.  I squat in these shadows for a moment, to catch my breath, and to watch the movement of the night.  I remain by the side of the shack for several moments.  Nothing changes.  There is a little wind coming through the meadow.  The horses are quiet for the most part, occasionally shifting.

    I am convinced that I have not been seen.  I look for the barn, among the outbuildings, the place where horse-shoeing is done, where saddles and equipment are kept.  The front of the barn is in view of the sentry locations on the hill.  But there is a step-ladder built in to the barn, leading to an open window-door on the second floor.  This is on the side opposite the sentries, so I climb the ladder.

    Inside the barn, on an attic of hay, and amid an occasional box and a pitch-fork, I accustom my eyes to the dark.  There is no moonlight here.  Everything is black.  I can see in the dark; but it takes time for me to accustom myself to the darkness.  There is a ladder down to the main floor of the barn.  There are animals in the barn, in the stalls.  Horses.  Some colts very recently born.  Perhaps these horses are ill.  I cannot tell if there are men sleeping in the barn.  I doubt that there are.  The villages are not far away; there are women in the villages; nice warm beds.  Only an outcast would be living in a barn.  The barracks near the barn harbor men, but the barn seems empty of men's sounds. 

    I descend the ladder to the floor of the barn.  I am very quiet.  I know how to breathe evenly, alert in every manner, but never short of breath.  I would hyperventilate, in the first days of the Canadian war.  Over time I learned to quiet my fear, to breathe peacefully, even in the face of danger.

    It is ve