Ah, Treachery!

Chapter 8

The Acropolis Restaurant on Connecticut Avenue occupied the ground floor of a sixty-six-year-old gray stone building that was only thirty feet wide. The building had no elevator but the retired Brigadier General walked up the four flights of stairs and arrived at the top-floor landing with no more loss of breath than if he had just completed a brisk stroll around nearby Dupont Circle.

He paused on the landing to remove his seventeen-year-old camel hair topcoat and drape it carefully over his left arm, which was encased in the sleeve of a fourteen-year-old tweed suit whose tailor had died at 83 two years ago in London.

After making sure his blue-and-maroon-striped tie nestled properly into the collar of his white shirt, the General removed the old light tan Borsalino — with its new dark brown grosgrain band — and transferred the hat to his left hand. He used his right hand to open the door whose upper half was mostly opaque pebbled glass. Painted on the glass in neat black letters were two signs. The top one read:

The other sign read:

There was no reception area beyond the door, but to the right was a partitioned-off twelve-by-twenty-foot office with six-foot-high plastic walls whose top third was clear glass. The walls enclosed three bar-locked gray steel filing cabinets, a gray metal desk, a phone console, a personal computer, a fax machine, a photocopier and Emory Kite, licensed private investigator, who spun around in his swivel chair to wave at Vernon Winfield and give him a bass greeting of, “Hey, General, how’s it going?”

Winfield paused, nodded formally to the small detective and said, “Very well, thank you, Mr. Kite.”Winfield then turned toward the nerve center of VOMIT, which was a massive seventy-three-year-old golden oak flat-top desk jammed up against two windows that overlooked Connecticut Avenue. The top of the desk was nearly buried under piles of domestic and foreign newspapers, magazines and government reports — all of them with that plump, well-thumbed, well-read look.

Beyond the desk and against the building’s south wall were overcrowded and unpainted pine bookcases that rose to the fourteen-foot ceiling and stretched thirty feet toward the alley. Close to the desk were a personal computer, a fax machine, a small Xerox copier and a very old, very large, wide-open safe with flanges that had been bolted to the floor so long ago that the bolts had rusted to a dull red.

Occupying, or perhaps filling, the golden oak swivel chair in front of the desk was Nicholas Patrokis, a huge half-bald man in his forties, who wore an enormous black mustache and a gold ring as big as a wedding band through his left ear. Patrokis’s eyes were as black as human eyes ever get and above them a pair of dark hedges just failed to meet over a nose that hooked down toward the mustache.

A white scar formed a lightning bolt that began near the top of Patrokis’s left ear, slashed across his mouth and chin and ended an inch or so below the right earlobe. A woman had once told him the scar made him look like an N. C. Wyeth illustration of a pirate in one of her childhood books. Patrokis liked the image so much that on days he judged too hot or too cold he wore a red bandana wrapped pirate fashion around his half-bald head.

Hunched over the desk now, a phone clamped to his left ear, Patrokis listened and scribbled notes on a gray legal pad. At the General’s approach, he turned, phone still to his ear, and pointed with a ballpoint at a wooden armchair whose seat was occupied by a foot-high stack of The Economist. Patrokis used the worn jogging shoe on his left foot to kick the magazines to the floor, then went back to his listening and note-taking.

General Winfield settled into the chair and glanced around with the neutral expression of someone who knows all there is to know about waiting. From his seat next to the desk he had a fine view of the entire fourth floor and automatically began taking inventory of its contents.

About two-thirds of the fourth floor was devoted to what Patrokis liked to call the auditorium. This was an open space separated from the two offices by a divider railing much like those found in courtrooms. Beyond the railing were fifty folding metal chairs in two rows that were five wide and ten deep. Some of the chairs were gray, some brown, a few were black and all of them were old.

Beyond the chairs and near the alley end of the room was a long golden oak table placed parallel to the back wall. On top of it was a speaker’s podium that faced the wrong way. Surrounding the table were fifteen more folding chairs used for board meetings, panel discussions and by those who dropped in on Saturday afternoons to clean up and help with mailings.

Against the exposed brick back wall was a five-gallon coffee urn that rested on a fifty-gallon steel drum. Next to the urn was a card table that held three gallon cans of Yuban coffee, six small cans of Pet milk and a ten-pound paper sack of C&H sugar. Six boxes of Styrofoam coffee cups were stored beneath the table.

The walls offered no posters, no slogans, no photographs. The only decoration was a huge American flag turned upside down in the traditional signal of distress. The General thought the upside-down flag was sophomoric and raised the issue at each board meeting. But his motion to right the flag always lost 7 to 6.

The General sat as he almost always sat, not quite at attention, knees nearly together, hands on thighs, topcoat folded over knees, hat on topcoat, back straight but not touching anything. Winfield had restless shiny blue eyes that were fine for distance but needed glasses for reading. They flicked around the big room, noting all changes — even a nearby recent copy of El Pais, airmailed from Madrid. He assumed Patrokis must have recently subscribed to it.

The General’s gaze eventually landed on the back of Emory Kite’s head. He noticed the private investigator wore earphones as he typed away at his computer. Winfield didn’t care for Kite and had opposed renting him space. But the $1,100 monthly rent Kite had agreed to pay for a fourth-floor walkup office was such a godsend to the organization that the General had withdrawn his objection.

When Kite stopped typing to stretch, both hands high above his head, Winfield shifted his gaze back to the upside-down flag. Kite swiveled 180 degrees, noticed the General’s fixed stare and used the opportunity to inspect him for signs of dissipation or dotage. He found only planes and angles that formed a resolute chin, an extra-bold nose, a rather stern mouth, a smart high forehead, a sagless throat and a lot of thick white hair, neither short nor long, that lay flat on the narrow head and looked as if it had been parted on the left at birth.

Kite was wondering how many men still wore real hats when Patrokis finally ended his phone call, turned to the General and asked, “You got any idea where we could lay our hands on five thousand dollars cash money?”

As Patrokis’s raspy baritone came through Kite’s earphones, he quickly turned back to his personal computer, switched on a concealed mini-recorder and slowly began typing “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party” over and over as he both recorded and listened to the conversation between the two founders of Victims of Military Intelligence Treachery.

It was a moment or two before General Winfield replied to Patrokis’s question with a sigh and a question of his own. “Five thousand for what?”

“There’s this Salvadoran ex-Army Captain, an illegal, holed up on Columbia Road who claims he has facts, figures and names concerning Langley money that went astray in nineteen-eighty-nine.”

“What does he say ‘astray’ means?”

“That the money was passed by Langley to U.S. Army advisers who only passed half of it to the Salvadoran Army brass.”

“Half of how much?”

“Two-point-four million dollars.”

“How many of our people were involved?”

“Only two. A captain and a colonel.”

“No names, of course.”

“For five thousand we get names,” Patrokis said.

“What do you think?” the General asked, then sighed again, as if he already knew the answer.

Patrokis shrugged. “If I had five thousand, I’d buy. But it’s been three years since I saw that much cash all at one time.”

“How much is in VOMIt’s account?”

“Sixteen hundred and something, which’ll just about take care of postage for the newsletter.”

“You have enough paper? Envelopes?”

“Paper and envelopes I’ve got.”

The General took out his checkbook and asked, “To cash, of course?”

“Of course,” Patrokis said and offered his ballpoint pen.

As he wrote the check, Winfield asked, “Have you had lunch?”

“It’s two forty-five. Of course I’ve had lunch.”

“Well, I haven’t,” Winfield said, signed his name, tore out the check and put it away in a pocket. “If you have a tie, we’ll go to the Madison, where I’m sure they’ll feed me something. You can have dessert and listen.”

“You don’t need a tie to get into the Madison,” Patrokis said.

“That’s not the point, is it?”

Patrokis stared at the General for a second or two, then opened a desk drawer, closed it, opened another one and said, “I know there’s a tie here somewhere.”

After they left, Emory Kite rewound the taped conversation, played it, rewound it again and used a foot pedal to make it start and stop as he typed out a verbatim transcript on his PC. Kite was a fast accurate typist. When finished, he read the transcript over and made one minor correction.

He then rose, made a hard copy, and went to the fax machine,switched it on and sent the page and a half of double-spaced dialogue to a fax number listed under the name of Jerome Able, the favorite of the three aliases used by Colonel Ralph Waldo Millwed.

After the “message received” signal, Kite returned to his swivel chair, sat down, leaned back, clasped his hands across his small still-hard belly and waited for his phone to ring, confident that it would be a short wait.