Strachey's folly

Chapter 2

Maynard had bought a small brick town house on the one hundred block of E

Street, Southeast, back in the mid-seventies before the Reagan boom drove Capitol Hill real estate prices beyond the reach of mere adventure-travel writers. The rows of late-nineteenth-century houses on Maynard's side of the street had been built as servants' quarters for the burghers, pols, and lobbyists in the grander houses opposite Maynard's humble row. Maynard's house, like the next-door neighbors', was a simple, two-story box with bay windows, tiny patches of flowering shrubs, and a black wrought-iron front stoop. While the E

Street houses' small rooms might have been considered claustrophobic in, say, St. Louis, on Capitol Hill, with its lingering emanations of life during the Van Buren administration, the little houses, now full of urban professionals instead of black cooks and Irish maids, just felt cozy.

Maynard had stuffed his home with folk art he had toted home from six continents, and in his ten-by-twelve-foot, fenced-in backyard, Maynard had built a rock fish pond surrounded on three sides by a garden he described as

"Japanese-slash-ltalian-slash-Camerooni." The Camerooni part was a big clay pot out of which climbed a restless, meandering yam plant, now defunct for the winter.

We arrived back at the house just after ten. Maynard drove us from Washington's Adams-Morgan section in his little Chevy Sprint. This followed a leisurely Ethiopian dinner-Maynard stuck with the relatively mild vegetable dishes-and several cups of a type of Abyssinian coffee Maynard said would be sure to keep us awake for eight to ten days. We said that didn't sound like much fun, but the coffee, black as lava and nearly as thick, was ripe with cloves and other unidentifiable spices. It was so alluringly strange that we kept drinking it, thinking the next small cup would seem suddenly familiar. None ever did, and now, back at Maynard's house, we were wired.

Timmy was watching the ten-o'clock news on the little TV set on a shelf in Maynard's dining room, I was browsing in that morning's Post, and Maynard was sorting through the mail that had arrived after we left the house that morning.

"Will you look at this!" Maynard said. "It's a letter from- guess who? Jim Suter."

"Is it from Mexico?" Timmy asked.

"Yep, it is. The postmark is blurred, and I can't make out the date, and there's no return address. But I know Jim's handwriting, and this is from Jim, for sure,"

Maynard said, and ripped open the airmail envelope. I could see that the postage stamp pictured an Indian with a flat, sloped forehead in noble profile.

Before we'd left the quilt display earlier, Maynard had sought out a Names Project official. The woman had been disturbed when Maynard insisted that a panel for a living person had found its way into the quilt. The official explained that records on panel submissions were kept back in San Francisco, and she would attempt to track down the source of the Jim Suter panel when she returned to California on Monday. She and Maynard exchanged phone numbers and each agreed to try to sort out this weird development.

"Holy cow, Jim's in some kind of bad trouble," Maynard said to Timmy and me, his wire reading specs perched on his sunburned nose. "He's in trouble and-jeez, that's not all. This is awful." Maynard was holding what looked like a single page of dense script handwritten on one side of some crinkly, thin paper. He finished reading and said, "This is entirely amazing."

Maynard passed the letter to Timmy, who read it aloud. It was dated Monday, September 30, twelve days earlier.

" 'Dear Maynard,'" Timmy read. " 'No, you weren't hallucinating. That was yours truly you saw on Saturday in Merida. I'm guessing you were in the Yucatan for a travel quickie and you'll be back in D.C. by the time this letter makes its way through the Mexican postal system and lands at Dulles. (I once asked a postal clerk in Merida, 'Who do you have to fuck in order to get a letter out of this country in less than a month?' and, I have to admit, his unusually forthright reply caught me off guard.)

" 'Hey, Manes, I do apologize for my rudeness on Saturday. Although, in fact, it was not mere bad manners at all, it was sheer panic. The thing of it is, I did not want anyone in D.C. to know where I was. And when I saw you, I just clutched.

What I should have done was to simply, straightforwardly, ask you not to tell anybody, under any circumstances, that you saw me down here, and of course you would have agreed to that, sans explanations, which unhappily I am unable to provide. But you always trusted me, if I haven't misread our friendship, which has been based on the flesh and the soul, rather than the mind, what with my being a sensible chap of the center and your being to the left of Enver Hoxha, somewhere out around Ted Kennedy, etc., etc.

" 'Hey, Manes, am I being evasive? Cryptic? A tiresomely cir-cumlocuting pain in the butt? Okay, then, friend, here's the actual deal. The actual deal is-hold on to your sombrero- somebody is trying to kill me. Did I write what I think I just wrote? A careful rereading of the text suggests I did. This extremely awkward state of affairs, Maynard, can be explained by the following: someone thinks I know something that could send quite a few rather large enchiladas to prison for muchos anos. Comprende, Senor Sudbury?

" 'And-I guess this is the main reason I am writing you, Manes-if any of these people knew that you had seen me in Merida, they might think that you know what they think I know, and they would want you out of what they perceive to be their hair, too. Sorry about this, but please do take it seriously. You've been around the world thirty-nine times-including bloody Africa, for chrissakes! and you know as well as anybody that murder doesn't just happen in mall movies-and in malls-but that it can and does happen in real life.

" 'So please do not-DO NOT-mention to anyone that you saw me, here or anywhere. It's especially important that you tell no one on the Hill or with the D.C. Police Department that I'm down here or that you have seen me or spoken with me. Okay? Look, I'm sure your curiosity circuits are popping right about now. I know I'd be drooling down my bib with curiosity. All I can really say is, someday I'll explain all this, if I can-and if I can ever again show my still quite presentable face in D.C. Meanwhile, mum is definitely the word.

" 'Hey, Manes, if all this sounds just too, too ominous- well, believe me, it is.'

"Signed, 'Your friend Jim, still unlucky in love.'"

Timmy laid the letter on the dining room table and said, "Wow."

"Lurid, isn't it?" Maynard said, attempting jocularity, though he shifted in his seat like a man unnerved.

"Could Suter be making it all up?" Timmy asked. "You said he was unprincipled in a lot of ways. Maybe he's trying to manipulate you or manipulate events back here somehow."

"Jim's cynical," Maynard said, "about his own life and about the human race in general. But I've never heard of him jerking friends around in a devious way. If anything, he's known for his brutal honesty. That's why I guess I think I have to take what he's saying seriously."

Timmy said, "Nice guy, this Suter. By writing to you like this, now he's got you involved in whatever he's mixed up in. By warning you of the danger, he puts you in more danger. Now you've got this dangerous knowledge of some kind of plot. You don't know enough of the specifics to really protect yourself. This letter both helps you and increases your vulnerability. Suter sounds like an extremely complicated kind of friend to have."

Maynard blinked a couple of times, as if he didn't want to dwell on that. He said,

"Maybe now we know why somebody put a panel for Jim in the quilt. It was meant as a threat or warning to him. Or," he went on, looking apprehensive,

"maybe the panel was a threat or warning to other people who know Jim and who know what somebody thinks he knows, or who are thought to know what somebody thinks Jim knows."

"That part of the letter is murky," Timmy said. "About how somebody thinks Jim knows something that could send some big enchiladas to prison."

"What's murky about it?" Maynard asked. "It seems clear enough to me."

"But it sounds as if it's murky even to Jim," Timmy said. "If somebody thinks Jim knows something incriminating, why can't Jim simply tell these people he doesn't actually know what they think he knows?"

"Because," Maynard said, "maybe he doesn't know who 'they' are. 'They' are threatening and warning him-apparently they've made actual threats on his life-without ever identifying themselves."

"But if 'they' think Jim knows they did something criminal, then why would 'they' not identify themselves when they communicated their threats and warnings to Jim?"

I said, "Is the fatiguingly abstract tenor of this discussion typical of the conversations you guys had in the Peace Corps in India? It must have been exhausting. For you and for India."

"No," Maynard said, "our conversations back then tended to be more descriptive than analytical. We talked a lot about (a) poultry-debeaking techniques and (b) the peculiar qualities of our bowel movements."

"Of course, the latter is still true in your case," Timmy said, and he and Maynard both enjoyed a hearty guffaw over that.

One of the odder aspects of being the spouse-or "spouse-figure," as Timmy described me in his employment forms at the New York State Assembly-of a former Peace Corps volunteer was having to listen occasionally to these people converse not about the complexities of development in the third world-although they sometimes did that, too-but nearly as often, it sometimes seemed, about their memories of their exotic stools. When JFK spoke of tens of thousands of Peace Corps men and women bringing back their relatively sophisticated views of Africa, Asia, and Latin America to enrich our nation, could this have been what he had in mind?

Timmy suddenly said, "Hey, look, it's the quilt," and reached over and turned up the volume on the television set.

There it was, this gorgeous, heart-swelling mosaic of lost lives-lost but well-remembered-spread across acre upon grassy acre of some of Washington's most historic open space. These were the lawns where the Bonus Army had encamped, the hunger marchers had been ignored by Herbert Hoover, Marian Anderson had sung, Martin Luther King had had a dream. The television coverage of the AIDS quilt opened with some voice-over statistics and a slow, panning shot from the air. Then a Names Project volunteer was interviewed, as were several men, women, and children who had come to see the panels they had sewn for people they loved and who were gone. Finally there were sound bites from some sympathetic strangers, people who simply found this great monument to loss beautiful and moving.

Back in the studio, the news anchor concluded the quilt report by saying,

"Today's display was also marred by a mysterious act of vandalism. Late this afternoon, just before the quilt panels were folded up for overnight storage, two men ripped a section off of one panel. The men escaped before security personnel could intervene. Typed pages coming out of the picture of a typewriter were taken from a quilt panel memorializing Jim Suter, of Washington. Police would not speculate on a motive for the vandalism. But a Names Project official said that earlier in the day questions had been raised about the Suter panel and the display organizers planned to investigate." The news reader had been somber, but now he looked instantly delighted, as if he were deranged, and said, "Today's balmy weather should con-linue, according to Flavius, and after a short break…"

Timmy turned down the TV sound and we all looked at each other.

Maynard's brown eyes were shining and he said, "Betty Krumfutz!"

"If the only parts of the quilt that the vandals took were the typed pages from the Krumfutz campaign bio," I said, "there does seem to be a connection to Mrs.

Krumfutz's hurried, discreet appearance at Suter's panel."

"Hurried, not to say panicked," Timmy said. "That woman was in a complete state."

I asked Maynard, "Did you read what was on the pages? They were slugged

'Suter/Krumfutz,' but are you sure that what was actually typed on them was Jim's Krumfutz campaign bio?"

"That's what it looked like. I saw some stuff there about Betty's antiabortion record in the Pennsylvania legislature. And another page had a paragraph on school prayer and getting patriotism back into history textbooks. I didn't read any of it with care. It just looked like standard religious-right boilerplate. But the pages I saw seemed to be exactly what the page slugs said they were, Jim's Krumfutz campaign bio."

"I'm surprised," I said, "that that stuff doesn't move directly from the printer to the recycling bins. But I guess it must have some effect, or politicians wouldn't spend their campaign millions on it."

"A small percentage of voters-usually the slower, more gullible folks-actually read campaign handouts as if they were as imperishable as Alexander Hamilton," Maynard said. "And often all it takes to swing an election is one or two percent of the vote. So it's not a waste of money when a candidate churns that stuff out."

"But," I said, "there must have been something on those sheets of typescript on the quilt panel that somebody badly wanted to keep out of public view. And when I looked at the pages, I saw what you both saw, and there was nothing remarkable about any of it on the surface. Maybe there was something revealing on the backs of the pages-although it's hard to imagine why anyone would be afraid of any words or pictures that weren't visible." I asked Maynard, "Did Jim Suter actually use a typewriter, and not a word processor or computer?"

"As a matter of fact, he did-does," Maynard said. "Jim is one of those writers who are sentimental about their old Underwoods and Smith-Coronas and are scared to death that if they throw over the machine they've always written on, they'll never write again. It's a karma thing, and I understand it. I compose on a Mac, but I keep a fresh ribbon in my IBM Selectric. I'm prepared for the day when I look into my video terminal and I can imagine nothing there besides I Dream ofjeannie reruns. And if the IBM quits-hey, I once lost my notebook in Eritrea and scratched out some notes with my Swiss army knife on a slab of sandstone. In fact, that's it right there on that shelf."

Maynard indicated a long, flat rock with scratches all over it. It sat next to a framed photograph of Maynard in the company of several slender Africans holding AK-47s, looking righteous and determined, and surrounding a Mobil Oil tanker truck. Next to this picture was one of Maynard and his lover of eleven years, Randy Greeley, who had been a Unicef field organizer and had died in a poorly aimed rocket-propelled-grenade attack by somebody-no one was sure who-in Somalia in 1993.

I said, "Maynard, it looks as if whoever designed the quilt panel for Jim knew him well enough to know he uses a typewriter instead of a computer."

"It does," Maynard agreed. "But of course that's a lot of people. Jim is among the more prolific hacks in the District. He's always been a writer who gets around, professionally and otherwise. Writer-slash-operator is a more apt description of what Jim does."

Timmy said, "Do you think Betty Krumfutz saw something on Jim's panel today that freaked her out and she sent some goons over to rip those pages off the quilt?"

Maynard said, "Well, yeah, it does look as if she did," and then he shook his head, as if he was both baffled and apprehensive and had no idea what to make of any of the afternoon's peculiar events.

We sat silently for a minute, deep in thought, the television jabbering in the background.

"I'm wondering," Maynard finally said, "what-if anything- I ought to tell the Names Project. Or even the police. I guess I can't tell anyone that I heard from Jim, or where he is. Not if it might actually endanger his life-or mine." Maynard smiled nervously, and we smiled nervously back.

"No," Timmy said, "and you specifically are not to tell the D.C. police where he is.

Or anybody on the Hill. I take it that means Capitol Hill the national legislative establishment, not Capitol Hill the neighborhood."

Maynard said, "It probably means both."

"Has Jim ever had problems with the law?" 1 asked. "Of a political nature or otherwise?"

Maynard looked doubtful. "Not that I've ever heard about. And if he'd been mixed up in the Krumfutz scandal, that would have come out in court. I'd guess no. His ethics are malleable, but Jim has plenty of lawyer friends, and my guess is lie's been able to stay a centimeter or two on the nonindictable side of the law."

Timmy sat up straight. "Then that probably means that- jeez! It might well mean that the D.C. cops are actually involved in whatever the conspiracy is that Jim knows about!"

"Conspiracy?" I said. "What conspiracy?"

"Well, what would you call it?"

"Timothy," I said, "it seems to me unlikely that the entire District of Columbia Police Department would conspire to assassinate a political writer." I told Maynard, "Timothy, as you know, is overall a rational man. But when he "was a boy in Poughkeepsie, the nuns told him stories about Masons plotting to snatch and devour little Catholic children, and to this day Timothy's imagination occasionally runs away with itself."

Timmy gave Maynard a look that said, "I've told you about how off-the-wall Don can be on the subject of my Catholic background, and now you've seen it for yourself." What he said out loud was, "Some cops are corrupt, and often dirty cops are dirty together. Word of this phenomenon has even reached some lapsed New Jersey Calvinists, I think."

Maynard, already unsettled by the letter from Jim Suter and the strange vandalism of the even stranger quilt panel, now looked alarmed over the possibility that his houseguests might be headed for a spat. He said, "Don, Jim did say explicitly that I shouldn't mention his whereabouts to the D.C. police, and he seemed to be saying not any D.C. cop."

"Right," Timmy piped up. "That was in the letter."

"I get the point," I said. "The point, it seems to me, is this: be careful of the D.C. cops because one or some of them may be connected to threats against Jim Suter or even attempts on his life. Let's just not become unduly paranoid, imagining some Oliver Stone-style plot against Jim Suter that everybody from the D.C. meter maids to the ghost of LBJ is a party to. Just for the moment, let's be cool-whatever that might turn out to mean in practical terms."

"But that's just it," Maynard said. "What do I do with what I know? I guess I'll have to do something. I told that woman from the Names Project that Jim Suter is alive, and then his panel was vandalized. So she might give the cops my name."

We pondered this dilemma. After a moment, Timmy said, "Why don't you call the Names Project woman-what's her name?"

"I left it in the car," Maynard said.

"And find out if she told the cops about you, and if she didn't, ask her not to.

Tell her you have your own reasons for not wanting to get involved at this point, which is true. Ask her if she'd mind keeping your name out of it, at least for now, and then get in touch with her when you have a clearer idea of what this.. this conspiracy is about, and how far it extends, and exactly what the dangers are to Jim and to you. I have to use the word conspiracy, based on the situation Jim described in his letter. In English, there just isn't any better word for it."

"Timothy," I said, "maybe it wasn't the nuns. Maybe it's all the years you've spent as an employee of the New York State legislature, an institution that makes a Medici court look like a Quaker meeting. Whatever the reason, your overstimulated sense of melodrama is getting the best of you-as I suspect Jim Suter's might be getting the best of him. Maynard, has Suter spent a lot of time in Mexico? Living among the cops there could certainly leave a man with a powerful sense that somebody might be out to get him."

"Jim's been taking vacations in the Yucatan for years," Maynard said, "and I think he has friends there. As for the Mexican police, they're an ugly fact of life down there that people have learned to live with when they must and avoid when they can, like the bacteria in the water supply. I doubt that Jim has been unhinged by them. He's a worldly guy. You know, I think I will call the woman from the Names Project and at least find out what she told the cops. Just so I'll know what to expect."

Timmy said, "I think you should."

Maynard crossed his living room full of primitive and modern art and artifacts paintings, carved-wood fertility totems, village-life-narrative wall hangings in brilliant primary colors- and walked out the front door.

"I wonder," Timmy said, "whether Maynard should tell the quilt official that the pages ripped off Jim Suter's quilt panel were from Jim's Krumfutz campaign biography and that he saw the actual Betty Krumfutz down on her hands and knees at the quilt this afternoon. I really don't see, Don, how you can sneer at the possibility of a conspiracy when-"

From outside the open front door came three loud pops. Then we heard the revving engine of a car speeding away down E Street, followed by silence.

Seconds later, when we reached Maynard-sprawled on the brick sidewalk next to his car, his blood pumping out of his body-he was still breathing, but only faintly. Timmy knelt by Maynard and began to speak softly to him as he searched for the correct pressure points to push against, and I raced back into the house.