Strachey's folly

Chapter 27

Now tell me the truth. The whole truth, if you're capable of it," I said to Suter.

We were stretched out on a couple of chaises under the stars on the foredeck of the cruiser, the Leona Vicario from Playa del Carmen, as it headed north-northeast across calm water. We had finished a light supper, as Suter had described it-a loaf of bread, two bottles of beer, and a rubbery object the youngest crewman had found in the sea, hacked up on a board with a machete, and sprinkled with lime juice. Suter had asked me how I thought the fresh conch was, and I said fair.

"I'm capable of telling the truth when it suits my interests," Suter said, "which it frequently does, and which it certainly does now. Most people in Washington would describe me as a truth-teller, in fact. Of course, when it doesn't suit my interests to tell the truth.. well… I guess you could say that that means I have some veracity issues to work on."

"That's how you might put it. I'd just say you're a liar."

"Not tonight." Suter waved his beer bottle at the magnificent starry vault above us. "How could anybody be anything but a truth-teller in the face of that?"

"Now there's a good line, Suter. A new one, too, for you."

He grinned.

"So where did you get the money that's in the suitcase? I saw you grab a gob of bills a while ago and pay off the captain of this boat. Is that suitcase you picked up in Playa stuffed entirely with U.S. currency?"

"Yes, it is." He smiled.

"Whose is it?"

"I'd say it's mine."

"Do the Ramoses say it's yours?"

He raised his bottle to the stars. "Fuck the Ramoses."

"Is it drug money?"

"Some of it."

"What's the rest of it?"

"The Ramoses' sources of income are wide-ranging."

"Uh-huh."

Suter added nothing more.

I said, "Won't they soon miss the money?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because it's cash Jorge has been skimming off the family operations over the past two years. He had it hidden under the roof of a house he owns in Playa.

After I heard that Maynard had been shot and some of the Ramoses were out of control, I took the money and stashed it with some friends of mine in anticipation of what I am doing now-disappearing from the Ramoses radar screen. Jorge will have rushed back from Merida tonight after hearing that I'm gone. But he won't be able to tell his family that I took three point two million dollars' worth of their money, because then they could say, 'What money, Jorge?' The Ramoses will be scouring eastern Mexico for me, not because I've got their money-which they will never be told about-but because of what I know about them."

"Because, for instance, the Ramoses know that you know that they bought the NAFTA vote."

"You got it."

"These assholes actually changed modern history. Jesus, Suter."

He shrugged. "There's no need to be melodramatic about it, Strachey. NAFTA might have passed anyway. It was close."

"Oh, well, when you put it that way… "

"It was a question of switching seventeen votes. Alan Mc-Chesney coordinated the campaign. I helped out, and so did a couple of other Hill people with Mexican-government business contacts and experience."

"Was the White House in on this?"

"Those clowns? Don't be silly."

"So the most historic piece of US. trade policy of the decade was made not by U.S. or Mexican elected officials, but by-who?"

Suter was staring at me now wide-eyed. "Are you really as naive as you sound?"

"No, I'm not. So who got what in return for their NAFTA votes?"

"The only outright buying of votes," Suter said conversationally, "was in the House. NAFTA pretty much sailed through the Senate. Of the seventeen House votes purchased, six were for vacation houses on the beach at Los Pajaros."

"Congressman Grandchamps, whom we saw on the beach on Wednesday, was one of those?"

"Right. Mexican law forbids outright ownership of beachfront property by foreigners, but there are easy ways around that. Banks hold the titles to property, and North Americans and other non-Mexicans buy long-term leases. So anybody planning on nailing the NAFTA vote-sellers need only follow the paper trail through the Mexican banking system."

"Okay. That's six."

"Another seven voters," Suter said, his curls fluttering in the warm breeze, "simply wanted campaign contributions that were laundered and untraceable. Vacation houses are nice, but for most House members reelection is what they anguish over night and day. They have to. It's how the system is set up. And overall, it works."

"It works for those who can afford to buy into it, yeah. So that's thirteen votes.

Four to go."

"Three congressman wanted young women, and one wanted young men.

There's nothing complicated about those motives, is there, Strachey?"

I said no.

"Strachey, you look discouraged." Suter shifted in his chaise and flopped a lithe bare leg over the side. "You needn't be. Few congressmen are out-and-out crooks like these seventeen. Most House members are-how to put it? — only as smart as they need to be. But they are, by and large, an honest lot who-even if they pocket wads of campaign cash in return for their votes- only accept cash and favors from those industry and other groups whose positions they honestly agree with. That's not corruption, that's enlightened self-interest."

"How did McChesney identify seventeen congressmen who were buyable on NAFTA? That must have been a project in itself."

Suter grinned. "You'll love this. Alan hired a psychological and public-opinion consulting service-an outfit that does focus groups and whatnot-and had these guys insinuate themselves into the summer party retreats in '93- Newt ran one for the Republicans and the Democrats had theirs-touchy-feely conferences where the participants all bare their ideological souls and plot strategy to save mankind through party-sponsored legislation. The consultants came back with a list of twenty-six names of male and female representatives of both parties who were considered buyable types. We only used seventeen names.

The other nine Alan was holding in reserve."

I swigged from my beer. "Fascinating."

"Isn't it?"

"So who shot Maynard? And why?"

Suter said nothing. His bare chest rose and fell in the moonlight. He shifted on his chaise but didn't speak.

"Maynard was your friend," I said. "Once he'd been your lover. Not that that would have singled him out in a crowd."

Suter ignored the slur. After a moment, he said, "When Maynard saw me in Merida last month, I was afraid something insane like this would happen. I'm just sick over the whole thing, honestly. I thank God Maynard survived the shooting. I just thank God for that."

"So who shot him?"

"According to Jorge, two of the Ramos drug gang in Alexandria shot and meant to kill Maynard. Alan McChesney told them to do it. Alan saw Maynard at the AIDS quilt display reading pages from the Betty Krumfutz campaign bio on the panel with my name on it, and Alan thought / had submitted the panel and was sending messages to Maynard and other people about where I was and what I knew about Alan and the Ramoses. Alan had the Ramos goons rip the papers off the panel, shoot Maynard, and search his house for connections with me as well as any incriminating information Maynard had that he might be getting ready to publish. Of course, no such information existed and Maynard had no such plans. Carmen LoBello had submitted the quilt panel to embarrass me, and the whole bloody chain of events started with nothing more than an absurd misunderstanding."

I thought again of Timmy and his feverish conspiracy theories, and I said, "In your letter from Merida to Maynard warning him away from you and all this crazy crap, you instructed him not to reveal your whereabouts under any circumstances to (a) anyone on the Hill or (b) anyone in the D.C. Police Department. Why did you tell him that?"

"On the Hill, Alan might have heard about it. Alan knew where I was, of course, but what I was really telling Maynard was 'Don't connect yourself with me. Don't even mention me if you want to be safe from Alan and the Ramoses.' And the Ramos drug-operation people have their own dirty cop high up in the D.C. department. A Captain something-or-other."

"Milton Kingsley?"

"That's it."

So I was the chump, after all: the conspiracy-theory skeptic, the literal-minded (lapsed) Presbyterian, the naive provincial- Rutgers, Southeast Asia, Albany who believed that individuals, simply being clumsy or neurotic, were behind nearly all major human folly. "My partner, Timothy Callahan-who attended parochial schools as a child-predicted some huge and melodramatic thing like what you have just described to me. I told him he was paranoid."

Suter laughed.

"I told him he'd read too much Sanders and Ambler and Ludlum. I told him the cause of almost all human misery is individual human weakness. I told him conspiracies like the one you just described to me exist only in popular entertainments and that real life is at the same time simpler and a hell of a lot more interesting than big, complicated, secret plots are."

"Sometimes real life is," Suter said, "but less and less so every day. Ludlum and Oliver Stone aren't just melodramatic entertainers. They are prophets, and they are manufacturers of self-fulfilling prophecies. Anyway, in the corporatized global economy, you don't call what happens conspiracies anymore. You call it integrated strategies."

"Someone else said nearly the same thing to me just last night. She called it synergy."

"All those guys on airplanes reading John Grisham might or might not share Grisham's moral disapproval of his worst characters' treacherous behavior. But mostly they read him because he describes the business and government world they know, or that they see coming and that they want a piece of. Human folly is still human folly, Strachey. It's just better organized and more efficient than it used to be."

"So what's the big difference between Big Brother Joe Stalin and Big Brother whatever it is you're endorsing here, Suter?"

"Much higher standard of living. Infinitely more personal freedom. Are you kidding, Strachey? There's no comparison."

"It's still Big Brother-Conglomerates and the Governments They Buy Big Brother-making people's decisions for them about the ways they'll live the only lives they'll ever have."

"Oh? So who's complaining?" Suter said dismissively, and opened another bottle of beer.

I said, "So. Did Alan McChesney have Bryant Ulmer killed?"

Suter nodded once.

"Why?"

"Because Ulmer, a bit of a wuss who couldn't be trusted, wasn't in on the Rarnos-McChesney plan to fix NAFTA. And when Ulmer found out-Ian Williamson got drunk one night and let it slip-Bryant went to Burton Olds and threatened to go to the FBI if Burton didn't go himself. That wasn't going to happen, since Olds had been part of the scheme from the beginning and knew where all the bodies were buried. Olds warned Alan that Ulmer was about to stray from the reservation, and Alan had the Ramoses' drug people kill Ulmer on the street and make it look like a mugging."

Suter lay quietly, looking up at the stars. I said, "Did you know this at the time?"

"No. Jorge told me a few days later. It's part of what he had over me." Suter still did not look at me.

"And it was McChesney who ordered the murders of Nelson Krumfutz, Tammy Pam Jameson, and Hugh Myers just so they couldn't tell me that your big, elaborate diversionary tale about drug smuggling in Central Pennsylvania wasn't true?"

"You'll have to ask Jorge-or Alan. But that would be my guess."

I thought about everything Suter had just told me, and of his plans for us to make our way to Havana, and from there by air to Mexico City and on to Washington and directly to the Justice Department.

"Are you certain," I asked Suter, "that when we get back to Washington, you'll be able to make anybody important believe that this bizarre story of yours is true?"

"Oh, sure. Or if I don't, you will." I didn't know at the time what Suter meant by that. I should have asked, but-yet another botched job on my part-I didn't.