Tongue tied

Chapter 12

Diefendorfer drove up from New Jersey in the morning, and by noon he and Timmy and I were on the road headed east. During the hour's drive over to Massachusetts, Thad told us stories of FFF rescues he had been involved in or had heard about from his cohorts. Most rescues, he said, were not especially difficult or dangerous; they involved winning over or just bribing lower-level mental hospital employees, many of whom were gay and often eager to be helpful. Doors were left unlocked, alarms disengaged or shorted out, escapees stashed in car trunks. Cash for bribes was always available in the FFF's later years as grateful young rescuees from wealthy families turned twenty-one and were not only immune to involuntary commitments but also gained access to their trust funds.

Rescues that could not be effectuated through these means were harder but also more exciting, Thad said. At one point a gay former cat burglar-rehabilitated after a stay in an Indiana penitentiary and retired from crime, he claimed-was brought in to teach a course in breaking and entering. Thad told us he had taken the course and was one of the foremost lock pickers in central New Jersey. Or had been; some locks worked electronically now, or were even computerized, and Diefendorfer had not kept up with the technology.

Timmy, educated by Jesuits, and Thad, the Mennonite second-story artist, had a good talk about Augustinian ideas of combating great evils by employing lesser evils if and when they became necessary. My own easygoing tendencies in these areas were well known to Timmy, who once described my companionship with moral relativism as "hair-raisingly blithe." He considered my late-adolescent departure from the Presbyterian Church "intellectually vacuous" mainly because it had turned Beethoven's and Schiller's "Ode to Joy" into an

"Ode to Good Taste." So it was interesting to listen to these two chew over moral questions I had sometimes been forced to grapple with in my line of work, and to hear them come down, if not as close to Satan as Timmy sometimes thought I belonged, then closer than either one of them might have admitted if described in those terms.

Uncertain that we would want to make a meal of Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese-Thad said, "I didn't come prepared to comb my lunch"-we stopped in Great Bar-rington at the Union Bar and Grill for salad and Cuban pork sandwiches. This inviting local landmark, with its metal sculptures and SoHo-in-the-hills brushed-aluminum interior, was packed with weekenders from the city. Some were in the Berkshires to have their souls filled up with art, theater, music and dance. Others, less transported by the offerings of the Boston Symphony Orchestra or the dancers at Jacob's Pillow, at least were getting their cultural tickets punched.

After lunch, en route east over the hills on winding, woodsy Route 23, Timmy, Thad and I worked out a plan. The chances were good that even after an event-filled twenty years, Kurt Zinsser would recognize me. So rather than spook him, we decided Timmy and Thad would engage Zinsser and keep him occupied while I looked around the farm. Then I would move in for a confrontation based on what I did or didn't discover.

The Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese Web site had provided us with directions and informed us that visitors to the farm were welcome. That made it less likely, we figured, that Leo Moyle was being held captive in the main farmhouse or cheese factory, but was probably somewhere nearby.

In the center of the village of Monterey, we turned down a country road just past the general store, where about half the cars parked out front had Massachusetts plates and the rest were Volvos and Saabs from New York and Connecticut. The narrow road followed a meandering brook through stands of maple, hickory and birch, and meadows where cows and sheep once had grazed.

Few of the farms were working now, however, and instead of John Deere and International Harvester machines outside the barns, there were sleek sedans from Germany and Sweden, and Detroit SUVs the size of Soviet troop carriers for hauling the peasant bread and radicchio out from Great Barrington. The white clapboard farmhouses were beautifully kept, and many of the barns, also bright white, were now garages or guest houses with skylights and discreetly placed satellite dishes.

We passed the farm that produces renowned Monterey chevre -in a pasture several goats frolicked for our amusement-and then we drove on for another mile or two until we spotted a herd of llamas in a field. Then came the farmhouse and a large, faded, red barn nearby, with a sign on a post that read: Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese, the Spirit of the Ancient Incas in a New England Country Setting.

Diefendorfer said, "It's like Grandma Moses at Machu Picchu. It's a little confusing."

Timmy asked, "Didn't you get a lot of this kind of cultural fusion-or at least weird commercial exploitation-in Lancaster County? Chain-hotel cocktail lounges with Pennsylvania Dutch happy hours, and so on?"

"We did. One of my favorites was a hex-sign extermination service. I once heard about a brothel over in Bucks County where for eighty-five dollars a dominatrix in an Amish farmwife's garb would raise welts on customers' bare backs with a buggy whip.

But I don't know if that story was true. Pennsylvania has never had much tolerance for commercialized sin. Historically, it's one reason New Jersey exists."

"Demand and supply," Timmy mused.

"Yes," Diefendorfer said, "the Bible should have included a book called Market Forces, with special verses commenting on New Jersey."

We pulled into the Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese parking area and stopped under a big spreading oak. Bees buzzed and flies zigzagged through the thick air, and the place smelled of warm green growth. A sign directed visitors to the barn, so Timmy and Diefendorfer headed over there in search of Kurt Zinsser while I ambled over to the wire fence to look at the llamas. A mud-spattered Chevy Blazer with Massachusetts plates was parked next to the barn, and closer to the house was a newer, cleaner Chevy 4x4 pickup. There were just the two buildings, close to the road and not far from each other, and it now seemed to me unlikely that Leo Moyle would be held captive in so public a place. Traffic on this rural lane was light, but the location didn't feel isolated enough for the safety and security serious kidnappers would need.

I watched Timmy and Diefendorfer disappear into the visitors' entrance to the barn, then turned back toward the dozen or so llamas. The two nearest peered my way while the others continued to graze. With their big soft eyes and alert pointed ears, the llamas looked like friendly storybook animals, maybe from A. A. Milne. I half expected them to be holding toy buckets and shovels, or even to speak: "Pleasant day, amigo."

Unsure of what to do next-approaching the farmhouse made no sense-I was about to join Timmy and Diefendorfer in the barn, when the screen door to the farmhouse opened and a stout, middle-aged man clomped across the porch and down the steps.

His head was shaved, and he wore jeans, work boots and a sweat-stained T-shirt.

The shirt had a picture of a llama on the front, and the lower half of the animal, stretched across the man's ample belly, was distorted, as if the llama had been blown up like a balloon.

I didn't recognize him at first, but Kurt Zinsser looked my way and did a double take.

"Denver?" he said, coming over to me. "Nineteen- what? Seventy-nine? Eighty?"

"I'm not sure," I said, struggling to look blank. "I've only been to Denver once. It was around that time that I was there, as I recall. Wait a minute. You're not… uh… uh?"

"Kurt Zinsser. And you're a private investigator. Bill Straithwaite?"

"Don Strachey. I didn't recognize you at first. You had a big, bushy beard back then, like Alexander Pushkin or the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi."

Cordial enough and definitely curious at first, Zinsser now began to look suspicious.

"What are you doing here? Are you looking for me?"

"No, I'm with some friends, just poking around the Berkshires. Is this your farm? Are you the Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese tycoon?"

Zinsser glanced toward the barn, noted Timmy's Honda, and said, "I'm on my way into Barrington. Sorry I can't show you around. But Darren's in the shop and he can help you out. Have you had our cheese?"

"Not yet. I'm looking forward to trying it. It's unusual."

"I learned to make it from an old woman I met in Cuzco. That's where I went after I left Denver in eighty-five. I heard it was going to be the high-tech center of the Andes, which turned out to be not quite true. But I found my health there, physical and spiritual."

"And your livelihood. I hear Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese is catching on."

"You'll understand why once you've tried it. Eat it every day for a month and you'll be a different person."

Since Thad Diefendorfer was not present, I asked the question I knew he would ask.

"Why would I want to be a different person?"

Zinsser smiled a smile that I guessed he thought of as enigmatic. He said, "If you have to ask, you may never find out. But read my chapbook-you can pick one up in the visitors' center-and perhaps then you'll begin to understand what I learned in the mountains. And if you choose not to open yourself up to the wholeness of being, it's no skin off my ass."

I said, "I heard Billy Blount has done some traveling, too. Someone in Albany told me recently that he's in Singapore. Are you two still in touch?"

I could see the lightbulb go on inside Zinsser's head, and he looked at me hard. "Are you part of the investigation?" he said.

"Which investigation?"

"The investigation of Leo Moyle's kidnapping."

"I might be."

Zinsser snorted. "What horseshit. What a lying sack of bull puke you are, Strachey.

Good Christ Almighty!" Zinsser shook his head, which glistened with sweat in the afternoon sun. His more spiritual self was not in the ascendancy.

"Are you a Jay Plankton fan?" I asked.

"You're friggin' right I am."

"You talk like him."

"I'm flattered."

"Aren't you gay anymore? Have you become one of those ex-gays?"

"No, but I no longer parade myself around the American landscape wearing a big sign that says Victim. Instead of whining about how oppressed I am, I lead a life of dignified self-sufficiency."

"If you're a Plankton fan," I said, "you must have as much wool in your brain as you've got in your teeth. His loathing for you and me and other gay people is vast and unadulterated. Plankton could care less if you've turned into some kind of neoconservative twit. To him, to be gay is contemptible. And you still admire him?"

Zinsser, the former Marxist, SDSer, FFFer, et cetera, sniffed and said, "Plankton is not antigay; he is anti-politically correct. That's something the J-Bird and I very much have in common."

"Cut the crap, Zinsser. Eight times out of ten, people who use that term are bigots and creeps. Anti-PCism is the current last refuge of the incorrigibly narrow and mean-spirited. So, is the FFF just more political correctness run amok? Is that what it was when you were part of it in the seventies?"

"I am neither ashamed of nor embarrassed by my years in the FFF. But if that's why you're here-which appears to be the case-let me assure you I have had no association whatsoever with the Forces of Free Faggotry since 1977. And I know for a fact that the organization fell apart soon after I left it. These people who are hassling Plankton and who kidnapped Leo Moyle are not FFFers. I am certain of that because whatever we were, we were never violent and we were never childish."

I looked at him helplessly. This was not the Kurt Zinsser I was hoping or expecting to find. After a moment, I said, "You've done quite a one-eighty over the last twenty years, Zinsser."

Looking smug, he said, "Oh, I have at that."

"Do you remember Thad Diefendorfer?"

"Sure, the Mennonite-farmboy-turned-cat-burglar. I once had a crush on him for about ten minutes. But he was joined at the hip at the time to Sammy Day, another member of the organization. Why do you ask?"

"He's over in the barn."

"Thad is? What's he doing here, with you?"

"We're looking for Leo Moyle. Thad wants to help clear the FFF's good name, and I'm working for… a client."

"Which client? Who is it?"

"My client prefers to retain his privacy."

Zinsser's eyes got bright. "It's Jay Plankton, isn't it? You're accepting the filthy lucre of this man you malign behind his back. Ha! I love it!"

"I malign Plankton to his face, and he maligns me right back. You've heard his show.

You know how these J-Bird people communicate with one another."

"Trading insults is how certain types of heterosexual men show affection for one another," Zinsser said. "Many gay men do too, in their own way. But you really mean it.

You hate your employer. What a duplicitous asshole you are."

"Actually, Plankton's not too crazy about me either, and says so sincerely. In any case, I've taken the job mainly as a favor to an old acquaintance, a New York City cop who once saved my life. He thinks my contacts with the old FFF might help me sort out this current thing."

Zinsser laughed. "And so you've come over here thinking I might have Leo Moyle trussed up in a dungeon behind my root cellar. Is that it?"

"You were not selected as a suspect randomly, Zinsser. The neo-FFFers, as you may know, have been harassing Jay Plankton for several weeks with insults and rude items sent to him through the mail. One of the substances, labeled 'excrement for the execrable,' has been identified under scientific analysis as llama shit. Any idea where it might have come from? I'm sure your supply here is ample."

He hesitated just perceptibly as something seemed to go through his mind. Then he said quickly, "If that's somebody's idea of advancing the cause of gay rights, it sounds ineffective to me. I can certainly assure you I had nothing to do with anything so juvenile, and so perfectly lame. As I said, I've got to be in Great Barrington in twenty minutes. But you're welcome to scour the premises here in search of Leo Moyle bound and gagged, if that's what you've come all this way for. Feel free to turn the place inside out."

"Thanks. I would like to look around. Eliminate you as a suspect or whatever."

Zinsser checked his watch. "Darren can show you around. Darren's my partner.

Although, he can't leave the visitors' center for long. People show up and want to see the operation and sample the product."

"Do visitors always take to your cheese immediately, or does eating it require some getting used to?"

"Nearly all our visitors," Zinsser said with a look of satisfaction, "are longtime customers before they arrive. For many of them, coming here is a kind of pilgrimage."

"And the Berkshires, luckily, are more convenient than the Andes."

"I should say hello to Thad," Zinsser said, quickly backing away now toward his pickup truck. "But I'm going to be late for a meeting if I don't get moving. Tell Thad I'm sorry I missed him. What's he doing now, anyway?"

"Farming. In central New Jersey."

"That sounds wholesome enough," Zinsser said, climbing into his truck. "He's not raising llamas, is he?"

"No, mostly eggplants."

"Ah, is moussaka an Amish dish?" Zinsser said. "Who would have guessed." He waved once and drove off fast.