Vanishing Act (5 page)
As Jane listened to Felker’s story, the events in her memory rose up to fill in the empty spaces. She could almost feel the hot, humid air that night in late June at the Big Wind Reservation of the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho in Wyoming It was the summer of her last year at college, and she had joined the Tecumseh Society, a student group formed on the theory that the Shawnee leader who traveled from tribe to tribe in the early 1800s to unite the Indians might not have been entirely misguided.
Jane’s assignment that summer was to travel with a Jicarilla Apache named Ilona Tazeh through the northern plains to establish voter-registration programs on the festival circuit: the Northern Cheyenne Fourth of July Powwow and the Crow Fair in Montana, the Oglala Nation Powwow and the Standing Rock Powwow in South Dakota. That night after the celebrations, she had lured a few young recruits into the air-conditioning of her tiny motel room. The theme of her pitch was that attempting to deal with the society at large only as Senecas or Commanches or Navajos was tantamount to suicide.
What she talked about were the abrogations of law and decency the state and federal governments had committed against the Iroquois in the preceding twenty years: confiscating all of the Complanter Reservation in Pennsylvania and much of the Allegany Reservation in New York for the Kinzua Dam; taking a large part of the Tuscarora Reservation for a reservoir; and Canada and the United States conspiring to slice off sections of the Mohawks’ St. Regis and Caughnawaga reservations to widen the St. Lawrence Seaway. She was already getting good at this speech, which she always delivered like a messenger from a distant front arriving breathless and weary to warn soldiers who were already fighting similar battles on their own doorsteps.
Ten minutes after they had left, while she was wondering whether she had inspired or bored them, she heard a knock on the door. She opened it to find four old men. At first she thought they had come to look for their sons or daughters, but they told her they were a delegation of elders from different nations. It seemed that earlier in the day, Ilona had tried to impress a tall, handsome Shoshone student with the group’s daring by casually mentioning that her friend Jane had the knack for hiding fugitives from injustice. The elders had come to commend Alfred Strongbear to her care.
She found Alfred Strongbear to be a special problem. At the time she met him he had just finished pretending to be a Greek. He had found it necessary to finish because he had decided not to be just an ordinary Greek. He had been an exceptional Greek, a relative of both Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos who had enormous projects in the works. He had pillaged various parts of the country on the strength of these schemes— using his cousins’ discarded oil tankers as floats to harness the sea tides to produce electricity, assembling a group of American investors to buy one of the television networks because he, as a foreigner, was prohibited from buying it in his own name. There was even one that Jane had never quite understood, about using airport-security fluoroscopes to produce involuntary more-than-nude photographs of famous passengers and publishing them for pornographic purposes under cover of a Belgian shell corporation. By now he had collected a great deal of money from investors who should have known better, and there were a great many policemen looking for him who did.
Jane had summoned her courage, glanced at Alfred Strongbear, and said, "You want me to risk my future, maybe even my life, to save a man like that?"
The leader of the delegation of elders was a Southern Brule named Joseph Seven Bulls. He said quietly, ’’The man is a piece of scum. But he is also probably the last Beothuk Indian left on earth."
Jane asked, "Beothuk? Did you say Beothuk?" It was commonly believed that the last Beothuk on earth had left it in the 1820s. The one issue the French and English who settled Newfoundland agreed on was the extermination of the Beothuk. The Beothuk had never grasped the European concept of private property, so they were deemed to be a nation of thieves.
An Arapaho man of a scholarly demeanor named Ronald Kills on Horseback said, "Look at California. They had a dedication ceremony for Point Reyes Park and who shows up but the first Wappo and Coastal Miwok anybody’s seen in a hundred years. Same thing happened up along the Oregon border. Half the people that showed up for the memorial to the exterminated Modoc were Modoc."
Jane said, "But Newfoundland isn’t northern California, and we’re talking about a hundred and sixty years."
Seven Bulls said, "He knows some stories, and he knows the language. He’s a disgrace, but letting them take him at his age and put him in prison is a death sentence. You want everybody to get together to further the cause of the Indian. Well, here’s an Indian. He’s carrying what’s left of his people in his head."
Seven Bulls had her and he knew it. She had driven Alfred Strongbear aka Alfred Strong aka Demosthenes Patrakos off the reservation in the trunk of her car past a roadblock of state cops who had traced him that far and figured he would try to hide in the crowd.
She had been the one who made Alfred Strongbear a Venezuelan. She had been new at the craft in those days, but she had an aptitude for it. In the early part of the century, people used to take a name off a gravestone and get a copy of the dead person’s birth certificate, which they used to start collecting other documents in that name. By the eighties that method wasn’t working in the United States anymore, because it had been done too often. But Jane gambled that it might still work in a country where there wasn’t much demand for false identities and the records weren’t all computerized. Jane had a college friend named Manuela Corridos who was spending her summer vacation at home learning her parents’ sugar business in Merida, Venezuela. Manuela had found it exciting to collect the names and file the papers.
The bargain the elders had made with Alfred Strongbear was that within one year he would make one thousand hours of videotape recordings of the stories his parents and grandparents had told him—Beothuk mythology and cosmology, anecdotes about the old times, and whatever else they had managed to retain over five or six generations—and one thousand hours of videotapes in the lost language of the Beothuk. When Jane had seen him off in New York on what must have been the first of many cruises, he had given her a blessing in a language she didn’t know, winked, walked up the gangplank, and said something to the purser in Spanish. She had felt relieved to see the last of him.
A year later she received an envelope with the return address "Kills on Horseback, Big Wind Reservation, Wyoming." Inside was a photocopy of a letter from a professor in the anthropology department of the University of California at Berkeley. It said that the first five hundred hours of the tapes had been copied, circulated to experts, and analyzed. They were in an unaffiliated language that showed many similarities with what had been pieced together of the Beothuk Language Isolate. He needed to know more about Alfred Strongbear. Jane had sent the letter on to the mysterious Venezuelan in care of the shipping line.
Four years later, Alfred had sent her Harry Kemple. It had been the middle of a cold winter night, with the wind blowing hard across the river from Canada, and she was wearing thick wool socks and a flannel bath-robe. She had just come in from a trip to Chicago to transplant a teenaged boy named Raul. She had done this to hide him from a Los Angeles street gang who would only temporarily remain under the impression that they had succeeded in beating him to death for quitting. When Harry had said, "My name’s Harry Kemple and I’m from Chicago," her first thought was that he had something to do with Raul. He had said it apologetically, as people spoke when they came to announce that somebody had died.
Somebody had. Harry told her the story of meeting Alfred Strongbear first as a kind of credential, but he got around to the part about Jerry Cappadocia soon enough.
Harry told it to her differently. She could see him telling it now. "So Jerry Cappadocia walks up to me in the middle of the lunch hour at Mom’s. Hell, it was worse than that. What walks up to me is not a guy but a couple. What I see first is the girl. She looks like a cheerleader in one of those movies about cheerleaders where the whole thing is a waste of time until they end up in the shower, you know?" Jane didn’t, so he explained. "She’s very blond, very smooth, very young. Now, Mom’s has not seen a girl like this for some time. Mom’s is not in the guidebooks. Mom’s is what the polite would call a hole. It’s likely that this is the only female in the place who still has all her own teeth. So every head in the room turns to stare at her and each of her components. And to make matters worse, her name is Lenore. Not Eleanor, not Lena. Lenore. It actually occurred to me after I knew Jerry Cappadocia that having her was some kind of security measure—like in a war, they send in a big artillery barrage and aerial bombardment and flares to dazzle the enemy before a few little guys in olive-drab suits slip out of their foxholes and attack. But he seemed to really like her. I actually heard that she wasn’t even his full-time. He had to compete, because she couldn’t decide if she liked him or somebody else better.
"Anyway, now that he’s got the attention of half of Cook County, he makes his announcement. He likes to play poker, and he is interested in an invitation to my game."
Felker hadn’t mentioned any of this. Maybe Harry had told him an abbreviated version. Harry had been talking to a cop, and when someone talked to a cop, he tried to say the things that mattered. What mattered would have been the murder.
She tried to bring back what Harry had told her about the murder. "So Jerry Cappadocia is a bit ahead. I’ve been watching his hands like I’m considering putting mustard on them and eating them. It had occurred to me that a man like Jerry might very well be waiting for a chance to palm cards or even slip in some readers. Not that he needed the money, but because it was a reflex. This was not a sportsman; this was a thief. So far I hadn’t caught him at it, but tonight he was getting a little ahead, and that could mean he was doing it or it could mean nothing. But when amateurs start to see those chips piling up in front of them, even the best of them get some kind of euphoria, and they take chances.
"I had been drinking club soda all night to keep my head clear, but by now it has to go somewhere. I’m a little nervous about leaving the room to go to the can at this time, but I convince myself that this may be the best thing to do. If Jerry is going to cheat, he’ll pick the time when I’m gone to do it. That night the game was in an old-fashioned motel with eight little cabins. The bathroom is right behind Jerry, who always liked to face the front door, for obvious reasons.
"So I go into the bathroom and find that five or six bottles of club soda take a long time to drain out of a person. This gives me lots of time to stand there looking around. I notice that there’s a vent over the door. If I put one foot on the bathtub and hold on to the towel rack on the door, I can actually see down into the room. Better than that, I can see it from above, the way the bosses watch the dealers in Las Vegas. There’s only one thing I haven’t figured out, and that’s what I’m going to do if I catch Jerry cheating.
"Next thing I know, there’s something going on at the front door. I didn’t hear anybody knock, but I guess somebody did. This guy Milhaven, who is a very rich guy who probably never got a door in his life, says, ’Must be more drinks. Harry, get that, will you?’ He sees I don’t hop to it, so he goes to the door.
"He gets his hand on the knob and turns it, and that’s about all he gets to do. The door is kicked in, and it hits him. He’s on the ground. The two guys who kicked it in are already inside. One of them holds his gun in two hands to aim and pumps two rounds into Jerry Cappadocia’s chest, while the other bends over Milhaven and puts one into his forehead. There are four more guys in the game, and they go crazy. Nadler the lawyer charges toward the door, but the guy who shot Jerry stands his ground and drops him, then steps aside to let Nadler fall while he aims again. Somebody kicks over the table, and Villard the grocery king and Smith the broker duck behind it. I could have told them this was going to turn out to be a bad idea. They each get hit three or four times through the green felt. Hallman, who owns a bunch of sporting-goods stores, decides to go acrobatic and dive through the closed window. He gets two steps before they clip him, so what hits the window is a dead Hallman. About this time I hear another shot, and I’m ready to faint. I mean, there’s nobody left to shoot at but me.
"I’m still in the bathroom watching this, too scared to move. These two either don’t know about me or they heard somebody say I wasn’t around to get the door. They start stealing things—taking wallets and watches and stuff. Now, these particular six players represent a pretty impressive chunk of money. Each time they arrived to play, I would sell each of them ten grand in chips. It was a kind of assurance that everybody was serious. But each of them brought a lot more, so they could buy more chips if they had a setback. Gentlemen don’t ask each other to take checks for gambling debts. So right now these two shooters are doing pretty well pocket-mining. They get the money, walk out the door, and close it behind them.
"I’m still clinging to the bathroom door like a kitten that climbed up a tree that was bigger than it looked. I’m shaking. To tell you the truth, I’m glad they didn’t break in until my bladder was empty. After about a minute, I can’t think of a reason not to let myself down. I go and look at the six guys on the floor and see there’s no chance anybody is going to make a quick trip to the emergency room and make a dramatic recovery.
"I think maybe I’ll call the cops. I mean, I’m an innocent bystander, right? I actually reach for the phone, but I stop. There’s nothing I can do for these six guys, but there’s a lot I can do for me. See, what happened is strange. Maybe it’s just a robbery. They got maybe a hundred thousand and change. But what happened when they kicked in the door wasn’t that somebody said, ’Give me your money.’ The first one in found Jerry Cappadocia and put two holes in him. I went to look at Jerry’s body, and sure enough, while they were robbing the corpses, one of them had put another shot through his left temple. That was what I heard.
