He paid off a squad of New York State troopers. They were expedited with parcels of emeralds, no cash. The troopers raided the campground. Several inhabitants resisted. The troopers rounded them up and burned down the women’s bunkhouse.
Joseph and Helen Klein resisted. They were arrested and severely beaten at a state police jail near Poughkeepsie. They died from their injuries.
Joan was home in Brooklyn that weekend. A veil of rage and horror fell over her.
New York City agents stormed Tom Leahy’s apartment. They found his file. Hoover read it and burned it. His informants helped him build a sedition case against Tom. The war was newly raging. Hoover played a trump card: “national security.” He had Tom Leahy arrested and tried sub rosa. Tom was convicted by a hastily impaneled judge and jury. He was sentenced to six years at Sing Sing.
Tom Leahy’s file was comprehensive. It was diligently annotated and superbly constructed. It begat Mr. Hoover’s devouring file lunacy.
FBI paperwork accrued to ten tons yearly. Tom Leahy died in prison in 1943. He drank himself dead on rotgut toilet brew. He had been repeatedly beaten. The guards who beat him all wore emerald rings.
Tom’s son Jack disappeared and lived anonymously. He attended college and served in the U.S. Navy. He entered Notre Dame Law School. He was wholly and committedly RED and equally committed to sustained vengeance. He laid out a paper trail of obscure name changes and came all the way back to the defiant John Leahy. The trail was built from his date-close birthday up. His father’s file taught him how to build paper. His father’s access to Hoover’s files taught him to build paper fraudulently. He got through the FBI background-check process. He was appointed to the Bureau in 1950.
Special Agent John C. Leahy-RED.
He worked routine Bureau assignments. He kept up with his father’s subversive friends. He covertly redacted his comrades’ files and diverted FBI interference. Jack Leahy: Fed toady by day. Jack Leahy: RED provocateur by night.
Jack reconnected with Joan. She had gone underground and gone criminal. Her sense of vengeance had gone scattershot. She had remained fixedly RED.
She recruited on college campuses. She proudly retained her own real name, much as Jack did. The sporadic use of aliases muddied her trail. She met Karen Sifakis. Their deep friendship began. A floating dialogue defined it. Karen advocated non-violence. Joan nearly always disagreed.
A strikebreaker pulled a gun on her. She hit him with a two-by-four. She sustained a scarring knife wound.
Two Legionnaires cornered her at that Paul Robeson concert. She took a savage beating. She waited nine years. She shot and killed the two men in their sleep.
She loved the thrill of armed robbery. She planned the jobs and steered clear of the jobs as events. She was conscious of herself as a woman. She crouched in certain shadows as she raged RED.
Jack fed her inside scoop on payroll jobs and bank vaults. She always donated her heist takes to the Cause. Joan and Jack became comrade-lovers. They shared a family story and a family hatred. They moved together and in circles overlapping. Joan became Williamson, Goldenson, Broward and Faust and always returned to Klein. Jack remained a G-man under his real and entirely fictive name. Jack got Joan out of jail. Jack utilized municipal PD contacts for criminal-records deletes. Joan conceived two textile-plant jobs in L.A.-’51 and ‘53. Dragnets caught her up. Jack got her out and blitzed file reports. Joan conceived a heist in Dayton, Ohio. Jack bought off key investigators and got most of the paperwork expunged.
Joan roved and toured revolutionary hot spots. It was a breathless errand and a blood duty of great urgency. Her dialogue with Karen Sifakis curtailed her worst urges. A lust peaked and sent things bad: ‘51, ‘56, ‘61. Only Karen knew the details. Only Karen knew the price she paid to continue at her mad pace.
She moved heroin to finance left-wing coups. She fomented revolt in Algeria and Cuba. She was heedless, reckless, vindictive and in many ways ideologically unsound. The death of her great love Dwight Holly taught her things. Her arc left matched his arc right in hate and specious rigor. She should have told him that before she ran from him.
She roved. She ran from and toward J. Edgar Hoover. She thought about the emeralds near constantly. She heard out rumors and cribbed lore and supposition. She exerted common sense and followed the trail.
Jack followed it with her. They shared information and came to this:
Hoover sold the stones to a Paraguayan fascist after the war. It was greed and political payback. El jefe hid Nazi scientists the U.S. wanted. El jefe knew brilliant gemologists. They knew of the stones and had their own designs.
They studied the emeralds. Their findings comprised a thesis on exploitative mining techniques. A straight bore-through-rock technology evolved. It was successfully employed and brought an end to the quaquero raids. El jefe was afraid of overt quaquero vengeance and ordered massacres. Scores of quaqueros were slaughtered.
The bore-through-rock technology caused massive worker layoffs. Enhanced emerald profits financed right-wing coups throughout South America and the Caribbean.
Green Fire served to sustain Rafael Trujillo’s power. The Goat became obsessed. He had to own the initial Muzo-Klein stones outright. The provenance consumed him. He wanted the story to end with him.
Trujillo hoarded Dominican money and grabbed Haitian-owned land. Papa Doc Duvalier had been emerald-financed and wanted the gems for himself. Trujillo and Duvalier hated each other. Trujillo murdered Haitian refugees. Duvalier enacted reprisals. The two fьhrers discovered their mutual longing. They decided to trust each other on the acquisition of the stones and nothing else. Joan tracked the arc of the emeralds to this point and no further. She went to the D.R. in early ‘59.
She found a country ripe for revolt. She found Celia.
A leftist network supplied the introduction. Celia was a gone-bust United Fruit heiress. She was half American, half Dominican, all old money. She used her father’s surname of Farr and her mother’s maiden name of Reyes interchangeably. Gretchen and Celia came and went at whim. Joan preferred the latter name. Celia was a casualty of revolution, left- and right-wing. Castro nationalized the cane fields and bankrupted her father. The Goat robbed her mother in a recent land grab. Celia was a nationally ranked polo player and a bunco artist extraordinaire. She was omnivorously intelligent and not quite brilliant. Joan considered her ripe for conversion. One thing told her this.
The emeralds. Celia was crazed over them.
They became comrade/lovers. Celia was headstrong and tractable, independent and willfully submissive to the concept of revolt. Celia was a mystic. Joan was not. Celia dabbled in Eastern philosophy and more than dabbled in voodoo. Celia believed in the spiritual force of the emeralds. Joan did not. They reconciled their differences and traveled to Castro’s Cuba. They began plotting the 6/14 invasion.
The invasion failed. A rebel named Maria Rodriguez Fontonette betrayed the Cause. A Tonton Macoute man named Laurent-Jean Jacqueau assisted the Cause. Jacqueau secretly emigrated to America and changed his name to Leander James Jackson. Joan and Celia were captured, imprisoned and bribed free. Joan had stashed a robbery take in an L.A. bank vault. Jack Leahy tapped the cash and found the right officials.
Joan and Celia flew to America. The Goat was assassinated. Juan Bosch and Joaquin Balaguer succeeded him. They were repressive and much less garish rulers. Balaguer inherited the Goat’s emerald fixation. He was then a government lawyer eyeing the presidency. Papa Doc remained in power and remained emerald-fixed.