The infrared gave the history a special green hue, as brought to life in the AN/PVS-7 goggles. He was a frogman swimming the bottom of the murky bay of radical America, 1969 to 1975.
Bill and Mitzi were everywhere in those days. Beautiful radical children, with wild piles and tendrils of hair and eyes wide as pie plates, elves, stars, charismatics, leprechauns of mischief. A hundred shots showed them with megaphone or loudspeaker, leading or addressing the masses. They were always sexy, in raffish war surplus cast-offs, with Indian bands about their heads, gaudy scarves, tight jeans that showed off their leanness, combat boots, sharp cheekbones, and everywhere they appeared they fronted rows and rows of hand-painted signs, like medieval kings leading an army of banners: stop the war now, stop the bombing, no more napalm, get out now, bring the boys home, legalize pot, lsd now and forever, and he realized that while they were painting, he’d been crawling through the bush, hoping not to get his belly blown open.
He checked for signs of search and came up with ambiguous possibilities. Yes, the cabinet locks in Jack’s office appeared uniformly scarred. But that could have been Jack’s own clumsiness with keys as easily as a professional burglar’s pick. There had indeed been an open window that allowed him to squeeze into the basement, and that lock too bore signs of picking-or of a careless window washer banging it with a squeegee.
He himself picked each cabinet, and inside, besides Jack’s secret stash of porno (he was a Penthouse guy), a pound of very nice hash, some prescription meds, there seemed to be nothing suspicious, certainly no obvious sign of something having been removed. But what would that be? A blank space on a shelf? An opening in a row of books? There wasn’t much.
He went over the office top to bottom, opening each cabinet, rifling through each book, looking in each drawer, searching for computer code words (and finding none). He’d wait to turn the machine on in the light, so that its glow wouldn’t radiate through the windows into the night. He thumped the walls for evidence of a safe hiding behind the bookshelves, but no safe seemed to present itself.
Nothing, nothing at least on a first pass.
He tried all the obvious hiding places, feeling under the drawers for tape strands that might indicate something had been secretly affixed in an out-of-the-way site, opening the battery casings of all the portable tape recorders, the cameras, the iPods that lay around, finally, laboriously-it took hours-opening each CD jacket, running from jazz to classics to heavy metal to songs of the Spanish Civil War, and in each finding nothing but a CD. He went to the bathroom, took the lid off the toilet for a waterproof bag-yep, but full of grass, not diamonds or other contraband-opened all the folded towels and washcloths in the closet. Went through the laundry hampers, the pile of folded clothes, the kitchen with its abundance of spices and herbs and exotic condiments from overseas; Mitzi was evidently quite the chef. Again, nothing, just life, lived by aging baby-boomer haute bourgeoisie with fading memories of the glory of the struggle, so long ago, when they were young and bold. It was a kind of counterbiography: for each demonstration they’d led, he’d been on a deep jungle mission; for each cop they’d confronted, he’d dropped a man with an AK-47; for each time they’d fled gas, he’d fled napalm or heavy bomber ordnance or some such. Same coin, different sides, and now the years have passed and what’s gone around has come around, and who’s the only one who cares why you assholes got your brains blown out but me, the guy you thought was a war criminal, a psycho kid killer. Ain’t it a strange fucking world, though?
He went upstairs and spent the rest of the night in the bedroom, the slow, methodical search, unfolding each item of clothing, paging through each volume-the house was stacked, crammed, jammed with books-emptying the wastebaskets and uncrumpling each wad of paper. Nothing, just the detritus of an involved professional life-notes on meetings, calendars, appointment books, nothing at all out of the ordinary. One of them spoke French and one spoke Spanish; there were many, many books in either language, and he went through them too, page by page, looking for notes either written in the margins (frequent and meaningless) or tucked between the pages. Nothing.
He worked through the morning, going to his low crawl during the daylight hours so that nobody walking by might catch a glimpse of shadowy movement and call the police.
He slept for two hours in the spare bedroom, then got up with enough light remaining, turned on Jack’s computer terminal, and didn’t get much beyond the desktop full of icons, because a code was required. He’d found no code; obviously Jack had committed it to memory. He tried number sequences based on obvious dates-Jack and Mitzi’s birthdays, the dates of big demonstrations, the date they almost got blown up in the house in New York, the date of the Pentagon bombing, the date they were freed from prosecution, that sort of thing. Nothing.
When it got dark, he reverted to the photos on the wall. He took each one down, carefully probed it for hidden documents folded between the photos and the matte backing, and that was more tedious than anything. He looked at each one for scrawled notes or something. This went on and on, as the Strongs literally had hundreds of photos. It seemed their every second was subject to a photo, some with celebs, most on the glorious ramparts. He even found one of the two of them with fists upraised after some sort of dinner with T. T. Constable and his then-wife, the beautiful Joan Flanders, four extremely beautiful human beings caught in a circle of love and adoration, all celebrating the smugness of the moral righteousness that made them so perfect for each other, maybe early nineties, when everyone was in from the cold.
He felt a momentary spasm of rage and had an urge to smash the picture, but what would that prove? Really, what would that prove? He hung it back up and continued with the thankless task, picture after picture, again coming up with nothing.
What am I missing? What is here that I don’t see? I’m too stupid to see, of course, because I’m the redneck marine from Arkansas and these people are so much smarter, so much more insightful, so much more penetrating. Bob Lee, Earl’s son, was just a grunt who followed orders, almost got killed, and killed too much. They knew better. They were above that. With their airs, their sophistication-the wine cellar was amazing, and clearly Jack knew his vintages, while Mitzi’s kitchen was the most complex room in the house, still full of life from the dinners she’d cooked for their many friends, the many joyous nights of camaraderie here in the old castle in Hyde Park. He’d seen the pictures, for many had been taken; Jack more or less holding court, lots of young, beautiful kids, lots of earnest intellectual types with the bushy hair, the wire-frame glasses, the women all with straight, undyed hair, in tight jeans, all of them so goddamned happy.
It was like they were some kind of European royalty, Bob thought. It had nothing to do with-
European.
That was something, yeah. Yeah, they really didn’t see themselves as American, did they? There was nothing anywhere in the house that was, strictly speaking, American. No pictures of landscape, nothing celebratory of American themes like farms, mountains, plains, no flag; instead it was all European in tone and texture. From the food to the books to the photos on the white walls, to the slick, hardwood floors, to tapestries of multitextured, usually African or Afro-Cuban tonalities, all of it belonged in a house in Paris.
What does this mean? Practically, not philosophically. They don’t shower enough. They have affairs, Jack a mistress? They drink espresso? They have wine with dinner? They won’t eat sliced bread? Hmm, among other things, it meant they put little lines through the letter Z and the number 7, after the European fashion, an idiosyncracy that he’d noted that meant absolutely nothing.