Killing Plato

Football until I realized I didn’t give a damn about American football anymore. After that, I went down to the bar mostly just to have something to do. Pleased to find the place nearly deserted, I took a stool and sipped a Bushmills and water in silence.

The television set at the end of the bar was tuned to New York One, a twenty-four-hour cable news channel that featured mostly local news. I didn’t pay much attention to it until I happened to glance up and see the church where Zoe’s funeral had been held that afternoon.

“Could you turn that up?” I called out to the bartender.

The ferret-faced man who looked like Al Pacino with bad hair was washing glasses in a sink at the other end of the bar. He dried his bquohands on the towel hanging over his shoulder, then picked up a remote control and raised the television’s volume.

As I listened to a woman reporter deliver a rambling and unnecessarily detailed description of Zoe’s funeral, the bartender eased over, tilted his head up, and watched along with me. The reporter wrapped her story with a brief account of Plato Karsarkis’ own death in a plane crash and then summarized some of the more outrageous stories that had swirled around him in life.

“Good riddance,” the bartender mumbled in a thick Eastern European accent of some kind. “The bastard.”

“I’m sorry?” I asked automatically, not entirely certain I’d heard the man correctly.

“I said the bastard got what he deserved,” the bartender repeated, gesturing with his towel toward the TV set. “Plato Karsarkis getting killed like that, I meant. Not the little girl dying, God bless her.”

I said nothing.

“That scumbag was a piece-of-shit criminal and everybody treated him like a movie star,” the bartender snorted in disgust. “Made a fortune helping the rag heads kill people. Got what he deserved, if you ask me.”

“There was never a trial,” I said. “Plato Karsarkis might not have been convicted of anything if one had taken place.”

The man snorted again. “I expect you got that right, pal. Make the crime big enough and nobody ever did it. Notice how that always works?”

The bartender tossed his towel up in the air, caught it smartly, and scrubbed a spot off the bar. Then he turned the television set back down and returned to washing his glasses.

I let him, finishing my whiskey in silence.

The next morning, wrapped in a hotel bathrobe and trying to read the New York Times over toast and coffee, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about what the bartender had said.

He was right about one thing, of course. The really big crimes had little or nothing to do with justice. What they had to do with was power. I didn’t like it, but I understood it. What I didn’t understand, at least not yet, was exactly what the really big crime had really been in this case.

Was it Plato Karsarkis’ deal to peddle smuggled oil and launder the profits? Was it corrupt Asian politicians taking payoffs when their countries bought the oil? Was it some cockamamie National Security Council scheme to subvert Indonesia? Was it the secret diversion of American weapons to terrorists who then used them to kill hundreds of kids? Was it somebody, maybe even the Americans in the White House who had set the whole scheme into motion in the first place, murdering people in an effort to retrieve tape recordings implicating them in the plot?

Or was it something worse? Something even worse than that.

Was it that a few powerful men knew exactly what they had done; that their scheming and plotting had set in motion events that they could no longer control; that innocents had been killed as a consequence; and that they were all going to get away with it?

When I thought about it that way, a hard knot of anger began to form deep within me. If they did get away with it, wouldn’t I be responsible now? Didn’t I possess both the means and the ability to see they didn’t get away with it?

I knew I had to forget all about abstract concepts like good and evil, fairness and injustice, honor and shame. What I had to fo?away wicus on now was power. Who had it, how they used it, and where it was.

I knew where it was.

The White House was just at the other end of the Delta Shuttle, hardly more than an hour from New York.

In the bottom of my bag there was a flat manila envelope and inside that envelope was the printout of the NIA files Kate had given me together with the three microcassettes Plato Karsarkis had committed into my care. When I had packed in Bangkok, I had put them into my suitcase without really understanding why I was doing it.

But now I understood completely.

What Karsarkis had wanted me to do all along was to carry a message to the White House, to my old roommate Billy Redwine in particular. The message was to have been that Plato Karsarkis wanted off the hook for everything he had done or he would make them pay. He would tell the world what they had done, what the White House had done, and he would bring them down with him. He would bring them all down.

Plato Karsarkis might be dead, but the soul of his message still lived on the three little cassettes I had in my possession. The time had come for people to start doing the right thing, not because Karsarkis would expose them if they didn’t, but just because it was right.

I tossed the New York Times onto the couch and got dressed. Then I packed and took a cab to LaGuardia, where I caught the Delta Shuttle to Washington.

FIFTY ONE

Billy Redwine and I hadn’t actually spoken since the time a year or so ago when he had flown all the way to Phuket to hear my tale about the Asian Bank of Commerce and the string of dead bodies somebody in Washington had been leaving across Asia to hush up the real story behind its collapse.

I was at National Airport waiting for my bag and trying to decide what to do now that I was in Washington when I noticed a big Hertz sign at baggage claim. That sounded like as good a start as any, so I went out to the curb, caught the yellow and black Hertz bus, and about half an hour later was tooling up the George Washington Parkway in a shiny red Mustang that smelled of new vinyl and old tobacco.

I pushed the radio buttons and found an oldies station and all at once I remembered how much I missed cruising the streets of a city listening to music on a car radio. In Bangkok or Hong Kong or Singapore, they didn’t get the idea at all. Driving just for the sheer hell of it was such an American thing to do. It wasn’t a concept that translated very well.

The disk jockey started playing the original Rolling Stones version of Honky Tonk Woman and I slapped out the rhythm on the steering wheel with my palms.

Damn, that feels good.

When I got to Key Bridge, I turned off the Parkway and crossed over the Potomac into Georgetown. A brisk wind slashed at the city from the east, bringing with it a damp chill off the water and leaving piles of yellow leaves splotched with crimson banked like snowdrifts against the hubcaps of parked cars. The wind spun the dry leaves into miniature tornadoes and lifted scraps of paper and sailed them over the car like tiny squadrons of paper airplanes. The Four Seasons was full, but the Georgetown Inn had a room, so I left the car with the doorman, got my bag out of the trunk, and checked in.

Then I picked up the telephone and called the White House switchboard.

I left a message with a woman who identified herself as Billy Redwine’s administrative assistant. I?he Wthink that meant she was his secretary. She was cool and correct, and her voice contained no suggestion she expected my call ever to be returned by anyone at all, let alone by Billy Redwine.

It was less than twenty minutes before the telephone in my room rang.

“Mr. Shepherd?” It was the voice of a different woman, her tone professional but with subtle hints of deference and warmth. “Mr. Redwine wonders if you are free for dinner.”

“That would be fine.”