The Puppet Master

And suddenly I got the idea that if I checked on Donald C. Pasco, I'd find he was a COGS, too. It would fit him like pantyhose.

'Thank you, Mr. Ashley—excuse me; Mr. Ashkenazi,' I said getting up. 'You've been very helpful. I'll phone you again when the article begins to take form. To fill holes.'

Calling him Ashley hadn't been a slip. I wanted to see if he'd react. He had, with a look of annoyance. It rekindled my curiosity about the name change. 'Maybe I'll start checking my horoscope in the morning paper,' I added. 'It might prove helpful.'

* * *

Driving back to Santa Barbara, I examined what I'd learned. I couldn't see it leading anywhere, but I realized I liked Arthur Ashkenazi. He seemed like what the Jews call a 'mensch,' which I've had explained as someone who is able, responsible, decent, and feeling. I hoped I didn't learn something discreditable about him.

5

Meanwhile it was my job to look. So the next morning I hired a statistically sophisticated CPA intern to check the entries—the dates and contents of the actual publications—and the computations in Ashkenazi's research. It was a lot different than anything she'd done before, but she had the right attitude—she was a skeptic who liked a challenge. And it seemed to me she had the tools.

Then, independent of that, I went to Pasadena and hired a Ph.D. candidate in astronomy at Cal Tech, to check the same stuff from the viewpoint of an astronomer. I'd met him at Carlos' place that summer, at supper. He was a friend of Carlos' son, Keith. It seemed to me he'd be reasonably open-minded. He was an ex-member of the 'New Gnus'—the Church of the New Gnosis—and you had to be damned flexible to even consider that one.

I also visited the Santa Monica High School library and looked through the 1968 and '69 yearbooks. I got a list of students who might have been personal friends of Aldon Ashley, kids who'd been in the same student activities. Then I did essentially the same things with the UCLA yearbook for 1973. After that it was back to the State Data Center for locations and phone numbers—the drudge work of investigation. Nearly half the people I was interested in had died in the plagues of '99 and 2000, but phone calls still got some information.

The most productive was a friend of both his high school and college days, who still exchanged Christmas/Hanukkah letters with him. They'd see each other every five or ten years. The guy lives in Minneapolis, so I didn't talk to him eyeball to eyeball, but a telephone call was useful.

For one thing, I learned why Aldon Ashley had changed his name, and there was nothing discreditable about it. The same weekend he'd graduated from UCLA, he'd gotten in some kind of fuss with his sister-in-law, whom this guy characterized as a real bitch. Eldon, Ashkenazi's twin, got upset listening to it, and left to drive around. And smoke dope, something Eldon was into. He ended up losing an argument with an overpass abutment, which is how he became a brain-damaged cripple.

The sister-in-law told their father that the reason Eldon had done this was, Aldon had insulted him. And for whatever reason, the father believed this, and raised hell with Aldon. Told him it was his fault his brother's life was ruined. Apparently overlooking the daughter-in-law, the dope, and Eldon's decision to drive recklessly.

So Aldon left home, and that summer changed his name. Something his father wouldn't learn about for years, the break was that complete. When Aldon's grandfather was young, he'd resigned from being Jewish, and changed his name to Ashley. Aldon, as a sort of resignation from being his father's son, had switched back to something about as Jewish as he could find. He even learned to speak some Yiddish. It was his Methodist mother, though, who secretly helped him through grad school at Arizona. She'd inherited money of her own.

All of which was interesting, but didn't seem to lead anywhere. It occurred to me that maybe I should write that article about Ashkenazi, or a whole damned biography. Make a truthful man of myself.

Something else Ashkenazi's buddy gave me was the name of a woman Ashkenazi had gone with for years, in their middle age. Again the Data Center gave me a location and phone number. After setting up an appointment, I took a short airbus hop down the coast to Oceanside, rented a car, and interviewed her in person.

They'd dated for several years, she said, and she'd liked him a lot. But she liked to travel and entertain, and had money of her own. While Aldon liked to stay home, read, walk, and play with his computer. 'Arthur's idea of a night out,' she told me, 'was to take his portable telescope and we'd drive up to Pine Mountain Summit, in the Sierra Madre above Ojai. To look at stars. Our most typical dates were pleasant drives along the coast, stopping to walk on the beach. Then have a nice meal at some expensive restaurant, followed by a movie.'

Which she'd enjoyed, she said, but they weren't enough. She'd ended up marrying a widower who also liked to travel and entertain.

She also told me about Ashkenazi setting up a trust fund for his brother, with his hostile sister-in-law as payee. Something I'd already verified through the Data Center. Ashkenazi might or might not hold grudges, but apparently he could set them aside when it seemed right to him. A mensch all right. I was getting to like him better all the time, and Pasco less.

I also talked to a guy who'd known him pretty well in grad school at the University of Arizona. The scene there was a set of grad students with a lot of attention on the problems of getting jobs once they graduated. People who spent so much time on their studies and assistantship duties, they'd hardly had any left for social life.

Aldon never did get a job in astronomy. But in the process of getting his degrees, he'd gotten well trained in math, statistical analysis, and computers. So he took a job with a Santa Monica firm called Spectronics. Within two years he was an independent software consultant and troubleshooter, and built a successful business. Meanwhile investing. Successfully. Another interview with the Minneapolis buddy got me the information that those were the years Aldon had begun 'playing with astrology.'

A couple of Aldon's software clients during those years said his prices had always been reasonable and his service good. And he'd always been pleasant and easy to communicate with.

By '92 he'd dropped out of the software business, apparently living on his investments. I learned little about his investment activities during those years. The broker he'd dealt through had suicided in the Great Crash of '96, and the broker's secretary had died, along with more than a billion other people, of epidemic viral meningitis in 2000.

6

None of that was going to make Pasco happy. I woke up one morning with the decision to lay it all out for