The Language Of Cannibals

Mosely shook his head. 'Assignment? You mean he came to Cairn on Bureau business?'

Suddenly I felt tense, slightly bewildered. I was no longer aware of the pain in my wrist. 'You didn't know that?'

'No.'

'It's standard procedure for an FBI agent to establish a liaison with local law enforcement officials as soon as he or she begins an assignment.'

'That I'm fully aware of, Frederickson,' Mosely replied evenly. 'The first time I ever laid eyes on Michael Burana was when we responded to a call early Monday morning and fished his body out from between two pilings down by the Tappan Zee Bridge. We made him as FBI from the shield in his wallet. What was his assignment?'

My mouth had gone dry, and I licked my lips and swallowed. It didn't help. 'I'm not supposed to know.'

'But you do.'

'He was supposed to install wiretaps and conduct a mail surveillance. The whole business was probably illegal, but Michael's boss was never much concerned with minor technicalities like that.'

'Who was he supposed to be conducting this surveillance on?'

'The Community of Conciliation.'

Mosely abruptly dropped his pencil on top of the pad, leaned forward on his desk, and shook his head. Just before he turned his face away, I saw him smile.

'What's so funny?' I asked tersely.

When he looked at me, his smile was almost-but not quite-gone. 'Sorry, Frederickson,' he said evenly. 'I don't mean to seem insensitive, but your friend must have been one hell of an agent and had one sweet-talking silver tongue. Either that, or he told you some things that may not have been exactly true. The Community of Conciliation owns a donated mansion on the north side of town, right on the river. That's where Michael Burana was staying, and that's where the canoe the Westchester police found came from. Some surveillance. Our investigation showed that the first thing Michael Burana did when he arrived in town was go to that mansion. And they let him in. That's where he stayed from his very first night in town.'

The muscles in my stomach and between my shoulder blades had begun to flutter. 'What did the people at the Community have to say about all this?'

'Goddamn little. They described him as an old friend.'

'That's all?'

'They verified what I just told you, but they didn't have much else to say. The Cairn Police Department and the Community of Conciliation don't exactly form a mutual admiration society. It was a woman there who described him as an old friend.'

'What woman, Chief?'

'Mary Tree.'

No one had ever said civic duty and loyalty to friends were always easy, I thought as I walked back up the steeply inclined streets of Cairn toward my motel on 9W. I'd come to the river hamlet to unload some information that I'd hoped might raise a question or two in the minds of the local authorities who'd originally investigated Michael Burana's death in a supposed boating accident. The chief of police had fielded my modest offering with a gracious thank-you and tip of the hat, and then proceeded to unload on me in return a whole barrelful of questions for me to ponder. Instead of easing, my dilemma had grown more complicated.

I had no reason to think that Dan Mosely was lying, since most of what he'd told me would be relatively easy to check out. However, Michael Burana's behavior from the day he arrived in Cairn to the time of his death, as described by Mosely, didn't begin to match the profile of the topflight FBI agent who had sat in my living room until three in the morning getting drunk while he poured out his disappointment, rage, and sense of shame at the same time as he poured down my Irish whiskey.

It had been two weeks before, one week before he was scheduled to set up shop in Cairn in order to spy on the Community of Conciliation. His superior, Edward J. Hendricks, was deliberately trying to humiliate him, he'd said, and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it. I'd reluctantly agreed with him on both points. He hadn't mentioned anything about visiting an old friend, and he certainly hadn't seemed in any mood to set aside a soul- deep aversion to water in order to go paddling in a canoe on the Hudson River.

The RestEasy Motel was a horseshoe-shaped affair, three building units trisected by two narrow promenades lined with vending machines. Only two of the units were being used, and the area around the third unit, including its adjacent promenade, was only dimly lighted. I had a room on the second floor of the middle unit, with the entrance at the rear, off the parking lot. To get to it I cut across the lawn and headed up the second, dim promenade. With my mind thrumming along at a fairly rapid pace, distracted by the questions raised by Dan Mosely, I had virtually dismissed Gregory Trex from my mind-failing, of course, to take into account the fact that he might feel he had further business to discuss with me, and that it wouldn't take a lot of phone calls by a genius to find out where a certain dwarf was staying.

Trex caught me completely by surprise, stepping out behind me from the shadow within a shadow between an ice maker and a soda machine near the end of the promenade, and delivering a whack to my left arm, just above the elbow, with something that felt like an iron rod. The blow knocked me sideways, off my feet. There was an explosion of white-hot pain, and the whole arm went numb virtually before I'd hit the ground and rolled on my right side. Immediately I rolled again, this time forward, over the curb and into the parking lot. I came up in a crouch, right arm and foot forward to protect my damaged left arm, which was hanging limp at my side.

Gregory Trex, still dressed in his tank top, camouflage fatigues, and black sneakers, stepped down off the curb, stopped about five yards away. His too-bright jade-green eyes, the polished mahogany of the rock-hard nunchaku sticks he carried, and the foot-long steel chain connecting the sticks all gleamed in the light from a floodlamp set on the balcony of the second unit, just above my head. I backed up a step, tentatively shrugged my left shoulder; welcome pain stabbed through it. I could tell the arm wasn't broken-but the triceps had received a severe banging, and it was going to be some time before the arm would condescend to do anything for me.

Trex's puffy lips curled back, revealing his small, gapped teeth. He took another step forward, whirling his nunchaku sticks over his head and at his sides, apparently to demonstrate his expertise, and not incidentally to put a good scare into me.

What I had in me was a good mad, despite the fact that I had no one but myself to blame for Trex getting the drop on me. I had a mountain of paperwork to attend to, and, thanks to Gregory Trex, it was beginning to look like I was going to have to do it holding the pencil in my mouth. I glanced up and around. While there was no one in the darkened unit to my left, there were people in my unit and the one beyond that. Trex apparently wasn't concerned about being seen, since he didn't believe the police would do a damn thing. It occurred to me that in some dark corridor of his decidedly primitive mind he might prefer that there be witnesses, so that word would get around town that I'd gotten my comeuppance. He might even be satisfied now and walk away if somebody else arrived on the scene; he'd already accomplished what he'd come to do. I suspected that I might be able to rouse some attention if I started shouting, but I really wasn't interested in attention or help. I was interested in putting a good hurt on Gregory Trex, who was proving to be a real pain in the ass; he'd seriously inconvenienced me and managed to make me very angry.

How I was going to accomplish this particular feat of laying some serious hurt on the other man wasn't clear to me at the moment, but I was damn well determined to find a way to do it.

'How does that feel, dwarf?' Trex said in a piping voice that sounded surprisingly high-pitched for a man of his bulk.

'Actually, Gregory, it's kind of hard to tell,' I replied, keeping my gaze fixed on the nunchaku sticks he held. 'Right now, my arm doesn't have much feeling in it, but I suspect it's going to smart like hell. What kind of a chickenshit war hero are you, anyway, ambushing me from behind? Did you ever see Chuck Norris pick on someone smaller than he was?'

His expression changed slightly, and something that actually looked like hurt passed over his thick features; I'd bruised his feelings by bringing up the subject of our disproportionate sizes. It occurred to me then that Gregory Trex, in addition to being a murderous young thug, might be more than moderately retarded.

'You made a fool out of me,' he said in a whiny tone. 'You hit me from behind, so I hit you from behind.'

'I goosed you, Gregory, for Christ's sake. You tried to take off my head back there, and you could've broken