Dream of a Falling Eagle

'You noticed. It should also be important to you.'

'Garth, do you really think our role in the CIA investigation is so unimportant that we should risk missing a tight deadline to go off chasing after some poem-robber?'

'Hey, the company has fucked me over every bit as much as it has you-maybe more. And, in the final analysis, I still say Dickens' problem is more important. But it doesn't have to be that complicated. What's the big deal? Call a couple of his editors and see if one of them has a submission envelope with this Jefferson Kelly's return address on it, and we proceed from there. Francisco can do it.'

I thought about it for a few seconds, shrugged. 'Hey, when you're right, you're right.'

'Damn right I'm right. You wouldn't have needed me to explain it to you if you hadn't become such a self- important little prick whose ass I'm probably still going to have to kick.'

'Garth, I really hope this doesn't mean you're losing enthusiasm for our other little task at hand.'

Garth smiled thinly. 'Not in the least. Now that we've addressed Moby Dickens' concerns, serious thumping on the CIA suddenly seems very important to me again. It's what Mr. Castaneda would call 'controlled folly.' Among other things, I still owe them for costing me a career I wasn't ready to give up at the time, and almost getting the both of us killed on more than a few occasions. Now go do some good before I thump on you.'

'Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.'

I went back into my office and found Moby Dickens sitting on the edge of the couch staring at the floor, nervously rubbing his enormous hands together. I walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. 'We're going to,see what we can do for you, Moby.'

'Thank you,' he rumbled, then got to his feet and reached for his wallet.

'You don't have to give us any money now, Moby. We'll bill you for our hours after we get the job done. Here's what you can do for us. Give me copies of all the poems you've written that you know Kelly has plagiarized, along with the magazines that have his versions in them. I need the dates each poem appeared.'

'I've already done that, Dr. Frederickson,' he said quickly, picking up his portfolio from the couch and holding it open for me to see. 'It's all in here. I've catalogued and cross-referenced everything.'

'Good. Then I want the names and addresses-and telephone numbers, if you have them-of every editor who's ever published your work, and the same for the editors who've published Kelly's smudge jobs. I'm particularly interested in the editors you've communicated with and who might help us track down Kelly. The editor who first put you on to Kelly should be at the top of the list.'

'I've done that too, sir,' he said, hefting the leather pouch in his hands. 'It's all in here, along with a copy of Poet's Market. That lists the names of editors and addresses of all the magazines that publish poetry. I've highlighted the editors I've dealt with, and cross-indexed them with my poems and Kelly's plagiarisms.'

'Outstanding.'

'If you can just find this man, talk to him and make him see how important my work is to me. I'm afraid that, someday, people who've read both my work and his versions will look at me and believe I plagiarized his poems, not the other way around. All I want is for him to stop doing it, sir.'

'You've got it. And accomplished poets like yourself get to call me Mongo-in fact, it's required.'

For the first time since he'd entered my office, Moby Dickens smiled. He must have received reasonably good dental care in prison, because his teeth were white and even, with a gap between the two front ones. 'Okay, Mongo. This means a great deal to me.'

'Drop your portfolio off with Francisco at the front desk on your way out, along with your address and a telephone number where we can reach you. I'll be in touch.'

He shook my hand again, then, still grinning, turned and walked out. I went back to my computer to call back up the notes and data I had been working on, then went out into the hallway to look for Garth. He must have gone back up to his apartment to work, because there was no sign of him. I went into the front office, and Francisco looked up from his computer terminal. Moby Dickens' worn leather portfolio was on the desk beside him.

'Francisco,' I said, walking over to him and putting a hand on one of his frail shoulders, 'give Margaret a call and see what she's up to. If she's not working, see if she can come in and handle the office for a few days. Otherwise, call in a temp. Make sure he or she is good, because he'll be doing your job.'

My secretary frowned slightly. 'You're firing me, sir?'

'Hardly. I'm temporarily promoting you to the rank of Associate Investigator.'

Now he grinned. 'Really? What do you want me to do, sir?'

'Find me a plagiarist.'

Chapter 4

I had green tea and cold sesame noodles for lunch at my desk, working my way through the reams of notes and data. Most of the 'records' we had obtained from the Aristide government- everything from military and police payrolls to the sundry contents of government filing cabinets-were written in longhand, and it had taken the combined, full-time efforts of three translators just to decipher what we had. Next had come the not inconsiderable task of transcribing it all into computerese so that the information could be sorted and analyzed and finally called forth to form charts and graphs which we hoped, in the end, would paint a very damning portrait of an entire, brutalized country essentially owned and operated by the CIA, the poorest of nations serving as a mysterious conduit for billions of dollars which could not be accounted for in any CIA budget. This phase wasn't the most stimulating work, but it had to be done, for if the CIA was to be brought down, it had to be accomplished with numbers and the irrefutable testimony of witnesses, not the Frederickson brothers jumping up and down and screaming hysterically about the bloody deeds of a bunch of savage killers, many of whom seemed to be monumentally stupid, whose salaries were paid by the American people. The blade of the saber with which we hoped to decapitate the company had to be ice cold.

Garth entered the office in late afternoon. He was carrying a large manila envelope which he was in the process of opening. 'Just arrived by messenger,' he said, tearing open the envelope. 'Figured we'd check it out together.'

I watched as he spread the edges of the envelope and peered inside. 'Well?'

His answer was to take out the contents and hand them to me. They were two enlarged copies of photographs. One was a duplicate of the head-and-shoulders shot of the triangular-faced man with the piercing eyes that had been displayed on the altar in the basement of General Vilair Michel's house, and the other was a wide-angle shot of the altar itself, as it had appeared when we'd first discovered it. A note clipped to one of the photos read:

Good hunting. Hope you nail the bastards.

Carl Beauvil

'Voila,' I said, glancing back up at Garth.

'Yeah,' Garth replied with a shrug. 'Nice of Beauvil to come through for us like this, but we probably should have told him that our curiosity was a lot bigger than our capacity to try to do anything with this stuff. We've got no time to try to track down this guy. We've got all we can do to organize and tie together the information we've already got.'

'You're right,' I said, reluctantly tossing the photographs onto my desk.

'Let's go get something to eat.'

'I figured I'd have Francisco call out for a pizza before he goes home.'

Garth shook his head, then grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me up out of my chair. 'Come on. I'll buy you a steak. We both need a break. There's nothing our company friends would like better than for one or the both of us to keel over from exhaustion and malnutrition before we can finish this thing.'

'In that case, I'll take you up on your offer of a steak. But only for medicinal purposes.'

Over drinks and dinner we discussed literary strategy, the actual form of our report, and the order of its contents. I wanted to start off with what I considered the good stuff, offering up front a lurid account of the voodoo-style ritual murders that had thwarted our interrogation of six key witnesses to CIA-sponsored atrocities in Haiti and elsewhere. Garth was against that approach, pointing out that we could prove no link whatsoever