(2012) Cross-Border Murder (10 page)

Steve Symansky met us at the front door. He was tall and thin, and was dressed informally. He gave us a warm smile, shook our hands, and gave Gina a friendly appraising look. “We were both sorry to hear about your father. We all liked him.”

Gina responded with only a polite, perfunctory smile.

He led us into a living room that was almost twice the size of mine. I noticed that he carried himself with what I took to be an aristocratic bearing. I suspected he had spent the morning on the local golf course.

Almost on cue, Stella appeared carrying a tray with coffee in a large china pot, matching china mugs and an assortment of biscuits. Steve Symansky introduced her. She did not seem to have changed much since her picture had been taken in that photo enlargement Gina had given me. And as in the photo, she was dressed with style and the simplicity that went with it. Well-cut, cream colored, corded slacks, a matching loose turtle neck sweater and a silver pendant hanging from a long thin silver chain around her neck. She had put on a little weight perhaps. And upon closer inspection, I noticed wrinkles of age that all the best creams and lotions in the world could not fully disguise.

She offered us coffee. We declined. Gina explained. “We’ve just finished large containers of it from McDonald’s.”

“Perhaps later?”

Gina nodded. Stella smiled graciously. “I think I’ll wait as well.” She waved us in the direction of a large couch. Gina chose the far corner which gave her a good view of everyone in the room. Steve Symansky poured some coffee for himself and took his place in his favorite armchair. Stella retired to a small winged chair not far from the door to the hallway. I took the corner of the couch opposite to Gina. It allowed me to look and speak directly to Symansky without having to move either my eyes or my head. Well, I thought to myself, the stage has now been carefully set.

Not sure where to begin, I decided to plunge right in. “Tell me, did the murder of Professor Monaghan come as a surprise to you?”

My question seemed to catch him off guard. He frowned, looked over at his wife, and then returned his gaze to me. “Yes, of course. It seemed somehow senseless.”

“And Frank Montini’s arrest?”

“Yes, that too.” He threw a quick glance at Gina. “In academic circles,” he said with a tight smile, “love and sex aren’t considered serious motives for murder. I’m afraid the police simply had no cultural conception of the circles we lived in.”

“It was a pretty small circle, wasn’t it?” I said, “motivated largely by everyone’s opposition to the Vietnam War?”

He studied my face. Then he looked over at his wife again. The seconds seem to drag. It took all of my journalistic training not to break the silence with another question. His hands slowly formed a triangle supporting his lower lip. “How much do you really know?” He asked finally. He must have seen in my face the trap I had placed in my question about everyone’s opposition to the Vietnam War.

“Not enough,” I replied. I smiled knowingly, but enigmatically. He frowned. He seemed to be pondering his next move.

“Late yesterday afternoon,” he said, holding my gaze, “after you phoned and told me that you believed there had been some interference from Washington in Frank’s trial, I had a long chat with an old friend in Washington.” He smiled. I waited. “I was told that someone who works as a stringer for your newspaper had been asking questions and exploiting his contacts. I would imagine you are aware of that?”

“Steve!” Stella obviously did not like the direction the conversation was taking.

With some chagrin, I remembered Haylocke’s remark about the marvels of the modern computer. Information now traveled everywhere faster than I could imagine. I cursed myself for not thinking about that. I nodded very slowly.

He drank from his coffee and placed his mug on a side table. He sighed. “Look, why don’t we put our cards right out on the table, Mr. Webster. In the end it will probably save us all a lot of time and bother.”

His wife protested again. “There are laws, Steve, you know that!” But there was a hint of defeat in her voice. I had the feeling that they had discussed all of this on numerous occasions before and that there was a certain inevitability to what was happening.

He looked at her. “Stella,” he said in a confident voice, “it’s time. Besides, it’s all so minor. No one with real clout in Washington gives a damn anymore, and you know it.”

She opened her mouth to speak but then thought better of it. Some sort of signal seemed to go between them. I turned my attention back to Symansky. I thought: so he’s decided to come out of the dirty linen closet, but his wife hasn’t, and he won’t make her. Because of what I already knew about her, but did not yet want either of them to know, any response on my part to what he might choose to tell me was nuanced with difficulties. Still, I was intrigued. “Okay,” I said, “let’s try to put our cards on the table.”

He seemed remarkably cool and self-assured for someone who was sitting in the line of fire. And I had the smoking gun, didn’t I? But maybe it was just an act on his part. Or perhaps he was just determined to see this through in a way that might permit some damage control on his part. He held my gaze. I felt that he was trying to tune himself in to any subtleties he might see in my reactions. It was something I had often tried to do as a reporter.

“If you’re to understand why I behaved the way I did while I was at Winston,” he told me, “first you must understand the nature of my background.” He paused. I tried to keep my reaction attentive but otherwise meaningless. But I was right: he was intending to expose only himself. “My father, you see, was the publisher and editor of a Catholic newspaper in Poland before the Russians seized that country. Communism was not just a concept to us. The same could be said about Vietnam. It was a symbol of communist expansion, not just an indigenous war of liberation. We were not ignorant, bible-belt conservatives. I could understand some of the views of my colleagues. But I could not agree with them. When the CIA asked for my co-operation, I agreed. I felt I owed it to my father and to the country which had given him political asylum.”

“And so you agreed to spy on your colleagues at Winston.”

“If you insist on putting it that simply,” he said with a touch of frustration and impatience, “then the answer is yes. But that’s not how I would describe it.”

“And just how would you describe it?” I asked. I wondered how long he would keep his cool.

He gave my question a few moments of careful thought. “I filed information reports about some of my colleagues without their knowledge. But I did not spy on them. In almost every case, my reports cleared the professional careers of my colleagues. I did not find my colleagues engaged in criminal activities, they were not active in encouraging covert terrorism against the American government and its laws. It may be hard for you to accept, but our national security agencies had too much on their plates to keep serious tabs on people simply because of their ideological views. And as I’ve said, I was not an uneducated, unsophisticated red-neck. Most of my colleagues, and I’m referring to the Americans at Winston, were about as dangerous as one of your former prime ministers.”

“Oh? And which one was that?” I could not resist asking.

“Pierre Elliot Trudeau.”

We both exchanged a very slight smile, but a smile nonetheless.

“Which brings us to Monaghan.” I said.

“He, I’m afraid, was in a category all his own.”

I felt a need to display some of the knowledge I had recently acquired. “Because of his involvement with Dr. Bull’s artillery developments?”

“That, yes, but not just that on its own.”

“So he was not one of the Americans you ideologically exonerated in your reports.”

“No. Unfortunately, his hatred of the United States was, how can I put it, too unusual for that. He would say things like if the Russians and Cubans ever managed to nuke New York and Washington, he would throw a party and pop the champagne corks.”

“And you believed him?” I asked.

Symansky shrugged. “In a manner of speaking. I began to think I had met my first real sociopath.”

“And you thought he might act out his feelings? Be involved in something criminal?”

“No. Not quite. I didn’t come to that conclusion. He was far too self-preoccupied with what he thought was his genius to put his own life at risk. That was my cautious conclusion. But when he began to do some work for Dr. Bull, he had to be taken seriously.”

“And watched.”

“Yes and watched.”

“But not murdered.”

I saw that touch of frustration and impatience again in Symansky’s eyes. “No. Nothing I saw or heard, or filed, could possibly have encouraged that.”

“Besides,” I said, “Bull at the time was still of interest to the United States military.”

Symansky nodded.

“And Monaghan was still useful as someone to watch so long as he was working for Bull, although it put Monaghan in the odd position of possibly helping a country he hated.”

Symansky nodded again. “But it was all a little more complicated than that. What was involved was a very significant growth in artillery technology, potentially a very dangerous one, depending on who might later decide to purchase it. Who would control what Bull developed was what was at stake. Or even the limited knowledge Monaghan might acquire.”

“In other words, Bull might still be potentially of interest to the U.S. military, but he was not willing to cede ultimate control of what he was working on to anyone.”

Symansky seemed satisfied by my grasp of what was involved.

“He was,” he said thoughtfully, “in every sense of the word, a rogue engineer. Bull, I mean. And Monaghan for that matter too, in his own way! Bull’s allegiance was not to any particular country or ideology, but only to his own place in the history of artillery development. As you know, he even eventually entered negotiations with Saddam Hussein of Iraq.”

“At a time when Iraq was an American ally.” I could not help adding.

“True. But as a rogue.”

“And even earlier with Communist China.” I added to bring matters back to an area closer to Symansky’s ideological heart.

“So I believe. But I had moved here by then.”

“And were no longer interested in what was happening at Bull’s artillery range just fifty miles from here across the Canadian border? I find that hard to believe.”

That seemed to give him pause. I could feel his wife shifting in her chair with irritation.

He frowned. “You may find it hard to believe. But I had broken all my contacts with our national security agencies. I was no longer involved.”

“May I ask why?”

“Certainly.” His eyes engaged mine. He smiled. I could feel him trying to turn on the charm. “My involvement was always part-time and temporary. I no longer felt the cold war posed a danger to the United States. I still cared about the eventual liberation of Poland, but my primary interest has always been academic. I had other pressing intellectual interests I wanted to pursue.”

He looked over at his wife, tried to give her a smile of reassurance and added, “as Stella knows, for many years now I’ve been trying to make progress on a book.”

I thought of obsessive patriotic Americans like Ollie North, and the growing evidence of illegal covert activities by the CIA and the FBI both inside and outside the United States. But I felt sure that Symansky was no Ollie North. In fact, I was beginning to see him in the way he wanted to see himself. Still I decided to be blunt.

“Did you ever break into Monaghan’s office and go through his files?”

His hand which was reaching for his coffee mug froze in mid-air. But I could still see his eyes and his face, and they had not altered as a result of my question. He sipped at his coffee. He stared at me, but there was still a trace of a smile. “Well, we’re really getting down and dirty now, aren’t we! No,” he sighed,” I never did anything remotely like that.” I did not want to look at Stella but I could sense that she had tensed. I wondered why. “I never broke into Monaghan’s office,” he added categorically, “and the CIA never asked me to. As I’ve told you, I was never a full-time CIA employee. And I never received any special training. I just kept a watchful eye out, and filed reports upon request.”

“I have reason to believe someone broke into Monaghan’s office just prior to his murder.”

For a moment, an odd silence seemed to permeate the living room. For the first time I became aware of traffic outside. Finally Symansky just shrugged as if he were at a loss about what to say.

“Were you in the building that day?” I asked.

“Yes. But not in the evening. If I remember correctly, it was late in the evening when Monaghan was killed.”

I smiled. “In other words you have an iron-clad alibi covering that time period.”

He returned the smile. But he no longer looked quite as comfortable as he had when Gina and I had first arrived. “Fortunately, yes. I did have one. Not that anyone asked me of course. I was at a lecture downtown at McGill University. A heated discussion period followed which lasted quite late. I went out for coffee with the guest speaker and some other colleagues from McGill.”

“Was Stella with you?” Gina asked. The question startled Steve Symansky. It was as if he had forgotten Gina’s presence in the room. Or Stella’s for that matter. He shifted in his chair slightly in order to answer Gina directly. “No. She wasn’t.” He acknowledged. “If I remember correctly she was at home nursing a cold. Why do you ask?”

I was afraid that Gina was about to reveal not only what we knew about Stella’s relationship to the FBI, but that Stella might well have been better trained to go through Monaghan’s files than her husband. But Gina surprised me by suddenly producing an innocent, open-faced, smile that I had never seen before. “Well, after all, she’s your wife.” She observed. “I’m sure you shared information. And she did have an office in the same building as you and Professor Monaghan.” She turned to Stella. I watched Gina’s expression and tone suddenly shift gears, acquiring a kind of woman-to-woman intimacy I had not seen or heard from her before. “I was wondering whether you heard or saw anything unusual the day that Monaghan was killed? Something which might help to explain what happened.”