The Last Manly Man (24 page)

“A real angel?”

“Who knows? ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels, unawares,'” he said. “Hebrews.”

When we got to Coney Island, Blue parked near the armed services recruiting center just off Surf Avenue and we walked down to the boardwalk. It was around ten, and the lights were all on in Coney Island. All the rides and amusements were lit up and moving to their tinny carnival music. There were sailors on leave and girls in polka-dot dresses with beehive hairdos. If you squinted a little, it seemed like it was 1952, the Dodgers were still at Ebbets Field and Chevrolet still ruled the road. But then two punked-out lovers walked by, followed by a couple of yuppie dads in Dockers pushing yuppie puppies in strollers. I heard the Ramones blaring from the sound system of one of the open-front bars on the boardwalk, and I was caught in this lovely anachronistic warp.

We walked down the boardwalk toward the Surfside Bar. Tucked into a long line of concessions, the front was wide open and facing the ocean. We walked in and looked around, until we saw a table of guys playing cards at the back.

“One of you guys Les?” Blue asked.

“Yeah, I am,” said a short white guy with a monkish fringe of hair and dark-rimmed glasses. “Excuse me, guys, I gotta go talk to these people. Can you get me another beer and some French fries?”

“Thanks for helping us out,” I said.

“No problem. Larry and Ernie vouched for you. Let's sit down at this table. You need a beer?”

“No thanks,” I said.

I unfolded the map and put it on the table between us, and Les took a long hard look at it.

“I didn't do this job,” he said. “But I might know who did. Can I keep this?”

“Well …” I said.

“How about this? Here's my card. Fax a copy of this to me tomorrow, and I'll make some calls.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Les, your fries,” called one of the cardplayers.

After he left them, Blue said, “Don't expect there's much more we can do tonight. And Jason hasn't beeped. Come on, I'll take you home. You in a hurry?”

“Not a terrible hurry.”

We wound our way through the anachronistic, somewhat seedy midway, and Blue stopped at a shooting gallery and shot off a few rounds at little metal targets that moved back and forth along a wire. He was a good shot, and won me a tiny gold Buddha.

“That's good karma,” he said to me.

When I got home, my cat was at the window, and the message light was blinking. Liz had called to say the interview went well—I'd forgotten to call the office and check up on her. Gus had called to say he was moving to the Metro Grand Hotel and would be in town for a few more days, could we please get together to talk, to really talk. He asked that I call him, but I couldn't deal with it right now, though I felt bad. He was confused by my blowing him off without a logical explanation and he was falling into an old trap, where you think you like someone more than they like you just because they seem to be cooling to you. No matter what I told him, he wouldn't believe me: Hey, Gus, I'm hot on the trail of a biological weapon at the moment, can we talk later?

I crawled into bed with the hat, a beautiful hat despite its now torn lining. Boy, the world had changed. When I was a kid, you would see a steady stream of men in hats walking down the street on a Saturday afternoon, even more on Sunday, as men always wore hats to church in my town, which they removed before they entered. Now you see men in hats and it either seems old-fashioned or a retro affectation. Funny, too, that hats, which protect the head and serve a practical purpose, went out of style and ties survived. Between the two, wouldn't you vote for the hat over the paisley noose? Men got screwed on that one.

I fell asleep holding the hat and dreamed of Jesus, one of those Jesus dreams like I used to have as a kid, after my dad died, Jesus as cartoon superhero, swooping down out of the sky to kick the shit out of the bad guys, with lots of
thunks!
and
pows!
Adam West—Batman style. In this dream, Superhero Jesus rescues me, Jason, and the bonobos, and we all hold hands and fly through the sky to some safe, warm, dry place. Jesus is wearing the hat.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The next morning at the office, I faxed the map to Les the plumbing contractor, pounded out a script for the second part of the series, and delegated all other authority to my staff. Liz got another interview. Shauna got one, too. Karim the agoraphobic tape editor was assigned the promo. The interns were assigned to help the others.

This presented a problem, because there wasn't one of my employees I trusted. Word that they were doing these challenging assignments could cause quite a ripple around the network. Not only would this give newsroom gossips something to fictionalize about, but it might tip Reb and Solange off that my energies were being focused elsewhere.

To prevent this, I convened a staff meeting in our conference area and spun my abdication of responsibilities this way: You, my loyal employees are being given increased opportunities on account of your excellent work. There are risks involved in these new responsibilities. The newsroom naysayers are watching you, ready to pull you down before you even get started. Don't give them any ammunition. Work quietly and discreetly until the series airs, showing me, the newsroom naysayers, and all other doubters what you can do.

Now, my employees were professionally and emotionally invested in the quality of the product. Their butts were on the line.

Jack had called, and that was one task I couldn't delegate. I called him back immediately.

“Robin, I was readin', uh, an article by this woman Suzy Hibben. You know her?”

“Not personally. But I know of her. She's spent most of her adult life running all over the country telling other women to stay home and serve their husbands and children.”

“She's here at the women's conference with a bunch of her college girl followers.”

“Yeah, her college followers have a group called the Mrs. Degree,” I said.

“That's clever. She says here that women have always secretly run the world, as the power behind the throne.…”

“Those women who have been secretly running the world, they sure have been doing a lousy job,” I shot back. “What was up with the Inquisition? Or World War Two? Or Watergate? Or the Vietnam War? Or all that postwar wife-beating? What were women thinking?”

“Touched a nerve, huh? You havin' a bad day, Robin? You sound aggravated.”

“Oh. No. It's just one of those days, Jack. Hectic, you know? Women have influence and always have, sure. But not enough. That secret-power-of-women crapola is a myth they feed women to keep them from clamoring for more real power.”

“You have more power than you think, in my opinion,” Jack said.

“Yeah, probably so, and we have just as much of our own crapola,” I said.

He laughed and hung up without saying good-bye.

Les the plumbing contractor had left a message to call him back, but he wasn't in when I returned the call. While I waited for him to get back to his office, I read through the papers. All the tabloids were reporting the Luc Bondir “dead for fifteen years” story. All the papers hinted at a connection between Bondir and illicit nicotine experiments. Blue and Jason had been effective in their ruse to mislead the media so far.

“I think I've found the place for you,” Les said. “A guy I know was the plumbing contractor two years ago on a job on Tweak Island, off Long Island in the Atlantic. He did the job for a company, LMM Corporation.”

LMM. Last Manly Man.

“Know who owns this island?”

“The LMM Corporation, offshore registry, Cayman Islands, I think. I'm gonna fax you the coordinates.”

“Thanks, Les.”

For a moment, I toyed with tracking down this LMM Corporation. This would take a long time, and I wasn't sure what good it would do. It was no doubt a holding company of a holding company of a holding company.

As soon as I got the Tweak Island coordinates from Les, I beeped Jason.

“Found island,” I said. “Am at work.”

Five minutes later, he beeped back, “Blue coming. Half hour.”

Jason was waiting for us with another man at a table at the Bog, an environment- and cannabis-friendly club in downtown Manhattan. It was an eco-club, where you could pick up the latest literature on boycotts, swig a brew, and watch
The Wizard of Oz
with the sound turned down and the soundtrack from Pink Floyd's
Dark Side of the Moon
turned up. If you're around my age and you want to really feel your age, stop by this place on a busy night. You never saw so much baby fat. And what an anachronism. It was the 1960s here, black light, glow-in-the-dark peace signs, and R. Crumb “Keep on Trucking” posters, girls with frizzy hair in Indian muslin skirts and tunic blouses (some of them born post-MTV, all born well after the Beatles broke up).

The bar was carved out of half a psychedelic school bus, once used to transport deadheads from Grateful Dead concert to Grateful Dead concert. Plastered around the walls were signs exhorting people to help save this animal or those indigenous people, to free Animal Liberation Front activist Rod Coronado, to boycott this company or that company.

Today, Jason was wearing a coral pink and yellow sundress with pale pink, closed-toe sandals. He looked pretty as a picture.

“This is number twenty. He's a liberation specialist,” Jason said, introducing Blue and me to a short, skinny white man in his thirties. “This is Robin, the journalist I told you about, and this is number seven.”

“You can call me Blue,” Blue said.

“Good to meet you,” he said, spreading a Long Island map out on the table and checking the coordinates of Tweak Island against it. “Okay, Tweak Island is right … here.”

Jason spread his copy of the hand-drawn map of Tweak Island next to the larger map. “We think the bonobos are being held there,” he said, pointing.

Number twenty studied the hand-drawn map, then the Long Island map. “We're going to need to reconnoiter the island, confirm its location, and make note of all visible security,” number twenty said. “Let's take a little trip out there.”

An hour later, Jason, Blue, number twenty, and I boarded a fishing boat moored at the northern end of Manhattan. There was a six-person crew in addition to us, all members of the Organization, two dressed in loose cotton pants and shirts that bore the name Islander Fishing Expeditions. Three others were dressed as tourist fishermen, in Bermuda shorts and short-sleeved shirts. The last member of the crew, named Ethan, was a young, bearded redhead wearing a knit cap and a big unbleached apron over baggy, rough-weave clothes. He looked like he'd just stepped off a Greenpeace recruitment poster, and he smelled like a burlap bag full of potatoes.

“We are a couple hours away, so just relax for now. When we get close, we'll want you to stay out of sight, inside the cabin, in case they have lookouts who might recognize any of you,” number twenty said.

Jason knew Ethan from a previous operation, and they renewed their acquaintance with bear hugs.

“Wow, you make a good-looking woman,” Ethan said to Jason. “I almost didn't recognize you.”

“Most people don't until I open my mouth,” Jason said. “What are you doing on this operation?”

“I'm the chief cook and bottle-washer. Come on down to the kitchen. Bring your friends,” Ethan said.

We followed him down to the galley.

“I'm making a big batch of couscous,” Ethan said. “You all like couscous, with veggies and broiled tofu?”

“Robin doesn't like vegetarian food.” Jason sneered.

“You're not a vegetarian?” Ethan asked me.

“I'm a minerarian.”

“What's that?”

“I don't eat any living things, animal or vegetable. I eat rocks. Only rocks. I wash them down with water,” I said.

“She's a meat-eater. She thinks she's funny.” Jason scowled.

“My couscous is excellent. People sign on to our crew just for the cooking. You'll like it,” Ethan said. He was a sunnily optimistic counterpoint to Jason's cynical self-righteousness.

Blue pulled out a deck of cards and we sat at the table and played hearts while Ethan cooked. We all helped ferry food to the rest of the crew, then sat in the sun and ate it. Ethan, Jason, and Blue discussed various endangered and extinct species—the harelip sucker, the long-jaw cisco, the Wabash riffleshell, the spectacled cormorant, the Tasmanian wolf, the dusky sea sparrow, the hairy-eared dwarf lemur, and so forth. They all had such colorful names. Being interesting was no defense against obliteration, evidently.

It was warm in the sun, and it made me sleepy. I dozed off, visions of long-jaw ciscos dancing in my head. Some time later, Jason awakened me. We were getting close to Tweak Island and had to go into the cabin.

Inside, we were handed binoculars. The fishing boat pulled up near Tweak Island and stopped. We were about a hundred yards offshore. The island was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with coils of razor wire. Behind the fence was a large, one-story brown building. There was a pier and two speedboats were tethered to it, bobbing in the water and bumping against each other.

For the first half hour, we saw no visible activity on the island. Then a helicopter rose up from behind the building and circled above it. It flew out to us, hovering above us momentarily before flying off.

After that, there was nothing for another half hour, when two men got into one of the speedboats and came out toward us.

“Get down, away from the windows,” said Jason.

Outside, we heard the speedboat motor approach, then cut to idle.

“Who are you?” asked a man.

Number twenty explained he was the operator of a fishing tour. Two of our crew, posing as tourists, said something in some foreign language, and then one of the men in the speedboat said, “This is a private beach. Could you please take your fishing elsewhere?”