Geistmann Read online

  Geistmann loved systems, and he had not yet had the opportunity to study this apparently efficient one. (What was that joke name he had read on a blog about the market, “Whole Pay Packet,” or something?) Especially when he found a system he wanted to exploit, he would study it assiduously for as long as it took to effect penetration without risking detection –-unless he wanted to be detected. To him, the dawn of the computer age, when he was in his early twenties, felt like the invention of the printing press must have felt to medieval Europe’s proto-Protestants. It especially amused him to compare the initial motive forces that propel systemic innovation with the unanticipated abuses and side effects that inevitably follow --such as his own sophisticated and lucrative cybercrimes.

  Geistmann’s technophilia was not indiscriminate. Surprisingly perhaps for a gamester, he had no interest whatsoever in video games. These, he regarded as holding pens for adolescents during the years when their hormones raged ferociously. That so many adults all over the world also seemed taken with these games he regarded as a symptom of the global angst that sought refuge in pseudo-heroic passivity. When he watched some forty-something asshole on a train, plane or bus with his or her head buried in the latest version of Doomsday Man or Twang Woman, he saw a small animal offering its neck to a predator. Not that Geistmann was himself a biter.

  It took him only a minute to move into second place on line. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a tall, strongly built, red-faced, gray-haired Caucasian in an expensive tan suede jacket and designer blue jeans do an end run past the vitamin display to a cash register that had just begun blinking its availability. Back at the lines, the woman whose turn it was, a young punk-style person chattering like a purple squirrel on her cellphone, did not even notice the interloper. The minder of the local lines, when he saw the number disappear from his display panel (as the cheat plunked down his purchases), merely directed the young woman to the next number, which, as it happened, popped up almost immediately. If he had noticed the line-jumper, the minder gave no indication.

  By then, too, Geistmann’s own number had come up. He moved slowly forward. Rolling over to the blinking register, the old woman smiled at the handsome young dreadlocked checkout clerk, who “Good Morning-ed” her and turned his sign off. In the row of registers directly across the aisle from her, the cheat was already waiting for his own clerk to finish his credit card authorization.

  “Did you see that, young man?” said the old woman in an indignant sotto voce. He –that man in the brown jacket over there –“ -she gestured with her head– “he cut right in line, without even waiting!” As she turned to gesture, the old woman zoomed in on the man’s credit card –American Express Platinum Plus-- and using the digital camera attached to the powerful lenses of her spectacles, she lifted the information.

  “I know,” said the blasé clerk, ringing up her purchase, “it’s awful. Do you need a bag today, Ma’am?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Paper or plastic?”

  “Oh, no, I always carry my own.” Taking the vinyl bag from the walker, she placed it on the counter without pushing it toward him. They exchanged a smile of shared ecological correctness.

  “Yes, Ma’am. Cash or credit?”

  “Cash, thank you.”

  For a few moments, she stared myopically at the numbers on the register panel display. Then, she laboriously extracted a change purse from her coat pocket and fumbled with the money. As she fumbled, she kept on nattering away.

  “It’s a shame how much cheating goes on in the world today. When I was...” She broke off, apparently staring into space. The line-jumper was halfway to the exit doors beyond the registers.

  “I know,” said the clerk, waiting in apparent patience for her to count out the money and leave. “It’s terrible.”

  “It’s unfair,” she said. “When so many honest young men like yourself are working so hard for their living.” Dropping semi-sequiturs was a Geistmann trademark; he loved dropping them.

  ‘Oh, that’s okay,” the cashier said. “I’m really an actor, anyway. Your total is $7.61.”

  “Good,” said the old woman vaguely, resisting the urge to say that she, too, was an actor. “But don’t you think people like that cheater should be punished?” She handed over a ten-dollar bill and three pennies, which the clerk took without a blink. As he scooped change from the drawer, she admired both his manners and arithmetic facility. “What do they do to them if they catch them?”

  “Oh, nothing much, just send them to the back of the line.” He handed her two one-dollar bills, a quarter, a nickel, and two of her own pennies.

  “Well,” she said, fumbling the money back into the purse, and the purse back into the pocket, “if you ask me, they should be spanked!”

  The clerk looked delighted. “There’s an idea!”

  “Or maybe,” she added, starting to push away from the register, “an hour or two in the meat freezer.” The clerk laughed uproariously.

  “Wait!” he said, and, when she looked back, he held out her food container and the vinyl bag. “Shall I?” He pantomimed putting the container into the bag.

  “Yes, please,” she said, and watched while he squeezed the container into the bag, pushing aside whatever it was that was already in there, but politely not scrutinizing it. She smiled, enjoying his conscientiousness and good manners. In fact, she had “forgotten” the bag just to see what he would do.

  “Thank you,” young man, she said, hefting the heavy bag into the walker and once again turning toward the doors. She decided on a final tactical touch. “Have a nice day, young man. The world needs more kind and honest young men of color like yourself.” The intention was to leave behind, as a last impression, a little puff of benign racism he would remember. Geistmann knew a great deal about racism.

  Peter: Where did you find this guy?

  Weatherbee: I was at Oxford with his boss.

  Peter: Ah ha, the usual. But what’s the point? I mean, a librarian?

  Weatherbee: The point is to get Warfield off my back. Here, looK.

  From: Weatherbee, Arnold//PD, Coordinator, JOLETAF

  Subject: JR, code name: Librarian

  Date: Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008, 7:03:44 p.m. EST

  To: all JOLETAF members

  cc: Donald Warfield

  SUBJECT FOUND SUITABLE. HAS ACCEPTED CONSULTANCY & IS PREPARING PRELIMINARY REPORT FOR 3/1. BIO ATTACHED.

  GEISTMANN: EPISODE THREE

  EPISODE THREE

  Summer, 1999. Oxford, England.

  At a semi-formal afternoon wine party hosted by the Rector of a minor college of Oxford University, the centerpiece was a plentiful assortment of desserts, each featuring one or more varieties of the berry. At some point during the party, the London Head of Interpol was served a slice of what he suspected might have been (when he bit into it) dingle berry pie. Lab reports confirmed the presence in the slice of trace amounts of human excreta and anal hair. DNA testing of these items, however, proved useless, because neither Scotland Yard nor Interpol’s files had DNA samples from the most likely suspect, a criminal-prankster who had recently committed two spectacular murders in Moldova (see “Donduceni, Stefan,” supra), and who had melodramatically dubbed himself “Geistmann.” A heated argument ensued, also inconclusive, among Interpol’s house experts, as to whether the prankster would have used his own excreta, anyway. The eminent forensic psychologist Pablo Markowitz had the last word, opining that “This doesn’t tell us squat about Geistmann. He probably scraped the shit from a toilet bowl in some Tube station.” The Interpol victim’s SIS (popularly and falsely known as “MI-6”) bodyguard, “Mike 666,” remarked: “This bloke enjoys risk, doesn’t he? He’d die for a joke. And he may well do, some time.” The only person at the party whom they were unable to identify was a male Filipino server, who had affected to speak only Tagalog. A day or two earlier, Subject may have been spotted on his way across the College grounds, which cut through a garden, wearing tennis
whites and carrying a squash bag. An Interpol Linguist said, “Let’s see, Tagalog for ‘ghost’? Mr. Multo? Aswang?” Analyst’s note: “Aswang? Hmm, sounds possible. Do we bring the Manila boys on board, then?” Response from Arnold M. Weatherbee, JOLETAF Coordinator: ”Let’s just keep them in mind for now. Not to stereotype, but a Filipino ... well, they’re all crazy, aren’t they? I wonder how many pairs of shoes Mr. Aswang owns.”

  Robinson: That’s disgusting..

  Saturday, March 1, 2008. New York, NY.

  Intending to save his lunch for the train ride, Geistmann purchased a large-sized frozen custard from the kiosk at the south end of Madison Square Park, on East 23rd street. Wheeling further into the park, he settled down on a bench and re-energized himself by eating the custard (strawberry, too sweet). Then, he spent a fruitful half hour with his CrackBerry: Alex Gold, 265 Lexington Avenue, which the address finder told him should be around 36th Street. Only a few people in the park chuckled at the techno-savvy female senior citizen. Exiting the park and proceeding up Madison to the Business Library at 34th, the old woman pushed her walker into the Ladies room and, cautiously peeping out first, emerged a minute later.

  Geistmann exited the library as “a Suit” from “the ‘burbs.” He enjoyed Americanisms and suspected that the family of English included the best languages in the rich world for slang or jargon. The fold-up walker and discarded clothing he now carried in a Big Brown Bag that he had plucked from a trashcan on 28th Street. His plan was to substitute the bag for the duffel in the checkroom at the station. That way, once they caught wind of the “Warburton” identity, his pursuers would be able to pick up the scent. If they did not pick it up this afternoon, they would certainly do so within twenty-four hours. If it took them that long, perfect. If not, also perfect –-in either case, he knew what to do.

  The Suit strolled two blocks east, then north through “Curry Hill,” enjoying the food smells. Arriving at Gold’s big ugly modern apartment building, he spotted a liveried doorman, a short, fat fellow who might have been Greek.

  “Excuse me, my man. Isn’t this where Tom Coughlan, illustrious Head Coach of the World Champion New York Football Giants, lives?”

  The doorman, of course, looked uneasy. “I’m sorry, sir, we’re not at lib...” At the speed of prestidigitation, Geistmann slipped something into the man’s white-gloved left hand. Seeing that the something was a fifty-dollar bill, the doorman’s eyebrows went up, and he smiled. “Actually,” he said, “it’s not him. Sorry, sir. The guy who lives here is a look alike. People always think he’s Coach Coughlan. Want your fifty back?” But he did not extend the fist in which he squeezed the bill.

  “No, no, please, consider it a gratuity. The look alike is Mr. Gold, in Fifteen C, isn’t he? Mr. Alex Gold?”

  The doorman laughed. “That’s right, Mr. Gold, Alex Gold.” The penny dropped. “But how did you...”

  “Ah well,” said the Suit with a laugh of his own, as he started to walk south again, back toward the corner. “You know what they say in our language. He uttered six words in demotic Greek. The doorman laughed again: “All that glitters is not gold.” Before sauntering off down the sidewalk, the Suit winked back at him.

  Noting the time once again, and re-checking an address, both on the CrackBerry, he walked four more blocks north to New York City’s other main railway hub, Grand Central. As he sauntered along, he recalled the intercepted memo that had been forwarded to him late Thursday night by his Number One Orange, who operated out of a hermetically sealed office hole in Buenos Aires.

  From: Weatherbee, Arnold//PD, Coordinator, JOLETAF

  Subject: JR, code name: Librarian

  Date: Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008, 7:03:44 p.m. EST

  To: all JOLETAF members

  cc: Donald Warfield

  SUBJECT FOUND SUITABLE. HAS ACCEPTED CONSULTANCY & IS PREPARING PRELIMINARY REPORT FOR 3/1. BIO ATTACHED.

  “You’d better tell me more about this Robinson,” Peter said.

  “He works in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, a tenured researcher in incunabula. Do you know what… ”

  “Of course, old books.”

  “Not only does he have a reputation as a ferret, his resume’ will impress Warfield. He edited and catalogued the Library’s Joan of Arc manuscripts and led the team that prepared the electronic edition of Boethius’s De institutione arithmetica.”

  “Okay, so he’s our replacement for that guy in California, Podgorny. But Joan of Arc? Boethius? What relevance could they even ostensibly have to our pursuit of Geistmann?”

  “Well, as the telephone company here in New York used to say, ‘We’re all connected.’ “

  For only the second time ever, Geistmann enjoyed the beautiful Grand Central renovation. In the course of his travels, he had observed something about crowds in train stations. In some, like Grand Central, no matter how complex the pedestrian walking patterns, no one ever seemed to get in anyone else’s way. In others, like Union Square, there were constant bumps, brushes and near misses. It had something to do with feng shui, spatial patterns, especially with the height of the ceilings.

  Geistmann had avoided this city since March 2002, when the little joke with the real estate developer had turned into something more. Justice had decreed that ugly man’s appropriate humiliation, but not his death. The reasons Geistmann now recalled this caper were so obvious that he apologized to himself for even thinking of them. Not only was this his first return to New York in those six years, but that earlier apprehension had been the prototype for Orville Johnson’s, less than twenty hours ago.

  --New York, New York, March, 2002:

  At 3-4 am in an alley in the financial district, Geistmann constructed a tableau comprising a mound of garbage with an unconscious middle-aged man’s drunken face, hair piece askew, peeping out from the top. He then text-messaged the tabloids and the TV and radio stations, provoking a media jubilee. More than a thousand photographs were taken of the victim, thirty of which were either printed or appeared on the evening television news. Later, victim said he had felt a pinprick, blacked out, and awakened just in time to see the cameras going off. Geistmann had posed the victim with one of his famous placards: “Say, brother, can you spare a buck to buy a poor developer some hot soup, to sober him up?” T Two days later, Victim died of acute myocardial infarction. If this prank is added to the list of probable murders, their current total becomes ten.

  Robinson: I remember that one, all right. A lot of New Yorkers raised a glass to Herr Geistmann.

  For some reason, Geistmann no longer remembered the victim’s name –some ugly monosyllable, like “Dump” or “Truck.” Nor did he blame himself for the man’s death, the real cause of which had been the pig’s own disgusting penchant for “fast foods,” especially those drolly named “French fries.” Nevertheless, for the next six years, showing a healthy respect for the municipal police force, the “NYPD,” Geistmann had avoided this wonderful city, Two features made this particular force a … force to be reckoned with: their excellent, almost impenetrable computer system, and their large core of grizzled veteran detectives, many of whom had preternaturally sharp noses and teeth. The elaborateness of his disguises as he passed through the city today illustrated this respect. Warburton/Warfield was an anomaly, a thrilling indulgence.

  He still had ninety-six minutes until the train for Washington was scheduled to depart, sufficient time to continue indulging –cautiously, of course-- his playful curiosity. After strolling (un-bumped and un-brushed) through the main concourse, he descended into the subway, which he knew the natives sometimes called “the bowels” of the city, and which were indeed redolent of the nether body parts. Shuttling west to Eighth Avenue, and mentally humming the famous, wonderful tune, he took the A train north to the last stop, 207th Street and Broadway. He walked a few blocks ahead, then turned left onto a side street, where he stopped in front of a nondescript six-story yellow-brick apartment house. It looked a bit like the o
ne in which Glen Gould had lived for most of his so few years in Toronto. Geistmann had not yet visited that city, only seen photos of its landmarks, including the ugly, nondescript home of the impeccable musical genius, a kindred soul.

  Checking to make sure no one was around to observe him, he donned a pair of very thin leather gloves, then picked the locks of the two front doors. Taking the stairs (unlocked) up two flights, with a sense of profound, excited interest, he let himself into Apartment 3A. As anticipated, all three entries had proven pathetically easy. At this time of day, late Sunday morning, the streets in this working-class, largely “Latino” neighborhood were almost completely deserted. Just about everyone must either be in church or lolling in sinful slumber. As for the rentier of Apartment 3A, Geistmann knew his whereabouts. He wondered what it was about this neighborhood that made its residents so unafraid of break-ins. Not a single dog barked. Perhaps it was a neighborhood of car thieves.