The window groaned when I opened it, letting in the night fog to ease the stuffiness of the place.

“You live here?”

“Seven years.”

“Why? Did you take a vow of poverty?”

“I never had to take a vow; I was born to poverty.”

“Your dossier said you have a rich aunt?”

“Adelle Wilson. She owns Grayling Motor Freight. This isn’t it. Its a big complex in Oakland. This is just a little outfit she bought out about the same time I came to San Francisco, which she runs as a local annex to the main business. I needed a job and a cheap place to live; she gave me this room and a job as a night watchman. It was ideal. No rent to pay, a small salary, and all I had to do was be here from ten at night to six in the morning. I made rounds a couple of times a night and responded if an alarm went off. Otherwise I could study or sleep.”

I pulled the blanket off the mattress and whipped the room with it. For a minute, the dust filled the air, but cross ventilation carried most of it out the window and made the place more habitable. Ed Wilkes sank down on the sofa while I went through the cupboards and found an unopened can of coffee. I set water to boiling. “If you want to stay here tonight you can sack out on the sofa. I have a sleeping bag you can use.”

“OK. We need to make some plans.”

I plugged in the ancient refrigerator and put water in some ice cube trays. “Excuse me while I’m being domestic,” I said. “The place isn’t very complicated. I’ll have everything that matters running again in a minute.”

Ed looked around and shook his head. “Seven years?” he said.

I filled the filter cone with coffee and poured in boiling water. “Yes. You read my state department documents, so you know that I dropped out of high school to enter the Army.”

“At age sixteen.”

“I was only a month shy of seventeen and those days the Army was pretty unpopular. It was only a short time after Viet Nam. You could still get in if you were upright and breathing.”

“Fake ID?”

“Homemade. It wouldn’t have worked if the recruiter hadn’t had a quota he couldn’t fill.”

“You were in the Army three years out of a four year enlistment. You went out on a medical discharge. How is your knee these days?”

I looked at Wilkes. He was amused. No doubt he had some idea of the truth. I said, “As good as can be expected.” 

There was nothing wrong with my knee; never had been. And I was sure Ed knew that.

“How is Sgt. Davenport?”

He knew.

“Still in prison, as far as I know. I haven’t had any contact with him since I last saw him in Germany.”

“We should talk about him some time.”

I handed Ed a cup of coffee and said coldly, “No, we shouldn’t.” more tomorrow

The adrenaline rush had washed all the doubts out of my system, and that took me back.

When I was eight years old, there had been a fire in a house on my block. As soon as I smelled the smoke, I ran there, cutting across back yards and jumping fences. It was an old abandoned house; I can still remember the raw disappointment when I realized there was no one for me to heroically rescue. I crawled under the shelter of a lilac bush to where I could feel the heat of the blaze and watched the flames and smoke. I stayed there until the backwash from a fire hose caught me and washed me out, wet and embarrassed as a kitten in a rainstorm.

There are men who live for quiet and security, and men who live from crisis to crisis. I have always been one of the latter.

So why had I applied to the State Department to be a junior officer in an embassy, a job about as exciting as being a clerk at Macy’s? Because the other half of me was the abandoned child who wanted to be accepted and respectable. There is not much respectable about a private eye. But it was probably a mistake to think I could give up the rush.

*       *       *

A layover in Dallas meant a morning arrival in San Francisco. I watched the Nevada desert give way to the crumpled mass of the Sierras, which then graded out too oak dotted foothills and the vast, hot, flat, green expanse of the San Joaquin Valley. When we crossed the Coast Range, we were too low to make out its true shape and then the bay area was spread out beneath us like a map.

It was home. I had lived here for years, but until now, coming back after seven months absence, I hadn’t realized that it was home.

Chapter Twenty-nine

The street ended at an iron and hurricane fencing gate. Beyond was a parking lot, mostly empty, and a warehouse with the Grayling Motor Freight logo on its concrete block side. At the side of the gate was a call box holding a simple push button which I rang. A few minutes later the guard came out. I didn’t recognize him.

“What do your want?”

“I’m Ian Gunn. Even though I don’t know you, someone should have told you about me.”

He shone a flashlight in my face, and grunted. “Yeah,” he said, “they showed me a photograph. Got any ID?”

I showed him my passport. “I also have a key, but I didn’t want to get shot.”

“Yeah.” He opened the gate. “Who’s the other guy?”

“A friend of mine.”

“Look, I was told to let you in, but . . .”

“Don’t push it.”

He decided not to. Ed followed me across the parking lot while the guard relocked the gate. I still had a key to the building, too, so I let us in after I had turned off the alarm.

“Are you going to tell me what is going on?” Ed asked.

“Sure. This is where I live. Come on up.”

The hallway inside skirted the main office and led by a narrow stairway to an upper room. No one had touched it since I left. There was a layer of dust on everything, from the Salvation Army couch, to the battered desk, to the mattress in the corner, to the dust cover on my Macintosh computer. My old bike was hanging upside down from its hooks and acres of bookcases still spilled their excess onto the floor. more tomorrow

“I’m here to pick up some unclaimed luggage.”

“Let me call someone to help you.”

A natural delay, or a calculated one?  I couldn’t decide.

Minutes dragged by, scurrying nervously, looking over their shoulders at the door. Finally a balding, fiftyish man in a blazer with the company logo on the breast came up and asked for identification. Instead, I handed him a letter on Raven’s personal stationary authorizing me to pick up her luggage. The signature was quite authentic looking. Ed had a talent for forgery. He read the letter briefly, then said, “May I see your ID.”

“I don’t have any on me. I didn’t know it would be such a federal case!”

The word play was lost on him. He said, “If you don’t have any personal identification, I really don’t see how I can give you Ms. Cabral’s luggage, even if you do have a letter from her.”

I shrugged. “OK, no sweat. I’ll get my ID and come back.” I held out my hand.

“That’s all right. I’ll keep the letter.”

That removed all doubt. 

I snapped my fingers, but he just said, “No, I insist.” 

I made a long arm over the counter and snagged his wrist. I pulled him sharply and painfully against the counter and retrieved the letter. His eyes were wide with shock. I was half way to the door when he staggered back and shouted, “He’s getting away.”

I didn’t look back to see who he was calling to. The sound of the front door slamming open brought Ed upright behind the wheel. He had the motor roaring when I went across the hood in a sliding dive, and the car spat gravel before I could get the door closed.

*       *       *

We ditched the car, took a subway, then a bus, then another subway, and ended up at our hotel. Twenty minutes and several phone calls later we picked up a second rental and headed south to Pittsburgh. There we caught the first of several flights that eventually brought us into San Francisco the next morning.

The flight on the Concorde had been a novelty and the views had been arresting. I had found myself moving in a kind of vacuum, acting too quickly on my decision to wonder if it was all a good idea. The flight from Pittsburgh to San Francisco gave me time to sort things out.

As Senator Cabral had said, there was nothing I could do for Raven in Europe until she surfaced again. She needed for her troubles to be traced to their source and ended. The question was, “Why me?”

From the Senator’s viewpoint, I was an ideal candidate. He could not call on official help without endangering his career. I was a known quantity and I had experience.

From my viewpoint? 

Well, why not me? I could tell myself that I was putting to rest a piece of unfinished business so that I could get on with my life, but it would be a lie. I was having too much fun for that to be the real reason.

I hadn’t enjoyed the search for Raven, because the pain of her leaving was still too fresh. But since I ran from the cruise line office, everything had been different. I felt alive for the first time in weeks. The adrenaline rush had washed all the doubts out of my system. more tomorrow

Chapter Twenty-eight

Ed Wilkes and I boarded the Concorde in Paris just after seven PM, and got off at Kennedy two hours earlier, local time. We had outrun the sun. My luggage consisted of a toothbrush stuffed in my shirt pocket and a paperback novel. My other jeans and shirt had been so stained with Davis’ blood that I had dumped them, and I would hardly need a pack full of camping gear in New York City.

We checked into a medium priced hotel. I left Ed making phone calls and went out to buy some fresh clothing and a suitcase. Then I stayed out, sightseeing. I had been to Washington, to Europe twice, through much of Canada, and from San Francisco to Marseille via the Panama Canal and the Caribbean. For a small town Wisconsin boy, I had gotten around. But I had never been to New York City.

*       *       *

Ed Wilkes’ phone calls had given us some new information. He had claimed that his wife had left a suitcase aboard one of the cruise ships. When they had not been able to locate the nonexistent bag, he suggested that they check with customs to see if they were keeping it. Customs officers, he was informed, were present whenever a ship landed, and any abandoned luggage was seen by them before being stored by the cruise line.

“I timed him,” Ed explained. “From the time he put me on hold until he told me that the bag was not there it took six and a half minutes. He could possibly have called somewhere or just checked a list, but more likely he looked in a nearby room.”

We parked our rented car between two dumpsters across the street from the pier.  Most of the pier was taken up by a warehouse.  On the right was a driveway, wide enough for a pickup or front end loader.  There were wide yellow strips painted on the macadam to guide passengers to the embarkation lounge.  Half way down the building was a sign with a stylized gull and the words Gull Lines, in English and Norwegian.

Wilkes turned to me and asked again, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Not particularly, but I will.”

“If the luggage is clean, it will cause no problems, but if it isn’t, it would be better if no one saw my face. I might run into some DEA officer who knows me.”

I nodded. 

“If they stall you, they are probably calling for help. If that happens, get out fast. If we get separated, you have the number to call.”

I nodded again. I didn’t like this. Facing an armed assailant on a darkened Venetian bridge was one thing. Getting the entire bureaucratic might of Washington on my back – now, that was scary.

Wilkes slumped down behind the wheel where he could watch the entrance from behind a newspaper. I went down the yellow macadam road to the Gull Line offices. Beyond the glass doors, all was modern and cool, with a hundred steel and plastic chairs linked together and bolted to the floor, a TV, now blank, placed high in a corner and a glass partitioned ticket counter. Not unlike an airport or modern bus terminal.

A uniformed girl sent me a pert smile from behind the counter, and asked if she could help.

“I’m here to pick up some unclaimed luggage. It belongs to Ramona Cabral. She came back from Bermuda on the fourteenth of April.”

“Wow, that’s a long time for luggage to go unclaimed. What happened?”

“A honeymoon.”

“Lucky girl. Still, three months?”

“Actually a honeymoon and a divorce.” more tomorrow

Here is the crux of the problem. When drugs – and it doesn’t matter if you are talking about cocaine, pot, or alcohol – become scarce and expensive, they are profitable to sell. Every junkie who feels the pinch when he buys, knows that he could make money if he were selling. It is a grass roots movement. Every junkie wants to sell, but that only works in an expanding market. Any student from Economics 101 knows that. Like a pyramid scheme or a chain letter, the result is middle management types recruiting new customers in the xerox room, mechanics selling baggies behind the garage, and sixth grade junkies selling to third grade wannabes.

More enforcement means higher prices. Higher prices mean more pressure on users. That pressure sends the users-turned-sellers looking for new customers.

More enforcement means more drug users. QED.

When his leave was over, Cabral resigned from the FBI and ran for the state senate. And lost. But he learned from the experience and four years later he won the seat he still occupies. His platform was moderate, but his hidden agenda was legalization. He introduced no drug legislation during his first term, but soon after his first reelection, he authored a bill to legalize marijuana in California. It failed, and he spent the rest of that term mending fences and explaining his position to anyone who would listen. He almost lost the next election. A month after, he introduced a second legalization bill.

Two decades later, his yearly legalization bills were a constant in California, like the swallows returning to Capistrano. They always failed, but every year a few more of his fellow Senators voted with him.

*       *       *

“Senator,” I said, “I follow your arguments. It doesn’t matter if I agree with them. What I don’t see is how you jumped from that to suspecting drugs in Raven’s luggage.”

“Look at it as a problem in economics, Ian. If enforcement increases drug use, it also increases drug profits. Up to a point. No enforcement means low prices. Perfect enforcement, if that were possible, would mean no sales. Somewhere in between is the optimum level of enforcement to maximize drug profits.”

“OK.”

“I set out to calculate that optimum level, and I found that we are right at that level now in California.  It is too close a match to be a coincidence.”

I shook my head at the implications. Ed said, “Gunn, the big dealers are calling the shots. And nothing scares them so much as the fear of legalization.”

I thought he was paranoid.

I was only half right. more tomorrow