-
a novella
My name is Martti Seppanen, and I work for Prudential Investigations and Security, Inc. Things had been slow, and I'd had nothing much to do for a day and a half—since I'd finished rounding up the collusion evidence against Funsch, Carillo, and Wallace. So I stood there in my two-by-four office—ten by ten feet, actually—looking westward across the L.A. basin toward the higher rises of Lower Wilshire. While drilling Spanish.
I don't mind days like that. But there was the nagging worry that if business didn't pick up, Joe might have to lay people off. Me for example. Times like that you can wonder whether it had been a good idea when Joe leased the whole ninth floor of this high-rent high rise. Of course, the old building got sold out from under him and knocked down. The old buildings are disappearing.
Besides, when I don't have a case, I get the munchies worse than usual, and I gain weight too easily.
I kept drilling, using a question and answer program on intermediate spoken Spanish. The computer would voice a question in fairly simple Spanish, and I'd answer it. Or it would tell me to discuss some simple thing. Then it would critique my diction, grammar, and pronunciation, and we'd repeat it till the program was satisfied with my performance.
¿<<Donde guardan los documentos financiales>>? the computer asked me. ("Where do you keep your financial records?") The program is part of the department's advanced language training.
<<Debajo de la bañadera, I answered, donde nadie los buscaria>>. ("Under the bathtub, where no one would ever look for them.") You do enough of those drills, you learn what the program will accept.
That's where things stood when Carlos looked in on me. "Come in my office," he said. "We've got something for you."
"We" meant himself and Joe Keneely. Joe's the founder, principal shareholder, and CEO of Prudential. Carlos is the senior investigator, and I was his protégé, top of the list of junior investigators. And the something would be an assignment.
I followed Carlos down the hall. His office was big enough for a small conference without people sitting in each other's laps. He sat down behind his desk, and I took the chair across from him. Fingering his computer, he turned on the wall screen. A picture formed and stopped. It showed Joe Keneely's office, with Joe and Carlos, and some guy I'd never seen before.
"The client is Donald C. Pasco," Carlos said. "All the way down from Sacramento. Joe just signed a contract with him." He said it as if it tasted bad. I'd heard of Pasco. He was director of the Anti-Fraud Division of the California Department of Commerce, and had a reputation as an aye-aitch.
The picture came to life, and I watched their conference. Actually I watched Pasco bitch and snarl. About three weeks earlier, an astronomer named Arthur Ashkenazi had read a paper to the California Section of the Astronomical Society of America, at the section's annual meeting. The paper was what had gotten Pasco upset. Pasco didn't have much presence, but he had rank and venom. After playing back the meeting with Pasco, Carlos ran Ashkenazi's talk for me. I'd been aware of it before, just barely. It had been written up in the papers, but I hadn't read it. I read fast, but the L.A. Times is thick, and the talk hadn't had any significance for me.
Now, watching him deliver it, it turned out to be pretty interesting. It didn't offend me at all, but it had offended Ashkenazi's audience. He'd hardly gotten well underway when people started to leave. "Stalked out" is the best description.
About halfway through his talk and three-quarters of the way through his audience, one of them got up and shouted that Ashkenazi should be thrown out. That what he was spieling was astrology, not astronomy. And another guy stood up then, apparently an officer of the meeting, and told the guy yelling that he'd either have to sit down and be quiet, or leave. The guy left, madder than hell, most of the remaining audience following him out in a bunch. Ashkenazi finished to a dozen listeners, probably mostly reporters, and didn't seem upset at the exodus. I suppose he wasn't surprised.
Basically what Ashkenazi was reporting was, he'd run correlations of events of one sort and another against the positions of stars and planets. Which did amount to astrology, as far as I could see. And while I'm no statistical analyst, I do know that the kind of correlation coefficients he was claiming aren't the sort of thing you get by chance. Not in the real world.
He'd done it the hard way, too, or that's how it looked. He hadn't picked a scattering of historical events that fitted his purpose. Over a period of almost thirty years he'd predicted events, supposedly from the positions of stars and planets, and published them in various newsletters put out by different astrology groups, New Age groups, and groups into psychic phenomena. And a lot of his predictions came out as forecast, his scores getting better as he improved his system. Predictions like droughts, major political shifts, uprisings, big stock market swings, major deaths . . . If the publications were real. In 1994 he'd even predicted that a then-unknown source of electrical power would be released in 1997 that would change the world. Which of course was Haugen's geogravitic power converter! That was uncanny.
I could see why astronomers might get spooky about stuff like that. But why was Pasco so upset? Even if Ashkenazi made it all up, it wasn't illegal and it wasn't commerce. Which was what the Anti-Fraud Division was supposed to be concerned with—criminal fraud in commerce. This was something the astronomers could take care of themselves if they wanted to, by kicking Ashkenazi out of their society. Which in fact they had, for misrepresenting his talk to the program committee.
From the recording of the meeting with Pasco, I could see that Joe felt uncomfortable with the job, the same as I did. Because what Pasco wanted was a fishing expedition at taxpayers' expense. We were supposed to investigate every damned thing about Arthur Ashkenazi. Everything but his finances; the California Commerce Department's Audit Division would cover that. To quote Pasco: "Find something discreditable about this Ashkenazi, preferably something criminal."
I asked Carlos why Joe had accepted the contract. I guess I knew, but Joe spelled it out for me: "A fair amount of our business comes from Commerce. We're their number one contractor in southern California, and we can't afford their turning to another investigation firm."