The Blackmail Caper, Ch. 8

Three weeks later, I was pulled over by a uniformed cop driving a marked car. It was two in the morning; I was five blocks from Haupmann’s home. He came up alongside my car and asked for my license, registration and proof of insurance. I gave them to him. He went back to his car and pulled out the microphone for the radio. He had turned his roof-mounted light bar off after he stopped me. Only the standard emergency flashing lights were on. I guess he didn’t want to upset the residents.

Ten minutes later, he came back to my car. He didn’t hand back the papers.

“Is there a problem, Officer,” I asked.

“What do you have in the trunk?

“Spare tire, jack, first aid kit, some bags of trash, a change of clothes.”

“Lemme see,” he demanded.

“OK, I’m going to reach down and pull the release.”

“Go ahead.”

I popped the release, the trunk lid swung up a little. The cop went back and shined his flashlight into the trunk. I could hear him shift a few things around.

He came back up to the side of my car. “Why are you driving around with bags of garbage in the middle of the night?”

I looked up at him. It was hard to tell, since he was shining his flashlight in my face, but he appeared to be a white guy in his mid-twenties, maybe. “Why, is it illegal to have garbage in a car, now?”

“If you’re going to dump it somewhere. You don’t live around here.”

Fuck this, I thought. I asked: “Are you arresting me?”

He stepped back. “Get out of the car.”

I did.

“Turn around.”

I did.

He handcuffed me and put me in the back of his cruiser. Ten minutes later, I was sitting in a holding cell at the police station. The young cop took me out of the cell, booked me on a charge of “suspicion of illegal dumping”, and put me back in.

Two hours later, I asked one of the other cops walking by if I could see the duty sergeant. The cop was suspicious, but I told him that I only needed thirty seconds and it would be worth the sergeant’s time.

Ten minutes later, a sergeant came to the cell. He didn’t have a nametag on his uniform. He was a white guy, a bit overweight, greying hair and he had an attitude of having to bear too much of the world’s burdens. He looked at me and said: “Whaddaya want?”

I handed him my PI license.

He looked at it and gave it back. “So, what?”

“Watch,” I said. I put my hands to my left leg and pulled up the trouser leg. That exposed an ankle holster, complete with a Smith & Wesson Centennial revolver.

The sergeant’s eyes widened. “Holy fucking shit. You, don’t do nothing. I’ll be right back.” He turned and all but ran away.

I let the trouser leg slide back down.

Five minutes later, the sergeant was back with his lieutenant. The sergeant had some papers in his hand.

“Show the lieutenant what you just showed me.”

I gave the lieutenant my PI license. After he handed it back, I pulled up my trouser leg.

The lieutenant looked, then turned to the sergeant. “What was he arrested for?”

“Says here ‘suspicion of illegal dumping’. The arresting officer reported that he had four bags of trash in the trunk of his car.”

“And where’s his car now,” the lieutenant asked.

“Impound lot.”

The lieutenant thought it over. “OK, get him out of here, right now. Take him over to Impound and give him his car back, free of charge. Take care of it personally, sergeant. If those fuckers say or do anything other than giving this man back his keys, I want to know about it and you tell them that I’ll deal with them if they don’t. Make it happen. And make this arrest go away. I don’t want any record of it, anywhere. Shred the fingerprint card, the booking photos and the negatives.”

The sergeant waved over another cop and ordered him to open the cell door. That cop went to get the keys.

The lieutenant took the papers from the sergeant, glanced them over and looked at me. “I apologize for any inconvenience, Mr. Hawkins.”

“Once I’m on my way, Lieutenant, as far as I’m concerned, this never happened,” I assured him.

He nodded. “Good.” He reached into a pocket, pulled out a business card and handed it to me.

I tucked the card away without looking at it. The clear implication was that as long as I kept my mouth shut, I had a favor owed to me. I liked it when cops owed me a favor.

The one officer came back with the cell door’s keys. He let me out. The sergeant drove me to Impound and got my car back for me. He didn’t say anything, he only nodded with I thanked him.

By six that morning, I was sitting in a diner, having breakfast and coffee. I yawned and almost dislocated my jaw. I had had maybe three hours of sleep before I had driven over to Haupmann’s place to switch out the trash. And I still had to go home and sort through the bags. That was a job that didn’t get any less pungent for postponing it.

The worst thing about it was that after all of that brouhaha with the Alexandria cops, I didn’t find anything in Haupmann’s trash that even remotely resembled a clue. I rebagged his trash, then I went upstairs and took a nice hot, long shower. I’d toss Haupmann’s trash into the restaurant’s dumpster on my way into the office.

-----------------------------------------------

On a side note, once I've run through the chapters that I've written of this story, then I'll be done. Writing for me was an enjoyable way to pass the time, but it's not any more. It's more like work.

The Blackmail Capter, Chapter 7

I have a friend who owns a restaurant. I gave her the boxes of garbage bags. Each Monday night, I would stop by and pick up four full bags of garbage. Then I would, anywhere between one and five in the morning, drive up the alley behind Haupmann’s house. I took his garbage and put the restaurant garbage into his cans. If there were only two bags of garbage, I’d leave two. There never were five bags. After one of them leaked and soaked the floor mat of my car’s trunk, I bought some large plastic containers to put into the trunk. The containers were originally too tall to close the trunk lid, but that was easily fixed with a power saw.

I also began following him. That was harder than one might think, for even though the alleys were barely wide enough for a single truck to drive down them, they weren’t officially one-way streets. If I got close enough to the alleyway to see his garage, I was easily within spotting distance. Fortunately, most people are creatures of habit and Haupmann was no exception. He always entered the alley from one cross-street and left it from the one on the other end of his block. After several days of watching, I saw that everyone else drove the alley the same way. Even the garbage truck did. So while the alley wasn’t a one way road, it was by custom.

Haupmann was kind of boring in his routine. He left his home at a quarter `till eight each day, varying by no more than five minutes. He took the same route to the embassy. I was able to fall back some distance and still keep a tail on him. He had enough rank to park in the embassy’s lot. Some days he had meetings or conferences at office buildings in the city center. A couple of times, he went into one of the Senate or House office buildings. When he went on those trips, he took a cab. That put me at a disadvantage, as he could just hop out while I had to find a place to park my car.

After work, he normally went home. Sometimes, he’d go to restaurants. A few times, I was able to see him and his dinner mates. A few I recognized. When I got into this case, I looked up who were the power players in the regulation of foreign capital and banking matters.

If I could have gotten closer, I might have been able to see who picked up the check. That’s a good indication of who wants what in this town, for those asking for something always pay the check. Politicians never do. It’s probably a union violation for a senator to pay for a meal at any place other than Chuck-e-Cheese’s Pizza. And it’s hard as hell to find out afterwards who paid, as the restaurants are notoriously closed-mouthed about that. If their patrons found out that the staff had been indiscreet, the restaurant’s business would have disappeared in very short order. You would have better luck finding out which politicians boarded private jets at National Airport. I sometimes wondered why reporters never thought about checking into that angle.

Haupmann’s garbage, so far, wasn’t yielding a lot of clues. From the food garbage, it seemed that somebody was a decent cook, if only because of the lack of takeout containers, pizza boxes and tin cans. He had some concern about personal security, for most of the papers in his trash had been run through a cross-cut shredder. Maybe the feds could have pieced them back together. I didn’t have the ability to do that.

What I could see is that either Haupmann was so boring that he could have been a spokesman for Wonder Bread or, if he was doing something bad, he had the skills to hide it. Or he was just lucky, for I couldn’t sit on him every damn hour of the day. If he snuck out for a few hours in the middle of the night, I was going to miss it.

I called Hauger and asked to meet him. He agreed, but he didn’t want me coming to the embassy. Fine with me, we met about 7:30 the next morning at a coffee shop near the Rosslyn Metro station. He looked indistinguishable from the rest of the businessmen who were buying their cup of morning joe. Except for his eyes, for he quickly glanced at everyone who came bear our table. He probably could have described them all to a police sketch artist. I told Hauger what I had done to try and find out what Haupmann might be up to. That took a lot longer than giving him the results.

He sipped his coffee. He didn’t say anything.

After a few minutes of silence, I said: “Any thoughts on the prospects of bringing a major-league ball club to RFK Stadium?”

Hauger said nothing.

“If they do, what do you like for a name? The old team was ‘the Senators’, but I think they should come up to the times and be called ‘the Lobbyists’.”

“All right. What do you recommend?

I spread my hands. “How far do you want to take this feeling of yours?”

Hauger looked at me. “I still think there is something wrong.”

“Yeah, but what? You’ve seen his financials, he gave you disclosure forms. Does anything show up?”

“Nothing other than what you’ve already discovered.”

“Are you satisfied that his background is good?”

Hauger nodded. “We checked him out pretty thoroughly. He’s not a plant.”

“I can’t wiretap his home. I can’t get the Post Office to monitor his mail. I might be able to get copies of his phone records from C&P Telephone, which will be illegal as all hell, if you care.” “I don’t.”

“OK. Can you at least get a log started of when he arrives at the embassy, when he leaves and if he goes out for lunch or meetings?”

“That may be possible,” Hauger allowed. “It may be time for the embassy to begin a formal check-in and out process.”

“That would help. I can continue checking his trash. As for tailing him, that’s hit or miss, unless you want me to bring in help. Do you still want me to put a priority on being covert?”

“Yes, I do.”

“So, that means I can’t go check out his house and search his home office,” I mused.

“I would prefer that you stay as discreet as possible.”

“What’s going on that bothers you? Unauthorized use of copiers? Classified documents are missing for short periods of time, only to be found again? Somebody found film boxes or canisters in the trash?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Then like what, Mr. Hauger? Come on, you’re killing me, here.”

He smiled at that. “I know that this is, as you say, like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

I shook my head. “No, it isn’t. At least I’d know I was looking for a needle. This is more like a snipe hunt.”

“What is a snipe hunt?”

“Looking for something that isn’t there. You’re asking me to prove a negative, that Haupmann isn’t dirty.” I drank some of my coffee. “Hey, let me ask you this: When did you stop beating your wife?”

Hauger looked offended. “I have never hit my wife.”

“But that’s not the question and how would you prove, sitting here, that you’ve stopped beating her?”

“I take your point.”

I looked right at him. “Just to be clear, Mr. Hauger, I have no problem with taking your money and following this guy around, or using some of your money to have other people follow him around some of the time. While rummaging through other people’s garbage isn’t my idea of fun, it’s part of the job. But if there’s nothing to find, there’s nothing to find. And even if there is, I don’t have the resources to have eyes on him every minute of every day. Catching him doing something wrong’ll be a combination of luck and a misstep on his part.”

“I understand. Please keep working on this task,” Hauger said. He stood up and left the coffee shop without another word.

The Blackmail Caper, Chapter 6

I soon received the results of the criminal records and credit checks. At first blush, there wasn’t much in them. Haupmann’s criminal history was limited to parking tickets near the Embassy and the occasional traffic ticket. He had twice pled guilty to a defective muffler beef. That was probably a moving violation that a lawyer had plea-bargained down to a charge with a higher fine but no points. Which meant that the insurance companies wouldn’t raise his rates.

Haupmann married Mary Pulaski when he was working for Chemical Bank in New York in 1971. Their eldest daughter, Kimberley, was born ten months later. Brian followed in `74 and Melissa in `78. Mary had a moving violation for failure to yield the right of way in 1983, nothing else. Kim was a senior at Yale, Brian was a freshman at Tufts. Kim had more credit card debt than she should have, but nothing that could be considered to be outrageous. There was no criminal history on the children, but then again, I didn’t have access to juvie records.

Haupmann had worked for a few other banks, mostly in New York and then in D.C. Seven years ago, he went to work for the Norwegians as a financial analyst. He must have done some public relations work or something, because he had taken the time to register as a foreign agent under the Logan Act. Hardly anyone bothered to do that; so either Hauptmann or the Norwegians were sticklers when it came to following the law.

Hauptmann’s stepfather was pretty much a solid citizen. Andrew Johnson had been born in 1921; he dropped out of college after the war started to become a Marine fighter pilot. He left as a major after the war, but he stayed in the reserves as he finished getting an engineering degree from Ohio State. Johnson went to work for Ford until he was recalled to active duty during the Korean War. That second round of combat flying resulted in a medical retirement as a bird colonel. There was a note that his first wife had died of cancer in 1947 without having had a child.

He went back to work for Ford, he retired in 1986, then was elected to the school board, where he served until he died of a heart attack three years ago, still married to Solveig.

There was nothing substantive about his mother. She had been in the League of Women Voters in the ‘70s. Other than that, she was almost invisible until she died of a massive stroke a little over a year after her husband had died. Solveig never had a child after her son by the German. Whether she didn’t want any more children or if she and Andrew had tried was not of record.

There was also no mention of whether Andrew had sought to adopt Peter. Given that Peter had been about sixteen when his mother remarried, my suspicion was that Peter had probably loathed his stepfather for a very long time.

The financials showed that Hauptmann’s family was a little stretched, what with two kids in Ivy league schools, but they weren’t in trouble. The Haupmanns had re-financed their house to cash in on equity, more than likely to meet college costs. They had two cars. No surprise, the cars were Volvos. One was five years old, the other nine years old. I’d bet that he drove a sedan and she drove a station wagon. They owned some rental properties in Manhattan that made a little more than the carrying costs. Haupmann probably considered them long-term retirement investments and, given the track record of real estate in Manhattan, he was probably right.

There was nothing unusual in their tax returns. Those are normally hard to get, but he had to provide the Embassy with a copy of his return each year. Hauger had thoughtfully sent the last five years’ worth to me. Haupmann had some investment income from his previous work in banking. Mrs. Haupmann reported income, there was a W-2 form for her from a credit union. In the signature lines of their tax returns, Haupmann had listed his job as a “financial analyst, Mrs. Haupmann listed her occupation as “secretary”.

Nothing jumped out at me from the papers. I didn’t expect that anything would. Hauger didn’t strike me as being a stupid man. If whatever had tripped his warning trigger was obvious, he would have found it.

I called Hauger’s office and spoke to him. I asked him if the Embassy had security logs of when Haupmann came and went. He said only for visitors, not for staff. He seemed a little shocked that I’d even think that they’d have a need to keep close tabs on their people. I thanked him and hung up. Cripes, if I had suspicions about someone and I was him, the first thing I’d do would be to keep track of his movements. On the other hand, employees talk and the fact that he was being watched, if even a little, would get spread around.

I took out a pad of paper, one of the yellow-lined ones that lawyers love, and made some notes. Basically, I had nothing. Most of the time, there is some loose corner or a threat that can be pulled on. There were about as many loose threads in Haupmann’s life as there were on a billiard ball. Sometimes, the way to generate something to run down was to try spooking the target and seeing what he does. But that would have violated the prime directive from my client.

On a normal case, what I would have done is reported what I had to the client and then let them decide if they wanted me to continue the investigation. No point in doing that here, for I had no doubt that Hauger already knew what I had found out.

I drove over to Haupmann’s neighborhood on a scouting run. The neighborhood dated back to around to the Twenties, when appliances began replacing servants for the professional classes. The houses were smaller than those of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. There was an alley that ran down the middle of each block of houses. The street side of the houses showed only the houses and the front yards. There were no driveways; the garages were in their back yards that faced onto the alleyways. Garbage cans stood next to many of the garage doors. The garbage trucks came down the alleys to pick up the trash. Back in the day, milkmen probably delivered to boxes in the alleys.

That trip gave me a path to take. I went back to the office, called the town’s department of public works and eventually found someone who knew the trash pickup schedule. I told the lady that I was house-sitting for friends and that they hadn’t told me the trash day.

Which was why, on the following Tuesday. I was driving slowly down the alley at three in the morning. I’d be screwed if the Haupmann family was one of those which put out their trash thirty minutes before the truck came by. I stopped and looked in their cans, they had put their garbage out. I grabbed just one bag, put it in the trunk of my car, and drove off. There were three other bags in the cans. This time, I was less interested in what was in the bag than the bag itself. I later stopped by a grocery store and bought four boxes of the identical type of trash bags.

My plan was to do a switch on Haupmann’s trash each week. In the business, it’s called a “trash cover”. It’s even legal, the courts have ruled that trash set out for pickup is deemed to be abandoned property, which is why the police can search your trash without a warrant. Still, the big trick was not to get caught. Not because I was worried about getting pinched by the cops, but because the goal was not to be detected by the target.

I went home and set up a pair of sawhorses in the garage. A sheet of plywood went on top of the sawhorses, which, in turn, I covered with a sheet of plastic. I pulled on a set of coveralls, donned a pair of rubber gloves and looked through the trash. There was nothing remarkable in the trash. There were a few boxes from a Chinese takeout, lots of Kleenex, dental floss and grungy paper towers. There were six cans of Fancy Feast and a bag of grey dirt that apparently was used cat litter.

I rebagged the stuff up and wadded up the plastic sheet. I had gotten garbage juice on my coveralls. I made a mental note to get some of the disposable impermeable coveralls used by house painters and serial killers. Hell, I might as well get some goggles and a face mask, for only the Almighty knew what I’d find the next time.

My garage smelt of garbage. Ah, the glamorous life of a private detective.

The Blackmail Caper, Ch. 5

When I came to the office four days later, the receptionist, Amy Airhern, handed me an envelope that had been delivered by a messenger service. I thanked her and went into my office to see what was in the envelope. It held copies of the papers that Hauger had shown me in his office and a check for my retainer. The check was in the name of the “Embassy of the Kingdom of Norway,” it was drawn on the Bank of Boston. There were also copies of releases that had been signed a few years earlier by Haupmann, as well as a letter which authorized me to make inquiries and conduct investigations of embassy employees on behalf of the Kingdom of Norway. The letter was in both English and Norwegian. The Norwegian text had that funny letter “o” with a slash through it.

I made out a deposit slip and went to the bank. When I asked how long it would take for the check to clear, the teller looked at the check again and called over one of the cube-dwellers. They conferred and the answer was twelve business days.

I read the background materials on Haupmann before then. He had been born in a “displaced persons” camp in 1945. He and his mother, a Norwegian named Solveig Jorgensen (she was born in 1928), lived in the camp until 1949, when they were permitted to emigrate to the United States. His mother’s reason for emigrating was that she feared retribution for having borne a child of a German officer and that her family had disowned her.

In 1954, Haupmann’s mother applied for a Norwegian passport for both her son and herself. They both became naturalized Americans in 1959. His mother married Andrew Johnson, an American, in 1961. Johnson was a widower. There was no mention in the papers as to whether or not Solveig and Andrew had any children or if Andrew had children by his previous wife. Those were all things that I would have to check into.

Haupmann was one smart cookie. He graduated high school in Westlake, Ohio three years early, earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree from the Wharton School of Business by the time he was 23. He married at age 26 and was still on his starter marriage. In my line of work, coming across someone who had been married for that long was like sighting a unicorn. Haupmann had two daughters and a son, all in school.

When the Embassy’s check had cleared, I ordered criminal records checks and credit checks on Haupmann’s immediate family, his mother and his stepfather. Hauger had probably done that already. He hadn’t included them in the materials that he sent to me. No matter, I’d have done the checks regardless.

I had just finished sealing up the order envelopes (with the fees) when Sarah Thorpe came into my office. “Do you have a minute,” she asked.

“Sure.” I gestured to one of the client chairs.

Sarah sat down. She’s the private detective that I rent my cubbyhole of an office from. Or, I guess, sub-let it. “You busy these days?”

I shrugged. “I make a living. You?”

She nodded. “The same. I think it’s time to start talking about formally joining forces. We help each out enough on cases. If we were to merge, then we wouldn’t have to keep billing each other out as subcontractors or consultants. We wouldn’t have to keep getting our clients’ consents for each of us to work the other’s cases. And if one of us can’t do something, the other can cover as clients would be retaining our firm, not us as individuals.”

“Like Spade & Archer?”

She smiled. “Yeah, except I’m not looking to end up being shot by Brigid O'Shaughnessy.”

I grinned.

“How do we work the money end of it,” I asked.

“The root of all evil?”

“Yeah.”

Sarah nodded. “I thought about that. We could do it much the same way as now. The company would pay the rent and pay Amy. We’d each chip in our share. Outside of that, we’d get what we earned. If I work a case you brought in, you’d be paid for your time and vice versa. And maybe we can get a small business rate for health insurance or even set up some form of pension plan.”

I leaned forward and put my elbows on my desk. “You’ve thought a lot about this.”

“Yeah.”

“You got a name for this operation?”

“Thorpe-Hawkins Investigations, Inc.”

I thought about that. It’d probably look good for applying for government security work, what with the first name being that of a female owner. “Why that,” I asked.

“Because we could have a logo that emphasizes the initials for the words,” she said.

I frowned at that a little. “That’s read as ‘t-h-i-i-n-c’ or ‘thiins’?”

“More like ‘thiink’.”

I blew a little bit of air out my nose, it sounded like a snort. “Think IBM might complain of trademark infringement?”

She shrugged. “Probably not. I’ll get my lawyer to check to see if IBM’s trademark covers detective work.”

I stood up and held out my hand. “OK. Deal?”

Sarah stood up and shook my hand. “Deal. I’ll have my lawyer draw up what needs to be done. He’ll probably tell you that you should consult with an attorney of your choosing.”

We sat back down. “I don’t see a need for that. We’ve had each other’s backs when the guns’ve come out. If I can trust you to be behind me with a loaded gun in your hand, I can trust you not to screw me on this deal.”

“OK, but he won’t like it.”

I made a dismissive gesture. “Fuck him if he can’t take a joke. But maybe he can draw up a form of a retainer agreement that we can use.”

Sarah shook her head. “Nah, I have one. I’ll get Amy to revise it once the lawyer files the incorporation papers.”

I shrugged. “OK, but let’s not spend a friggin’ fortune on lawyering this thing.”

“Right. Well, I have paying work to do,” she said. She stood up and said: “See ya,” and left.

Yet Another Project, Ch. 4 (The Blackmail Caper)

I am quite a bit into this, so I thought it was time to start posting more chapters.

____________________________________________

“Would you care for an aperitif,” Hauger asked.

“Coffee with cream would be nice, thanks.”

Hauger picked up the handset of his phone and presumably placed the order. One word did sound like coffee.

“Tell me about Haupmann,” I said.

Hauger opened his desk drawer and removed a manila envelope. He handed it to me. “This is a copy of his personnel file, translated into English,” he said.

I opened up the envelope and slid the papers out. There were about thirty sheets. I slid them back in, it was more than I wanted to look at right now.

“Who typed them up,” I asked.

“I did,” Hauger said.

“Who knows about this case,” I asked.

“Here? Only the ambassador. My superior in Oslo knows,” Hauger said.

“The other day, you said that you had a bad feeling about Haupmann. Did you consider just asking him if something was wrong,” I asked.

He shook his head. “I have no indication that something is wrong. If I were to talk to him about what I suspect, that can be an adverse personnel action under our rules.”

“For just showing concern?”

“Yes.”

I was thinking of something to say when the woman who had brought the sandwiches returned with another serving tray. She set a coffee cup, carafe and a pitcher of cream on Hauger’s desk in front of me. I thanked her, she collected the detritus from dinner and left.

“You’re not having anything,” I asked.

Hauger turned around and opened a file cabinet that was a disguised mini-fridge. He put some ice into a glass, closed the fridge, and then produced a bottle. He poured some booze into the glass. Then he sipped it.

“I am going to miss American bourbon whiskey when I am transferred for my next assignment,” he said. “It costs too much in Europe.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. There was no shortage of American military PXs in Europe; surely he had some contacts who would get him some bourbon from one of them. Maybe Hauger was too straight-laced for that. I poured some coffee into the cup, added some cream and took a sip. This was the good stuff.

“So, Haupmann is pinging your spydar,” I asked.

Hauger looked confused. Then he smiled. “Ah, a contraction of ‘spy’ and ‘radar’. You are correct. There is something wrong with him or his life. Will you look into it for me?”

“If the price is right,” I said. “I’ll need a healthy retainer from your government.”

“How much is ‘healthy’,” he asked.

I named an amount. It was into the five-figure range.

Hauger sat back in his chair. “Why so much money?”

I shrugged. “You represent a sovereign nation. I’m not going to get anywhere trying to collect from you if you don’t pay. And I don’t know you. It would be too easy for you to disavow any knowledge of my actions and not pay me. So I want payment, in advance.”

Hauger sighed. “I will need to obtain approval for that. It is above my level of authority.”

“Fine with me. Also, if this case costs more than that, I’ll let you know. Same rules apply, I don’t go into the hole for governments.” I stood up. “If you get approval, you can send the materials on your guy over with the check. I’ll start on the case once the check clears. Also, if Haupmann has signed releases for his medical and financial records, please include them, along with whatever authorizations I would need.”

“What do you mean,” Hauger asked, as he stood up.

“If he’s signed releases for your staff to look through his records, then I’ll need a letter authorizing me to act on behalf of the embassy.”

“I see. I’ll show you out, then,” Hauger said. He walked me to the door. People were still coming in to the reception. The noise level spilling out of the dining room was incredibly high.

At the front door, Hauger stuck his hand out. “Thanks for coming, Mr. Hawkins.”

I shook it. “My pleasure, Mr. Hauger.”

He nodded, somewhat gravely. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Until then.” I turned and walked out the door and went back to my car.

I was a good part of the way out of the city when I realized that I was being tailed. I stopped off at a gas station and topped off my car, for all of four gallons of gas. I went inside, paid for the gas, then browsed the convenience store part for a few minutes. I bought a few things, then went back to my car. A tail picked me up about a half a mile down the road. Whoever was tailing me wasn’t being terribly overt. It wasn’t like they were trying to tell me that I was being tailed. But it wasn’t a big-budget job with several cars picking up the tail and then dropping off.

The tail disappeared when I was about ten minutes from home. I guess they assumed that I was going home for the night.

They were right.

Stephen Hawking Begins Training

Steve found his room in a building several blocks away from the cafeteria. The room was on the fifth floor of a building that looked functional. The door outside of the room had his name embossed on it. He opened the door and went inside.

To call the room “spartan” would be overstating it. There was a single bed, a desk and a chair. He tested the bed and was not surprised to find that it felt heavenly. The desk had a lamp. In the single drawer was a few sheets of paper and a stylus. He tried the stylus, it made a black line on the paper. He thought about a different color ink and drew a red line. He put down the stylus.

The view out of the single window was of another building. Navy-blue blackout curtains could be pulled across the window. There was a flush lighting fixture in the ceiling, controlled by a switch by the door.

Then Steve noticed what wasn’t there. No mirror, no sink, no bathroom, no outlets, no telephone and no lock on the door. The last made sense, what was there to steal and who would steal it?

He heard a slight ding and turned to look. There was another piece of paper on the desk. It read “Report to Intake Training, Room 348.”

OK, he thought. Now to find it. He went down the stairs, still marveling that he could do that unaided. Across the street there was a sign that indicated he should go to the right to find the Intake Training Center. At each corner, there was a sign.

Steve walked along. The streets were not very wide, he had not seen a single vehicle of any kind. There were people walking along it, a goodly number, but he had no idea what was the population density of Heaven. It was quiet, almost too quiet. There was no mechanical sounds whatsoever. No animal sounds. It was like walking in the biggest church ever. He looked up. There were no clouds. The sky was sort of a diffused bluish. He turned his gaze back towards the ground. There were no shadows. It really felt otherworldly. Or afterworldly.

He found the Intake Training Center. Clearly, nobody here gave a thought to aesthetics. It was the most boring building he’d ever seen. It had all of the charm of a packing crate. Room 348 was on the third floor as the French figure it. For Steve, it was the fourth floor. The room was small. In it was a chair and a waiting angel. “Be seated,” the angel said.

Steve did so. “This is individual training,” he asked.

The angel laughed. “Not hardly. Look around you.” The side and real walls vanished, Steve saw rows and rows of people sitting in chairs, people of all descriptions, all wearing simple white robes. The walls then reappeared. “I’m talking to everyone, but as far as you’ll perceive, I am talking to you. Heavenly multitasking. If you have a question, ask.”

“How long are the sessions?”

“As long as you can take it. I’ll know when to stop. I’ll also know what you want to ask, but at this point in your existence here, the convention is to wait for you to ask it. Unless I see the need otherwise. Ready?”

Steve nodded.

“First off, let’s discuss lying. That’s a human trait. Everybody on Earth lies to some extent. Don’t do it here. Your fellow residents, for want of a better word, may be fooled, but management isn’t. We keep track. Do enough bad things and you get sent down for a time to reflect. Maybe you’re allowed back, Maybe not. You’ll find that most of the other sins and Commandment violations aren’t possible here. Lying and taking The Boss’s name in vain are possible. They’re not looked upon kindly.

“Now, miracles. There will be things that seem miraculous to you, at first. They’re the way things work here. So, they’re not considered miracles to us. In the universe you left, there are perceived and unperceived miracles. Unperceived miracles are when we need to correct or modify reality. Perceived miracles are to remind people of the Majesty of The Boss. We don’t do as many of them as we did during the Wars with the Old Gods.”

“They were real? Odin, Zeus, Apollo, Neptune? They existed?”

“Yes, but not in the way that you think. Human society was too primitive to deal with the concept of just one god. You needed a lot of gods to explain how the world worked. But as human society matured, the old gods became redundant. Zeus wasn’t throwing thunderbolts, Aries wasn’t fomenting wars. But the beings who played those roles didn’t like losing power, even if all power came from The Boss. People needed convincing.”

“The fifty plagues, the Parting of the Red Sea were really miracles?”

“Indeed. We had some debate about the Slaying of the First-Born, but The Boss thought it was necessary and Thy Will Be Done.”

That brought another point to Steve’s mind: “Is The Boss male?”

The angel shrugged. “The Boss is above such distinctions. The Boss appears to people as they believed in life. Your society believed in Him as a man, so that is how He would appear to you. If you had sincerely believed that The Boss was a woman, that is how She would appear. If you were Hindi, The Boss would appear as a man with four arms and blue skin. If anyone sincerely was a Lovecraftian, It would appear as a giant creature with a head like an octopus.”

“What are ‘unperceived miracles’?

“Things that we need to do in order to maintain a rational Universe. You’ll learn a lot of them later on. A good example is neutrinos. Everything would have worked fine without them, but humans theorized about them and the Review Committee agreed that it was easier to have them, so we created them.

“Oh yes, before you ask. The Review Committee examines sentient theology and science and decides whether or not to make those ideas and concepts reality. For example, the Big Bang. A steady-state Universe would have been too hard to maintain once human instruments got better. And it was kind of in line with the Creation Myth, so it was put into effect by Divine Edict when Creation was begun.”

“And how will the Universe end? Will it keep expanding forever or will there be a Big Crunch?”

The angel shrugged. “It hasn’t been decided.”

“What are dark matter and dark energy?”

At this, the angel looked embarrassed. “We didn’t make enough stuff for the Universe to work the way it does. As of now, they are essentially an ongoing miracle, or, if you prefer, a Divine fudge-factor. We’re working on it, but whatever it will be, it has to be consistent with what came before.”

What about ‘the standard model of physics’?”

“That’ll work until it doesn’t. You physicists examine smaller and smaller particles by a childish method of smashing them up to see what they’re made of. It’d be like trying to discover how an engine works by hitting it with bigger and bigger hammers. What they find has to make rational sense. The Universe worked well when the various elements were the smallest things that existed. But if we can’t sustain the standard model, then we have to be ready to replace it with something that works better.

“It’s the same for cosmology. As humans make more powerful telescopes, some of the theories begin to fall apart. We’re working on what will be revealed when really powerful telescopes are deployed on the far side of theMoon.

“All right. Now, everyone up here has a job. Everyone’s job is important to the functioning of Heaven and of Creation. You’ll be assigned to a position that the staff feels is best suited to your abilities and your record on Earth. If somebody has a spotty record, as your friend Al, they have to prove their reliability. When you’ve finished here, however long it takes, you’ll receive your assignment. With me so far?”

“I do have a question. What eventually happens to us, to souls?”

“Everyone wants to know that,” the angel said. “Some move on to work as angels. Not many, our ranks were pretty full before humans began walking the African savannah.”

“Wait a second. The savannah, not the Garden of Eden?”

The angel smiled. “You know better. We needed a story, a legend. Something that would be understandable to primitive pastoralists, a few generations away from being hunter-gatherers, people with no written language, with no concept of evolution.

“The operating principle is nothing is forever, other than The Boss and maybe his counterpart down below. It’s like your concept of black holes. Eventually, souls fade away. Or evaporate. You won’t find too many souls from homo erectus. Generally, a few millenia or so, and souls get tired. They go when they’re ready and the Boss knows when.”

The angel looked at Steve. “You’re tired, so go rest. Come back when you’re ready,” he said.

Steve nodded. He got up, left the room and went back to his quarters. When he walked into his room, it appeared to be dark out, even though it was light as he walked down the street. He was too tired to even remark on that.

His head was asleep when his head hit the pillow.

Stephen Hawking Wakes Up

Steve Wakes Up

Steve opened his eyes. The first think that he noticed was he wasn’t wearing glasses. He appeared to be lying on his left side in a meadow. He could smell the grass. It felt warm. The sun was shining, but it wasn’t hot.

Then he noticed that it was quiet. He couldn’t hear a ventilator, the sound of which had been his constant companion for a very long time. He was breathing on his own. He tried taking a deep breath and was able to. Then he tried holding his breath for a few seconds. His body was responding to his commands.

Steve laid there for a time. He didn’t feel hungry, tired or thirsty. He felt peaceful. There was nobody bothering him or around him; no attendants or family. He was alone. But he didn’t feel lonely.

After a time, he felt a twitch in his right index finger. He tried to move it and it felt as though it did. He moved all of the fingers on his hand, then rotated his wrist. It felt as though it was working. He raised his arm and moved his hand into his field of view. He moved his fingers, clenched and unclenched his fist. It all worked.

Then he turned his attention to his feet. They felt the way that they did when he was a child, before he got sick, decades ago. He put his hand on the ground and pushed himself up to a sitting position. His toes wriggled as he moved them. He brought his hands together and then clapped them. He didn’t know what sort of dream that he was having, but it was the best one, ever.

It was only now that he became aware that he wasn’t wearing any clothing. Not a stitch. He had not a single scar from any of the medical procedures that he had had during his life.

Dare he? He took a breath, pursed his lips and blew out through them. Then he cleared his throat and said: “Hello? Is anyone there? Is this real?”

From behind him, he heard a voice. “It’s real enough. Get up on your feet, Bub.”

Steve pushed himself to his feet. He hadn’t stood up, under his own power, in over half a century. But he was standing. He hopped a couple of times, then took a short jump. If there was music, he might have tried to dance. He slumped his shoulders and then threw them back into a military posture. Everything worked.

Then he turned around and staggered at what he saw. Before him stood what appeared to be a man, dressed in all white. Shimmering white, actually. It was almost so white as to hurt his eyes. The man wasn’t overly tall or short, average height, average build. Then Steve noticed that there was a shimmering circled of gold hovering about six inches over the man’s head. At the man’s waist was what appeared to be the hilt of a sword, but there was no blade.

“Are you an angel,” Steve asked.

“Yes, and before you ask, yes, you are dead.”

“ Am I in Heaven?”

The angel shrugged. “No, and you’re not in Hell. This is Collection.” He pointed towards a line of hills in the distance. “Walk that way. You’ll come to a road. Go to the left and follow it to Processing. You’ll find out what’s what when you get there.”

“But..”

“Start walking, Bub,” the angel said. He turned and moved away. He wasn’t exactly walking, more like floating a few millimeters above the ground.

Steve started walking.

Stephen Hawking Has His First Lunch in Heaven

Steve Has Lunch

The first thing that Steve saw was a series of cafeterias, all of which indicated that they served different national cuisines. He went into one at random and similarly selected some food. He had no doubt that it would be nothing short of excellent.

Of course, there was no cashiers. Money didn’t exist in Heaven. As he left the line, he was hailed by a gray-haired man at a table.

“No, it can’t be,” Steve thought. But he went over anyway.

The man stood up and indicated that Steve should take a seat. As Steve put his tray down, the man said: “Hello, Steve, I’m Al” and he stuck out his hand.

Steve shook it and said: “I thought you might be. Nice to meet you.” As though he needed an introduction to the man who was the most famous physicist of the 20th Century. He noted that while he himself was wearing a plain white robe, Al’s robe had orange sleeves.

“It’s nice to see another physicist. I just got here a few days ago, myself,” Al said.

“A few days ago,” Steve echoed. “I thought you died sixty years ago.”

Al shrugged. “I did. But I was in a holding area. You might call it ‘purgatory’, but it was basically a processing center.”

“I didn’t know anything about any of this. How does that work,” asked Steve.

“They call it ‘Holding’. That’s where they put souls whose final disposition is in doubt. They stay there until The Powers That Be make a decision. And they aren’t in any rush. I met a Sumerian there.”

“What happens there?”

“They decide what to do with you, really. Was your life righteous enough to get into Heaven, evil enough to send you to the place that we call ‘Hell’, should you get another chance, or should you just stay there and reflect on your life’s work. And I should mention that being absolved by some religious figure for your sins counts for nothing. In point of fact, religious piety while perpetrating evil deeds gets you sent to Hell even faster.”

“I’m trying to take this all in. I didn’t believe in any of this,” Steve said. “God, Heaven, an afterlife, none of it.”

Al nodded. “By the way, we don’t use that name for Him. We refer to Him as ‘The Boss’. I understand your reaction. I didn’t believe in The Boss as a celestial judge or architect, so it was a bit of a shock to find myself in Holding.”

“Why where you there,” Steve asked.

“It was that whole atomic bomb thing. The support I lent to the Manhattan Project and that letter I sent to the President. The pursuit of knowledge is a noble thing. What one does with it is quite another.”

“And your fellow physicists on the project? What happened to them?”

“Bobbie Oppenheimer is still in Holding, what happened to him and what he did after they tested the Gadget counted for something. Ed Teller, well, he got sent down. Some others got another chance.”

Steve pondered that. “What is this ‘other chance’ that you mentioned?”

Al ate a little and then said: “You might call it reincarnation. Your soul gets wiped of all knowledge of your past and then you get to try again. Your native gifts, such as intelligence, don’t get wiped. But sometimes your past leaks through. That’s where the ‘past lives’ stuff comes from.”

It was a lot to take it. Steve hadn’t believed in a lot of what he was hearing. “But you got through.”

Al didn’t look pleased. “Not entirely. These orange stripes mean I’m on a tight probation. I do whatever they want me to do, with a smile. And there is no faking anything here. They know what’s in your mind, in your heart. You can’t fake sincerity.”

Steve looked puzzled. “You said you’ve been here for a few days. How have you learned all of this?”

“In Holding. They’re nothing if not forthright with the challenges one faces. Souls who come here directly don’t get all that information. They don’t need it. They get cured of all infirmities, all physical disabilities, they’re basically reset to their prime for mental abilities. Nothing is added, in that regard. You get a job commensurate with your abilities. If you’re a good soul, you do what you can. If not, that eventually reveals itself and down you go.”

Steve gestured towards his meal. “And this? Do we really need to eat?”

Al laughed. “No, it’s mostly for the new souls, to help them become accustomed to being here. You’ll find out that you don’t urinate or defecate, the waste products just...disappear. It’s sort of a minor miracle, I guess. It’s a tradeoff for not having to install sewage systems.”

Steve laughed. “I can’t imagine what heavenly poop would be like.”

“Me either. Anyway, go. You should find your room and then check in at your job.”

“And my tray and dishes? Where do I take them?”

Al pulled them across. “Leave them to me. It’s part of my job.”

Steve stood up and offered his hand. “It was nice to meet you.”

Al shook it. “You, too. Be good.”

“I shall.”

Steve left to find his quarters.

Stephen Hawking in Heaven

So I had this idea: What if Stephen Hawking went to Heaven. What would happen? What would he do?

This is a part of that tale. This is when he reports to his new job:

Steve at Work

Steve found a note in his new room that informed him that he was assigned to the “FCB” and that he was to report there forthwith. The note had a map on the back of it. He followed the map to a very large building. He had never seen a structure so vast. There was a sign across the front door that read “Firmament Control Bureau”.

This should be interesting, he thought. He went inside, where there as a sign directing new workers to Room 12. There, he found an angel sitting at a desk. “Hi, Steve,” the angel said. “Take a seat. Call me Fred.”

Steve did and observed the angel’s desk. It was covered with paper and scrolls. The angel made a gesture and they all disappeared.

“I suppose you’re wondering what we do here,” Fred said. “We build and maintain the firmament. The stuff that humans see when they look up. The majesty of His creation.”

Steve was struck by that he could hear the capitalization of the pronoun referring to the Almighty. But then he was staggered by a thought. “You mean that the night skies are a decoration? Heavenly wallpaper?”

Fred sighed. “Yes, and it was my idea. I convinced The Boss that it would remind humans of the wonder of Him and also keep them aware of their place in the Universe. That they were insignificant specks living on a pale blue dot in the heavens. He liked the idea and He put me in charge of it.

“It was easy, at first. Some planets, some distant stars, some nebulas. Once we got it all built, it didn’t take much of a staff to maintain it. We’d send a few comets by, some shooting stars, blow up a few distant stars now and then for a show. Easy enough.

“But then you humans got curious. You built instruments. We had to make the firmament more detailed, more mysterious. The nebula became galaxies and those had to be maintained. The comets had to come from someplace, so we built the Oort Cloud. You hypothesized the existence of black holes, so we built them. We didn’t make enough stuff for it to all work by your calculations, so we had to throw in dark matter and dark energy.

“So what we do here is stay ahead of the curve. We take top people to do that. It was Jimmy Maxwell who figured out that the act of creation, which you call ‘the Big Bang’, would leave a microwave signature, so we created that, knowing that somebody would eventually look for it. Look behind you.”

Steve turned around. The wall behind him vanished. He could see row after row of desks, so many that they disappeared in the distance, all occupied by people in robes.

Fred said: “There are six levels. We’re going to add more. And this is where you’re going to work.” The wall reappeared, Steve turned back around.

“What am I going to do, here?”

“You’re going to work in the Multiverse Prevention Office.”

“I don’t...”

Fred slammed his hand on his desk. It made a sound like a thunderclap, Steve jumped at the sound.

“Do you have any idea how much work we’ll have to do if there are other universes? The amount of work involved will make the FCB as it exists now look like a construction trailer at a building project on Earth. Even now, we’re expanding because we can’t have the Universe as it is without life in it. You humans keep making better instruments and we have to ensure that what those instruments detect is consistent with the Laws of Nature that He has established. There will be other inhabited star systems with intelligent life, which mean we’re going to have branch offices running them.”

Fred sighed. “You know, we could have avoided all this. There were once just a few colonies of humans living in caves on the African coast. Some of us told The Boss that He could just delete them and start over. But others said that humans would be manageable, so here we are.

“Anyway, Joan is your section head. She’ll show you where you’ll work and introduce you to your team.” Fred gestured, Steve turned around and beheld a somewhat sour looking woman in a white robe. She didn’t have a halo, but her robe was nicer than Steve’s.

“Get to work.” The papers reappeared on Fred’s desk. He unrolled part of a scroll and picked up a stylus.

Steve had been dismissed.

Editing Sucks

I'm editing the secone Lena Smirnova book, "Blood on the Range." I wrote the first draft ten years ago. I had it printed out and "comb bound". Over a lot of years, I've marked up the draft.

And now I'm editing it into a digital version. Once I do that, I should figure out how to take that and make it Kindle-friendly, with a chapter index. Or I just may say "fuck that noise" and put it up as a single mass of text.

At my current pace, I should be done next year. Maybe.