Steve Martini - Double Tap

On cue, when his turn came, staff kicked him awake and handed him a list of typed questions carefully prepared by committee counsel and printed out in sixty-four-point type. The man stumbled and stuttered, the single sheet of paper moving like a hummingbird’s wing in his palsied grip.

In the end the senator managed to turn each of the two critical questions posed to Satz into a double negative. This left the court of appeals to conclude that while Satz may have said one thing at one time, in answer to the two questions for which he was convicted-though he may not have intended it-on the recorded transcript of the committee hearing General Satz had actually answered both questions truthfully.

The fact is that in the last three decades congressional committees in political war paint have ruined enough Justice Department prosecutions to cause one to wonder if this is not intentional. Skulk around Washington too long and you’ll find the bones of Diogenes-frustrated in his lamp-lit quest for the last honest man in the American Athens-piled up somewhere in the Senate cloakroom.

After the court hammered them in the decision in Satz’s appeal, the Senate investigating committee stumbled around, bumping into one another for a while until they decided some other burning issue from the previous Sunday’s 60 Minutes required their immediate attention.

As for Satz, while his name was indelibly stamped with scandal, his reputation carried the Good Housekeeping Seal of Fidelity. The general was now known to the world as a man who would keep his mouth shut and do time if he had to. Whether it’s the mob or the White House, friends in high places usually appreciate this and can often be counted on to find positions in their regimes for these qualities.

When it was all over, Satz found a dark corner of government in which he hoped no doubt to quietly serve out a few more years before merging his military pension with a fresh one from civil service and then disappear from the partisan hell that is the nation’s capital.

Satz was given a job overseeing an obscure computer project at Defense, some pie-in-the-sky spy-wars project intended to create a massive computer database: Big Brother’s ultimate clearinghouse, Information for Security, or IFS, and the Primis software program.

According to the news articles culled by Janice and downloaded to my computer, everyone knew that the IFS proposal was dead on arrival. The ACLU and opponents in Congress didn’t even bother to center it in their sights, as the project was already down on its knees, gripping its chest, when it was first proposed by someone at Central Intelligence. They would spend federal pocket change-forty or fifty million dollars-on feasibility studies, then the program would go the way of the dodo. General Satz would lose himself on some river in Oregon, where he could spend his retirement perfecting fly-casting techniques. That was the plan.

All of this changed when two airplanes flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Like a wilted dragon who inadvertently squatted over an oil-field fire, Satz suddenly found his project aflame with political vitality. The whacko theory of some intelligence analyst at the CIA all of a sudden looked both politically compelling and technologically feasible.

And Gerald Satz, once a convicted felon, found himself minister, soon to be in charge of the tree of knowledge-not just an opportunity to pluck a little fruit but fee-simple title, ownership, everything, including the roots, trunk, and branches. Even J. Edgar Hoover had been reduced to using three-by-five cards and wooden file drawers in his closet in order to compile dirt on his enemies. Satz, who had a long list of get-even announcements waiting to be printed, was being given a warehouse filled with the latest supercomputers and a portfolio to go forth and ransack the lives of everyone in the country. All Americans, including every member of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the press-their lives were part of his playground now. It was enough to put the fear of God into anything that moved.

Opponents in Congress were suddenly howling that the administration, inadvertently or not, had put the poster boy for perjury in charge of the most sensitive government program in U.S. history.

The missing art glass has been a puzzler from the beginning. The district attorney is going to have to deal with it in his case. But how? The real question being what do they know that we don’t? It is possible that the cops are as confused as we are by a lonely part that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere, as if the picture on a puzzle’s box cover is a Currier amp; Ives print, but the piece in your hand is something from a Picasso.

“You’re never gonna believe what Herman found.” Harry is smiling like a Cheshire cat.

I shake my head: no clue. Herman is already inside my office, shifting around on the couch against the wall, trying to get comfortable.

Harry is seated in one of the client chairs on the other side of my desk. He has a stack of papers and files in his lap. We have been meeting each Thursday morning to go through the evidence, new items that have come from discovery, motions to produce delivered to the police and the DA, and subpoenas served on private parties.

“She paid a small fortune for it,” says Harry. “The Orb at the Edge . Guess how much?” Harry wants to play twenty questions.

“How much?”

“Almost six hundred grand,” he says.

I whistle. “It must be nice to have that kind of pocket change for an afternoon shopping spree.”

“Five hundred ninety thousand and change, assuming you don’t wanna put a fine point on it,” says Herman. He’s reading from a piece of paper he has pulled from his coat pocket, a pair of reading spectacles pushed down toward the end of his nose. He hands the paper to Harry, who looks at it and hands it to me.

The document is a copy of the bill of sale. From the form, it looks like the kind you might buy by the booklet in any stationery store. In the upper left-hand corner is the name and address of the gallery in La Jolla. This appears to have been impressed on what was probably foolscap on the original form, since the inked stamp seems to have bled a little into the paper.

“Apparently the thing, the Orb , had a history,” says Herman. “Once belonged to the widow of the Shah of Iran. I’m told that type of thing tends to drive the price up. According to an expert we talked to, the highest-end Tiffany lamps, the very tip-top, go for maybe two hundred thousand dollars. That gives you a kind of benchmark of what we’re talking about here.”

This doesn’t help much, since I doubt that I have ever seen a real Tiffany lamp, much less purchased one.

“Course, I ain’t no expert,” Herman goes on, “but listen to this.” He starts reading from a second sheet of paper he’s unfolded from his coat pocket. “The work christened Orb at the Edge is composed of the most expensive sa. . sa. . sa-fussid. .”

Harry looks over his shoulder and reads, “Suffused.”

“Yeah.‘. . suffused blue crystal known to man. . ”’ From the ragged edge on the paper, I assume Herman is reading from something he probably ripped from an art catalog in the library when no one was looking. “‘The Orb is carved and shaped from a solid block of lead crystal that weighed nearly one hundred pounds before it was reduced. In its original form, the crystal took more than two weeks to cool.’ Can you imagine that? ‘The shimmering cobalt-blue Orb , with its filigreed threads of twenty-four-karat gold spun through the crystal in a style and using techniques known only to ancient Venetian glassmakers, last sold at auction in New York for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.’ That was more than ten years ago,” says Herman. “Probably before the Shah’s wife bought it.”