April Smith - Judas Horse

“God bless you.”

“Don’t push it,” he warns.

“What’d I say?”

“Asatrú is a modern-day religion based on ancient Norse beliefs.” He reaches for a habanero and cheese fritter. “Its adherents practice a pagan philosophy that talks about preserving nature. The white supremacists have adapted a form of it and switched it around to justify their views.” “There were neo-Nazis at the bar.”

“What were they doing?”

“One of them was eating an ashtray.”

This doesn’t register as anything strange.

“Barriers are coming down,” Donnato muses without missing a beat. “Interesting alliances are starting to form between terrorist groups. Right there you have a potential affinity between environmentalists and right-wing thinking. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that these groups could get together. ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’” “You have blood enemies at Omar’s who should be tearing each other’s throats out.” “It’s called business.”

“You can buy anything there. Hookers, dope, hazelnut brittle—” “Hazelnut brittle? Pretty damn subversive. That’s it. Now I’m hooked.” He rolls his eyes.

“Shut up. Megan Tewksbury is our way in. She will lead us to FAN.” “Why?”

“She’s accessible. Funny. Openhearted. I liked her.”

“She is not supposed to be your mom.”

“I know that.”

“It’s my job to remind you that in isolation the bad guys can start looking pretty good.” “That’s not it. Look.”

I flash him the latest issue of Willamette Week, a liberal throwaway I snagged at the vegan Cosmic Café. There were piles of it near the bulletin board, underneath an unpleasant chart of a side of beef. The whole front page of the newspaper is a poster in the style of the Old West: WANTED — FOR GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER, with a photo of BLM’s deputy state director, Herbert Laumann.

“Megan gave me the heads-up that FAN would break the story, and here it is. Laumann has been illegally adopting mustangs under his relatives’ names and selling them to a slaughterhouse in Illinois.” Donnato studies the paper.

“She rescues animals on a farm; she’s hooked in. They don’t like visitors, which is an excellent reason for me to get my butt out there and see what’s going down.” He still doesn’t like it.

“Sounds weak. We commit the resources, and your friend Megan turns out to be a housewife who likes cat calendars.” Donnato brushes his tie of crumbs. He is maddeningly fastidious about his Calvin Klein suits and fine tasseled loafers, even in a sleazoid motel. But today his meticulous mannerisms are pissing me off.

“What would be solid enough for you?”

“Give me Bill Fontana.”

Bill Fontana is a leader in the movement who did two years in prison for setting fire to 250 tons of hay in an animal-husbandry building at UC Davis. Fontana is a scrawny, bright-eyed kid, still winning hearts and minds with his “fearless saboteur” shtick. The prison sentence only added to the mythology.

“Wonder Boy Fontana is speaking here at a big animal rights convention. I met with the Portland task force that has been assigned to FAN—” “Wait a minute,” I say stubbornly, interrupting him. “Can we go back to Megan? We’re looking for me to make my bones. This is a legit way in. Megan is a can-do person, the type who gets things done. I’m telling you, she’s good.” “She may be good, but Angelo will say she’s weak.”

I don’t like the innuendo. Weak because we’re talking about the two of us establishing a female relationship? Weak because she doesn’t fit the prototype of the male junkie informant guys like Angelo understand?

I lift my chin. “I’ve identified a true believer and I’m getting close to her. That’s procedure, absolutely! I need your help to find a way of getting out to that farm.” Donnato stands, thoroughly irritated.

“Tell me something, Ana. Why is it always your agenda?”

I am dumbfounded. “ My agenda?” “You are fixated on this woman, and I know why. Not because it’s a knockout idea, but because it’s yours. Yours against mine. You against the badass bureaucracy. It’s been that way as long as I’ve known you.” My fastidious partner has never attacked me like this before. “What is wrong with you? I thought I was the one with the hormones. You’ve been touchy since I walked in the door.” Men hate it when you use the word hormones.

“Omar’s Roadhouse was Steve Crawford’s last known location,” Donnato insists. “And we still don’t know why he was there, and why he was not following procedure.” “Who said he wasn’t?”

“Marvin Gladstone.”

“You believe that? Marvin’s just covering his ass.”

“Why wasn’t Steve checking in?”

I shrug. “He was running his own game. The old-timer couldn’t keep up.” “What game?”

I snort slowly through my nose. I become aware of afternoon traffic. I wish we had some beer. Okay, I’ll be the one to say it.

“Maybe he was meeting a woman.”

Now Donnato is incensed. “Steve was a good father and a good man! What on earth would make you say something like that?” “It’s an idea,” I protest. “I don’t like the implications, either, but I throw it out for discussion, like any other case, and you go off on me. We all love Tina and Steve. Nobody’s trying to stir something up. Him getting it on with someone else — it’s just a theory. Why does it bug you so much?” The two of us arguing about Steve’s marriage in a sterile box in the middle of a strange city is suddenly absurd and strangely familiar. It reminds me of undercover school, and the dead-serious games they forced us to play. It is almost as if, against our wills, Donnato and I have been cast as a pair of ridiculous personages — I a naïf named Darcy, and he all buttoned up in the Bureau uniform.

Or is it failure of will that has ignited Donnato? Could the true source of his distress be the unbearable frisson (God knows, I’m feeling it) of a man and woman who have worked together twelve years, alone in the late afternoon, in not one but three empty motel rooms? No, no — of course we have a lid on it. Donnato is back with his wife after yet another separation. Isn’t he?

If we continue to look at each other in this pleading way a minute longer, one of us will drift over the line, and that will tick off the obsession, and then we will be back in that sweet morass. We have been successful in avoiding it for years now, clean and sober despite the ache. It happened only once, and for good reason, in a wet field of strawberries, beneath the shuddering bellies of helicopters patrolling a military base — the kind of memory you can put on the wall and be happy just to look at for the rest of your life. He was going to leave his wife; then he wasn’t. Finally, we had to put an end to the possibility and soldier on. It is an adjustment we have learned to make, swiftly and silently, a dozen times a day, often right under the noses of our instinctively suspicious FBI colleagues. Nobody is watching us now, which makes it imperative that I sit down in a chair as far away as possible.

“I take it back,” I say, crossing my legs primly. “Steve was not meeting a woman.” Donnato accepts the move without a blink. “Steve was meeting someone, but he misjudged them badly and—” His Nextel buzzes. It is Special Agent Jason Ripley, calling from L.A. Odd to look at, because his strikingly milky skin and white-blond coloring are like some kind of an albino rose, Jason remains to the bone the lanky son of a Midwest farmer who was raised to behave deferentially around his elders yet give no ground to wickedness or sin. He is, in the FBI garden of belief, a perennial.