Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

But the other big contradiction was: If Lionel Congreaves was such a key figure in the CIA, in the notoriously anti-Communist Phoenix program, why would he be teaching incarcerated felons about Karl Marx? Puffing up their self-righteousness for the next time they felt like aiming a pistol at a liquor store clerk?

Lionel Congreaves brewed a pot of tea, for himself and his visitor: orange pekoe with its excellent blend of choice Ceylon teas. A plate of English biscuits, just on the sweet side of savory. The afternoon sun was fading, slipping mellow through the big windows.

Another thing was, Lionel Congreaves wanted to be shown a single slip of paper that demonstrated that his years with West Coast Construction had ever been anything other than a matter of administering personnel. It was pretty humorous when you looked at it. The company had been incorporated in Delaware for tax purposes, as were many legal American enterprises. Otherwise, he knew little about its structure. Could he state with categorical certainty that it was not a CIA front? No, but that was precisely the point. He was a personnel administrator and stuck to his particular field of expertise. Was there a tape of him interrogating a prisoner? Was there a photograph of him standing outside one of these famous torture chambers that to hear people tell it, he practically had built himself, brick by brick? Oh, yes, and he had been in two branches of the armed forces as well, the marines for three years and the air force for four. That was supposed to prove something too. Very shady business. Right. One thing Lionel Congreaves could state with Cartesian certainty was that he didn’t know the first thing about the Phoenix program. He certainly couldn’t speak to allegations that it had led to the indiscriminate killing of thousands of South Vietnamese. Was there eyewitness testimony to the extent that “Lionel Congreaves worked for the CIA”? He was not that kind of “spook.”

Sporting Goods was staged to alert the authorities to begin the termination op.

Lionel Congreaves had put that message on his answering machine to demonstrate a sense of humor. A sense of humor was sometimes the only thing you had left. Also, he thought it broke the tension. Because the fact of the matter was there were a lot of people calling up just to see if he’d been offed yet — most of them pro — Lionel Congreaves, incidentally — and he thought the message was considerate in a humorous sort of way, while also being a bit of a thumb in the eye of those who were less than well-wishers.

There were some other totally baseless reports too, plenty of them. But after having put them side by side in their endless permutations and studied them for a while, Lionel Congreaves had decided that this particular arrangement formed a nice, coherent chronology of innuendo. And he generally liked to take a break right about here to review some of the contradictory aspects of the above-mentioned insinuations, after which all the rest could be presented as the humorous miscellany of ridiculousness that it so plainly was. The fact of the matter was that he had done his best to help Don DeFreeze, as he had with all the worthless losers in the AACE, not to mention their exceedingly immature white friends on the outside, such as Willie Wolfe. What Lionel Congreaves had tried to do was develop a selection of courses in art, black history, literature, math, and political science (though basically his whole thrust was necessarily remediation). And in the spirit of free inquiry Lionel Congreaves was happy to admit Marx and Lenin into the curriculum; they were dandy as far as they went, which was pretty damn far in prison with its compulsory work rules and poor conditions and the natural solidarities that tended to form among the various constituencies thereat. But to urge a bunch of convicts to think of themselves as “soldiers” was just asking for trouble. The fact of the matter was that as soon as Chairman Mao entered the room where the AACE participants met, channeled by skinny uppermiddle-class white kids like Willie Wolfe, Lionel Congreaves had scooted out double quick.

Now, Lionel Congreaves could certainly understand why, for example, a loser who had never managed to get a single thing right in his life might become transfixed by a vision of himself as a righteous

Speaking of which. Just some more happenstance that Lionel Congreaves had collected for his own edification and for that of those who were willing to look with their eyes, there was a novel by Sam Greenlee, The Spook Who Sat by the Door. The book deals with a spook, that was to say a black person, who works as a double agent, that was to say a spook, for the CIA. But he evades his control officer to recruit a multiracial, coed guerrilla army — which he characterizes using the neologism symbiology— the idea being to incite a race war. In the end, the brother and his group are cornered in a small tract house in South Central L.A., surrounded by overwhelming police fire power. Published when? 1968. Funny, huh? Coincidence was always funny. Wouldn’t be coincidence if it wasn’t funny .

You wanted to hear funny , now here was something so funny it might curl your hair. Book called Black Abductor. By a man named Harrison James, who nobody ever heard of. Published by Regency Press, which never before or again published another book so far as anyone knows. A PO Box address. Deals with the heiress of a famous California conservative family. She is kidnapped from the off-campus apartment she shares with her boyfriend by a multiracial band of revolutionaries. After indoctrination and many freewheeling sexual experiences with her captors, she is converted to their revolutionary cause and opts to join them. And oh, the name of the heiress is Alice . Year published: 1972.

But anyway. Lionel Congreaves was getting a little ahead of himself. Now, how — if the Shepards were the ones coordinating the assault on the SLA from inside — did the rumormongers get Don DeFreeze and company all the way from the house on West Eighty-fourth Street over to the house on East Fifty-fourth where they got cremated? The Shepards and the rest of the SLA were incommunicado after the machine-gunning at Mel’s, so how did the Shepards “coordinate” DeFreeze all the way to a specific house in a totally different part of town? ESP? It’s humorous; it’s laughable in the extreme.

And DeFreeze. Supposedly he was the agent provocateur nonpareil, yet his single distinguishing qualification was that he had been a police informer ? So a man who obviously couldn’t keep secrets was expected to keep the lid on something like this? Assuming, for the sake of argument, the truth of the allegations regarding Lionel Congreaves’s intelligence affiliations, his immanent pigginess, would he have selected or acceded to the selection of an individual whose instability was so luminously apparent?

Lionel Congreaves found the accusations concerning that poor kidnapped girl to be revolting. Personally, and only on the basis of what he’d read in the papers plus his own schoolmarmish knowledge of the inner lives of his AACE charges, he believed the girl had been snatched for real. Mary Alice Siem he remembered very well; she was what in an earlier time might have been called an “adventuress.” She certainly was not the missing girl whose smiling face he’d been looking at in the papers for months. And it hardly seemed likely, at least to Lionel Congreaves, that the girl would dream up her own kidnapping to get out from under an unhappy engagement. He meant, first you wanted to try less drastic measures. A series of long and candid talks, therapy, a weekend in Sonoma, even a trial separation. He knew the drill.