Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry Read Free Book Online Page A

Harry as he told the story. The voice, the cadence of his speech were the same. He wasn’t exactly mimicking Harry, because it wasn’t conscious. But he had heard Harry tell this story.
    "This is not enough to think about, but the man is having a heart attack. Now Harry’s got a decision to make. When the old guy fell across the table, what he landed on was, among other things, all of Harry’s money and a whole lot more. And he knows that unless they do things a lot differently in South America, a man with a false mustache is not called an industrialist. But Harry did the right thing. He got on the phone, called the doctor, and then bagged all the money and locked it in the little safe in the cabin. The man recovered. Before they took him off in a helicopter, he gave Harry two things—the forty thousand in cash that was in the safe and your address. You see, he knew what Harry would need most... had known from the beginning, because he was no more an amateur than Harry was."
    As Jane listened to Felker’s story, the events in her memory rose up to fill in the empty spaces. She could almost feel the hot, humid air that night in late June at the Big Wind Reservation of the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho in Wyoming It was the summer of her last year at college, and she had joined the Tecumseh Society, a student group formed on the theory that the Shawnee leader who traveled from tribe to tribe in the early 1800s to unite the Indians might not have been entirely misguided.
    Jane’s assignment that summer was to travel with a Jicarilla Apache named Ilona Tazeh through the northern plains to establish voter-registration programs on the festival circuit: the Northern Cheyenne Fourth of July Powwow and the Crow Fair in Montana, the Oglala Nation Powwow and the Standing Rock Powwow in South Dakota. That night after the celebrations, she had lured a few young recruits into the air-conditioning of her tiny motel room. The theme of her pitch was that attempting to deal with the society at large only as Senecas or Commanches or Navajos was tantamount to suicide.
    What she talked about were the abrogations of law and decency the state and federal governments had committed against the Iroquois in the preceding twenty years: confiscating all of the Complanter Reservation in Pennsylvania and much of the Allegany Reservation in New York for the Kinzua Dam; taking a large part of the Tuscarora Reservation for a reservoir; and Canada and the United States conspiring to slice off sections of the Mohawks’ St. Regis and Caughnawaga reservations to widen the St. Lawrence Seaway. She was already getting good at this speech, which she always delivered like a messenger from a distant front arriving breathless and weary to warn soldiers who were already fighting similar battles on their own doorsteps.
    Ten minutes after they had left, while she was wondering whether she had inspired or bored them, she heard a knock on the door. She opened it to find four old men. At first she thought they had come to look for their sons or daughters, but they told her they were a delegation of elders from different nations. It seemed that earlier in the day, Ilona had tried to impress a tall, handsome Shoshone student with the group’s daring by casually mentioning that her friend Jane had the knack for hiding fugitives from injustice. The elders had come to commend Alfred Strongbear to her care.
    She found Alfred Strongbear to be a special problem. At the time she met him he had just finished pretending to be a Greek. He had found it necessary to finish because he had decided not to be just an ordinary Greek. He had been an exceptional Greek, a relative of both Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos who had enormous projects in the works. He had pillaged various parts of the country on the strength of these schemes— using his cousins’ discarded oil tankers as floats to harness the sea tides to produce electricity, assembling a group of American investors to