Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry Read Free Book Online Page B

buy one of the television networks because he, as a foreigner, was prohibited from buying it in his own name. There was even one that Jane had never quite understood, about using airport-security fluoroscopes to produce involuntary more-than-nude photographs of famous passengers and publishing them for pornographic purposes under cover of a Belgian shell corporation. By now he had collected a great deal of money from investors who should have known better, and there were a great many policemen looking for him who did.
    Jane had summoned her courage, glanced at Alfred Strongbear, and said, "You want me to risk my future, maybe even my life, to save a man like that?"
    The leader of the delegation of elders was a Southern Brule named Joseph Seven Bulls. He said quietly, ’’The man is a piece of scum. But he is also probably the last Beothuk Indian left on earth."
    Jane asked, "Beothuk? Did you say Beothuk?" It was commonly believed that the last Beothuk on earth had left it in the 1820s. The one issue the French and English who settled Newfoundland agreed on was the extermination of the Beothuk. The Beothuk had never grasped the European concept of private property, so they were deemed to be a nation of thieves.
    An Arapaho man of a scholarly demeanor named Ronald Kills on Horseback said, "Look at California. They had a dedication ceremony for Point Reyes Park and who shows up but the first Wappo and Coastal Miwok anybody’s seen in a hundred years. Same thing happened up along the Oregon border. Half the people that showed up for the memorial to the exterminated Modoc were Modoc."
    Jane said, "But Newfoundland isn’t northern California, and we’re talking about a hundred and sixty years."
    Seven Bulls said, "He knows some stories, and he knows the language. He’s a disgrace, but letting them take him at his age and put him in prison is a death sentence. You want everybody to get together to further the cause of the Indian. Well, here’s an Indian. He’s carrying what’s left of his people in his head."
    Seven Bulls had her and he knew it. She had driven Alfred Strongbear aka Alfred Strong aka Demosthenes Patrakos off the reservation in the trunk of her car past a roadblock of state cops who had traced him that far and figured he would try to hide in the crowd.
    She had been the one who made Alfred Strongbear a Venezuelan. She had been new at the craft in those days, but she had an aptitude for it. In the early part of the century, people used to take a name off a gravestone and get a copy of the dead person’s birth certificate, which they used to start collecting other documents in that name. By the eighties that method wasn’t working in the United States anymore, because it had been done too often. But Jane gambled that it might still work in a country where there wasn’t much demand for false identities and the records weren’t all computerized. Jane had a college friend named Manuela Corridos who was spending her summer vacation at home learning her parents’ sugar business in Merida, Venezuela. Manuela had found it exciting to collect the names and file the papers.
    The bargain the elders had made with Alfred Strongbear was that within one year he would make one thousand hours of videotape recordings of the stories his parents and grandparents had told him—Beothuk mythology and cosmology, anecdotes about the old times, and whatever else they had managed to retain over five or six generations—and one thousand hours of videotapes in the lost language of the Beothuk. When Jane had seen him off in New York on what must have been the first of many cruises, he had given her a blessing in a language she didn’t know, winked, walked up the gangplank, and said something to the purser in Spanish. She had felt relieved to see the last of him.
    A year later she received an envelope with the return address "Kills on Horseback, Big Wind Reservation, Wyoming." Inside was a photocopy of a letter from a professor in