The Crate (sample chapter)

Sunday 27 August, 1950: FBI Headquarters San Juan, Puerto Rico

“Mr. Ramler, are you hurt badly?” comes a voice from across the room. Ramler is crumpled up against the opposite wall, having slid down into the nook behind a couch. He can’t see a thing. After several moments, he recognizes the smell of pine oil; feels soft wooden grooves against his hands and forehead. There’s a rush of warmth below his left eye. The bones along his cheeks feel loose, like crumbling plaster of paris. He’s on the ground—sort of. His face is pressed up against the floor, along an uneven patch of crisscross herringbone. His feet are still up in the air, pinned between the couch and the wall.

It couldn’t have been ten seconds ago, Mr. Spillers’ hand had darted out so fast—grabbed Widger’s neck, squeezed down almost to a closed fist—how that was possible, Ramler couldn’t work out, not at the moment. He remembers though, the fist made a revving motion, the kind teenage boys make when popping a towel in a locker room. Then Widger went flying through the air, crashing against the far wall by the bookcase. Ramler went next, landing a few feet away, in the dark space behind the couch. With his eyes open now, he wriggles his shoulders back and forth, widening the nook he’s in so his feet can drop down to the floor. On his hands and knees, he turns and feels something warm and moist down by his belt. Oh God, did he urinate himself? He may have been unconscious for a bit, he’s not sure. Using his elbows, he pushes the couch out wider, to give himself space. In a moment, he’s leaning against the wall and the couch, mostly shielded from the man who moments ago, asked him if he was hurt. He looks down and sees a hole in his shirt, and something sticking out, what he believes might be his ribs. And something else—something soft and brown pinched up inside the tangle of bone and tendon. He thinks it might be his liver—he can’t tell.

Why had Spillers done this? How? None of it made sense. He thinks back to earlier this morning, when Spillers had greeted him warmly and said, “Good morning Mr. Ramler,” and thanked him for coming in on a Sunday. Then he pursed his lips and tapped his fingers on his forehead as though typing a secret message to himself, and added, “There is a thing—involving a wooden crate. And a pair of brothers. They’re with the insular police in San Juan. Can you get them for me?” And that’s how Anton Ramler’s last day on Earth began—running a slightly unusual errand for the FBI station chief on a Sunday morning. Contained in Mr. Spillers’ instructions though, was cause for concern. Ramler followed those instructions to the letter. The man who accompanied him did not. Which is why he’s lying on the ground convulsing—dead, or dying on an area rug next to fragments of pine; a final bowel movement inching out of his anus with torpid determination. Ramler sees him now, splayed out a foot away from the couch armrest, his face turned up toward the ceiling despite his body resting on the floor, stomach down—an enormous bruise where Mr. Spillers had wrenched him by the neck. Ramler thinks he may have severed Widger’s spine in the process of crushing his trachea. Leaning against the wall now, from behind the couch, he stares at Widger’s neck—imagines a tongue tangled up inside somewhere, like a stinking desiccating rag coiled up in his gullet; a tongue that will never again loosen peanut butter or jab at a stick of chewing gum.

To Ramler, the rules of Puerto Rico were more like those of a forward operating base—far away from football games and Sunday matinees and ice cream shops. At first, he felt this distance as an insuperable chasm. Trying to dip his toe into it was like yelling into canyons of unfathomable depth, stupidly waiting (hoping) for an echo to come bouncing back—knowing it could take a very long while. And in the time being, he’d still have to go on and live and decide and choose: what’s my next move? Being an FBI man out in the canyons of unfathomable depths, Ramler had to adjust; had to learn how to be comfortable being uncomfortable. It was exhausting. When he was feeling especially philosophical, he’d think of something an instructor told him at Quantico: we each know what we do, but have no idea what we’re actually doing. The man who told him that was very good at math, and believed that a single human brain—even millions of human brains acting in concert couldn’t possibly chase down all the permutations of all the cascading consequences of all the multiple colliding factors that emanate from a single course of action in a chaotic world. It’s what the instructor called combinatorial explosion. Applied to an FBI agent’s day-to-day, it could never be decisively proven or even reasonably clear that your idea of doing the right thing would actually improve or worsen a situation. But you still had to act. You had to commit. And all you ever had in those moments of doubt, was faith. Well, that last part about faith—the man didn’t actually say that. Anton added that in later.

Convinced that he could make an end run around the long tail of combinatorial complexity—at least in Puerto Rico—Ramler decided to make a major revision to his story, reimagining himself as a kind of switchboard. When he was called upon to execute a request he didn’t fully understand or agree with, he’d push a button on that switchboard, momentarily assigning proxy control to a third party authorizing entity—something he saw in his mind’s eye as a stout man sitting in a leather chair surrounded by law books and a floor globe.

Special agent Ramler’s imaginary switchboard gave him the power to believe there were solid reasons behind all the paperwork hit jobs and strange requests from Spillers—that somebody back at headquarters, perhaps a real flesh and blood fat man with real law books and a floor globe; someone possessing an understanding of the entire ball of wax, sat somewhere in a plush leather chair, underwriting all of it. A person of standing; whose moral and legal credentials were so unimpeachable, they could span the largest and darkest of unfathomably deep canyons, causing the yells of FBI agents in Puerto Rico to bounce back and complete their roundtrip circuits.

Spillers is the kind of man who somehow always knew exactly what kinds of situations would result in the longest periods of waiting for that echo to return. And he had a razor sharp sense of where each man’s point of exhaustion was—how long he’d wait for that echo to return, before surrendering in despair, and simply give up waiting. Spillers knew, like an accountant knew, the precise measure of each man in those kinds of moral units. At some point, he must have discovered the existence of Ramler’s switchboard, because he stopped calling on any of the other men to run his special errands.

On Sunday afternoon, August 27, 1950, four hours after one such errand, Anton Ramler found himself crumpled up on the floor behind a couch, with several broken ribs and a punctured liver, wondering how a noodley armed middle aged FBI station chief could have thrown him across a room like a rag doll.

Continue reading / listening on Substack… https://roughmasters.substack.com/p/1-the-crate