seymoure | The Ilium Obligation (A Matt Savage Adventure) Chapter 1

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“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”
-Christopher Marlowe (“Doctor Faustus”)

“The Trojan War was fought to decide who could sleep with somebody. But then, aren’t they all?”
-Lorre Greenstreet

“Somewhat is sure design' d, by fraud or force:
Trust not their presents, nor admit the horse.”
-Virgil (The Aeneid, Book 2 – Translated by John Dryden)

“The Trojan Horse, now that was a case of the Confidence Game goes to war.
Bluffing had always been there,
but this was the case of a full on con as strategy. Beautiful.”
-Eddie “The Stick” Mangotti

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Chapter 1.
Opulence as a Beginning

“A learned man has always riches in himself.”
-Phaedrus

The last time we talked, I had just gotten a reward for killing somebody.

He deserved to die, that is true. Leo MacPherson was a murdering engine of evil itself.

But a $20 million bounty for someone’s life? Not the way I normally work.

But, with that kind of money things do change.

First, not one of my friends had a mortgage that was unpaid.

I now owned a nice house, nothing showy, but nice. So did my friends Rayleen and Hugo, though of late, they had only been using one of them at a time.

My office moved from a dilapidated building into the nicest upper floor of a downtown skyscraper. Rayleen liked that a lot.

It seems that for years she had been taking accounting courses at one of the junior colleges. She had also taken over doing my taxes, the end result being that I hadn’t paid any taxes for the last two years.

It was only recently that I had found out the reason she wanted me to be tax free. Besides the fact that it insured that she would be paid, it also kept money from going toward the Viet Nam war. Rayleen was from a conservative country family and could not think of herself going to rallies or speaking out against the government. But she could keep the money that funded the war out of their hands, and that was her plan.

My generation was formed by the war.

Hugo had served two years before he was wounded and sent home. He was just too big a target. He would not speak about what happened in the war, but I knew it weighed on him. He wouldn’t talk about it and couldn’t even watch war movies on TV. Even the ones starring his beloved John Wayne.

I, on the other hand considered Wayne one of the two actors I couldn’t divorce from his political views. The other was Ronald Reagan. When I saw him “Balance the Budget” of California by closing the state mental institutions and turning those patients out onto the streets, I couldn’t forgive that. “Knute Rockne, All American” was not too much to give up to avoid being angered by the man who could voice compassion while doing whatever politics asked of him.

Hugo, who I admit I love, talked me into watching “The Quiet Man,” and I had to admit it was good. Then “Stagecoach” and “The Searchers.” I had to accept that the man was more than his politics. I even began to enjoy the whole western genre.

I had time to enjoy those things now.

I could have stopped everything else and just read great books and watched wonderful movies. But I had become a Private Detective, and it was part of who I was.

So we moved into a posh office and took clients with cases that paid very well, but more importantly, were interesting.

No more following disloyal spouses or cheating schemers taking nickels from other cheating schemers.

I took an Art Gallery break in and used the case as an excuse to study art. Do you know that most of the great forgeries were caught because of Chemistry? Cool, huh? (I bought an original Dali sketch and took payment in a Chagall signed print.)

I had never even thought about forensics beyond fingerprints before. Now I had a lab on retainer. They would run all kinds of evidence and all I had to do was have someone bring it in.

Rayleen had a cousin whose law firm was also on retainer with us. They could council us on what would fly in court and what we needed to focus more closely on.

I made Hugo and Rayleen financial partners in the firm, and Hugo was official my assistant on the scene. I wanted to make him a full partner, but he said, “No, boss, you still have to be the Boss.”

So I was.

It took us three years to get to this point.

It was now April 19, 1970.

The box came in this morning’s mail.

Then the odyssey began.