Chapter Five.
Yerevan, Armenia.
Saturday, December 29th, 2018; & Sunday, December 30th, 2018.
Geistmann Possibles (12/29-30, 2018):
1. Killed an underling of Boutros Boutros-Ghali for his master's derelictions re: Bosnia and Rwanda. BBG's father, BG, had been assassinated in 1910, which may have initially drawn G's attention to the son.
The 2008 dossier Robinson had prepared for Weatherbee amply explained G's hypothetical animosity to Boutros: "Geistmann is a retaliator. His signature comes straight out of Dante, the contrepasso, tit-for-tat." Boutros-Ghali's life for the many lives lost in the two genocides.
In the Wiki entry that was his default resource for rush jobs like this one, Robinson discovered a second, related reason that BBG could have been targeted: G's insanely intense aversion to hypocrisy. This aversion had been analyzed in Markowitz's profile as a key component of G's malignant narcissism. As PM had put it:
Subject exhibits the element of MN behavior that we call "ego-syntonic aggression" -- i.e., aggression acceptable to the self without guilt or anxiety, i.e. hatred ... defined as a complex aggressive affect whose primary aim is to destroy its object, a person who is both needed and desired, and the destruction of whom is equally needed and desired.
In 1994, when the Armenians conferred upon the Secretary General one of his many honorary degrees, the citation read, "for being a good Christian gentleman." If G., like many others, held BBG ethically responsible for two genocides, that citation would have been toxic. "Christian gentleman," indeed! Besides, what could be more hypocritical than the leader of the world's foremost peacekeeping organization's having stood by as thousands of innocents were slaughtered?
The death of BBG, in Cairo, in 2016, aged 93, may have been why G. had settled for a surrogate, whose own asassination (by G.?) occurred in February 2017. The surrogate was Major Marc Avril. More precisely, Avril would have been the surrogate for a surrogate. Avril's immediate superior, General Bernard Janvier, was also a likely target of G's wrath. In a closed-door session in New York, Janvier had persuaded the U.N. to abandon to their fate the Muslim safe havens in Bosnia, including Srebrenica. (Boutros had defended that decision.)
From a bare news wire statement to the effect that Avril really had been assassinated, Robinson dreamed up a scenario involving Geistmann, which mixed fact with imagination (Robinson's): On Wednesday, April 1st, 2017, known in France as poisson d-Avril, Major Marc Avril was killed with a single shot to the lower half of his face, fired from a high-powered rifle apparently modeled after the one used by Frederick Forsyth's fictional "Jackal," who missed the fictional Charles de Gaulle with his own shot. Avril, as target, had G.'s modus operandi all over him. Not only the coincidences of the date and name, but he was assassinated at an outdoor café in posh Menton,* on the Cote d'Azur, when he was (a healthy) seventy-eight, and Bosnia was only a vague memory -- for him. (* Allowing himself a Geistmann-ism, Robinson noted that, "the Major took it on the chin." And, when he did, had be been eating fish? Truite meuniere, perhaps?)
Both G. 's penchant for retaliation and his aversion to hypocrisy may have figured in his choice of Bernard Janvier's underling as surrogate victim. Part of Janvier's education had taken place in Algeria, after which, again according to Wikipedia,
On December 1, 1960, he [Janvier] joined the Center of Perfection of the Infantry Cadres 2 at Philippeville in Algeria, then was assigned on January 1, 1961 to the 1st battalion of the 1st Tirailleurs Regiment in Quality, as a commando chief.
If G. needed more red flags, those two details could certainly have provided them. His own family had left Algeria for France in 1965, three years after Independence, and G. had been born in Marseilles June 12th, 1970. His subsequent rejection, when he applied to the prestigious Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA), on the grounds of his father's status as an immigrant, had been a foundational cause of G's spectacular career of mayhem. Thus, the murder of Marc Avril could have been another instance of "ego-syntonic aggression."
Robinson asked himself a further question: why Avril, rather than Janvier? In other words, why would G. have chosen to assassinate Janvier's underling, instead of targeting the then-seventy-nine year-old general, himself? Who could say? Perhaps, it was an exaggerated sense of sportsmanship that had prolonged the life of the wheelchair-bound general. (As of now, December 2018, twenty months later, Janvier was still among the living.)
How, exactly, could Geitmann's hypothetical assassination of Marc Avril have been carried out? Drawing on his copious knowledge of G's previous escapades, Robinson added to the scenario. Employing some sort of ruse, he must have caused Avril's bodyguards to leave him unattended for a minute or two, at his outdoor table at the Menton café. The fatal shot could have been fired from about 1,200 feet, or 365+ meters, well within G's range (unless his vision had deteriorated).
Robinson dreamed on. G's "calling card," left on the tray on the Major's table, where the bill would normally have been, alluded neither to the date, nor to menton. Instead, it read, TRADUCED AND ABANDONED. Why "traduced?" First, the word play. As Markowitz had put it, "Subject's punning, ethical preoccupations and ritualistic tableaux all suggest that, surprisingly, he suffers from a measure, at least, of O-CD." G. might even have realized that blaming the surrogate-surrogate, Avril, for Srebenica, could be regarded as a kind of slander, or traduction. But since he was never one to tolerate the "camp-guard" defense, the point of the note would have been to refute the slander charge: the record spoke for itself. The refutation would thus have been another instance of "ego-syntonic aggression." Always the pedant, Robinson added a final, irrelevant, factual detail to this entry: the estimated net worth of Marc Avril at his death was U.S. $2.7 million.
By now, the clock on his screen told Robinson that it was almost time for him to visit actual dreamland. So he decided to confine himself to a few further preliminary notes on a few further hypothetical victims. He could return to this list later. The first additional note was rooted in a rumor.
2. In early 2018, someone had supposedly tried to poison the notorious Bosnian-Serb genocidaire, Radko Mladic, inside the prison cell in The Hague where he was serving a life sentence. Obviously, the rumored assassination had failed, but Robinson could not resist sketching a plausible scenario for the attempt. Impersonating Radko's friend, Serbian Health Minister Zoran Stankovic, G. could have chemically induced a heart attack. But, even assuming that an assassination had really been attempted -- whether or not the putative assassin was G.-- the prison doctors must have saved Radko (since he was still living). Besides, if anyone ever had the courage of his convictions, it was Radko Mladic. The man was assuredly not a hypocrite.
3. Another rumored assassination attempt, this one of a group, also allowed for a scenario involving Geistmann. As far as anyone knew, there had been no justice for several senior officers of the Bosnian-Serb army who had perpetrated the 1992 massacre of 200+ civilians at Boracko Lake, near the town of Konjik. In Robinson's perhaps overtired imagination, G., wearing judicial robes, had shot several of the killers in the back of the head, then left their bodies unburied, at the site of the massacre, for animals to rip apart. (The actual victims' bodies had been left unburied.) Robinson realized that, over the years, he had developed a taste for concocting Geistmann-isms. This one, paraphrasing Galatians: 6.7, was:
GEISTMANN SHALL NOT BE MOCKED. AS YOU SOW, SO SHALL YOU REAP!
4. And, finally, pushing aside this heap of arrant speculation, and returning to more likely possibilities, after killing Donduceni's younger brother, G. must have attempted to trace the money trail of the African Cartel, and their smuggling routes across Eastern Europe. Were there any unsolved murders of Swiss bankers, for example, during the period in question, 2013-18? (Swiss bankers, those poster boys for hypocrisy!) Picking off Cartel accessories could have been the motive for G's return to Europe in 2013.
CONCLUSION: IN ADDITION TO HAWAII, CHISINAU, SREBINICA, AND GENEVA, BERNE, OR ZURICH MIGHT BE AS GOOD PLACES AS ANY TO PICK UP THE TRAIL.
Before kissing his computer goodnight, Robinson realized he had not taken any serious measures to encrypt his new files and searches. But, weighing the possible consequences, he made a conscious decision to leave them unprotected. After all, his speculations might shoot a load of buckshot into the pants of Geistmann's other pursuers.
If readers are interested in Reading Geistmann, it is available as a free PDF from the author. Please visit www.ronsinger.net for contact information.
And Geistmann in Africa (Geistman II):
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