Finding the missing pieces

A DAY after his 60th birthday, he told the president of his extra-marital affair and subsequently tendered his resignation as the country’s most powerful man in the CIA.

Her husband, meanwhile, cancelled her 40th birthday party after she was identified as the mistress.

Events leading to the shocking end of the admirable career of CIA director David Petraeus all seemed so simple. Not unlike the script from the Desperate Housewives, a woman received a series of harassing and threatening emails from anonymous accounts, accusing her of flirting with “him.”

She complained to an FBI agent. The Bureau caught out the top spy in the country by linking the emails to his autobiographer, Paula Broadwell .

It could well have been summed up that Petraeus offered to resign simply because he felt he had violated his personal code of honour by entering into an affair with Broadwell.

If you are a die-hard CSI fan, you will not accept such a theory and just conclude: Ah, how true, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

You will instead snap your fingers and swear there must be more to the whole regrettable affair than meets the eye. There are still too many pieces of the puzzle that just don’t seem to fit!

So, the search for the missing pieces continues.

I am quite thrilled, actually, with how the FBI opens up the secret compartments – like how I do with my set of nesting wooden dolls. First, with the outer layer, then as I open, dolls of either gender of decreasing sizes appear!

The FBI has been fast in finding the missing pieces if we are to draw a comparison with what’s happening here at home.

The timeline of the event, as provided by the American news-papers, showed Broadwell only started sending harassing emails to the other woman – 37-year-old Tampa socialite Jill Kelly, said to be having a liaison with four-star General John Allen, US commander in Afghanistan – in May this year and by September, the FBI had nailed Petraeus and Broadwell.

Now back at home, the missing pieces that the men in blue have found in the three open shooting cases in the major cities – or are still trying to find, to be more precise – appear to be in connection with crimes allegedly linked to one common theme – Internet gambling.

But the cops have said otherwise. The state police chief was reported as having brushed aside talks that the recent fatal daylight shootings in Sibu could have been linked to Internet gambling.

On the surface, Internet gambling is not the main cause of the murder because the victim’s scope of business covered mainly entertainment, logging and oil palm, according to Police Commissioner Datuk Acryl Sani Abdullah Sani.

He said the killing could have been due to a personal grudge and possibly business rivalry. He also ruled out the possibility of the three murder cases in question having any link to each other.

But the CP’s top man in Sibu said he believed the husband of the woman, gunned down in the most recent coffeeshop shooting, was involved in illegal computer gambling but added, with reservation, that it was too early to link the underground activity with the killing.

I am just trying to make sense out of the whole messy episode but have no clue whatsoever as to where I can find the missing pieces. But maybe – just maybe – I might have one missing piece in hand. Ah Kang, the husband of the murdered woman, had frequented the café where the shooting occurred. The killers must have trailed him to keep tabs of his movements and struck him when they thought the timing was right.

Even as police investigations are on-going, I remain apprehensive and for good reason too because the venue (of the shooting) is also my favourite café for kampua and liver soup!

Which reminds me of the grand adventure of a wedge-shaped animal searching for the “perfect (missing) piece to perfect itself” while singing and enjoying the scenery as it travels along its journey.

But after the animal has finally found the perfect piece that fits the purpose of its search, it begins to realise it can no longer do the things it used to enjoy doing – like singing or rolling slowly to enjoy a conversation with a worm or a butterfly.

There and then, it decides it was happier when searching for the missing piece than actually having it. So it gently puts the piece down and continues searching … happily.

I like how Anne Roiphe explained this fable in a book review. The fable can also be interpreted to mean that no one should try to find all the answers or hope to fill all the holes in themselves or achieve total transcendental harmony (psychic order) because a person without a search or loose ends or internal conflicts and external goals becomes too smooth to enjoy or know what’s going on. Too much satisfaction blocks any exchange with the outside world.

The FBI is probably close to finding its missing pieces. Will the truth hurt?

By the same token, are our men in blue also close to finding the perfect pieces to fill the gaps that are causing the three shooting incidents to remain unsolved thus far?