“Oh, nothing. This book has some pretty pictures. Kid who painted them really knew his birds.”
“Bob, it’s so unlike you.”
“I was just curious, that’s all.”
“Eagles?”
“Eagles,” he said.
They returned to Arizona and with the money, Bob was able to upgrade the barn, hire two Mexican assistants, buy a new pickup and reintroduce himself to the Pima County horsey set. In just a little bit of time, they had patients-seven, eight, then ten horses in various states of healing, all ministered to with tender care. His lay-up barn became a thriving concern after a while, mostly on the basis of his own sweat, but also because people trusted him.
Nikki went back to school but she rode every day, English style, and would start showing on the circuit’s junior level the next spring, her coach insisted. Julie resumed working three days a week at the Navajo reservation clinic, helping the strong young braves mend after fights or drinking bouts, helping the rickety children, doing a surprising amount of good in a small compass.
No reporters ever showed; no German TV crews set up in the barnyard; no young men came by to request interviews for their books; no gun show entrepreneurs offered him money to stand at a booth and sell autographs; no writers from the survivalist press wanted to write admiring profiles. He and the war he represented seemed once again to have disappeared. No part of it remained, its wounds healed or at least scarred over.
One night, Bob sat down and wrote a letter to Trig Carter’s mother. He told her he was planning a trip east some time in weeks to come and, as he said, he’d like to stop by and share with her what he had learned about the death of her son.
She wrote back immediately, pleased to hear from him. She suggested a time, and he called her and said that was fine, that’s when she should look for him.
He loaded his new pickup with gear and began the long trip back. He drove up to Tucson, to the veterans cemetery there, and walked the ranks of stones, white in the desert sun, until at last he came to:
Donny M. Fenn
Lance Corporal
U.S.M.C.
1948–1972
Nothing set it apart. There were dozens of other stones from that and other wars, the last years always signifying some violent eddy in American history: 1968, 1952, 1944, 1918. A wind whistled out of the mountains. The day was so bright it hurt his eyes. He had no flowers, nothing to offer the square of dry earth and the stone tablet.
He’d been in so many other cemeteries; this one felt no different at all. He had nothing to say, for so much had been said. He just soaked up the loss of Donny: Donny jumping over the berm, the vibration as the bullet went through him, lifting the dust from his chest; Donny falling, his eyes going blank and sightless, his hand grasping Bob’s arm, the blood in his mouth and foaming obscenely down his nose.
After a while—he had no idea how long—he left, got back in the truck and settled in for a long pull across Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and on to the East.
The last part of the trip took him to the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, where once again he bunked with an old friend who had become the Command Sergeant Major of the United States Marine Corps. As a few months before, he fell in with cronies, both still on active duty or recently retired, men of his own generation and stamp, leathery, sinewy men who bore the career imprint of the Corps. There were a few loud nights at the CSM’s house in the suburbs, the whole thing slightly more celebrative.
It was the next day that he called Mrs. Carter and told her he’d be up the next night. She said she couldn’t wait.
He hung up and waited on the line for the telltale click of a wiretap. He didn’t hear it, but he knew that meant nothing: there were other methods of penetration.
Now, he thought, only this last thing.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Bob drove carefully through the far reaches of Baltimore County, at sunset. It was as he remembered, the beautiful houses of the rich and propertied, of old families, of the original owners of America—people who rode English. At last he turned down a lane and drove under the overhanging elms until he found Trig’s ancestral home.
He pulled in, once again momentarily humbled by the immensity of the place, its suggestion of stability and propriety and what endured in the world. At last he got out, adjusted his tie and went to the door.
It was September now, turning coolish at night here in the East. The leaves hadn’t yet begun to redden but there was nevertheless a definite edge in the air. Things would change soon: that was the message.
He knocked; the old black butler answered, as before.
He was led through the same halls of antiques, paintings of patriots, exotic plants, dense Oriental rugs, damask curtains, lighting fixtures configured to represent the flicker of candles. Since it was darker, there wasn’t quite the sense of the threadbare that had been so evident his first time out here.
The old man led him into the study, where the woman waited. She stood erect as the mast of a ship—the family had owned shipping once, of course, as well as railroads, oil, coal and more. She was still stern, still rigid, still had that iron-gray uplift to her hair. She was demurely dressed in a conservative suit, and he could see, even more now, that at one time she must have been a great beauty. Now an air of tragic futility attended her. Or maybe it was his imagination. But she’d lost a son and a husband to a war that the husband said was worth fighting and the son said wasn’t. It had broken her family apart, as it had broken apart so many families. No family was immune, that was the lesson: not even this one, so protected by its wealth and property.
“Well, Sergeant Swagger, you look as if you’ve become a movie star.”
“I’ve been working outdoors, ma’am.”
“No, I don’t mean the tan. I have sources still, I believe I told you. There’s some news afoot about your heroics in Idaho, how you disconnected some terrible conspiracy. I’m sure I don’t understand it, but the information has even reached the society of doddering State Department widows.”
“They say we were able to get some good work done, yes, ma’am.”
“Are you congenitally modest, Sergeant? For a man so powerful, you are so unassuming you seem hardly to be there at all.”
“I’m just a polite Southern boy, ma’am.”
“Please sit down. I won’t offer you a drink, since I know you no longer drink. A club soda, a cup of coffee or tea, a soft drink, something like that?”
“No, ma’am, I’m fine.”
They sat across from each other, in the study. One of Trig’s birds observed them; it was a blue mallard.
“Well, then, I know you came here to tell me something. I suppose I’m ready to hear it. Will I need a drink, Sergeant Swagger? A great shot of vodka, perhaps?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t believe so.”
“Well, then, go ahead.”
“Ma’am, I have satisfied myself on this one issue: I don’t believe no way your son would have killed another human being and I don’t believe he killed himself. I think he was duped by a professional Soviet agent—rather, Soviet in those days. Your son was sort of charmed into—”
“What a quaint euphemism. But I have to tell you I’m aware of my son’s homosexual leanings. You believe it was a homosexual thing?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. That’s not my department. I only know the result, that somehow he was snookered into assisting in what was represented as an act of symbolic violence as a way of reenergizing the peace movement. But the Russian operator, he didn’t give a tinker’s dam about the peace movement. He was only interested in your boy’s fame and reputation as a masking device for the mission’s real target, Ralph Goldstein, who was working on satellite topography-reading technologies and seemed on the verge of a breakthrough the Russians felt would put them way behind in the Cold War.”
“It was only about murder, in the end. And some other boy was the target?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“So my poor Trig wasn’t even the star of his own murder?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, he’d been the star of so many other things, I don’t suppose it matters.”
“My guess is, he had begun to have doubts; perhaps he even tried to back out, or go to the FBI or something. Possibly there’s some record of his doubts in his missing sketches. But it appears I won’t never see them. He was killed, probably with a judo chop to the back of the neck. That was their specialty in those days. In fact, everybody who saw this agent was killed, at some effort, including another peace demonstrator named Peter Farris, a Marine named Donny Fenn, and later attempts were made on my wife, who had seen the agent with Trig. She was married to Donny Fenn at the time. I believe Ralph Goldstein was killed in the same way. Their bodies were put in the building and it was detonated. It goes down into the books as a violent fool and a math geek. But the books are always wrong. It was something entirely different; kids used by older, smarter, far more ruthless men, then thrown away for a momentary strategic advantage. It was a war, but the cold one, not the hot one.”
“The one we won.”
“I suppose we did.”
“What happened to the Russian?”
“Well, our intelligence people found out a way to turn the information against him. I don’t know much about it, but he’s dead. They had it on CNN. You could see the burned bodies in the back of the Jeep.”
“That nasty boy?”
“That one.”
“And the man who was trying to kill you?”
“Well, he wasn’t trying to kill me. He was trying to kill my wife. He was stopped,” Bob said. “And he ain’t never coming back.”
“Were you responsible?”
Bob just nodded.
“Do you know what you are? Sergeant, you’re a sacred killer. All societies need them. All civilizations need them. It is to the eternal shame and the current damnation of this country that it refuses anymore to acknowledge them and thinks it can get by without respecting them. So let an old bat speak a truth: you are the necessary man. Without you it all goes away.”
Bob said nothing. Speculation on his place in the nature of things was not his style.
The old lady sensed this, and asked for an accounting of the politics of the affair, the details of history. He gave it, succinctly enough.
“Odd, isn’t it? As you’ve explained it, after it’s all counted up and all the accounts are settled, the one party to it all that could be said to benefit is the old Russian communist apparatus. It’s kept them from going under another few years. And who can tell what that’ll mean? The cruel irony of history, I suppose.”
“I wouldn’t know about that, ma’am. They were very happy, the intelligence people, that they were able to stop this fellow Pashin. He was their real target. My wife was his, but he was ours, and we got him first.”
“Well, anyway: you’ve provided a measure of serenity to my life. My son wasn’t a fool; he was overmatched by professionals, who’ve been punished. Justice isn’t much, but it helps the nights go easier.”
“Yes, ma’am. I agree.”
“Sometimes you don’t even get that, so one must be very grateful for what one does get.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now … I know you weren’t working for me, you were never my employee. But the one power I still have in the world is to satisfy myself through my checkbook. I would very much enjoy getting it out now and writing a nice big, fat one.”
“Thank you,” he said. “That’s not necessary.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am.”
“Soon there’ll be college expenses.”
“Not for a while. We’re doing fine.”
“Oh, I hope I haven’t spoiled things by bringing up money.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, then—”
“There is one thing, though.”
“Name it.”
“The painting.”
“The painting?”
“The eagle after the fight. I don’t know a thing about art and I don’t know a thing about birds, but I’d be honored to have that. It has some meaning to me.”
“You felt your breast stir when you saw it?”
“Well, something like that.”
“Then you shall have it. Come with me, Sergeant Swagger.”
She led him forthrightly out of the room, commanded the old butler to get a “torch”—a flashlight—and led Bob in the butler’s uncertain illumination to the studio. Their breaths plumed in the frosty air. She opened the door, found a switch and the birds flashed to life, still and majestic.
“These are worth quite a lot of money to connoisseurs of the macabre, I expect,” she said. “But the eagle … it’s so atypical, and also unsigned. Would you want a certificate of authenticity? It might seem pointless now, but when your daughter goes to school, it could mean the difference between buying one year at Radcliffe or four years.”
“No, ma’am,” he said, walking to the painting. “I just want it for what it is.”
He stood before it, and felt its pain, its distraught, logy mind, its survivor’s despair.
“I wonder how he got so much into it,” she said.
He unscrewed the painting from the easel, where it had been clamped since May of 1971. It was unframed, but the canvas was tacked stoutly to a wood backing.
“I hope you’ll let me pay for the framing,” said the old woman. “That at least I can do.”
“I’ll send you the bill,” he said.
He wrapped the painting carefully in some rags, making certain not to disturb the elegant depth of the crusted pigment, and put the whole package delicately under an arm.
“All set,” he said.
“Sergeant Swagger, again, I can’t thank you enough. You’ve made my dotage appreciably better, to no real gain of your own.”
“Oh, I gained, Mrs. Carter. I gained.”
The team watched him from far off, through night-vision binoculars. It had been a long stakeout until he showed, longer still since he was in there. Where had he been all afternoon? Still, it didn’t matter. Now it was going to happen.
Swagger turned his truck around, pulled out, drove down the lane, and by the time he got back to Falls Road, the number-one van had moved into position, not behind his turn, as amateurs will do, but before it, letting him overtake them, and falling into position from behind that way, without attracting notice.
Swagger pulled around the van, scooted ahead and settled into an unhurried pace.
“Blue One, this is Blue Two,” said the observer into his microphone. “Ah, we have him picked up very nicely, no problems. I have Blue Three behind me, you want to run this by management?”
“Blue Two, management just got here.”
“You stay on him, Blue Two, but don’t rush it,” came the impatient voice any of them knew as Bonson’s. “Play in the other van if you think you’re in danger of being burned. Don’t be too aggressive. Give me an update—”
“Whoa, isn’t this interesting, Blue One. He didn’t do the beltway. He just stayed on Falls Road on the way into Baltimore.”
“Doesn’t that become Eighty-three?” asked Bonson.
“Yes, sir, it does. Goes straight downtown.”
“But his motel is out at B-W.”
“That’s the credit card data. He had something with him, some kind of package. Maybe he’s going to do something with it.”
“Got you, Blue Two, you just stay on him.”
They watched as Bob drove unconsciously into downtown Baltimore on the limited access highway that plunges into that city’s heart. He passed Television Hill with its giant antennae, and the train station, then the Sun, and finally the road drifted off its abutments to street level and became a lesser boulevard called President Street just east of downtown.
“He’s turning left,” said Blue Two. “It’s, uh, Fleet Street.”
“The map says he’
s headed towards Fells Point.”
“What the hell is he doing there? Is he starring in a John Waters movie?”
“Cut the joking on the net,” said Bonson. “You stay with him. I’m coming in; be in town very shortly.”
The men knew Bonson and his radio team were in a hangar at B-W Airport, less than twenty minutes south of town this time of night, assuming there was no backup at the tunnel.
Bob turned up Fleet, and the traffic grew a bit thicker. He did not look around. He did not notice either the white or the black vans that had been on him since the country.
He passed through Fells Point, jammed with cars, kids, scum and bars, presumably the shady night town of the city, and kept on driving. Another mile or two and he turned on the diagonal down a beat-up street called Boston.
“Blue One, this is Blue Two. The traffic is thinning out. He’s headed out Boston toward the docks. I’m going to stay on Fleet, run a parallel, and let Blue Three close on him, just to be safe.”
“Read you, Two,” said the observer in the second van.
There was no way Swagger could tell, now that the van which had been closest to him sped away down another road and the unseen secondary vehicle closed the gap, that he was under surveillance. More important, he exhibited nothing in his driving that demonstrated the signature of a surveillee who’d burned his trackers: he didn’t dart in and out of traffic, he didn’t signal right, then turn left, he didn’t turn without signaling. He just drove blandly ahead, intent on his destination.
But once he passed two large apartment buildings on the right, at the harbor’s edge, he began to slow down, as if he were looking for something.
It was a kind of post-industrial zone, with ruined, deserted factories everywhere; oil-holding facilities for offloading by tankers; huge, weedy fields that served no apparent purpose at all but were nevertheless Cyclone-fenced. There was little traffic and almost no pedestrian activity; it was a blasted zone, where humans may have worked during the day, but deserted almost totally at night.
The number-two van was a good three hundred feet behind him when he turned right, down another street—it was called South Clinton Street—that seemed to veer closer to the docks. The van didn’t turn; it went straight, after its observer notified the first vehicle, which had run parallel down Boston, and itself turned right on the street Bob had turned down.