Without Remorse

  “What do I owe you?” Rosen asked.

  “For what?” Kelly took off his gear and switched off the compressor.

  “I always pay a man for his work.” the surgeon said somewhat self-righteously.

  Kelly had to laugh. “Tell you what, if I ever need a back operation, you can make it a freebie. What is it you docs call this sort of thing?”

  “Professional courtesy—but you’re not a physician,” Rosen objected.

  “And you’re not a diver. You’re not a seaman yet, either, but we’re going to fix that today, Sam.”

  “I was at the top of my power-squadron class!” Rosen boomed.

  “Doc, when we got kids from training school, we used to say, ‘That’s fine, sonny, but this here’s the fleet.’ Let me get the gear stowed and we’ll see how well you can really drive this thing.”

  “I bet I’m a better fisherman than you are,” Rosen proclaimed.

  “Next they’re going to see who can pee the farthest,” Sarah observed acidly to Pam.

  “That, too.” Kelly laughed on his way back inside. Ten minutes later he’d cleaned off and changed into a T-shirt and cutoffs.

  He took a place on the flying bridge and watched Rosen prepare his boat for getting under way. The surgeon actually impressed Kelly, particularly with his line handling.

  “Next time let your blowers work for a while before you light off the engines,” Kelly said after Rosen started up.

  “But it’s a diesel.”

  “Number one, ‘it’ is a ’she,’ okay? Number two, it’s a good habit to get into. The next boat you drive might be gas. Safety, doc. You ever take a vacation and rent a boat?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “In surgery you do the same thing the same way, every time?” Kelly asked. “Even when you don’t really have to?”

  Rosen nodded thoughtfully. “I hear you.”

  “Take her out.” Kelly waved. This Rosen did, and rather smartly, the surgeon thought. Kelly didn’t: “Less rudder, more screws. You won’t always have a breeze helping you away from alongside. Propellers push water; rudders just direct it a little. You can always depend on your engines, especially at low speed. And steering breaks sometimes. Learn how to do without it.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Rosen growled. It was like being an intern again, and Sam Rosen was used to having those people snap to his orders. Forty-eight, he thought, was a little old to be a student.

  “You’re the captain. I’m just the pilot. These are my waters, Sam.” Kelly turned to look down at the well deck. “Don’t laugh, ladies, it’ll be your turn next. Pay attention!” Quietly: “You’re being a good sport, Sam.”

  Fifteen minutes later they were drifting lazily on the tide, fishing lines out under a warm holiday sun. Kelly had little interest in fishing, and instead assigned himself lookout duty on the flying bridge while Sam taught Pam how to bait her line. Her enthusiasm surprised all of them. Sarah made sure that she was liberally covered with Coppertone to protect her pale skin, and Kelly wondered if a little tan would highlight her scars. Alone with his thoughts on the flying bridge, Kelly asked himself what sort of man would abuse a woman. He stared out through squinted eyes at a gently rolling surface dotted with boats. How many people like that were within his sight? Why was it that you couldn’t tell from looking at them?

  Packing the boat was simple enough. They’d stocked in a good supply of chemicals, which they would have to replenish periodically, but Eddie and Tony had access through a chemical-supply business whose owner had casual ties to their organization.

  “I want to see,” Tony said as they cast off. It wasn’t as easy as he’d imagined, snaking their eighteen-footer through the tidal swamps, but Eddie remembered the spot well enough, and the water was still clear.

  “Sweet Jesus!” Tony gasped.

  “Gonna be a good year for crabs,” Eddie noted, glad that Tony was shocked. A fitting kind of revenge, Eddie thought, but it was not a pleasant sight for any of them. Half a bushel’s worth of crabs were already on the body. The face was fully covered, as was one arm, and they could see more of the creatures coming in, drawn by the smell of decay that drifted through the water as efficiently as through the air: nature’s own form of advertising. On land, Eddie knew, it would be buzzards and crows.

  “What do you figure? Two weeks, maybe three, and then no more Angelo.”

  “What if somebody—”

  “Not much chance of that,” Tucker said, not bothering to look. “Too shallow for a sailboat to risk coming in, and motorboats don’t bother much. There’s a nice wide channel half a mile south, fishing’s better there, they say. I guess the crabbers don’t like it here either.”

  Piaggi had trouble looking away, though his stomach had already turned over once. The Chesapeake Bay blue crabs, with their claws, were dismantling the body already softened by warm water and bacteria, one little pinch at a time, tearing with their claws, picking up the pieces with smaller pincers, feeding them into their strangely alien mouths. He’d wondered if there would still be a face there, eyes to stare up at a world left behind, but crabs covered it, and somehow it seemed likely that the eyes had been the first things to go. The frightening part, of course, was that if one man could die this way, so could another, and even though Angelo had already been dead, somehow Piaggi was sure that being disposed of this way was worse than mere death. He would have regretted Angelo’s death, except that it was business, and ... Angelo had deserved it. It was a shame, in a way, that his gruesome fate had to be kept a secret, but that was business, too. That was how you kept the cops from finding out. Hard to prove murder without a body, and here they had accidentally found a way to conceal a number of murders. The only problem was getting the bodies here—and not letting others know of the method of disposal, because people talk, Tony Piaggi told himself, as Angelo had talked. A good thing that Henry had found out about that.

  “How ’bout crab cakes when we get back to town?” Eddie Morello asked with a laugh, just to see if he could make Tony puke.

  “Let’s get the fuck outa here,” Piaggi replied quietly, settling into his seat. Tucker took the engine out of idle and picked his way out of the tidal marsh, back into the Bay.

  Piaggi took a minute or two to get the sight out of his mind, hoping that he could forget the horror of it and remember only the efficiency of their disposal method. After all, they might be using it again. Maybe after a few hours he’d see humor in it, Tony thought, looking at the cooler. Under the fifteen or so cans of National Bohemian was a layer of ice, under which were twenty sealed bags of heroin. In the unlikely event that anyone stopped them, it was unlikely that they’d look farther than the beer, the real fuel for Bay boaters. Tucker drove the boat north, and the others laid out their fishing rods as though they were trying to find a good place to harvest a few rockfish from the Chesapeake.

  “Fishing in reverse,” Morello said after a moment, then he laughed loudly enough that Piaggi joined in.

  “Toss me a beer!” Tony commanded between laughs. He was a “made man,” after all, and deserved respect.

  “Idiots,” Kelly said quietly to himself. That eighteen-footer was going too fast, too close to other fishing boats. It could catch a few lines, and certainly would throw a wake sure to disturb other craft. That was bad sea manners, something Kelly was always careful to observe. It was just too easy to—hell, it wasn’t even hard enough to be “easy.” All you had to do was buy a boat and you had the right to sail her around. No tests, no nothing. Kelly found Rosen’s 7 x 50 binoculars and focused them on the boat that was coming close aboard. Three assholes, one of them holding up a can of beer in mock salute.

  “Bear off, dickhead,” he whispered to himself. The jerks in a boat, drinking beer, probably half-potted already, not even eleven o’clock yet. He gave them a good look, and was vaguely grateful that they passed no closer than fifty yards. He caught the name: Henry’s Eighth. If he saw that name again, Kelly told himself, he’d remember to keep
clear.

  “I got one!” Sarah called.

  “Heads up, we got a big wake coming in from starboard!” It arrived a minute later, causing the big Hatteras to rock twenty degrees left and right of vertical.

  “That,” Kelly said, looking down at the other three, “is what I mean by bad sea manners!”

  “Aye aye!” Sam called back.

  “I’ve still got him,” Sarah said. She worked the fish in, Kelly saw, with consummate skill. “Pretty big, too!”

  Sam got the net and leaned over the side. A moment later he stood back up. The net contained a struggling rockfish, maybe twelve or fourteen pounds. He dumped the net in a water-filled box in which the fish could wait to die. It seemed cruel to Kelly, but it was only a fish, and he’d seen worse things than that.

  Pam started squealing a moment later as her line went taut. Sarah put her rod in its holder and started coaching her. Kelly watched. The friendship between Pam and Sarah was as remarkable as that between himself and the girl. Perhaps Sarah was taking the place of the mother who had been lacking in affection, or whatever Pam’s mother had lacked. Regardless, Pam was responding well to the advice and counsel of her new friend. Kelly watched with a smile that Sam caught and returned. Pam was new at this, tripping twice as she walked the fish around. Again Sam did the honors with the net, this time recovering an eight-pound blue.

  “Toss it back,” Kelly advised. “They don’t taste worth a damn!”

  Sarah looked up. “Throw back her first fish? What are you, a Nazi? You have any lemon at your place, John?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I’ll show you what you can do with a bluefish, that’s why.” She whispered something to Pam that evoked a laugh. The blue went into the same tank, and Kelly wondered how it and the rock would get along.

  Memorial Day, Dutch Maxwell thought, alighting from his official car at Arlington National Cemetery. To many just a time for a five-hundred-mile auto race in Indianapolis, or a day off, or the traditional start of the summer beach season, as testified to by the relative lack of auto traffic in Washington. But not to him, and not to his fellows. This was their day, a time to remember fallen comrades while others attended to other things both more and less personal. Admiral Podulski got out with him, and the two walked slowly and out of step, as admirals do. Casimir’s son, Lieutenant (junior grade) Stanislas Podulski, was not here, and probably never would be. His A-4 had been blotted from the sky by a surface-to-air missile, the reports had told them, nearly a direct hit. The young pilot had been too distracted to notice until perhaps the last second, when his voice had spoken its last epithet of disgust over the “guard” channel. Perhaps one of the bombs he’d been carrying had gone off sympathetically. In any case, the small attack-bomber had dissolved into a greasy cloud of black and yellow, leaving little behind; and besides, the enemy wasn’t all that fastidious about respecting the remains of fallen aviators. And so the son of a brave man had been denied his resting place with comrades. It wasn’t something that Cas spoke about. Podulski kept such feelings inside.

  Rear Admiral James Greer was at his place, as he’d been for the previous two years, about fifty yards from the paved driveway, setting flowers next to the flag at the headstone of his son.

  “James?” Maxwell said. The younger man turned and saluted, wanting to smile in gratitude for their friendship on a day like this, but not quite doing so. All three wore their navy-blue uniforms because they carried with them a proper sort of solemnity. Their gold-braided sleeves glistened in the sun. Without a spoken word, all three men lined up to face the headstone of Robert White Greer, First Lieutenant, United States Marine Corps. They saluted smartly, each remembering a young man whom they had bounced on their knees, who had ridden his bike at Naval Station Norfolk and Naval Air Station Jacksonville with Cas’s son, and Dutch’s. Who had grown strong and proud, meeting his father’s ships when they’d returned to port, and talked only about following in his father’s footsteps, but not too closely, and whose luck had proven insufficient to the moment, fifty miles southwest of Danang. It was the curse of their profession, each knew but never said, that their sons were drawn to it also, partly from reverence for what their fathers were, partly from a love of country imparted by each to each, most of all from a love of their fellow man. As each of the men standing there had taken his chances, so had Bobby Greer and Stas Podulski taken theirs. It was just that luck had not smiled on two of the three sons.

  Greer and Podulski told themselves at this moment that it had mattered, that freedom had a price, that some men must pay that price else there would be no flag, no Constitution, no holiday whose meaning people had the right to ignore. But in both cases, those unspoken words rang hollow. Greer’s marriage had ended, largely from the grief of Bobby’s death. Podulski’s wife would never be the same. Though each man had other children, the void created by the loss of one was like a chasm never to be bridged, and as much as each might tell himself that, yes, it was worth the price, no man who could rationalize the death of a child could truly be called a man at all, and their real feelings were reinforced by the same humanity that compelled them to a life of sacrifice. This was all the more true because each had feelings about the war that the more polite called “doubts,” and which they called something else, but only among themselves.

  “Remember the time Bobby went into the pool to get Mike Goodwin’s little girl—saved her life?” Podulski asked. “I just got a note from Mike. Little Amy had twins last week, two little girls. She married an engineer down in Houston, works for NASA.”

  “I didn’t even know she was married. How old is she now?” James asked.

  “Oh, she must be twenty ... twenty-five? Remember her freckles, how the sun used to breed them down at Jax?”

  “Little Amy,” Greer said quietly. “How they grow.” Maybe she wouldn’t have drowned that hot July day, but it was one more thing to remember about his son. One life saved, maybe three? That was something, wasn’t it? Greer asked himself.

  The three men turned and left the grave without a word, heading slowly back to the driveway. They had to stop there. A funeral procession was coming up the hill, soldiers of the Third Infantry Regiment, “The Old Guard,” doing their somber duty, laying another man to rest. The admirals lined up again, saluting the flag draped on the casket and the man within. The young Lieutenant commanding the detail did the same. He saw that one of the flag officers wore the pale blue ribbon denoting the Medal of Honor, and the severity of his gesture conveyed the depth of his respect.

  “Well, there goes another one,” Greer said with quiet bitterness after they had passed by. “Dear God, what are we burying these kids for?”

  “‘Pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe ... ’ ” Cas quoted. “Wasn’t all that long ago, was it? But when it came time to put the chips on the table, where were the bastards?”

  “We are the chips, Cas,” Dutch Maxwell replied. “This is the table.”

  Normal men might have wept, but these were not normal men. Each surveyed the land dotted with white stones. This had been the front lawn of Robert E. Lee once—the house was still atop the hill—and the placement of the cemetery had been the cruel gesture of a government that had felt itself betrayed by the officer. And yet Lee had in the end given his ancestral home to the service of those men whom he had most loved. That was the kindest irony of this day, Maxwell reflected.

  “How do things look up the river, James?”

  “Could be better, Dutch. I have orders to clean house. I need a pretty big broom.”

  “Have you been briefed in on BOXWOOD GREEN?”

  “No.” Greer turned and cracked his first smile of the day. It wasn’t much, but it was something, the others told themselves. “Do I want to be?”

  “We’ll probably need your help.”

  “Under the table?”

  “You know what happened with KINGPIN,” Casimir Podulski noted.

  “Th
ey were damned lucky to get out,” Greer agreed. “Keeping this one tight, eh?”

  “You bet we are.”

  “Let me know what you need. You’ll get everything I can find. You doing the ‘three’ work, Cas?”

  “That’s right.” Any designator with a -3 at the end denoted the operations and planning department, and Podulski had a gift for that. His eyes glittered as brightly as his Wings of Gold in the morning sun.

  “Good,” Greer observed. “How’s little Dutch doing?”

  “Flying for Delta now. Copilot, he’ll make captain in due course, and I’ll be a grandfather in another month or so.”

  “Really? Congratulations, my friend.”

  “I don’t blame him for getting out. I used to, but not now.”

  “What’s the name of the SEAL who went in to get him?”

  “Kelly. He’s out, too,” Maxwell said.

  “You should have gotten the Medal for him, Dutch,” Podulski said. “I read the citation. That was as hairy as they come.”

  “1 made him a chief. I couldn’t get the Medal for him.” Maxwell shook his head. “Not for rescuing the son of an admiral, Cas. You know the politics.”

  “Yeah.” Podulski looked up the hill. The funeral procession had stopped, and the casket was being moved off the gun carriage. A young widow was watching her husband’s time on earth end. “Yeah, I know about politics.”

  Tucker eased the boat into the slip. The inboard-outboard drive made that easy. He cut the engine and grabbed the mooring lines, which he tied off quickly. Tony and Eddie lifted the beer cooler out while Tucker collected the loose gear and snapped a few covers into place before joining his companions on the parking lot.