by Thomas Laird
She eats voraciously, like a she-wolf, and she never even looks up at me. She goes for a refill of the Coke, and then she gobbles her slice of apple pie dessert.
“What’s your name?” I ask, after I finish my own food.
“Li.”
I spell it out loud, and she nods.
“Where do you live, Li?”
“Out there.” She smiles sadly.
“You mean you don’t live anywhere?”
She doesn’t answer.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“You afraid I’m jailbait?”
There’s no trace of an accent. She sounds American-born.
“Were you from Vietnam?”
“I was born in Saigon. My parents put me on a boat and sent me here to an aunt, who died on me, and now…”
“Now you’re alone.”
“My aunt died alone, just about the way I will.”
“What makes you think like that?” I ask.
She takes a long slurp at the bottom of her Coke.
“Why would I think any other way? I’m nineteen, just so you know. So you won’t get pinched for being a kiddie molester. I’m legal.”
“I wasn’t going to harm you.”
“What’s your name?”
“Roberts.”
“Last or first?”
“Roberts,” I repeat.
She smiles. She’s streetwise. She’d have to be.
“What do you do, Roberts?”
“I troubleshoot for my associates.”
“Sounds interesting. You live in that apartment building, right?”
I nod.
“You don’t have much to say, do you?” She smiles.
Now I see her brown eyes and the doe-like color of her face, and I see her long black eyelashes that don’t come out of a cosmetics store. Everything about her reminds me of in-country. She’s authentic. I know her, somehow. I’ve never had a long-term relationship with a woman. Nothing ever went more than a few weeks or a few dates. I never met anyone I thought was authentic, real. They all seemed like they were putting on a pleasant façade just so I’d like them, just so anyone would be attracted to them.
Li seems natural, like a teak in the rainforest.
“You live out in the street?”
She smiles again. “You interrogating me, officer?”
“I’m not a cop.”
“You look like a cop.”
“I was in the Army, the military. Maybe that’s what you see.”
“Were you in—”
“I was in Vietnam, yes.”
“Did you—”
“Did I kill anybody? Yes.”
“I was just going to ask you if you were in combat, but thanks for volunteering all that.”
She gets up and goes for another refill of the pop.
Then she’s back. I never know if when she rises she’s just going to bolt out the door.
“Are you looking for work, Li?”
She eyes me suspiciously.
“I’m not asking you to go down for me. I mean legit work, like in a job.”
She eyes me warily for another beat or two.
“Sure. Why not?”
“I don’t know anyone with work, but my associates might. They know a lot of people, and they owe me a favor.”
“Why would you do a thing like that? I mean why would you go out of your way for someone you don’t even know?”
“Let’s call it atonement.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you some other time. You need a place to crash?”
“Now I know this shit’s too good to be true. There’s always a price tag.”
“There’s no price tag. You can have the couch. You can stay until you can afford to get out, and I won’t touch you or harm you in any way. You have my word.”
“Your word?” she laughs.
“Yes. That’s all I’ve got left of me.”
She looks at me with a question on her face.
“What’s in this for you?”
“I told you before.”
“Atonement, yeah. Sounds like bullshit. Sounds like a setup.”
“Then just walk away, Li. Offer’s good for about twenty seconds.”
I get up.
“You won’t touch me. You won’t hurt me.”
“But I will feed you, until you can feed yourself.”
She rises, and then she follows me out of the feeding frenzy at Burger King.
*
Chicago, 1984
I’m getting used to working alone, in the few days that Rita’s taken her vacation leave. Her absence might extend longer because she told me she’s accumulated another two weeks of personal days, so she might be gone until November, about a month from now.
I follow Johnson around, but he’s so predictable that he’s becoming boring to follow, so I keep perusing that list of Rangers who were together in Vietnam. It’s too hard to piece anything together about them because their histories in the war are classified. I try making calls to any of the family the living remainders of the list might have, but each of them—McIntosh, Dellacord, Azrael, James, and Johnson—doesn’t seem to have close ties to their kin. I get little and nothing from the phone contacts. McIntosh’s people are in Maine, and like most Northeasterners I’ve met, they’re very tight-mouthed about their own. Dellacord was from Tacoma, and he wasn’t tight with any of his blood and his parents both died in an automobile accident three years ago. James is from Indy, and he had no wife, no fiancée, no girlfriend. And my man Cal Johnson lives like a phantom, like a ghost.
Azrael vanished after the war. I was able to find out that he went AWOL in 1972. I have a few friends in the Army who will talk to me, on occasion, so I have sources beyond the usual communication lines that we have with the military. It was Sterling Hammond, a lifer that I knew in Vietnam, who quietly got into a classified folder and passed on the information to me. He was taking his career in his hands when he helped me out, and I told him I owe him one, and I do. I knew Sterling slightly in Saigon, on R and R. We got drunk together, and we said we’d get back to each other in the States, and we did share another great drunk at O’Hare Airport when we returned from the shit. Sterling stayed on. I was only a draftee. I got the hell out after my two tours.
Azrael has a very odd name, for one thing. I look his name up at the Chicago Public Library, and I see it’s the English version of “Angel of Death.” So it can’t be him because that would be too symmetrical, too geometric. People don’t have names that define who they are. Yet he disappeared to parts unknown right at the end of the conflict, our little police action, and Azrael has all the qualifications all the other Rangers had to be lethal. They were trained snipers, all of them, and they knew a whole lot of other ways to stop anybody’s clock. It was their job, of course. They were operators, they were specialists—Special Forces, after all.
I didn’t read Moby Dick in high school when I was supposed to read it. I read the novel in a hotel room in Saigon on R and R after a tremendous forty-eight-hour drunk. They had it on our base’s little library, and I took it with me so I’d have something to read, because I didn’t plan on getting laid since I was in love with Erin and was trying to be faithful to her. So I read that Ahab was named after a wicked king in the Bible and that the dogs drank his blood after he croaked—the guy in the Bible—and in the book by Melville some Quaker tells Ishmael, the main character and the narrator, not to hold it against Ahab that he was named for an evil son of a bitch.
I figure I should look at Evan Azrael the same way, and he’s only one name on my list, and he’s evaporated like the mist in an August sun, and I’m figuring the odds are very good that he never got out of the Nam alive. I should concentrate, then, on the guys who are still above the ground, not in the ground.
Vincent and Miranda are dead, and maybe it really is a coincidence, but I can’t buy it. Too many dots are connected in this one.
I talk to Doc Gibron over at his apartment, once in a while, but he’s still in a little pain after the major cutting on his knee, and I can see it’s a trial for him to concentrate on conversation with me, especially when it’s a homicide case we’re talking about. Doc says he’s writing a novel, so I don’t want to disturb him, anyway.
Rita’s gone, and I don’t think she’s coming back. Ever. I don’t think she’s taking a break; I think she’s making a break. From me. I have this sure feeling she’ll be hitching up with a new partner when she does get off leave.
*
Cal Johnson gets his, about six days after I stop following him. He doesn’t even last a week after my surveillance. I get the call from downtown in the middle of the night, about 2:45 a.m.
The phone is next to my bed, and I jump up and ask, “Erin?”
Then I remember, and then I grab the phone, and forty minutes later I’m at Johnson’s place.
The guy who owns the building where Cal Johnson lived called it in. He’d come home late and was heading upstairs to his own apartment when he saw Cal’s door wide open and knew that Cal never left his door open. The owner, Jeff Krasny, opened the door and called for him, and then he walked inside and found Johnson strapped to a chair in the middle of the kitchen floor.
When I get there, the techs are doing their things. The ME has already arrived, and when Fred Parsons M.D. looks over at me, he simply shrugs.
“Same, same,” he says sadly, referring of course to the Vincent slaying. “One small caliber bullet to the back of the head, right at the base of the skull. It’s another execution, Jimmy.”
The first thing that comes to my mind is that Vincent and Johnson were the only two Chicago residents, which tells me also that if the killer skipped town, he may never be coming back, which tells me the remaining members of my list will all be out of my jurisdiction. Only stupid killers come back to the scene of the crime. You know, the perps in Agatha Christie and in all the other 25-cent paperbacks.
Our guy is not stupid. He’s a trained assassin who called himself a soldier. I’ve got no beef with these Special Forces types. I knew a few of them in a glancing sort of way in Asia, and I know what they did was necessary for the war effort and all that, but I’m wondering how you turn off the killing mechanism when you get back home. It must come so naturally to them, trigger time, I mean, that when someone strikes them as a persona non grata, how do they simply power down and walk away from those irritating assholes? You have guys pulling pieces on the highways when someone cuts them off in traffic. I can’t believe that those operators did their things in a completely dispassionate manner. I know they’re trained to do it that way, but how do you turn off the humanity in yourself when you squeeze one off and terminate another’s breathing time?
I would never have been able to do what they did, what they did in anonymity. Classified killings. They were soldiers who were following orders, and they didn’t analyze the wisdom of the choice of targets. That was above their pay grade. Choice was given to their superiors, to their overlords, to their brass bosses.
I have a list. But I can’t reach out and cuff someone who’s left the house, who’s fled to Maine or Indiana or the state of Washington. I can’t pursue unless my presence is requested by the cops in those far-off places.
I look at the names of Carl Vincent and Cal Johnson on my whiteboard, and I have the feeling their names will remain in red, always in red.
CHAPTER SEVEN
San Francisco, 1984
The girl has moved in, and she has nothing other than the clothing that she wears. So the first thing I do is bring her out to a department store and buy her a few hundred dollars worth of basic clothes. She tries to tell me that she can’t afford to pay me back, but I tell her one of my associates has made a phone call to a coffee house not far from the Wharf that some of the associates’ friends operate. I asked the Italian if there was something going on in the back room of the coffee house, but he said the place was strictly legitimate. It had something to do with appearances, but there was nothing going on except selling coffee at exorbitant prices, he assured me.
She started work the day after we got her some new duds. Li is able to go casual because the bistro is sort of a post-hippy operation. All the heads from the district like to gather there, and they do poetry readings on the weekends. Lawrence Ferlinghetti is supposed to do a gig there on Saturday night, and when Li comes home from her first day’s shift, she asks if I want to go see this guy. He was big in the sixties and seventies, and I remember some soldiers had copies of his Coney Island of the Mind when I was in-country.
Li seems excited from her first tour of pouring caffeine-laden coffee and espresso, and she talks more in her first half hour home in the apartment than she did all of the first day I met her.
She seems to be settling in well, and I went to a furniture store and I ordered a couch that rolls out into a double bed. I figure even when she leaves I can use it as another couch in the front room. When they deliver it the next day, Li begins to bawl when she sees it.
“Why’d you do that?” she asks from behind the droplets on her cheeks.
“Room was half empty. I’ve been meaning to buy some more stuff for in here for a long time.”
“You’re full of shit, Roberts.”
She’s smiling when she says it.
“Listen,” I tell her as she pulls out the bed from the couch. “I have to leave town for a few days.”
“For work?”
“Yeah. It’s for work. But I’ll be back by the weekend, probably. I left you money for when I’m gone, and the fridge is full of food and drinks. Will you be all right?”
“I’m not a baby, Roberts.”
“No, you’re definitely not that. Do I need to tell you not to bring anyone up here when I’m gone?”
“I won’t bring anyone here if you say not to.”
“Good. This is our little fortress of solitude, right?” I smile.
“You’re Superman, then. Am I Lois Lane?”
“You’re just who you are, and I like it that way. There’s nothing super about me.”
“I’ll bet you have a secret life, Roberts. Something exotic and fascinating.”
“There’s nothing interesting about what I do, and I’m hoping to be done with it very soon.”
“You won’t say what it is that you—”
“I already explained all that.”
She looks at me as if she’s offended with my reticence, but there’s nothing I can add that won’t make her run right back out into the streets where she came from.
“It’s confidential work. I have to keep my business to myself. I owe it to the people I work for. Can you understand that, Li?”
She nods, but I see she’s still disappointed that I won’t confide in her.
“All right. I’m going to tell you a secret. You can’t tell this to anyone. Okay?”
She nods again.
“I’m going to Indianapolis, but that’s all I can say.”
“Will you call me here at the apartment?”
“I guess I can do that. Why?”
“Just to talk. It’ll be lonely here, all by myself.”
“I’ll only be gone a few days. I’m not lying to you, Li. I won’t lie to you.”
“I won’t lie to you, either.”
She comes hurriedly over to me, here in the front room, and she grabs hold of me.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done.”
I can feel her warmth against me, and I find myself holding her as tightly as she’s embracing me. I shouldn’t have brought her here in the first place. It was a grave tactical error. She’s a complication, and I never should have allowed her inside the apartment. I could’ve set her up in some room somewhere, and I could’ve picked up her tabs until she gets herself going without bringing her in here with me. It’ll make my life difficult, in the end.
*
The flight to Indy takes about three hours. The wind w
as at our back, the pilot said, so we’re arriving early.
I’m here for Steven James, and Indianapolis is his last known address. Some of my associates did the intelligence work for me as part of my fee for my next job, which takes place in Evansville, Indiana. I can’t imagine doing a whack in a place like Evansville, but apparently someone tried to do a runner on them, and this pissant town in Indiana is where I go after I take care of Steven James.
James was the bomb expert and he was our Asian linguist. He set the charges that leveled the villages and hamlets and hootches that we torched after our operations. It was amazing what he could do with C-4 and plastic explosives. He could make places disappear; he could literally dissolve little thatched hootchvilles.
He made that tiny town in Quang Tri Province go invisible after we dispatched all those souls, innocent and guilty, the day I took a round and went off to the hospital, just before I left the war for good with the Hmong.
I have his address, but when I get to the apartment complex, there’s a different name on the mailbox for apartment 321. I ring the doorbell, and a middle-aged woman answers. She’s black and thin and sports a foot-high Afro. She doesn’t look too happy to see me.
“What y’all want?” she challenges me.
“Does Steven James live here?”
If the answer’s yes, she’s dead, too.
“Naw. He moved out of here a month ago. He was real nice. He tole me he’s movin’ to Chicago.”
“Did he give a forwarding address?”
“Y’all need to talk to the manager, Honey. He live in 412.”
She shuts the door abruptly in my face.
I ring 412, and the manager answers. At least I suppose it’s the super or whatever they call him when their drains clog or their lights go out.
