Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “Well, let me ask you one thing, sir. Just one thing. You don’t have to answer verbally, so if anybody asks, I can tell them you didn’t say a thing to me. All you have to do is nod your head yes, or nod your head no. I just want to know one thing, Major. One little thing. Who’s responsible for this? For me not being on the list. Grimshaw?”

  The major shook his head no.

  “Hedges?”

  The major nodded his head. Yes. Slaight just sat there, staring at him.

  “Please, Mr. Slaight. Don’t ask me … I’ve got a wife and kids. My career …”

  “Yessir. I got you. The committee, sir. I got a good cow for a deputy. I’ll send him down here to see you this afternoon. Now I gotta go.”

  Slaight bounced downstairs to the Law Department two at a time. He walked into Room 408. Captain T. Clifford Bassett started clearing a hole in the pile of papers on his desk.

  “So?”

  “So it’s happening. This morning. All at once. Grimshaw calls me in. They’re convening an Aptitude Board. I asked him why. He wouldn’t say. Asked him to see the papers. Wouldn’t show me. All he did was ream me for not having any sick slips in my folder on Saturday mornings. Then I get back to the barracks, and the excused-from-class list is down for SCUSA. I’m head of the committee that runs the show administratively. My name isn’t on it. I just got back from the OIC for my committee. Asked him who was responsible. He was fuckin’ pathetic. Pleading about his career, Jesus. He wouldn’t say anything, but I got him to nod his head. It was Hedges. Captain Bassett, it looks like the shit is coming down. Now. All at once.”

  “Settle yourself, Slaight. Settle down. There’s nothing to worry about. Yet. Let’s give this thing some thought. The list for SCUSA we won’t concern ourselves with. That’s just a slap in the face, and a stupid one at that. He’s showing his hand, showing it too early in my considered opinion. But the Aptitude Board. Did Grimshaw say anything about when it would happen?”

  “He said I’d hear in ‘due time.’ That’s all.”

  “Excellent. Excellent. Grimshaw is just the crack in the door. Regulations require that any Aptitude proceedings originate with the company tactical officer. So that means it’s just starting. And you’ve got to remember. They feel time is on their side. They’ll keep you dangling for a while. Tension. They love to play with the tension. While they think you’re dangling, we’ll be getting your ducks lined up. We can use time, too. I’ll keep track of your board with a friend in the Department of Military Psychology and Leadership. MP&L officers sit on the boards. In the meantime, we’ll begin a few delaying tactics of our own. A request for representation by counsel before the board, for example. There’s a neat one. They’ll need an opinion from the judge advocate general before they can turn you down. It’ll take at least a week to grind that opinion out of this office. I’ll see to that. Then we can put in requests for witnesses on your behalf. One at a time. One each day. We’ve got plenty of time, Slaight. Don’t worry about that.”

  “I’m not worried about time, sir. I’m worried about this goddamn Aptitude Board. I’ve seen those things in action. I got called as a witness by a guy in my company they were boarding back in 1966. They asked me a couple of questions, he called a few more witnesses, and that was it. He was in the Boarders’ Ward the next day.”

  “Yes. I know all about Aptitude Boards. Not exactly your paradigm of procedural rights. But don’t let that bother you. We know what’s behind this thing. The murder of David Hand. Slaight, you hold a lot of cards. Our only problem now is to figure out when to begin playing them. And in what order. Now, are you ready to lunch at the club? I think it would make good politics for those in the Tactical Department to observe us lunching together. Let them know where things stand. Don’t you?”

  “Yeah.” Slaight grinned. Bassett was prepping to go to the wall.

  They lunched at the O Club, as it was called. Slaight had a steak sandwich. Grimshaw watched him chew every bite from a table across the room. The little woman hadn’t gotten him home for lunch, after all.

  30

  “Ry, I want to know what’s happening to you. What’s going on? Something is wrong.” Irit was angry, and the tone of her voice on the phone caught Slaight off guard. He took her call in the company orderly room. It was Thursday night, around 11:30, October 24. Three days had passed since he learned about the Aptitude Board. He hadn’t told Irit about it, not wanting to upset her unnecessarily. Bassett seemed to have things fairly well under control. His draft of Slaight’s request for counsel before the Aptitude Board had gone up the chain of command today.

  “Irit, what’s up? What are you doing calling me at this hour? It’s after taps.”

  “I want to know what’s going on, Ry. There is something you are not telling me. There is something wrong.”

  “What do you mean, something wrong?”

  “I’m being watched, Ry. It’s been going on for several days now.”

  “Watched? By whom?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is, I am being watched.”

  “Irit, call me back on another number, will you?” asked Slaight, giving her the number for the phone in Leroy Buck’s room.

  Slaight took the stairs two at a time, hit Buck’s door, and flopped on his bunk. A Marty Robbins album was playing softly on the stereo. Buck was working on some damn computer program he had designed to predict the outcome of the presidential election, based on a sampling of cadet opinion, via computer-card straw poll. Buck had run the program several times and had a sample of about 750 cadet votes by now. Nixon was ahead, Wallace second, Humphrey a close third. The phone rang. Slaight picked up.

  “Irit?”

  “Yes. Ry?”

  “S’me. I’m up in Buck’s room. We can talk now. Tell me about this again, slowly. You’re being watched?” Buck’s head swiveled like a snake’s.

  “Yes, Ry. I’m positive. It’s an around-the-clock surveillance on my shop and my apartment. I waited to call you after I had made sure.”

  “You made sure? How? What is this, anyway, some kind of paranoid New Left gibberish? I feel like I’m talking to … Mark Rudd or one of those Columbia idiots or something. Come on, Irit. Get serious. You’re talking to ‘nothin’-but-the-facts’ Slaight.” Buck laughed aloud.

  “Ry, this is no joke,” said Irit, her voice level, words like stainless steel. She heard Buck’s laugh, Slaight’s chuckle.

  “Are you sure the phone you are speaking from is secure?” she asked.

  “Secure?”

  “Yes. Secure. Are you sure the phone is not bugged?”

  “Jesus, Irit. First you’re being watched, now there’s bugs in the phones. What gives?”

  “I’m calling you from my grandfather’s, Ry. I have been watched for the past three days … maybe more. Maybe a week. It’s hard to tell for sure. I did not start keeping track of the surveillance until three days ago. Today I had my grandfather check with friends in the government in Israel. I am not under surveillance by Israeli intelligence. My grandfather assures me of this. I have told you before, Ry. In my country, this is no joke. We are accustomed to intelligence activities. I have friends who are Israeli agents … here … elsewhere. We must live constantly with terrorism, so we must live constantly with intelligence activities. Surveillance, the tapping of telephones—this happens all the time in my country. It happens here. I know. I have more than one Israeli friend in the business world here in America who is in reality one of our intelligence agents. Believe me, Ry. I am not joking. I am being watched, but not by Israelis. These men are professionals. I have the feeling, Ry. It has something to do with you.”

  Slaight leaned against the pillow on Leroy Buck’s bed in a state of near catatonia. She was dead serious. He remembered talking with Irit about the Israeli equivalent of the American CIA—how in Israel the whole business was just taken for granted, because it was so goddamn necessary. Once they’d had dinner in New York with a friend of Irit’s from Israel, and afterwa
rd, after they’d spent a leisurely evening discussing the Middle East and the news business—for her friend was a reporter—Irit told him her friend was also an intelligence agent. He was stationed in New York to keep an eye on Arab business activities in the United States. His job covering Wall Street for Reuters provided an ideal “in,” she explained. Slaight had been intrigued—and horrified. Knowledge of foreign agents—the very words evoked images of Hitchcock films and paperback novels—no matter what country they were from, operating in the United States, his country, disturbed Slaight. The idea of espionage ran counter to his essentially democratic conservative instincts. He recalled arguing with her—what right have they to and on and on—then the cold, harsh realization that she wasn’t talking about rights, she was talking about what had to be done. She was talking about survival.

  Now here was Irit laying it on him again about intelligence agents … they were American, and moreover, they were probably watching her because of him. Ry Slaight. Jesus.

  “Irit, I don’t know what to say,” he stuttered.

  “You don’t have to say anything, Ry. Just answer my question. Is there anything wrong, anything you haven’t told me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think your phone is secure … it is not tapped?”

  “I don’t really care, Irit. It’s all out in the open now. I put off telling you until this weekend, because I didn’t want to spoil your week for you. Yeah. I’m in trouble. Big trouble. They’re running an Aptitude Board on me sometime soon. I don’t know when. And I’m catching shit from the tac again. Something is up, Irit. It started Monday.”

  “That was when I first noticed them. Monday. I kept track of them Tuesday and Wednesday. That night I visited my grandfather and asked him to contact his friends in Israel. We just received word tonight. They are not Israeli. Who could they be, Ry?”

  “Jesus, Irit. I don’t know. I can’t think of why they’d want to be keeping on eye on you, unless …”

  “Unless what, Ry?”

  “Unless something big has happened in the David Hand case that I don’t know about, which might explain why they’re eager to bounce me out of here, and they just might by trying to cop some dirt on you to sue against me at this Aptitude Board. Christ. Enough people up here know that I’ve been going out with a foreigner now. Who can tell?”

  “Ry, I can’t tell you the reason, but I can tell you they’re watching me twenty-four hours a day. Three shifts. The shifts are irregular, so there is no pattern. I never see the same face in the same location twice. In Israel, when they put physical surveillance on you, it means they’ve already tapped your phones. So I am afraid for my phones now. I will not talk to you from home or from the shop.”

  “Well, goddammit. This is ridiculous. I’m not doing anything wrong. You’re not doing anything wrong. We’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “This is true, Ry, but you never want to give them anything they can use. Anything.”

  “Well, goddammit. This shit is going to stop. I’ll take weekend tomorrow and come down and check these fuckers out. Grades came down this week. I’m 2.3 or above in all my subjects for the first time all year! I can take leaves on Friday afternoons now.”

  “Well, good for you!” She sounded genuinely excited. Then her voice dropped again, steely. “But what do you propose to do, Mr. Big Shot? Do you think you can walk out and make them go away—pooof!—just like magic? It does not work this way in Israel. I am sure it does not work this way here.”

  “Let me give it some thought. I’ll let you know before I come down tomorrow.”

  “Not on the telephone, Ry Slaight.”

  “Goddamn. Forgot. Okay, you’ll be at your shop tomorrow afternoon, right?”

  “Yes, until six.”

  “I’ll get word to you, Irit. Just don’t leave the shop until you hear from me tomorrow.”

  “Okay, Ry … Ry? I hope you know how serious this could be.”

  “I do, Irit. Believe it. I do.”

  They said their good-byes, and Slaight told Leroy Buck the latest news.

  “Goddamn-goddamn,” said Buck. “What you gonna do, Slaight?”

  “You got a 2.3 in all your subjects, Leroy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So has Lugar. Maybe it’s about time the three of us took an old-fashioned weekend leave in New York City, stayed at the Van Rensselaer, just like the old days, huh?”

  “You thinkin’ what I think you’re thinkin’, Slaight, goddammit?”

  “I don’t know, Leroy. Haven’t done much thinking yet. Get one of those bean runners of yours in here, and get him to wake up Lugar and tell him to get over here.”

  Buck banged his fist on the wall next to his desk twice, and within seconds, a bathrobe-clad plebe was standing at attention in the door.

  “Get over to 226 and tell Mr. Lugar I wanna see him,” commanded Buck.

  “Yessir,” said the plebe, about-facing and double-timing down to Lugar and Slaight’s room. Buck walked over to the stereo and changed the record. Tammy Wynette. By the time she was singing the “V” of “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” a sleepy John Lugar was scratching his red hair and wondering what the fuck was up, that he had to be roused out of the rack by some goddamn plebe to see the goddamn company first sergeant.

  “That girl friend of yours, Josie Irene, she still a reporter for the Bergen Record!” asked Slaight.

  “Yeah. Ole Severns been moved to the city desk now. They took her off night rewrite. Good deal.”

  Slaight suggested that the three of them repair to the shower room, where two banks of six shower heads going full blast would drown out their conversation. Paranoia, he was discovering, had its own twisted logic.

  It didn’t take long for the three of them to work out a feasible plan. Convinced of the accuracy of Irit’s assessment of her surveillance—for John Lugar had long been an admirer of Irit Dov—he insisted on drawing up a set of plans. Into his extensive file of maps dove Lugar, and up he came with the best street map of New York he could find.

  “Even shows the directions of the one-way streets, and every alley in the Village,” he boasted. He and Josie Severns had used it many times to find obscure off-off Broadway theaters.

  Leroy Buck insisted on renting the car.

  “If we’re gonna figure out what the fuck is really going on, we gotta be mobile,” said Buck.

  “Not bad, for a farm boy,” laughed Lugar. The three were standing naked in the corner of the shower room, all twelve shower heads blasting hot water, turning the place into a steam room. They were joking, dancing through the hot showers, gathering around Lugar’s now-soggy map, spread on one of the wood benches running down the middle of the shower room. They had no idea who the intelligence agents were, of course … or if in fact they were intelligence agents at all. Nor did they know where they were to be found, for Irit’s description of the situation had carefully avoided details. But they were confident they’d come up with something. Hell, what had they spent three and a half years at the Military Academy for, if it wasn’t to have a bit of self-confidence when it came to matters of tactics and strategy?

  Friday afternoon, October 25, the three drove to New York City and parked several blocks from Irit’s boutique on Madison Avenue. Slaight waited on the street until a young kid happened by. For two dollars, he got the kid to deliver a message to Irit: Meet them in the back room of a bar across the street from where they were parked on Seventy-eighth Street in ten minutes. She showed up on time.

  Slaight outlined the plan. Irit would return to the shop, business as usual until closing. Once she had locked up, instead of going back to her apartment, she would walk a few blocks up Madison, grab a cab, and take it in a big ten-square-block circle back to the same bar on Seventy-eighth. The “agents,” she explained, had stationed themselves in a drugstore across from her boutique, one of the last on Madison that still had a fountain. They plugged dimes in a meter for a nondescript Chevy at curbside all day. Chevy today, Ford yester
day, Buick the day before that. They weren’t dummies, these guys. Somehow, they always found a parking place on her block at night for whatever car they were using. By morning, the car was gone, and a new one would show up in front of the drugstore. She had gone on a walk around the block one night. Nobody was sitting in the car. She had the feeling they were still around, but she didn’t know where.

  “That’s why you’re taking your long cab ride to the bar here, Irit,” said Lugar. “I’ve watched enough spy movies to figure they’ll put one guy on you on foot, and one in the car. If we’re lucky … well, let’s see.”

  Irit went back to her shop. At ten minutes to six, Lugar and Slaight walked up Madison. Buck hopped in the rental car, drove around the corner, and pulled into a standing zone a block away from the drugstore.

  AT 6:05, Irit backed out of her shop, locking the door and the electronic burglar alarm. She walked briskly up Madison Avenue. A man in a charcoal London Fog raincoat followed, a half block behind her on the opposite side of the street. Two blocks ahead, John Lugar waited at the corner of Eighty-fifth Street, an unlit cigarette in his hand. Slaight stayed back at Eighty-first and Madison, just inside the entryway to an antique store, his eyes riveted on Irit, moving now two, now three blocks away across the street and up Madison.

  She reached the corner of Eighty-fifth Street. Stopped. Moved a half block up the street into a bus stop zone and waited. The man in the charcoal London Fog reached the corner of Eighty-fifth Street, and did some disinterested window-shopping. Irit spied a cab. She raised her hand.

  Slaight signaled Leroy Buck. He pulled out from the curb, heading up Madison, passing the Chevy just as it was starting its engine. Irit’s cab arrived. She opened the door. The man in the charcoal London Fog stepped to the curb. John Lugar made his move.

  “Hey, mister, can I bother you for a light?” he said, dangling his unlit cigarette in front of the guy’s face. Lugar stood between the man and the curb, blocking his way. The man fumbled in his pockets for matches. Irit climbed in her cab, shut the door, and signaled the driver to take off. He did.