The mainland?
“Los Angeles,” Lett said.
Selfer shook his head.
“San Francisco.”
Selfer yanked his finger away as if he’d burned it, still glaring at Lett.
There it was. San Francisco.
Lett felt the same burn in the tips of all his fingers, then it was shooting through him as a shudder. If Selfer was confiding in him like this, Selfer must truly be worried.
“Now, the why?” Lett added.
“Why?” Selfer rushed over to Lett. “All right, fine. It’s an important meeting,” he hissed. “A secret meeting.”
“So. A mission to the mainland, to San Francisco. An important meeting. Security and surveillance. All right. Now, who?”
At first, Selfer didn’t answer. He stared into Lett. He stared back at the map. Eventually he spoke, slowly, deliberately. “Listen. If I could call Lansdale back in here to answer your questions, I would—or to address my questions, for that matter . . .”
Then Selfer lurched, took a step back. His heel knocked at the plywood.
Lett had never seen Selfer taken aback. He looked as if molten solder and melting ice were surging through his veins at once, a horrid paradox of a surge. Lett thought the man might be sick. Selfer pressed his hands and back to the plywood.
“What? What is it?” Lett said.
Selfer looked down, as if to locate his feet there, like Lett had seen Joes do up on the line who had body parts blown off and searched the ground for them, picking them up before falling over dead. Selfer’s feet stepped and they moved him, but gently, mechanically; he picked up the paper on the floor, rolled it up, set it inside his briefcase; he pulled the chalkboard back across the map; he stood at the table and slung his briefcase.
“I’m leaving now,” he said. “You better, uh, return to your billet and wait for any . . . instructions.” From the doorway, Selfer stared at him one last moment. “Good Lord,” he muttered.
27.
As Lett watched Selfer back out of the briefing room, he saw a man so very different from the intelligence staff captain leading a certain premission briefing well rear of the front lines in a lush Belgian villa in ’44—the charmer in a pressed tunic who worked the room like a politician mingling with donors, shaking hands, smiling, offering cigarettes, thoroughly unruffled by the naked terror on the faces of these GIs he’d called up for his special mission.
What made Selfer freeze up like that, made him back out of that briefing room like . . . well, there wasn’t any other word for it—like he’d seen a ghost? Had he just realized something about the mission now at hand? Or had he realized something worse, something deep and dark? Maybe he sensed that horror that Lett always had, that was now returning full force—that incessant dread he had understood even when V-E Day and the so-called peace came. V-E Day was just a fine party for the rear and the home front. “For the duration” was finally over, they’d thought. But there was no duration. This was beyond death. This was eternity. The iron boot would grind them down eternally. The wearer might change, but he always had an aching and unquenchable lust for power and riches and they were the fodder and the fertilizer. He didn’t need an official war, or medals or even insignia on his chest, and he certainly didn’t need official orders. In secret was far better. Peacetime would do just fine. All the wearer needed was the money.
Lett went back to his bungalow, just as Selfer ordered. He kept off his porch. He waited for instructions, as instructed. He hunkered down there with a bottle of Johnnie Walker, but it only made his head spin and his thoughts tumble around again. He tried coffee. That only made his body heat up and sweat and his thoughts collide and ricochet. He paced the bungalow. He looked out windows.
His dead friends appeared, one friend for each window, then it was all of them at every window he approached. There they stood like a group photo of a squad after taking a town. He yanked all the blinds shut, but now they sat on the bed, all piled on there like in the bed of a troop truck. They spoke to him, individually yet all at the same time; a grim chorus.
You need your dose again, Wendell. That’s what you need.
“I already got my dose,” Lett muttered, “he gave it to me.”
You need it again. You need to see Lansdale. He’s the key. His dose is the key, Tom Godfrey told him.
Then his kindred spirit appeared. Holger Frings. Lett had met the German deserter when he himself deserted, deep in the dark Ardennes. Frings had vowed to help Lett return to Heloise, whom he’d met on leave in Belgium. But American MPs spotted them—they fled but not before the MPs fired. Lett got a bullet in the back. Frings saved Lett’s life, and he then vanished. Lett had always held out hope Frings was still alive. But Frings was dead. Because only the dead spoke to him.
You must listen to them, Frings said in German. Listen to your good old friends.
Lett kicked at the bed. But he had to listen. He’d named his son after Holger and Tom.
Go find Lansdale, they told him. Go demand your dose.
“No!”
Trust us. Because the dose, it’s not what you think it is. Not even close.
Lett kept kicking, stomping. His friends left the bed. It was empty. He’d kicked it so hard the mattress hung off it. It was just him now.
I’ll take the damn thing myself. He found his musette bag with his dose. He pulled out the vial, but he fumbled it in his sweating fingers and the already loose rubber stopper popped off. Some of the clear liquid dripped onto the crook of his thumb and forefinger. He stared at the clear drops. He’d expected it to sting, turn color, something. He smelled the vial. He tried again, breathing deep. Nothing. He smelled his skin. Still nothing. He was tempted to lick it but recoiled instead. “What the hell?” he muttered, glaring around the room as if anyone else were there.
He kicked at the bed again. He pulled on his shoes and shot out the front door.
***
Lansdale never stayed at the Main House—he had his own bungalow just beyond the infirmary, but it wasn’t visible from there owing to a strategically placed high picket fence. It wasn’t any nicer than the other bungalows, but it had its own clearing with a hammock and a little lawn Lansdale used to putt golf balls.
Lett had always believed what his good old friends told him, because the dead knew truth. But he had to see for himself, feel for himself.
Dusk had passed and the clearing was submerged in darkness. The open front door was a rectangle of light. Lett kept moving, past the fence and into the clearing and up the steps. He hit the screen door, kept going right through its feeble pine frame.
Lansdale was sitting in a rattan easy chair with his bare feet up on a matching ottoman. He wore short white pajama bottoms and a white tank top. His skin was nearly as white, his shoulders bony.
Lett stood in the middle of the room, catching his breath, his shirt unbuttoned and hanging out on one side, trousers stained and wrinkled, hair a greasy yarn mop.
Lansdale eyed him. “What are you doing here?” he said.
“Inject me,” Lett said, “give me another dose.”
Lansdale showed Lett his sneer of a grin. He snatched a robe from the neighboring coat rack and wrapped that around him. “What makes you think I should? You coming here like this.”
“Just give me the dose,” Lett repeated. “And I’ll be on my merry goddamn way.”
The sneer stuck to one side of Lansdale’s face. He eyed his telephone, on a side table by the doorway to the kitchen, just steps away.
Lett stood between Lansdale and the phone. Lansdale’s eyes darted. Lett stepped toward him. Lansdale tightened the belt of his robe.
“You have no idea what you’re doing to yourself,” Lansdale growled, leaning in close, and Lett smelled the stench of stale cigar ash.
“Give me the dose,” he said.
Lansdale’s eyes twinkled. “Yes! Right, all right. Let’s do that.” He stepped around the room until he found his bag. He pulled out a syringe ready to go,
and he held it up.
“You first,” Lett said.
“What?” Lansdale laughed.
Lett came at him and Lansdale stabbed at him with the syringe. Lett was faster. He ducked and propelled Lansdale against the wall, Lansdale’s head knocking against it. It stunned him. His eyes rolled around. He let the syringe drop into Lett’s hand.
“Open your mouth,” Lett said.
Lansdale laughed again, this time loud and resounding, releasing more tobacco stench. “Open your own!” he chirped. “Go on. Have at it.”
Lett just stood there. “Don’t you think I’ve had enough already?”
Lansdale bared slimy yellow teeth at Lett. He snatched the syringe from Lett’s hand and squirted half the liquid into his own mouth. He glared at Lett, wiping at his mustache.
Lett waited a moment. Nothing happened. Lansdale just smiled away.
Lett grabbed the syringe. He squirted into his own mouth.
The clear solution tasted of nothing. “It tastes like water,” he muttered.
“That’s because it is water,” Lansdale sang. “Sterile water! That’s all it ever was.”
“A placebo.”
“The very same. You got duped, friend. Good and duped by the dose.”
“There’s no medicine involved,” Lett stammered, “no real science at all.” The blood drained from his face. He backed up. “That means . . .”
Lansdale came at him. “That there is no cure. There is no cure!”
“But, it was the only part I thought was working. The only one.” Lett felt so cold suddenly. He had so wanted it to work, and Lansdale, that relentless psychological trickster, he had always seen that in him. Lett backed up a step, then another.
Lansdale raised his chin in pride. “It was just another angle, see, to get funded. All part of the pitch.”
“The pitch?”
“To prove our value. Show how we’re different. Didn’t you know? I’m a former ad man—”
“Con man, you mean.” Lett’s arms lowered. His feet shuffled, his legs so heavy.
Lansdale grinned. “However you like it.” He pushed at Lett’s chest, sliding him back to the door. “Now you get the hell out of my house. Get some sleep. If you’re lucky? Maybe I’ll forget this ever happened.”
“But, why?”
“Why you? GI, you sure got a numb skull. Isn’t it painfully obvious?” Lansdale snarled. “It’s because you wanted it. You wanted it bad. Bad enough to prove yourself.”
28.
Lett rushed across the compound. He’d buttoned up and tucked in his shirt and pushed back his hair to approximate a fellow on an evening stroll. Except he was walking too fast. Except his thoughts and fears rode heavy on his back like a pack full of river stones and his old friends would not return to help him, guide him, save him. He wanted to ask them:
Why am I the only one left? Like this. Why me?
He headed down a forest path. At this hour, no one was around. He thought he kept hearing a guard coming his way, and halted to listen, but then he realized it was just the underbrush making that crazed whisper it always did. Any sentries would be farther out along the perimeter, where a fence stood and then nothing but lava fields for miles inland. He found the wide main trail, out in the open. A breeze picked up. The few lights in camp filtered through curled fronds and contorted branches to create fantastical shadows that swooped and barbed yet showed the way to him.
He found the boogie house bungalow but it was all dark, locked up. The Main House had lights on inside. Lett rushed through the trees and up the driveway and hugged the front door to stay in shadow on the porch. All clear. He gently knocked on the door with his knuckles, so as not to alert any possible sentry. He stopped, placed his ear to the door and listened, the sweat making his ear a suction cup.
The door pulled away from his ear with the slightest wet smack.
Kanani stood before him. She wore a robe too big for her. Her hair was up. She hadn’t turned a light on. “He’s not here,” she said from the dimness.
“I’m not looking for Selfer.” Lett stepped inside, pulling the door shut. “Is it safe?”
“I’m the only one here. They laid off old Yoshiko, she went home—”
“There is no cure,” Lett blurted.
“What?”
“My dose. It’s bogus. It’s all a sham. Lansdale . . .”
Kanani’s eyes widened. She pulled him into the sunken living room area without turning on a light. She sat him down and sat facing him.
He told her about confronting Lansdale.
“You what?” She pulled back. “Oh, no . . .”
She moved to punch him in the arm but he snatched her wrist.
“My treatment, it makes me even worse than I was,” he told her. “Corrupts me all the way. Early on, ‘Doctor’ Lansdale told me treatment has three stages: talk, medication, training. He said treatment involves the full confrontation of what’s troubling a guy. First, I talk it out, then I get a ‘revolutionary’ new medication, then I ‘replace’ my toughest issues with new assignments that rebuild my ability to cope, all by reinforcing my latest actions. Lansdale claimed I would own my trouble this way and thereby destroy it. ‘Rebuild,’ he called it. The mission makes the man—”
“You’re hurting me.”
Lett was squeezing her wrist. He kept squeezing. “Treatment turns me into a man who doesn’t feel the combat fatigue, the terrors. That makes me a psychopath. A guy who likes it. And who doesn’t need his dose after that. But I was fighting it. I kept needing my dose. Even though it was a placebo. See? I was fighting it inside and didn’t even know it at first.”
“Let go.”
Lett released her. “The end stage of the cure—it’s killing. The cure is the cause.”
Kanani, rubbing her wrist, stared above his head, into darkness. Thinking.
“Finally using a gun? That’s the clincher,” he added.
“Your next mission,” she said.
“Who’s at this important meeting?” Kanani said.
“I don’t know. Has Selfer told you anything? Confided in you?”
“No, not like that,” Kanani muttered. She wiped at her face, pushing the last of her sleep off it. “He just said things are changing and changing fast.”
“Frankie. You seen him here again? Anywhere?”
“Not yet. Just that once coming out of that tunnel. But I can feel him.”
Kanani rocked in place, hugging herself, still thinking. He let her think.
“Selfer did say there are new bosses, big kahunas, more secret,” she said eventually. “Sounds to me like some kine transaction happened.”
A transaction. That made Lett think of Lansdale’s big haul in the Cagayan Valley, visited by MacArthur, like an inspection. A new arrangement. Old deals nullified.
He remembered what Miss Mae had told him. She knew things. She’d learned they planned to assassinate someone so important she could not say his name. Then? Big confusion. They use the chaos. The people feel weak. They take over.
His chest ran hot, a bed of coals, his heart the fire.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Miss Mae,” he blurted. “I saw her.”
Kanani’s face lit up in a smile, but he doused it fast enough. He told her about his mission to Honolulu. He even told her what he had done. “I think she ended up knowing too much for her own good,” he said.
“You’re an angel,” Kanani said. Her eyes welled up, and she touched at one with her index finger to keep the tears in. “I owe you even more, Wendell Lett. You always help me.”
“You want to repay it? Save yourself. Drop this gold hunt. Get Selfer to transfer you somehow, if he even can. Or just run. You’re playing with fire.”
“Haven’t you heard? We’re surrounded by live volcanoes,” she muttered. “Madame Pele.”
“Who?”
“Hawaiian fire goddess. No mess with Pele. She mess with you.”
He shook her, gently. �
�Listen to me. If they find out? They’re gonna do to you what they were gonna inflict on Miss Mae—and she thought she had a deal.”
Her face hardened, and she raised her chin. “Frankie must’ve cut a better deal,” she said. “More money.” But her voice creaked. Her chin gave in. The tears pushed out and rolled down her face, bright lines in the dim light.
Lett brushed her hair with his fingers. He set an imaginary red plumeria behind an ear. She chuckled through sniffles.
Lett said, “I tell you one thing, right here and now: I will not complete the treatment.”
“What does that mean? Speak English.”
“I won’t do their dirty work for them. Get blood on my hands when it’s really on theirs. I will never use violence again. Ever. I will never fire their weapons. I vowed that to Heloise a long time ago. I owe it to Holger Thomas.” And to all of them, to all his friends who had helped him. To her, the little German girl. If he only knew her name, he thought, and now the tears welled around his eyeballs, heating them up, too.
“Oh. Now you are really talking lolo,” Kanani said.
“Call me crazy. I don’t care.”
“Don’t do anything stupid. Not till I can catch up. What about Jock Quinn?”
“Unknown quantity. He’s conflicted. He wants to believe in something. I don’t want to make him choose—it might just break him. Besides, there’s no time. I probably ruined my chance already by confronting Lansdale like that.”
“But, what if you haven’t? What if the mission really is just for security, surveillance? Like they tell you.”
“It’s not. I can feel it. A dogface, he knows . . .”
Kanani closed her eyes, and the room seemed to darken even more. When she opened them again, her tears were gone. “They will do whatever they want to you. Take it from one islander. Cause you don’t have the mojo. They have all the mojo and they’re gonna keep it every time.”
“Mojo funded by gold,” Lett said. “Gold that you want.”
“How else I gonna make my own way. Eh? They only gave me one assignment—get that Kodama to talk nice. That was it. There’s no moving up here.”
“That’s what they do. They zero in on what makes a person tick. Exploit it. Bang.”
The Preserve Page 22
