Code of Blood

by George C. Chesbro

  “And you, Tony, How are the legs?”

  “They hurt like hell in weather like this, but just the sight of you makes them feel better. It’s been a long time, my friend. Too long.”

  “Agreed.”

  “You want a drink?”

  “You still have my bottle?”

  “Of course I still have your bottle. It’s been sitting there gathering dust since the last time you were in the city.”

  “It only improves with age.”

  Tony Black limped across the room, closed the office door, and pulled a shade down over the window. Then he went to a large filing cabinet, opened the bottom drawer, and took out a bottle of Scotch and one of fine, imported saki. He removed a tiny china cup from a plastic bag, filled it with saki. Holding the cup by its rim with his fingertips, he passed the flame of a cigarette lighter four times across its bottom before handing it to Chant, who accepted the cup with a slight bow from the waist. Black poured himself a small tumbler of Scotch, lifted his glass to Chant, sipped. Then he went back to his chair, leaned back, and studied his friend.

  John Sinclair had often remarked that ceremony could enhance the pleasure of many things, yet Black was still struck by many of the small things his friend did, such as the ritual he went through in consuming the tiny amount of saki in his cup. The ex-convict knew that Chant would take as much as fifteen minutes to drink the saki, and during this time he would not wish to speak. Sitting straight in his chair with both feet on the floor, Chant would take tiny sips of the rice wine as he stared straight ahead, his eyes slightly out of focus. The expression on his face would be distant, as though the smell and taste of the saki were evoking memories of … Tony Black did not know what.

  And then his own memories began to flow.

  Black recalled how he had met John Sinclair many years before, at a boot camp in Georgia, where they had become friends; yet now, when he thought about it, he was amazed at how little—virtually nothing—he knew of the other man’s life before it had intersected with his own Indeed, it had not even occurred to him until many years later—when there were no longer bullets flying through the air, and he had only the demons in his mind to contend with, and he had lots of time to reflect in his prison cell—that John Sinclair had never spoken of his background, where he had been or what he had done, before joining the Army at the age of twenty-three.

  Black had always assumed that Chant had been born and raised in the United States, now, as he watched the man go through his ritual of drinking saki, he questioned this assumption. Not that it made any difference. The mystery surrounding John Sinclair did not bother Black now any more than it had when they were together in Southeast Asia The only thing that had mattered there was whether or not a man could be trusted and could fight John Sinclair had always been trusted by everyone whose opinion was worth anything. And he was the best fighter—with any weapon, from antitank gun to his bare hands and feet—Black had ever seen, before or since. Upon entering the Army, John Sinclair had already been a consummate master of the martial arts, and no one, at least not to Tony Black’s knowledge, had ever learned how or where the twenty-three-year-old had acquired his skills.

  Memories of fighting … of awesome technique pitted against monstrous brutality; the epic duel between the young John Sinclair and the maniacal Tommy Wing, the man they called Hammerhead, a fight which had landed both men in an Army hospital for weeks. Black considered Tommy Wing, a man apparently impervious to pain, to be the most dangerous and terrifying man he had ever met—but he knew there were many who would think and say the same of the man sitting across from him, savoring a tiny cup of saki.

  Memories.

  They had trained together, fought together, been promoted together—at least for a time. Senior officers began to take notice of, and reward, John Sinclair’s fighting and leadership skills, and there were many who predicted a long and illustrious military career for the young man with the iron-colored eyes and hair, with his eventually becoming the youngest general in U S. Army history. They had even been recruited by the CIA at about the same time, and had become Company operatives in addition to their Army duties.

  Then their careers had gone in different directions. Chant had been assigned to the CIA’s secret war in Laos, his mission to equip, train, and fight with the Hmong villagers against the Pathet Lao. Almost two and a half years had gone by, and then the stones had begun trickling back of the fierce American who had become a legend to the Hmong, and was the Pathet Lao’s most feared enemy, a man upon whose head they had placed a great price.

  And then had come the devastating rumors of Chant’s desertion The rumors hinted of something terrible that had happened, a dark event that had involved Chant—but no more. Then even the rumors had stopped when a tight lid of secrecy had been clamped down and the men had been forbidden ever to speak of John Sinclair and the story that he had killed six American servicemen in the process of deserting.

  Memories and loss of them.

  Eventually, Black had forgotten John Sinclair. Black had survived combat in Vietnam, then returned to a society that suddenly seemed alien to him. Emotionally scarred like so many Vietnam veterans, he couldn’t seem to keep a job, couldn’t function with nightmare memories which even vast amounts of liquor didn’t wash away. Eventually he’d turned to crime. Caught and convicted of armed robbery, he had served eleven years in prison before gaming an early release on parole as a model prisoner.

  With the help of the Fortune Society, he had found a job and rebuilt his life. When he had been elected President, he had been told by his predecessor that a considerable part of the society’s operating budget came from an anonymous donor living somewhere in Europe.

  The donor had turned out to be John Sinclair, who had decided to make himself known to an astonished Tony Black. Their friendship had blossomed anew, and since then Black had learned that John Sinclair represented many things to many people: he was either an unspeakably brutal vigilante and terrorist, or a man of unmatched courage and kindness who carried on a global war for justice as a kind of one-man mercenary army. The most amusing—and, Black had often mused, possibly accurate—description of John Sinclair the ex-convict had ever heard had come from an FBI agent who’d called him a “badass Robin Hood who steals from the rich and gives to the poor—after taking a big cut for himself.”

  For Tony Black, it was enough that John Sinclair was simply his friend.

  “Thank you,” Chant said, leaning forward and placing the empty china cup on Black’s desk. “I enjoyed that very much.”

  “Another one?”

  Chant shook his head. “One is enough.”

  “Are you here for the holidays?” Black asked carefully, not wishing to seem to pry.

  “Perhaps,” Chant replied. “Actually, I was in Florida recently for quite a while.”

  “Business?”

  “Paying a visit to some crooked nursing-home operators.”

  Tony Black smiled. “Sounds like small potatoes for the infamous international criminal and extortionist, John Sinclair.”

  “It wasn’t small potatoes for the old people who were trapped in the home.”

  “I’m sorry, Chant,” Black said quietly. “I was trying to be funny, and I made a bad joke. I didn’t mean to be insensitive.”

  “I know that,” Chant said easily. “By the way, you’ll be interested to know that Alistair played a key role in putting those guys out of business.”

  “Alistair!” Black cried, grinning “How the hell is that feisty old bastard?”

  “Still feisty, for sure,” Chant replied with a wry smile “Alistair’s a good man, Tony.”

  “How much does he know by now about the man he’s working for?”

  Chant shrugged. “He knows enough to know not to talk about what he knows.”

  Black splashed some more Scotch into his tumbler, but did not drink. “Speaking of criminals,” he said in a soft, serious tone as he stared down into the amber-colored liquid, “I h
eard a rumor a couple of months ago that the state had let Hammerhead out of whatever hospital for the criminally insane they’d been keeping him in.” Black paused, looked up at Chant, and shook his head in disgust “Can you imagine letting that fucking cannibal loose on the streets? I mean, there were a lot of ‘fragging’ incidents in that war, potheads throwing a fragmentation grenade into the tent of a CO he didn’t like; but that fucking Tommy Wing literally chewed his CO to death.”

  Chant felt the puckered scars on his belly, thighs, and arms slowly begin to throb, burning with a kind of cold fire “Tommy Wing is here in New York?”

  Black lifted the tumbler and drained it off, set it back down on the desk. “I don’t know if he’s here now—in fact, I don’t know for sure that he was ever here. One of the guys who was with us in ’Nam said he saw him coming out of Bloomingdale’s, of all places. That was some time ago, maybe a year or more. The guy could have been mistaken.”

  “Tommy Wing would be hard to mistake for anyone else,” Chant said in a low, flat voice.

  “That’s for sure. Anyway, he’s damn well never come in here, even though he’d be eligible for membership.”

  “Why? He was in a mental hospital, not prison.”

  “He was behind bars, which is just about the only criterion we use. Which is not to say that I’d be here if he were; there’s no way I’d share membership in any organization with Tommy Wing.”

  Chant smiled thinly, without humor. “Maybe he’s all better now.”

  “Sure he is,” Black said with a sharp laugh. “It’s more likely the hospital got overcrowded, or he started to spook the shrinks. Shit, I’ll never forget that fight between you two. You’re the only man who ever defeated Hammerhead.”

  “I didn’t defeat him, Tony. It was a standoff.”

  “Fighting Hammerhead to a standoff was the same as defeating him. Before you came along, and before the Army threw him in the stockade after he bit out that major’s throat, he’d used those big buck teeth of his to cripple a half dozen men. From the stockade he went straight to Matteawan, and I really can’t understand why they’d let him out.” Black paused, shrugged. “So much for the walk down memory lane. Chant, will you have dinner with me?”

  “I counted on it. But first, there’s something you can do for me.”

  “Name it.”

  “Two days ago, a friend of mine was shot and killed.”

  “I’m sorry, Chant.”

  Chant nodded. “He was gunned down on a street in Rome by an American ex-convict.”

  “The Italian magistrate?”

  “Yes. His name was Vito Biaggi.”

  “I read about it in the papers. He sounded like a good man, Chant.”

  “He was His killer’s name was Tyrone Good. Alistair said he knew him in prison, and that Good had also been a member of the Fortune Society here in New York. It would have been a few years ago I thought you might remember him.”

  Black thought about it, shook his head “If Alistair says Good was a member, then he was a member. The name just doesn’t ring a bell. He may not have been that active, or I simply may have not run into him. We have a lot of members.”

  “I’m sorry to hear you didn’t know him I was hoping you might be able to tell me something about him.”

  “The papers said he was just a crazy doing a crazy thing You think there may be more to it?”

  “I don’t know, Tony.”

  Black turned in his chair and glanced at the file cabinet across the room “We don’t really keep records, as such, on our members,” he said tentatively “It’s not what we’re about. But we do keep a card file for purposes of employment—which kinds of jobs have worked out for certain kinds of people, good sources of employment, that kind of thing. I can rummage around, if you’d like, see if there’s anything in there on Tyrone Good.”

  “I’d appreciate it. While you’re at it, I’d also like to know if you have any information on a man named Axle Trent.”

  “Another one of us?”

  “I don’t know He’s another American ex-convict who shot down a prominent diplomat in Switzerland a few months ago Like Good, he didn’t seem to have any motive for what he did, no passport that anyone could find, and no reason for being in Europe.”

  Black rose, walked across the room, opened the top drawer of the file cabinet, and began searching through it. Five minutes later, he apparently found what he was looking for. He grunted, slowly walked back to his desk carrying two sets of papers loosely held together with paper clips.

  “Trent was a member, too,” Black said as he sat back down in his chair Behind the thick lenses of his glasses, his eyes glowed with obvious interest. “He’s another one I never met.”

  “I’d like to know what, if anything, the two men might have had in common. Anything at all.”

  Black nodded, began leafing through both sets of papers. “You’re welcome to look at these,” he said absently, “but the guy who wrote these up has worse handwriting than mine, and I can probably read it a lot better than you can.”

  “You go ahead As I said, what I’m looking for is a common link, if there is any.”

  Black continued to pore over the papers, alternating his attention between one set and the other. After a few minutes he looked up and shook his head. “About the only thing I can find here that they had in common was that they were both bad news—real losers. They were both longtimers, but one was in San Quentin—that would be the one Alistair knew—and the other in Folsom. They got out about a year apart, came here to New York. One had been in for murder two, and the other on seven counts of rape. Neither one was here for very long, and the society obviously couldn’t do much for either one.”

  “Could they have known each other?”

  “Extremely unlikely that they even met. As I said, they got out roughly a year apart, came to New York, and left—or at least dropped out of active membership in the society—after a short time. There’s no indication that either ever landed a job, and judging from what’s in these records we wouldn’t have recommended either one to any of our good employers. Both of them picked up a little cash by agreeing to participate in a research project, and there’s nothing on them after that.”

  “What about the research project, Tony? That sounds like a common link.”

  Black pushed aside the papers “A totally predictable one. Show me a long-term ex-convict living in the city, and I’ll show you a man who’s probably picked up a couple of bucks over at Blake College, which is a small school in Brooklyn. The psychology department at Blake has been running an ongoing project for years, using ex-convicts as test subjects.”

  “What’s the purpose of the research?”

  “As I understand it, they want to compare the overall physical health of long-term ex-convicts with the normal population outside The project’s funded by a bunch of insurance companies I haven’t got the slightest idea what they want to find out, but it’s a good deal for a lot of our people—gives them a chance to pick up a little extra cash.”

  “Did you participate in it, Tony?”

  The President of the Fortune Society shook his head “Not eligible. When they say they want long-termers, they mean serious long-termers fifteen years or longer I didn’t make the grade.”

  “That’s the only qualification for participation?”

  “The way I understand it, that’s it By now, there must be hundreds of men who’ve taken part in it. Long-termers are referred by friends, social workers, psychiatrists, whoever.”

  “Blake College takes all comers?”

  “You’ve got the picture, all comers who’ve been incarcerated fifteen years or longer.”

  “You didn’t know Good or Trent. Are there any people you do know who’ve been in the program?”

  “Sure Alistair, for one.”

  “Besides Alistair.”

  Black cocked his head to one side, drummed his fingertips on the desktop “Offhand, I can think of six,” he said at last.


  “Alistair works for me. Good and Trent ended up killing people in Europe What’s happened to the six men you know?”

  “Well, let’s see … two are still working steady jobs they’ve had for some time Another got laid off last month and is collecting unemployment. If you want to talk to them, I can arrange it.”

  “Maybe I will I’ll let you know You said you knew six men who’d been in the program. What happened to the other three?”

  “One died in a drowning accident two summers ago. I lost touch with the other two They dropped out of sight, probably left the city. One, a guy by the name of Ron Press, ended up somewhere in Texas. I happen to know his girlfriend, and she got a letter from him last summer apologizing for leaving in such a hurry and without saying good-bye. From what this woman told me, his letter made it sound like he was in pretty good shape—said he had a job in a Pharmaceuticals plant. I never heard anything from him, which doesn’t surprise me. We were never what you would call friends, and I never much cared for him; I found him more than a little paranoid, with a hair-trigger temper. Still, if he did finally latch on to a job he can hold, I’m happy for him.”

  Chant was silent for some time, staring out the window at the streets of Manhattan ablaze with Christmas lights and decorations.

  “Chant? You need to know anything else?”

  Chant turned his attention from the window, smiled at the other man. “Not now, Tony. Thanks. Why don’t you pick us out a good restaurant?’

  Black grunted. He was silent for some time, an odd expression on his face, as he studied the half of his friend’s face that was not now hidden in shadow in the poorly lighted office.

  “God,” he said at last in a very low voice, “they must have laid something really heavy on you.”

  “Who, Tony? What are you talking about?”

  “Sorry,” Black said, abruptly lowering his gaze. “It’s none of my damn business. The talk about Hammerhead triggered memories. I remembered the way things were back in ’Nam, and then hearing about the incredible job you were doing fighting with the Hmong up in Laos. Everyone said you were going to be sitting with the Joint Chiefs one day. Then, the next thing we hear is that you’d deserted. Chant, I hit the first man who said that to me, knocked out a couple of his teeth, and almost got myself court-martialed. I said there was no way John Sinclair would have deserted, unless … I don’t know. I’m saying you must have had one hell of a good reason.”