Middle Man

by David Rich

  When he got about ten yards away I said, “Truth is, I’m waiting for Ethan Williams.”

  His head slowly tilted and his eyes got squinty as if I had asked him to complete a tough math equation. A car was coming up from behind me. The guard considered hustling back to his post. Instead, he put up his hand to stop the car. It slowed down and stopped next to him and he leaned down. I could only hear his end:

  “Hey, Bill. You got anything I need to know about . . . ? When you coming back . . . ? It’s fine. No problems . . .” Bill drove across the invisible border and the guard returned to me.

  “Who’d you say?”

  “Ethan Williams.”

  “You a relation of his?”

  “No.”

  “Well, if you’re waiting for Ethan, you better be patient. That boy died in Iraq years ago.”

  “You knew him?”

  “I know about everybody here. Except you.”

  ______

  It took a day and a half to get to Chicago. Only Dan interrupted my guilty silence.

  “This isn’t on you. You didn’t cause this.”

  “Man down, a good man. Another man wounded.”

  “It might have been worse if they hadn’t been there.”

  “How?”

  “Did I ever tell you the story about the time I fell in love? Beautiful woman, lived up in San Francisco.”

  “Before I was born?”

  “I think you were staying with someone in Arizona and I didn’t want to interrupt your life. It wouldn’t have been fair to drag you away.” Fair to him, he meant. “A beauty she was, and rich, too. Her father was a financial wizard on the East Coast. She ran an art gallery. The walls lined with paintings I couldn’t look at and the floor filled with rich friends I couldn’t take my eyes off of. All of them eager to spend their money. For me, it was like being the house at a craps game; I could make a deal every time I blinked my eyes. The biggest problem was keeping track of them all. Sometimes I would hide from people trying to give me checks, which you know made them increase the size of those checks. She was perfect; I don’t think she cared what deals I made. And then, suddenly, she broke it off. Not only did the checks stop coming in, everybody wanted their money back. I was devastated. At least I convinced myself of that, at first. Played the part. Of course that helped me with all the investors who suddenly needed their money back. I was too distracted to bother about such small matters. But I must have bought into my show of distress because they seemed to believe me.”

  “How long did that last?”

  “Couple of weeks. But I could never believe anyone’s tears, not even my own. I felt lousy, but it wasn’t about the woman. I felt lousy because I didn’t feel lousy about the woman. I was relieved it was over. Love was a burden I did not like to bear. That was not easy to face. But once I admitted that I disliked being in love, I was elated and left town immediately with all the money.”

  “Who did she catch you with?”

  “She didn’t catch me with anyone. Her sister confessed. Unsolicited. More of a boast than a confession.”

  “Your story does not help me. There’s no correlation with my situation. A woman caught you cheating; a sniper killed two men and wounded another on my watch. Not the same thing.”

  Even in death, Dan did not argue or explain, though I would have welcomed either. “Okay,” he said.

  I knew what I had to do and did not want any orders getting in my way, so I ignored Major Hensel’s calls, but I left the battery in the phone. When he knew where I was, he would know what I was doing. Dan’s story was like a thorn in my shoe: The irritation lingered. I had to let go of the idea of Dan dispensing wisdom. Dan did not dispense, not anything of value. Dan led you toward the truth and stood there watching you find ways to ignore it, twist it, disguise it. That was his thrill in life. As a shadow he was the same, only more so, though I suspected the thrill was gone.

  The humiliating possibilities outlined in Dan’s story slouched in front of me like criminal candidates in a police lineup: relief, excitement, delight, elation. Whichever I chose incriminated me. But even if I put aside the guilt and ache of losing my man, I could not place any one of those snickering partners with me at the scene. I longed for change, longed to be released from the drudgery of interviews and paperwork. But longing for change does not cause change.

  The plane felt like a cage. Behind me, a young boy started to cry in a throbbing rhythm that matched the drone of the engines. The woman in the aisle seat woke herself with a snoring snort. She wiped drool from the side of her mouth and looked past me at the dull black outside the window. She closed her eyes again and her head tilted back sharply, as if she had been hit. Below, a cluster of lights looked like the marking of a drop zone. The exit row was just three in front of me.

  All I had to do was admit that I was relieved and I would not mind whatever condemnation came along with it. I would be free. That temptation, posing as my shadowed reflection, winked at me in the window, tempted me to open it up. But I did not want to follow Dan’s lead. I never did. Love was a burden he did not want to bear, as was the truth. Dan was a ghost and had been a ghost for many years before he died. I was not ready to become a ghost. I was not ready to open the window and get sucked out.

  I was released, not relieved. Released from the routine and administration that my first job with SHADE had devolved into. Released from the lies and paperwork and permits required to retrieve the dead. The bundled emotions were easier to carry than any single one of them would have been. I could open the bundle and inhale the vile mixture whenever I got too sure of myself.

  The list of graves was wrong. I was certain we had followed the right path to obtain it, but the list was wrong, and hoping the next graves would have millions inside them would mark me as an arrogant, ignorant mark. I closed my eyes and rewalked the steps that led to the list, trying to understand where I went wrong.

  3

  Major Hensel had sent Will Panos along with me to Iraq: to spy on me, I thought. But Sergeant Panos proved to be the perfect partner, documenting the search and quoting regulations no one ever heard of, with enough gruff authority and self-assurance to inject doubt into the nastiest obstructing bureaucrat. Unfortunately, the men and women we interviewed were the most innocent, pure, untainted sample of humanity on the planet. Colonel McColl was their saint. No one ever saw any money in Iraq, but each one swore to do his or her all to help us.

  McColl served in Baghdad from March 2003 until August 2004. More than one thousand Americans were killed in that time. The problem could not be attacked that way. The grave Dan dug up provided our best lead and most frustrating dead end. Master Sergeant Brian Kenny signed the death certificate. But Brian Kenny died days later. To those who worked with him, it was inconceivable that he was involved in anything criminal. Brian Kenny had signed many forms just like that one before he died. Too many. Will and I sat at computers in a windowless room at Camp Pendleton. I don’t know what Will was looking at. I was looking at lists of the dead as if they were assembly directions written by foreigners.

  “We can’t dig up all of them, Will.”

  He kept staring at his screen and said, “Do you think he was murdered? Brian Kenny, I mean.”

  “One way or another.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “The report said an IED blew up the vehicle. Four men died. How many lived? It’s the difficult way to go about eliminating one guy.”

  “The driver lived. Lamar Davis. Lost his right leg.” Will didn’t have to check his notes to recall the name. “He says he didn’t know Sergeant Kenny except to say hello when he got into the vehicle.” I returned my eyes to the lists on my computer screen, but my mind wandered to Baghdad, trying to picture Sergeant Kenny deciding to go into town. Why? “Maybe if you called him,” said Will.

  “Who?”

  “Lamar
Davis. Maybe he’ll be more talkative with an officer. Maybe he remembered something.”

  I called from my phone, which blocked the ID. Lamar Davis answered the phone, saying, “I told you not to call me at work.”

  A bad start. I explained the reason for the call. He did not want to be called about that, either.

  “Look, here’s everything I know. I drove from the Green Zone to the airport on October fifth, 2003, and dropped off a general and two majors. Four soldiers filled up the vehicle for the ride back. About five kilometers along Route Irish, I saw a car stopped in the right-hand lane and pulled to the left; about five seconds later, there was a blast. That’s all I remember.”

  “You mean October fifteenth,” I said.

  “Screw you. All you guys. You think I don’t remember the day? You changing the truth? October fifth, fourteen hundred hours twenty-one minutes, 2003. That’s all I know. I never said more than hello to Sergeant Kenny or any of the others. And I didn’t overhear anything they might have said to each other. Don’t call me again.”

  Will could hear Davis’s tone and the hang-up. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought it was worth a try. We can still search for every death certificate Sergeant Kenny signed and check who had an open casket and . . . Why are you smiling?”

  “What day did Sergeant Kenny sign the death certificate?”

  “October twelfth.”

  “After he was dead for a week. Check it. Check the date Lamar Davis drove over the IED.” He checked. It was October fifth. “Which means someone else filed that paperwork. And it was probably a master sergeant, right?”

  “Right.”

  And so we found our way to Chicago in February, an exotic treat for me, a desert child, but a torment for Will Panos, a native. Will visited his sister and mother while I went to the Triple A, a bar featuring gooey wings, northwest of the city on a strip of Milwaukee Avenue lined with restaurants. There, at three P.M., I found the owner, Frank Godwin, Army master sergeant, retired, perched, short legs dangling, on a barstool the size of a love seat next to the waitress station, copping feels with his gooey hands and barking greetings to his customers. He wore a Blackhawks sweater that made him look like an Easter egg with a flat top.

  Godwin pushed away his most recently finished basket of wings and we shook hands and I caught a waitress watching for my reaction to that experience. Her name was Nita. Godwin was gregarious at first, pegged me for a salesman, and I let him think that while we talked about the weather and the reputation his place had all across the country.

  “A friend in Arizona told me about it,” I said. On the slight chance that he had heard about who brought down Colonel McColl, I was Mickey Taylor, formerly a Marine warrant officer. His smile disappeared. He sent Nita away and tried to force the smile back. Strangers from the military worried him. I told Frank that Colonel McColl had died and watched his reaction closely. He knew.

  “I didn’t know,” he said. “When?” Godwin looked up at one of the thousands of flat-screen TVs plastering the place. Someone was running and being chased. He asked, “Were you there?”

  “If I were there, the Colonel would be alive.” The bartender brought me a beer and another Diet Coke for his boss. I could see the dark fingerprints of barbecue sauce on the bright red of his sweater.

  We toasted to Colonel McColl, the great man. “A great man, a great soldier. If we had more like him, we’d run the whole damned world. I’d follow that man to hell.” He talked until he could get the tears started.

  Behind the bar, in a glass case, was a display of Third Army patches: a large A in a circle, usually red. That was the only military reference I saw there. When I finished my beer, he said, “Well, thanks for letting me know. How long you in town for?”

  “That depends on you, Sergeant.” I looked around dramatically, then leaned in close to him. “It’s time. We have to know if you’re in.” And I did not back up.

  “Slow down. In what?”

  “The Colonel started the ball rolling. The plan is going forward. Are you with us?”

  “Could you back up a few inches?”

  “The Colonel told me you were solid.” He was boxed in and squirming like a child who wanted to get out of his high chair.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  I stepped back and just stared at him. The bartender watched from the other end of the bar, waiting for Frank’s signal for help. But Frank still thought he could wriggle out of this on his own. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Maybe it’s time for you to go back to Arizona.”

  “The graves, Frank. We have three of them. We need the other three.” I thought he would be more comfortable giving me a partial list, especially if I already had half on my own. Arrest was my worst option. He could play dumb while investigators played with handwriting specialists decoding the death certificates. Besides, I had no authority to arrest him.

  I was certain we had the right guy. Godwin served at the airport in Baghdad; he served under McColl in the first Gulf War; he knew the procedures; he had the means and the motive, which was the desire to do as McColl told him to. Most revealing, though, was the squirrelly aura of fear surrounding his roundness. Godwin knew where the graves were.

  Will Panos had exhausted the possibilities with his relatives. He told them he was leaving town then hid out at the Holiday Inn bar. “How will you break him? And when?” He sounded like a man who was on the run. Chicago made him nervous because it reminded him of his life as a civilian. He wasn’t sure of the rules. Camp Pendleton was home and refuge for him.

  “I’m going to make him realize how scared he is,” I said.

  “I thought you weren’t going to threaten him.”

  “I’m going to make him realize how good it would feel to share the knowledge. Relieve the burden.”

  ______

  The Triple A filled and emptied. Trays of wings crashed. Bouncers tossed young sports fans. Women came in packs and left in pairs with men. Frank balanced on his stool, commanded the floor, as only a master sergeant could. I would have paid him to turn off just one of the TVs so I could stop seeing and hearing the excited propaganda from ESPN for a few minutes while I camped out the next few days at the bar, ignoring the chicken wings, flirting fuzzily with Nita the waitress. She got impatient with me. “Are you married or something?”

  “I’ve got to take care of something first. Then I can concentrate on you.” I was concentrating on making Humpty Dumpty crack.

  “I checked. No one ever heard of you,” said Frank.

  “Did you tell them why I’m here, Frank?” I knew the answer. “Are they coming around to take care of me? No, they’re not. Because you can’t tell anyone why I’m here. If you do, they might decide they want the information from you, or it might mean you intend to steal the money for yourself. Even if you have enough brains not to try it, how long until they come to the conclusion you’ve gotten greedy? Even the Colonel, even the great Colonel McColl couldn’t last once word of the money leaked out. The guy who killed the Colonel isn’t going to stop there, Frank.”

  “Why would he come after me?”

  “A lot of good men have been busted. The Colonel’s people. Someone is talking. Someone is handing them over. Word is getting out. Why am I here? You’re the man with the secrets. At least the Colonel sent me. I wouldn’t want you to have to face the guy who killed him.”

  He pushed the basket of wings away and stared at a TV showing a hockey game. Someone in a Blackhawks jersey that matched Frank’s checked someone hard into the boards from behind. A fight started. The two players threw off their gloves, and each one grabbed the other’s jersey with his left hand and they pounded each other with short rights. The referees circled to make sure no one else interfered. Eventually the fighters fell to the ice, the enemy on top of the Blackhawk. “That guy never wins a damn fight. He’s useless,” Frank said. />
  “What does he lose?”

  Frank turned to me and his mouth fell open and his eyes flashed with the self-indulgent outrage of a sports fan given a nit to pick. He thought I had taken the pressure off. “It’s all about positioning and strategy and . . .”

  “I thought it would be a relief for you to get rid of the secrets, Frank. But play it your way.” I left.

  When I came back the next day, I brought along my suitcase: Frank’s last chance. An older man with white hair, red nose, and yellow fingers was boring Frank on the subject of baseball. I stood a few feet away to let Frank ponder my appearance and it was clear he did not hear a word the old man was saying. I left the suitcase in the middle of the floor and joined them at the bar. Suddenly, Frank was fascinated by every word from the old man’s mouth. The focus was the Cubs.

  “They’re two players away. Two players. The question is which two,” he explained.

  “I heard they’re moving to the American League,” I said. The man jolted upright and his jaw hung open. “I’d like to speak with Frank alone for a moment, please.”

  “What about the Sox?”

  “Let me buy you another, Joe,” said Frank, and he signaled the bartender. “He’s just putting you on. He’s a big joker.”

  “You had me. I never thought of that one. They just need two players . . .” The bartender delivered his beer, but the old guy was talking too much to touch it.

  I stared at Frank and this time he met my eyes and smiled as if he had outmaneuvered me. Frank was not much of a tactician.

  The old man kept talking and I started in, too. “The Colonel financed this place for you, didn’t he, Frank? He was a loyal guy, but he didn’t do that for everyone who worked for him. He couldn’t. You were special and we both know why.”

  “I don’t think it’s the pitching or the defense . . .”