Mark wrapped the blanket around him tighter, and his voice was quieter. ‘Murdered. How? A knifing in a bar? Shot by an irate husband?’
‘No. Shot in the back of the head, in what looks like a burglary attempt. Except...’
‘Except what?’
He decided not to tell everything about Merl, about the list of the names and what Merl had said last month. Mark was looking frightened, and red splotches had appeared on his cheeks.
‘Except it didn’t look like anything had been taken, that’s what,’ Carl said.
Mark said nothing and Carl knew what was wrong. It was one thing to talk grandly about politics and being in opposition to the government and have semi-banned periodicals in your living room. It was quite another to discuss blood and dead bodies. It grew more quiet after a few moments, quiet enough to hear the ticking sound of a clock from the kitchen, an occasionally passing car, and the waves of the ocean, sliding ashore at York Beach. Mark shook his head and looked at his hands, and Carl saw that they were shaking again.
‘A part of me wishes you’d not visited me, Boston Globe,’ he said.
‘And why’s that?’
Mark looked away and said, ‘I’ve been taken in twice by the Zed Forces, and have gone twice to a decon camp, one outside of DC and the other outside Omaha, sentenced for seditious activities. I’ve had two tumors cut out of me and I’ve got half a stomach and one kidney left. What few years I have remaining I want to spend here in York, Carl. I don’t want to go back to a decon camp. I want to stay here. I think you should leave.’
It was like the air in the room had gotten thin and hot, all at the same time. He leaned forward and said, ‘Please, this is important, what happened to Merl—’
‘Of course it’s important, you fool. A man who was once military attaché to President Kennedy’s been found murdered in his home. Doesn’t that tell you anything? You know what they say? That history is written by the victors? But in this case, history was written by the survivors. Those who made it through, including that overbearing general who’s actually governing this sad country. And the Zed Force—those military units who so much enjoy enforcing the martial law declarations. But maybe some of the other survivors from the war, maybe they have a story they want to tell, one that doesn’t mesh with what’s been officially reported. You’re a newspaper man. Has there ever been a book written in this country about the war, a real, serious look at the missile crisis and the blockade and invasion. Has there?’
‘No, there hasn’t.’
‘And why’s that?’
Shame, he thought, we’re still ashamed—he remembered saying that to Sandy a while ago—and he saw Mark’s face and said, ‘Censorship. Reasons of national security.’
A quick nod. ‘Exactly. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. We worship at the altar of national security, guarded by the acolytes of the Zed Force and aided and abetted by our fine British friends. Here’s some advice, Boston Globe. Go back home and drop this one.’
Mark struggled out of his chair and Carl put the teacup down on the coffee table. He followed the old man out to the entrance way. It had gotten darker since he had first arrived, with storm clouds making their way across the water. Mark stopped at the door. ‘Back in ‘62, Caz called me up and said I should come here. This was our family’s summer home. I was still living in Cambridge at the time but Caz said I should stay away from the big cities. He said I should store up some food, and that if things got worse, he’d be here with maybe a friend or two. And, I’m sad to say, that was the last time we talked, and I’m afraid I was quite short with him. Blaming him for being part of a system that was about to cast us into the darkness.’
He paused one last time in the doorway. ‘You know, I wonder if we could have become friends, if it weren’t for the bomb. That damnable bomb.’
~ * ~
Carl was a half hour out of Boston, driving south on 95, when he noticed the brake lights flickering ahead of him. It was dusk and he was now quite hungry. Lunch had been that cup of tea back in York and a half-stale doughnut from a gas station, after fueling up and using his last ration coupons for the week. The hours on the road had made his left leg achy again. As he drove he kept playing and replaying his conversation with Mark Cynewski in his mind, remembering what the man said, especially that one phrase:
History is written by the survivors.
Merl Sawson had been a survivor, but what was his history? Just to end up in a cheap East Boston apartment with his head blown away, not even missed much by his neighbors, who basically ignored him except for sharing an occasional meal or overhearing an occasional howl from a bad dream. What did it mean? And what about that damn list he had passed over?
More brake lights, and then flares in the center of the highway. Figures moved in shadows among the flares, and the lanes of traffic flowed right and left, onto the shoulders. He turned to the left, seeing Army soldiers wearing MP brassards, slowing traffic. Up and down the grassy median strip were Army deuce-and-a-half trucks, two or three armored personnel carriers, and jeeps. Some of the jeeps had .30 caliber machine guns mounted on the rear. There were also a few state police cruisers, their strobe lights giving everything a bluish glare. The cruisers were parked near an area about fifty feet square that was enclosed by barbed wire. A handful of people sat behind the wire, hands on their heads.
Two soldiers approached his car and he rolled down the window. They wore clean fatigues and helmets. One was a sergeant and the other a corporal. Their shoulder patches identified them as the 45th Division, the Yankee Division. The sergeant had a holstered pistol at his side and a clipboard in his hands. The corporal had an M-14 in his hands with a flashlight attachment at the bottom of the barrel. He stood behind and to the side of the sergeant, providing cover.
The sergeant stepped up to him. ‘Evening, sir. Could I see some identification, please?’
Carl knew the drill, and knew how to play it. He reached into his rear pocket, took out his wallet, and removed his Massachusetts driver’s license, his Boston residency card, and his Armed Services identification card. The sergeant’s attitude instantly changed when he saw the green and white military identification.
‘Sorry to stop you, Sergeant Landry. We’re doing a sweep of this county for draft dodgers. Can you tell me where you’re coming from?’
‘York, Maine.’
‘Did you pick up any hitchhikers along the way?’
‘No.’
‘Did you see any hitchhikers in your travels?’
‘No.’
‘And your destination tonight, Sergeant Landry?’
‘Boston, and you can stop calling me sergeant. I’m not active duty; I’m in the inactive reserve.’
The man smiled. ‘Very good, sir.’ He made a notation on his clipboard and handed Carl back his driver’s license, residency card, and military identification. ‘You’re cleared to go.’ And then they left, to check on a semi-trailer truck behind him. Carl glanced in his rearview mirror and noted two other officers talking to an Army lieutenant, near the truck’s cab. They weren’t wearing standard-issue uniforms. When they moved in front of the headlights, Carl noted the difference. One wore a British army uniform, and the other officer looked British as well, except for the flag patch on the shoulder: white and red, with a red maple leaf in the center. Canada.
Carl was surprised at how prickly he suddenly felt. He wanted to yell out the window, Just go home. Just go back to your own country. And he also felt guilty, although it was hard to know why. Because he’d been away from the newspaper today? Because there was a lonely old man dying in Maine and for a brief few seconds he had given the man the false hope that his brother was still alive? Because he felt like he owed something to Merl, and he had gained almost nothing today?
Then the traffic started moving and he inched his way forward. He saw four young men and a woman on the grass in the median strip, behind the temporary fence of barbed wire, illuminated by the lights from the state police
cruisers and a couple of jeeps. They were dressed in jeans and T-shirts and jackets, and the woman was weeping, leaning against a bearded man, both of them with hands on top of their heads.
Guilt. He remembered Southern California and tried to concentrate on his driving.
~ * ~
Back in Boston he grabbed a take-out container of beef stew from Dilligan’s Market at the corner and made his way up to his apartment, copies of the day’s Globe and Herald under his arm. He stood at the kitchen counter, the television set on, half listening to Gunsmoke, eating the rapidly cooling stew. As he ate he flipped through the newspapers, scanning the headlines. More rallies for Rockefeller and McGovern. A successful launch of the Fer de Lance rocket from French Guiana with two French astronauts aboard. Some fighting among two of the Chinese states. One caught his eye:
PAROLE DENIED FOR BUNDY
* * *
LEAVENWORTH, Kansas (AP)—In a secret hearing held yesterday, parole was again denied to McGeorge Bundy, an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, who is currently serving a life term in the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.
A spokesman for the Federal Parole Board would not give details of the hearing. Bundy will next be eligible for parole in 1973.
Bundy is one of the highest-ranking members of the Kennedy Administration who survived the Cuban War, having been in New York City at the time of the missile attack on Washington, DC.
In 1963 he and a number of other surviving members of the Kennedy Administration were convicted before the special Domestic War Crimes Tribunal.
Now there was a survivor. What kind of tale could he tell, if he were allowed to speak? He flipped to the back page of the Herald, and saw a smaller story about someone who did not survive:
EAST BOSTON MAN DIES IN HIT AND RUN
* * *
An East Boston man, Andrew Townes, 59, of Monroe Street, died late last night in an apparent hit and run accident, police say. Witnesses said Townes was walking across the street near his home when he was struck by a dark-colored van, which then sped away. Police had no other details, but an investigation is said to be under way.
Carl threw away the cardboard container from his dinner, turned off the lights in his apartment, and tried to sleep that night in a chair in the living room, dozing off sporadically, his Army-issue .45 in his hands.
No matter what was going on, he intended to be a survivor.
~ * ~
EMPIRE: TWO
A MATTER OF EMPIRE: TWO
* * *
It was night when Major Kenneth Hunt of the British army’s Parachute Regiment, 16th Parachute Brigade, threw open the door to his office and sat down at the tiny desk, his legs trembling. He had just come from a regimental briefing that had finally given him and the other officers the word on what they were doing in Canada, and why, and the news had sickened him. He almost ran back to his little office, wanting to be alone, not wanting to talk to any of his brother officers. Not at all.
The only light in the tiny room was an overhead lamp that cast a faint pool of illumination over the desktop and left the rest of the office in darkness. A pencil on the desktop vibrated from the sound of a jet engine out on the runway. He leaned forward and put his head in his hands. Damn them, he thought. Damn them all for planning this awful piece of shit and asking him and his paras to take care of it.
Turnabout, he thought. Operation Turnabout. Such a simple name for such a horrid plan. He reached down, opening a drawer in the desk. Inside, he saw a collection of file folders, a tiny framed photo, and a bottle of single-malt whiskey. He gingerly picked up the black-and-white photo. It showed a smiling woman, wearing a white sweater, standing next to a rose bush in a garden. His wife, Rachel. The photo had been taken eleven years ago, before his transfer to West Germany and the AOR; the British Army of the Rhine. When war had broken out he and his unit had been on the highest stage of alert, waiting for the Soviet and East German tank divisions to start moving west. But except for streams of refugees, nothing else had ever come across the border. When the American warheads had struck in the old Soviet Union, both NATO and the Warsaw Pact had collapsed. The Soviet armies melted away, and soon, so had the armed East Germans.
He remembered breathing a sigh of relief that horrid October and November, thinking he would live after all, live long enough to retire, enjoy life with Rachel and start a family.
But Rachel had been on holiday with her parents in the Punjab in northern India, touring places that her father knew, back when he was in the Foreign Service. No one had known of the fallout that had moved with the winds, but that hadn’t made much difference. Rachel and her mother and father had died a month later from the exposure, not even able to leave India to come home.
M’love, he thought, gently putting the photo back into the drawer. I don’t know what I can do, but I do know I can’t do this. I can’t go forward and doom so many others to what happened to you.
I just can’t.
He took a deep breath, pulled the bottle out, and put it in the center of the desk. He stared at it and then finally, reached out and uncorked it.
When he poured the drink into the glass, his hand shook so hard that the bottleneck rattled against the rim of the glass.
~ * ~
TEN
The morning after his visit to Maine, Carl drove over to Lane Street Division Headquarters, keeping a close look at the other traffic as he navigated the narrow streets, looking for any dark-colored vans. His .45 automatic - heavy in his hands during last night’s fitful sleep—was under the front seat. He parked at the rear of the station. It was a cloudy day that was threatening mist, and even on police station property, he didn’t feel safe.
All it would take would be a word from someone—almost anyone with authority—and he could be detained up to seven days for questioning, if it involved matters of national security. Then he could be released, and two minutes later, be picked up again for another seven days. And so forth and so on. With the deaths of Merl Sawson and Andrew Townes and the disappearance of the upstairs student, Troy Clemmons, Carl knew he had entered the murky land of late-night arrests, ‘disappearances,’ and closed-door trials. Despite all that, he felt a tingling energy as he went up the steps, even as he yawned from last night’s lack of sleep. It was a sense of energy he had felt before in South Vietnam and in California, when he had perversely felt very much in control and very much alive. Even with everything that was going on, it was a good feeling, a better feeling than what it had been like last week and last month and last year, putting in a day’s worth of work and going home to an empty and quiet apartment.
What had changed, he wondered. The murder of Merl Sawson? Or the arrival of Sandy Price?
The inside of the police station was a rolling wave of chaos. There were people sitting on benches and on chairs, some of them handcuffed to railings. Cops and plainclothes detectives wandered about, phones rang, typewriters chattered, and raised voices echoed from a caged-off area in the back. Two Army officers were behind a glass-enclosed office, sitting at a desk with what looked to be a police lieutenant or captain. Just into the entrance was a sergeant’s desk. Carl pushed his way forward until he got the attention of a police sergeant with a handlebar mustache and large sweat stains on his uniform shirt.
‘Yeah, whaddya want,’ the sergeant said, barely looking up to acknowledge him.
Carl passed over his press ID. ‘Carl Landry from the Globe. Is Detective Malone in?’
‘Nope,’ the sergeant said, head bent over.
‘Well, will he be in later today?’
‘Nope.’
‘How about tomorrow?’
‘Nope.’ His head was still lowered, as he wrote with a thick pen on a pad of paper. A sign on the nearby rear wall said CONSERVE PAPER. CONSERVE PENCILS.
He took a deep breath and said, ‘Look, have I pissed you off in the past, or are you just having a bad day?’
The sergeant looked up. ‘Any day in this freakin’ zoo’s a bad
day, pal. Look. Detective Malone won’t be back for a month or two. He’s been called up.’
‘Army reserve?’
A shake of the head. ‘Nope, Navy.’
‘He doesn’t seem young enough to be in the active reserves.’
The sergeant’s face colored. ‘Yeah, and neither does his wife or his dying mother or his three kids think so. The son of a bitch was in the inactive reserve, just like me and half the crew in this station. But for no goddamn good reason, he’s been called up. Last I heard, he’s going up to Seattle, do some boat patrols on the Canadian border. Shitty duty for a guy that old.’
He thought fast, wondering what in hell was going on, and said, ‘Can you tell me who’s handling a case of his? The Merl Sawson homicide, over in East Boston.’
Resurrection Day Page 15
