First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

“They are returning us to—?”

  “No, no. Colonel Museddes thinks he can catch the whole group on the ground before they call in support from Oman or the Emirates.”

  “You sure of that?”

  Corbin shrugged. “We can stay here … if we want.”

  “No way. Count me in. Besides—you may need a pilot.”

  So we flew back to Abaila. On the first pass, they blanketed the oasis with tear gas canisters. Anyone who came out peacefully, they bound and held for evacuation on a big troopship they had whistled down from Riyadh. The rest they went in after, wearing gas masks and flak vests, and took by force.

  I was standing next to Corbin, watching the fun from upwind by the lead helicopter. Then I looked around and he was gone, just a shadow among the swirling gases. When he came back, he was toting a police-issue Ingram and claimed to have bagged four.

  “Did you see Faisal?” I asked.

  “Nope!” Corbin gave me a big clown smile. “He’s either in hiding or being hid.”

  “Should we tell someone about him?”

  “Who would you tell?” He slung the empty assault gun into the nearest bird. “And anyway, why spoil his game?”

  In Riyadh, where the Security forces dropped us off the next day, we were met by the senior Petramin official and the American consul. They wanted us to leave the country immediately. However, the Saudis moved in smoothly and said we had to stay for the trial, to give evidence against the terrorists. It was an official diplomatic suggestion that our corporate bosses could not ignore. In the meantime, we were put on administrative duty. Which meant Corbin and I did paperwork and kept to the compound.

  I understood nothing of the trial. Robed judges and prosecutors droned in musical Arabic. Sybil and a dozen of her lieutenants were seated in a fenced area, like the dock in British courts. She had a neck brace and a head bandage that covered most of her beautiful black hair. Her eyes were puffy. Corbin and I were interrogated through translators. We told the kidnapping story at least three different ways and nobody noticed. Sybil never looked at us and hardly seemed to follow what was going on.

  Then it was over and the verdict was in: death for them all. I thought this would be like an American court, where the death penalty is just a distant threat and they would have a dozen years or so of legal footwork. But no, the next day the Saudi government invited us back.

  One of the city squares had been cleared of traffic and market carts. A scaffolding had been set up from folding risers, like you might see at a rock concert. Fifty or a hundred thousand people were ranged around this platform, waiting noisily. Corbin and I had box seats with some other Petramin people. Very big people.

  At noon, they led out a dozen figures, dressed in simple white pullover gowns like they issue in hospitals. From a distance of three hundred feet, I could not recognize them. Then I saw the one on the near end had long, black hair. They had removed Sybil’s brace and bandages.

  One by one, with Sybil last, they were brought forward and their heads laid on a block. A man in classic Bedouin robes swung a great, two-handed, silver-shining sword to cut those heads off. With each swing a mist of blood flew out over the crowd, and the crowd screamed cheers.

  Corbin explained to me how big an event this was, a chance for the Saudis to strike back at the Shi’ite threat hovering along their northern borders. The entire country was watching these executions on television. He pointed to a nearby camera, which panned across our box every thirty seconds or so. We were celebrities.

  But wait, I said, it was all wrong. The terrorists had been on the royalists’ side, the Saudi side, against the Ayatollah, right? And Corbin said, no, that is not the way it had come out at the trial. The translators had freeformed their own story out of our testimony and not one of the English-speaking judges had contradicted them. All the time he told me this, Corbin never took his eyes off the sword and the flying blood. Beside us, I could hear one of the other Petramin people being sick down near his shoes.

  Finally it was Sybil Zahedi’s turn. She walked toward the block and I could see her lips moving. I thought she might be saying a prayer, but no, she was shouting something to the crowd, to the man who was going to kill her, to us sitting a hundred yards away. What she might have been saying was lost in the animal howl of the aroused crowd. It was like watching a silent movie. Two men pushed her down, her mouth still working, and the third cut quickly.

  Jay Corbin did not even flinch. I know because I had my eyes on him.

  Then we were allowed to leave the country. We became a nine days’ wonder back in the States. Corbin was interviewed on at least four video talk shows and I had two radio spots when they could not get him. There was a ceremony at the White House with the vice president giving us the Medal of Freedom. Finally, Petramin paid us a nice severance and left us on the street. … That seemed to be another suggestion from the Saudis.

  After a brace of years, I had had my fill of taxi flying for rich corporoids or hauling the beer around in a jungle war. So I headed west, unfroze the rest of my stash, and set up in the business I knew best, selling kiddy ass, loosely basing myself in Carson City, Nevada. My front was talent scout and booking agent for a fictitious Chicago modeling school. You see, the prettiest girls—and boys—never feel very secure and need to test themselves against the plastic faces they see every day on video and in the magazines.

  Let me tell you: All of Nevada is not the same. A misinterpretation of local statutes for which, in Vegas, they would give you steep bail and a dozen continuances, in Carson City they do not even bother taking through the desk sergeant. They take a hank of tow rope out of their Jeeps and look around for a lamp post. Confronted with such an angry crowd during my first month back in the business, I had to walk through three citizens to find a stretch of pavement with running room. Even now I look over my shoulder anytime I get ten miles this side of the State border.

  So, about six months after separation from the oil company I was in Portland, with no forwarding address that anyone knew, when I got a call from Corbin.

  “You used to be in the service, in Nicaragua, didn’t you?” he asked right off.

  “How did you know I was in Nicco?” My voice dropped about an octave.

  “Your Petramin records, of course. Do you know anything about—conditions there?”

  “You mean today?”

  “No, at the end of the war, just before we blew Managua away.”

  “I saw the American side of it.”

  “Any reactions?”

  “Yeah, palefaces should not be allowed to wage a war. They know scoot about etiquette and taking coup.”

  “Uh—right. Look, can you—could you come down to San Francisco and help us with a case we’re putting together?”

  “What kind of case?”

  “A prosecution. We’re taking one of the colonels apart over the war.”

  “What he do?”

  “Killed a lot of people.”

  “Hell, we all did that.”

  “Yeah, but this one got caught.”

  “When do you want me?”

  Inside of two days, Corbin said, and he gave me an address. So I went down to help him prosecute Colonel Donald L. Beyer, the Butcher of Boaco. And after that I never left his side—Corbin’s, that is.

  The address he gave me was on lower Montgomery Street, three entire floors of an elegant old granite-faced building that was only six floors tall, a luxury low-rise in that soaring part of the city. The name, in gold letters raised half an inch, was Knox, Schnock, Hughes & Thayer, Attorneys. Corbin was listed, in a gold-colored decal on the building directory, third from the end among the junior associates.

  “They hired me mostly on the wave of publicity, I think,” he said as he led me back through the shelves of law books to his cubicle. It was a work station built out of chest-high fabric partitions; it contained a data terminal and three square feet of desk space. There were just the two chairs.

  “You need a pilot in he
re?” I grinned.

  Corbin shook his head. “Tell me about Managua, the last days. … And by the way, you aren’t still on active reserve, are you?”

  “Nope, I got clean of that shit.”

  “You didn’t sign anything with the government—”

  “Only about a million forms.”

  “But nothing which promised you would not reveal what you saw on duty in Central America?” he prompted.

  “Does not matter. I will not be sworn in a court of law,” I said firmly.

  “Why not?”

  “My reasons.” Who could know what charges were still pending against me in California from the old days? I had three bail bondsmen on my payroll at one time, from all over the West.

  “All right. … We can find others to testify. Just tell me what you saw.”

  I told him. Although I had not been personally involved in the house searches that followed the siege of Managua, I knew enough troops who were. There was not much hand-to-hand fighting because by that time the population was out of ammunition, long out of food and water, and completely out of spirit. The Marines rounded up ghosts, pale-eyed children, old women, young boys with rust-pitted weapons and bloated bellies.

  Of course, I had heard rumors about genosquads, but I never met anyone who had served on one. The camps they set up on the east of the city at Jinotepe, Masaya, and Tipitapa were just that—refugee and resettlement camps. No executions, no gas chambers, no fiendish experiments, no cremations, no ashes to scatter. But those stories reflect the temper of the times.

  I saw the special sapper units go through the city, using professional demolition techniques. Five satchels of plastique, strategically placed, and a fifteen-story apartment block would come straight down like the earth had opened beneath it. For the shack rows on the city edges and the cottages of the middle-class suburbs, they fitted ’dozer blades on M-60 battle tanks and drove diagonal lines across the landscape. The rest we soldiers broke up with picks and crowbars, as I have explained.

  Looting? What could the average infantryman want in one of those places? A five-year-old transistor radio? Handmade clothing? Cracked dishes? A dimestore cherrywood Madonna? The CIA teams had gone through the government buildings and staff officers had gone through the hotels and official residences. The rest was a thousand times poorer than an East Los Angeles garage sale.

  Yes, I saw the dusters at work. That was one of the assignments of the 452nd Airborne, although I never flew one. Yes, moonsuits and breather gear were the uniform of the day. But no, they never did explain what the stuff was, except that one day the ground in Managua showed plenty of black soil and green plants, and the next it was blowing dust and brown stems. The lakeshore was three feet deep in dead fish for a week. Yes, I did know some of the pilots—names if not serial numbers—who flew the duster flights. Yes, I could probably contact two or three without any trouble; some of them kept in touch through the battalion newsletter. Then it was my turn to ask him the questions.

  “Why do you want to know all this? Just history now.”

  “We are trying to find out, through various sources, who it was that gave the orders for the dusting of Managua,” Corbin said.

  “Came from the President, right?”

  “No, not according to any published source. The highest authority we can locate is this Colonel Donald Beyer. He was in charge of ‘Special Operations.’ ”

  “Who is ‘we,’ exactly?” I asked.

  “This law firm.”

  “But why are you involved? If there was something wrong with the orders, if this Beyer exceeded his authority, then it would be a military matter, a court-martial.”

  “Not necessarily. This is a civil case, a class action suit brought for damages on behalf of the soldiers who were exposed to this unknown ‘dust’ you describe.”

  “How many of these soldiers are there?”

  “We don’t know that yet.”

  “Come again?”

  “The firm is—ah—prospecting right now.”

  “You mean you are peeking inside the ambulance to see if there is a case for you.”

  “Indelicately, yes.” Corbin smiled that wide, clown smile he had.

  “And you want me to help you find pilots who can testify about the dust.”

  “Or exhibit symptoms that may be related to its use.”

  “All right.”

  “We can make the effort worth your while. …” He eyed me steadily. “Do you want to name a sum?”

  “I will have to think about it.”

  In the end, I agreed to work with them. Over the next eight months, I helped him and the other lawyers question veterans from the Nicaragua campaign, about four hundred of them. How much help I was, who can say? Three obvious bullshitters—men who never left the States on active duty, although to hear them tell it they cleaned out Managua singlehanded—were eliminated on my say-so in half an hour. But Corbin and his paralegals would probably have weeded them in twice that time themselves. Sometimes, I could corroborate a man’s testimony; sometimes, just correct a few town names.

  Corbin, himself, was as distant and cool as a judge, although he must have wanted the case against Beyer pretty badly. Still, he would have blown it if he had gotten into the spirit of their stories, adding and embellishing. He had to hold off and explore whatever doubts came to him. He had to think like Beyer’s defense attorneys, who would surely raise those doubts themselves. And Corbin could do it every time—think through the evidence and testimony rationally and coolly— all but once.

  That was over a young soldier. He must have been fifteen when he went to Nicco because he could not have been more than eighteen when he came into the KSH&T offices. He had blond hair in fine curls, doe eyes just like a girl’s, and a beautiful mouth. To me, he was just another immature kid, at most a PFC with a worm’s-eye view of the action. But when he walked into the office that first day, I thought I could hear Corbin draw breath from across the room. Jay believed everything this Harry Schisser had to say. And once, when I corrected the little darling about a landing zone—he had been just a wrench jockey, a ground mechanic, after all—Corbin cut across me in his defense. Corbin took him to dinner, and afterwards he was talking about the little jerk as some kind of star witness. The boy sat at his right hand like a poodle.

  The big surprise came when I had to call Corbin’s office to change the timing on an appointment. The call might have been picked up by his secretarial pool or an answering machine. It might even have been picked up by Corbin himself. But the voice on the other end was little Harry’s. And when he knew who was calling, I swear his voice changed from his normal demure to sassy-brassy bold, like he had aced me out or something.

  For that alone, I was ready to render him for parts. But the heavy stuff came down three days later when I found him in Jay’s apartment, alone, in a silk bathrobe monogrammed with the familiar GJC, holding a pillowcase half full of silverware, desk accessories, and some crystal. I worked out the contents later, but right then all I could see was some sharp-angled bulges that did not look like feathers.

  “Hey! I can explain!” Harry protested.

  I threw him across the living room.

  Up against the book case, he tried to take a stance, digging his toes into the thick carpeting. Before he could plant it, I kicked him twice, once in the balls and again higher, in the solar plexus. Neither was a crippling blow—just a light snap with my instep, a lion tamer. Harry screamed like a woman and went down clutching himself. He curled up on the floor like an infant or some kind of wounded snake.

  I bent down and put my mouth close to his trembling ear. “Now listen to me, fellah. I am going to turn my back for three minutes. You are going to get up, take off that stupid bathrobe, put everything back where you found it, get your clothes on, pass a little inspection—with all your pockets turned out—and then get out of here. Go find yourself a bus back to wherever you came from. Can you remember all that, hey?”

  He nodded,
blinking back tears.

  “Very good, soldier. Now march!” I nudged him with my shoe. Harry moved. And none of us ever saw him again. When he did not show at the law offices, there was not a word from Corbin, even though I was listening for it. The case went on without our “star witness.”

  I soon figured out that Jay Corbin had a blind spot for beauty. He reacted strongly to people with pretty faces and bodies because he thought his own were not. He fell for people who were self-centered because that sort of self-absorption sometimes passes for confidence, which the young Corbin sometimes lacked. So he would close his eyes while the love of the moment climbed up on his or her pedestal. Corbin was always looking for a state of grace and beauty that was perfect and permanent. He never found it.

  He had another weakness that I discovered during the investigations for the Beyer case. We were locking up the papers and tapes after a long day of depositions. Corbin was rolling on about the latest testimony.

  “… clearly had the authority to order suppression of the Nicaraguan civilian population,” he was saying, “but not the destruction of public property. And if that compound was dioxin based, as those medical officers claim, then we have at least a violation of OAS environmental principles if not of the Contadora Con-con-con … vention … of eigh-eigh-eigh … ty-nine …”

  Corbin’s voice stuttered out like an engine running down, dying at last in a hiccup. I looked across the work table after a minute to see if he had just lost his train of thought. His face was a blank, his jaw hanging down toward the knot in his tie. He had half-risen from his chair, then he threw it over backwards as he flopped down.

  It took me perhaps four seconds to get around the cubicle and, by that time, the seizure was in full flood. I got my billfold out and jammed it into his mouth—I still have it today, with a perfect set of Jay Corbin’s canines and bicuspids cut into the leather.

  His head, elbows, and heels were all bouncing in different rhythms on the carpet. To keep him from busting his skull, I grabbed him around the shoulders in a kind of wrestler’s pin and held his head up. Since then, I have read that holding him like this was most dangerous because it put pressure on his back muscles and could have injured his spine. I should have just put something soft under his head.