“I know that,” Peter said. “As you say, we are in Moscow. I could be shot for talking to you as I have done. But I have talked to you anyway. That was an act of trust. Do you agree?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that. Now the question is, Will you reciprocate? For your own good as well as for the good of the work we can do together?”
Jack locked eyes with Peter. After a long moment he said, “Yes. I will.”
“In that case you’ll have a wonderful life,” said Peter.
Jack knew that his answer was the equivalent of taking a final vow before joining this secret order that Peter kept talking about but never actually described. The answer had pleased Peter and he let Jack see this. But he did not let Jack see what had pleased him even more: Jack’s behavior under stress. It was not only appetite that drove Jack. He had the courage of a lion and the cunning of a Jesuit when his own interests were at stake. He had just forced Peter to admit that he needed Jack more than Jack needed him.
Peter stood up. “Now I’ll say goodbye. Your train leaves in two hours. Igor will drive you to the station. KGB flatfoots will follow you. This will be obvious. You are intended to see them. Don’t be concerned.”
Peter opened his attaché case and removed Jack’s Canadian passport. He handed it to him.
“Use this to leave the Soviet Union and to enter Sweden and Germany. Do not alter it in any way.”
He gave Jack a meaningful look. He gripped his hand. “Jack. We will meet again.”
“I hope so,” Jack said.
“In happier circumstances,” Peter said.
He tapped a story on the front page of the Herald-Tribune. Jack glanced at it. Manfred’s bespectacled face, harshly lit, gazed out of the identity-card photo that accompanied the article. Jack scanned the text: The corpse of a lecturer at Heidelberg University had been found floating in the Neckar River. Police said that there were one hundred bullet wounds in the victim’s body, apparently inflicted by a nine-millimeter machine pistol used as a weapon of torture. Every joint of bone had been shattered before a fatal burst was fired into the heart. The Red Army Faction claimed responsibility for what it called the execution of a traitor. Police were investigating possible links between the murder and last week’s attempted robbery of a Heidelberg bank by terrorists connected to the Red Army Faction.
By the time Jack finished reading and lifted his eyes, Peter had vanished. The house was deeply silent. Jack thought about Heidelberg, thought about America. He could not picture them; they were things he had read in a book that he had outgrown.
But this! The silence, the absence of clocks, the cold that no furnace could heat, the absence of sensations. He smelled the hand that had held the American money Peter had given him. It was the only thing in this room that had aroma. He breathed the dead air, which seemed incapable of transporting odor, sound, even light.
He rose to his feet and took the first soundless step of his return journey to America.
Peter’s Gift
One
1 Just as Peter had promised, doors began opening for Jack Adams soon after he got back to America. Following instructions to the letter, he landed a menial but paying job on the staff of a subcommittee chaired by his senator. Soon afterward, with help of the same sympathetic staff director who had recommended his reemployment, Jack joined a field hospital unit of the U.S. Army reserves as a laboratory technician trainee. Next to leading the riderless horse in a dead president’s funeral, this military occupational specialty was the least likely job in the army to require his presence on a battlefield. The only combat soldiers he would ever see would already be wounded and evacuated back to America.
It was summer, and ordinarily Jack would have gone off to an army camp for an abbreviated period of basic training, but because his senator was an important member of committees that approved the Pentagon’s budget, this formality was waived. Instead, Jack reported every other Thursday night to Walter Reed Army Hospital, just outside Washington. There he changed out of the jungle-camouflage fatigues he had been issued, put on the pastel pajamas of a technician, and learned how to draw blood and prepare it for laboratory analysis. Most of his teachers were female soldiers who knew exactly why Jack was in the reserves. They treated him coolly, and he quickly understood that sleeping with a draft dodger was, in their culture, as loathsome an act as servicing a GI would be for a Movement chick. Jack regretted this exceedingly. These were working-class girls looking for love. They reminded him of his high school dates, and he felt that, given the opportunity, his old methods would work well with them.
To everyone’s surprise, including his own, it turned out that Jack was good at drawing blood. The sequence—sterilizing the skin, wrapping the rubber tourniquet, finding the vein, inserting the needle—required total concentration combined with a deft touch and the ability to regard the arm from which the blood was being drawn as an abstract object rather than a living limb attached to a human being. Jack possessed all of these qualifications, especially the last, in abundance. At first he worked on outpatients who came into the lab, but his natural skill was soon noticed, and he was sent into the wards with a long list of patients who needed blood tests.
Walter Reed was the army’s top hospital, where its best doctors worked on its worst cases. Most of the surgical patients were soldiers who had been wounded in particularly dreadful ways. Jack’s superiors had not told him what to expect; the horrifying shock of walking into a room filled with amputees, burn cases, blind men, and men whose faces had been obliterated was a rite of initiation. Jack took one look at this gallery of suffering and fled.
Back in the lab, the man in charge of the night shift was depositing drops of blood from a pipette into a tray of tiny glass receptacles.
Jack said, “Motley, I’m sorry, but I can’t do this.”
Motley went on with what he was doing. Without looking up, he said, “Can’t do what?”
“Draw blood from those guys.”
“What guys?”
“The ones on the surgical floor.”
“Really? Why not?”
“I can’t look at them.”
Motley—a kind of sergeant, Jack thought—continued to work steadily with his tray of blood. He did not look at Jack. He said, “I’m not surprised, you yellow-bellied, draft-dodging piece of shit.” Motley had a slight lisp, so the sibilants were quite noticeable.
Jack said, “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Okay. But why are you talking to me like this?”
“You want to know why? I’ll tell you why. Those men are the way they are because they defended the United States of America against its enemies foreign and domestic and whatsoever. They paid the price you would not pay. They bled for the country while you pissed on the flag. Is that not the situation, Private?”
“Whatever you say.”
Lisp notwithstanding, Motley was enormous, black, and angry. He said, “Glad you agree. Now get your sorry pink ass back up to the ward and carry out your legal orders, or I will personally take you into the latrine and beat that selfsame sorry pink ass into dog meat. Do you understand?”
Jack nodded.
“Good,” said Motley. “Now get of my sight, dogshit. If you had the balls to look those men in the eye, you wouldn’t have to look at their stumps and burns and shot-off faces. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“Don’t call me Sergeant. I am not a sergeant. And don’t even talk to me no more. Move it!”
Jack went back to the ward and began to draw blood, moving from bed to bed. The first man was unconscious, bleeding through the bandages that covered his face. The next, who had lost both legs, watched with disinterest as Jack stuck the needle into his arm and filled the several vials that were required by the lab.
He said, “You new around here?”
Jack said, “Sort of.”
“When you came in the first time, you looked lik
e a queer in the girls’ locker room, man. Left in a hurry.”
No one laughed. The soldier said, “Where was you headed?”
Jack scratched his head, looked straight into the soldier’s eyes, and said, “To buy some rubbers.”
It was a feeble joke, but the legless soldier laughed, one bark. To the man in the next bed he said, “You hear what the man said, Harper?”
Harper nodded; he was watching television.
The first soldier said, “You ever see anybody get shot, man?”
The death of Greta flashed in Jack’s mind, a gory nickelodeon. “No, I haven’t,” he lied.
“Don’t sweat it, man,” the soldier said. “Ain’t fuck-all to it. Hello, bang, you’re dead, who gives a shit.”
That described it, all right. Jack realized that this man, who would be better off dead and knew it, was being kind to him. He said, “I can’t believe that, but thanks.”
After that, it wasn’t so bad. If Jack could talk, he was all right. He had the touch. He asked questions, he made jokes, he charmed and entertained and talked about sports. Soon guys in the next bed were listening in, telling him he was full of shit if he thought Carlton Fisk was in the same class as Johnny Bench, that gook pussy squeaked, man. Jack began to enjoy himself. He stopped seeing the horror. Ignoring the wounds, pretending he and the wounded had something in common, was just another form of white lie. He was good at both the things he was doing—drawing blood and blowing smoke. He was, in a strange way, happy.
Jack worked his way down one side of the ward and was about halfway back on the other side when he came to a bed in which a soldier lay rigid and unmoving, face covered by the sheet. Was he dead? Jack started to back away. Then the man spoke from beneath the sheet.
“Other side of the bed,” he said.
He stuck his left arm out. Jack thought he understood: There was no right arm. He went around the bed, swabbed the soldier’s arm, applied the rubber band, found the vein, inserted the needle.
In a falsetto, the man said, “Ooh! That hurt.”
Jack said, “Sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t help. You’re supposed to be an angel of mercy, motherfucker.”
The voice was black. The arm was white. Jack said nothing.
Face still covered, the soldier fluted, “You always were a clumsy lout.”
This time Jack recognized the voice and looked up, startled. The man in the bed uncovered his face. It was Danny.
2 On night patrol inside Cambodia, Danny’s squad had been advancing along a jungle trail in pitch darkness, each man tethered to the man ahead of him by two bootlaces tied end to end and fastened to their belt loops by a quick-release slipknot.
Danny was walking point, several meters ahead of the other men. It was so dark that he sometimes had to fall on his hands and knees to locate the path by sense of touch. The talcumlike red dirt of the trail had been pounded into chalk by the feet of the enemy. He was worried about mines. The thought of stepping on a mine in the dark was a particularly horrible one to Danny; the idea of losing his legs, of dying in the dark, of bleeding to death while not being able to see a thing, made him shudder.
Right now he had a feeling that he was almost on top of a mine, that the next step he took would detonate it. He drew his bayonet and slid its point gently into the dirt, probing for metal. He thought he heard a click, but it came from somewhere down the trail. He paused, crouched in the darkness, and listened hard. He immediately heard the unmistakable spoing of the spring-steel safety lever flying off a captured American hand grenade. Four seconds later a phosphorus grenade exploded behind him. It went off at the feet of the first man in the file, almost certainly because he had stumbled over a trip wire that detonated the device. This meant that enemy soldiers lying in ambush beside the trail had let Danny go by, and had then tightened the wire across the path so that the first man behind him would trigger the booby trap.
“Shit!” Danny cried, spinning around.
He saw the explosion as a blinding blue-white fountain of burning phosphorus that threw off droplets of burning liquid in all directions, just as a real fountain releases a mist of water.
Danny was out of range, but the squad leader and the man behind him were burned alive when the phosphorus set their clothes and then their flesh on fire. A third man was burned, too, when two or three globs of liquid fire landed on his shirt. He ran down the trail toward Danny, screaming and shedding equipment. The wind created by his movement fanned the flames, and in a matter of seconds he was on fire, too. Danny dropped his rifle and tackled the man. He then attempted to put out the flames by rolling him in the dirt. It was too late for this, so Danny attempted to smother the flames with his own body. His own fatigues caught fire, enveloping the entire right side of his body from ankle to shoulder. As he rolled on the ground trying to put out the flames that were igniting his own body fat, the dead man’s ammunition started to go off. Danny threw off the bandolier he was carrying and pressed the burning half of his body into the ground. The flames died—but not before they had consumed most of the skin and about 20 percent of the muscle of his right arm and leg.
Down the trail, Vietnamese soldiers were firing assault rifles and a machine gun at the surviving members of the squad, who had deployed into the trees on the opposite side of the trail and were returning fire. Danny was in shock, so he felt very little pain. He had lost his rifle, and when he found it again by sense of touch and tried to lift it to his right shoulder, he discovered that his right hand and arm no longer functioned. He found his discarded bandolier and grenades and crawled in among the trees, intending to attack the enemy from the flank, but he lost consciousness before he could reach them.
When he woke, the sun had risen. He made his way back to the trail. Three charred corpses lay on the path. He found blood and scattered brass among the trees on both sides of the trail, but no other bodies or equipment, either American or Vietnamese. By now he was out of shock and in agonizing pain. He lost consciousness again. An hour or two later another American patrol found him lying in the path and carried him out to a landing zone. None of the missing members of his squad were ever heard from again.
Jack said, “You tackled a guy who was on fire?”
“Saved my life,” Danny replied.
He was right, of course. With the sheet pulled up to his chin, Danny looked the same: thick blue-black hair, dancing blue eyes watching for an opening, twisted grin. The eternal optimist.
Jack said, “What about Cindy?”
“I haven’t exactly been communicating with Cindy.”
Jack said, “Not communicating with Cindy? Since when?”
Danny’s face lost all expression. “Since when do you think, Jack?”
An electric shock ran through Jack’s body. He was a stranger to guilt, but dread was his constant companion. Getting caught is the liar’s greatest fear, and like all liars Jack lived with it every day. Danny was staring into his eyes. Did he know?
He said, “What are you saying to me, Danny?”
“You figure it out,” Danny replied.
Good God, he did know. Jack hadn’t thought about his hour with Cindy since it happened. But suppose she had told Danny? He could hear her sweet, flat, Ohio voice saying, I wish it hadn’t happened, honey, but it did. With your best friend. For a long moment Danny stared brightly at Jack. Then tears filled his eyes. He closed his lids. The tears squeezed out between them like a child’s tears, great beads of water appearing one by one and then bursting.
“Shit,” Danny said, his eyes still closed. He wiped his eyes with the sheet. Jack handed him a box of tissues, and—touched to the heart, Cindy forgotten—he reached under the sheet and took his friend’s good hand. Danny returned the pressure.
Jack said, “Danny, I don’t know what to say. Things happen—”
Danny grinned again, painfully. “That’s what I mean,” he said. “She must be pretty horny by now. The minute I tell her, she’ll be down here with the wedding rings
and a bouquet. I’d never get rid of her.”
Relief flooded through Jack’s whole being. Danny didn’t know what had happened between him and Cindy. He had no suspicion, no idea. And now how could Cindy ever confess? She couldn’t, not ever, not to this victim of fate. Jack was safe.
Jack said, “So she comes down in a wedding dress. Would that be so bad?”
“Being married to Florence Nightingale for the rest of my life? It would be terrific.”
“How long have you been back?”
“A month.”
Jack said, “And she doesn’t know you’re here? Danny, let’s go. There’s a phone in the hall.”
“I can’t.”
“Like hell you can’t.”
Danny tightened his grip, but Jack wrenched his hand free and ran out into the hall and grabbed a wheelchair. When he returned with it, Danny waved him away.
Jack said, “Danny, get in the fucking chair.”
The men in the other beds, those who were conscious, were watching and listening. Who were these guys?
Danny said, “No fucking way. Get your ass out of here, Jack.”
“Get in the chair or I’ll call her myself.”
Danny was angry now—a good sign, in Jack’s experience of him. When he got mad on the gridiron or the diamond, he usually did something amazing.
“You’ll call her?” Danny said. “She’d hang up.”
“Not before I told her what’s going on.”
“You’d do that to me?”
Jack said, “You have no fucking idea. Believe me.” Then, softly: “Come on, Dan. Pick up the phone. Please.”
Danny closed his eyes. Then he said, “I haven’t got the balls.”
“Yes, you have. And that’s the whole point. Come on, Dan. Get in the chair.”
Danny thought hard, eyes vacant, remembering his life: a landscape with three figures: Jack, Cindy, Danny.
Lucky Bastard Page 14
