by Bill Mesce
Halverson faced the room, his feet slightly apart, casual but firm, one hand slipped into his trouser pocket, the other a home for his cigarette. “I believe you had something to say, Lieutenant?”
“We’re going to need those pictures, General,” Grassi declared. “Those pictures are evidence. It’s customary to have access to evidence to prepare a case!”
“Is that a fact?”
Harry shrank back in his seat, awaiting the explosion.
“We have the legal authority to demand — ”
“Demand?”
Grassi stopped himself. Even he knows he’s overstepped, Harry thought.
But the explosion never came. Instead, Halverson smiled slightly, coldly. “Lieutenant, you have as much authority as the Army lets you have. So, if I were you, I’d learn to get by without those pictures for now.”
“General — ”
“None of those pictures are going to see the light of day until they have to. The day you need them in court is the day they come out of the safe and not before.”
Grassi looked to Harry for support. It was a rare occasion: Harry sympathized with the lieutenant. They should have access to the photographs. But it was painfully obvious to Harry that General Halverson’s mind was as closed to the idea as Major Van Damm’s safe. Now, what Harry was trying to signal to the lieutenant with frantic looks was not to annoy the general any further. The case had suddenly grown wildly beyond his expectations and Harry felt that, more than ever before, he was going to need Halverson’s goodwill on his side.
Grassi looked from Harry to the general, then back to Harry. Finally, he smiled, gave a barely perceptible nod, and parked against the wall.
Halverson acknowledged the surrender with a tight smile of his own. He turned to Harry and the smile was gone. “Major, I take it, then, that your supposition is this O’Connell kid was killed to conceal all this,” and he nodded at the blank projection screen.
Harry stood. “Uh, yes, sir, that does bring the pieces together.”
“What about a motive, Major? Why this?” and he nodded at the screen again.
Harry’s mouth opened reflexively but he had nothing to say.
“Um, sir?” Ricks came to his feet. “A motive is always a useful element of prosecution, but it’s not a prerequisite.”
“I know that, Captain.” Halverson turned to the empty screen. Was he, too, looking for nonexistent answers? “I was just curious.”
Ryan cleared his throat. He did not stand. For the first time since the lights had come up, Harry had time to regard his friend. He found the sight unnerving. Joe Ryan was slumped in his seat, his face slack and pale, his eyes shining with a shocked, unfocused glaze. A cigarette burned forgotten between his fingers.
“Something to say, Colonel?” Halverson asked.
Ryan cleared his throat again. “The captain’s right.” His voice was faint, his tone tentative.
“I can’t hear you, Colonel.”
“If you’ve got the evidence to make the case, the captain’s right. I mean, what he said about motive. But we don’t have the evidence.”
“You don’t.”
“When the time comes to introduce them, we’ve got these photographs,” Ryan said. “That’s not proof positive. There’s no precedent for using this kind of material as evidence of — ”
“Set one,” Halverson decreed.
“Sir?”
“Set a precedent. That’s how you get a precedent, right? Somebody does it first? Be the first.”
It was obvious to Ryan — to all of them — that Halverson was not looking to debate the point. Ryan sank back into his chair.
Halverson turned to Harry. “Major, how long to trial?”
“We haven’t even drawn up an indictment — ”
“I didn’t ask you about an indictment, Major!” The general was growing peevish. “If you told me you could be in court by tomorrow morning, I’d say, ‘Do it!’ Can you be in court tomorrow?”
“With all due respect.” Ryan interjected, “normally, what with all the paperwork, if we could pull it together in four weeks — ”
“Half of that’s protocol, waiting for signatures, that kind of stuff,” Grassi interrupted, ignoring Ryan’s glare. “We can get off the dime and cut that down by a week. Maybe two without a problem.”
“Tomorrow,” Halverson counteroffered grimly, still focused on Harry.
“General,” Harry pleaded, “I can understand the urgency here, but — ”
“No, you can’t. Saturday.”
“General,” Ricks put in, “the faster we go, the greater our chances of leaving some opening for an appeal so that even if we get a conviction — ”
“Let someone else worry about the damned appeal, Captain!” The rebuff exploded so curtly that Ricks’s head snapped back, his eyes blinking, as if he’d suffered a physical blow. Halverson was back to Harry again. “OK, here’s how it’s going to be: I want this thing in court bright and early Monday morning. I don’t care how many hours you work or what you have to do. Whatever you need to get it done, call me, but get it done! In court on Monday! If you don’t think you can handle that, tell me now and I’ll find someone who can.”
Harry exchanged a quick look with Grassi and Ricks but knew before their eyes locked what he’d find. Grassi’s face was wide-eyed with adrenaline; if Halverson had told them to be in court the following morning, Grassi would’ve been happy for the early debut. Ricks, on the other hand, wore a hangdog look that seemed to be hanging lower with each passing moment. Harry’s feeling may have been more aesthetic than moral (as Ricks had said, such speed almost guaranteed a host of procedural errors that could turn a conviction into a nightmare of appeals) but he agreed with the captain that this was not the way the law — even Army law — was supposed to be.
Yet Halverson had been quite clear on their options.
“Monday morning, sir.” Harry glumly nodded an assent.
“Colonel Ryan, you’ll naturally do whatever you can to expedite the matter. I’ll look to you to see that the accused are secured counsel and whatever else they need to be in court Monday A.M.”
“Yessir,” Ryan murmured.
Halverson stood with his hand on the doorknob. He turned and smiled at the four officers among the school chairs. All looked a bit lost. It was an odd smile, sad, as if he alone knew a sad truth. “Believe me, Major Voss, if you don’t get this to court by Monday, you may never get it to court at all.” And he left.
Harry looked back to Ricks. The captain’s look was part indictment, part resignation, and the rest represented by a silent sigh and small shake of the head that made Harry want to say, out loud, “I’m sorry. It’s not my fault, but I’m sorry.”
They were silent for a long while, and then Grassi spoke, swaggering down to the front of the room, an annoying, cocky smile on his lips. He opened his mouth, no doubt prepared to say something acidic.
“Shuddup!” Ryan snarled. “I swear to Christ, Lieutenant, unless the next words out of your mouth are ‘Good-bye,’ you don’t want to say them!”
Grassi’s mouth closed, slowly, and his smile evaporated.
Ryan turned to Harry, his face a fiery red, looking ready to tear into his friend next. “Harry — ”
The briefing-room door squeaked open; Van Damm leaned in. “I saw the general leave. You gentlemen going to be much longer? I need this room.”
“We’ve got to talk,” Ryan hissed. He gave Harry enough time to tell Grassi and Ricks to wait in his quarters, then dragged Harry out the door by his arm and through the G-2 darkness. Harry wasn’t quite sure where they were going, or even if they were going anywhere, but he eventually realized that Ryan’s frantic zigs and zags were a search for privacy that finally ended with them bursting through the door of a glaringly lit latrine.
A second lieutenant stood at a urinal. He looked over his shoulder and saw Harry and Ryan glaring at each other, waiting. With all the expertise of his Intelligence-staffer status,
the lieutenant deftly interpreted the situation, forced an abrupt halt to operations, and scooted past them.
As soon as the latrine door clicked shut behind the lieutenant, Ryan detonated. “What the hell is going on?” The words reverberated off the concrete walls of the loo like artillery rounds.
Harry stood dazed and blinking, partly from the shock of the noise, partly in earnest confusion. “What do you mean — ”
“You waltz me around with all this ‘Just a few more days’ crap! ‘Oh, Joe, pretty please, oh, I need just a little more time’ — ”
Harry bristled. “You wouldn’t mind telling me what this is all about, would you?”
It occurred to Ryan that he had not adequately secured the premises; now he began to look under the doors of the stalls. “That’s my question, Harry! You should’ve come to me first, you really should’ve, before you went flapping your gums to Halverson — ”
“Come to you first about what?”
“Don’t play games with me, Harry!”
It was Harry’s turn to shout. “I’m not playing any games! I don’t know what you’re — ”
“How long have you been sitting on this thing?”
“Sitting on what?”
“Dammit, Harry — ” Ryan’s voice dropped to a comparatively discreet hiss. “That butcher’s orgy we just saw!”
“Joe, I knew about it when you did; when Van Damm put those pictures on — ”
“You’ve been stretching me out all along, telling me you had questions — ”
“That’s right! Questions! And I got the answers a few minutes ago, right along with you! I didn’t know where they were going. That’s why they were questions. You think I was holding back — ”
The latrine door opened; Harry cut himself off. This time, it was a young captain. As quick-witted as his colleague the lieutenant, he took an instant to analyze the situation, then about-faced and exited.
Harry understood now — or thought he did. In the beginning, two days ago, Ryan had been bestowing a gift. But Ryan had not expected the gift to turn into a coup. “I get it!” Harry said. “Joe, I know this is a lot bigger than how it started. You think I don’t know who I owe? If you want a piece of this, all you — ”
“A piece of this? Harry, I wouldn’t go near this thing in an asbestos suit! You really have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into. Let me clear it up for you: You’re in the shit, my friend, right up to your eyeballs!”
“Instead of browbeating me,” Harry persisted, “why don’t you try explaining — ”
“Don’t do anything!” Ryan bellowed, driving the point home with a painful jab of his index finger to Harry’s chest. “Not until you hear from me.”
“What do you mean, don’t do — ”
“I mean don’t make a move, don’t do a goddamned thing on this case, don’t talk to anybody — ”
“What about Halverson? If he asks how it’s going, do I just say, ‘Well, General, I’ve just been sitting around twiddling my thumbs because Colonel Ryan’ — ”
The possibility of such an attribution struck a responding chord in Ryan. He sprang back to Harry. “All right, all right, you go ahead and keep moving the paperwork along, but before you make any big moves you talk to me. Understand? Before you get us in this mess any deeper, let me see if I can get us out.”
“I still don’t understand what you’re — ”
Ryan wasn’t waiting; he was already at the door. “You’re putting yourself in a corner where I can’t help you, Harry. I won’t!”
Then Ryan was gone and Harry was standing alone in the loo, more at sea than when he’d entered. He was still standing there when the patient but anxious captain, the one who’d bounced in and immediately backed out, stuck his head inside.
“All clear, sir? We’re developing a line out here.”
He held the door respectfully as Harry passed stonily through.
*
I had just emptied a tin of kippers into the small skillet atop my little gas ring and had left the door open to help dissipate the consequent smell, when Himself was suddenly there in my doorway. He scarcely waited for my nodded welcome before he stepped inside, the door sighing shut behind him as if closed by his immortal will. He fleetingly smiled a greeting and set himself in my most comfortable chair, resting an ankle across a knee, and parking his trilby on the upraised toe of his shoe. He nodded at the kippers sizzling malodorously in what should have been sweet butter but, in its rationed absence, was margarine.
“That’d be dinner?” Himself asked.
“Afraid so.” I prodded the kippers with a fork. “Care to partake?”
“Oh, I think not.”
I looked down at the kippers curling in the crackling margarine and saw his point.
He felt an obligation not to be deprecating in my home, however, and justified his refusal with, “The missus has one of her usual culinary monstrosities waiting for me. She was never what you’d call your gourmet, but I think all the rationing has completely done her in. The nice thing about me being late home is it gives her an alibi for damage done. ‘Of course it tastes off, ya silly clod!’” he said à la his wife. I’d seen her in the office once or twice and his mimicry of her voice — the trilling shrillness and barbed declaratives — was more impressionistic than accurate. “‘It always tastes off when it’s been sitting about cold half the night!’ Ah, well,” he sighed, then his eyes darted about hopefully. “Um, there wouldn’t be a taste about, eh? Something to numb the palate for what’s to come?”
It seemed a good idea for both of us. I turned off the gas ring but the kippers continued to crackle and smoke, throwing off a dockside smell thickening inside the closed blackout curtains. I produced a pair of glasses and a fair bottle of scotch, not as good as the one he kept in his desk drawer, but then again an editor’s purse stood a bit thicker than mine. I poured the drinks and dragged a chair close by. We raised our glasses, nodded solemnly, and sipped with equal devotion.
“Ahhh,” he said and I agreed. “You see Cathryn?” he asked.
“Since the divorce?”
“I’d like to think you’d seen a bit of her before, you silly git.”
“Permit me to amplify: since the divorce, or since my triumphal return?”
“Either or.”
“Yes, no, respectively”
He set his glass down on the lamp table by the chair and absently drew a triskelion in the dust there. Perhaps it was the thick coat of dust, something one would never have seen in Cathryn’s house, that prompted him to say, “I miss that one. Good lass, her.”
“They’re all good lasses after they’re gone.”
“I’ll toast that, my son. How about another? Mine seems to have evaporated. Ah, thanks. She were a good one, though, Cathryn. Any chance at that? A resurrection, I mean? You’re on the list, you know, my preferred list when one of the editorial desks opens. Old Glatley’s practically at death’s door. Don’t know why the old duffer doesn’t just take his pension and race his damned pigeons. Be that as it may, it’s yours come the time. No more gadding round the world then, eh? She’d like that, I fancy. Maybe not you, not at first, all that sitting’d be quite a change, eh? But you’re good enough for the desk, my son, always thought so, you being right for the desk once you got the gallivants out of yourself. Any chance with her, then? Or is that all tick, eh?”
“One of the things I admired most about Cathryn was her good sense.”
“Ah, then she won’t be back.”
“I think not.”
“Well, as you say, she were always a sensible girl, wot?”
“Aye. Not to be rude, or to suspect your goodwill, but was there some business? Or is this just a friendly chat?”
“There are no friendly chats in business, my son, particularly in this line of country.” He sighed. “It’s off. The story. Close the book.” He finished his drink in a gulp and set the glass down on the dusty tabletop with a rap of finality.
“Yo
u said I had until — ”
“Two drinks does not interfere with my recall, my son. It’s not you, if that’s your concern. In fact, I’ve been quite happy to see you running with the hounds again. Put a bit of color back in your cheeks, it has. No, no, not you at all. Not my decision, so you know. It’s just the word.”
“From?”
“From the people that give one the word. ‘National interest’ and all that, a call from the general-list blokes, waving the flag and the Official Secrets Act, vital military information and all that rot. You know the program. Off-limits and such.”
The tactic itself didn’t disturb me. One bounded into it rather regularly covering the war. What took me aback was that I could see nothing in this particular story to merit such severe treatment.
Himself pretended a tone of polite, disinterested conversation when he asked his next question, but it was still the good reporter at work. “Had you come across anything of note?”
“I thought the story was over.”
“Academic interest, my son.”
I smiled and poured another pair of fresh drinks. “Since last we joined our heroes, it seems we have one American aeroplane — a Thunderbolt, a wreck — sitting in a Scotland Yard warehouse aswarm with the Yard’s ballistics boffins. They’ve been whiling away the hours digging through it for bullets. I’ve also found out that the Yard has brought in the guns from some other Yank aeroplanes to do ballistic comparisons.”
He tried not to express interest. He was a good editor: Let the reporter work to convince that there is a worthy story here. “What else?”
“You remember that spotter I told you about? Names Gresham. He and his wife, they lived down on the coast where whatever happened happened. The bogies spirited the Greshams away somewhere, where they’re being kept under lock and key. And there’s a dead Yank in the Yard morgue been put through a postmortem. And — this is the plum part — two American pilots were taken by their Provost Marshal and tossed in the clink. They’re from the 351st Group, down by Chillingham.”
