Two Songs This Archangel Sings

by George C. Chesbro

“Just as long as you call collect, creep,” McGarvey said, then turned and walked to the door. “I’ll get a medical kit for His Highness.”

  Garth and I followed McGarvey out of the office, and I closed the door behind us. Five minutes later the door opened and Andrews, his face still covered with his bloody handkerchief and fear in his eyes, stood and stared at us for some time without speaking. McGarvey, Garth, and I stared back.

  “Would you two come with me, please?” Andrews said at last.

  “Sure,” I replied. “Right after I make my call to my reporter friend. I’m a little anxious to get Son of Archangel rolling.”

  “Please, Frederickson; no calls yet. You’ve won, and you are in a position to destroy this administration. I … mishandled this situation badly. Perhaps you’ll be more gracious than I was, and give this administration and this country just a bit more time.”

  “Give me back the package of slides, the list of owners, and the sequence key. We’ll give it all to Captain McGarvey for safekeeping.”

  Andrews lowered his eyes. “I’m sorry. I destroyed the package after I saw what it contained.”

  “He’s telling the truth,” McGarvey said, the disgust in his voice directed at himself as well as Andrews. “He had me start a fire in a trash can in the back. For your information, it looked like there were four pieces of paper along with the slides. One had names and numbers on it, and the other three looked like sketches.”

  I grunted. “Three murals to piece together.”

  “There are still the slides belonging to the art dealer,” Andrews said. “You have nothing to lose by holding off just a little longer. Will you come with me? There’s a plane waiting for us at Albany Airport.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Washington. The president of the United States would very much like to speak to the two of you.”

  21.

  “How the hell did you know what was in that packet?” Garth asked me when, hours later, we were finally alone.

  “What else could it have been?” I replied as I stretched out on a monster bed in a monster suite in the most monstrously expensive hotel in Washington. In the bedroom there was a spectacular view through a huge picture window out over the Ellipse. In the distance, the sun was going down behind the Washington Monument; the last, blood-red rays were split and scattered by the tip of the spire, making it appear as if the concrete spear had pierced the ball of fire in its heart. There were two Secret Service agents in the hallway outside the suite—whether to guard us or keep us from leaving, we weren’t sure, but at the moment it didn’t seem to make much difference.

  “Whatever was in the packet almost certainly had to relate to the Archangel business,” I continued. “Otherwise, Veil wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to make sure it was in a safe place, with Gary Worde in the mountains; a safe deposit box was no good, because Madison could have gained access to that. He put the record into a kind of time capsule without knowing if, or how, he would ever use it. But what kind of record? Veil certainly didn’t walk out of any army stockade with secret documents in his pocket, and he would have had no access to any kind of documentation after he was out. So whatever was in the packet had to have been created by him. When I realized that, everything else fell into place. Vivid reds, browns, and greens combined with flesh tones are the colors he used when he first began to paint. Those are also the colors he’d used in the painting he left for me in the secret compartment in his loft, the colors of men, blood, and jungle.”

  “Kendry could have gone up there and gotten the slides himself, at the beginning,” Garth said, unrelieved bitterness in his voice. “Instead, he let you and me roam around on a Goddamn scavenger hunt.”

  “It’s arguable whether he could have gone himself, Garth. Remember that he’d been under constant surveillance from the time he’d been kicked out of the army. Madison must have known about his visits to Worde, and after the botched assassination attempt Madison’s men were almost certainly watching those mountains; they could have been waiting for him to try to go to Worde long before we ever went up there. We provided the necessary distraction for Madison’s forces. It’s also arguable whether he could have done anything with the slides himself even if he had been able to get them out without being ambushed. Without someone else to bear witness to the truth, he would have been just a discredited man peddling a bizarre slide show while constantly having to look over his shoulder.”

  “So now we’re the ones who constantly have to look over our shoulders.”

  “He couldn’t have done it alone, Garth. He needed us.”

  It was obvious from the expression on Garth’s face that he didn’t agree, but he let it go. “A hell of a piece of quick thinking under pressure, brother,” Garth said, putting a huge hand affectionately on my shoulder.

  Garth sat down on the edge of the bed, and we remained silent for some time, staring out the window as the wounded sun continued to sink down behind the monument.

  “I should have killed that fuck, Andrews,” Garth continued at last in a matter-of-fact tone that startled me and sent a little chill up my spine.

  I eased myself up into a sitting position, next to Garth, and looked into his face in the gathering darkness. What I saw, I didn’t like. “I’m glad you didn’t, brother. I don’t think we could have gotten clear of that, and I like happy endings.”

  “We’re never going to get clear of this, Mongo. Madison’s been trying to kill us with bullets; these guys are trying to do the same thing, in a different way. There isn’t going to be any happy ending.”

  “Why not? You said the same thing when we were caught up in Valhalla, and we were in one hell of a lot worse shape then. I think we’re in a pretty good position right now.”

  “I just wish I’d killed him when I had the chance,” Garth said distantly, after a long pause.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say, and we again lapsed into silence. After a few minutes I stood up and groped my way around the suite until I found a light switch.

  We had been asked to be patient and wait. We were patient, and we waited. At six thirty there was a knock at the door. It was one of the Secret Service agents asking if it was a convenient time for us to be taken to dinner. It was a most convenient time, and if our attire—jeans, denim shirts, and hiking boots—did not seem quite appropriate for going out to dinner in Washington, nothing in the demeanor of the agent indicated that he thought so, or that there would be any problem.

  There wasn’t. We were taken to one of Washington’s better restaurants. Arrangements had obviously been made beforehand, for the maître d’ nodded to the two agents as we entered, and we were ushered through a velvet-roped gate, past a number of startled diners, to a candle-lit table in a private booth at the rear of the main dining room.

  “Shannon’s laying it on a bit thick, isn’t he?” Garth said to one of the agents sitting across from us.

  “The captain has been asked to order for us, Lieutenant,” the stern-faced man replied evenly. “I hope you approve. You won’t be disappointed.”

  We weren’t. An hour and a half later, stuffed with French cuisine and fine wine, Garth and I followed the agents out of the restaurant to the waiting limousine that had brought us.

  Followed by a second car with four Secret Service agents in it, we rode slowly through the night streets of Washington. I had assumed we were going to be driven to the White House, but that wasn’t the direction in which we were headed. Finally the car pulled up to the entrance of a park, and I knew where we were. Up and down the street, spaced twenty yards or so apart, were police cars, with their lights off. The officers standing on the sidewalk were alert and watchful.

  “The president will meet you at the war memorial,” one of the agents said as he opened the car door for us. “Just follow the sidewalk.”

  Garth and I ducked under the wooden barricade that had been placed across the entrance and headed down the sidewalk into the park. There were lights over the wal
k, but they had been dimmed to the point where they were not much brighter than the dappled moonlight. We walked in silence, for there seemed nothing left to say to each other. We had “come in from the cold” only to end in an even colder place, and now we were on our way to meet the supreme commander of what was beginning to look like just one more enemy army.

  We came around a bend in the path and suddenly found ourselves confronted by the startling sight of the Viet Nam War Memorial, its long slab of polished black stone faintly glowing in the moonlight like a sacred obelisk left behind by some ancient, extinct tribe of warriors.

  Suddenly a man with a walkie-talkie stepped out from behind a clump of bushes to our left. “The lieutenant has to say here,” the Secret Service agent said, blocking Garth’s path.

  “Bullshit!” I snapped, moving closer to Garth. “My brother and I go down there together, or we don’t go at all.”

  “Then you don’t go at all,” the agent said evenly, looking directly at me. “You won’t get around us on this one. We didn’t approve of meeting here in the first place. We lost the battle on choosing the meeting site, but we won’t budge on choosing who goes down there. We’re responsible for the safety of the president. The lieutenant is dangerous; he attacked a presidential aide.”

  “Fuck you, thank you, and good night.” I said, and turned around. I started to walk away, but was stopped when Garth gripped my shoulder and turned me around again.

  “Go ahead, Mongo,” Garth murmured. “This man’s just doing his job, and he happens to be right. You go ahead and see what Shannon has to say. I’m feeling very spooky, and I really don’t care to meet with the son-of-a-bitch anyway.”

  “Okay, brother. You all right?”

  “I’m all right. Go take care of business, and don’t give him shit.”

  I squeezed Garth’s hand, then walked ahead, across a short open expanse, to the lip of the recess in which, like a monster shard in a great, rectangular bomb crater, the Viet Nam War Memorial stood. Again, I found myself profoundly moved by the stark simplicity and awesome power of the sculpture. As had been intended, the black stone slab cut not only through space, but also through all the pretensions and desperate, muddled rationales all sides offered to try to explain the most complex and ultimately futile war the United States of America had ever fought.

  I slowly descended a ramp into the magnificent hole in the ground, walked up to the granite, and touched my fingertips to the sharp lines of the stonecutter’s art in the center of the wall of names. Keeping my left hand on the wall, I moved to my right until I finally came to the last of the names. The rest of the wall was naked black stone awaiting more bad news about bones unearthed from unmarked graves halfway around the world.

  There were some names that should be added, I thought—the victims, including two children, who had died in the fire that had destroyed my apartment building; Loan Ka and his family, and Kathy; Gary Worde, and the six fighting men of America’s armed forces sent to die in shame on a madman’s murderous errand.

  I was most impressed by the monument—and angry that Kevin Shannon should use the mystery of the site in an embarrassingly obvious effort to manipulate my feelings. I resented the banality and predictability of his action and found it depressing.

  I heard footsteps behind me, and I turned as Kevin Shannon, casually dressed in charcoal slacks, black loafers, black turtleneck, and a heavy white cardigan sweater, came down the ramp and walked toward me at a brisk pace. He was shorter in person than he appeared on television or in photographs. His thick, gray-streaked black hair was cut sharply in the swept-back style that was his trademark. His craggy, fifty-seven-year-old face could not be described as handsome, but his features were nonetheless striking, with a square jaw, pronounced cheekbones, and bright, black eyes. He looked like a man who could control himself as well as situations, and it was this bearing—along with his political views—that had first attracted me to him. I had believed in Shannon, believed he was somehow different from the mangled politicians who usually survive the internecine warfare that is our political system to gain election to high office. Now I felt like a fool.

  His grip, when he shook my hand, was firm. “Good evening, Dr. Frederickson,” Kevin Shannon said in his pleasing baritone.

  “Good evening, sir.” Courtesy costs nothing.

  Shannon motioned for me to sit down on the stone bench behind us. I did, and he sat beside me. He crossed his legs, reached into a pocket of his cardigan, and to my surprise, brought out a small silver flask emblazoned with the presidential seal. He unscrewed the silver cap, drew a shot glass out of the same pocket, set them both down on the bench between us.

  “Your rather extensive dossier indicates you like Scotch, Frederickson. I thought you might like to share a drink with me. The flask is for you.”

  I hoped that the offer of a presidential souvenir at the beginning of our discussion was an attempt at humor, but I had the most disquieting feeling that it wasn’t. Like Burton Andrews, probably like most people who crave for and exercise power, Kevin Shannon seemed to have had his soul, as well as a good deal of common sense, displaced by a preoccupation with symbols. It was at once fascinating and unnerving, and I wondered how much of this presidential stroking I was going to have to put up with before we got down to business.

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  Shannon shrugged, set down the flask next to the shot glass and cap. “What do you want, Frederickson?” he asked, leaning toward me and resting his forearms across his knees.

  “I thought Burton Andrews might have told you.”

  “You tell me.”

  “Justice.”

  “We might disagree over what constitutes justice.”

  “Let the courts decide. That’s what they’re there for.”

  Shannon leaned back, drew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He offered me one, which I declined. He lit one, inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly. “What, in your opinion, would constitute justice in this matter?”

  “At the very least, Orville Madison should be sent to prison for the rest of his life.”

  “What about Veil Kendry?”

  “He should be left alone.”

  “Ah. That might or might not be just, but it would certainly be a circumvention of the law. No?”

  “No. Not if he received a presidential pardon in advance—something on the order of what Gerald Ford provided for Richard Nixon would seem appropriate. There were extenuating circumstances for everything he’s done. He’s killed, yes—but only in self-defense, or in defense of others.”

  “He’s killed for revenge.”

  “That, too—which is why a presidential pardon is needed. But we know, and I’m sure Veil knows, that things aren’t going to work out that way. I can’t speak for Veil, but I’m certain that when he sees Orville Madison being dealt with appropriately, he’ll come in peacefully and surrender himself to the authorities.”

  “Oh, good,” Shannon said, lighting a second cigarette from the butt of his first. “That’s just what I need. With a little luck, Madison’s trial will be over in a year or so, and then Kendry’s trial can begin. Are you serious? My entire term would be dominated by headlines about Archangel and a defrocked, murderous secretary of state. Do you think I intend to allow myself to be mortally crippled by events before my tenure in office has barely begun?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you intend, sir.”

  “Do you think I wanted to become president so that my administration could be blown out of the water before it had even set sail?” Shannon continued like a man whose carefully prepared speech had been interrupted. “Do you think I will jeopardize this adminstration’s place in history because of one man’s mistake?”

  “Mistake? You’re talking about a man who’s killed—”

  “I know what I’m talking about, Frederickson. I’m talking about an entire administration imperiled because of a long-standing personal grudge between two men. I won’t have it. What yo
u propose is patently ridiculous. Frankly, I’m surprised at your naiveté.”

  “I wouldn’t presume to try and guess why you wanted to become president,” I replied curtly, trying to suppress my anger. “And if you’ll pardon my continuing naiveté, I don’t understand what you mean when you say that you won’t have it. You’re responsible for Orville Madison—not for his actions, because you couldn’t have known he was a lunatic, but for making certain he’s sufficiently punished for those actions.”

  “Mr. Madison has been totally neutralized, Frederickson.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means he’s lost all vestiges of power already. If you knew Orville Madison as well as I do—”

  “How well do you know him?”

  “Well, enough. As a matter of fact, our relationship goes back a good many years; I’m sure you’ll be interested to know that it goes back to the war in Southeast Asia. I was a congressman then, without a great deal of seniority, but I was rewarded for certain good political deeds by being named to a very prestigious, select, secret Senate-House committee that monitored intelligence activities in Southeast Asia. That’s how I met Madison, and he deeply impressed me. I knew he was ruthless, but certain kinds of jobs require ruthlessness; his was one of them. I respected him for his ability to get things done, and for his ability consistently to win skirmishes against other men who were every bit as ruthless as he was. I was one of the people who first heard about—and approved—the Archangel plan. I was also instrumental in cutting through about a thousand miles of red tape in order to get Colonel Po secretly into this country after the collapse of Saigon. I didn’t know about the affair with the Hmong village, or about Madison’s bit of business with Kendry. I never even knew why the plan had been abandoned. I’d like you to believe that.”

  “I do believe you, Mr. President, and I appreciate your candor.” It was the truth; indeed, I considered it a remarkable admission.

  “I thought you would. I’m telling you all this so that you can appreciate that I’m even more vulnerable to certain revelations than you thought I was. I might barely survive as a badly crippled president after the business about Orville Madison came out, but I would never survive being named as the man who helped bring Po into this country. I’d be forced to resign, and I don’t intend to let that happen. For Mr. Madison, complete loss of power is a punishment worse than death. I suspect Veil Kendry might even agree with me.”