The Day Before Midnight

Arbatov has uncovered. The great Gregor Arbatov has penetrated to the very center of the capitalist war machine. He has extraordinary documents on the crisis in central Maryland, and you thought he was nothing but a sniveling fool. Well, young whelp, it’s you who’ll do some sniveling soon enough, you and your powerful uncle Arkady Pashin, who’ll do you no good at all. You’re the one who’ll be recalled to the Mother Country, not the great Gregor Arbatov.”

It was such a wonderful moment, he hated to relinquish it, but at that second some equally drunken American prodded him, wanting the phone, and he realized he stood in a smoky bar in College Park while a great American whore shook her milk-jug tits at him and he stood and breathed cigarette smoke and clung to a phone that was not being answered.

Walls was dead and had begun to putrefy. The smell of decay, foul and noxious, reached his nostrils through death, and involuntarily, he squinched his face to avoid it, and threw his arm over his face, even in the grave. Amazingly, the arm still moved, if only in the medium of dirt. He had a brief moment of black clarity, and then the stench penetrated again, enough to make a man insane it was so foul, and he coughed, gagging, and a shiver rolled through him, deep from the bone, and as he shivered he shook himself from the shallow coating of coal dust that covered him.

Alive!

He blinked.

God, it was awful, the smell.

He pulled himself upright. His head ached, one arm felt numb, his knees knocked and quivered, and he was terribly thirsty. The air was full of dust; his tongue and lips and teeth were coated in dust. He tried to stagger ahead, but something held him back, pulling at him. He spun to discover it was the damned shotgun, its loose sling looped around his arm. With a grunt he pulled it free, searching his belt simultaneously for his angle-head flashlight. He found it.

Whoo-eee. No going back, no way, no how, no sir. The collapse of the tunnel, in whose rubble he had been loosely buried, completely sealed him off. His beam flashed across the wreckage, revealing only a new and glistening wall of coal and dirt. He was cooked, he now saw.

Dead, he thought. Dead, dead, dead.

He turned to explore what little remained of the sarcophagus. Blank walls greeted his search in the bright circle of light. It was the same end of story they had discovered before the tunnel fight. It was like the door in his cell. Fuck Niggers.

Walls laughed.

You die slow, not fast, he thought. Them white boys have their way with your nigger ass anyhows.

But still, the smell. He winced. The odor of corruption he recognized instantly, having encountered it so many times in the long months underground back in the ’Nam, when the gooks could not get their dead out of the tunnels and so left them buried in the walls, where occasionally, after a fight or a detonation, they fell out, or rather pieces of them did, and with them came this same terrible odor.

Man, how could it smell so? It only your old pal death.

Yet as he pieced the situation together, his curiosity was also aroused. For the smell had to come from somewhere. It could not come from nowhere and it had not been there before the explosion.

He began to sniff through the chamber for that spot where the odor was at its most absolutely unendurable. Led by his nose, his fingers searched the crevices in the walls. It didn’t take long.

Shit, all right. Yes, sir, here it was. Walls found it. A kind of crack in the wall, and from the crack, which was low off the floor, there came a kind of breeze and from the breeze the moist, dank, terrible stench.

Walls searched his belt. Yes, dammit, he still had it, a goddamned entrenching tool. He remembered now that the damned thing had banged against his legs in the long tunnel fight. Removing it, he quickly unfolded the blade, locked it into place, and with strong, hard movements began to smash at the wall, scraping and plunging. The air filled with more dust, and his eyes began to sting, but still he kept at it, thrusting and banging away, amazed at how swiftly it went. With a final crack the wall before him heaved and collapsed. He stepped back. The dust swirled in his single beam of light, but yes, yes, there it was, a tunnel.

A way out.

Or no, maybe not out. But to somewhere.

Faces. The world had become faces.

“Now, these are American military, Mrs. Thiokol. We put this file together rather hurriedly, but these are the faces of men who possess the skill necessary to plan and execute the sort of operation we’re dealing with at South Mountain.”

She was amazed by how much she despised soldiers. These were exactly the kind of men she was never attracted to, that made her yawn and mope. If she had seen any of these bland, uncomplicated serious faces at a party, she would have run in the opposite direction. They looked like insurance agents, with their little haircuts all so neat, their eyes all so unclouded, their square, jowly heads atop their square, strong shoulders, over neatly pressed uniform lapels, with great mosaics of decoration on their square, manly chests. They looked so boring. Their business was supposed to be death, but they looked like IBM salesmen. They looked grim and task-oriented and hideously self-important and dull.

Still, now and then there’d be one a little more interesting than the others — with, say, a little pain in his eyes or a faraway look or a peculiar haunted look. Or maybe even the suggestion of evil, as if the owner enjoyed the power of death that was his profession.

“This one.”

“This one. You know this one?”

“No. No, I’m just curious. He looks as if he’s had an interesting life.”

One of the men breathed heavily, almost a sigh.

“He was a colonel in the Special Forces. He was in Vietnam for seven straight years and spent a long time out there in what they called Indian country.”

She couldn’t begin to imagine what that meant.

“But, yes, he has had an interesting life. He’s now in Bangkok, Thailand, where he runs a very proficient private army that protects a heroin merchant. Could we go on, Mrs. Thiokol?”

“I’m not being very much help, am I?”

“Don’t worry about pleasing us, Mrs. Thiokol. Pleasing us has no meaning. Finding the man or men behind all this, that has some meaning. Fred, would you get me another cup of coffee?”

She went on. But none of them bore the faintest resemblance to that charming, forceful man in the Israeli consulate that morning.

“I’m sorry. They’re beginning to blur together. I’ve been looking at them for hours now. I don’t think he’s here.” Somehow she suspected he wouldn’t be.

“You’ve been looking at them for about half an hour. It doesn’t appear to me that you’ve been concentrating.”

This irritated her.

“I have been concentrating. I have a visual imagination, and that man’s face is in it. I know that face. I can call it up even now, I can remember it. Do you want me to go through it again?”

“No.”

“Maybe if you had one of those police sketch artists I could describe him, and then the computer could help you find him.”

“We’ve found that’s a very long shot. Statistically, it almost never works out.”

“Maybe I could draw him. I mean, I’m—”

They looked at one another as though they really were Three Dumb Men. You could fly a plane through those open mouths. It seemed so elementary to her.

“An artist, goddammit!” one of them yelled. “Yes, goddammit. Why the hell didn’t we think of that sooner?”

“It’s my fault, I should have—”