smile, too tight, and he felt as though he should touch her. “It was all so long ago. And I heard about your problems. Nobody is supposed to talk, but it always gets out. Walk with me, will you? Let’s talk. I saw so many people today that I once knew. But I didn’t want to talk to any of them. But then I saw you.”
He fell into step beside her. They were on a path, under trees, on a hill. It was bright and he wanted to put on his sunglasses. Washington, like a white, phony, movie-set Rome, lay straddling the horizon. Chardy pinched the bridge of his nose because his head was beginning to hurt.
“It’s terrible about Bill, isn’t it?” Marion said.
“Poor Old Bill. But he lasted longer than most,” Chardy said, and almost instantly regretted it: Bill lasted longer than Frenchy, floating in the Danube.
But she seemed not to have heard.
“What are you doing now?” he asked.
“I’m married again. My husband teaches English at a branch of the University of Maryland, out near Baltimore.”
“Sounds great. A nice, calm life. I guess after the Frenchman—” He let it end, a wild memory of Frenchy Short swirling in his head. Frenchy had cheated on her horribly, every chance he got, but who could hold anything against the Frenchman? She’d probably known, and forgiven him. Everybody forgave the Frenchman — it was one of his great gifts. He was irrepressibly childish, charming as black sin, without scruple, maliciously clever, magnificently brave. He was one of those rare men built for combat and his joyous ferocity, his sheer heat, always left Chardy feeling pale in comparison. Frenchy had taught Chardy everything and Chardy owed him a lot. Frenchy also invented jams and wiggled out of them, coming most vividly alive in the violent moments of extrication.
“Even the Frenchman was slowing down,” Marion said. “Near the end.”
“I can’t imagine a slowed-down Frenchy,” Chardy said. He didn’t really want to think about it. Though it was true Frenchy also had a down phase, a real killer of a crash, when he could hardly make himself leave his bed.
“I don’t know, Paul. He’d mellowed, or burned out. Maybe he was just tired of it all.”
“Occupational hazard,” Chardy said pointlessly. He was trying to remember about kids. Frenchy never talked about kids, he was always too self-involved. Were there kids, little Frenchys, to feed and care about like the three troopers Old Bill had left? Frenchy might have made a good father — but Chardy suspected he might also have been the kind of man best with other people’s children, for whom he can play hero and never have to change diapers. But Chardy wasn’t sure one way or the other — and could think of nothing to say to poor Marion.
It is always hardest on the women, he thought. We chase around the world, playing cowboy on Agency expense accounts; they stay here and get leathery or brittle and try not to resent being sealed off so completely, until one day they realize they live in an entirely different world from their husbands’. Or maybe a call comes, with inadequate details, like the call Bill’s wife had gotten or Marion. And then they get a folded flag from a stiff young Army sergeant, a few words with an oily grief merchant like Sam Melman, a little pension, and the door. This melancholy series of thoughts brought him to Johanna, for whom he still ached. He would never seal her off, he swore; finish this business, and that was it. No more secrets, no more operations. He was done with it.
Marion, meanwhile, was talking with considerable animation.
“… and I’d never seen him so fascinated, not in years.”
Now what the hell was she talking about?
“It meant some kind of security, too. Schlesinger was DCI then and he fired about two thousand people in six weeks and Frenchy was terrified he was on the next list. And he was so tired of the travel, the violence. So I think Frenchy was happiest then. I think it was his best time. He learned so fast; he was so good at it.”
“Uh-huh,” Chardy said dumbly, trying not to tip her off that he’d not been listening and had no idea what she was talking about.
“And then the Vienna thing came up. He just had to go — one last fling, I guess. But he loved those computers, he really did.”
Computers? Frenchy Short, computers?
“The computers,” Chardy said.
It didn’t sound like Frenchy. Or maybe it did. Maybe Frenchy had taken a hard look at what was coming and realized the day of the cowboy was over. The future belonged to robots: to computers, to satellites, to microwave processors, to lasers. ELINT they called it in the trade, Electronic Intelligence, as opposed to HUMINT, Human Intelligence. So Frenchy had jumped to the side of the robots, the Melmans. Curious images floated around Chardy’s head — he had no experience with computers and so to imagine Frenchy among them was difficult.
“I just can’t see Frenchy with computers,” Chardy said.
“It was the future, he said. He was tired of the past.”
“He was thinking of you, Marion, I guess.”
“It’s nice of you to say that, Paul. We both know better. The Frenchman never thought of me.”
“Marion—”
“No, it’s all right. It doesn’t matter. Don’t apologize. But he was thinking of
A jet filled the sky, a 727 roaring down the Potomac toward National Airport, its noise burying their words. The great silver craft banked as it sped by, close enough to be touched. Its landing gear locked down. They had climbed and now stood atop one of the hills across which the cemetery spread, and it all lay before them, the white markers spilling into the valleys and the clumps of dogwood, and beyond that a band of highways, a sluggish brown river, and finally a blazing white city. It looked even more like a movie Rome from here.
“I hate Washington,” said Chardy. “I hate the people, the newspapers, the pretty women. It’s no city for guys like Frenchy and me. I just hate it.” His own sudden passion amazed him. But he did hate it.
“It’s just a place,” Marion said.
A cool wind whipped the leaves, chilling Chardy. He’d left his overcoat in his car, from which he was now, in his wanderings with Marion, a mile distant.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I interrupted you. I’m not much company today, I’m afraid.”
“Funerals depress everyone. Please don’t worry about it, Paul.”
“Thanks.”
“I was telling you that Frenchy was thinking of you at the end.”
“That’s right.”
“He had a message for you. He told me especially to tell you. But then he died and it was a difficult time and then I didn’t see you and I started another life. The years went by. But now I remember. Seeing you, standing by yourself up on that hill with your new beard, I remembered.”
“A message?” said Chardy, curious.
“ ‘Marion,’ he said, ‘Marion, when Paul gets back, tell him to fetch the shoe that fits. Got that? Fetch the shoe that fits? He’ll know what I’m talking about.’”
Chardy couldn’t keep a sudden cruel grin off his face.
“What does it mean, Paul?”
“Oh, Marion, it goes back so far, to another time. A terrible time. I hate to tell you.”
“You can tell me, Paul. I’m a big girl.”
“When we were running our missions into the North up around the DMZ with the Nung people, there was a Chinese opium merchant in the area named Hsu. H-S-U. Pronounced ‘shoe.’ Anyway, one of our patrols got bounced bad, and we just got out of there with our hides. It was a bad, bad time. And then somebody told us this Hsu was working for the North Vietnamese. He was their agent; he’d infiltrated our area to get a look at our operations. He was a very bad guy, it turned out. Well, we had our contacts too. We set him up. We let it be known that he’d done some work for
“Marion, you’re horrified. Look, we were in the middle of an ugly kind of business. People were getting greased left and right. It had come out that up north they’d put out a fifty-thousand-piaster bounty on our heads. You never knew which way was up and you went out on these long patrols with the Nungs and you never knew if you were coming back. It was a hard time, a difficult time, and nobody knows or cares about it anymore. And a lot of things seemed funny then that don’t now.” He was irritated that she seemed so offended. What did she think Frenchy’s job was all those years?
