“One second, please.” He heard her yell, “Paul, Paul, honey. It’s some marine thing.”
The voice came on.
“Hello?”
“Captain Chardy?”
“Well, no one’s called me that in quite a while. I’m a high school basketball coach now.”
“Sir, I don’t know if you’ll remember me. I NCOed up at Base Camp Alice near Cambo and briefed you when you came in country in August ’68. I served with you for six months before I DEROSed home. My name is Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger and—”
“Bob the Nailer! My God, yes, I remember you. You were the best recon team leader SOG ever had and when you went back for your third tour—well, Gunny, it’s an honor to talk to Bob the Nailer. Hell yes, I remember.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Thank
“Sir, reason I’m calling, I’m trying to find another man in country with us. He was civilian, spook type. You were closer to him than I was. You and him ran a number of missions together as I recall.”
“Frenchy.”
“Yes sir.”
“Oh, Christ, I haven’t thought about Frenchy in years. Poor old Frenchy.” Bob thought he heard something in the man’s voice, some odd tone: regret, buried pain, the stirring of memories best left untouched in the darkness.
“Sir?”
“Well, Gunny, the Frenchman didn’t make it. His adventures caught up with him.”
Bob cursed silently.
“Frenchy was pure spook, that I’ll tell you. He crammed several hundred lifetimes into one.”
“Yes sir.”
“Yes, well, he recruited me. I spent, well, it’s not worth going into, a long story, not a very pretty one. After the war, I spent four years on an Agency contract and Frenchy was my case officer. I went back for a hitch TDY in ’82. But Frenchy, well—”
He paused. Bob could sense the pain.
“I shouldn’t tell you this. It’s all off the record, you never talked to me. Frenchy was captured and killed by a Soviet GRU colonel in Vienna in 1974. Tortured to death. Not a pretty story.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Bob said, and then had to ask the next question: “What happened to the colonel?”
“Somebody blew him out of his socks,” said Chardy in a voice that said he didn’t want any more questions asked.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead, Gunny.”
“What was Frenchy Short capable of? Under orders, or not under orders, what would he do?”
Chardy thought a bit.
Finally, he said, “Anything. He was capable of anything. The truth is, even though they had his name on a plaque on the wall at Langley, Frenchy sold me to the Russians in 1974, when I was in Kurdistan. There were unpleasant consequences. He had no conscience. He was a great man who was capable of great evil, not that uncommon a combination. Whatever you think he did, he probably did. And worse.”
“Did he ever say anything about a job in Arkansas in the fifties? An Agency scam, something very black involving infrared stuff.”
“Gunny, he never talked about the past. And if you’d seen him operate, you wouldn’t want to know about the past.”
“Yes sir. Thanks very much.”
“You okay, Gunny? You need help or anything?”
“No sir. I’m fine. You told me what I needed to know.”
“Good luck to you, Sergeant. Semper Fi.”
“Semper Fi, sir.”
He turned to Russ. “Good man. But goddammit, now where we going to go?”
“What about—to dinner?” Russ said.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Bob.
They went to the motel restaurant and sat down. Bob ordered a cheeseburger, Russ the tuna salad. But Bob wouldn’t or couldn’t talk. Russ had never known a man quite like this: he just locked himself off, still, almost in repose, his face dark and wary, his eyes alert, but a definite No Trespassing sign impressed in the set of lines. He only pretended to eat. Something about Chardy or Frenchy, or that lost war and the men it devoured, was dogging him, Russ guessed.
“Uh, I have an idea,” said Russ.
“What?”
“I said, I have an idea.”
“Lord spare us,” said Bob.
“Frenchy Short is gone; you’re not going to get anything out of the Agency, that’s a given. So we have to move from what we’ve got. Our first principle: your father
Bob nodded.
“Miss Connie,” he said. He remembered her too, from all those years ago: an imposing, beautiful woman, in her fifties, who came from the East and was married to and widowed by Rance Longacre, the county aristocrat. She had a son: he died young too. She had a kind of doomed quality about her: everybody she ever knew or loved died. He had some memory coming home on leave back sometime in the early sixties, before the war, that someone—his mother possibly?—had told him she’d left and gone back. No, his mother was dead then. Sam. Sam knew her.
“She’d be in her nineties now,” Bob said, “that is, if she’s alive, if her mind hasn’t gone, if we could find her, if she would talk.”
“Maybe Sam would know where she went.”
“He would have said something. I have the impression—I don’t know why—that there may have been something between them but it ended badly. He never talks about her.”
“Um,” said Russ, digging into his salad.
“Damn, boy, don’t you ever eat meat?”
“It isn’t good for you.”
“Hell, it didn’t do me any harm. I’m fifty goddamned years old and I may live another two or three days if I’m lucky.”
He smiled finally, and Russ saw that he was joking again.
“But it’s a good idea,” he continued. “It’s a damned good idea. Maybe Sam will know, wouldn’t that be nice. We’ll call him tonight. Maybe he’s found that coroner’s brief or whatever it was.”
They got back to the room and called, but there was no answer, and Russ tried ten more times.
“I wonder where that old bastard is,” Bob said.
“Maybe he’s got a new girlfriend,” Russ said.
Finally, in the morning, somebody answered at Sam’s.
The voice, vaguely familiar, confounded Bob.
“Sam? Uh, I’m trying to reach Sam Vincent.”
“Who is this, please?” asked the man.
“Ah, my name is Bob Lee Swagger and—”
“Bob! Bob, it’s John Vincent, Sam’s eldest son.”
John was a physician in Little Rock, Bob knew; and he also knew the tone of voice, that hushed, exhausted tone that communicated in its remoteness the bad news.
