'I'm sure you're merely being modest. So why are you here, if you're not writing a book?'
'Your son's death is somehow tied up with something that hasn't yet been answered. It's also tied up, I think, with the death of that young man I mentioned earlier, another Marine. I just have a glimmer of it, I don't get it yet. I was hoping you could tell me what you knew, that maybe in that way there could be some understanding.'
'You said on the phone you didn't think my son killed himself. You think he was murdered.'
'Yes.'
'Why?'
'I don't yet know.'
'Do you have any evidence?'
'Circumstantial. There seems to be some level of intelligence involvement in this situation. He may have seen something or someone. But it seems clear to me that there were spooks involved.'
'So my son wasn't a moron who blew himself up for nothing except the piety of the left and the sniggering contempt of the right?'
'That would be my theory, yes, ma'am.'
'What would be more of your theory? Where is this heading?'
'Possibly he was used as a dupe. Possibly he was murdered, his body left in the ruins to make it look like it was a protest thing. His body would make that almost certain.'
She looked hard at him.
'You're not a crank, are you? You look sensible, but you're not some awful man with a radio show or a newsletter or a conspiracy theory?'
'No, ma'am.'
'And if you do come to understand this, what would you do with that understanding?'
'Use it to stay alive. A man is trying to kill me. I think he's also a Spock. If I'm to stop him, I have to figure out why he's after me.'
'It sounds very dangerous and romantic.'
'It's a pretty crappy way to live.'
'Well, if you went into most houses in America and laid out that story, you'd be dismissed in a second. But my husband spent twenty-eight years in the diplomatic corps, and I knew spooks, Mr. Swagger. They were malicious little people who were capable of anything to advance their own ends. Theirs, ours, anyone's. So I know what spooks do. And if the spooks of the world killed my son, then the world should know that.'
'Yes, ma'am,' said Bob.
'Michael,' she called, 'tell Amanda Mr. Swagger is staying for lunch. I will show him around the house and then afterwards he and I will have a long talk. If anybody comes looking to kill him, please tell the gentleman we are not to be disturbed.'
'Yes, ma'am,' said the butler.
It is exactly as it was,' she said, 'on that last day.'
He looked around. The studio had been built out back, in what had once been servants' quarters. The house was small, but its walls had been ripped out, leaving one huge raw room with red brick walls, a gigantic window that looked down across the orchards. It still smelled of oil paint and turpentine. Dirty brushes stood in old paint cans on a bench, the floor was spotted with paint drops and dust. Three or four canvases lay against the wall, evidently finished, one more was still on the easel.
'The FBI went through this, I guess?' Bob asked.
'They did, rather offhandedly. I mean, after all, he was dead by that time.'
'Yes, ma'am.'
'Come look at this one. It's his last. It's very interesting.'
She took Bob to a painting clamped rigidly on an easel.
'Rather trite,' she said.
'Yet I suppose it was the correct project for him to express his anxieties.'
It was, unbelievably, a bald eagle, with the classic white head, brown, majestic body stout with power, anchored to a tree limb by clenching talons. Bob looked at it, trying to see what was so different, so alive, so painful.
Then he had it: this wasn't a symbol at all, but a bird, a living creature. It had obviously just survived some ordeal, and the gleam in its eyes wasn't the predator's gleam, the winner's smug beam of superiority, but the survivor's dazed, traumatic shock. It was called the thousand-yard stare in the Corps, the look that stole into the eyes after the last frontal had been repulsed with bayonets and entrenching tools. Bob saw that the talons which gripped this tree branch were dark with blood and that the bird's feathers, low on its stout body, were spotted with blood.
He bent closer, looked more carefully. It was amazing how subtly Trig got all the components: the slight sense of the blood spots being heavier, moist against the fluff of the other feathers.
He looked at the bird's single visible eye: it seemed haunted by horrors unforgotten, its iris an incredibly detailed mix of smaller color pigments that were different in color yet formed a whole, a living whole. Bob could sense the muscles twitching under its netting of feathers, and the breath coming heavily to it after much exertion.
