I scribbled the names on the top leaf of a pad of paper sitting on the table between her grand inquisitor’s chair and my supplicant’s stool.
“You wait here,” she said. “I’ll look ’em up.”
AT ANY OTHER TIME I would have picked a book off one of the shelving carts and started reading. I’m a reader. As a rule I love books, but not that day. The only things I was interested in then breathed and bled or cried.
I sat there trying to come up with a plan for approaching General Thaddeus King. I couldn’t get to him on a military base, and even Gara’s precise records wouldn’t have a home address. That meant I had to use the phone. I’d have to find his number somewhere and call him.
But what would I say? That I knew about the scam he and Miles were up to? An approach like that might work on a street punk but not a soldier, certainly not a general. No. A general in this army had seen combat. He’d faced death and done things that would sicken any normal man.
And who was I to say that King knew anything about Miles’s criminal activities? Maybe I should tell King about Miles and see what he’d have to say about that.
But for subtle investigation, I’d have to meet him eye to eye. He wouldn’t give up his heart over the phone like some teenage girl.
Love over the phone was the wrong avenue of conjecture. It brought Bonnie to mind, curled up in the living- room chair, talking on the phone and laughing. Her voice got very deep when she laughed. Her head tilted back, and that long brown throat offered itself to me.
That image shattered any ability I had to resist the hurt. All I could do was stare at the buff-colored wall of the librarians’ lounge. I imagined my mind as that inarticulate, meaningless flat plane. It was a kind of temporary intellectual suicide.
“Was that a trick question?” Gara asked as she entered the room.
I looked up, and the mirth in her eyes died.
“What’s wrong with you, baby?”
“I . . .”
Gara pulled a chair up next to me and took my hands in hers. Gara had never touched me in all the time we’d been acquainted. She was a proper woman who didn’t want to give the wrong impression.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Just a problem at home. It’s all right. Nobody’s sick. Nobody’s dying.”
I took a deep breath and pulled away. “What you talkin’ about a trick?”
“There ain’t no General, Colonel, or Major Thaddeus King anywhere in the army, and the only Clarence Miles is a master sergeant in Berlin.”
“Can I smoke in here?” I asked.
“No, but I’ll allow it anyway. You look like you need somethin’.”
The inhalation of cancer-causing smoke felt like the first breath I’d taken in a long time. It reminded me of what a man, I’d forgotten his name, that was friends with my maternal grandfather used to say: “We born dyin’, boy,” he’d opine. “If it wasn’t for death, we’d nevah draw a breath.”
Everything Miles had said was a lie. What he’d said but not what I’d seen. They’d come armed and in force. They all had at least been in the military. They were killers and soldiers inasmuch as they were willing to put their lives, and others’ lives, on the line.
10
I always had a pretty good memory in times of stress. When I felt that my life was threatened or someone I loved was in danger, I began to pay very close attention to detail. It was like that when the liar Captain Miles and his men came in on me. Many of those details, including the decorated MP’s medals, had stuck in my mind.
One medal had red and yellow stripes with a bronze leaf across it and an ornate bronze circle dangling underneath; another had a yellow background with green and yellow stripes on it with a medal like a coin; the last ribbon was green, yellow, red, yellow, and green, holding up a bright red star.
Gara let me go into the small military library after seeing my haunted expression. She probably thought I was upset because someone I loved was dying or near death. If I had told her about Bonnie, she would probably have laughed and sent me packing. A broken heart was no reason to put her job in jeopardy.
The medals on my soldier’s chest were all earned in Vietnam: the Republic of Vietnam Gallantry Cross, the Vietnam Service Medal, and a medal given specifically for wounds.
I wrote down the names and came out to the lounge to see Gara once again in her big green chair. She’d finished Salinger’s masterpiece and moved on to some fat tome. She was drinking from a sixteen-ounce soda bottle, smirking at the text.
“I have a need,” I said, all the sadness and remorse gone from my face and my voice.
“We all do,” she replied, continuing her reading and drinking.
“I need to know what soldiers have received these three medals in the last five years.”
I placed the list on the table next to her.
“Here at the library we lead the horse to water, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “We don’t get down on our knees and drink for him.”
I placed one of Miles’s hundred-dollar bills on top of the list. That was just another example of my emotional distress. If I had been in a normal state, I would have put a twenty down. Twenty dollars was enough for what I was asking. But there was something poetic, something that resonated with justice, about paying for my information with the very money the liar had given me.
