Twilight at Mac's Place

else, clamped it shut instead, nodded good-bye, turned and walked away.

“What kind of report you think Brother Undean’ll turn in?” Tinker Burns asked, once the analyst was out of earshot.

Still staring at Undean’s back, Haynes said, “ ‘How I Alone Swelled the Crowd at Steady Haynes’s Grave by Twenty-five Percent.’ ”

Burns chuckled and made a quick survey of the cemetery slope with its rows of matching white headstones. “When I was fixing up my pass and getting directions, they told me they were burying Steady not far from where they’d buried two other great Americans, Lee Marvin and John Mitchell. How’d you get ’em to plant him here?”

“Isabelle arranged it,” Haynes said.

Burns looked at her. “Blackmail?”

“What else?” she said.

“They know it was you?”

“Of course.”

Burns shook his great head in appreciation, chuckled again and said, “Well, it by God deserves a great lunch and all we can drink.”

Without waiting for their acceptance of his invitation, which he obviously took for granted, Burns asked Gelinet whether she had a car. After she nodded, Haynes volunteered he had come by taxi.

“Then you ride with me, Granny, and Isabelle can meet us there.”

“Where?” she asked.

“What about Mac’s Place?” Tinker Burns said. “If it’s still in business.”

Chapter 3

The man with the courtly air and the bald head turned from the seventh-floor window at 1:13 P.M. and dropped into his high-backed leather chair with a sigh just as Gilbert Undean finished the last of his egg salad sandwich on whole-wheat toast.

The man in the high-backed chair was Hamilton Keyes, who had sent down for the sandwich after learning that Undean had not yet eaten. After Undean licked a trace of mayonnaise from the left corner of his mouth, carefully folded the unused paper napkin and stuck it down into the right-hand pocket of his brown herringbone jacket for possible future use, Hamilton Keyes said, “Steady was never in any branch of the service, you know.”

“Wrong,” Undean said. “He was in Korea in ’fifty and ’fifty-one.”

“But not in the service,” said Keyes, leaning back in the leather chair and resting his feet on one corner of the 137-year-old rosewood desk his rich wife had given him as a fifteenth wedding anniversary present. He had given her a copy of the 1915 Woodberry Society edition of The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, numbered (No. 27) and signed by George Edward Woodberry himself. Keyes had acquired the copy at a Georgetown garage sale (where it had been called an estate sale) for $3.50 after realizing it was worth between five and seven hundred dollars.

“We talking about the same Steadfast Haynes?” Undean said.

Keyes smiled slightly and nodded. A careerist, Keyes only recently had realized he had gone as high as he would ever go in the agency. The realization had come not as a shock, or even as a disappointment, but rather as a curious kind of relief, and he now took an almost morbid interest in the progressive atrophy of his ambition.

Undean said, “Well, if he wasn’t in the Army in Korea, what the fuck was he doing there?”

“He was a C.O.”

“Different Steady Haynes then,” said Undean, who had known the courtly man since 1962, when, fresh out of Brown with a full head of hair and even then a certain mannered courtliness, Hamilton Keyes had joined the agency as a probationer.

“Steady was with the American Friends Service Committee,” Keyes said. “The Quakers. He drove an ambulance or carried a stretcher or passed out doughnuts. Something humanitarian. He was attached to the Seventh Division when the Chinese hordes overran it on Thanksgiving Day in nineteen fifty. It was Thanksgiving, wasn’t it?”

“Around in there,” Undean agreed. “He get captured?”

“No, but during the retreat he hooked up with six GIs, all that was left of a rifle company, who were hell-bent on surrendering. Steady argued against it. The ringleader, or lead surrenderer, I suppose one might call him, aimed his piece at Steady and told him to shut up.”

“And?”

“And Steady, of course, refused. The ringleader shot at him and missed, probably on purpose. Our Quaker friend snatched a submachine gun, a Thompson, I believe, from the hands of one of the other GIs.” Keyes looked doubtful for a moment. “They did use Thompsons in Korea, didn’t they?”

“Must’ve.”

“At any rate, Steady promised to shoot the first fucker who tried to surrender. The ringleader fired again and this time the round grazed Steady’s left arm just above the elbow. Steady shot him dead. After that he led the remaining five down to Hungnam, where they were evacuated.”

“Leaving his faith behind,” Undean said.

“He may not have lost it completely until after the five he led to safety preferred murder charges against him, which was their way of thanking him for saving their lives. The Army couldn’t decide whether to shoot Steady or give him a medal. So they shipped him back to the States and forgot him.”