And he knew they would lie about the theft. But he knew who couldn't lie.
'I am unsure who they were.'
'Do you think you can find them?'
'No. Except for one.'
'And who might that be?'
'Captain Walker Townsend, sir. The chief prosecutor. He saw me with the item in question.'
This name made the SAO stiffen, and rise to his feet. For several seconds, he seemed to be thinking deeply. He turned away from the two men, walked to one side of the small room, then turned, and took several strides back, so that he was once again facing the two lieutenants. Tommy could see the SAO calculating, almost as if he were inspecting the damage done by combat to an aircraft, trying to determine whether it would fly. Again, Tommy took note of MacNamara's reaction as much as he did anything the SAO had said. He hoped that
Lincoln Scott was equally alert.
Abruptly, MacNamara waved his hand in the air, as if he'd finished the equation in his mind, and written a result.
'All right, gentlemen. We will deal with this matter before the tribunal in court tomorrow. You can raise your questions then, and perhaps Captain Townsend and the prosecution will have some answers for you at that point.'
MacNamara looked over toward the two younger men. He both frowned and smiled and in the same gesture, shook his head slightly.
'You may have struck a blow. Lieutenant Hart. A well-placed and accurate blow. Whether it does great injury to the prosecution remains to be seen. But I will keep an open mind on the issue.'
Tommy nodded, although he wasn't sure he believed this and doubted that
Scott would consider it anything but a blatant lie. He saluted. He started to pivot toward the exit, but Scott, at his side, hesitated.
Tommy had a sudden surge of nervousness over what Scott was about to say, but he saw the black flier point down at the novel that had been left open on MacNamara's bunk.
'Do you enjoy Dickens, sir?' he suddenly asked.
Colonel MacNamara let a small look of surprise cross his face before he replied, 'Actually, this is the first I've had time to read. I never was one for fiction, when I was younger. History and mathematics, mainly. That was the stuff that helped you into West Point and the reading that kept you there. I don't even believe they offered a class at the Point that read Dickens. Of course, I never had all the free time growing up and going to school that I've now got right here, thanks to the damn Krauts. But so far, this seems quite interesting.'
Scott nodded.
'My own schoolwork was dominated by technical literature and textbooks, too,' he said, a small smile filtering across his face.
'But I still made time for the classics, sir. Dickens, Dostoyevsky,
Tolstoy, Proust, Shakespeare.
Need to read Homer and some of the Greek tragedies, as well.
Hard to consider oneself properly educated without a fundamental grounding in the classics, sir. My mother taught me that. She's a teacher.'
'That may very well be true, lieutenant,' MacNamara responded.
'I hadn't considered it in precisely those terms.'
'Really? I'm surprised. Well, regardless, Dickens was an interesting writer, sir,' Scott continued.
'There's one important thing to remember, when reading any of his best works.'
'What's that, lieutenant?' MacNamara asked.
'Nothing is exactly as it seems at first,' Scott answered.
'That was Dickens's genius.' Then he added, 'Good night, sir. Enjoy your reading.'
The two young airmen then exited the SAO's bunk room.
By the time they walked out of Hut 114, darkness had crept into the air around them, turning the world into the weak and faded, indistinct gray of dusk. The barbed-wire walls around the camp perimeter seemed like so many twisting lines of black penciled against the leftover daylight.
Most of the kriegies were already in their bunk rooms, preparing for the night, anticipating the evening chill that slipped inexorably over the camp. The two men could see an occasional airman hurrying through the start of the evening, his pace dictated less by the encroaching cold than by the night that threatened him. Darkness could always mean death, especially at the hands of some nervous, poorly trained teenage guard carrying a machine pistol. Tommy looked up, through the first moments of gloom, toward a nearby guard tower, and saw that there were two goons resting there, their arms on the edge, like men at a bar. But both goons were watching them closely, expecting them to hurry their stride.
'Not bad. Hart,' Scott said. His own eyes had followed Tommy's, up to the guard tower and the two German soldiers watching them.
'I especially liked that part about tossing the charges. Won't work, of course, but it made him a bit nervous, and gave him something nasty to think about tonight when the Krauts shut off the lights, and I liked that.'
'Worth a try.'
'Anything's worth a try at this point. And you know who would have liked it? The old limey, the one they shipped out.
Pryce would have admired the maneuver, even if it didn't work.'
'Probably right about that,' Tommy replied.
'But there aren't a lot of tricks lurking at the bottom of this barrel, are there. Hart?'
'No. We still have Fenelli, the medic. His testimony should shed some doubt on things. And when he shoots his mouth off it will mess up
Captain Townsend's neat little package. But I wish we had something else. Something concrete.
The real murder weapon, maybe. Some other witness.
Something. Something convincing. That's why that damn board was so critical.'
Scott nodded.
'It would be nice.'
They took a few steps through the start of the evening, and then Tommy asked the black flier, 'Tell me, Scott, what's your take on MacNamara?'
Scott hesitated, then asked his own question.
'How so? Do you mean as an officer? Or as a judge? Or, maybe, as a human being? Which?'
'All. Or whichever you want to answer. Come on, Scott, what's your impression?'
Tommy could see a small grin creep across the black airman's lips.
'As an officer, he's a by-the-book professional military man. A career officer looking for advancement and probably being eaten alive every second he has to sit here, completely forgotten, while his classmates from West Point go and do what West Pointers do, which is generally to send men out to get killed and then get to pin medals on their own chests and enjoy their promotions up the military ladder. As a judge, well, I suspect he'll be more or less the same, though he will bend over backwards at odd moments to appear that he's being fair.'
'I agree,' Tommy said.
'But there's a difference between actually being fair and appearing to be fair.'
'Bingo,' Scott said quietly.
'Now, as a person, well… Do you have any idea. Hart, just how many
Lewis MacNamaras I've met in my life?'
'No' 'Dozens. Hundreds. Too many to count.'
