this Virgil Flowers?”
“Yes, it is… Hang on just one second.”
Virgil said to Mai, “I gotta take this, it’s from China… I’m gonna run outside, sometimes you can drop the calls inside here.”
He went back to the phone as he walked toward the door. “Yes, Mr. Chen, thank you for calling me back. I’m looking for information about Chester Utecht, a man who died there a year or so ago. I’ve got the details in my notebook-”
“I’m quite familiar with Mr. Utecht’s case.” Chen sounded like he’d just left Oxford. “Could I ask why you’re inquiring after him?”
“We’ve had a series of murders here…” Virgil told Chen about the murders in detail, and about the possible tie to Vietnam.
When he was done, Chen said, “Well. Vietnam. I should tell you that Mr. Utecht was something of a character. One of the last of the old-time soldiers of fortune, so his death was… noticed. He had been suffering from a series of debilitating diseases in his final days. Both his liver and kidneys were failing. However, his death hadn’t appeared imminent when he saw his internist a few days before he died. The pathology suggests that he may have taken his own life, or perhaps accidentally overdosed, on pain pills and alcohol.”
“Ah. A suicide,” Virgil said. “Nobody told me that on this end.”
“There was no official finding of suicide,” Chen said. “The cause was recorded as ‘unknown.’ However, the pathologist, who is quite competent, told me privately that Mr. Utecht had some bruises on his arms above his elbows, and around his ankles, that would be consistent with restraint.”
“Restraint.”
“Yes. But restraint by who, or what-or even if there was any restraint-is unknown. We looked for something, but couldn’t find anything at all. The fact is, he was elderly, alone, sick, probably dying, and running out of money. The easiest answer is suicide or accident; however, I wasn’t entirely satisfied by that. I looked for anyone who might have had any animus toward him. Anyone who could have carried out such a sophisticated murder, or would have any reason to. I found nothing; and frankly, Utecht was not important enough to be the object of such a murder. Now you say there was a murder in Vietnam, that he was involved, and that others who were involved are also being killed.”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying,” Virgil said.
“That may give me a few more questions to ask. But I can also tell you this: we are quite certain that Mr. Utecht had connections with your CIA in his past. He didn’t work for them, he wasn’t paid, but he had… connections, if you see what I’m saying. He helped them when he could, and they helped him when they wished.”
“You don’t think the CIA is killing these people?”
“I think nothing in particular,” Chen said. “But who really knows what happened in the last minutes before the victory? The whole business of the ship, this sounds like too complicated an operation for one man. If it were a CIA operation that had gone bad, if, as you say, you have photographs of a man raping a dead woman, if babies were killed… Well, this is an ugly thing. With the controversy about the CIA, perhaps they wouldn’t like to have this float up from the past. Especially if the men were willing to talk about it.”
They let the satellite idle for a moment, then Virgil said, “Mr. Chen, if you’re curious, I will call you and tell you how this works out. I would deeply appreciate it if you would ask your questions and let me know the answers. I don’t like the sound of this CIA connection. I don’t like that.”
“Yes, because what could you do? Your hands would be tied.”
They talked for a few more minutes, details and phone numbers, then Virgil rang off, and as he walked back to the cabin, he could hear Mai talking. He stepped inside, and she smiled and said, “Daddy… I will be home when I will be home. We’re just going out fishing. I will see you when I see you. Good-bye.”
THEY DROPPED the boat in the water and headed out, a good blue day without wind, the water like green- black Jell-O, not quite still, but jiggling from the distant passings of small motorboats. Virgil found a weed bed, and explained about musky fishing. “There’s a cliche about musky-that they’re the fish of ten thousand casts. Hard to catch. Which means, when you go musky fishing, you probably won’t actually have to deal with catching one.”
He tied a black-and-orange-rubber Bull Dawg lure onto one of the rods, flipped it out, retrieved it, showed her how the tail rippled at a certain speed, showed her how to cast with her arms and her back instead of her wrists, steadied her in the boat with a hand on her waist and back and occasionally her butt. Twenty or so casts out, the lure was hit by a small northern pike, two feet long, which hooked itself and then flipped once out of the water and gave up, and she reeled it in. Virgil wet a hand in the lake, grabbed the fish at the back of its head, unhooked it, and dropped it back in, looked up to see her watching in fascination.
“You threw it back! That’s the biggest fish I ever caught!” she said.
“Shoot… hmm, I didn’t think you’d want it. Besides, if you want one, we’ll catch more.”
“Well, I guess I don’t really want one. I like fish… but…”
So they went on around, and she caught two more northerns, which were easy, and lost a fish that Virgil thought might have been a small musky.
“You fish for a while; I’m going to drink a Coke,” she said.
So he fished as she sat in the boat, and then she said, “Is that a thunderstorm?”
He looked off to the southwest, over his shoulder, and saw the anvil of cloud coming in. “Yeah… gotta be thirty miles away. We got time.”
“Until you reminded me… I hadn’t thought about the Terrace for years-I was never that much for it. Too busy. Now that I look back, I wonder what I was busy at. I should have had some lazy friends, you know, just sit out there with root-beer floats and watch the sailboats. But what the heck did I do?” She stared at the water, and Virgil flipped the lure into a niche in the weed line, twitched it a few times, and she said, “You know what I did? I worked. But I worked at all this art stuff. Dancing. Photography. Writing. All the time. Obsessively. I hardly ever went and sat and laughed with friends.”
“ Madison is the best place in the world if you want to hang out,” Virgil said. “You see these old gray-bearded guys on their rusty bikes, they’ve been hanging out since the sixties. Never quit.”
“Yeah, but… ah, I don’t know. And the Rat. What a dump; that’s what I used to say. What a dump. Just too busy… busy, busy, busy…”
So they floated and talked and she cast some more, and once almost tipped over the side, and he said, eventually, “If you cast any more, you’re gonna be sore in the morning. You’re going to feel like this muscle”-he rubbed his knuckles up and down the big vertical muscle just to the left of her spine-“is made out of wood.”
She’d caught five fish at that point. “One last cast.”
“No point. You never catch anything on the last cast.”
She cast, and didn’t catch anything. “All right. I submit to your greater knowledge, although it doesn’t make any statistical sense.”
“Sure it does-if you catch something, that’s never your last cast,” Virgil said. “You always keep going for at least ten minutes. So you never catch anything on the last cast.”
He sat next to the motor, saw a distant flash of lightning, counted the seconds, and then said, “Six miles, more or less. Better get off the lake.”
They got off, cranked the boat out of the water, pulled the plug, tied on the canvas cover, walked up to the cabin, washed their hands, got a couple of beers, sat on the lakeside porch, and watched the storm coming in.
When the first fat drops of rain hit around them, she said, “We probably ought to go jump in bed.”
“Probably,” he said.
SHE SAT on the edge of the bed and let him take her clothes off; he did it from behind her, kneeling on the mattress, with his face buried in the pit of her neck, his hands working the buttons on her blouse and jeans.
“Ah, God, this is where I can’t stand it,” he said. He popped the hooks on her brassiere.
She giggled with the stress. “What? You can’t stand it?”
“It’s always so wonderful…” He popped her brassiere loose and let his hands slip up her stomach and cup her breasts.
“It can’t
