PART THIRTEEN
Back at John's, I took a couple of aspirins for the pain in my back and went upstairs. I didn't even bother with a book, I just stretched out on the guest bed and waited for unconsciousness. John must have been still on his way home from Chicago —I wasn't looking forward to his reaction to what had happened to his car. I had just decided to tell him about my meetings with Tom Pasmore when I witnessed my hand picking up the fourth, most disfigured photograph from the blood-soaked bed in the St. Alwyn. I understood that if I shook the photograph while holding it upside down, the markings would fall away like hair cuttings. I upended and shook the little square. Dried-up ink fragments obediently dropped to the floor. I turned the photograph over and saw an image I knew—a photograph my mother had taken in front of the house on South Sixth Street. A three-year-old me stood on the sidewalk while my father, Al Underhill, crouched behind me, his hat slanted back on his head, his hand loose and proprietorial on my shoulder.
Some time later, an actual hand on my shoulder brought me back up into the real world. I opened my eyes to the gloating face of John Ransom, six or seven inches away from mine. He was almost demonic with glee. 'Come on,' he said, 'let's hear about it. You tell me your adventures, and I'll tell you mine.'
'Did you see your car?'
He pulled away from me, waving the trouble away with his thick hands.
'Don't worry about that, I understand. I almost had a real crack-up myself on the way to Chicago. You must have been sideswiped, right?'
'Someone ran me off the road,' I said.
He laughed and pulled the chair closer to the bed. 'Listen to this. It was perfect.'
John had made it from Purdum to Chicago in four hours, narrowly missing several incidents of the sort he'd assumed I'd had. The fog had vanished about thirty miles this side of Chicago, and he'd parked a block from the train station.
He had left the keys in the unlocked car and walked up the street. Two potential thieves had been chased away on the basis of being dressed too well. 'I mean, some yuppie, what's he going to do, actually steal it? Give me a break. I had to shut up some guy who started yelling for a cop, and he gave me a big lecture about leaving the keys in my car. Anyhow, this white kid finally comes up, gold chain around his neck, his pants halfway down his ass, no laces in his shoes, and when
'The kid'll beat the shit out of it for a couple of weeks, total it, and I'll get the insurance. Perfect.' He all but covered his own face with kisses. Then he remembered that I had been in an accident and looked at me with a sort of humorous concern. 'So you got run off the road? What happened?'
I went into the bathroom, and he stood outside the door while I splashed water on my face and told him about coming back from Tangent.
I rubbed my face with a towel. John was standing in the doorway, chewing on the inside of his cheek.
'He pulled a knife on me, but I got lucky. I broke his arm.'
'Jesus,' John said.
'Then I went inside the hotel and took a look at the room where they found April.'
'What happened to the guy?'
'He's in the hospital now.'
I went toward the door, and John backed away and slapped me on the back as I came through. 'What was the point of going to the room?'
'To see if I'd notice anything.'
'It must be pretty bad,' John said.
'I have the feeling I missed something, but I can't work out what it was.'
'The cops have been over that room a million times. Ah, what am I saying? A cop is the one who did it.'
'I know who he is,' I said. 'Let's go downstairs, and I'll tell you the rest of my adventures.'
'You found out his name in Tangent? Somebody described him?'
'Better than that,' I said.
'John,' I said, 'I want to know where you were assigned after you brought the man you thought was Franklin Bachelor back to the States.'
We were sitting at the table, eating a dinner both of us had made up out of food we had come across in the refrigerator and the freezer. John wolfed down the meal as if he hadn't eaten in a week. He'd had two substantial glasses of the hyacinth vodka while we worked in the kitchen and opened another bottle of the Chateau Petrus from his cellar.
Since we had come downstairs, he had been debating out loud with himself whether he should really go back to Arkham next year. If you thought about it, he said, his book was really a higher duty than meeting his classes. Maybe he should admit that he had to move on to a new phase of his life. My question interrupted this self- absorbed flow, and he looked up from his plate and stopped chewing. He washed down the food in his mouth with wine.
'You know exactly where I was. Lang Vei.'
'Weren't you really somewhere else? A camp not far from Lang Vei?'
He frowned at me and sliced off another bit of veal. He took some more of the wine. 'Is this more wild stuff you got from that quartermaster colonel?'
'Tell me.'
He set down his knife and fork. 'Don't you think the name of the cop is a lot more important? I've been really patient with you, Tim, I let you do your Julia Child number at the stove, but I don't feel like rooting around in ancient history.'
'Did someone tell you to say that you'd been at Lang Vei?'
He gave me the look you'd give a mule that had decided to stop moving. Then he sighed. 'Okay. After I finally made it to Khe Sanh, a colonel in Intelligence showed up and ordered me to tell people I'd been at Lang Vei. My orders were all rewritten, so as far as history goes, I was at Lang Vei.'
'Did you know why you were given those orders?'
'Sure. The army didn't want to admit how badly it fucked up.'
'Where were you, if you weren't at Lang Vei?'
'A little encampment called Lang Vo. We got wiped out right after Lang Vei was overrun. Me and a dozen Bru. The North Vietnamese took us apart.'
'After you came back from Langley, they sent you off to a postage stamp in the jungle.' So far, Colonel Runnel had been telling the truth. 'Why did they do that?'
'Why do they do anything? That's the kind of thing we did.'
'Did you think you were being punished for having brought back the wrong man?'
'It wasn't
