about Havens.'
'Uh huh.' Scoot was gloating down into the bag in a way that made me uneasy.
I asked who Havens was.
Scoot tugged his ponytail again. 'Why do you think I wear this fuckin' thing? Havens. This is my
'Baby,' di Maestro said. 'Bomb Hanoi.'
'Fuck that, bomb Saigon.' He leveled an index finger at me. His eyes burned far back in his head, and his cheeks seemed sunken. Scoot was always balanced on an edge between concentration and violence, and all the drugs did was to make this more apparent. 'I never told you about Havens? Didn't I give you the Havens speech?'
'You didn't get around to it yet,' di Maestro said.
'Fuck the Havens speech,' said Scoot. His sunken, intent look was frightening exactly to the extent that it showed he was thinking. 'You know what's wrong with this shit, Underdog?' He gave the peace symbol again and looked at his own hand as if seeing the gesture for the first time. 'All the wrong people do this. People who think there are rules behind the rules. That's
'Peace is the fight,' I said.
'Because there ain't no rules behind the rules.'
That I nearly understood what he was saying scared me—I did not want to know whatever Scoot knew. It cost too much.
Havens must have been the reason Scoot was on the body squad instead of out in the field where he belonged. I had been wondering what someone like Scoot could do that would be bad enough to banish him from his regular unit, and it occurred to me that now I was about to find out.
Scoot stared at di Maestro. 'You know what's gonna happen here.'
'We'll send him home,' di Maestro said.
'Gimme a drink,' Scoot said. I poured the rest of the Jack Daniels into my glass and walked across the shed to get a look at Captain Havens. I gave Scoot the glass and looked down at a brown-haired American man. His jaw was square, and so was his forehead. He had that pricky little nose and those pricky little eyes. A transparent sheet of adhesive plastic covered the hole in his chest. Scoot tossed the glass back to me and detached his knife from its peculiar thong, which looked more than ever like a body part. Then I saw what it was.
Scoot noticed my quiver of revulsion, and he turned his crazy glance on me again. 'You think this is about revenge. You're wrong. It's proof.'
Proof that he was right and Captain Havens had been wrong—wrong from the start. No matter what he said, I still thought it was revenge.
Attica took an interested step forward. Picklock sat up straight in the back of the truck.
Scoot leaned over Captain Havens's body and began sawing off his left ear. It took more effort than I had imagined it would, and the long cords of muscle stood out in his arm. At length the white-gray bit of flesh stretched and came away, looking smaller than it had on Captain Havens's head.
'Dry it out, be fine in a week or two,' Scoot said. He placed the ear beside him on the concrete and bent over Captain Havens like a surgeon in midoperation. He was smiling with concentration. Scoot pushed the double-edged point beneath the hair just beside the wound he had made and began running the blade upward along the hairline.
I turned away, and someone handed me the last of the 100 that had been circulating. I took another hit, handed back the roach, and walked past Attica toward the door. 'Make a nice wall mount,' Attica said.
As soon as I got outside, the sunlight poured into my eyes and the ground swung up toward me. I staggered for a moment. The sound of distant shelling came to me, and I turned away from the main part of the camp, irrationally afraid that body parts were going to fall out of the sky.
I moved aimlessly along a dirt track that led through a stand of weedy trees—spindly trunks with a scattering of leaves and branches at their tops, like afterthoughts. It came to me that the army had chosen to let these miserable trees stand. Normally they leveled every tree in sight. Therefore, they wanted to hide whatever was behind the trees. I felt like a genius for having worked this out.
An empty village had been erected on the far side of the growth of trees. One-story wooden structures marched up both sides of two intersecting streets. There were no gates and no guards. Before me in the center of the suburb, on a little green at the intersection of the two streets, an unfamiliar military flag hung limply beside the Stars and Stripes.
It looked like a ghost town.
A man in black sunglasses and a neat gray suit walked out of one of the little frame buildings and looked at me. He crossed over the rough grass in front of the next two structures, glancing at me now and then. When he reached the third building he jumped up the steps and disappeared inside. He had looked as out of place as Magritte's locomotive coming out of a fireplace.
The instant the door closed behind Magritte, another opened and a tall soldier in green fatigues emerged. It was like a farce: a clockwork village where one door opened as soon as another closed. The tall soldier glanced at me, seemed to hesitate, and began moving toward me.
Fuck you, I thought, I have a right to be here, I do the dirty work for you assholes.
He kicked up dust as he walked. He was carrying a .45 in a black leather holster hung from his web belt, and two ballpoint pens jutted out of the slanted, blousy pocket of his shirt. There were two crossed rifles on his collar, and a captain's star on his epaulets. He carried something soft in one hand, and a wristwatch with a steel band hung upside down from a slot in his collar.
Too late, I remembered to salute. When my hand was still at my forehead, I saw that the man coming toward me had the face I had just seen in a body bag. It was Captain Havens. My eyes dropped to the name tag stitched to his shirt. The steel watch covered the first two or three letters, and all I could read was SOM.
Good trick, I thought. First I see him being scalped, then I see him coming at me.
I thought of wet elm leaves in a gutter.
The ghost of Captain Havens smiled at me. The ghost called me by name and asked, 'How'd you find out I was here?' When he came closer I saw that the ghost was John Ransom.
'Just a guess,' I said, and when his smile turned quizzical, 'I was just following the road to see where it went.'
'That's pretty much how I got here, too,' Ransom said. He was close enough to shake my hand, and as he reached out he must have caught the stench of the shed, and maybe the smells of whiskey and the 100s too. His eyebrows moved together. 'What have you been doing?'
'I'm on the body squad. Over there.' I nodded toward the road. 'What do you do? What is this place?'
He had grasped my hand, but instead of shaking it, he spun me around and marched me away from the empty-looking camp and into the spindly trees. 'You better stay out of sight until you straighten up,' he said.
'You should see what the rest of them are doing,' I said, but sat down at the base of one of the trees and leaned against the slick, spongy bark. The man in the gray suit and sunglasses came out of the building he had entered earlier and strode back across the grass to the building he had left. He jumped up onto the stoop and touched his breast pocket before he went in. 'Johnny got his gun,' I said.
'That's Francis Pinkel, Senator Burrman's aide. Pinkel thinks he's James Bond. That's a Walther PPK in his shoulder holster. We're giving the senator a briefing, and then we'll take him up in a helicopter and show him one of our projects.'
'You in some kind of private army?' He showed me the soft green cap in his hand. 'You're one of those guys
