“I suppose that’s why I loved Mark Weir so fiercely when I did,” she said. “He was like a miracle to me, so beautiful. He’d been there and come back. He was alive.
“And maybe you wonder why I keep my brothers’ picture next to the coffee pot where I’ll see it every morning. Well, I want to remember them, to talk to them and tell them day after day after day how sorry I am about what happened to them, to all of them. It’s important they understand that. Bonnie Caidin is sorry. I wouldn’t want them to hate me.”
Lasari poured more wine into her glass and moved it toward her on the glass coffee table. “Does your landlord turn the heat down after eleven, or something? It’s so damned cold in here.”
He walked to the chair near the door and picked up his folded jacket, rubbing it between his big hands for a few minutes as if to work a little friction heat into the fabric. Then he came over to Bonnie where she sat on the floor and draped the jacket over her shoulders. She took the long sleeves and knotted them across her chest.
“No one could hate you, Bonnie,” Lasari said.
Chapter Fifteen
General Buck Stigmuller’s home phone in Georgetown was still busy when Scotty Weir dialed the third time. Stigmuller had married late, an attractive divorcee with two daughters barely ready for kindergarten. Weir had, in fact, been his best man, flying into Hawaii on a muggy July day for the ceremony. Those two daughters must be in their teens now, he thought, but at least the number was current and some one was at home.
Tarbert Weir began to pace his study, attempting to clarify and then marshal the questions he wanted to ask Stigmuller. Birddogging for information was not the way Weir had expected to spend this evening and he felt himself growing restless, even angry, at the busy signals, the delays in his plans. It was his Army they were talking about... and since he had decided to help his son the general wanted to get the process underway.
As he paced he caught sight of his face reflected back at him from the glass doors of the trophy cabinets and was almost surprised at the hard, intent impatience in his features.
The general’s nose was sharply arched, the bridge twisted at the place where it had been broken years ago by the recoil of a misfiring artillery piece. That injury had occurred in Korea, and a medic had set and then reset Scotty Weir’s shattered nose at a battery command post, working by flashlight in a snowstorm. The break was clean, there was no infection, but Weir had insisted on going back into action and somehow, in the winds and cold, the bones had mended, causing the general’s nose to slant at a crooked angle between his high, strong cheekbones. As a result, his face had a damaged, almost piratical mien, an air of challenge, warmed only by the look of interest and communication in the dark eyes.
Scotty Weir had long enjoyed the battered look of his face; it gave him an edge of authority that had served him well in the military. He never had to give an order twice and few soldiers, from brass to noncoms, smiled at General Weir until they were sure he was ready to smile in return. How much he had changed in body and mind, he thought, since those first fading photographs were taken at the Tranchets’ barnyard outside the village of LePont, Belgium, nearly four decades ago.
Grimes had brought down the old mapcase from Weir’s upstairs bedroom, and the General leafed through it while waiting to get his call to Washington. The mapcase was of natural pigskin, long and wide enough to hold several folded maps, worn rough at the corners, the leather beginning to darken. It had been a Christmas gift from Maggie the first year they’d known each other. On active duty, at every post, at every battle station, Tarbert Weir had taken the mapcase with him, putting it to practical use and trusting it as a talisman link with Maggie.
In peacetime, on all their leaves and jaunts through the United States, Africa and Europe, often with young Mark in the back seat, they had kept the case in the glove compartment, tracing highways and mountain passes and back roads of their trips in bright red ink, like a vital network of the time and places they were able to be together.
After his wife’s death Weir had bound a thick rubber band around all the maps and that packet rested now with other memories at the bottom of the footlocker. Yet he could never quite force himself to discard the mapcase itself and tonight, even under the cured animal leather scent, he felt he could catch the faintest hint of Maggie’s perfume.
Now the General used the pigskin envelope as a filing case for his correspondence over four decades with Marta Tranchet, three dozen letters, telegrams of congratulations for his wedding, his promotions, a collection of photographs and — just last year — Marta’s proud letter stating that her only son, Claud Tranchet LeRoi (a full captain now) had been transferred with his Belgian unit to NATO forces outside Kassel, West Germany.
Grimes had brought the Tranchet file to the study on a tray with crackers and cheese, and a tall Scotch and soda.
Weir settled himself at his desk, opened the mapcase and then took a sip from the frosted goblet. The General held the glass, bell clear and etched with fine flowers, carefully in his big hand. It was one of the Val Saint Lambert set, he knew. Grimes was insistent that this farmhouse was the general’s home, that all the fine china and silver and crystal the Weirs had collected abroad be put to daily use. But on more than one evening, sitting alone, roiling with both unwanted energies and memories, thoughts intense almost beyond his control, General Weir had inadvertently crushed one of these fragile goblets in his strong hand.
He studied the old snapshot of himself at nineteen, stiff and shy in his private’s uniform, young Marta Tranchet standing close beside him, a coarse wool blanket with holes cut for the arms, serving as an overcoat for her thin child’s body. The day, the hour, the moment those pictures were taken seemed suddenly as vivid as yesterday to Tarbert Weir. Splash a little whiskey on your memories, he thought, and they flared up with a brilliance and radiance that startled you.
The pictures had been taken after the peace, when he went back to visit, but Private Weir first met the Claud Tranchets near the end of the war when his unit, caught in the crossfire and confusion of the Battle of the Bulge, were cut off and isolated, without orders and food supplies and almost without ammo, on the outskirts of a war-impoverished farm in rural Belgium. His platoon was then only a handful of stragglers, the first and second lieutenants dead and only a buck sergeant, badly wounded, to tell them what to do.
Supporting the sergeant between them, Weir and a buddy, followed by the half dozen other survivors, had made their way across the frozen, rutted mud of the barnyard to a dark and silent farmhouse, windows blown out from artillery tire, walls and timbers pockmarked by rifle shot.
Young Marta Tranchet was there, huddled with her parents in the freezing kitchen, almost out of their minds with cold and hunger and fear, waiting for the Germans to come down the hill at first light, waiting to die.
Claud Tranchet, a man in his late forties, had once been a prominent businessman in LePont, leasing this farm to tenants. Now he was gaunt and dirty, his arm tattooed with a concentration camp mark for political dissidents, his voice slurred, his mind wandering with the fever that often comes with starvation.