Lasari sat up straight when she walked to her desk, as if she were a teacher returning to a classroom.
“I hope you’ll excuse me,” she said. “That was a call I had to make about another matter.” She put her coffee cup on the desk.
“Now. I’d like to get all the details you can give me, George,” she said. “I won’t use your friend’s name, of course. That’s policy here. I’ll make out a card and we’ll refer to him by a case number. You can assure Luis Carlos there won’t be anything in our files that can be traced to him. Whatever you tell me will be kept in strictest confidence and all the references will be coded, so there can’t be an accidental leak.”
She picked up a sharpened pencil and dated her note pad. “First of all, I’d like to review Carlos’ service record — where he was inducted, his tour of duty, rank, decorations and medals, if any, the names of his superior officers, his family and civilian contacts, educational background, whatever might be helpful if we want character references and so forth.”
“You really need all that, a complete profile, Rorschachs, sex kinks, everything?”
Bonnie Caidin’s smile was polite but it didn’t touch the cool appraisal in her eyes. “George, the Army holds all the aces when it deals with deserters. They made the rules, Carlos broke them. The Army controls all the options. If your friend hopes to clear his record, to be allowed to serve out his time, he’s got to convince them there were extenuating circumstances for his desertion, that he’s a good and loyal risk for any further investment they have to make in him. So it’s necessary for us to have all the facts before we can advise Carlos. Because, and we should be clear about this from the start, if the Army rejects your friend’s application of reenlistment and/or an honorable discharge, the alternatives can be pretty severe.”
“A hitch in a federal prison, is that the alternative?”
“That’s one of them. Sometimes the Army likes to let a desertion charge drop. They examine the case, decide to issue a discharge without honor and sever all connections with the ex-soldier. But the Army does have the option of sending a bona fide deserter to a federal penitentiary for two years or even longer, plus a dishonorable discharge.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you what I know about Carlos,” Lasari said. He fixed his eyes on a wall calendar a few feet away from where Rick Argella was sorting papers. He kept his tone casual, but careful, every word measured before he spoke.
“... Raleigh. He enlisted for four years and entered the Army at Raleigh, North Carolina, that was in 1970, May twenty-second. He was out of school and working in a gas station, eighteen years old, a few months shy of nineteen. He’d had some sports interest but that didn’t pan out. Carlos had a low draft number, but he decided he ought to go.
“After basic training he was sent to Fort Bragg for awhile, then he was assigned to canine training in a semiamphibian operation in Virginia — Norfolk, the Navy base there. It was a joint training operation,” he explained in reaction to Caidin’s puzzled expression. “The men trained and jumped with dogs, Army shepherds, from the fan-tail of Navy seacraft. Units were trained to work as teams, to see how the dog might coordinate in beach assaults. It was an experimental program, and Carlos was part of it while it lasted.
“Later he was sent to Vietnam with a regular infantry unit. He got hit first in the hand, I told you that. The big hit came ten months later, hip and thigh and a lot of torn cartilage in the right leg. Like I said, he had surgery there and then surgery again and therapy in the States, in and out of hospitals for nearly two years, twenty months all counted. And he was in the hospital Stateside when the war ended.”
Duro Lasari talked for another ten minutes, filling in, backtracking, encapsulating those years of his life, years of endurance, confusion and ultimately angers and doubts so deep that even now, when he was at Mrs. Swade’s or walking the streets of Calumet City, he sometimes had to stop and grip something solid, a telephone pole, a mailbox, or even Carlos until the spasms of rage ceased and he could breathe normally again.
Bonnie Caidin took careful notes. Her handwriting was tiny but legible and she was fast. Several times she erased a word or phrase and substituted something else, determined to get his meaning down as accurately as possible.
“Decorations?” she asked.
“My friend got the Purple Heart twice, a Bronze Star and a lot of those ribbons that just mean you’ve been there, like buying a T-shirt at the Grand Canyon to show you looked but didn’t fall in.”
Caidin smiled, her pencil poised, her eyes watching him impersonally. Lasari frowned. “What bothers Carlos is — if he was going to desert — why he did it when he did. His record was good, he was still in the hospital, but the leg was healing and he was going to be one free civilian. In basic, when the going was tough, and in ’Nam, which was a real firelight, why didn’t he try to desert then?”
“Did he explain that to you?”
Lasari shook his head. “He’s not too much for talking, really. He says he needed time to make sense out of the whole thing. In the hospital he did a lot of reading, books, magazines, newspapers. He told me he didn’t know if that made him smarter or more scared. He told me the happiest guys in the wards were the paraplegics, the guys who would never be released, didn’t have to figure out what to do with their lives. They had all the answers spelled out for them.”
She was writing rapidly, and he stared at her bowed head. “I don’t think why is the problem, ma’am. It’s the fact that he did it. He packed it in, just walked away. So he’s a deserter.”
Her pencil was poised over the yellow lined paper. “You mentioned that his last treatment, before he walked, was Fitzsimons. Is that Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Denver?”
For the first time Duro Lasari felt a flick of caution. “... we won’t use your friend’s name... that’s policy here... there won’t be anything in our files that could be traced to him...”
But dates, place names, sequences, that could make a traceable map. He thought suddenly of the years of lying low in Jackson Hole, the peace and anonymity of the Wyoming countryside, and then the suspicions and panic that sent him hitchhiking in a frantic, broken path from the west to the midwest and finally, for the last two years, hiding in a safe Calumet City body shop, with a bedroom and shared bath in a fifty-dollar-a-week boardinghouse.
“He didn’t tell me everything, ma’am. I think he was in a number of hospitals. I don’t know exact dates at Fitzsimons.”
Bonnie Caidin put her pencil aside and tilted back in her swing chair. She clasped both hands behind her head, turning her neck as if to relieve tension, then said, “Your friend, Carlos, was he on drugs in Vietnam?”
She had shifted moods and topics suddenly, almost making him forget the role he was playing.
“I don’t think so, ma’am,” he said carefully. “But he told me once that the stuff was everywhere, joints, Mao’s one hundreds, speed, morphine. There was heroin so pure you didn’t have to cook it, just mix it with cold water and bang it. Carlos said you could get anything you wanted, any time and at the right price. That’s what he told me.”
“But Carlos himself wasn’t a user?”
“Joints maybe, nothing else.”
“Was he involved in dealing or pushing? I’ve got to know these things, George.”
“He knew what was going on. You’d have to be blind not to, but he wasn’t into that scene.”
“So Carlos told you, in substance, that he’d been a good, responsible soldier, and you believe he has been telling you the truth about all this, George?”