He had greeted the January, 1973, news of United States withdrawal with relief. The Kissinger "peace" had seemed a last, comic punctuation to an era of futility. He had predicted the disaster even then, and had tried to school himself to live with its inevitable consequences.
Vietnam was dead. The people who had buried it wanted everyone to forget. That would be nice, Cash thought. He wished he could. If he had known for sure about Michael, he might have been content to stick his head in the sand with the rest. But he knew the other side wouldn't forget. They knew, now, that they had carte blanche in that end of the world. They knew, from peasant to premier, that the fall of Saigon symbolized far more than the culmination of years of warfare. It marked the east's watershed victory in World War III. Solzhenitsin had pointed it out: the west had been fighting a halfhearted and half-assed delaying action since 1945; Vietnam had marked the beginning of the end. From the fall of Saigon onward the collapse would cease to be gradual. The west, whether good or evil or whatever, was about to come apart, and at a rate which, historically speaking, would be precipitous. Cash supposed he would live long enough to see the barbarians at the gates himself.
But, from a historical perspective, it would not matter much. Life would go on. The big change would be in which gang of mental cases would be running things.
Times were when Cash grew extremely cynical. Especially about government and the people in it.
Annie, in her anger, in her passion to show others her feelings, volunteered to adopt an orphan. There weren't enough to go around. After the collapse, she decided they would sponsor a Vietnamese family. Cash acquiesced, hoping she would not start blaming them about Michael, expecting she would forget the whole thing when she calmed down.
Mayagыez put everyone on an even keel again. It was silly, being such a small incident, not well executed at all, and likely to be nothing more than a fix for the national pride.
Yet next day Cash was able to get back into his world, to work by more than the numbers.
John Harald was more perceptive than Cash had suspected.
During the grim months he had not said a word about the mystery corpse. That morning after Mayagыez, quiet because even the bandits were home following the news, he strolled into Cash's office and dropped the ancient file onto his desk. "Want to glance through this?"
"What?"
"Carstairs's file on the Groloch investigation. The missing man."
"That again?"
"Just have a read. I'll be catching up on my paperwork."
They had been a lot less formal in the old days, Cash discovered. Carstairs's report contained a lot of opinion and suspicion that was hard to separate from evidence. The story was much as Annie had described, though Carstairs had been convinced that Miss Groloch had murdered Jack O'Brien. Good riddance, he had observed. But the extent of the report indicated that he had put a lot of hours into hunting a solution.
Initially, Cash's strongest reaction was an eerie feeling of dйjа vu. Carstairs's emotional responses had been identical to his own.
Atherton Carstairs had felt driven to find out what had happened to O'Brien. And had faced the same reluctance to push it on the part of his superiors. They had wanted to write it off as a simple disappearance after only two days-despite the fact that there had been a dozen witnesses willing to testify that O'Brien had been seen entering Miss Groloch's house, that later there had been the screams of a woman being beaten, then a masculine voice pleading for mercy. And O'Brien had never come out.
The file included a thick sheaf of letters. For years Carstairs had kept up a correspondence with friends in other cities, hoping someone would stumble on to O'Brien alive. A search of Miss Groloch's house, in a day when such things need not be done so politely and proper, had produced nothing. He had not found a doily out of place, let alone bloodstains or evidence of violence. For weaponry the woman had possessed nothing more dangerous than a few kitchen knives.
Carstairs had made his final entry in 1929, on the eighth anniversary of the case, and the eve of his assignment to the Board of Police Commissioners. He had left best wishes for anyone who became interested in his hobby case.
He had finally surrendered.
Pasted to the last page was a snapshot of a man and a woman, in the style of the early twenties. Penned on the yellowed sheet was "Guess who?" in John's hand, with an arrow indicating the man.
The resemblance was remarkable. Even to the suit. And the woman was undeniably Fiala Groloch.
"John!" Cash thundered. "Get in here!"
He appeared quickly, wearing a foolish grin. "Saw the picture, eh?"
"Yeah. You didn't fake something up, did you?" John and Michael, as teenagers, had loved practical jokes. John had once gone through a camera stage. He and Michael had made some phony prints showing Cash and a neighbor woman leaving a motel. There had been virtual war with Annie before the boys had confessed. Cash had never forgiven them.
Because he really had been guilty, his feet of clay had been innocently, accidentally exposed, his darkest secret had been hauled, bones rattling, from its casket by children who knew not what they did. The experience had made him suspect there might be something to the law of karma after all.
John's smile faded. "Not this time. You want to run tests?"
"No." Cash believed him. He didn't want to, though. "Wait. Maybe. This's impossible, you know. It can't be him."
"I know." Harald seemed proud of his little coup, but frightened. As was Cash, who felt like a wise Pandora about to open the box anyway.
"There're no prints in the file," Cash observed. "Did they use them then?"
"Got me. I don't even know how to find out."
"They started in the eighteen hundreds, I think. Didn't Sherlock Holmes use them?"
"Shee-it, I don't know. Never made any difference to me."
"Okay. Okay. We got a problem. How to prove our corpse isn't Jack O'Brien. We need something concrete. Dental records?"
"No way. You saw the coroner's report. No dentist ever saw the inside of that mouth. Perfect teeth."
"Yeah. Wouldn't find anything medical, either. It'd be here in the file. Scars and things. Carstairs doesn't mention a one. You'd think a guy with O'Brien's street record would've gotten cut up a little. Must've been a lucky bastard. Bet you couldn't even find a birth record… Wait! O'Brien. Catholic…"
"Got you." John started to leave.
"Hold on here. Let's have a plan. All we can do is find out if he was born here, maybe if any relatives are still alive… Yeah, that'd help. Find somebody who really knew him besides Miss Groloch. Wouldn't be conclusive, though."
Cash paused, thought for nearly a minute. "We need to get ahold of something with his prints. You think any would still be around?"
John spread his hands, shrugged. "They found pterodon bones in Texas a couple months ago."