"I don't know. What do you mean? I knew him for thirty years, but not very well. He was a private sort of guy. Saw him more at the neighborhood association meetings than any other time."
"I just wondered. Can't tell what it was anymore, but he had a lot of strange stuff in his basement."
Cash shrugged. He hadn't noticed. But he hadn't done much looking. "He says he was a doctor in the old country. I don't think he ever practiced here. Never did anything but hang around his house and go to stamp-club meetings. He was some kind of expert on rare stamps. The whole third floor of his house was filled with stamp albums and books about stamps. Like to drove me crazy talking about it the one time I went over there."
"You see anything strange?"
"No. Except for the stamp collections the house was the same as any other place on the street. I never went in the basement, though."
"Hospital-type stuff. Yeah. That's what it was."
"Now you mention it…" The basement had looked a lot like a ruined intensive care ward.
"Think he might have been in the abortion business before it was legal?"
"Without us ever getting a hint?"
Railsback shrugged. "I'll believe anything anymore. Not much we can do here now. Shit! I forgot about the Old Man. Smith or Tucholski say anything about taking him in?"
"I don't think so." Cash was too tired to think. And he still had to go back to the station for his own car. He handed Hank the keys to the police vehicle. "Why don't you get the car, check on your dad, then pick up me and Beth at my house?" Beth had fled thither after her first glimpse of a burned corpse.
"Okay."
As Cash strolled homeward with Tran, the major asked, "What became of your partner? His wife and your daughter-in-law were at your house when I returned from work. They were upset."
"Oh, I don't need that."
"Pardon?"
"I'm wiped out. I don't think I can cope with Carrie tonight." He quickly explained what he and John had done, and that John had vanished. Just like O'Brien, four hoods, and a twelve-year-old detective.
"And now the woman's disappeared too?"
"Slick. But I got a good idea where she went. Hank gives me fifteen minutes tomorrow, I'll find out for sure. She's got a brother or uncle or something in New York that she doesn't know we know about. She'll go there."
Annie had managed to get rid of Carrie and Nancy somehow. He didn't ask, just collapsed into a chair and listened bemusedly to Beth and Le Quyen, who were carrying on an animated conversation. Friday would be another along day, and during it he would have to tell Carrie the truth.
And Teri, too.
His life was closing in. His job was polluting it, and he was losing his zest.
He didn't get to bed till one, and then only with Hank's hard, "Be in bright and early, Cash!" still ringing in his ears.
XXII. On the Z Axis;
1969-1973;
Huang's Academy
Michael had been there for two years. His teachers had succeeded. He now could not remember ever having been anything but a Maoist. Once, maybe, an unawakened Maoist. But never an enemy of the people. It had been his awakening social conscience that had driven him to enlist in the imperialist army. So he could learn its ways against the day the Revolution came.
He could scarcely wait for the war's end. He dreamed of carrying the truth to family and friends.
He gloried in having been the first American graduate student, and the first of his class chosen to instruct his countrymen. He was now the official greeter of new classes, and one of the senior American staffers. From his humble beginnings here he might one day rise to command an army of liberation.
There wee signs that the potential had begun to develop at home. The marches, the excitement at last summer's Democratic Party National Convention, seemed so promising. It was time for a man, an American Mao or Ho.
Michael believed Huang was grooming him for big things.
The school had a name so typically, so Chinese communistically, hyperbolic that Michael found it embarrassing to repeat. In English it came out resembling: Institute of Imperialist Recidivist Reeducation for the Purpose of the Establishment of a Peace-Loving People's Guided Democratic Republic of the United States of America. It sounded better in Chinese.
Michael suspected that the director himself found the name both tedious and ludicrous and had chosen it in hopes the fascist intelligence agencies would discount it as a fraud or red herring.
The academy's mission was to produce agent-larvae who would, eventually, devour the rotten fruit of capitalism from its core outward after their repatriation. Only an honored few men were to be reserved, at war's end, for later special employment on behalf of the director.
Michael's dream of bearing the light to his near and dear was pure fantasy. He already knew that he was one of the elect stay-behinds.
What he didn't know was that his selection wasn't an honor. He hadn't been chosen as the American Mao. Those chosen to remain forever MIA were the moral weaklings, the personalities incapable of withstanding the heat of the forges of pre-Revolution. Michael had been singled out as a loser, as a blade good for but one stroke. In the long run he was as expendable as a hand grenade.
Let him dream his dreams of becoming mighty among the socialist mighty. They did no harm, and kept him usefully eager.
The academy's population was never large, and the lot of a confirmed collaborator was loneliness. The weakness of character that made shifting allegiances easy was such that even defectors secretly loathed it in one another.
Michael Cash didn't have a single friend inside.
So it was that he awaited Snake's arrival with rising excitement.
But people change. Time, separation, and hardship devour the commonalities that form the bedrock of friendship. Michael and Snake had lived out two years in radically different environments. They had worked toward radically different goals. They were no longer the two pained, frightened, bewildered GIs who had shared the march up the Ho Chi Minh trail.
Snake wanted nothing more than to get the essential spark that was his self through this purgatory unconquered.
"Hey, man!" said Michael as Cantrell came toward him, down the ramp, beneath the cold-eyed desert stars. "Hey! Two years."
His pleasure was genuine and absolute. He had missed Snake's stubborn strength. "Really good to see you. How have they been treating you? I heard they gave you to Chico and Fidel for a while. They tell me those guys play rough. That's why I been busting my ass trying to get you here. Things are better here. You'll see."