Occasionally he punctuated a point with an offhand wave of his arm, or by rolling his eyes, looking upward, as if mocking the black flier's denials.
"It's the truth! How hard is it to argue the truth?" Scott fairly shouted, the words bouncing off the walls of the cell.
"And what relevance does the truth really have?" Hugh replied softly.
This question seemed to stop the black man abruptly. Scott was bent forward at the waist, but rendered slightly openmouthed, as if the force of words gathered in reply had jammed his throat like commuters hurrying toward a rush-hour train. He turned to Tommy for a moment, almost as if he wanted him to come to his assistance, but he still said nothing. Tommy kept his own mouth clamped shut. He thought they were all being measured, in that small room, heights, weights, eyesight, blood pressure, and pulse. But more important, whether they were on the right side or the wrong side of a violent and unexplained death.
Into this small silence, Hugh Renaday eagerly stepped.
"So," he said briskly, like a mathematician reaching the end of a long equation, "you had motive. Plenty of motive. A goddamn abundance of motive, correct, lieutenant? And we already know you had the opportunity, for you have also rather blissfully admitted to everyone arrayed against you about leaving your bunk in the middle of the night in question.
All that's lacking, really, is the means. The means to perform the murder. And I suspect our counterparts are examining that question as we speak."
Hugh eyed Scott narrowly. He continued to speak in irritating, frank terms:
"Don't you think. Lieutenant Scott, that it makes much more sense to admit it? Own up to the killing. Really, in many respects, no one will blame you. I mean, certainly Bedford's friends will be outraged, but I think we could argue fairly successfully that you were provoked.
Provoked. Yes, Tommy, I truly think that's the way to go. Lieutenant Scott should openly admit what happened… it was a fair fight, after all, wasn't it, lieutenant? I mean, him against you. In the Abort. In the dark. It very well could have been you lying there…"
"I did not kill Captain Bedford!"
"We can argue a lack of premeditation. Tommy. Some bad blood between men that leads inevitably to a rather typical fight. The army deals with these all the time. Manslaughter, really… probably do a dozen years, hard labor, nothing more-" "You're not listening! I didn't kill anyone!"
"Except Germans, of course…"
"Yes!"
"The enemy?"
"Yes."
"Ah, but wasn't Bedford just as great an enemy?"
"Yes, but…"
"I see. It's all right to kill the one, but jolly well wrong to kill the other?"
"Yes."
"You don't make any sense, lieutenant!"
"I didn't kill him!"
"I think you did!"
Again Scott opened his mouth to reply, then stopped. He stared across the small space at Hugh Renaday, breathing hard, like a man fighting ocean waves and currents, struggling to make the safety of the shore.
He seemed to make some sort of inward decision, and then he spoke, in a cold, harsh fashion, evenly and direct, a voice of restrained passion, the voice of a man trained to fight and kill.
"If I had decided to kill Vincent Bedford," Lincoln Scott said, "I would not have done so in secret. I would have done it in front of everyone in the camp. And I would have done it with this…"
With those words, Scott suddenly stepped across the space separating himself from Renaday, throwing a roundhouse right fist through the air, but abruptly stopping short of the Canadian's face. The punch was savage and lightning-fast, delivered with accuracy and brutality. The black man's clenched hand hovered inches away from Renaday's chin, remaining there.
"This is what I would have used," Scott said, almost whispering.
"And I wouldn't have made any damn secret out of it."
Hugh stared at the fist for a second, then looked at the black man's flashing eyes.
"Very quick," he said in his quiet voice.
"You've had training?"
"Golden Gloves. Light heavyweight champion for the Midwest. Three years running. Undefeated in the ring. More one-punch knockouts than
I can count."
Scott turned toward Tommy.
"I quit boxing," he said stiffly, "because it got in the way of my studies."
"And those were?" Hugh demanded.
"After obtaining my undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Northwestern, I received a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Chicago," Lincoln Scott replied.
"I have also done some graduate work in the unrelated field of aeronautical engineering. I took those courses in order to become an airman."
He dropped his fist to his side and took a step back, almost turning his back on the two white men, but then stopping and looking them, in turn, in the eyes.
"And I have killed no one, except Germans. As I was ordered to do by my country."
The two men left Lincoln Scott in the cooler cell and walked into the
South Compound. Tommy breathed in hard; as always, the tight confines of the cooler cells triggered a slight unsettled sensation within him, like a reminder to be afraid.
The cooler was as close as he wanted to get to confinement and his lurking claustrophobia. It was not a cave, a closet, or a tunnel, but it had some of the dreary, dark aspects of each, and this made him nervous, stirring his childhood fear within him.
An odd quiet seemed to have settled across the American section of the camp; the usual numbers of men weren't out in the exercise yard, nor were men walking the perimeter with the same steady, frustrated march.
The weather had improved again, breaks of sunshine and blue sky interrupting the overcast Bavarian heavens, making the faraway lines of pine trees in the surrounding forest glisten and gleam in the distance.
Hugh strode forward, as if the quickness in his feet mirrored the calculations in his head. Tommy Hart kept pace beside him, so that the two men were shoulder to shoulder, like a pair of medium bombers flying in tight protective formation.
For a moment. Tommy looked up. He imagined rows of planes lining runways throughout England, Sicily, and North Africa. In his mind's ear, he could hear the drone of the massed engines, a steady, great roar of energy, increasing in pitch and thrust, as phalanxes of planes raced down the tarmac and lumbered up, laden with their heavy bomb loads, into the clearing skies. He saw above him a shaft of daylight streaking through the thinning clouds and thought that there were officers and flight commanders sitting at desks in safe offices throughout the world seeing the same sunlight and thinking that it was a fine day to send young men off to kill or to die. A pretty simple question, that, he thought to himself.
Not much of a selection. Not much of a choice.
He lowered his eyes and thought about what he'd seen and heard in the cooler. He took a deep breath, and whispered to his companion: "He didn't do it."