“Yeah, right. That was a crazy night,” Ed Pearl whistled.
Vincent Meredith did not beat about the bush.
“Is Johnny Seiffert the sort of man who would burn down a club just to make a point?”
“Maybe. He’s a mean son of a bitch. He’s always got money to throw around, too. I heard he was busted a couple of times up in the Bay Area. Drug busts but nothing stuck. The way things are nowadays shits like Johnny must think they died and went to heaven. At least around here you know that as long as you pay Reggie O’Connell his tithe you’re not going to have to pay every grafter and loser who sticks out his hand.”
“Is it that bad?”
Ed Pearl nodded.
“That’s why Doug Weston thought he was safe pointing a shot gun at a little shit like Johnny Seiffert. The trouble with people like Reggie O’Connell is that if somebody is prepared to pay him more then all bets are off.”
On stage the young guitarist was starting the fill the club with reverberating, semi-orchestral chords.
“Should I know that kid’s name?” Vincent Meredith inquired as the rising crescendo of sound threatened to interrupt normal conversation.
“Ry,” Ed Pearl chuckled and with a shake of the head added, “Ry Cooder. And yeah, you probably should know his name!”
Chapter 33
Captain Nathan Zabriski of the US Air Force had only known Lieutenant-Commander Walter Brenckmann of the US Navy twenty-four hours but he trusted the dapper, grey-eyed submariner. When they were introduced it was evident that the Navy man knew everything there was to know about him; that he was a war criminal, that his mother had attempted to assassinate the President and that some days if he was left alone in a room with a gun he would gladly blow his brains out…
‘Good to meet you Captain Zabriski,’ the Navy man had intoned with no trace of irony in his voice. Just sympathy and an uncanny empathy that said more than any words could have said that he too had spent some time in the last year in the dark, desolate place where Nathan now found himself.
His handshake had been dry and firm.
The two young officers had been left to introduce themselves in a lonely corridor, their minders having taken several steps back to give them the sensation, if not the reality, of privacy.
‘They say I’m here to help you ‘break’ my Ma?’ Nathan had asked rhetorically. ‘I know why I’m here but what did you do wrong, Commander?’
Walter Brenckmann had understood that the question was not meant seriously; the other man had to have been feeling like shit at a time like this and the mere fact that he was holding himself together so well spoke highly of his personal moral courage.
“Like you I’m obeying orders,” he had replied evenly. “Like we both did on the night of the war and like you did twelve days ago in the Mediterranean.”
The two men’s eyes had met, held a long contact.
‘To be honest I really don’t know why I’m here,’ Walter had confessed, a self-deprecating twinkle in his gaze. ‘My Pa was the first person to jump on your Ma when she pulled the gun in the Oval Office. I’m between postings and maybe some shrink here in Langley reckoned that might be a potential point of contact with your Ma. Either that or maybe, they just thought I’d be the sort of guy who’d understand a little of what you must be going through now. Honestly, I gave up trying to work out what goes on inside the heads of elders and betters a long time ago.’
Nathan had smiled. Despite himself he had smiled, albeit only momentarily.
‘I killed hundreds of innocent people on Malta,’ he had insisted.
‘What about on the night of the October War?’ The Navy man had shot back at him.
‘A lot more than just thousands,’ Nathan had rasped, tingling with anger.
Walter had shrugged
“You and me both,” he had offered resignedly. ‘To this day I still don’t know where the birds I launched flew. I never want to know either. You didn’t get to have that choice, that’s really hard. I can’t begin to imagine how hard that must be, Captain. But at the end of the day we both obeyed orders. If we hadn’t the World would probably be an even bigger crock of shit.’
Now as Nathan Zabriski stared through the two-way mirror in the observation room behind Walter Brenckmann’s back at the sobbing, pathetic seemingly prematurely aged husk of a woman whom he lately only occasionally thought of as his mother, Nathan was not convinced he could go through with this charade. Edna Maria Zabriski had never been any sort of Mother to him; he had been beaten and neglected as a child, farmed out to foster parents time and again by the Air Force Welfare Division and when he was accepted into the Officer Candidate School at Lackland Air Force Base at San Antonio in Texas aged eighteen in 1956 he had effectively severed all contact with both his father — who had never been there for him when he needed him — and his mother, whom he had come to despise and rather pity. It had been explained to him that if the pathetic slobbering neurotic wreck of a woman in the interview room continued to refuse to co-operate with the CIA — apparently the Secret Service, having self-evidently failed to properly ‘vet her’ had been excluded by Presidential directive from any part in the interrogation of ‘the assassin’ — she would either be locked away in a secure asylum for the rest of her life, or sooner or later, be strapped into an electric chair. One part of him badly wanted to care what happened to her but he could not actually bring himself to feel anything for her but contempt.
Mainly he loathed himself.
It would have been much better for everybody concerned if he had died when the British fighters had chopped ‘The Big Cigar’ — and the other three 100th Bomb Group B-52s pressing home their attack on command and control centers, radar installations, dockyard installations and warships the Grand Harbour and the surrounding anchorages — out of a clear blue Mediterranean sky over Malta. The Big Cigar had just unloaded her bunker busters and a single, experimental thermobaric weapon — a fuel-air bomb which used oxygen from the surrounding air to initiate a high temperature, violent explosion which generated an intensely damaging shock wave, mimicking a small nuclear detonation — when the thirty-millimetre Aden cannon fire of an RAF Hawker Hunter jet that had had no right to be at combat height at the time of the attack, had chewed up the bomber so badly that it had virtually disintegrated around him. One moment he was watching his screens, following the radar traces of the bombs arrowing down towards their targets; the next he was falling through thin air in a cloud of pulverized aluminium, Perspex and what looked like strands of electrical cabling embedded in the shattered body parts of the other members of The Big Cigar’s crew. Instinctively he had hauled on his parachute handle. Thereafter he had watched in horror as The Big Cigar’s wingman — Follow Me Home — had plummeted down onto the Island of Gozo trailing a five mile long tail of smoke and fire…
There was a quite cough at his shoulder.
“I think your mother is ready to be reunited with you, Captain Zabriski.”
Nathan did not move. In fact he made no indication that he had heard what had been said to him.