A jet filled the sky, a 727 roaring down the Potomac toward National Airport, its noise burying their words. The great silver craft banked as it sped by, close enough to be touched. Its landing gear locked down. They had climbed and now stood atop one of the hills across which the cemetery spread, and it all lay before them, the white markers spilling into the valleys and the clumps of dogwood, and beyond that a band of highways, a sluggish brown river, and finally a blazing white city. It looked even more like a movie Rome from here.
“I hate Washington,” said Chardy. “I hate the people, the newspapers, the pretty women. It’s no city for guys like Frenchy and me. I just hate it.” His own sudden passion amazed him. But he did hate it.
“It’s just a place,” Marion said.
A cool wind whipped the leaves, chilling Chardy. He’d left his overcoat in his car, from which he was now, in his wanderings with Marion, a mile distant.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I interrupted you. I’m not much company today, I’m afraid.”
“Funerals depress everyone. Please don’t worry about it, Paul.”
“Thanks.”
“I was telling you that Frenchy was thinking of you at the end.”
“That’s right.”
“He had a message for you. He told me especially to tell you. But then he died and it was a difficult time and then I didn’t see you and I started another life. The years went by. But now I remember. Seeing you, standing by yourself up on that hill with your new beard, I remembered.”
“A message?” said Chardy, curious.
“ ‘Marion,’ he said, ‘Marion, when Paul gets back, tell him to fetch the shoe that fits. Got that? Fetch the shoe that fits? He’ll know what I’m talking about.’”
Chardy couldn’t keep a sudden cruel grin off his face.
“What does it mean, Paul?”
“Oh, Marion, it goes back so far, to another time. A terrible time. I hate to tell you.”
“You can tell me, Paul. I’m a big girl.”
“When we were running our missions into the North up around the DMZ with the Nung people, there was a Chinese opium merchant in the area named Hsu. H-S-U. Pronounced ‘shoe.’ Anyway, one of our patrols got bounced bad, and we just got out of there with our hides. It was a bad, bad time. And then somebody told us this Hsu was working for the North Vietnamese. He was their agent; he’d infiltrated our area to get a look at our operations. He was a very bad guy, it turned out. Well, we had our contacts too. We set him up. We let it be known that he’d done some work for us. His bosses didn’t see the humor in it. The guy was found floating in the river in oil drums. Several of them. And Frenchy said — we were drunk at the time; you have to understand that — Frenchy said, ‘Well, Paul, we proved the Hsu fits.’ It seemed very funny at the time.” She didn’t say a word.
“Marion, you’re horrified. Look, we were in the middle of an ugly kind of business. People were getting greased left and right. It had come out that up north they’d put out a fifty-thousand-piaster bounty on our heads. You never knew which way was up and you went out on these long patrols with the Nungs and you never knew if you were coming back. It was a hard time, a difficult time, and nobody knows or cares about it anymore. And a lot of things seemed funny then that don’t now.” He was irritated that she seemed so offended. What did she think Frenchy’s job was all those years?
“I had no idea it would be so cruel.”
“I’m sorry, Marion. I didn’t mean to wreck your illusions.”
“I can be an awful prig, can’t I? It’s not your fault. As you say, it was a different kind of time. But what about the ‘fetch’?”
What about it?
“I just don’t know what he was thinking about with that. I think he meant ‘remember’ or something. He was saying, ‘Remember the times we had.’”
“Oh, it’s such a strange world you and Frenchy had, Paul. I’m so glad to be out of it. Look, here’s my car.” They had reached a low brick wall that separated the cemetery from Fort Myer. Just beyond, in the Army parking lot, was a dirty yellow Toyota.
She smiled, her features briefly lighting. She’d really been a beautiful woman once, where Frenchy had always been especially ugly, and Chardy had always been impressed with his ability to earn the loyalty of such a lovely woman.
“It was so good to see you again, Paul. I’m so glad I came to this. It was nice to step into the past again. I really do miss him, Paul. I really do.”
He thought she might cry, and said quickly, “Yes, I do too, Marion.”
“Call me sometime, if you’d like. My husband’s name is Brian Doelp.” She spelled it. “We live out in the suburbs, a place called Columbia. Halfway between Baltimore and Washington. It’s very nice.”
“I will, Marion. It was nice seeing you too. It really was.” He bent and kissed her on the cheek.
“Can I drop you somewhere?”
“No, my car’s just over there,” and he pointed vaguely in the direction of Maryland and the North Pole.
“Bye-bye then.”
“Goodbye, Marion.”
She climbed into the car, started it quickly, and disappeared into the traffic of Fort Myer.
Chardy walked back through the boneyard, a tall man, bearded, hunched against the wind, his hands in his pockets. He put on his sunglasses. The cemetery was empty now, except for a few tourists, and he walked among the American dead, thinking of his own losses.
20
Chardy sat in the back seat with Lanahan, while some Agency gofer — a kid, no introductions had been made — chauffeured them down Wisconsin Avenue through increasingly snarled traffic.
Lanahan droned: “And at four fifty-five the car takes you to National. You’ll be covered the whole way, Paul, backup units, checkpoints, escort, the works.”
“Just like I was in Boston, Miles?”
Miles plunged on. “By six you’ll be on a Lear to Chicago. You land at Meigs, on the lake, not at O’Hare. From there it’s just a hop to the Ritz-Carlton in Water Tower Place, where the conference is; there’s a room for you there too.”
“Miles, I don’t think I’m going to make a very good bodyguard.”
“Look, Paul, I thought Yost was clear on this. The last thing anybody needs is for this guy to wax Danzig. We’re going to nail him. We’re going to lay out such a net, there’s no way he can get through. But if he does, Paul, if he should get through — you’re there, you’ll recognize him. Remember, nobody else knows what he looks like. You lived with him for over a year in the mountains. Have you got the piece?”
Chardy nodded. A Smith & Wesson Model 39 9-mm automatic hung upside down like a bat in a shoulder holster under his left arm.
“You’ve fired a nine-millimeter?”
“I’ve fired everything, Miles.”
“Okay. Now let me brief you on Danzig.” Lanahan at his most officious. His splotchy acne was particularly bad today, fiery red. The back of his neck hadn’t seen a barber since the last ice age. Flecks of dandruff lay across the dark shoulders of his rumpled blue suit. His short warty fingers jabbed the air as he discussed Danzig, but his eyes were bright with their own special kind of intelligence. They were small, sharp Irish eyes, city eyes. Miles wouldn’t miss much. He pushed ahead, lecturing Chardy.
“They say Danzig can be very charming. He likes to talk, he’s got this way of grabbing hold of people, talking them into oblivion. So you have to watch yourself. He’ll really rivet you if you don’t.”
Chardy thought of Joseph Danzig in all the hundred thousand pictures, on the TV shows, in the books: everywhere, like wallpaper. Of course, all that was a few years back, during his term in office and just afterward; still, the whiff of celebrity would cling to him. Yet Chardy knew he’d dislike him on principle, the way infantrymen dislike generals. For there’d been a time when if Danzig said go, a whole operation went: money, plans, papers, case officers, logistics people, on-site specialists. And somebody usually got burned and usually it was a Special Operations type — Chardy’s type. Nicky Welch, greased in Laos. Tony Chin had caught it in Laos also, or maybe it was Cambodia, a sucking chest wound, slow death. Chardy couldn’t remember. And hadn’t Stan Morris taken some junk in Angola, the African op, and been turned into a basket case? Yes. And in every one of those scams, the outcome was the same. At the crucial moment, Danzig had pulled back. He’d seen the cost escalating and he’d pulled back, and Nicky and Tony and Stan and the others had bought nothing with their skins. As had Chardy bought nothing with Saladin II, a classic example. Once, down at the Special Warfare school in Panama, he and a bunch of other instructors, all old Special Operations vets, had tried to figure out how many had died on account of Danzig’s way of doing things. The list had been long.