The Throat (76 page)

Our flight
boarded at a quarter to eleven, and at a quarter after, the captain
announced that the tower was going to take advantage of a reduction in
the fog to land aircraft that had been stacked up above us for several
hours. He apologized for the delay, but said that it would not last
much longer than thirty minutes.

After an
hour, the stewardesses passed out free drinks and extra packets of
honey-roasted nuts. I spent the time reading the last two day's issues
of the
Ledger
, which I'd
brought along.

The death of
William Writzmann, alias Billy Ritz, took up only three inches of type
on page five of the second section of yesterday's paper. Five grams of
cocaine, divided into a dozen smaller quantities and double-wrapped in
plastic pill envelopes, had been found in his suit pockets. Detective
Paul Fontaine, interviewed at the scene, speculated that Writzmann had
been murdered during a drug transaction, although other possibilities
were under investigation. When questioned about the words written above
the body, Fontaine replied, "At present, we think this was an attempt
to mislead our investigation."

The next day,
two patrons of the Home Plate Lounge remembered seeing Billy Ritz with
Frankie Waldo. Geoffrey Bough examined the life of Frankie Waldo and
came to certain conclusions he was careful, over the course of three
long columns, not to state. Over the past fifteen years, the Idaho Meat
Company had lost ground to national distributors organized into
vertical conglomerates; yet Waldo's salary had tripled by 1990. In the
mid-eighties, he had purchased a twelve-room house on four acres in
Riverwood; a year later, he divorced his wife, married a woman fifteen
years younger than himself, and bought a duplex apartment in the
Waterfront Towers.

The source of
this affluence was his acquisition of Reed & Armor, a rival meat
company that had gone into disarray after its president, Jacob Reed,
disappeared in February of 1983—Reed had gone out for lunch one day and
never been seen again. Waldo immediately stepped in, bought the
disintegrating company for a fraction of its real value, and merged the
resources of the two firms. It was the operations of this new company
that had roused the suspicions of various regulatory agencies, as well
as the Internal Revenue Service.

Various
persons who chose to remain anonymous reported having seen William
Writzmann, known as Billy Ritz, in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs
with Mr. Waldo, beginning in late 1982. I would have bet a year's
royalties that these persons were all Paul Fontaine, rewriting history
to suggest that Billy Ritz had killed Jacob Reed so that Ritz and Waldo
could launder drug money through a profitable meat company.

I thought
that Waldo was just a guy who spent too much money on stupid things.
Eventually, he made the error of turning to Billy Ritz to get himself
out of the hole. After that, he was nothing more than a victim with a
glitzy apartment and a lakefront view. Paul Fontaine had Ritz murder
Waldo in a way that looked like a gang killing. When Billy's body
turned up, it was just the bigger dealers taking out the little ones. I
wondered if anyone but me would ever wonder why a big-time dealer like
Billy Ritz was walking around with separate grams and half grams in his
pockets.

And then I
reminded myself that I still had no real evidence that Paul Fontaine
was Fee Bandolier. That was part of the reason I was sitting on a
stalled airplane, waiting to take off for Ohio. I didn't even want Fee
to be Paul Fontaine—I liked Fontaine.

The plane
took off into a clinging layer of fog that soon thickened into dark
wool. Then we shot out of the soft, clinging darkness into radiant
light. The plane made a wide circle in the sudden light, and I looked
down at Millhaven through the little window. A dirty, wrinkled blanket
lay over the city. After ten minutes, the blanket had begun to admit
shafts of light. Five minutes later, the land lay clear and green
beneath us.

The speakers
overhead hissed and crackled. The pilot's unflappable voice cut through
the static. "You people might be interested in knowing that we departed
Millhaven just before the tower decided to shut down operations until
further notice. That inversion bowl that caused all the trouble is
still stickin' around, so I congratulate you on not having chosen a
later flight. Thank you for your patience."

An hour
later, we landed at a terminal that looked like a ranch house with a
conning tower. I walked through a long waiting room with rows of
plastic chairs to the pay telephones and dialed the number Tom Pasmore
had given me. A deep voice jerky with anxiety answered after four or
five rings.

"You're the
writer fellow I was talking to? Suppose you tell me what outfit you
were in." I told him.

"You bring
your discharge papers?"

"No, sir," I
said. "Was that part of the agreement?"

"How do I
know you're not some peacenik?"

"I have a few
genuine scars," I said.

"What camp
were you stationed at and who was the CO there?"

It was like
talking to Glenroy Breakstone. "Camp Crandall. The CO was Colonel
Harrison Pflug." After a second, I said, "Known as the Tin Man."

"Come out and
let me get a look at you." He gave me a complicated set of directions
involving a shopping mall, a little red house, a big rock, a dirt road,
and an electric fence.

At the rental
counter, I signed up for every available kind of insurance and took the
keys to a Chrysler Imperial. The young woman waved her hand toward the
glass doors at what looked like a mile of parking lot. "Row D, space
20. You can't miss it. It's red."

I carried my
briefcase out into the sun and walked across the lot until I came up to
a cherry-red car about the size of a houseboat. It should have had a
raccoon tail on the antenna and a pair of fuzzy dice in the front
window. I opened the door and let the ordinary heat trickle into the
oven of the interior. When I got in, the car smelled like a Big Mac box.

About forty
minutes later, I finally backtracked to a boulder slightly smaller than
the one I had chosen, found my way to a dirt road that vanished into an
empty field, and bounced the Chrysler's tires along the ruts until the
road split into two forks. One aimed toward a far-off farmhouse, and
the other veered left into a grove of oak trees. I looked into the
trees and saw flashes of yellow and the glint of metal. I turned left.

Huge yellow
ribbons had been tied head-high around each of the trees, and on the
high cross-hatched metal fence that ran through them a black-and-white
sign said:
DANGER ELECTRIFIED FENCE NO TRESPASSERS
. I
got out of the
car and went up to the fence. Fifty feet away, the dirt road ended at a
white garage. Beside it stood a square, three-story white house with a
raised porch and fluted columns. I pushed a button in the squawk box
next to the gate.

The same
deep, anxious voice came through the box. "You're a little late. Hold
on, I'll let you in."

The box
buzzed, and I pushed open the gate. "Close the gate behind you," the
voice ordered. I drove in, got out of the car, and pushed the gate shut
behind me. An electronic lock slammed home a bolt the size of my fist.
I got back in the car and drove up toward the garage.

Before I
stopped the car, a bent old man in a white short-sleeved shirt and a
polka-dot bow tie appeared on the porch. He hobbled along the porch,
waving at me to stop. I cut the engine and waited. The old man glowered
at me and got to the white steps that came down to the lawn. He used
the handrail and made it down the steps. I opened the door and stood up.

"Okay," he
said. "I checked you out. Colonel Pflug was the CO at Camp Crandall
right up until seventy-two. But I have to tell you, you have pretty
flashy taste in vehicles."

He wasn't
kidding—Hubbel didn't look like a man who had ever wasted much time on
humor. He got up to within a yard of me and squinted at the car.
Distaste narrowed his black little eyes. He had a wide flabby face and
a short hooked nose like an owl's beak. Liver spots covered his scalp.

"It's a
rental," I said, and held out my hand.

He turned his
distaste to me. "I want to see something in that hand."

"Money?"

"ID."

I showed him
my driver's license. He bent so far over that his nose nearly touched
the plastic covering. "I thought you were in Millhaven. That's in
Illinois."

"I'm staying
there for a while," I said.

"Funny place
to stay." He straightened up as far as he could and glared at me.
"How'd you learn my name?"

I said that I
had looked through copies of the Tangent newspaper from the sixties.

"Yeah, we
were in the paper. Irresponsibility, plain and simple. Makes you wonder
about the patriotism of those fellows, doesn't it?"

"They
probably didn't know what they were doing," I said.

He glared at
me again. "Don't kid yourself. Those commie dupes put a bomb right in
our front door."

"That must
have been terrible for you," I said.

He ignored my
sympathy. "You should have seen the hate mail I got—people used to
scream at me on the street. Thought they were doing
good
."

"People have
different points of view," I said.

He spat onto
the ground. "The pure, they are always with us."

I smiled at
him.

"Well, come
on in. I got complete records, like I said on the phone. It's all in
good order, you don't have to worry about
that
."

We moved
slowly toward the house. Hubbel said that he had moved out of town and
put up his security fence in 1960. "They made me live in the middle of
a field," he said. "I tell you one thing, nobody gets into
this
office
unless they stood up for the red, white, and blue."

He stumped up
the stairs, getting both feet on one step before tackling the next.
"Used to be, I kept a rifle right by the front door there," he said.
"Would have used it, too. In defense of my country." We made it onto
the porch and crawled toward the door. "You say you got some scars over
there?"

I nodded.

"How?"

"Shell
fragments," I said.

"Show me."

I took off my
jacket, unbuttoned my shirt, and pulled it down over my shoulders to
show him my chest. Then I turned around so that he could see my back.
He shuffled forward, and I felt his breath on my back. "Pretty good,"
he said. "You still must have some of that stuff inside you."

My anger
disappeared when I turned around and saw that his eyes were wet. "Every
now and then, I set off metal detectors," I said.

"You come on
in, now." Hubbel opened the door. "Just tell me what I can do for you."

The crowded
front parlor of the old farmhouse was dominated by a long wooden desk
with high-backed armchairs behind and before it. An American flag stood
between the desk and the wall. A framed letter on White House
stationery hung on the wall behind the desk. A couch, a shaky-looking
rocker, and a coffee table filled most of the rest of the room. The
rocker faced a television set placed on the bottom shelf of a unit
filled with books and large journals that looked like the records of
his hardware business.

"What's this
book you want to write?" Hubbel got himself behind his desk and let out
a little puff of exertion. "You interested in some of the boys you
served with?"

"Not
exactly," I said, and gave him some stuff about how representative
soldiers had been affected by their wartime experience.

He gave me a
suspicious look. "This wouldn't be one of those damn pack of lies that
show our veterans as a bunch of criminals, I s'pose."

"Of course
not."

"Because they
aren't. People go on and on gassing about Post-Traumatic Whatzit, but
the whole damn thing was made up by a bunch of journalists. I can tell
you about boys right here in Tangent who came back from the war just as
clean-cut as they were when they got drafted."

"I'm
interested in a very special group of people," I said, not adding that
it was a group of one.

"Of course
you are. Let me tell you about one boy, Mitch Carver, son of a fireman
here, turned out to be a good little soldier in Airborne." He went on
to tell me the story, the point of which seemed to be that Mitch had
come back from Vietnam, married a substitute schoolteacher, become a
fireman just like his dad, and had two fine sons.

After the
children had been produced like a merit badge, I said, "I understand
that you also have records of the volunteers from your area."

"Why
shouldn't I? I made a point of meeting each and every one of our boys
who enlisted. A fine, fine bunch. And I kept up with them, too—just
like the boys I helped get into the service. I was proud of all of
them. You want to see the names?"

He gestured
toward the row of record books. "See, I wrote down the name of every
one of those boys. I call it my Roll Call of Honor. Fetch me a couple
of those books, I'll show you."

I stood up
and went to the bookshelves. "Could we look at the list from 1961?"

"You want to
see something, get me the book for 1968— that's a whole volume all by
itself, there's a million good stories in that one."

"I'm working
on 1961," I said.

His venomous
face distorted itself into a smile. A hooked old finger jabbed the air
in my direction. "I bet that's the year you went in."

I had been
drafted in 1967. "Got me," I said.

"Just
remember you can't pull anything over on me. 'Sixty-'sixty-one is the
second book in line."

I pulled the
heavy book off the shelf and brought it to his desk. Hubbel opened the
cover with a ceremonious flourish, roll call of honor had been written
in broad black strokes on the first page. He flipped through pages
covered with names until he came to 1961 and began moving his finger
down the line. The names were listed in the order in which they had
been drafted and had been written very carefully in the same broad
strokes of Hubbel's fountain pen.