Time to Hunt (51 page)

“Sierra-Bravo-Four.”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four. You say ‘Sierra-Bravo-Four’ and you will get my attention immediately and you will be stunned at what I can do for you and how fast. All right?”

“Fair enough.”

“Swagger, it’s too bad about Fenn. The game can be rough.”

Bob didn’t say anything.

“Now go on, get out of here.”

“I should beat the shit out of you for what you did to Donny. He was too good to use that way.”

“I did my job. I was a professional. That’s all there is to it. And if you ever do strike me, I will use the full authority of the law to punish you. You don’t have the right to go around hitting people. But if you do, Swagger, remember: not the face. Never the face. I have meetings.”

B
ob wondered what it would be like to be born in a house like this one. It was not really in Baltimore, but north of Baltimore, out in what they called the Valley, good horse country, full of rolling hills, well packed with lush green vegetation, and marked with fine old houses that spoke not merely of wealth but of generations of wealth.

But no houses as fine as this house. It was at the end of a road, which was at the end of another road, which was at the end of still another road. It had a dark roof and many complexities, and was red brick swaddled in vine, with all the trim white, freshly painted. Beyond it lay acres of rolling paradise, mostly apple orchards; but the house itself, tall and dignified and a century old, could have been another form of paradise. The oak trees surrounding it threw down a network of shadows. A cul-de-sac announced a final destination outside it, and off to the right were formal gardens, now somewhat overgrown.

Bob parked the rented Chevy, adjusted the knot on his tie and walked to the door. He knocked. After a while the door opened and a black face, ancient as slavery, peeked out.

“Yes, sir?”

“Sir, I am here to talk to Mrs. Carter. I spoke to her on the phone. She invited me out.”

“Mr. Stagger?”

“Swagger.”

“Yes, come in.”

He stepped into the last century, hushed, now thread bare. It smelled of mildew and old tapestries, a museum without a sign in front of it or a guidebook. He was escorted through silent corridors and empty rooms with elegant, dusty furniture and under the haunted gaze of
illustrious predecessors until he reached the sunroom, where the old lady sat in a wicker chair, looking out fiercely on her estate. Beyond, from this vantage, the windows displayed a view of a formal garden and a long, sloping path down through the apple trees.

“Mrs. Carter, ma’am?”

The old woman looked up and gave him a quick, bright once-over, then gestured him to the wicker sofa. She was about seventy, her skin very dark with too much Florida tan, her eyes very penetrating. Her hair was a ducktail of iron gray. She wore slacks and a sweater and had a drink in her hand.

“Mr. Swagger. Now, you wish to talk about my son. I have invited you here. Your explanation of why you wanted this discussion was frankly rather vaporous. But you sounded determined. Do you care about my son?”

“Well, ma’am, yes, I do. About what happened to him.”

“Are you a writer, Mr. Swagger? He has been mentioned in several dreadful books and even got a whole chapter in one of them. Awful stuff. I hope you are not a writer.”

“No, ma’am, I’m not. I have read those books.”

“You look like a police officer. Are you a police officer or a private detective? Is this some paternity suit? Some snotty twenty-five-year-old now says Trig was his father and he wants the bucks? Well, let me tell you, those bucks aren’t going to anybody except the American Heart Association, Mr. Swagger, so you can forget that idea right now.”

“No, ma’am. I’m not here about money.”

“You’re a soldier, then. I can see it in your bearing.”

“I was a Marine for many years, yes, ma’am. We would never say soldier. We were Marines.”

“My husband—Trig’s father—fought with Merrill in Burma. The Marauders, they called them. It was very rigorous. His health broke; he saw and did terrible things. It was very unpleasant.”

“Wars are unpleasant things, ma’am.”

“Yes, I know. I take it you fought in the one my only son gave up his idiotic life to end?”

“Yes, ma’am, I was there.”

“Were you in the actual fighting?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Were you a hero?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I’m sure you’re merely being modest. So why
are
you here, if you’re not writing a book?”

“Your son’s death is somehow tied up with something that hasn’t yet been answered. It’s also tied up, I think, with the death of that young man I mentioned earlier, another Marine. I just have a glimmer of it; I don’t get it yet. I was hoping you could tell me what you knew, that maybe in that way there could be some understanding.”

“You said on the phone you didn’t think my son killed himself. You think he was murdered.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t yet know.”

“Do you have any evidence?”

“Circumstantial. There seems to be some level of intelligence involvement in this situation. He may have seen something or someone. But it seems clear to me that there were spooks involved.”

“So my son wasn’t a moron who blew himself up for nothing except the piety of the left and the sniggering contempt of the right?”

“That would be my theory, yes, ma’am.”

“What would be more of your theory? Where is this heading?”

“Possibly he was used as a dupe. Possibly he was murdered, his body left in the ruins to make it look like it was a protest thing. His body would make that almost certain.”

She looked hard at him.

“You’re not a crank, are you? You look sensible, but
you’re not some awful man with a radio show or a news-letter or a conspiracy theory?”

“No, ma’am.”

“And if you do come to understand this, what would you do with that understanding?”

“Use it to stay alive. A man is trying to kill me. I think he’s also a spook. If I’m to stop him, I have to figure out why he’s after me.”

“It sounds very dangerous and romantic.”

“It’s a pretty crappy way to live.”

“Well, if you went into most houses in America and laid out that story, you’d be dismissed in a second. But my husband spent twenty-eight years in the diplomatic corps, and I knew spooks, Mr. Swagger. They were malicious little people who were capable of anything to advance their own ends. Theirs, ours, anyone’s. So I know what spooks do. And if the spooks of the world killed my son, then the world should know that.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Bob.

“Michael,” she called, “tell Amanda Mr. Swagger is staying for lunch. I will show him around the house and then afterwards he and I will have a long talk. If anybody comes looking to kill him, please tell the gentleman we are not to be disturbed.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the butler.

“I
t is exactly as it was,” she said, “on that last day.”

He looked around. The studio had been built out back, in what had once been servants’ quarters. The house was small, but its walls had been ripped out, leaving one huge raw room with red brick walls, a gigantic window that looked down across the orchards. It still smelled of oil paint and turpentine. Dirty brushes stood in old paint cans on a bench; the floor was spotted with paint drops and dust. Three or four canvases lay against the wall, evidently finished; one more was still on the easel.

“The FBI went through this, I guess?” Bob asked.

“They did, rather offhandedly. I mean, after all, he was dead by that time.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Come look at this one. It’s his last. It’s very interesting.”

She took Bob to a painting clamped rigidly on an easel.

“Rather trite,” she said. “Yet I suppose it was the correct project for him to express his anxieties.”

It was, unbelievably, a bald eagle, with the classic white head, brown, majestic body stout with power, anchored to a tree limb by clenching talons. Bob looked at it, trying to see what was so different, so alive, so painful. Then he had it: this wasn’t a symbol at all, but a bird, a living creature. It had obviously just survived some ordeal, and the gleam in its eyes wasn’t the predator’s gleam, the winner’s smug beam of superiority, but the survivor’s dazed, traumatic shock. It was called the thousand-yard-stare in the Corps, the look that stole into the eyes after the last frontal had been repulsed with bayonets and entrenching tools. Bob saw that the talons which gripped this tree branch were dark with blood and that the bird’s feathers, low on its stout body, were spotted with blood. He bent closer, looked more carefully. It was amazing how subtly Trig got all the components: the slight sense of the blood spots being heavier, moist against the fluff of the other feathers.

He looked at the bird’s single visible eye: it seemed haunted by horrors unforgotten, its iris an incredibly detailed mix of smaller color pigments that were different in color yet formed a whole, a living whole. Bob could sense the muscles twitching under its netting of feathers, and the breath coming heavily to it after much exertion.

“That boy was in one hell of a fight,” he said.

“Yes, he was.”

“Did he work from models? It ain’t like no eagle I ever saw. You’d have to be out in the wild and just seen the bird after it got out of a mix-up to get that look.”

“Or, possibly, see it in a man’s face, and project it onto a bird’s. But he’d been out West. He’d been all over, doing his paintings. He’d been all over the world, to Harvard, in a war, in every major peace demonstration, on committees, and the illustrator of a best-selling book by the time he was twenty-five.”

“Is he using the eagle as his country?”

“I don’t know. Possibly. I suspect that such a bird would be Jess alive, more rigid. This bird is too alive to be symbolic. Maybe it’s his own revulsion for bloodshed he’s displaying. I don’t see much heroic about that bird; I see a shaken survivor. But I don’t think you can know too much from it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Bob.

“For some reason, he
had
to finish this painting. Or finish the bird. He showed up late, in a pickup truck. He was dirty and sweaty. I asked him what he was doing? He said, ‘Mother, don’t worry, I can handle it.’ I asked him what he was doing here. He said he had to finish the bird.

“Then he came out here and he painted for seven straight hours. I had seen the preliminary sketches. It was different, conventional. Good, but nothing inspired. On that last night, this is the one place he had to go, the one thing he had to do.”

“Can you tell me about him? Was he different after he got back from England? What was going on with him, ma’am?”

“Did something happen to him? Is that what you’re asking?”

“Yes, ma’am. The intelligence officer I spoke to about all this said that the security services monitoring him believed he’d changed in England.”

“They kept a watch on all the bad boys, didn’t they?”

“They sure tried.”

They walked outside, where a few more rustic pieces of furniture languished. She sat.

“He was burnt out by seventy. He’d been marching since sixty-five. I think like all the young people then, it
was more of a party than a crusade. Sex, drugs, all that. What young people do. What we would have done in the forties if we hadn’t had a war to win. But by seventy, I had never seen him so low. All the marching, the jail sentences, the times he was beaten up, the people he’d seen used up: it seemed to do no good. There was still a war, boys were still getting killed, they were still using napalm. He was traveling, also painting; he had a place in Washington, he was everywhere. He spent four months in jail in 1968 and was indicted two more times. He was very heroic, in his way, and if you believed in his cause. But it wore him out. And there was the problem with Jack. That is, his father, who was forced by circumstance and perhaps inclination to accept the government’s view of the war. His father was still in the State Department and was, I suppose, actively engaged in planning some aspect of the war. Jack and Trig had been so close once, but by the end of the sixties they weren’t even talking. He once said to me, ‘I never thought that decent, kind man who raised me would turn out to be evil by every value I hold dear, but that’s what has happened.’ Rather a cruel judgment, I thought, for Jack had always loved and supported Trig, and I think he felt Trig’s alienation more painfully than anyone. I do know that Trig’s death ultimately killed Jack, too. He died three years later. He never really recovered. He was a casualty of that war, too, I suppose. It was such a cruel war, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am. You were telling me about 1970. Trig goes to England.”

“Yes, I was, wasn’t I? ‘I need to get out of here,’ he said. ‘I have to get away from it.’ He took a year at the Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford. Do you know Oxford, Mr. Swagger?”

“No, ma’am,” said Bob.

“He really was a wonderful artist. I think it had more to do with his decision just to get out, though, than with any particular artistic need.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, somehow, for some reason, it worked. He came back more excited, more dedicated, more passionate and more compassionate than I’d seen him since 1965. This was the early winter of 1971. He had evidently made some personal discoveries of a profound nature over there. He met some kind of mentor. I believe the name was Fitzpatrick, some charismatic Irishman. The two of them were going to end the war, somehow. It was so uncharacteristic of Trig, who was so cautious, so Harvard. But whatever this Fitzpatrick had sold him on, it somehow transfigured Trig. He came back obsessed with ending the war, but also obsessed with pacifism. He had never formally been a pacifist before, though he was never an aggressive or a brutal young man. But now he formally believed in pacifism. I felt he was on the verge of something, possibly something great, possibly something tragic. I felt he was capable of dousing himself with gasoline on the Pentagon steps and setting himself aflame. He was dangerously close to martyrdom. We were very worried.”