Tree of Smoke (69 page)

“You don’t have milk?”

“I mean it’s just the weak stuff—you know. Watery. The way they make it.”

He poured tea and watched Crodelle devour several sandwiches in two bites each. He realized he was sitting forward tensely and sat back and pretended to relax. He checked a midwestern impulse to urge on his guest more sandwiches, and more—chicken, pork, a little butter. “Good bread,” his guest remarked. Neither spoke again until Crodelle had wiped his hands on a blue linen napkin.

“I believe,” Crodelle said, “your last words to me were a question as to the location of the JFK warfare school.”

“Fort Bragg. Yeah. It came back to me.”

“I’m with the Fourth Battalion. MOS training.”

“And MOS, what’s that?”

“Military Occupational Specialty.”

“Well then. Who do you train?”

“Guys. Fellows.”

“Really. What’s your specialty?”

“Psychological Operations.”

“Captain Terry, you seem a little miffed with me.”

Crodelle smiled, but only slightly. “So we couldn’t interest you in a polygraph.”

“No. I would have lied on the control questions anyway.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Just to mess up the first-round results.”

“Skip, you’re not expected to behave when we’re questioning you as you’ve been taught to behave when being questioned by the enemy. We are not the enemy.”

Skip said, “‘Enemy’ is no longer a term I’d use in any case. Ever.”

“Why not?”

“It’s just stupid, man. Have you looked around yourself lately? This isn’t a war. It’s a disease. A plague. And that was my preliminary round the other day, with the phony polygraph. And this is the second round. Correct?”

“No. Incorrect. This is just a pick-up. Sort of. I mean, it’s just time for you to wrap up here, that’s all, so I’m here to get you.”

“Then why are we sitting around?”

“Intellectual curiosity. It’s always my downfall. Who
was
the colonel? What was he doing? I mean, his little article was an act of professional suicide, but the assertions are hard to refute.”

“Voss told me he wrote most of it.”

“The ideas came from the colonel. The semi-treasonous ones anyway.”

“He was a great man,” Skip said, “and he wasn’t in any way treasonous.”

“We all want to believe that, Skip.”

“He was a force of nature, Terry, and now he’s gone. I’m confused and you’re confused. He’s suddenly absent. It’s disorienting as all get-out.”

“Then let’s orient ourselves, Skip, and deal with the colonel’s mess.”

“You misunderstood him completely.”

“Oh no you don’t!—you don’t turn this into a movie about Walt Whitman or somebody—the shortsighted, narrow-minded boobs lynching the golden-boy visionary. You don’t turn this into the crucifixion. I’m asking you who
was
this guy, and you’re singing a bullshit movie theme song.”

“Hold on, hold on. I’m just trying to tell you something you don’t understand. I knew him all my life, and I swear to you, Crodelle, the colonel was exactly who he looked like. He really was this madman flying a plane with one wing blown off and smoking a cigar and laughing at death and all that. But he had this second side. He wanted to be intelligent, he wanted to be erudite, he wanted to be the suave bureaucrat. I’m surprised he didn’t take up smoking a pipe. He wanted to intellectualize, he wanted to monitor information systems, he really—somewhere inside him was this librarian, hidden away.”

“And that’s the part that fucked things up for us, Skip. Let’s deal with that part.”

“Deal with it?”

“Come on, Skip, come on, work with me. We need to get everything back under the light. The colonel didn’t share. He didn’t lend his efforts to the general endeavor.”

“So?”

Crodelle poured the dregs from the teapot into his cup.

“Look, Terry, am I supposed to be getting something right now? Because I don’t.”

“I want to ask you about these files.”

“They’re right upstairs. Take ’em.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, take ’em. They’re shit.”

“You realize at this point you don’t need to lie.”

“I realize. The files are upstairs. The files are worthless. That is the absolute truth.”

Crodelle relaxed, as if perhaps he believed. “The guy was really something. Really something.”

“Yeah. Yeah. He was a lot of things.”

“How did he characterize his relationship with John Brewster?”

“Brewster?”

“Yeah. I’m curious. How were their relations?”

“Strained. Brewster had some concerns, and put him behind a desk.”

“Hah! Concerns?”

“About his health.”

“His health. You mean about his heart, and his drinking, and his tendency to suddenly slug people in the jaw.”

Skip said, “His heart?”

“Isn’t that what killed him?”

“I have no idea how he died. I heard he was assassinated.”

“I’ve heard all that nonsense too. The colonel threw a coronary upstairs at the Rex. In the swimming pool. Or in the restaurant or somewhere. Anyway, he didn’t go down defending the Alamo.”

“Oh—oh,
wow
.”

“What.”

“You’re Brewster’s boy.”

“I resent that.”

“Yeah, but I repeat it: you’re Brewster’s boy. Brewster wants to look at the files before anybody else finds out about them. Right?”

Crodelle smiled.

“Don’t leer at me like I’m an idiot, Terry.”

“I can’t help it.”

“This isn’t about any crazy unauthorized op. This is just about a bunch of note cards that might make somebody look bad. Somebody who probably hasn’t done anything to worry about.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“Yeah, it is, it certainly is. I mean, considering the fucked-up nature of the files. But that’s what’s going on here, isn’t it? Jesus Christ. Come on, let’s look at them.”

“Yeah?”

“Come on.”

Crodelle followed him up the narrow stairs. This time of day the villa’s upper regions trapped the heat like an attic. Sands pointed at the spare room and opened his own bedroom door to get what they might of a breeze. Crodelle stood looking into the spare room. “Where are they?”

Sands pushed past him and raised the lid of one of the footlockers. “Cleverly hidden.”

“That’s them?”

“They’re all in alphabetical order. And cross-referenced. Go ahead, look up Brewster.”

“Come on. If the old man was serious, they’re coded.”

“It’s not in code. Look up anything that might cross-reference with Brewster. Place names, something like that.”

Crodelle raised the lid of another and stared down into it. “You’re willing to turn these over to us?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Let’s load these babies in the buggy. If we stack things properly, we can get them all to town in one trip.”

“To the Language School, or where?”

“The MAC-V compound. Tan Son Nhut.”

“MAC-V’s not there anymore.”

“There’s a little facility there.”

“Oh, fuck,” Skip said.

“What?”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

Crodelle looked at him with raised eyebrows, and Sands gauged the redhead’s size, considered taking a page from Jimmy Storm’s book and throwing an uppercut into the man’s middle, just below the sternum, but thought against it. Having recently lost one fight, he didn’t feel like starting another one.

“Hang on,” Skip said. “I’ll get dressed.”

He went across the hall and into his own rooms, and Crodelle followed him and watched as he changed his shorts for long slacks, put on socks and shoes and a shirt. What else? He wouldn’t be returning. On his dresser, a stack of photos from the Philippines. He put half a dozen in his pocket.

From his dresser drawer he took his watch, his passport, and his .25-caliber Beretta. “Shit,” Crodelle said. “Never happen.”

Sands pocketed the passport, put the watch on his wrist, and stepped forward and put the gun against Crodelle’s forehead.

“Okay, okay, okay. Is the safety on?”

“No.” Sands tried to think. “Here’s where it gets tricky.”

“Just put the safety on, and step back, and let’s talk.”

“I do all the talking. You do what I tell you. I don’t have to shoot if we do this right.”

“I’m with you,” Crodelle said.

“Stand there.”

“I’m standing.” Crodelle stood very still with his hands raised to the level of his chest and his fingers splayed. “Just put the safety on, that’s all I ask.”

“Not one more word.”

“Fine.”

“I mean it. Sit in that chair.”

Crodelle drew a chair from the tea table and sat. Sands opened his dresser’s top drawer and with one hand pulled out socks and underpants, feeling for his first-aid materials. He placed several rolls of gauze bandage on top of the dresser. “Stand up. No talking.”

Crodelle stood. Holding the gun against his spine, Sands pulled the chair closer to himself. “Sit down.” Crodelle sat. “Cross your arms behind the chair. Open your mouth. Wider.” He jammed a sock into Crodelle’s mouth. Pulling the clasp from the roll of bandage with his teeth and managing as best he could with one hand, he wrapped Crodelle’s face and neck with the gauze and then girded him around the chest, going around him several times until he’d reached the end of the roll and pinned his arms behind him to the back of the chair. With one hand he was able only to make a rudimentary knot. He felt apologetic about his materials. An electric lamp cord would have been just the thing. Not possible in a house out past the power lines.

Crodelle seemed, by the pattern of his agitated breath, to attempt some commentary on the process, which Sands repeated with two more rolls in order to bind each of Crodelle’s legs to a chair leg, providing the commentary himself: What are you doing? What comes next? How do you tie a Green Beret to a chair with gauze and no tape? You’ll have to tie a knot. Don’t you need two hands to tie a knot?

“I’m putting the gun on the dresser while I get you tied down tight,” he said. “You can try something and see how it all turns out, or you can sit still.” Crodelle made no movement while Sands used two rolls to tie his wrists together and secure his arms to the back of the chair with a proper trucker’s-hitch knot. Sands knelt in front of him with the four remaining rolls and tied each leg firmly in place as tightly as he could without concern for his prisoner’s circulation.

Without speaking to Crodelle he left the room to find some packing tape across the hall. When he returned Crodelle hadn’t, as far as was discernible, made any movement to escape. Sands wound several yards of tape around his mouth, chest, and legs, covering the knots he’d made. “I’m taking the files downstairs. I’m going to be up and down the stairs and I’ll be checking on you. If I think you’ve been fooling around here trying to get loose—I swear to God, that’s it. I’ll kill you.”

On his last trip up the stairs he leaned close to Crodelle’s ear, breathing hard from his exertions, and said, “I’m going to burn the colonel’s files. Do you know why?” He paused, as if the redhead might answer through a suffocating inch of gauze. Crodelle only kept his eyes shut and concentrated on breathing through his nostrils. “No? Well, think about it.” The speech disappointed him. He left the room feeling embarrassed and went out back of the house to Tho’s burn pile, where he’d assembled a mound of cards and papers five feet in circumference, perhaps, and a couple of feet high at its peak, a paltry monument, he thought, to the work of two of his years and God knew how much of the life of Colonel Francis Xavier Sands. The breeze blew strongly, and some of the note cards fluttered away to land in the creek.

He was out of matches before the pile had caught. He went into the kitchen for something more incendiary and heard Crodelle upstairs thumping around on the floor overhead, progressing over it, perhaps, in the manner of a monkey hopping on its ass. It didn’t matter.

He carried a full box of matches outside and went past the burn pile and shouted for Tho, who came from his house barefoot, in long pants and a T-shirt. “Mr. Tho, where’s the kerosene?”

“Kerosene? Yes. I have.”

“Get the kerosene, please, and burn those papers.”

“Now?”

“Please, yes, now.”

Tho went to the side of the house and came back with his battered two-gallon can of kerosene and doused the pile while Skip knelt and struck matches at its base. The fire blazed up, and he stepped back. He stood with Tho and watched a minute. Across the creek and downstream a ways, above the coconut palms and papayas, gray and brown smoke also rose from some neighbor’s pile of trash.

Jesus, he thought, what a fool that old man was.

Tho went for his rake. Skip returned to the house.

He was astounded to find Crodelle in the kitchen, still in the chair, bent forward, his hands free, cutting away with a bread knife at the windings that still bound his left leg.

Sands dug in his pocket for his Beretta and pointed it as Crodelle stood up.

Immediately he sat down. “You don’t have to shoot me! You don’t have to shoot me!”

“Do you know what I’m doing? Can you smell that smoke? I’m burning the files.”

“This isn’t about the files! God
damn
, man. You don’t have to shoot anybody.”

“What happens if I don’t?”

“I can pretty well assure you that’s the end of it. I want to move my hands. I want to rub my legs. They’re dead, you cut off the blood. Jesus. What a fucking asshole you are. Go ahead and shoot me. I’ve got six thousand dollars for you. Fuck you.”

“You’ve got what?”

Crodelle leaned forward and spat bloody drool onto the floor. “A really fucked-up thing has happened, Skip. A BND operative got X’d the other day in Saigon. A man named Fest.”

“For God’s sake,” Sands said. “I know that guy.”

“Dietrich Fest?”

“Not by name, but I met him in the Philippines. And I’m pretty sure I saw him at the Green Parrot—the same day I met you.”

“Well,” Crodelle said, “it’s a screwy deal. It blew up. We should have stopped it, but things develop a momentum. And it was a legitimate VC target.”

“Oh, shit. Trung Than?”

No answer.