Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy Page 26

  I sat on the sill and poured myself a small dose and lit an American cigarette. The street below was empty but for a couple, young I assumed by their cooing and smothered giggles. He was in uniform, though what kind I couldn’t tell in the darkness. They circled each other, pretending a chase. He would grab her about the ribs in a thinly disguised attempt to touch her up, and she’d laugh, then he’d allow her to wriggle free. She’d run along the cobbles, her tarn hanging oddly from her hair, held in place by a hatpin, mocking and teasing him to spur him to chase her again.

  From the other end of the street, out of sight from my flat window, came the slow, steady rhythm of heavy boots. I saw the boy and girl recompose themselves like errant children hoping to throw off any suspicion of naughtiness, and then, trying to restrain giggles, they toddled off hand in hand.

  The owner of the boots wore a cocked helmet, held an unlit torch in his hand, and had a gas mask satchel on his hip. His tread bespoke an older man. Home Guard, I thought. He stopped on the walk below me, glanced up and down the street, then upward. He must’ve seen the glow from my fag. He raised his torch to the brim of his helmet. I waved the amber tip of the cigarette back in returned salute, then he trudged off.

  Thereafter I had more of the scotch than I should have.

  I fobbed off, appearing at the office that morning with a vague tale of a lead on a new story, and returned to my observer’s station across from the Annex. It soon became obvious to me from the lack of the bustle and urgency that had marked the courtyard in recent days that whatever story had been a-brewing seemed to be finished. Still, I stayed until Harry Voss appeared as nattily put together as I’d seen him since the case began. The reason for his attentiveness to appearance became clear as I followed him to General DiGarre’s headquarters. I was still there when he exited a short time later looking very much a man adrift.

  None of it — the lying in wait, the surreptitious following of Harry to DiGarre’s offices and then, afterward, into the park — had anything to do with the story. If asked I would’ve said otherwise, something to the effect of these simply being the actions of a damned dogged journalist and if there were a story about, by heaven, no warning from Himself, Whitehall, or the Almighty would hold me off. But it was none of that.

  Harry was different from those bubbly cohorts of his who looked at their stationing in England as some grand holiday adventure. Nor did he have the swagger of those who considered themselves the heirs presumptive to a fading Empire. From the first day I saw him — and even more so since I’d seen him emerge from the Grosvenor Square complex after seeing the photographs of a burning Helsvagen — he looked like a man who would rather be at home. And more and more, I was feeling like a man who longed for one.

  Sitting by the Serpentine, sunk within himself, he seemed painfully alone. Without really being conscious of the act, out came my whistling: a contact. He looked over to where I was on the esplanade. I nodded and smiled, and he smiled back. And then — again not even really considering it — I made over to him and tipped my head toward the empty side of his bench. He shrugged in return and scooted over, and I sat.

  Across the water, the children were running at the swans, only to run off shrieking, terrified by the flapping of large, warning wings.

  “They’ll get themselves in a bit of trouble,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” Harry said.

  “The wee tykes there. Those birds are under protection of the Crown. All the swans in England, actually. Property of the King. Foul-tempered beasts, too. Odd what a person’ll care to protect. That’s the sort of queer business I suppose a visitor would describe as ‘quaint.’ And you do appear to be a visitor.”

  He looked down and seemed surprised to find himself in uniform. “Oh, yes.”

  “They’ll be all over the park soon, I imagine.”

  “Who? The swans?”

  I laughed. “The wee ones. They plopped most of ’em down in the countryside in the early days. Blitz Babies, they called ’em. Some went overseas. Australia. Canada. Some even to the States, so thank you for that. Oddly, the ones who stayed seem to have thought the whole affair a jolly pink tea. Enjoyed themselves immensely, climbing about the rubble, scavenging, dodging school, the whole lot of it quite fun. Too young to know any better, I suppose.”

  Harry squinted across the lake. The nanny had grabbed the children by their hands, scolding them for abusing the birds as she led them off. “Do you think they ever grow out of it?”

  “Some do.” I held out a hand. “Eddy,” I said in introduction. He took the hand. I nodded at the insignia on his shoulder. “Major, is it?” I asked, affecting a certain naive earnestness.

  “Harry. You’re...Scottish? I hear the brogue.”

  “Burr. It’s a Scottish burr. The Irish have a brogue, the Scots a burr. And you have a good ear, Harry.” I looked after the receding nanny and her charges. “Aye, they’ll all be coming back. Already started, it has. Bombs’ll be a lullaby to that lot running amuck. You have kids?”

  “Two.”

  “Then you know I’m spot on about the rumpus.”

  “They do get noisy.” He smiled wistfully.

  “Pictures?”

  He hesitated, not wanting to appear another boringly boastful parent, then he drew out his billfold, opening it to the transparent sleeves that housed his family. There were the boys, then the wife, then the boys and wife.

  “Nice lot, that,” I said. “Prettier than you, I dare say.”

  It was his turn to laugh. “I agree. I wonder if I’ll recognize them when I get home. It’s been so long.”

  “Oh, you will.”

  He nodded, still doubtful, then took another glance at the pictures before he tucked the billfold safely away.

  I thought of Cathryn and mishandled welcome-home’s. “There’s always an awkward bit at first.”

  “It passes?”

  His eyes were still across the lake and that gave me a chance to study his soft face. I could see it there: I should never have come home, and he should never have left.

  “For you,” I told him, “it’ll pass rather quickly, I should think.”

  We sat a few minutes more, exchanging bits of inane conversation, but the chat seemed to please him. I offered him something from the tea stall at the end of the lake, but he glanced at his watch, then shook his head.

  “Things to do,” he explained sadly. “Too many.”

  I rose with him. “Ach, I know the feeling. A day like today you could almost forget it was on, eh? The war, I mean. You should come back, Harry. When it’s over. It’s like this all the time, then.” I pointed at the quiet, green park.

  He grinned. “Except for the kids.”

  “Well, aye, except for that.”

  We wished each other a pleasant day and he moved on. When I thought a discreet distance had appeared between us, I followed. Again, I told myself it was only business.

  *

  At the Annex, Harry put in calls to Ricks and Grassi to meet him in his quarters immediately. While he waited for them he went back over the case material for the nth time.

  He was looking for two things:

  Paramount was the answer to DiGarre’s riddle concerning Dennis O’Connell’s wireless silence on the return trip from Helsvagen. A mechanic’s report on O’Connell’s aircraft stated that the damage to O’Connell’s wireless equipment had been inflicted both by the burst of gunfire that downed the aeroplane, and by the final crash into the sea. Ergo, O’Connell had had a working wireless on his way home. So, DiGarre’s question gnawed at him: Why was O’Connell silent?

  Beyond that, he was hoping that by going through the material again he could find the solidarity it’d had before DiGarre had pummeled it into bread pudding with his subtly deprecating voice and dissecting gaze.

  Finding neither, Harry was left looking for a third thing: What to do next.

  When Ricks and Grassi arrived, Harry made sure the door was closed firmly behind them before outlini
ng their current position. DiGarre’s warning in mind, he avoided any mention of Hamburg. But he did state, in vague but forceful terms, Headquarters’ objection to pursuing the Helsvagen matter, and DiGarre’s offer of a quick conviction on O’Connell’s murder and the attack on the Greshams in exchange for not charging Markham and Anderson with an attack on the village of Helsvagen. So there’d be no illusions as to the risk involved, Harry also presented his own view that — win or lose — there existed a strong possibility of punitive measures against them afterward, official and otherwise, if they prosecuted Helsvagen-related charges.

  Harry’s warning of the danger of prosecuting the Helsvagen case only roiled Grassi. “You know what that is?” he declared heatedly, pacing about Harry’s room. “You know what all that crap is? That crap is obstructing justice is what that crap is!”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Ricks said tiredly, but before he could continue, Grassi was waving a finger in his face.

  “What the hell do you mean ‘it doesn’t matter’? We should slap these sons of bitches with a restraining order and have the whole bunch of them yanked clear of this case!

  “A restraining order.” Ricks rolled his eyes. “A restraining order.”

  “Or something!” Grassi declared. “File for conflict of interest, get Ryan recused...” Grassi was fueling his anger to the point where he almost couldn’t speak. He took a deep breath. “Were holding onto a case bigger than Scopes, Leopold and Loeb, and Baby Lindbergh all rolled into one, and maybe you don’t care if these bozos want to pull it out from under us — ” Grassi stopped, struck by a thought. His tone turned accusing. “You don’t care! You’ve been gun-shy on this thing from the beginning — ”

  “And where are you going to go to get your restraining order?” Ricks snapped back. “Where are you going to find the referee to slap them down?” The unprecedented burst of anger from the usually reserved captain set Grassi back on his heels. Ricks recomposed himself, speaking quietly, but firmly: “Think a minute, Armando! This is Army law! You can’t protect this case without the cooperation of the same people who are trying to suppress it! They run the game. They are the referees.”

  Ricks turned to Harry, curious as to his senior’s silence. He marked it strange that Harry had made none of his usual attempts to quiet Grassi down.

  “If you two are done with the free-for-all,” Harry said impassively, “I want us all to have a clear picture of where we’re at right now, and then maybe we can figure out where we go from here. I want to hear everybody’s thoughts. What about you, Pete?”

  Ricks remembered it as the first instance of Harry addressing him by his Christian name. “Maybe I’m just imagining it,” he told me, “but it almost felt like he was asking me...asking anybody what the right thing was to do.”

  With a certain degree of embarrassment Ricks told me he could only muster a confused shrug. Harry continued to stand over him, not pressing, but hoping.

  Ricks cleared his throat and stood. He began to pace; a convenient vehicle for getting out from under Harry’s beseeching eyes.

  “First,” he began, his voice somewhat strained, “we have to decide on our priorities.” Armando Grassi was already rolling his eyes impatiently. “If our first priority is a conviction, then, obviously, the strategic thing to do is to accept the general’s — ”

  “And just forget everything else?” Grassi exploded, shooting to his feet.

  “Armando — ”

  “Don’t ‘Armando’ me!”

  “You know as well as I do that what someone did, and what is viably prosecutable, are not the same thing. You look at what you have and try the best case — ”

  “And that’s what you want to do? Let them off — ”

  “This has got nothing to do with what anybody wants to do!” Ricks tried unsuccessfully to keep his voice from rising. “If we’re interested in a felony conviction and appropriate sentencing, the most practical course — ”

  “Meaning the safest.”

  “In terms of — ”

  “In terms of saving your own ass!”

  “Enough!” Harry snapped, stepping between them. “I think we’ve got enough to worry about without having to worry about each other. Agreed?”

  Like schoolboys caught fighting, they shamefacedly nodded, then nodded apologies in each other’s direction. Grassi backed away, and Ricks returned to his chair.

  Harry walked to a far corner of the room to gather himself. They were three men squabbling in a small boat and if the fighting didn’t stop, the boat would capsize and drown them all. Think, he told himself. It’s just another case. Study it, think it through, and look at it like just another case. He lit himself a cigarette.

  “All right, then,” he said quietly. Then more firmly: “You’re right, Peter, about setting priorities. Number one is let’s get our house in order. I don’t have to give an answer to DiGarre until tomorrow. We’ll meet here at 1200 tomorrow and when we do, I don’t want to hear moral indignation, or right makes might. I want to hear practical courtroom strategy. I want to hear solid trial argument. I want to hear the charge, the defense’s counter, our rebuttal. How do we handle a prosecution on O’Connell? On Helsvagen? What are the possible combinations? Is there another avenue we haven’t yet considered?

  “Both of you can start by addressing yourselves to this little hole in our case the general sprang on me. Go see that sector ATC,” he commanded. “Get a look at the original air traffic log if you can. See if the controller’s got anything to add. Go back to the mechanic who drafted that report on O’Connell’s plane. Is it possible there was something — anything — wrong with O’Connell’s radio before his ship was hit? Get me some radio expert; is it possible O’Connell did transmit something before he went down but nobody picked it up? Go back to old man Gresham. Is he sure O’Connell didn’t say anything before he died? Maybe he mumbled something and the old man didn’t think it meant anything, but it might mean something to us. Failing all that, craft me a good reason why the man we say was killed because he witnessed a massacre didn’t see fit to make a peep about it!”

  They had been scribbling notes furiously, Grassi on a piece of paper cribbed from Ricks and with a pencil fished out of Harry’s escritoire. When he looked up, he was startled to find Harry’s hard face a few inches from his.

  “You win a case, Lieutenant,” Harry said, “not because you’re right, but because you make a better case than the other guy. Make me a better case.”

  “You got it, Boss.”

  “We’ll see. I also want you both to seriously consider possible repercussions to yourselves. If we get involved in a Helsvagen case in any way, there’s going to be hell to pay. You better start thinking about how high a price you’ll be willing to pay. Now go to work.”

  As they started to leave, Harry made a slight motion of his head to Ricks. Ricks told Grassi he needed to use Harry’s loo; he’d meet up with him in a minute. After Grassi was gone, Harry nodded Ricks into a chair and pulled another close by. He offered the captain a cigarette and lit one for each of them.

  “Grassi’s not hard to understand,” Harry said, waving out his match. “Grassi’s — Well, Grassi’s Grassi. If he’d said anything even remotely reasonable a few minutes ago I would’ve fallen over dead from shock.” Harry smiled but Ricks didn’t see the joke. “I don’t agree with him that you’re just concerned with saving your own tail.”

  Ricks nodded appreciatively, but he looked past Harry, trying not to meet his eyes.

  “Come on, Pete. What is it?”

  Ricks stood to pace again, feeling hemmed in by Harry sitting so close. “I’ve always thought if we could just present this case in front of an impartial jury without having to concern ourselves with everybody else’s agenda, then everything’d work out the way it’s supposed to.”

  “If that was an option, it’d be my first choice.”

  The captain’s face reddened. “You asked us to consider what price we would pay. If I end up d
irecting traffic on the Burma Road, I suppose I could live with that. Permanent latrine officer in Benghazi, Eskimo liaison in the Aleutians — ”

  “It seems like you’ve given this a lot of thought.” Harry smiled.

  But again Ricks didn’t see the humor. “I’ve done nothing but think about what could happen to us...since Major Van Damm showed us those photos yesterday. Major, you’ve got more time in than I do. Grassi may not understand, but I shouldn’t have to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “How much are you willing to pay?” Ricks shook his head, embarrassed by his own boldness. “I don’t mean any disrespect, Major — but if you work for a law firm, and they don’t like what you’re doing, you either leave or they fire you. Then, you go to another firm, or set up your own shop. But this is the Army, Major. The Army! For the duration, they own us! One day you forget to shine your shoes for inspection, and by the time the Army’s done with it, it’s insubordination and a court-martial offense. Don’t laugh, Major! You know they can do it! Look at how some of this case has been handled! You can end up home, dishonorably discharged, maybe even looking at disbarment.”

  Ricks stopped his pacing, his eyes to the floor, running his cap round and round through his fingers so hard Harry thought he would crush the wire grommet “cheater” in its crown. “If I lost the law, Major...I wouldn’t know what else to do.” Slowly, he raised his head and asked, hungrily curious, “Would you? If that’s the price...I don’t know if I can afford it.”

  It was Harry’s turn to flush. He was angry. Not with Ricks; with himself. The captain was right: Ricks should not have had to spell out the obvious for Harry. Harry may have made a proper speech about understanding the risks of pressing this case, but now he sharply realized that he’d never really understood how great those risks could be. He’d spent most of his time in service under Ryan’s sheltering wing, forgetting what life in the Army universe could be like out from under that wing.