The Enemy

Once when I was a kid we lived for a month in an off-post bungalow somewhere. It had no dining table. My mother called people and had one delivered. It came packed flat in a carton. I tried to help her put it together. All the parts were there. There was a laminated tabletop, and four chrome legs, and four big steel bolts. We laid them out on the floor in the dining nook. The top, four legs, four bolts. But there was no way to fit them together. No way at all. It was some kind of an inexplicable design. Nothing would join up. We knelt side by side and worked on it. We sat cross-legged on the floor, with the dust bunnies and the cockroaches. The smooth chrome was cold in my hands. The edges were rough, where the laminate was shaped on the corners. We couldn’t put it together. Joe came in, and tried, and failed. My dad tried, and failed. We ate in the kitchen for a month. We were still trying to put that table together when we moved out. Now I felt like I was wrestling with it all over again. Nothing went together. Everything looked good at first, and then everything stalled and died.

“The crowbar didn’t walk in by itself,” Summer said. “One of those twenty-eight names brought it in. Obviously. It can’t have gotten here any other way.”

I said nothing.

“Want dinner?” she said.

“I think better when I’m hungry,” I said.

“We’ve run out of things to think about.”

I nodded. Gathered the twenty-eight medical charts together and piled them neatly. Put Summer’s original list of thirty-three names on top. Thirty-three, minus Carbone, because he didn’t bring the crowbar in himself and commit suicide with it. Minus the pathologist, because he wasn’t a convincing suspect, and because he was short, and because his practice swings with the crowbar had been weak. Minus Vassell and Coomer and their driver, Marshall, because their alibis were too good. Vassell and Coomer had been stuffing their faces, and Marshall hadn’t even come at all.

“Why wasn’t Marshall here?” I said.

Summer nodded. “That’s always bothered me. It’s like Vassell and Coomer had something to hide from him.”

“All they did was eat dinner.”

“But Marshall must have been right there at Kramer’s funeral with them. So they must have specifically told him not to drive them here. Like a positive order to get out of the car and stay home.”

I nodded. Pictured the long line of black government sedans at Arlington National Cemetery, under a leaden January sky. Pictured the ceremony, the folding of the flag, the salute from the riflemen. The shuffling procession back to the cars, bareheaded men with their chins ducked into their collars against the cold, maybe snow in the air. I pictured Marshall holding the Mercury’s rear doors, for Vassell first, then for Coomer. He must have driven them back to the Pentagon lot and then gotten out and watched Coomer move up into the driver’s seat.

“We should talk to him,” I said. “Find out exactly what they told him. What kind of reason they gave him. It must have been a slightly awkward moment. A blue-eyed boy like that must have felt a little excluded.”

I picked up the phone and spoke to my sergeant. Asked her to get a number for Major Marshall. Told her he was a XII Corps staffer based at the Pentagon. She said she would get back to me. Summer and I sat quiet and waited. I gazed at the map on the wall. I figured we should take the pin out of Columbia. It distorted the picture. Brubaker hadn’t been killed there. He had been killed somewhere else. North, south, east, or west.

“Are you going to call Willard?” Summer asked me.

“Probably,” I said. “Tomorrow, maybe.”

“Not before midnight?”

“I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.”

“That’s a risk.”

“I’m protected,” I said.

“Might not last forever.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll have Delta Force coming after me soon. That’ll make everything else seem kind of academic.”

“Call Willard tonight,” she said. “That would be my advice.”

I looked at her.

“As a friend,” she said. “AWOL is a big deal. No point making things worse.”

“OK,” I said.

“Do it now,” she said. “Why not?”

“OK,” I said again. I reached out for the phone but before I could get my hand on it my sergeant put her head in the door. She told us Major Marshall was no longer based in the United States. His temporary detached duty had been prematurely terminated. He had been recalled to Germany. He had been flown out of Andrews Air Force Base late in the morning of the fifth of January.

“Whose orders?” I asked her.

“General Vassell’s,” she said.

“OK,” I said.

She closed the door.

“The fifth of January,” Summer said.

“The morning after Carbone and Brubaker died,” I said.

“He knows something.”

“He wasn’t even here.”

“Why else would they hide him away afterward?”

“It’s a coincidence.”

“You don’t like coincidences.”

I nodded.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s go to Germany.”

eighteen