The Consignment (33 page)

I said that I still didn’t see why Trevanian had to steal the bill of lading.

“Bureaucracy.” Channon gave a bitter smile. “Butt-covering by the CIA. They had to be able to put their hands on their hearts and swear they didn’t have an operation under way on U.S. territory. They had to transfer money into a DIA account.”

“Biron.”

He nodded. “The transfer took time.”

I asked why the CIA hadn’t simply given the funds to Trevanian, and let him pay Rossiter.

“After what happened with the diamonds?” Channon shook his head emphatically. “We figured so long as Rossiter got paid, he wasn’t going to make a problem about losing the bill of lading a little early, or about being held out of town for twenty-four hours. The CIA could get a reimbursement from the Congolese government later, after the rebels were put down, and after we had figured out where those damn diamonds went.”

“But now Rita knows about Biron.”

Channon studied me. “The only thing Durranti’s got is the name. The Swiss lawyers will make sure that’s all she ever gets.”

I dropped my head. Two years. Two years buried in a deceit that cost Fiona her life. And Dimitri’s.

“Ned?”

I looked up. “If you think I’m just going to let bygones be bygones, you’re insane.”

“Listen—”

“You used me.” I stabbed a finger at the air. “You lied to me, and you used me. Now you’re going to chopper into Kinshasa, become a big fucking peacekeeping hero? I’m supposed to go home and tend the flowers on Fiona’s grave?” He stepped toward me, opening his hands in a placatory gesture. I jabbed my finger into his chest. “That is not going to happen. You implemented the policy. Now let’s see if you’re man enough to take the goddamn consequences.”

“You’re not thinking straight.”

“It’s the first time I’ve been thinking straight in two years.”

“I’m ordering you not to tell her.”

I reached to open the cabin door.

“Ned!” he shouted, and I turned. He’d grabbed the Beretta from the holster on his bunk. He wasn’t pointing it, he was holding it up near his waist. I looked from the gun up to him. Once, I’d taken orders from the man. Once, I’d genuinely respected him. We stared at each other for several seconds, finally his shoulders dropped and he tossed the gun back onto the bunk. When he stepped toward me this time I shoved him, and he stumbled back and struck his head on the bunk. He touched his head, then he turned and flew at me, he dropped his shoulder into my chest and pinned me back against the wall. I reached over his back and hammered my fist into his left kidney. He cried out and released me, twisting away, clutching his back.

I turned and stepped out the door. Suddenly he grabbed me from behind and tried to haul me back into the cabin. I gripped the door frame and braced my legs. When he couldn’t budge me, he wrapped an arm around my neck, I crouched and heaved his weight onto my back. We stumbled into the gangway. I clawed his arm, he squeezed tighter, so I pushed back, slamming him into the wall, then I staggered a few paces and we fell, sprawling onto the wet steel plate by the service area. His arm was still around my throat. Through the railings I glimpsed the rain lashing down on the sea.

“We can talk,” he said, breathless. “If I let go, we can talk. We can work something out.”

I clawed along his forearm, got hold of his thumb, and yanked it back against his wrist. He gave a choked cry, his arm went limp, and I held on to his thumb and scrambled to my knees. Then as I got up, he swept his other arm against my legs, and I went down again, and he pulled his thumb free.

He rose, cradling his right hand. His chest heaved. “You can’t tell her. For chrissake, what good would it do?” I got to my feet. “You’d just be buying yourself a whole lot of grief.”

“Grief?”

“We could get you recommissioned. We could get you back into West Point.”

“West Point’s not the goddamn Promised Land.”

“Well, what do you want, Ned? You tell me. What do you want?”

The ship rolled, I swayed on my feet. The steel plate was slippery, the wind swept a gust of rain into us. We looked at each other. We both knew what I wanted. The one thing that no power on earth could give me back. At last I turned away, took a step across the wet steel. He grabbed at me again. I spun around and took a swing, my fist glanced off his jaw, and he lurched back, clinging to my left arm. We stumbled against the railings, I slipped and went down on my knees. He grabbed me by the hair, shoved my throat up against the middle rail, then he released my hair and I felt his forearm slide onto the back of my neck. He pressed down hard. I started to choke. My throat was on fire, I struggled, tried to push away from the railings, but now he had his knee on my back, and when the ship rolled, I saw the gray sea beneath me, then it darkened, and black spots burst in front of my eyes.

I twisted, strained till I finally got one foot planted under me, then I reached up over my head and clutched his left arm. His left hand was holding the rail. Then I powered up, straightening my leg and heaving my shoulders into his chest, dragging his left arm down. His feet lifted off the steel plate, his weight swung forward onto my shoulders as I rose. I could have stopped, but I didn’t, I kept driving up, hauling on his arm. He tried to wrap his other arm around my throat again, but I kept my chin tight against my chest, and he twisted and I stumbled against the rail. His weight suddenly slid from my shoulders, I let go of his left arm, shoved his right arm off my face, and he hit the top rail on his side, and fell outward. His arms slapped frantically against the rails as he grabbed at them in his fall, then he was gone. I leaned over the rail and saw him turning. One second. Two seconds. He hit the water hard, flat on his back.

The dark shape of him was like a dolphin just beneath the water. The shape slid back along the hull toward the propellers, then went down, disappearing into the churned foam, and I watched astern but nothing resurfaced, and I turned and slumped against the bulkhead. I stayed like that for maybe half a minute, then I finally moved, sliding into automatic.

I went back to Channon’s cabin. I checked that nothing in the cabin had been overturned by our tussle. I wiped my handkerchief over the doorknobs, inside and out, then I closed the door and retreated to my cabin. I changed my clothes and lay down on my bunk. I breathed. My senses were shredded. My heart went on beating, beating, an incessant rhythm that wouldn’t let me forget, and at last I surrendered to the sound of it, closed my eyes, and listened to the pulse in my ears. Drumming. Remorseless. The undeniable murmur of continuing existence. The insistent whisper of unended life.

EPILOGUE

A
fter it was over, I came up to the mountains. It is spring now, the sugar maples are coming into leaf. Most mornings I rise early and walk from the shack down through the woods to the river where my father used to fish with me as a boy. Once there, I bait my line, then crouch and study the clear river awhile. Finally I plant my feet on the dappled riverbank, make my first cast, and wait hopefully for some kind of peace.

No trace of Channon’s body was ever found. He wasn’t missed till more than an hour after I saw him go under, and it was another half hour, after an increasingly alarmed search, that the captain decided Channon was lost overboard. The carrier turned back to retrace its course. Choppers were sent skimming over the sea in all directions, but night came on fast. The search continued through the darkness and into the following morning, it was Rita who came to my cabin around midday with the news that the captain had at last called an end to it. Once one of the Marine officers was appointed to lead the peacekeepers in Channon’s place, the choppers were reassigned from the search to start ferrying the Marines into Kinshasa. Some CIA spook came out to the carrier on a return flight, he collected Channon’s suitcase and spent a couple of hours with me finding out what I knew. I stuck by the five-page summary he’d found in Channon’s suitcase, he seemed satisfied with that. He flew back to Kinshasa and I never saw him again.

The next day, Rita was on a military flight back to America. Brad and I followed several days later, after the doctors had given him the all-clear. We declined the captain’s embarrassed offer to bury Fiona at sea, and took her body home. She was cremated in Yonkers. We carried her ashes to a high rocky outcrop above our shack in the mountains, a place she liked to climb to in the fall. I opened the urn, then found that I could not do it. I gave the urn to Brad and he said a prayer, then scattered his mother’s ashes on the wind.

The first two weeks I stayed with Brad down on Ellis Street, receiving calls and cards of condolence, and being debriefed by a pair of agents from the DIA who were closing the file on Hawkeye. They weren’t bad men, but having them in my home so often, being compelled to deal with them on a daily basis, I couldn’t help but see that they were just soldiers dressed in suits, with all the soldier’s clarity of commanded purpose and narrowness of sight. Instruments of the institution they served, they worked methodically through my story, stripping it down, as they said, to the essentials. In the end, they reduced it to a recitation of events that had apparently occurred without the intervention of any human motive beyond what might be found in a Superman comic or a presidential speech. Good guys and bad guys. White hats and black hats. Us versus them.

From various remarks they made, it was clear to me that they had no idea of the real nature of Hawkeye. I took care not to enlighten them.

Rita Durranti, on her return to work, found that her zeal to pursue into court those behind the illegal shipment was not shared by her superiors or colleagues. Hawkeye, down at Customs, had become a byword for operational disaster. Rita’s intimate association with it had lowered her standing in the department and somewhat tarnished the bright silver star of her career. As Channon had anticipated, all her inquiries into the principals behind Biron came to nothing. The Swiss authorities were uncooperative at best, sometimes actively hostile, and after a month knocking her head against a legal brick wall, she was ordered by her superiors to stop trying. She sent a note to me at the shack, explaining what had happened. To that one, I never replied.

I left Haplon, of course. The day after my return to New York, I drove up to the plant in Connecticut to offer my resignation. I intended to collect from my office any paperwork that Customs might find useful, but I was a week too late. Gillian Streiss had already been promoted to my chair. Rossiter sat me down for half an hour and after explaining the necessary rearrangement of Haplon’s business that had left me unemployed, he gave me a check for fifteen thousand dollars to tide me over. I banked the check without a qualm. I assumed, at the time, that Rossiter simply wanted to put some distance between himself and the Trevanian deal, and letting me go achieved that. Since then, however, I’ve learned from Rita that Micky Baker resigned his job at Customs while we were in the Congo, informing them that after the mandatory six-month break he would be returning to Haplon as a bona fide employee, Gillian Streiss’s assistant, in fact. What Micky did or did not tell Rossiter about me, I can only guess. That something was said seems more than likely.

With my career as an arms salesman ended, the DIA offered me a no-brain desk job down in Washington, which I declined, and there was an approach from West Point indicating that an instructorship might be offered me if I wanted it. That, too, I turned down. After all that has happened, I can’t return now to the world of snappy salutes and freshly pressed uniforms, of young men offering unquestioning obedience, and old men issuing commands. Somehow that would not be right. In her note to me, Rita suggested I had a range of skills and knowledge that Customs would gladly pay for, and maybe, in time, there will be a niche there in which I can turn my training and experience to good effect and yet still be able to face myself in the mirror each morning. But I am not ready. For now, I have decided to let it lie.

With Brad my relationship has changed fundamentally. He’s still at home back on Ellis Street, but making noises, recently, about a move up to some diamond mine in Canada. I think he should go, but I keep my own counsel. He’s not a boy, looking for my approval, or an adolescent, seeking reasons for dissent. We seem to be able to accept each other, these days, in a way we never managed before. Fiona’s death has given us our own personal ground zero, a time and place beyond which the usual concerns and everyday battles of life are so diminished as to no longer be of any real account. If I have a hope for him, it’s that he will learn from what has been the greatest misjudgment, regret, and sorrow of my life, and be sure not to follow me. I pray that he never lends or surrenders his conscience to any man, woman, or institution, and that he recognizes early those duties higher than any owed to the world. That he holds faith with himself. That he stays true to his own.

He has recovered completely from his flesh wound, the naval surgeon did a fine job. The other wound goes deeper. Deeper, I know, than he will ever let me see.

For my part, I’ve gone through many staging posts of grief, and each stage, at the time, has seemed to me the final one, the point at which my emotional compass would stay fixed forever. But even in the mountains, time passes. Even the quietest of lives has a way of moving the lodestone. Yet if I was asked to swear that what I feel now will remain with me, I could do that, because what I feel now I have felt since the moment of Fiona’s death. I feel a burden of sorrow. I feel inexpressible remorse and regret.

She was my wife. To Fiona I swore vows that I did not keep, and that is a cold, hard truth that I will carry with me to the grave.

Today, Brad is coming up to the shack to see me. He has come up every weekend this past month, he tells me he has finally decided he wants to learn how to fish. I know it’s just his way of reaching out to me, but with each hour he spends by the river I can see him becoming quietly entranced. We tend not to speak much, even during meals at the shack, but the silence between us these days is comfortable. Last weekend, over breakfast, he suggested that it might be time for me to return home. He said it lightly, just an aside, but I know Brad, and he must have given it plenty of thought, and I can’t pretend that I haven’t thought about it too.

I can’t go on like this forever, I know that. At some point, I’ll have to take up the reins of my life again, and I will. Maybe someday soon. But for now I want to remain here, just where I am. In a few hours, I’ll do what I’ve done every weekend this past month. I’ll cast my line into the river, and watch Brad, on the far bank, cast his. Then we’ll wait, and watch the river flowing past us down the mountain, sweeping over the stones, whispering.

A sparkle of sunlight on the water. A turning leaf. Time passing.

Imperfect peace.