A Matter of Time Read online

  “If this will work an emotional hardship, perhaps I should look elsewhere?” Tran, of course, would have been briefed. Cash supposed he was just making sure all the cards were on the table.

  “No. No. There’ll be no problem.”

  “I think I understand. My father, mother, sisters, brothers... It’s been more than twenty years since I’ve heard anything from my parents. And only my one brother, Trich, got out this time. He’s in San Francisco. The others were all army officers too. There are nights when I get no sleep wondering what has become of them.”

  It helped. Especially when he told Annie the same things, after insisting on helping her with the dishes — an eventuality which left John agog.

  The major’s return bus was a late one. Cash didn’t get to bed till after three o’clock. Next morning he was in no mood to take crap from anyone. He went in to work almost hoping Lieutenant Railsback would pitch one of his infamous fits.

  The man had a sixth sense. He stayed out of sight even while the saucer freaks were stamping up dust in the outer office, driving Beth to distraction.

  XIV

  On the Z Axis;

  24 December 1967

  “Shit, Mike,” said Caldwell. “They’re making an early start this week.”

  “Eh?” Cash glanced up as Snake lowered himself painfully from the crack in the barracks wall. Dawn shoved a broken finger inside.

  “Bashful’s making his rounds. Got the colonel, Captain Richards, and Commander Wainwright already.”

  “Shit.” Cash tried to shrink into his pallet, to twist himself into a fetal ball too tiny to be found. His turn would be coming up again soon. He had stopped hurting. Except around the hunger knot in his stomach.

  “Going to be a big show. Dopey, Doc, and Sleepy are with him.”

  Michael shuddered. “I can’t take much more, Snake.” The polite, smiling, nameless little brown men never let up. They looked like comic opera or movie gooks in their baggy uniforms, carrying their antique rifles, but their humorousness ended in interrogation. “What the hell do they want?”

  Any military information they possessed was far out of date. And any forced confessions to imaginary war crimes would be believed by no one.

  “It don’t make sense, Snake.”

  “Shut up, you guys,” Koester growled from his pallet. “And for Christ’s sake quit whining, Cash.”

  He was getting a reputation for that, and for malingering. But what could he do?

  “They’re just trying to get even,” said Cantrell. His eyes were questioning as they rose to meet Michael’s.

  Did he suspect?

  Michael had just about decided to cooperate.

  The door creaked inward. Bashful made a black silhouette against the pale light. “Caldwell. Cash. Koester. DeLosSantos Zachary.” He needed to say no more. The prisoners knew the drill.

  The dwarves had collected twenty-three men already, including all the senior officers.

  “Big party,” Cantrell observed, as he and Michael fell in at the rear of the column of twos. Dopey made a threatening gesture with his bayonet. “Stick it where the moss don’t grow, asshole.” Snake said it like, “Good to see you again.” Bashful was the only dwarf who spoke any English. “Hey, group, what say we have a little Bridge music?” He began whistling,

  Michael turtled his chin down into his filthy collar. Snake just wouldn’t learn.

  Captain Richards quickly took up the tune, and the other navy flyers followed his example. Bashful’s shoulders tightened, but he didn’t turn around. He couldn’t club them all. Not right now. Soon even Michael was whistling.

  “Sesu Hayakawa he ain’t,” said Snake when the party, swollen to forty of the camp’s eighty-plus inmates, halted before a strange, bespectacled little man. The commandant hung around him like a nervous puppy anxious to please.

  “A Chink,” said Cantrell. “And a wheel. Maybe if I kiss his ass, he’ll get me a guitar. Or let me have the harmonica back.”

  The drill resembled an inspection. Spectacles passed through the ranks. The commandant and a translator followed, playing Pete and Repeat before each prisoner. The dwarf called Grumpy hung around with a stack of file folders, some of which Spectacles inquired into when examining lower grade officers and enlisted men. In most cases he just grunted what seemed to be Chinese for yes or no.

  Once he finished, Bashful called names. There were fifteen. Michael Cash was the fourteenth.

  “Shit. What the fuck? Snake....”

  “Just hang tough, Mike. It’ll be all right.”

  “I’m scared shitless, Snake.” He eyed the battered Russian-made bus coughing toward them.

  “Probably just a working party. Fix a road or power station the airedales blew away. You better move out. The dwarves are getting restless.”

  Bashful reassembled those who had made the cut and herded them aboard the bus.

  Four men in regular North Viet officer’s uniforms, with AK47s, watched over them. None, apparently, spoke English. They didn’t try to control the murmuring of their charges.

  It had to be something new, something special. This was the first time Cash had been taken anywhere without having to walk.

  The journey north had nearly killed him. He still hadn’t recovered completely.

  The bus rumbled through hills, jungles, and paddies for two hours, till it reached a deserted airstrip. Four MiG 21s lurked beneath camouflage netting at one end; two SAM sites and several AA positions could be discerned. Base personnel were remarkable primarily by their absence. ‘Spectacles had arrived already. He stood at the foot of a ramp leading to the passenger section of an old Ilyushin with Chinese markings. The four officers shepherded the prisoners into the aircraft. Spectacles took the weapon from one officer while he and the bus driver pulled the cabin hatch shut.

  The ship’s engines roared.

  The confused Americans sought seats. No one said a thing. Their guards took predetermined posts and, one by one, exchanged their Viet tunics for Chinese.

  The Ilyushin grumbled and shuddered down the runway, staggered into the morning sky. One engine coughed and sputtered uncertainly at times. Loose rivets rattled. There were places where Cash could look through cracks in its skin.

  Michael felt a brief moment of hope when navy F4s slid in on the quarters to see who had the balls to fly their sky in broad daylight. The Chinese pilot just kept heading for the border. Navy eyeballed the plane’s markings, then departed in search of prey on the politicians’ approved list.

  The Ilyushin was old and slow. The flight, including a fuel stop at another deserted airstrip, took sixteen hours. The thoughtful Chinese had provided a bucket which, when the pressure became unbearable, had to be used in full view of all aboard. There were no meals.

  Cash missed Snake. They all could use a little of his irrepressible defiance here.

  It was deep night when the aircraft reached its destination. The pilot did not kill his engines, remained on the ground only long enough to discharge his cargo. The passengers never saw him, nor he them.

  “Merry Christmas,” Captain Richards told each man as he descended into the chill air of an apparent desert. The pilots and navigators studied the skies as if seeking a guiding star.

  Michael Cash was too frightened to give a damn what day it was, or where he had been taken.

  XV

  On the Y Axis;

  1975

  It was a Friday, but an unusually quiet one. For once Norm didn’t have much paperwork. He suspected that it was his temper. It was so foul that the gnome-god who spat blizzards of blank fitness reports and law enforcement assistance forms had been intimidated. The easy load and a quart of Beth’s virulent station house coffee had brought him around to semi-human by ten o’clock. He called Tommy O’Lochlain, his man in with the Syrians, and made a lunch date.

  O’Lochlain was what the papers called “reputed consigliere” of the gang. His own people didn’t call him that, nor did Cash, who had never heard th
e term before The Godfather, but that was or had been his function. Number Two among those of the gang age and infirmity hadn’t yet claimed. They still had their hands in amusements, vending, and gambling, but were no more than a ghost of the old mob. The Italians had begun displacing them as early as the middle thirties. Now the Italians were giving way to blacks, at least on the street level, as time and the IRS depleted their ranks. But such transitions were long and slow and never as bloody or complete as movies and television would indicate.

  But that was unimportant to Cash or O’Lochlain.

  They were old acquaintances. During his rookie year, when the Syrians had had far more pull, Cash had made the mistake of stopping O’Lochlain for speeding, then had arrested him on a concealed weapons charge. The man had gone in with Cash grinning, chatting amiably, giving advice on what he saw as good police procedure, then had glad-handed it with his company fixer, who had beaten them to the station. Cash had felt, and had looked, so pathetic that O’Lochlain had laughed and promised him better for the future.

  Even then the man had been old, a gray-topped mop who had looked like he was dying of cancer.

  Though Cash had remained perfectly straight, O’Lochlain had adopted him as his pet cop. The relationship hadn’t become friendship, but they respected one another. Both had profited, though Cash had also come by his share of grief. People asked questions, especially when O’Lochlain gained as much as the department.

  The trouble with meeting O’Lochlain, even for lunch, was that someone would notice. Even a hood so old that he looked like an oversight in the Reaper’s bookkeeping remained a hood. Neither man, from viewpoints on both sides of the law, had any business consorting with the enemy. There was no way to escape watchers. So their meetings were infrequent, always public, and on neutral ground.

  Even so, Cash expected some static. He thought it worthwhile when balanced against what he might learn.

  “O’Brien?” O’Lochlain asked around a mouthful of expensive spaghetti. “Nineteen twenty-one? What the hell you digging that far back for?” The neutral ground was a restaurant indirectly owned by the man John affectionately called The Head Wop. The clientele were often a mixture of mafiosi and the crime-busters watching them. By meeting there the two announced to these observers that business wasn’t on their agenda. There was a ritual and formality to such things, though it was being destroyed by the barbarisms of the sixties and seventies.

  “I’m not sure. We’ve got a stiff that, by every test we’ve applied, comes up O’Brien. Yet he was supposed to have been killed back then, though the body never turned up. The one we’ve got is the right age, for then. I heard he ran with the Rats. I thought maybe you knew him.”

  O’Lochlain did his Fifth Amendment face.

  “Hey, look, it’s ancient history. And I’m not asking for names.”

  “I’m not holding out, Rookie. Just thinking. Sure, I remember the guy: wild, scatter-brained; didn’t care about anything but himself. What you’d call a security risk nowadays. Couldn’t trust him with your money, your secrets, or your woman. If he’d stayed around, he would’ve taken the ride. One way or another. He was a punk. The top boys were watching him.”

  “Why?”

  “They had him running the bag to the precinct houses and collecting cash and slips from the betting shops. Donkey work, the kind they used for breaking in new fish. It looked like he was skimming, a few bucks every run. Nothing big, but enough so that they wouldn’t trust him with a big bag. There was some talk about breaking a bone or two to straighten him out.”

  “Did it get done?”

  “No.”

  “Ah?”

  Playing a game of suspense, O’Lochlain downed mouthful after mouthful of spaghetti, chasing each with huge drafts of steaming coffee. A large pot had been brought to the table for his convenience, without his asking.

  “Thing came up where they were short on men. They decided to give him the acid test. They palled him with Fred Burke and sent him to Torrio with some new girls. They were doing a triangle with Torrio and the Purple Gang, with Maddox in Chi directing the thing. Girls recruited here usually went to Chi for training, then Torrio would wholesale them to Detroit for Canadian whiskey. Detroit girls came here, then went to Chi. And so on. Sometimes they went the other way. Clothing factory work was usually the hook. Sometimes they got suspicious. That’s why they needed a couple of guys along.

  “This time there was merchandise both ways. Torrio’s people had gotten onto some good counterfeit. They were going to bring back twenty Gs to, what you might say, test market. If it went, they’d buy in. They didn’t tell O’Brien. Wanted to see what he’d do around that much cash.”

  While O’Lochlain paused for more spaghetti and coffee, Cash reflected that the man’s theys were sometimes hard to follow. But Tommy had always been reluctant to name certain names.

  “What he did was knock Burke in the head and jump the train while it was pulling into Union Station.”

  “And?”

  “They put a thousand on him; a G and a half for recovery.”

  “Anybody collect?”

  “No. Not even when they went to twenty-five and opened the contract. Not a whisper. The G-men never got him either. Their people on the inside were watching for him. He just disappeared, Rookie. Like Judge Crater. They figured his girl friend got him, same as the bulls.”

  Cash asked the date. Perfect fit. O’Brien had jumped the train in the morning. The screams at Miss Groloch’s had been heard that afternoon.

  “Did you know him well enough to finger him if he walked in here right now?”

  “Yeah. I’ll tell you, Rookie, I was hoping I’d be the guy who collected on that one. I owed him.” But he wouldn’t go into detail.

  “Want to come look at the stiff we’ve got?”

  “No.”

  “Hey. I paid. Give me a break.”

  “Sure you did. On the expense account. Okay. But I don’t like morgues.”

  Cash grinned, thought, I can see why. You’re afraid they’ll realize they’ve overlooked you and yank your card out of the living file.

  “Good,” he said. “Maybe we’ll stir something up. I haven’t had a row about being on the pad for years.”

  “Rookie, I’m out of it. Everybody knows that.”

  “And you were saying that before I was born.”

  O’Lochlain smiled, downed another cup of coffee. “Kojak you’re not.”

  The lean black attendant was getting used to it. “Twenty-three again?” he asked, pulling the card.

  “Right.”

  “How long’s this guy been there?” O’Lochlain asked.

  “Since March fourth.”

  “Christ.”

  “They pumped him full of something. They’re kind of in a tight spot. Can’t get rid of him.”

  “Oh, Christ!”

  The attendant had rolled out the corpse. Cash glanced at O’Lochlain. “What?”

  “It’s him. The sonofabitch. Only it can’t be, can it?” He stared, stared.

  Cash felt like the Hindenburg, after. Down in flames. There was just no way to keep that bastard from being Jack O’Brien. “You know anybody else that might remember him?”

  He shrugged. “Looking for an out, Rookie?”

  O’Lochlain was quick. He had seen the whole problem without being told.

  “You won’t get it from me. I know it’s impossible, you know it’s impossible, but you park my butt on the stand, I’m going to say it’s him. That’s how it hangs. Sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? You don’t have to live with it.”

  “Are you finished with me? I’d better make a Mass. I feel the need coming on. You know, when you called, I figured you was going to be after me about Hoffa.”

  “Hoffa?”

  “Sure. Every cop in the country is after every guy that’s ever been even remotely connected, trying to make a name by being the guy who finds out what happened. Going to be some heat on over that one.
Hope the guys who did it got paid off in suitcases full of money.”

  “I haven’t been paying much attention. He asked for it.”

  “Yeah.”

  As they walked down exterior steps to where O’Lochlain’s driver had parked his limo in a No Parking zone, the Irishman asked, “You got any angles?”

  “Not that I can believe. Either it’s O’Brien and he’s been moved fifty-four years, without damage, or it’s not, and nobody in the whole goddamned country knows who he is.”

  “Maybe he’s a Russian spy.”

  “Maybe.” Cash chuckled, didn’t bother giving details which made that answer less than satisfactory. He said goodbye and returned to the station, where Railsback was waiting with the third degree about consorting with known hoodlums. The lieutenant was sorry he asked.

  John came in later, looking glum. “Gardner won’t help.”

  “Why not?”

  “I laid it all out. He only asked one question.”

  “What?”

  “Did we have any evidence that a crime had been committed.”

  “Yeah. I should’ve figured.”

  “But I do have a new angle.” And suddenly he seemed frightened and nervous. Cash was puzzled by it.

  “Norm, if I tell you something personal, will you keep it quiet?”

  “Eh? Sure.”

  “I mean really. Not even tell Annie. Especially not Annie. Or any body.”

  “Hey, if you’re that worried about it, you better keep it to yourself. That way nobody can tell.”

  “Well, if I tell my news, I have to tell the other thing too.”

  What the hell? Cash thought. He had known John since Michael’s second day of grammar school, didn’t think there was much he didn’t know about the younger man. “It’s up to you. But I’ll keep it under my hat.”

  “Well, there’s this girl. We went to high school together.”

  A ghost of a smile fleeted across Cash’s lips. So John was messing around. He almost confessed his own secret, in the matter of the doctored photograph, but remembered his own advice. There was no way he would risk getting that stirred up again.