A Matter of Time Read online

  There had also been the air of mystery still felt today. Perhaps it had been even stronger then. More than one letter mentioned an irrational dread of the foreigners, who were universally admitted to be perfect neighbors.

  Only the Fenian, O’Driscol, seemed to have been comfortable in their presence.

  Of the Irishman there was little mention. The man seemed to have maintained a low profile, which fit his hypothetical revolutionary and draft-dodger background. His disappearance had caused so little comment that Mrs. Caldwell hadn’t been able to pin down the exact year, let alone a specific date. Sometime in the eighties, probably late.

  His departure loomed important only in retrospect, in the minds of a handful of people who had still been around at the time of the O’Brien incident.

  Cash penned a marginal note: What was happening in Ireland? The man might have gone home to take part in one of the periodic uprisings.

  Then he noted, How has Fial been responding to ads? And, Miss Groloch to take lie detector? Ask Hank about her lawyer.

  The departure of Fian, also, had slipped by with little notice, though it was better documented. June 14, 1889, aboard an eastbound train from Union Station. Explanation, a death in the old country, an estate that had to be settled.

  Cash made another note: Passport issued? Then, U.S. citizenship?

  Suppose the Grolochs were illegals?... No, no leverage there. Every ten years or so Congress passed laws exculpating long-term illegals.

  There seemed to have been no animosity toward Miss Groloch during the Great War, either because no one knew of her origins or because St. Louis’s vast German community had remained completely, demonstratively loyal despite countless family ties in Europe. There had been little trouble.

  Cash closed the folder little wiser. Just with more questions. Always there were more questions.

  And don’t lose the forest for the trees, he cautioned himself.

  Jack O’Brien had a crafty way about him. He kept trying to disappear among the distractions. And he, or whomever the dead man might be, was what this case was all about.

  He opened Mrs. Caldwell’s report to the page where he had made notes and added, Any other mysterious corpses on record?

  Digging into that ought to keep John busy for a while.

  Harald poked him. Everyone was rising. Court was recessing without their having been called to testify.

  “Damn,” John complained as they departed. “There’s tomorrow shot all to hell. Christ, it’s hot out here. Hope Carrie bought some beer.”

  Cash told him of his evening plans.

  John was furious. But he didn’t say a thing.

  Cash brought him up to date on the morning’s work. John began to get that hungry hunter look again.

  “Maybe it is starting to go. Maybe. You’d better let Gardner know about those four hoods. If we could just jam her into the damned lie detector....”

  Cash had a sudden thought. “John. That mailman... let’s find out if her mail has changed since we’ve been pushing her. Also, you might ask your friend if there’s any chance of tracking down classifieds from the time when she was having trouble with Carstairs.”

  The look of the hunter faded. “Norm, this’s getting to be a pain in the ass.”

  “You don’t like it, get out and drum up some alternate business. Me, I’m determined to nail this one shut.”

  “That’s what Carstairs was going to do, remember? For eight years.”

  “Yeah. I remember.” And he thought about it all the way back to the office.

  XVIII

  On the Z Axis;

  1973-77;

  Homecomings

  The most striking thing, Thorkelsen scribbled on his notepad, as the former prisoners descended from the transport — and it is the same every time I come out here — is not their gauntness, nor their confusion about the changes that have taken place in their absence, nor even the mechanical way they greet their families and respond to our questions. It is something I cannot quite put my finger on.

  He wrote all his notes longhand, laboriously. His handwriting was so bad even he had trouble reading it if he hurried.

  He turned to Cameron, who had been sent down by the Sacramento Union. “They’re all the same. You see it?”

  The second reporter grunted. “Hunh? Nope. What do you mean?” But he wasn’t listening when Thorkelsen tried to explain. He was wondering if he would have time to slip into Frisco and catch a hooker before he had to go home to a wife he detested. The girl named Fay knew exactly how to get the damned thing up, and had the patience to do it right.

  “Big ones, little ones, black, white, commissioned or enlisted, they all look like the same guy designed them.”

  Thorkelsen knew only the air was listening. But he persisted. He could order his thoughts by talking, and might get through just enough to stimulate some sort of insight.

  This was his fourth planeload met. He was now certain he lingered on the edge of a story. But the damned puzzle pieces wouldn’t fall into place.

  “It’s not looks, though. They look pretty much alike because they’ve got to meet the same physical requirements and go through the same training. The pilots, anyway. No, it’s something else. Something inside.”

  There were enlisted men on this flight. Just a handful, but only the second group he had seen.

  They were the same too.

  “Hey, Bob, I’ll catch you later.” He had noticed a tech sergeant who didn ‘t have the nameless air.

  “Yeah. Sure.” Cameron resumed pursuit of his interrupted fantasy. What Fay could do with her dark little hands smothered in soap lather was a certifiable miracle. She ought to be canonized.

  The sergeant’s nametag read CANTRELL, A. O.

  “Excuse me, Sergeant Cantrell. Nils Thorkelsen, Fresno Bee. Got a minutel”

  The man stopped, but did not reply. He stared through Thorkelsen, did not bother dropping his travel bag.

  Thorkelsen tried to explain the feeling he had gotten about the returning prisoners of war, and that he had sensed something unique about Cantrell. “Could you tell me why that is?”

  “I’m uneducable.”

  “Eh? Could you try again?”

  “I can’t be programmed.”

  Debatable. The man’s a zombie, Thorkelsen thought. He stood as still as death, the weight of his bag unnoticed.

  “And the others can be?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have they been?”

  “Yes.”

  A fountain of information here. “How? For what? Would you explain?”

  “Brainwashing. The best ever. Their mission is to resume positions in the imperialist armed forces and society, assuming positions of control as available, and await orders. Some will enter business or politics. Most are unaware of their status. They will be activated by a post-hypnotic key at the proper time. One thousand Trojan horses.”

  Cantrell spoke without emotion or inflexion, as if repeating a message he had often rehearsed for this one telling.

  “Not that many prisoners are being returned.”

  “Some must be retained for other employment.”

  “How can you tell me this? If the others can’t?” There had never been a hint of such a thing, though it was clear the Pentagon was covering something. That, it was pretty clear, was simply a prohibition on discussing maltreatment while interned.

  “I couldn’t be programmed. They couldn’t break me.”

  Debatable, Thorkelsen thought again. Not much of a man remained here.

  He had his major story. A story of the decade. A sure prizewinner.

  If it could be proven.

  Prisoners of war returned as Communist agents.... Nobody would believe it. “How come they let you go, if you’re beyond control?”

  A frown twisted Cantrell’s face. “Bureaucratic error. The kind of screw-up that happens whenever people saddle themselves with the idiocy of a government. I didn’t set them straight.” He began to show
a little animation delivering that remark.

  “What do you plan to do with this knowledge?”

  “Nothing. I’ve done it.” He seemed puzzled by the question. “You ask. I have to tell. They succeeded that much. I talk. I talk. I talk.”

  “Shouldn’t somebody be warned?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t understand. Why not?”

  “Because I don’t give a fuck. The Chinese did this to me. But you put me where they could get their hands on me.”

  The Chinese? “A pox on both our houses?”

  “Yes.”

  Certain he was interviewing a madman, Thorkelsen shifted his questioning to the mundane. “What’re your plans now? What’re you going to do with all that back pay?”

  “Buy me a guitar.”

  “Eh?”

  “Buy me a guitar. They wouldn’t let me have a guitar.”

  “That’s all? That’s your only ambition?”

  “Yes. It’s been six years. I’ll have to learn all over again.”

  Thorkelsen was convinced. This pot wasn’t just cracked, it was shattered. Maybe the VA could put the man’s head back together again.

  “Thanks for your time, Sergeant. And good luck.” He was so sure it would draw belly laughs he promptly forgot the whole thing.

  It didn’t come back to him till, three years later, while working for a Los Angeles paper, he noted an AP wire-service story about a navy captain, ex-POW, who was resigning his commission to run for Congress.

  “Hey, Mack,” he called to his editor. “You see this about this ex-POW running for Congress in the Florida primary?”

  “Yeah. Need more like him. ‘Bout thirty of those men in the House, we might start getting this country back to what it’s supposed to be.”

  “I don’t know....”

  “What do you mean? A few real patriots up there...”

  “I mean he might not be a patriot.”

  “What? After what he went through for his country? The camps, the —”

  “Exactly. No, wait a minute. Let me tell you. When I was with the Bee they used to send me to Beale every time a planeload of prisoners came in. The third or fourth time I interviewed this army sergeant. A really spooky guy. He was a nut, but he had a good story.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the Chicoms brainwashed all our prisoners before the North Viets returned them. Turned them into agents. He claimed most of them wouldn’t even know they were agents till they got their orders from Peking. All they would know was they were supposed to get into important positions in the Pentagon, and in government and business. They were sort of, like, hypnotized as well as brainwashed.”

  Thorkelsen’s editor hailed from Orange County, Bircher country, and could believe in seven more outrageous communist plots before the first edition every morning. And his strongly conservative paper was in dire need of something that would catch the imagination of a predominantly liberal market.

  When the man’s jaw finally rose and his brain had at last finished pursuing the germs of a hundred new conspiracy theories, he asked, “What about MIAs? Did he say anything about them?”

  The man was planning a campaign, Thorkelsen saw. Allegations of a plot wouldn’t get him the attention he desired. He had made a career of crying wolf. But an apparent break in the MIA question... that would grab national attention. While he had it, his message could be delivered. The nation could be awakened.

  “Find that soldier, Nils!” Mack ordered. And he meant it. “Find him and drain him like a spider would. Every detail. His whole story, from the minute he was captured. You get the name of just one MIA, we can hold the whole world by the nose while we pound it with this other thing.”

  And for the next hour Thorkelsen endured a harangue damning the eastern Jew liberal press and the investigative reporting that had toppled Richard Nixon. Now those self-righteous hypocrites were going to get a shithouseful dumped right back in their laps.

  But Cantrell had left no trail. It took Thorkelsen more than a year to identify and trace his man, now the bass guitarist of an obscure British rock group.

  Long before Thorkelsen could make contact, before, even, he had located his man, Mack had begun trying to hype circulation with editorials hinting at a forthcoming blockbuster of a story, one that would send the blade of the guillotine plummeting toward the neck of the left-wing clique destroying the country.

  Unfortunately, he named and told too much about Cantrell.

  A Chinese agent included the articles in his routine reports. The story took months to percolate through the Peking bureaucracies, but it did, and eventually entered the ken of the man called Huang Hua.

  An order for executive action went out immediately. Hua had the confidence of Mao’s successor, Jua Kuo-feng, who had an even greater interest in the project than had the Chairman.

  A race was on.

  And Thorkelsen, plodding along in his spare time, drawn on only by drifty visions of a Pulitzer, convinced he was hunting one crackpot at the behest of another, never knew he was running with other horses.

  XIX

  On the Y Axis;

  1975

  Cash found Lieutenant Railsback in the process of departing when he reached the office. “Hang on a minute, Hank.” Beth had already left. An envelope addressed to him lay centered on her desk. “I need a couple things. Mainly, a shot at the old lady’s lawyer. To see if he’ll let her go on the lie detector. When he says no, I want to show him what we’ve got.”

  “What you’ve got? You’ve got to be kidding. You ain’t got shit.”

  “I’ve got four more mysterious disappearances, in her house, and a missing twenty grand in counterfeit that also looks like it ended up at her place.”

  “What kind of crap are you trying to feed me now?”

  Cash outlined his day.

  “Look, let me think. I’m just going to the Rite-Way anyway. I’m going to hang around for the polygraph session.”

  “Bring me a couple large Cokes and one of Sarah’s special cheeseburgers then, okay? Here.” He handed over two dollars.

  John came in while Cash was opening Beth’s envelope. He had a cold six-pack. Two cans were missing. “Bribes,” he admitted. Bringing beer in was a violation of regulations.

  “Hank’s coming back.” Cash popped a top and drained half a can.

  “I know. He’s got dibs on a can too. If I’d have known this was going to happen, I’d have got a case.”

  “Let me see what Beth has to say here.”

  It was a lengthy letter. She meandered. There had been something beside business on her mind. The gist was that she had begged, cajoled, or bullied everyone concerned into appearing for the polygraph test, and Immigration would be no help. The government hadn’t gotten seriously involved until 1882. Their suggestion was to appeal to immigrant societies of the national group to which his subject belonged.

  Well, he hadn’t expected that angle to pan out.

  If he wanted her to take notes during his evening extravaganza, he should call her at home.

  “What do you think about Beth, John?”

  “Huh? Nice ass. Tits ain’t bad either. But she’s cold. Something drifty about her.”

  “Not really. She’s just not sure of herself. You remember how she was when she first came here? Quiet, goosey?”

  “Still is with most of us. Got to whack her up side the head just to get her to say hi. Except you. You she treats almost normal. Guess maybe because you’re a safe old father figure.”

  All I need, Cash thought. Another part-time kid.

  “You know her number?”

  “Huh? That’s the best-kept secret since the atom bomb. Why?”

  “She says to call her.”

  “Then you must have it somewhere.”

  “Not that I know of. Maybe it’s in the book.”

  He looked it up. Sure enough.

  She had just gotten home. She begged five minutes for a shower.

 
; “God, I’m a rotten old bastard,” Cash told her when she arrived. He was feeling loose. Hank had gone out after more beer. “I saved you a Coke, though. And dinner when you’re done. All right?”

  “Getting pretty feisty for an old man, aren’t you?” John asked. “I mean, hustling young girls....” Beth blushed, stared at the floor, then tried to cover by searching for pen and dictation pad.

  “I already called Annie and told her,” Cash responded defensively. Annie hadn’t liked the idea, even when he had invited her to go along. She had refused on grounds that Nancy might need her.

  “Some other time?” Beth asked. “I think everybody’s down there now. They all got here early. Guess they want to get it over with.”

  As they descended the stairs, Beth observed, “Everybody was so cooperative, we probably ought to call the whole thing off.”

  “I’ll buy that,” said John.

  “You know we’ve got to go the whole route, John. Step by step. When I’m done there ain’t going to be a hole big enough for a roach to crawl through.”

  “You’re just painting yourself into a corner.”

  “Beth! Who are all these people?”

  “Reporting officers. Evidence technicians. Ambulance driver and attendant. Emergency room staff. People from the coroner’s office. From the morgue.”

  “Jesus.”

  Twenty bewildered pairs of eyes watched the polygraph operator set up his equipment. Hank Railsback leaned against the wall in a shadowed corner, an amused smile playing across his lips as he listened to the captain.

  “What kind of story did you feed them, woman?”

  Beth just blushed and studied the floor.

  “Uh-huh. A line of bullshit.”

  It was eleven-fifteen before they finished.

  John was right. Beth was right.

  Nothing.

  Nursing a headache, Cash watched the polygraph operator pack his gear. Beth kept flexing fingers sore from gripping a pen. John, and everyone else who could, had taken off long since.

  “Too bad Hank didn’t stick around. But he hates to see his brain-children stillborn.”

  Beth moved behind him, began kneading his shoulder muscles. It startled him, but felt so nice he didn’t ask her to stop.