Authors: Peter Abrahams
The rest of the screen remained blank for several seconds. Then a message appeared: “Error 57âInvalid File Name.”
“Meaning?” said Zyzmchuk.
“Meaning, I think, sir, Mr. Zyzmchuk, that Frame, Hartley E., was never in the army. Would you like me to try the other services?”
“No.”
There was a long silence. Zyzmchuk felt Fairweather's eyes on him. For a moment he believed Fairweather might be thinking along with him. “What is it, Fairweather?”
“Will that be all, then?” Fairweather asked, proving he wasn't.
“Yes.”
“I can go?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Mr. Zyzmchuk. It'll be a pleasure working with someone of your experience. Happy Thanksgiving.”
The first raindrops landed softly on the window and ran down the glass in hesitant streams.
38
Grace lived in a one-room apartment just east of the Georgetown campus. Ivan Zyzmchuk pressed her buzzer in the lobby. Grace's voice didn't come over the intercom; the lock didn't click. Two men in business suits came down the stairs and opened the door. “I've got to get my hands on some Redskins tickets,” one said in French.
“I'm desolated,” the other replied, also in French. “Je ne peux pas vous aider.”
Zyzmchuk went through the doorway and up two flights. At the end of a corridor, he knocked on Grace's door. No one answered, but he heard tinny excitement on the other side of the door, the kind of excitement that comes out of a box with rabbit ears.
He knocked again. “Grace,” he called. “It's me. Ivan.” Mr. Z., he'd almost said.
Grace opened the door. She wore a quilted pink housecoat and fluffy pink slippers. The color matched her eyes. He thought she'd lost weight. It didn't suit her.
“Oh, Mr. Z.,” she said. “They fired me.”
Her lip trembled. He thought she was going to cry, but she didn't. “May I come in?” he said.
“It's a pigsty. It's a dump anyway, but now it's a pigsty too.”
“I don't care.”
Grace stepped aside. Zyzmchuk went in. Framed prints hung on the walls, Degas prints, all of them with subjects from the ballet. The slender girls in tutus looked down on Grace's room: the unmade single bed; the litter of newspapers and magazines; the unwashed coffee mugs on every surface; the game show contestants on the box in the corner, jumping up and down at the sight of a toaster.
“I told you,” Grace said. “It's a pigsty.”
Zyzmchuk cleared a space on the couch and sat down. “What happened, Grace?”
She was gazing at the TV. “They fired me,” she said quietly. “What am I going to do?” Drums rolled. Trumpets blared. A beautiful woman in a tight dress pulled back a scarlet curtain. Waiting on the other side were a microwave oven and a VCR. Applause.
Zyzmchuk got up and switched off the set. “Who fired you?”
“Mr. McKenna. He does all the firing.”
“Did he give a reason?”
“Poor job performance.”
“That's ludicrous. Your record's outstanding.”
Grace shrugged. There was no fight in her; she needed an office to function, the way a honeybee needs a hive.
“McKenna doesn't know anything about your work. Who gave him his orders?”
“I don't know. It could have been anybody.”
“It couldn't have been anybody, Grace. Who could have done it?”
“You mean technically?”
“Yes.”
“I'd have to think.”
“Think.”
Grace's eyes cleared a little; he'd plugged her into office routine, no matter how temporary, how hopeless. Zyzmchuk picked up her phone. He called the 1826 House, first one room, then the other. The phone rang and rang. Grace was waiting for his attention. He hung up.
“There are only three people with the authority, Mr. Z. Besides Mr. McKenna.” She counted them off on her fingers. “Mr. Dahlin, Mr. Keith.”
“That's two. Who's the third?”
“You, Mr. Z.”
He smiled, but was conscious of how quickly it came and went. Time was short and he was far away. “It wasn't me,” he said.
Grace's lip trembled. “Oh, I know that.”
“So who was it?”
She thought. Her eyes grew blurry again. “I just don't know. Neither of them ever expressed any dissatisfaction with my work. And Mr. Keith hasn't even been in the office much lately.”
“Did anyone know you'd been helping me?”
“Helping you?”
“Looking for Hartley Frame's army file.”
She shook her head. “Not unless someone accessed my logs.”
“You logged the Hartley Frame search?”
Grace nodded. “And the woman. I log everything, Mr. Z. I always go by the book. Or went by the book, I should say.” She glanced around her room, as though taking in where that had got her.
“What woman?” Zyzmchuk said.
“The one you asked me to look up.” Grace was watching him closely. “Jessie something. She had two last names. There was nothing on her. I tried the Burâ”
“You logged her too?”
Zyzmchuk realized he had raised his voice; he was also on his feet, although he didn't recall standing up.
Grace backed away, one hand holding her housecoat tightly closed at the throat. “Did I do something wrong?”
Zyzmchuk struggled to make his voice reassuring. “No, Grace. Who could have accessed your logs?”
“Anyone with my code.”
“Who has your code?”
“It's no big secret. D-base has it, Mr. McKenna, even computer maintenance.”
Zyzmchuk turned and paced across the little room. He pulled back the curtains. A wind had risen from the north. It was blowing the rain at a slight angle across the sky.
“Mr. Z.? Have you done something wrong? Is that why I got fired?”
He closed the curtains and looked at Grace. She was afraid. He had no reassurance to give her. “What happened when you tried to get Hartley Frame's record?”
“I told you. It was classified. We needed A.D. or higher to get into it. I asked you and youâ”
“I tried to get into it today, Grace.”
“By yourself?”
“No. There's a new ⦠GR-3.”
“Already,” she said softly.
“Yes,” Zyzmchuk said. Grace's lip was trembling again. He waited for it to stop. Then he said, “He couldn't find any file for Hartley Frame.”
“He must have made a mistake.”
“Not that I saw. He got an Error 57 message.”
Grace said nothing. He could see she had chosen silence over repeating that her replacement had made a mistake.
“What came up when you tried?” Zyzmchuk asked.
Grace looked surprised. “I told you, Mr. Z. It was classified.”
“But what came on the screen? Exactly.”
“Word for word?”
“Yes.”
Grace screwed up her eyes like a child. “First came the classification code. It was an NP-6; that's the A.D. level. Then the entry, Frame, Hartley E. Then his unit, and that was all.”
“His unit?”
“Yes. It was the 173rd Airborne Brigade.”
“Will they have their own records?”
“Separate from army records, you mean?”
“Yes.”
Grace thought. Her eyes had an inward look, as though she were gazing back on twenty-five years of directing paper traffic in Washington. “They do,” she said.
“Let's go,” Zyzmchuk said.
“Like this?” Grace spread her arms.
“Why not? Just throw on a coat.”
Grace threw on a coat. They hurried out to her car. Her pink slippers flapped on the sidewalk, a foot of quilted housecoat hung down past the bottom of her coat, but there was a spring in her stride.
“Do you want to drive?” she said, digging the keys out of her purse.
“You drive,” Zyzmchuk said.
Grace drove. She drove fast and well. She parked in Zyzmchuk's space, but could have parked anywhere; it was after six and the lot was empty. They rode the elevator, walked quickly down the hall to her old office. Grace sat at the terminal. Her fingers tapped the keys, then froze in midstroke.
“I can't sign in,” she said. “The machine won't accept my code.”
“Use mine. I've got it written down in my desk.” He turned to go.
“Don't bother,” Grace said. “I know it. I know all the codes.”
“Dahlin's?”
“Yes.”
“Use it.”
Grace smiled. “You're funny, Mr. Z.”
Her plump fingers dove down to the keyboard. Letters and numbers appeared and disappeared on the screen. They meant nothing to Zyzmchuk. He watched Grace's fingers instead, how they hesitated, hovered, tappedâsometimes a single key, sometimes a flurry. Then the screen went black except for the cursor, pulsing in the top left-hand corner.
“We're in,” Grace said.
“And there's nothing?”
“No. I haven't entered him yet.”
“Go ahead.”
Grace's fingers flicked across the keys. “Frame, Hartley E.” lit the screen. A few moments passed; nothing moved but the pulsing cursor. Then words began running across the screen, line after line.
“Bingo,” Grace said. Her fingers were still. Zyzmchuk leaned over her shoulder; his eyes strained to take it all in at once.
FRAME
, Hartley Edmund
HT
.: 5'11”
WT
.: 170
EYES
: Blue
HAIR
: Blond
BUILD
: Medium
DISTINGUISHING MARKS
: None
IQ
: 132
EDUCATION
: College, three years
DRAFT STATUS
: 1A, as of Jan. 1, 1969
PHYSICAL
: Sept. 1, 1969. Fort Dix. Passed for active service.
INDUCTION
: Oct. 3, 1969. Fort Dix.
BASIC TRAINING
: Oct. 3, 1969âDec. 1, 1969. Fort Dix. Assigned 173rd Airborne Dec. 3, 1969. Rank: Private
MOVE ORDER
: Dec. 22, 1969.
EMBARKATION
: Jan. 10, 1970. U.S.S. Oriskany. San Diego.
DISEMBARKATION
: Jan. 28, 1970. Cam Ranh Bay.
PROMOTION
: Feb. 6, 1970. Pfc.
MIA
: March 10, 1970. Pleiku area. See note 1.
DECEASED
: Between March 1970 and December 1970. Exact date unknown. See note 2. Declared dead Jan. 5, 1971. See note 3.
DECORATIONS
: Combat service ribbon. Purple heart. Bronze star. All posthumous.
NOTE 1
: (From report of S. Sgt. Millard Flemming, March 11, 1970.) Pfc. Frame was point on a six-man sweep north of Pleiku March 9âMarch 10, 1970. Our bivouac was surrounded by 30 to 40 N.V. regulars at about 22:30 March 10. A firefight of about ten minutes followed. Enemy withdrew. Our casualties were two wounded, one seriously, and Pfc. Frame who was not seen after the fighting.
NOTE 2
: (From report of M. Gilles Ricord of International Red Cross, Dec. 3, 1970.) I send under separate cover dog tags (number 237â32495, name Hartley E. Frame) and fingerprints furnished by the Government of North Viet Nam. Bodily remains apparently lost in a fire which destroyed buildings in D-1 camp.
NOTE 3
: Prints match those taken at Fort Dix, Sept. 1, 1969, from Hartley E. FrameâJ. M. Morris, MD, Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii.
“Is that all?” Zyzmchuk said.
Grace tapped a key. The words scrolled out of sight. “Yup,” she said. “Does it help?”
Zyzmchuk stared at the empty screen. “It raises some question,” he said.
“Like?”
Like how could Hartley Frame have written a check to Mojo Guitars Limited in Reno, Nevada, on January 14, 1969, if he'd sailed for Viet Nam on January 10?
“You don't know or you just don't want to tell me?” Grace asked.
But Zyzmchuk was silent, lost in a maze of thought that changed shape with every mental move he made. Outside darkness had fallen, dark as the blank screen. Rain beat on the windows.
At last he spoke, but it wasn't to answer her question. “I've got to get to the airport, Grace.”
“I'll take you,” she said.
39
Rain cut down from the sky in slanting lines, like strokes painted with the edge of a palette knife. Jessie drove out of the Berkshires, into New York and across the Hudson. The rain and wind were busy knocking the last leaves off the trees. That made the trees whip their bare branches around like flagellants in a fury of mortification.
Jessie held the wheel tight in both hands and drove as fast as she dared; but the little rental car didn't handle as well as it had before the battering outside the campus residence, and when she turned on the headlights, Jessie found that only one was working. After almost an hour she tried the radio. It wasn't working well either. The only clear station had an oldies format and an announcer with the voice of a B-movie seductress.
“All your favorite ear candy from the fifties, sixties and early seventies,” breathed the woman.
“Ball and Chain” by Janis Joplin. “She Said She Said” by the Beatles. “Rip This Joint” by the Stones. Then the Levi's commercial came on. Jessie snapped it off before the ringing guitar part. She just drove. Her mind became a box, enclosing one word. The word was “please.”
Jessie entered Woodstock a few minutes after four. It would have been a beautiful town in any other weather. But now the lawns were muddy brown and the tidy, freshly painted shops on the main street looked like a movie set after the lighting men have gone home.
Jessie parked outside a store with a pumpkin in the window and went inside. A bell tinkled as the door closed behind her. It was a cheese shop. A woman in a black cashmere sweater and designer jeans had a white display card in her hands. She was writing the wrong accent over the e in chèvre. “May I help you?” she said. “We've got some lovely Camembert just in.”