The Day Before Midnight (26 page)

“Yep, they’re there, you bet, I could almost smell ’em,” said Uckley.

“How many?” asked Delta Three.

“I couldn’t exactly
ask,”
said Uckley, who was feeling somewhat heroic in regard to his exploit. “So what have you got?”

“Three-bedroom house, living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry downstairs. Stairs up front from the living room and out back from the dining room. Tough to crack with five guys.”

“Hmmm,” said Uckley. He was basically an accountant. He had an M.B.A. from Northwestern and had heard that five years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation Embezzlement Division looked great on a resume, especially if you wanted to go into tax accountancy, where the bucks were. He was engaged to a girl named Sally and had been born and raised in Rockford, Illinois. He had begun the day going over the books of Mid-Maryland Federal Savings, where the vice-president had fled with over $48,000 in bank funds, looted from a variety of accounts over the past several weeks. The man had left with his twenty-three-year-old secretary, leaving behind a forty-two-year-old wife and three children.

“Tough to crack especially when we don’t know how many there are or where they are.”

“Is it best to infiltrate slowly or hit ’em with a rush?” Uckley asked.

“The Israelis like to go in fast, low, and hard. GSG-9 will wait until the cows come home, inserting their operators a lick at a time.”

“That’s a tough place to rush,” said Uckley. “You could stage from Mrs. Reed’s place next door, but nothing on the
other side.” He looked at his watch. Time was really flying. It would be dark soon.

“So, who’s got an idea?”

They just looked at each other.

What am I doing here, Uckley thought. He wished he could concentrate a little bit better.

“Look, what about this?” said Delta Three. “We set off a smoke grenade in Mrs. Reed’s house, call the fire department. Say, you and me ride in on the truck, rush up the lawn. Except we hit the Hummel place instead. We’re in raincoats. Meanwhile Rick and Gil move in on the place from behind; they go through that back door, into the kitchen. We go in, yelling Tire, fire, you have to evacuate.’ We’ve got our pieces under our raincoats. Then we take ’em out.”

It was better than anything Uckley could come up with.

Megan Wilder took the tin can and put it in a vise. She spun the handle, watched the tin crumple. The can imploded and ruptured, achieving various interesting configurations of destruction as she drew the jaws of the vise closer and closer. It finally became a fully formed blossom of catastrophe, the light glinting in fascinating patterns off its tortured sides.

Quickly she spun the handle the other way, plucked the crippled thing from the vise’s grip, and took it over to a table. There she had several dozen other crumpled cans.

She stared at them. Some had collapsed neatly; there was something bland and banal in their demise. Others, like this one, had a curious inner vitality and force; they fought the jaws with every last shred of resilience. And when they died reluctantly, they died most spectacularly, forming orchids of broken metal. Of the dozens there were perhaps less than five that really touched her, that
spoke
to her, including the last one. She took them all to another part of the room.

Megan Wilder specialized in what she called “constructions” or, sometimes, “destructions,” depending on her mood and her honesty. Their form attempted to push out the boundaries of art; they would not fit into conventional categories. They were not quite sculptures, because although they occupied space and had plastic form, they had at the same
time not escaped entirely from the tyranny of the frame and the organizing impulse of two dimensions. They were meant, in short, to be viewed only from one angle, and although certain influential critics had denounced this as cowardice to the tyranny of convention, she could not force herself to abandon it.

But neither, of course, were they paintings, although they depended for their impact on color as
it
defines form. For she implanted the twisted tin buds with other shapes that took her fancy—beer bottles, for example, the insides of burnt-out calculators, filaments from light bulbs, this, that, and the other thing, the detritus of American society—and stapled them inside rough frames and shelves that she had constructed herself, against a plasterboard backing. When by accident she found harmony, she destroyed it. She was interested in disharmony, the radical lack of symmetry and structure that somehow especially pleased her since Ari had left. Anyway, when she got these items arranged just so, she painted them. Not flat black like Nevelson’s bleak little masterpieces, but comic-book colors, hot pink, Popsicle orange, sunburst yellow, mashed-banana yellow, a rainbow, a riot of flat, harsh, hot colors. There were critics who also despised this. Color is dead, they had decreed, and it irked them that she hadn’t read their position papers. They could really be nasty, too, particularly one faggot on Art
News.

It didn’t matter. Megan was really beyond other people now. After all the years and all the pain, she’d finally fought her way to her own private place. She’d finally found her own voice. It felt authentic and passionate. It satisfied her.

The work was going so well now, it was a shame it had to end. In fact, the imminence of its end gave it all a certain perishability and poignance that made her almost cry, something no man had ever been able to do, short of punching her, and both Peter and Ari had punched her. You could forgive Peter, he was an asshole genius with an IQ of about 900 and an emotional age of about eleven, but Ari had been different; she had expected so much more.

Thus when the knock came and she became aware of the shapes of men in suits moving around the studio, up on its
roof, out back in the frozen garden, it did not surprise her, but merely filled her with regret. It had to happen sooner or later and it was happening sooner. What seemed to her tragic was that she’d never see the series of constructions played out unimpinged upon, untainted by the inevitable scandal.

“It’s open,” she called.

There were three of them, Gentiles, strong-looking older men without irony or outrage in their eyes. They identified themselves as something or other from the FBI; she immediately forgot their names and ranks. Their blankness surprised her. She didn’t see the need for it. People could be so cruel. They said she ought to call a lawyer. She didn’t feel like it. She just wanted to go on working, she was so close to being finished.

“Do you have a lawyer, Ms. Wilder?”

“I have an agent,” she said.

“It’s not the same thing.”

“I suppose I have a lawyer. My father would be able to call him, I suppose.”

“I hope you’ll cooperate with us, Ms. Wilder. Time is very important, and your cooperation would help you enormously later.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” she said.

“Ms. Wilder, we don’t have a lot of time. Time is of the essence.”

Original line, she thought. Where do they get these guys? You’d think they’d at least go to the trouble to find someone that she could relate to. But then she understood that in the whole apparatus there was nobody she could relate to; by the very act of joining the apparatus, such a man would forever lose purchase on the possibility of relating to her.

“Here’s the deal. You let me work for a little while longer. Turn on your little tape machines or whatever. You let me work, and as I work I’ll answer any question you want. Is that fair?”

“I take it you understand you’re in grave trouble.”

“I guess I always have been,” she said.

She was a beautiful woman, with a high, aristocratic face,
a strong nose, and piercingly intelligent eyes. She had a supple body under jeans and a paint-spattered smock. She wore black high-topped Reeboks and round, owlish glasses. Her hair, black and lustrous, was drawn back tightly into a surprisingly girlish ponytail.

“We have information that suggests—”

“Let me just start where you want to end up. Won’t that save some time?”

“Yes,” the older man said.

She took a deep breath.

“Well, I did it. Yes. Whatever he says I did, I did it.”

“You gave foreign agents certain materials which—”

She laughed, involuntarily. “Foreign agents” sounded so forties.

“Materials?” she said. “I gave them
everything.”

They just looked at her.

“I had a little camera. Called a Minox, very cute. Later, sometimes, I’d just haul the stuff to the library and make Xerox copies of it. He made it so easy. He was so sloppy. The stuff was everywhere, he just left it lying around. He must have been in love with me or something.”

Then she looked at them hard.

“But the joke’s on him. And you. I gave it to a guy who’s on our side. He’s just another Jew. He’s an Israeli. The Israelis are our side. So you can do to me what you did to Jonathan Pollard, and it doesn’t matter. Throw me in prison and send the key to the dead-letter bin, What do you think of that?”

“Maybe you’d better start at the beginning,” said the oldest of the men.

“Do you have ten hours and a bottle of very cold white wine?”

“We have ten minutes and a thermos of very hot coffee.”

“Then I guess I’d better hurry,” she said, and began to explain.

The shattered unit collapsed in the snow reminded Dick Puller of his own A-detachment after the fight at Anh Tran in July of ‘65. When the 82d had finally fought its way through,
the survivors of the thirty-eight-day siege by the NVA in division strength just watched them come, numb and flat. He knew the feeling: the sense that your bones have melted, the way your brain fills with white fog and your joints are stiff and slow; and another thing, too, like persistent background music that will not go away—the terrible guilt you feel at the whimsy of the battle and all the good people who’ve died in spaces you’ve just moved out of or are about to
move
into. He shook his head. At the end, they’d depressed the 105s point-blank and fired canisters of fleschette into the NVA waves that had come at them as the perimeter shrank so small you couldn’t even call in Tac Air. Dick shivered. Fuck if that hadn’t been a fight. That was the fight to end all fights, a month of taking frontals and watching them burn away your best people until you were left with a shell of your team and less than a third of your brave, tough little Nungs. In the end we won. But won what, and why? He could still taste the bitterness.

Bravo, having straggled down the mountain, had made a stab at reforming just at its base, where the forest met the meadow and where the road began its switchbacks up to the summit. Dick rode in with the first medevac chopper and with several of the Delta officers to debrief the survivors.

Now he walked among them. The boys sat singly in the snow, having found one another and then collapsed in a loose circle, their olive drab uniforms dark blots against the blinding whiteness that surrounded them. Many were wounded though many were not. Some had weapons, some did not. Some cried. Some laughed hysterically; some merely stared at Dick with furious, dark hostility. Some chattered helplessly with the cold, their lips blue, their faces drawn and slack. They looked exhausted or sick. Their young faces had the shock of nihilism. Their gear was all fouled up, their pouches open, their straps tangled, their boots unbloused. Not many had helmets.

He knelt by a boy, one of the few who still had his weapon. He didn’t have his helmet, but he had his weapon.

“Pretty tough up there, Specialist?”

The boy’s eyes swung to him at an idiot’s cadence. The
boy just looked at him like a jerk. What, twenty-two? In ’Nam they were younger, even, in their teens. Dick, then a captain, had even had a seventeen-year-old; the gooks had caught him coming in off an ambush patrol and he’d died screaming in his own guts out beyond the wire.

“Son, I’m talking to you,” Dick said in a stronger voice.

“Huh? Oh, sorry, uh, sir.”

“They hit you pretty bad?”

“They had us cold. Just cut us up.”

“Did you do much damage?”

“Sir?”

“I said, did you hurt them?”

The question had no meaning.

Dick seized the M-16 from the boy’s limp hands, brought it to his nose, pulled the charging handle under the sight assembly. The ejector port snapped open; Dick sniffed the breech. It smelled of clean oil but not powder. He could see an immaculate cartridge sitting in the chamber.

“You didn’t see any targets?”

The boy looked at him, ashamed.

“I—I was too scared to think about that,” he said.

“I see,” said Dick. “Well, you’ve got a few hours to pull yourself together. Then tonight you go back. Tonight we all go back.”

The boy looked at him.

“I don’t want to go back,” he said baldly.

“Neither do I,” said Dick, “but I don’t see anyone else here, do you?”

“No, sir.”

Dick stood, winked at the kid, earning a little smile.

“I’ll try to do better tonight, sir,” the kid said.

“You don’t have to do better, you just have to be there.”

He could see the other Delta officers moving through the collection of dazed men while the Delta medics worked to patch the walking wounded.

Finally, Skazy came over to him.

“It’s not good,” he said.

“Anybody get close enough to get a peep under the canvas?”

“Nobody got within a hundred yards of their position.”

“So who are we fighting, Major? What’s your reading?”

“Whoever he is, he’s very good. He read the terrain, so he knew exactly the point of attack. He put his automatics in the center of the line and he must have linked belts. The volume of fire was terrific. The kids seem to agree there were two heavy guns hosing them down, plus lots of small arms. Lots of fire, so ammo must not be a problem. But that guy up there, he’s been in a fight or two in his time. He knows his business. I’ll bet we find he’s Forces. I mean, this is straight ’Nam, your basic A-team scenario, defending a tight hilltop perimeter against superior numbers way, way out in Indian country. That’s Forces work.”