G-Man

by Stephen Hunter

  “Sure,” said Charles.

  “I could use a drink. I’m Mormon, but since I’m also an Elder, I grant myself one day’s dispensation. Not sure you’re a drinker.”

  “I had a bad spell with the hooch when I got back from the war. But I got myself straightened out. I don’t drink the hard, but I can handle a beer or two.”

  “Sounds good. Honey, can you open a couple Schlitzes? We’ll be on the patio.”

  “Be right out,” Betty called, cheerily, from the kitchen.

  Sam led him out a rear door, where they found a patio raised above ground level, a little redoubt from which a lord could survey his fief. The backyard seemed immense and it opened all the way around the side of the house. But as usual, trees everywhere, shrubs, the whole range of chlorophyll-kingdom enterprises, lurking, climbing, blossoming. Through the foliage, other equally prosperous houses were visible.

  “Very nice here,” said Charles.

  “I didn’t want the kids in the city. Evanston turned out to be perfect. They have a six-block walk to school, up Orrington Avenue. It’s a great school, I’m told, equal to anything in the East.”

  “Beautiful place,” said Charles.

  “The traffic isn’t bad if I drive, but mostly I just take a two-block walk to the El. Straight up Noyes. Gets me downtown in forty minutes.”

  “That’s why you keep such long hours, I guess,” Charles said.

  “I hope you like steak, Charles. Betty’s got three of the best rib eyes out there I’ve ever seen. She’ll get the kids down—we won’t put you through our mess-hall family-dinner ordeal, nobody deserves that.”

  “It sounds great, Sam. Thanks so much for having me. I was getting tired of diner cooking.”

  Betty came out and served the two beers in tall glasses, frosty up top, glistening with dew, yearning to be consumed. Charles lifted his, clanked a toast with Sam, who said, “To the end of the journey,” and each took a draught.

  It was good, as Charles knew it would be, and it opened longings that he felt but knew he was strong enough to withstand. Now, what was this going to be? Had someone seen him with the known Italian Uncle Phil? Was he in trouble? Had Hugh Clegg brought off some coup to have him exiled, which was the same as having him fired, since he wouldn’t stay in the Division without Sam? Had some rumor, a suspicion, about a favor he may or may not have done for someone in Hot Springs in 1926 emerged? What the hell would this be?

  “Charles, first off, between us, I just wanted to thank you for what you’ve brought to the office. I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am.”

  “Sam, I’m just doing my duty. Nothing special—”

  “No, no, hear me out. You see, one of the things I have to know about is weakness. And I know my own as well as I know Clegg’s scheming bitterness and Mel’s vanity and Ed Hollis’s lack of a first-class brain. Here’s mine, Charles: I don’t like the violence. To be honest, it scares me. Maybe I’ve got too much to lose, unlike some of the others—”

  “Sam, nobody likes the violence.”

  “Well, I really don’t like it. So it was important to me that I find somebody who knew it, could lead the boys through it and bring most of them home, who was as brave as he was honorable, who would be the me I could never be. I couldn’t have done better. My first choice, Frank Hamer, with his big ways and hunger for glory, would have been a disaster, I see that now. Charles Swagger has been my finest triumph.”

  “We’ll get you trained on the guns, and when you know how to shoot, the ugly stuff won’t be a problem. The guns will get you through it.”

  “Well, perhaps. But there is one other thing I wanted to say, do you mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I’ve been meaning to have this conversation with you ever since you stood wide open on that hill and fired at Baby Face. But when I learned you told the boys—no, they didn’t tell me, they told a pal who told a pal who told a pal who finally was overheard by someone who was not a pal—that you went straight into Johnny’s gunhand because you knew if he got a shot off it would be into you and nobody else—I realized I had to act. That accounts for this overly engineered little tête-à-tête.”

  “Yes sir?” said Charles.

  “Charles . . . do you know what a ‘death wish’ is?”

  34

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  August 1934

  COURTESY OF HELEN AND J.P.’S ADVENTURING, they stayed at the Aurora Hotel, one of the city’s nicest, a couple blocks from the old fort where the Texans had stood off the Mexicans for so long, setting a standard for bravery in the face of treachery and force for all, including bank robbers, to admire. And these bank robbers did.

  But history’s charms ran out quickly enough, and soon enough they turned to nourishment, which the old city offered in abundance. They ate well, in the Aurora’s elegant dining room or the superb Mexican restaurants the town boasted. It was a streetcar city, and the amble of the big cars down the thoroughfares under wires that popped sparks at every junction was its own special pleasure, a kind of ongoing spectacle out-of-towners never tired of. But it was also a pastel-and-ocher city, in the colors of the desert, and it had the warm-climate casualness that outsiders find so appealing, and the availability of a smiling peasant class to facilitate all transactions. It was a city that wore its pride and grandeur well, like a beautiful gown.

  They had plenty of money, at least for now, even if the unexpected triumph of five crisp, new thousand-dollar bills couldn’t be touched.

  “That stuff is so hot we’d end up in the stir before nightfall if we tried to pass it,” Les said.

  “Maybe I should have left it there. Who knew it’d be so much trouble?” said J.P. They sat on the balcony of Les and Helen’s room, which overlooked the gently Hispanic city.

  “Nah,” said Les, “you were right to grab it. We’ll hang on to it. It’ll cool off, and somewhere along the line we can pass it off at a good rate, maybe in Reno. Right now, we wouldn’t get one-for-five, but by this time next year it’ll go easily for four-on-the-fiver. That’s close to standard, can’t bitch about that.”

  “Good idea, Les,” said J.P., as if ever in his life he could have said, “Bad idea, Les.” His submission was as complete as it was weirdly satisfying to him. It completed him.

  “Tell you what,” said Les. “We’ll peel one of ’em off and put it in the getaway bag, with a few guns and some ammo, some license plates, something to grab if the Division starts to blast us. On the run, we can spend it, because we’re moving so fast, and by the time they track it back to where it was passed, we’ll be long gone. One way or the other.”

  “That’s good,” said J.P.

  Both men had their feet up and were relaxed, coats off, ties loosened. Helen had gone to Frost’s, the great San Antonio department store, to buy a few new frocks, as she was sick to death of the ones in her suitcase that she washed out every night after wearing. She’d earned a few new dresses, Les thought.

  “So, tomorrow Lebman. I called him, he’s expecting us at eleven and is very eager for the business.”

  Hyman Lebman was a great mystery to many of his gangster clients. No doubt, he was a talented gunsmith, and could modify a good gun into a perfect gun, almost too clever to use on the job yet too lethal not to use—but what did he know about his customers and the uses to which they put his brilliance? He pretended to know nothing.

  If he was faking it, he was faking it brilliantly. He could be with Les and Johnny, showing them some work of genius—like his adaptation of the Colt Government Model automatic into a machine pistol, complete with compensator, twenty-two-round magazine, and Thompson grip, which Les had used to great effect on Carter Baum the night of the escape from Little Bohemia—and at the same time be completely oblivious to their identities. He just thought, or pretended he just thought, they were new-money oil millionaires giving
their adolescent selves a fun binge, with a love of guns so intense, it had taken them beyond the normal range of hunting and target-shooting firearms. Their hobbies seemed to be acquiring the still-legal fully automatics and retiring to an obscure corner of the ranch for a few hours’ and a few thousand rounds’ worth of shooting holes at anything in front of them, amid a clatter of noise, a storm of dust, and a spray of debris. It seemed to suggest a sort of polo-with-machine-guns kind of life.

  If anything else was involved, it never occurred to Mr. Lebman, who either made no connection between his clients and the massacres and bullet blizzards of the Midwest or, again, did a fine job of impersonating someone who made no connection.

  That was fine all around. The guns were perfectly legal, no laws were broken—well, the National Firearms Act had just been passed in June, but it seemed nobody was much interested in enforcing it for now—and it freed Mr. Lebman to his own pleasures, mainly leatherwork, as he was also extremely skilled at that craft and his saddles and bridles were prized among the high-swell class of Texan.

  So the next day, at 11, just outside the Flores Street shop in downtown San Antonio, a block from city hall and the police department, across the street from the sheriff’s department, Les and J.P. pulled in. Both were smartly turned out after the fashion of the big-money gun aficionado, and they entered the store. It had the rich smell of leather to it, and was decorated with the owner’s more flamboyant enterprises—saddles with elaborate scrollwork carved into them, bridles and reins, cuffs and chaps, which displayed the same kind of bas-relief tapestry.

  “Is the boss around?” Les asked a clerk behind the counter, who was showing a silver buckle to a richly appointed cowboy millionaire.

  “Sir, he’s in back waiting for you.”

  “Great,” said Les. He and J.P. went back, opened the door, and passed into another universe. Now they were in the world of ordnance.

  No leather smell back here. Instead, the fragrance of Hoppe’s No. 9, the ubiquitous bore solvent to the shooting fraternity, mingled with odors of petroleum lubricants of various densities, for one wouldn’t oil a machine-gun bolt with the same delicate vintage one used on a tiny Colt .25 automatic pistol.

  It was like a library of guns down here. The walls were lined with fine hunting rifles, many of foreign manufacture, as Lebman considered the European gunmakers far ahead of the American when it came to hunting rifles. A Mauser, a Mannlicher, or a Westley Richards far outshone their cruder American counterparts from Winchester and Remington and Marlin. Now, pistols were a different story. No one had surpassed the genius of Mr. Browning when it came to the automatic pistol, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson had shown the world how to build a revolver, though the Colt revolver was a treasure, particularly its Officers Model that rode in so many police holsters, or its sawed-off cousin, the Detective Special, which many a plainclothesman carried tucked away. An ample supply of all these variants, plus dozens more, lay in shelves on either side of the place.

  “Mr. Lebman, sir, how are you?” Les called, all charm and willed charisma. He could be a gentleman to you if he had decided not to kill you. Besides, he loved guns, he loved Mr. Lebman, he loved this place. He felt at home, happy, safe, which might be why he kept coming back.

  “Mr. Smith,” said Lebman, looking up from a bench where he’d been filing tiny checks into the grip of a Government Model with his strong, greasy hands, watching his progress through a jeweler’s loupe. He rose, pushed the loupe up, stopping to wipe his hands, and then put one hand out. “Back in town, eh? So good to see you!”

  “You know my associate, Mr. Davis?”

  “Howdy,” said J.P., and Lebman nodded.

  “Still having great fun with the machine pistol,” said Les. “I do think I like the .38 Super better than the .45. You need more weight in the gun to compensate for a .45’s recoil, but the .38 doesn’t move off its target at all.”

  “But was it designed to be a bull’s-eye gun?”

  “Hell, no. I like to get up close with it and just press the trigger. It’s empty in a second, and whatever I’m shooting at looks like it lost a fight with a hand grenade.”

  Everybody laughed.

  “Now, I heard you might have a little something I’d be interested in adding to my collection. That’s why I’m here,” said Les.

  “I bet I know what it is,” said Mr. Lebman.

  “Folks do talk to folks, and you hear things. So I heard you had this particular piece. Hard to come by, I’m told.”

  “And you know, Mr. Smith, ‘hard to come by’ means ‘hard to pay for.’”

  “I do indeed,” said Les. “Fortunately, we hit a new gusher on some property across the river, so I just have so much money coming in, I don’t know what to do with it. I’d give it to the poor, but that would be communistic. So I’ll just spend it, thinking that Texas has been mighty nice to me.”

  “Okay,” said Lebman. “And you know the law has changed on us, so there’s a new level of discretion advised. You understand that?”

  “Jimmie ‘Discretion’ Smith, that’s me. Fair price for the merchandise, lips sealed at no extra cost.”

  “Well, maybe we can do some business,” said Mr. Lebman. “But not out here, where anyone might walk in. Hoping you’ll come back at closing time, and when the doors are locked and the lights out, we’ll see what we can come up with.”

  “Sounds square to me,” said Les.

  35

  BOISE, IDAHO

  The present

  IT WAS BOILERPLATE, but it was good boilerplate, and he knew it well. He’d eked it out several years ago. Jen had helped him, when it got too tangled and the tenses threatened to go atomic, and he’d tested it enough times to know it worked. It’s what came of a bit of fame in a little pond in the boondocks. But he took some pride in doing it well, an old guy with buzz haircut, a face that looked like raw leather beaten with a crowbar, a weird gait to his walk, and a wardrobe perfect—just perfect—for 1957.

  “Now, I know we have a new president,” he concluded, “and it’s too early to tell which direction we’ll be going, how wise, how just, how reasonable, how reluctant to use force, but also how willing to use force, hard and fierce, when it’s called for. But I do know this, from hard-earned experience: if and when the time comes, the president—and you and I—can count on the United States Marine Corps, thank you very much.”

  Standard, but given meaning and dignity by the history he carried with him, having acquired it in rough zones. The applause was exuberant and he smiled, though tightly—he did everything tightly—and returned to his seat on the dais.

  The banquet room of the Boise Hilton had been turned into a Temple to the United States Marine. Iconographic images dominated the walls, and the tables were full of prominent men, many former marines, many well into what passed for “establishment” in Idaho, who wished to share the marine feeling, express their belief and honor in country and service, and of course make business contacts and hand out cards. The chicken had been fine, the green beans not so fine, the bread awful, and he’d been speaking during dessert, so he’d missed the sheet cake with whipped cream and a pineapple chunk. Now, at the end of the evening, coffee was being served, and people were beginning to trail out.

  “Nice job, Bob,” said Dr. Bill Tillotson, the vet and friend who’d asked him to do this gig as a favor, and, being involved in business with Bill, Bob had been unable to say no. It was okay. A few others leaned over, offering nice words, while on the dais the president of the Idaho chapter of the league was wrapping up routine business before signaling the end of the evening.

  Bob just sat there, slightly exhausted. It takes it out of you, and it took it out of him more than others because of his seemingly genetic recessiveness. He’d never thought, and couldn’t have predicted, his business would be such a success, but things just took off, and he dealt with it as well as he could. Some c
ross to bear! he sometimes joked to himself.

  But now the slight buzz of anxiety gone, he was free to relax and let his eyes find occupation in the photographs of marine history around the room. Of course he couldn’t see the most famous, which was mounted directly behind him, and showed the flag raising on Suribachi, caught in a freak moment of exquisitely designed perfection that seemed to sum up the marine experience in the war: filthy, exhausted men, sublime grace.

  His eyes passed to others, and other wars, until he came to his real favorite, because it seemed to sum up his father’s war, though it was taken on an island his father never set foot on. It lacked the Iwo symmetry, and caught more of the awkwardness of combat, how men just did the best they could, and were almost always completely un-self-conscious as to how they looked or appeared, though the marines in the shot certainly looked solid enough. It had been taken on Wana Ridge, in the last great battle and slaughter of the war, Okinawa, in May of 1945, where the Japanese were determined to teach the Americans what an invasion of the home islands would cost them. Swagger had gotten interested in it once, and knew that the marine with the Thompson was named Davis T. Hargraves, and the BAR gunner, Gabriel Chavarria, and that they were from F Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment, 1st Marine Division. Both survived the war; both even revisited this spot fifty years later.

  Hargraves stood upright on a slope of ruin, almost in perfect profile, against a landscape of shattered and leafless brush, and leaned into his Thompson. Somehow, he achieved a shooting position that was range-perfect, braced into the gun formally, locking it against his shoulder by the strong backwards pressure of his right-hand clutch on the pistol grip, his left arm also locked, pulling hard against the forearm piece and drawing it back into the shoulder for as much muscle as could be brought to bear on ten pounds of sheer weight and highly volatile recoil energy. His head perfectly aligned, so that his right eye precisely indexed both rear and front sights, he was in the act of firing—carefully, in light of the mandates of marksmanship—a burst at a Japanese sniper fifty or so yards away. Given his position, he probably didn’t miss. Just beyond him, Chavarria is pivoting to action with his BAR, rising from a crouch and following his comrade’s fire to the target so that he might fire too.