Judas Horse ag-3

by April Smith

  I was only in my twenties, not far removed from a childhood that had been dominated by his self-important anger. It buffered him from fears and losses too astringent for his macho taste — instead, the acid curled inside my gut. I had become so entwined in his emotions as a child that my role in life had been fixed as the vessel for holding the things that he despised and cast away.

  There, on that brick sidewalk in Fredericksburg, Virginia, secretly brushing hands with the first young man for whom I’d had real feelings, I hated my grandfather. I hated to be stuck in this world with him. I felt ridiculous. At the Academy, I was myself, big and three-dimensional and real; now I was stuck on this historic street in someone else’s history, three figures in a sweltering diorama, a shoe-box Colonial miniature like you make in school.

  Steve raised an eyebrow and gave a grim shrug. Poppy seemed unaware. He was looking in the window of the Scottish Center, where stuffed cats were wearing kilts. Nothing affects him, I thought bitterly. When I looked again, he had wandered down the street to some god-awful military store. Headless torsos were dressed in U.S. Army uniforms. There was a Life magazine from 1945 featuring Audie L. Murphy.

  “See this guy? He did his part.” Implying that we didn’t?

  “Audie Murphy was the most decorated soldier in the U.S. forces,” Steve agreed, mustering respect.

  Poppy turned away, somehow offended.

  I looked at my watch. It was barely 5:30. Time had slowed in the impassive heat.

  “I think the restaurant is open now.”

  On the advice of a middle-aged Academy librarian, who seemed, in her silk bow-tie blouses and wool skirts, closest to Poppy’s aesthetic, we had chosen La Petite Auberge. Inside, it was cool and dark, the air-conditioning a sensual pleasure. There were silver candle lamps with fluted glass shades, white latticework walls, and oil paintings of dogwood trees. Half a dozen well-heeled couples had come in for the early specials. They all knew the waiters; it was, after all, a living small town. Now we were like them — three people seated at a table in a nice French restaurant, none of whom can fathom why they are together.

  Steve and I ordered Cokes, which came with lime and lots of ice in a narrow bar glass that contained the sweet carbonation perfectly. The dinner rolls were soft and fluffy white. Things were looking up. Steve’s thigh, hard inside the perfectly creased dress slacks, edged reassuringly close to mine.

  Poppy decided the following day would be an excellent time to visit Manassas National Battlefield Park, forty miles away.

  I protested. “Tomorrow is graduation.”

  “Not until three-thirty in the afternoon, according to the schedule.” “I have to get ready.”

  “How long does it take you to get ready?”

  “I want to take the morning off, and pack, and take a shower and—” “I came all the way out to the other side of the country to find Joseph Grey.” “Is he a relative?” Steve asked genially.

  “A dead one. Poppy thinks he has a great-great-uncle who fought for the Union and died in the first battle of Manassas. So he wants to go there.” I rolled my eyes.

  “Can’t you find old Joseph on a computer?” Steve suggested.

  “A computer is not the same as being present on a field of honor. What is wrong with you?” “Sorry, sir.”

  “No need to be sorry,” I murmured as a waiter in a white dinner jacket offered the appetizers.

  I took a glistening bite of a farm-fresh tomato with onions and tarragon.

  “How about we drive up to Baltimore and see the Orioles instead?” “No, ma’am,” Poppy replied. “We are on a mission.”

  I groped Steve’s hand under the table. It was damp.

  “Sir, you should know that Ana and I are serious.”

  “Serious what?” He scraped the bottom of his bowl of mushroom soup.

  “We care for each other and we want to get married.”

  Poppy shocked me by simply asking, “When?”

  It threw us both off. “Well,” said Steve, coloring red, “we don’t know exactly when. We just haven’t set a date. One day, I’ll wake up and I’ll turn to Ana and say, ‘Let’s get married.’” “So in the meanwhile, you’re shacking up, is that what you’re saying?” “No, sir—”

  “We’re planning to get married in the chapel at the Academy,” I interjected quickly.

  “Aren’t you the one who said that soon-to-be Special Agent Crawford has been assigned to Miami and you’ll be in L.A.?” “Yes, but—”

  “I’m just a dumb cop, so explain to me. Exactly which bed is it where Special Agent Crawford turns to my granddaughter and says, ‘Let’s get married’? Because I can’t figure anything but a Motel 6 in the middle of Texas.” “One of us will be reassigned.”

  “And that’ll be who?”

  “We don’t know who,” I said.

  “It’ll be you, that’s who,” said Poppy. “When it comes down to it, he’ll be like any man; he’ll say, ‘My job is more important. You’re only the wife.’” “So what?” Steve said angrily. “If we love each other.”

  “You’d ask me to give up my career?”

  “Not give it up.”

  “But — what?”

  “We’ll work it out,” said Steve.

  “How?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t know.

  My mouth had set in that shut-down way. Steve was watching with distaste. He’d never seen that expression on my face. It made me look like Poppy.

  And I had never seen the cold, self-centered steel in his character.

  “You’re over twenty-one,” my grandfather said. “You can do as you damn well please.”

  The morning of graduation, I picked Poppy up at the Days Inn (he was waiting outside — camera in hand, wearing Bermuda shorts, high socks, an FBI T-shirt and FBI cap) and we headed north. It was 10:00 a.m. and already we were drowning in the muggy, listless air.

  Avoiding a revisit of last night’s dinner — how we ate quickly and skipped dessert, how it was endured in tense silence except for an argument about which exit Steve’s family should take from the airport — Poppy posed one of his “educational” questions: “What is Bull Run?” “It refers to an Indian chief whose tribe was massacred by U.S. troops and who tried to run away. They thought he was a coward, but history proves he was outnumbered.” Poppy was incensed. He liked to run these quizzes to demonstrate my stupidity, but there was a limit.

  “Bull Run is a stream!” he shouted. “The rebels were hiding in the woods along the banks of Bull Run and the Yankees were trapped. They couldn’t get across and they couldn’t go back. There were no goddamn Indians in sight. Goddamn it, Annie, don’t they teach anything in school?” “I guess I was thinking of Sitting Bull.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s bull.”

  I smiled with evil satisfaction for having provoked him. Manassas had a haunting sound, like a sultry breeze sweeping high dry grass. I knew it was the first major battle of the Civil War, a catastrophic fiasco, which is why I was struggling to maintain respect as we inched through choking traffic at Manassas Mall.

  It was ugly.

  “Imagine what lies beneath all this crap,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Bodies. History.”

  “The battle was fought over here.” He stabbed impatiently at a map. “Not at the mall. What’s the matter with you? Turn right after the overpass. Battle View Parkway, that has to be it.” The rental car was overheating, so I turned right. Battle View Parkway had no view of the battleground. It was an access route to an industrial development that ended in a cul-de-sac.

  “Well that just tears it.”

  Poppy folded his arms, as if perversely satisfied by yet another example of the failure of the world to see it his way.

  “What I don’t understand is the disrespect.” He shook his head. “Using the sacrifice of our war heroes to name a street that goes nowhere.” It occurred to me that I had never heard my grandfather admit that he was wrong.

>   We came upon a split-rail fence that bordered a grassy hillock. The driveway rose and passed a spreading locust. Beneath its canopy, on the near horizon, were framed the crisp black silhouettes of half a dozen cannons. Instantly, my restlessness was stilled. My grandfather removed his FBI cap. The gravity of war seemed to toll the stagnant air, just as it had, hour by hour, the past 130 years. A taste came to the tongue — iron bitterness, like blood.

  The car doors slammed and we stood in silence, looking over the rolling countryside, which had once been marked by tree lines, groves, a small white house — each a key location as the advantage of battle whipped from one side to the other like a thrashing snake. Now it was all open fields, and a tractor slowly worked the hay. Small groups of visitors paused here and there. The day was glaring, hazy. An American flag was drooping — limp as the flags that stultifying afternoon, July 21, 1861, when the grass was as high as the chests of seventeen-year-old boys, who fired on their own troops because they couldn’t tell the color of the standards they were carrying.

  But that sort of thing was just a stitch in the whole mad carnality of it all, a hideously misjudged engagement, in which nearly five thousand naïve volunteers from both sides were killed or wounded. The red-soaked earth that day was strewn with body parts. In the makeshift hospitals, stacks of arms and legs and hands and feet were described as looking like piles of shucked corn.

  The slaughter ended only when the Union retreated in terror, a disintegrating mob stampede. The politicians in Washington, D.C. — the Peter Abbotts of the past century — had promised “a great and glorious Union victory” in a week.

  We paid ten dollars for a computer search for Joseph Grey or Gray, who could not be found. Poppy was in a swoon, taken with every detail he could swallow of the massive hand-to-hand encounter. Heroes abounded.

  By then I was impatient with his petty chatter and eager to get back to the base and take an ice-cold shower. It was time.

  “You never said what you think of Steve.”

  “I didn’t like his eyes.”

  “You don’t like his eyes.”

  “They’re small.”

  “I see.”

  “They’ve got that hooded, criminal look.”

  I turned toward his stringent profile. “Can I ask you something, Poppy? Are you and I on the same planet?” “You’re not going to marry that cracker.”

  “You can’t stop us.”

  “I wish I were that all-powerful,” he said ruefully.

  But he was. And I didn’t marry Steve. I met his parents only briefly, after the ceremony. There were polite excuses for us not to get together — too many relatives, not enough time. We never made our announcement. He went to Miami. I went to Los Angeles. We wrote letters. We phoned. In six weeks, it faded to nothing. It never had a chance. Stillborn.

  “We have to leave in fifteen minutes,” I told my grandfather, and left him in the gift shop.

  Outside, the sounds were vivid — the call of birds and children’s voices shouting “Eee-ha!” as they scrambled over the barrels of the cannons. Fat black gnats flew in my ears and up my nose. And there was the slow, mysterious grinding of cicadas, like a mechanical toy winding and unwinding. Winding and unwinding, like an old lady rocking on a porch.

  In the white house in the center of the green battlefield, there had, in fact, lived a lady named Mrs. Judith Carter Henry. Her pretty china dishes were preserved in the museum. Eighty-five years old, a widow, she refused to leave the safety of her bed, even when Union sharpshooters took over the house. The Confederates fired back with howitzers and Mrs. Henry was mortally wounded. Some say she took more than twenty hits. Sources vary.

  By then I knew enough about the movement of the battle to see it play out vividly in the still, hot fields. I thought of Poppy, traveling all over the map, California to Colonial Virginia, in search of a hero to heal his wounded heart. Would I ever be that hero in his eyes?

  In a few hours, I would become a federal agent of the United States government, bound to carry the shield of core values upon which I, good soldier, was about to swear. Us and them. Black and white. Law and order. It was the defining moment. I was about to become Special Agent Ana Grey, for good. I wonder now, Would Darcy have let Steve Crawford go?

  A tractor slowly rolled the hay. The fields fell off toward the north, toward the glittering haze of Washington, D.C., from whose alabaster domes I would receive my orders.

  I heard the cicadas singing. Their musical clicks went up and down.

  Far away, in the white house, Mrs. Henry was rocking.

  This had been her property. It had been a farm.

  Twenty-eight

  Special Supervisory Agents Angelo Gomez and Mike Donnato are waiting at a rest stop on the I-5 when I pull up in Darcy DeGuzman’s Civic. My cover is an appointment with a local dentist at a phony number manned by an FBI agent in L.A.

  “Guys? This was bad.”

  “That’s why we’re here.”

  Donnato indicates a picnic area behind the brick restrooms, not visible from the freeway.

  “Let’s go around back.”

  They have dressed down for Oregon — polo shirts and jeans — but I’ve been up here long enough to make them for out-of-staters, by their clean shoes and precision haircuts. We swing our legs over the seats as they set their supersize coffee cups on the weathered redwood table.

  “Dick Stone just about buried the kid alive!” I am still incredulous. “And he sets it up, the bastard, so I almost run over the kid’s head.”

  “Was Megan part of this?”

  “No, she was in the car with us. Sara and I were just bringing her back from the airport. Mom leaves, and Stone runs amok. She was panicked. Even she couldn’t calm him down. I’m feeling completely degraded by this guy. No matter how much backup and surveillance you provide, I still have to live in that house and play by his rules, and he keeps changing them.”

  Donnato: “No control.”

  “Over what Dick Stone is going to do? You can’t predict his crazy shit.”

  “Okay, hold it.” Angelo leans forward on the picnic table, Mr. Stability and Reason. “Remember the scenarios in undercover school, where they kept on changing the framework, so you didn’t know if it was day or night, or what was real and who was on your side?”

  “Yes, the counterfeiters turned into drug dealers, shot a couple of their own — very convincingly — and held a gun to my head.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I did the cocaine. Just like I smoked the weed when we were out having some fun with a Colt.45 at Herbert Laumann’s in-laws’ house.”

  “You survived and Laumann survived,” Angelo says. “That was the lesson learned.”

  “Living inside the criminal mind…” adds Donnato. “The best we can do is stay with it, and you did.”

  I exhale deeply and fluff through my hair with both hands, trying to release the tension in my scalp.

  “Right.”

  “Try to put a finger on it. Why is this different from training?” Angelo asks.

  I think about it. “Because this wasn’t me, a paid U.S. government agent, who was put in harm’s way. This was a seventeen-year-old boy, who’s already suffered unbelievable abuse in some awful state-run institution, and on the streets, and now he’s been traumatized to the point where he might never come back, because we screwed up.”

  Angelo looks puzzled. “How did we screw up?”

  “We should have had a covert team sweep the house for electronic surveillance devices before I even moved in.” I look at Donnato. “Am I right?”

  “Peter Abbott vetoed the expense,” he says quietly.

  “What is in his head?” I exclaim.

  “That’s a management issue,” Angelo cautions.

  “When I get off this case, I’m writing a complaint about—”

  “You sound bitter.” Angelo’s observing me with that cockeyed look.

  “I am bitter. Peter Abbott swoops in from he
adquarters like some kind of god, doesn’t know the first thing about life on the ground, in the real world, and, as far as I’m concerned, has already made some ill-informed decisions. You have to ask yourself what Abbott’s doing commanding this operation. He’s about to retire and become a political honcho.”

  Angelo’s got his cop face on and fingers laced with deceptive calm on top of the table.

  “Are your feelings about Peter Abbott making it difficult to continue in the undercover role?”

  Donnato shoots a look toward Angelo. His eyes tell me: Warning.

  I got that.

  “I don’t have feelings for Peter Abbott, I just want the latitude to do my job. Look, Angelo, I want to nail Dick Stone. After what he did to Slammer, more than ever.”

  “Because you’re sounding awfully bitter,” Angelo repeats.

  I glance at Donnato. “Just blowing off steam.”

  “Talk about it with the shrink,” he says.

  “Do I have to?”

  “You’ve been under almost three months.”

  He is talking about a psychological evaluation with a therapist when you’ve been undercover a certain amount of time. It’s required. No way out. Just like critical-incident training. I’m looking forward to it about as much as a body scrub with a vegetable grater.

  “I am committed to the operation, and I’m fine,” I say. “But I’ll tell you what I am worried about. The satellite phone. Stone is talking to someone inside the Bureau, and we have no way to trace it.”

  The moment the words are out, the world begins to waver with vertigo and distrust. Have I said too much? What if the spook inside is Angelo? Or could it be Donnato? No, not possible. I wish I had said nothing about satellite phones, that I’d waited until I had more information. Or gone straight to Galloway. Can I trust him, either? How alone can you be?

  “No way to trace it,” Angelo agrees, “unless we involve NSA, and that’s a whole other thing.”