by Larry Crane
A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror
A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror
Midpoint
A Bridge to Treachery
“From Extortion to Terror”
A Novel
by
Larry Crane
Published by
Brighton Publishing LLC
501 W. Ray Rd.
Suite 4
Chandler, AZ
Copyright 2011
ISBN 978-1-936587-19-3
Smashwords Edition
E-Book
Cover Design by Tom Rodriquez
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher.
DEDICATION
For Deb and Dan
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.
—Louis MacNeice
Chapter One
Lou Christopher snatched the phone before the second warble.
“Christopher.”
“Louis, look, real quick. You were a grunt, right? Airborne? All that shit?”
“Yeah.”
“Sneaky peeky?”
“Infantry.”
“Patrolling. Long-range reconnaissance. Behind the lines?”
“C’mon, Calvin.”
“Hang tight, kid. I’ll talk to you later.” Click.
Oh, great, Lou thought. Terrific. Now on top of a stock market stuck in the toilet all year, the branch manager, Swisher, starts poking around at his military career. Like, how in the hell does Ranger training translate into even one crusado in commissions, baby?
The room was high, dim, and deeply carpeted. On the wall beside the cherry wood double doors, brass letters read: Pierson Browne & Company, Member of the New York Stock Exchange. Well-dressed young lions at rows of desks in the center of a horseshoe of glass offices whispered into telephones and pecked at personal computer keyboards. A projection of the stock ticker marched along the front wall, entertaining a gaggle of old men camped in leather sofas and overstuffed chairs.
Lou dragged his clutch of client profiles, neatly filed and tabbed, across the blotter. From his desk in the second row of the bullpen, his eyes roamed over the heads of the kibitzers scribbling in their little black books to the front wall and the ticker. He rippled the keys on the touch-tone dial and then leaned back, the phone wedged into his shoulder.
“Mr. Chin’s office.”
“Is he in?”
“Who may I say is calling, please?”
“This is Lou Christopher, from—”
“One moment, please. You have the switchboard.”
“Chin here.”
“Sir, this is Louis Christopher from Pierson Browne. You responded to a letter I sent you.”
“I just wanted some information. It didn’t say you were going to call. If I’d have known—”
“Is your broker making you money, Mr. Chin? Why don’t you take me up on a bet? I’ll send you a couple of ideas for capital appreciation and we’ll both watch them. If you don’t make a ten percent paper profit within thirty days, I’ll never call again. If you do, you open an account and we start to do real business.”
“All right. All right. Send me something.”
“Fine. I’ll give you several interesting stock ideas and—”
Click.
Out of ten calls, one warm body. It was all about the numbers. Send out 2,500 mailers a week and get eight to ten back, if it’s a dynamite mailer. Call the ten, get maybe three, four, bona fide prospects. Prospects? They’re never home after you send them the research report they want. So who’s kidding who?
Around eleven, Mag called from home to see if he was game for an auction down at the Elks. Lou managed to sound enthusiastic. As soon as he hung up, the phone rang again.
“Christopher.”
“Lou, how long ago was that? Ten, eleven years? Something like that?”
“What?”
“Ranger. C’mon.”
“What’s going on, Cal?”
“Just tell me how long ago.”
“Ten or eleven years? It was twenty-some years ago, July. It seems like a hundred.”
“Nam, right? RA. You were a lieutenant?”
“Right, but that was...”
Click.
Lou clomped upstairs, muttering. He dug his sandwich out of the refrigerator and washed it down with a root beer, just in time for a hot call from Vic Finamore wanting a quote on his Con Edison—as if Con Edison ever moved more than an eighth in a week. All afternoon: questions, questions—but no trades and no commissions.
Lou couldn’t shake that weird phone tag business with Calvin Swisher. References to patrolling, reconnaissance, anything military, had to be a message—and not even a subtle one—that people up the line were nudging him closer than ever to the ejection seat; that four years were more than enough to begin delivering a steady stream of commission business. Swisher didn’t call again; and when it got to be six o’clock, Lou knew he wasn’t going to call back. He stood in front of the Reuter’s teletype machine and watched the last story print out:
WASHINGTON—In his radio address this morning, President Jordan Bliss went out of his way to play down the seriousness of the growing economic malaise that has gripped the country only seven months before the general election. Back after a whirlwind tour of the western states, the president is caught between the extremes of countering Democrat charges of abandoning his pledge to enact no new taxes and taking firm action to beat back a growing deficit. This, according to unnamed sources close to Mr. Bliss, is in line with his recent attempts to counter a shower of criticism of his so-called liberal tendencies from his own party and to bolster election support from groups further to the right of the political spectrum; a tactic he sees as critical to success.
Lou hadn’t thought about the Army in years, but now it came roaring back, all of it, smack in the face, over this piddling desk-jockey job. It was nothing like old Fort Drum, even on its worst day. The infantry was physical: freeze your earlobes raw or sweat through your eyebrows. Get up with the sun and shut up tired when the night closes in around you. It was: run the maneuver over and over and over until you could do it in your sleep. The result was some physical act requiring physical exertion—tangible, concrete. Movement is the currency of the Army, not dollar bills. Go there, do this.
But you’re not twenty-five forever. Lou knew firsthand that lieutenants who could rappel down a fifty-foot cliff with a 180-pound man on their backs, or leap from a C-119 into the empty space below, eventually became sweater-clad colonels who shuffled the halls of the Pentagon, silently aching to be back in the field. And when the day arrived when they finally shed the green forever, the last thing they wanted was to dwell on how good a trooper they really were.
As the last broker exited for the day, Lou locked up the office. Chicken a la King was on the table when he got home, and within an hour, he and Maggie were on their way to the auction. He waited for a set of headlights to pass by in the rear view mirror before backing the old Subaru out of the drive. The valves chattered in the early April air as he pulled away from the front of their wood shingle Cape Cod. A lingering cloud of exhaust billowed over the windshield, and then boiled to
nothing in the backwash.
“I saw a Cedar Waxwing this morning,” Maggie said.
“That’s nice,” he said.
He knew it was a rare sight, but he had never cared about birds the way she did and he wasn’t about to start now. “We should’ve brought Trude along,” she said, flicking the heater switch on the dashboard.
“You know, the heater’s as good as dead when the engine’s cold, Mag. We’re not going to be gone that long. The worst she can do is mess the rug.”
“She knew she was going to be left alone. She wouldn’t even look at me. I could see her pea brain churning: ‘I’ll pee in your shoes, I’ll pee in your plants, I’ll pee in your bed.’ We need a dog sitter.”
“What’s at the auction?”
“The ad said a lot of furniture. He always has something good. Remember the little brass foot warmer?”
“The little brass...?”
“Will you ever really listen to me, Lou?”
He swung the car into the Shop-and-Save parking lot across the street from the purple facade of the Elks’ building with the “Auction Tonight” sign hanging over the door. Inside, a narrow hallway led away from the bar, its walls cluttered with skewed pictures of past presidents of the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks.
“Mag, I think we ought to do this in a semi-organized way.”
“Just tag along with me,” she said.
“I’m not tagging along.”
“Well, go get the bidding card then.”
“Here’s the plan. We look around independently. We eavesdrop, loiter, question the smart ones, shift from foot to foot, whistle, whatever. Then back together, we compare notes.”
“Go ahead, Lou. Go. You’d just be ragging me about lingering over the box lots anyway. Go. Go ahead. Do whatever you want.”
He did. He skirted the crowd of women lining the long tables of glassware and jewelry, and then wandered to the front, beside the stage. Of all places, under a table stacked with china, he spotted a bushel basket with a four-wheel block and tackle attached to a long tangle of rope. He almost had it straightened out when he heard Mag at his back.
“See anything?” she asked, picking up a Staffordshire plate, squinting at the bottom. “I kind of like the wingback.”
He rattled the keys in his pocket. “We already have a wingback,” he said.
“No, we don’t. We don’t have a wingback. It’s the flower pattern back there. Go on back and look at it. Did you see anything?”
“I guess I wasn’t looking.”
“I got the card,” she said. “Go on back.”
He did.
* * *
Mag maneuvered through the crowd, touching a crystal vase, then a butter mold, then a Victorian lamp. From across the room, she looked up from the pewter charger she was admiring to find Lou at the back, fussing over the floral wingback.
She still loved to watch him move and could still see the raw-boned athlete she had fallen for all those years ago. The image of Lou at thirty-four was a permanently imprinted in her mind like the photograph of the family forebears that hung in the hall: confident gaze, skin an inch thick, his face framed by dark brown hair, and the gold major’s leaf and infantry crossed rifles pinned to the collar of his khaki shirt.
Maggie first saw him on the edge of the Fort Benning pool, blanched and skinny, smelling of cocoa butter, limping from war wounds that left half-dollar-sized pits notched into his thighs. He had “gimped” over to her towel, mumbling something about birds. When she looked into his eyes, which were as blue as the pool, she saw ambition and naïveté and sensed that this was a man who would always need help. Hers.
Of course when things between them grew serious, he had to pass inspection, to meet mother. The pipeline had already sounded the alarm on him—something about disobedience of orders in Vietnam. The last thing her family needed was a rebel. But on that first Sunday afternoon around the table, father and Lou hit it off immediately and all the dark clouds lifted.
And why not? she mused. Lou was an infantryman to his bones. “A field officer, born to a true passion for mud,” father had said. Let spit-shined shoes go to hell. Lou was clearly a young man secure in his strength and still full of optimism, Nam be damned. Oh yes, he might need a little help from someone up the line to get his career in the Army re-ignited, someone like… well, father wore three stars on his collar.
The courtship was a short one. Once father got things straightened away with the Army, a new duty station beckoned. With mother’s help, Maggie threw the wedding together in two weeks, reserving the room at the Blue Ball Inn for their wedding night, which, as she recalled, was hot and silly. Lou had placed her on the bed in the wrestler’s starting position—kneeling on all fours—giggling. He knelt beside her and wrapped her arm over his back and around his chest. At the command, “wrestle,” he gripped her wrist and rolled, bringing her over the top of him, and kept rolling until she was beneath him and their noses touched.
Then he got quiet. He could’ve snapped her like a twig, but his hands were gentle on the small of her back. He fixed his eyes on her face and wouldn’t let go, focusing first on her chin, then her eyebrows, just as he did when the children were born—inspecting them, admiring them, absorbing them. His eyes fixed on hers and burrowed into them, out of focus now, and close, as close as it was possible to be.
He still had it. She saw it in him: the combination of strength and vulnerability that had drawn her in, back on the towel at Benning. She wasn’t the only one who saw it. Women still looked—like the little secretary in the office. He’d said that his “indiscretion” hadn’t meant anything, and they’d come through it.
* * *
Lou watched Mag at the front table as she scrutinized a large blue and white plate, holding it away, then close, turning it over and over, caressing the front and back with graceful fingers. Approaching fifty, she was still beautiful. Only her eyelids, and maybe her butt, made any concession to gravity. Actually, the years had made her even more appealing to him. She had a deliberate, easy way with people that spoke to her innate ability to see through to the truth of things. She had reserves to draw on, reserves that steered them both through trouble, no matter what happened. And she never seemed to fuss over herself. In his favorite photograph of her—an errant curl on her forehead, the collar of her blouse just slightly askew—he found her dazzling.
What was it, two years since he’d gone over two hundred pounds, fifteen over his wrestling weight? He’d never forget the day when, for the first time, he glimpsed breasts—his own—in the mirror. Now it was his hands; they’d lost all their strength. He remembered the summer he hadn’t been able to get the Phillips-head screw out of the screen door hinge and finally had to call a carpenter. The guy was forty, fifty years old— a regular blue collar guy with his pants drooping off his butt and under that medicine ball he carried in front—but he’d managed to get the screw out in a second. Of course, he had the right tools: an electric screw driver, and hands—like bagels—hard and brown.
So there was the specter of the breasts, and then, of his drooping pants. It was only because they either had to droop or be pulled up under his armpits, and he'd rather have the puddling in the back than showing a burl in front.
From across the room, through a veil of blue smoke, Mag looked like she did thirty years before when he first saw her testing the low dive at the Fort Benning pool; when she stretched out on a thick towel on the hot concrete pool deck and reached for her paperback—Roger Tory Peterson’s Guide to American Birds. He remembered he’d wasted no time making his move.
“Hot! Hot! Hot! Sorry. I’ll only perch here a second,” he’d said. “What’s that you’re reading about...birds?”
Over the next two months, they, but mostly she, carved a smooth, youthful relationship built on wisecracks, confidence, candor, and quirkiness, as evidenced by her adamant choice of the inn at Blue Ball, Pennsylvania, for their wedding night. Lou recalled a pair of globes, jus
t above the door of the two-story tavern, that swung in the wind as he and Maggie roared into the weedy, gravel parking lot, dust swirling at the bumpers of their white, ’58 Thunderbird convertible. Hand in hand they ran—his Army dress blues, epaulets askew and missing the bow tie, and her frilly, white gown hiked up to her shins—to the reservations counter, past faces peering from the darkness of the beery taproom.
Upstairs, halfway down the hall, he swept his arm behind her knees, lifted her, and twirled into the room. Champagne bottle in hand, his senses swirled with the dusky smell of the dark, floral wallpaper and the ceiling fan turning, slowly, amplifying the heat and wetness growing on their faces and in the crooks of their arms, twirling, on her nose, her neck, down her spine to the small of her back, twirling, between her breasts and on her throat and lower, in her navel, and down.