Frag Box

by Richard A. Thompson

  “That, I am not free to tell you.”

  “But you know, don’t you?”

  “I’m not free to tell you that, either.”

  “Thank you. What about the black Hummer, the one that’s been following me?”

  “Now you’re being paranoid. We had a walking tail on you for a while. But a Hummer? Get real. Who would use a stupid, obvious vehicle like that for surveillance work?”

  “That’s the question, all right. Who would?”

  “Not us, I can assure you. That’s all you get. Now it’s your turn.”

  “Okay, I buy at least some of it. Tell you what: I’ll give you Charlie’s box if you let me finish looking at the contents first.”

  “I want to be there when you do.”

  “Sure, why not?” I stood up and gestured to her to do the same.

  “So where is it?”

  “On the table in the next room.”

  “You son of a bitch!”

  “That has been observed, yes. I have some single malt Scotch on the table, as well as the box, by the way. Can I offer you a drink?”

  “You must realize I’m on duty.”

  “Of course you are. Yes or no?”

  “Why not?”

  What a remarkable evening this was turning out to be. I gestured Krause toward the dining room, and I went back to the kitchen to get another glass. But first, I went back to the hallway and picked up the phone.

  “Still with me Anne?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you hear all that?”

  “I might have missed a word or two while I was getting my tape recorder, but mostly, yes. I love it. I don’t know how much of it I can publish, but I love it.”

  “You probably won’t be able to hear us when we move to the dining room. I’ll hang up now and call you again when I get done with my disgruntled agent.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  Back in the dining room, I gave Agent Krause a cut glass tumbler.

  “Ice?”

  “Never.”

  “A woman after my own heart.”

  “I seriously doubt it.”

  “Do you have a first name other than Agent?”

  “No.”

  Right. Agent Agent, then. She had let down her hair enough to tell me that she hated her partner, but if I thought that meant we were going to be friends, I could just forget it. In fact, it probably guaranteed that we wouldn’t be.

  I settled into reading the last of Charlie’s ledger and finishing my notes. Sometimes she looked over my shoulder, but mostly she wandered around the room, looking at my things and putting a serious dent in the Scotch supply. At a glass case on top of my buffet, she paused overly long.

  “Do you play, Mr. Jackson?”

  “You’re looking at the violin? No. The only thing I play is a pool cue. The violin is a gift from an old friend, a sort of memento.”

  “Really? I would have thought you would be musical.”

  “Why would you think that?” I didn’t look up from the pile of papers.

  “Well, music is mathematical, they say.”

  “They do say that, yes. What’s your point?”

  “Didn’t your name used to be Numbers Jackson?”

  I was glad my back was to her, because that was a real kick in the guts, and there’s no way my face wouldn’t have told her so.

  “I can’t imagine where you would have heard that,” I said. And that was absolutely the truth. Numbers Jackson was actually the nickname of my Uncle Fred, not me. But that was still way too close to home. And how the hell had she found it?

  “You know, this box really doesn’t tell us anything about who the hired assassin was going to be,” she said.

  “If anybody,” I said.

  “Oh, there was somebody, all right. Or there will be. And I am going to find him. But of course, your friend Victor can no longer help me, so I need somebody else.”

  “Well, we all have needs.” I started dumping all of Charlie’s junk back into the box.

  “Yes we do. And you and I are going to help each other with them. Because, you see, somebody is going to go down here.”

  “I assume you mean for the murder of Charlie Victor.”

  “No, Mr. Jackson, I mean for the conspiracy to assassinate a president, the case that I am going to get a commendation for solving. A commendation and a new partner. Do we understand each other quite well now?”

  So there it was. Find the hit man or invent one, because Agent Agent said so. And Agent Agent also knew a name from my blighted past in Detroit and maybe a lot more. Worst of all, I had foolishly hung up the phone, so I had neither a witness nor a recording of the extortion. So as much as it galled me, I would have to play by her rules. I gave her a silent nod, just in case she had some kind of recording device of her own. Then I put Charlie’s box in her hand.

  “Don’t forget to pick up the magazine for your gun on your way out,” I said.

  “Thanks for the drink.” She smirked and left.

  There was a time when her threats would have seemed laughable. Not so long ago, either, but another era. Now we have the insultingly titled Patriot Act, and anybody who has read even a snippet of it and not been scared witless wasn’t reading very carefully. As a bondsman, I knew all too well that it’s an extremely fine line that decides which side of the law you are on. And if you have no rights, that’s very, very bad, because all too often, the law is enforced by the Agent Agents of the world. And besides not getting their facts right, they have no more professional integrity than a pack of hungry wolves. I had thought she was annoying. Now I knew she was downright scary.

  I stood at the front door and watched her drive away in a featureless government sedan, then reset the door alarm and called Anne Packard back and gave her a short version of the encounter.

  “Did you get enough notes from the ledger for me to do a write-up, I hope?”

  “I tried, anyway. I also got an address that my lady spook might not have noticed.”

  “Oh?”

  “The box itself had what I thought at first was an importer’s stamp on it. But when I looked closer, I saw that it was really drawn onto the box by hand, with a felt-tip pen or some such.”

  “Why is that important?”

  “The address was in Mountain Iron.”

  “As in Mountain Iron, Minnesota?”

  “The very one.”

  “Herman, I’m not inclined to think there are a lot of cigar importers on the Iron Range.”

  “Neither am I. I’m thinking it’s either a place where Charlie had a stash, or the address of his father, which could be the same thing. I’m going to go have a look.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow, early.”

  “I’m coming along.”

  Chapter 15

  Northland

  Before dawn the next day I picked up Anne Packard in front of her office and we headed north in my BMW. She was dressed in professional woman’s casual: slim-fitting khaki pants tucked into suede boots, a soft emerald green turtleneck sweater under a wool car coat, her usual thin, tailored leather gloves, and some tiny gold loop earrings. The earrings seemed to set off the gold flecks in her eyes, which I hadn’t noticed before. The lady had style. She also had coffee and pastry in a white paper bag and an appropriate look of cheerful determination.

  For the first thirty miles of I-35, we met a steady stream of headlights from inbound commuters. After twenty miles or so, she said, “Good grief, is it always like this?”

  “Scary, isn’t it? Apparently, life on your own little half acre up by Forest Lake or Scandia, with unleashed neighborhood dogs and strange snowmobiles in your yard and raccoons in your attic, is so wonderful that it’s worth getting up at five every damn morning to follow somebody else’s bumper for an hour or more. Personally, I don’t get it.”

  “Sometimes it’s nice being a newspaper person,” she said, nodding
. “It means you have to be aware of current trends, but you aren’t allowed to judge them.”

  “I don’t think I’m wired that way.”

  “No, you don’t seem to be. So what was your idea of the golden age?”

  “The what?”

  “You know, the time when everything was right with the world? The time we ought to go back to? Everybody has one.”

  “Oh no, you don’t.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I know you reporter types. You’re trying to trick me into rhapsodizing about the good old days when cholesterol was good for us, nobody rigged elections, and a gallon of gas cost less than a small loaf of bread. Then you can give me some clever label, like ‘pre-postmodern reactionary obstructionist,’ and you won’t have to think about who I really am any more. Not on your life.”

  She chuckled. “I usually try for something shorter than that.”

  “Like ‘renaissance man,’ maybe?”

  “I was thinking ‘curmudgeon.’”

  “I’m not old enough to be a curmudgeon. How about post-renaissance man?”

  “Have a doughnut. They’re the postmodern low-cholesterol kind.”

  “Thank you, I will.”

  We had the northbound lanes pretty much to ourselves, but I stayed at just barely above the speed limit, figuring that with that much traffic in the southbound lanes, the State Patrol would have a presence somewhere nearby. Fifty thousand people, all driving bumper-to-bumper and too fast were bound to need some guidance sooner or later.

  Finally, around the town of North Branch, the traffic thinned out to nearly nothing and the dirty gray sky started to get backlit with something that passed for dawn. I poured some more coffee from my own Thermos, switched off the cruise control, and let the machine have its head a little, running a constant throttle rather than constant speed. The sprawling ’burbs fell away behind us, and we cruised into the land of black-green pine and cedar forests, with occasional tiny farms so poor, all they could raise were blisters and junked cars. The road behind us was empty. I increased my speed a bit more and settled into the rhythm of machine noise and passing landscape.

  “Have you been up on the Iron Range a lot, Herman?”

  “First time,” I said.

  “You’re originally from…?”

  “Iowa.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “Not much.”

  “Married?”

  “No.”

  “What made you come to the Twin Cities?”

  “That’s a long and not very interesting story.”

  “This is a long trip. Did you have some trouble back there?”

  “Nothing worth talking about.”

  She laughed. “Wow, you don’t give much away, do you?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, I don’t.”

  “Then why are you traveling with a newspaper person?”

  “Because of Charlie Victor. I had this strange notion that he shouldn’t just die on a sidewalk in front of a pool hall and get ignored, as if he had never even existed. I thought his story ought to be told.”

  “I can understand that. So tell me his story, then.”

  So I did. I told her how he always bought a bond from me in the fall and I told her most of his in-country stories from the jungle. I did not, of course, tell her how his being abandoned in the tunnels reminded me of a dumb kid running scared in Detroit. But I told her quite a lot.

  “What about the fragging business?”

  “Ah, yes. How could I have left that out?” I told her.

  ***

  It took Charlie seven weeks to walk out of the jungle, a lot of which was spent hiding and all of which was spent being lost. He didn’t know where his firebase was in the first place, so he didn’t try to go back there. But he remembered when they were being choppered into the ville that they had turned above a river and then gone fairly straight the rest of the way. He figured if he could find that river, he could follow it downstream until it joined with some others, maybe even the Mekong, and eventually led to civilization. There were a lot of patrol boats out around the Delta, he had heard. If nothing else, he ought to be able to get picked up by one of them. He knew which way his platoon had come into the LZ. He left in the opposite direction.

  He took all the gear and ammunition that he could carry, but he only had food and water for about two days. Water was the biggest problem. He had canteens, but no safe place to fill them, and he wasn’t sure if he trusted his standard-issue purification tablets. He had heard about some kind of big tree that sent all the water from its branches down to its roots every day at sundown. You could hear it gushing inside the soft wood, the story went, and if you slashed open the bark, you could drink it.

  Just before sundown on his third day, he made camp in a deep thicket of alien-looking trees in triple-canopy forest, and he slashed the bark of every different kind of tree he could see. He stayed awake all night long, listening, but he never heard any gushing and he never got a drink. The next morning, he saw that he had made so many slashes, he might as well have set up signs pointing to his camp. After that, he resigned himself to filling his canteens with paddy water or from puddles where he saw animals drinking.

  He changed his attitude toward enemy patrols, as well. At first, he hid from them. Then he got to wondering if some of them might be just as careless and unmilitary as his own squad. So he followed a patrol during most of one day. When they settled down into a crude camp for the night, he snuck up and killed the sentry with his knife and took his food and water. He also took an AK-47 and a lot of ammunition. He figured if he had to get into a firefight, he didn’t want the VC to be able to distinguish the sound of his firing or his muzzle flashes from their own.

  It was a good strategy. Two nights later, he tried the same thing again but accidentally awakened one of the sleeping grunts. He wound up killing the entire squad with a couple of grenades and the stolen assault rifle. Things were definitely looking up. He joked to himself that as long as the VC kept patrolling the jungle, he could live there indefinitely.

  At some level, though, he knew that if he kept it up long enough, the VC would mount an operation to hunt him. He had no idea how long that might be, but he tried not to dally in the jungle, waiting for it.

  He fell into a routine. He traveled at night, hunting enemy patrols whenever he was out of food and water. During the day, he hid and slept, usually as high as he could get in some very leafy tree. But he never slept more than a couple of hours at one time, constantly waking up and rebriefing himself on who he was and what he was doing. He told himself he was a panther in combat boots, silent, deadly, and remorseless. He told himself he was young, fast, strong, and invulnerable. He told himself he was a legend, that the VC were afraid of him. He told himself a lot of things to keep from facing how wretched and alone he felt.

  Eventually, he found the river. By then, he had contracted malaria, dysentery, and every kind of bug bite and body parasite known to the rain forest, which was a lot. Weak from dehydration and hunger, he built a crude raft and simply let himself drift downstream. After three days on the water, he floated into a backwater of the Mekong, where a firefight was in progress between three US Navy “Pibber” patrol boats and a small fleet of armed sampans. The Navy won, and Charlie was picked up with the rest of the flotsam.

  He spent three weeks in a hospital in Manila, mostly getting his intestines rehabilitated. When he had first walked into the jungle, he was six feet, two inches tall and weighed a hundred and ninety-five pounds. When he was picked up, he weighed a hundred and forty, and he never again seemed to be able to stand straight enough to be over six feet. The Army gave him new uniforms, corporal’s stripes, and a bronze star. Then they sent him back to his old platoon. Nobody in authority would talk to him about bringing court marshal charges against Lieutenant Rappolt.

  Rappolt was still there, and Charlie might have been willing to forget about the wh
ole abandonment episode, as happy as he was to be alive and not an FNG anymore. But the idiot leut kept harping on it. He told Charlie that he, by leaving him at the ville, had made him into a better soldier, had forced him to overcome his own inadequacies. He finally went so far as to tell Charlie he had made him into a man.

  “Well, I sure do thank you for that, sir,” said Charlie, as he plunged his K-bar knife under Rappolt’s rib cage and up into his heart. “I probably couldn’t have done this, otherwise.”

  Later that day he was burning his bloodstained fatigues in a honey pot when Bong, who was now also wearing corporal’s stripes, brought him a big wad of money.

  “I figure this is yours now, man.”

  “What is it?”

  “The frag pot, baby. All of it. I was the official keeper. We been collecting on that asshole ever since you been gone and a long time before you even got here. Thanks, man. Anybody ever needed to die, it was that mufucker.”

  And that was how Charlie learned how the system worked. After that, he became the regular keeper of the frag pot. And he signed up for two more tours of duty, always with the stipulation that he could stay with his old outfit. He didn’t quite understand why or how, but he felt as though he had inherited a duty to protect his squad mates from more Lieutenant Rappolts. And as luck would have it, there were several of them.

  Chapter 16

  Iron Country

  A hundred and sixty miles north of where we started, the interstate freeway that had been steadily easing eastward made a more abrupt turn that way, plunging down into the Lake Superior basin to head for Duluth. I split away from it on Minnesota 33, through the town of Cloquet, following a sign that said “Range Towns.”

  What I expected to find there was not so certain. Charlie had said that he hated his father so many times that I had to believe it. But maybe hating him was not the same as not trusting him. The old man could still have been his banker. And in any case, the address on the cigar box did not get there by accident. He meant me to read it, of that I was sure. Time to find out if he also meant me to follow it.

  North of Cloquet, the landscape turned open, rocky, and white. The lasting winter snow cover had already arrived, broken here and there by windswept outcroppings of black rock. The buildings got more run down and farther apart and the farmsteads disappeared altogether. We crossed the Saint Louis River and linked up with Trunk Highway 53, which headed straight north, four lanes with a wide center median, though it had lots of signs telling me it was not a freeway.