“Well, he always does, doesn’t he?” I said.
“I bet he doesn’t say when, though, does he?” said Wilkie.
“He said you would be seeking enlightenment. Have I told you how the world tripped into the beginning of its present utter, irreversible madness in 1955, when people wanted coffee tables and picture windows?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Really? How was it?”
“Long.”
He frowned a bit and pursed his lips. “Hmm. Maybe I did tell you. What is it you seek today?”
“Is information the same as enlightenment?” said Wilkie.
“No,” said The Prophet. “Enlightenment, if you can find it, is free. Information costs. If it’s illegal, five hundred, minimum.”
“Steep,” said Wilkie.
“But worthy of it,” said the Prophet.
“‘A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,’” I said.
“Very good, Pilgrim. Proverbs, Chapter 22. But Ecclesiastes says, ‘Wine maketh merry, but money answerith all things.’ Five cee won’t ruin my good name or your profit-and-loss sheet.”
If he only knew.
“‘A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver,’” I said. You have to do a lot of homework to dicker with The Prophet.
“Could be,” he said. “Have you got one?”
“Sure. ‘The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way the smart money bets.’”
He looked at me for a while with some surprise on his face. Finally, he broke out into a smile.
“That’s not bad,” he said. “I can use that. All right, for the sake of your golden words, two-fifty, but it could go up if the stuff gets tricky.”
“Fair enough.”
I laid five fifties on his desk, and we got down to business. “Army personnel records,” I said. “Vietnam era.”
He began massaging two separate keyboards with great concentration, shutting out anything else we might say for a while. I noticed that although his chair was straight off the set of some Tennessee Williams play, it was nevertheless fitted with swivel castors, and he had a good time whizzing around on them, sometimes for no apparent reason. Finally he stopped and asked me for some more specific direction.
“I need the roster of a company that was in-country in about 1965. Echo Company, with the First Air Cavalry.”
“Brigade and Battalion, Pilgrim.”
“Excuse me?”
“The First Air Cav would be a division. It splits into brigades, then battalions, and then finally companies. That’s a lot of damn heathens.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about army organization, for a holy man.”
“When the walls of Jericho came tumbling down, I said Kaddish for the people buried under the rubble. I was a chaplain in the Fifth Roman Legion at the time. When the—”
“You’ve also got an organization chart on the screen in front of you,” said Wilkie.
“To download is to know, oh great one.”
Wilkie snorted. The Prophet continued to work mouse and keyboard. Sometimes I wished he weren’t so useful, so I could tell him how full of shit I thought he was.
“So a division is how many souls?” I said.
“Ten or fifteen thousand, with bodies attached.”
“That could cost fifty bucks just for the paper to print it out,” said Wilkie. I could stand for him to be a lot less helpful at times.
“Let’s attack it from the other end,” I said. “Find the record of Charles Victor, and see what unit he was in, back then.” I gave him Charlie’s service number, which I had pulled from one of his bond files.
“Which year, Pilgrim?”
“Work that backward, too, if you can. Go for a time when he was a newly minted corporal.”
He fired up a second screen and did a lot of looking back and forth between the two of them.
“July, 1966. Looks like the company had three platoons, about twenty people per. You want all of them?”
“What I really want is the last known address of each of them.”
“You’re a hard taskmaster.”
“Remember the golden apples.”
“Hmm. I’ll write a short program to pull them up. Perhaps you would like a cup of my famous tea while you wait?”
“Is it hallucinogenic?”
“Only a little. It will not affect your ability to drive, I think.”
“Um. Got any coffee?”
“Timid souls. There’s instant over by the sink, hot water in the carafe.” Wilkie and I helped ourselves, and the Prophet got back to work. After a while, he punched a last key, and machines began to click and whirr on their own. Now and then, a list of names would come out of the printer.
“Anything else, while we’re waiting for that to finish?”
Wilkie reached into an inside pocket a pulled out the CD in its plastic envelope.
“Fingerprint,” he said. “Put into some kind of electronic code, I guess. It’s not a picture anymore, anyway.”
“And you want me to check it for a criminal record?”
“Nah, we already tried that and came up dry. We were thinking maybe it would be in the Army’s records.”
“Ah.” He took the disc and fed it into yet another machine. Almost too fast to be believable, he said, “It’s there, all right.”
“And?”
“Classified.”
“How the hell can a Fingerprint be classified?” said Wilkie. “I mean, aren’t all these files we’re looking at classified? Why can’t we look at it anyway?”
“This is classified the way the true name of Buddha is classified, big man. I mean, nobody has the key to this.”
“Black ops?” I said.
“Could be. That, or the man simply had a friend in records and put the lock on it himself. Some sojourners prefer to go about anonymously.”
“Isn’t that the truth, though?”
“Anything else?”
“One thing,” I said. “While your machine is still back in 1966, see which brigade Charlie was in.”
“Easy. Q.E.D.”
“Why brigade?” said Wilkie.
“Because I think that’s the highest level that still has a commanding officer who is actually in the field, with the troops.” And therefore could have been assassinated in the field. Also because I had a hunch, but I wasn’t sure enough of it to say so just yet.
“Got it,” said the Prophet.
“Now see who commands that same outfit today.”
That took a little longer, but he got that, too.
“The name of the soul is Rappolt.”
“No way,” I said. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, Prophet, but you screwed up. You’re still back in the sixties, and Rappolt was a lieutenant.”
“Not so. Look for yourself. Colonel John S. Rappolt, the Third. He took command less than a year ago.”
“Well, I’ll be go to hell.”
“Not in my inner sanctum, you won’t.”
“What’s the big deal?” said Wilkie.
“We’re not looking for a service buddy, after all,” I said, “we’re looking for kin. John Rappolt was the name of the first officer Charlie ever fragged.”
“Not that common a name,” said Wilkie.
“It sure isn’t. I’m thinking this is his son.”
“Could be a grandson, by now.”
“I don’t think so. Not an immediate enough link. I’m thinking it’s somebody who grew up fatherless on account of Charlie and has been pissed off about it ever since. Somebody who took a long time and went to a lot of trouble to find out who to kill. Can you get me a picture of him, Prophet?”
“Coming out of the printer now.”
It was a face I had never seen before.
“Wide, you were in the Army, weren’t you?”
“Don’t remind me. Yeah, I was
in Desert Storm.”
“So tell me: if a colonel decided to go off duty and off the radar to kill somebody, who would he trust to go with him?”
“That’s easy. He’d take his sergeant major.”
“Isn’t that two people?”
“It’s a hybrid rank,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s the battalion commander’s link to the grunts, and the two of them are usually tighter than cell mates.”
“And what about the others?”
“A sergeant major would have a few enlisteds who are more loyal to him personally then they are to the army. It wouldn’t be hard to find a few to go along. In the current crop of grunts, there would even be some who would make the trip just for the chance to break some rules and raise a little hell.”
“Who pays for this supposed operation?”
“Rappolt, of course. He’s a full colonel, Herm. He’s got money coming out of his brass ears.”
“That much?”
“Hey, it’s an officers’ corps. Always was, always will be.”
I looked back at the Prophet and said, “Can we find Rappolt’s sergeant major?”
Two minutes later, we had the name of a Sergeant Major Robert Dunne.
“You want a picture of him, too?”
“Yes.”
His picture shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. A line at a time, the machine spat out the face of a fiftyish man in full dress uniform. He’d worn a uniform the last time I saw him, too, but not that one. It was the beefy-faced cop that I had followed into Nighttown.
“Do you have a fax?” I said.
“Is the Pope a child molester?” He spread his palms outward and grinned.
“I take that for a yes. I’ll need a regular phone, too.”
“Secure?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Then I don’t have one.”
“All right, then, secure.”
“Twenty bucks, Pilgrim.”
“You’re something else, you know that?”
“I am the thing nobody knows how to cope with: a genuine holy man with business sense.”
“Wide, loan me your phone, okay?”
“Some people just don’t believe in free trade.” The Proph went off somewhere to sulk.
I called Anne at work and got her fax number, so I could send her all the stuff we had just printed. But she had something else on her mind, as well.
“I’m glad you called,” she said. “I think I know where your dead man’s tunnel is.”
Chapter 25
The Road to the Jungle
Anne had found out about the tunnel quite by accident, chatting with an old-time staffer at her newspaper about the problems of interacting with the pressmen, who were across the river and a mile away. Email was all well and good, he said, but it was better when the presses were just down the street, at Fourth and Minnesota.
“They were? How did they get the big rolls of paper there?” she had idly asked. “Don’t they always come in by rail? There are no train tracks on Fourth Street, never were.”
The answer was that there was a long, sloping tunnel that ran down from the basement of the old press building, south, under Kellogg Boulevard, under Kellogg Park (né Viaduct Park,) and finally down to a small warehouse by the railroad tracks. The tunnel daylighted on the Mississippi river flats, at the base of the limestone bluffs that hold up Downtown. When the press building was wrecked and replaced with a parking ramp, the little warehouse down by the tracks was also leveled, and the tunnel was simply sealed up and abandoned.
I let Wilkie and The Prophet listen in on my phone call with Anne. It turned out that The Prophet also knew where Charlie’s tunnel was. Silly soul that I am, I had neglected to ask him. He knew most of what went on in the homeless community, but he never volunteered anything that wasn’t either for enlightenment or for sale.
“That place is full of bad joss, Pilgrim. Maybe demons, too. And it’s all linear, so you can’t dodge them. Nobody ever followed your man Cee Vee in there. Nobody even talks about what’s in there.”
“Where is the entrance, exactly?”
“Trust me, you do not want to go there.”
“I have to.”
“Then may Yah! protect you.”
“Where?”
He told me.
***
I had promised Anne that I wouldn’t go in the tunnel until she could get clear of her office and maybe bring a photographer with her. That would be about two hours, she said. Tight, but doable, if everything went right.
I drove back downtown from The Prophet’s place and dropped Wilkie off at Lefty’s. He didn’t like the idea of being cut out of the action, but I told him I had to do some things that were better done without any witnesses. That, he could dig. I went to my office and took a few things out of my desk, including the copy of Charlie’s Master key and Eddie Bardot’s wallet. Then I took my copy of Charlie’s will, penned a quick note to myself and headed out.
“Leaving again so soon?” said Agnes.
“Got to. Can’t let the bad joss catch up with me.”
“Well, I definitely know who you’ve been talking to. Where will you be, if anybody asks?”
“If anybody asks, you think I went to Lefty’s.”
“And if I ask?”
“I’m off to play tunnel rat. I also need you to make a couple of phone calls for me, but not just yet.”
“Honestly, Herman, why don’t you just give up and get a cell—”
“Don’t even start, Agnes.”
***
The rail yard that used to cover the river flats below Downtown is almost all gone now, mostly ripped out and replaced with contract-only parking lots. That makes the base of the bluff not so easy to get to anymore. I parked a quarter of a mile to the west, near the sally port entrance to the County Jail, took a flashlight out of my trunk, and walked back east, under the Wabasha Bridge. I followed the limestone rubble at the bottom of the looming wall of stone, skirting the parking lots that were baking in the late afternoon sun.
There were a lot of openings in the bluff face that had been plugged up with concrete or bricks. Most of them were quite high up, including a lot of them right under the steeply sloping roadway of Second Street. But down at base level, almost blocked by fallen stones and sand, was one that had not been simply bricked in. It had a rusty steel door built into the brickwork, with a hasp and a padlock. I took the copy of Charlie’s key out of my pocket and tried it.
Click.
I swung the door toward myself, and it drew with it a breath of musty, cold air. It smelled like wet limestone and dead rats and failed dreams. It smelled like fear. I pulled the door open as far as it would go, clicked on the flashlight and walked into Charlie Victor’s nightmares.
The machinery for moving the big rolls of paper was still there, sort of a trough-shaped skeletal steel framework with rollers on the cross-frames and a heavy chain running down the center. The chain had big hooks on it at regular intervals, and it looked like something out of a mechanized slaughterhouse for elephants.
The rusted conveyor took up most of the tunnel width, but there was room enough to walk alongside it on the left. Service access, probably. I imagined that once in a while a roll of paper would fall off the frame or get stuck, and some poor bastards would have to go into the tunnel and fix it. I also imagined that they didn’t like the job much. I wasn’t quite ready to start using terms like “bad joss,” but the place did not have a good feel to it. I found myself walking with my shoulders hunched. Whether you think you’re claustrophobic or not, the thought of about a million tons of earth above your head is going to be oppressive. There also seemed to be a draft at my back, which didn’t help my mood any.
I had left the door fully open, but a dozen steps into the tunnel, it provided no light at all. I turned around now and then to satisfy myself that it was still there, an increasingly small white rectangle in a
universe of black. Not an auspicious thing, having the light at the end of the tunnel behind your back.
My flashlight was woefully inadequate, and I used the steel framework like a banister, to keep myself oriented and to pull myself up at times. The tunnel floor was a soft, yellowish sand, almost a powder, and it sloped upward fairly steeply. Walking up it was a lot of work. Now and then something would drip onto my face and arms, cold and startling. If it was something other than just water, I didn’t want to think about it. And then there was the other thing.
I didn’t call it a ghost, and I didn’t think it was the Prophet’s demons, either, but there was definitely some kind of presence in the tunnel. And somehow or other, it was both with me and waiting for me to arrive. Was the Prophet’s instant coffee hallucinogenic, as well as his tea? Would he have told me if it was? I let my guts feel what they wanted to and forced my feet to move forward in spite of it. I had a job to do. I did not have to be comfortable doing it.
After maybe fifty or sixty yards, I came to a smaller tunnel, crossing the main one, with some kind of pipe in it. I tried shining my flashlight down it to see if it looked worth exploring, then shone it on the floor to see if there were any obvious footprints going into it. That’s when I saw the first of the white powder.
It crossed the path of the pipe and made a sort of one-pronged arrow, pointing deeper into the main passage. What was it Charlie had told me about marking his path in the VC tunnels?
I never used string, Harold. Somebody can move string on you. Some kind of white powder is better, some flour or baking powder, or something. You got to put it off to one side, so you don’t accidentally scuff it out, but it never moves on you. And the enemy don’t have any of the stuff.
It wasn’t a lot lighter in color than the sand of the floor, but now that I knew what to look for, I spotted lots more of it, always directing me farther up the main tunnel.
I passed another small pipe tunnel, then a bigger cross-passage that looked natural, rather than man-made. It looked irregular and deep, and the draft I had felt at my back seemed to be flowing into it. And there was a string on its floor, leading straight away from me and into the darkness. I smiled and continued the way I had been going. I imagined hearing Charlie chuckle and say I knew you’d be too smart for that one, Herbert.
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