A moment later a man appeared at the side door of the school—tall, erect, patrician in manner and carriage, wearing what appeared to be a uniform. He took two steps, glanced up at the fog, then came toward me at a martial pace, the suggestion of a limp in his stride.
As I watched from within my vertical shadow, he proceeded to the gate, unlocked it with a key chosen from a ring of at least a score of them, came out to the sidewalk, relocked the gate behind him, and turned in the direction opposite me and my tree. Up close, I could see the uniform wasn’t of the type issued by the army whose headquarters was at my back, but was rather a work suit of some sort, topped with a leather bow tie, black and shiny and snug beneath the proud jut of a well-honed chin. Given the grace with which he made his movements, I was as surprised to discover the man was a janitor as I was that he didn’t produce a top hat and cane before setting off down the street. When a suitable distance separated us, I started after him.
We paraded down Filbert to Lyon, the captain of the Fusiliers and his scruffy troop of one, then turned north in the direction of the Presidio’s main gate. Because of his bearing, I assumed my man had business on the post, but when he was halfway to the gate he disappeared. When I reached the place I’d seen him last, I was standing outside a tavern that called itself the Mess Hall.
Given its name and proximity to the post, I assumed it catered primarily to the military, and the scene inside confirmed it. The bartender wore a helmet liner, the waitress a jaunty service cap. The patrons had the well-shorn aspect of active troops: Many wore fatigues and most displayed a thirst that suggested they’d just come off duty. There was enough weaponry dripping from the walls and ceiling to outfit a platoon. A sign above the bar declared that all the weapons had been captured; it didn’t say from whom.
Viewed in the light of the Mess Hall, my man was at least sixty years of age, making it possible he’d been employed at the school during the period in question. Before he could adjourn to a table, I hurried to the bar and filled the stool that was closest to him.
When the bartender brought my beer, I found a pair of steel-gray eyes in the mirror in which we regarded ourselves, at least if we weren’t careful. I raised my glass. “Cheers.”
After a dubious moment, he took me up on it. “Up the rebels.”
I nodded, then we drank to complete the ceremony. “You work on post?” I asked, eyeing his uniform.
He shook his head.
“No?” I raised a brow to convey surprise. “The reason I asked was, you look like a fighting man to me. Retired, maybe. Signal Corps or Engineers. Got a civilian job now, the motor pool or the PX, the way they do for you if you served your stint and aren’t too bad a boozer and maybe earned some valor ribbons along the way.”
I paused to let him answer, but he didn’t. I pegged him for an honorable man but I also pegged him for a lonely one, one who hadn’t been asked to tell his story for many years. I decided to try to become his audience, in the hope that once he started talking he wouldn’t stop.
“So I’m wrong, huh?,” I continued cheerfully. “Which is surprising, since I specialize in stuff like that.”
He met my mirrored glance. “Stuff like what?”
“Guessing what people do, where they’re from, who they are. Stuff like that.”
He managed a weary smile in response to my forced garrulity. “The battles I fight are private,” he said obscurely, then took a pull on his drink that was deep enough to suggest that one of his battles might be with demon rum. “Not that it’s a concern of yours.”
“But you did do a hitch when you were younger, right?” I persisted. “I can always tell a man who’s seen action—there’s a look in his eyes, like he sees double or something. Like he’s not sure whether the war’s really over.”
“What you see is luck,” the man said bluntly, then motioned for another whiskey.
“So which one was yours?”
“Which what?”
“War.”
“Korea.”
“What unit?”
“Second Battallion, Fifth RCT.”
“The Regimental Combat Team. Hell of an outfit. Put in your twenty?”
He shook his head. “When they started to crank up the next one before the dead were buried from the last, I decided to retire.”
“You mean Vietnam.”
He nodded. “I saw it coming back in ‘fifty-six, when we wouldn’t let them pick their leader. Which meant we were going to put in one of our own, which meant sooner or later he’d suck us into a war to bail him out. So I turned in my duffel—I’d done enough fighting Asians on Asian soil; there’s no future in it.” He took another hefty pull on his drink and the impact made his eyes glaze and his demeanor pensive.
“What the hell, you’d already done your part, right?” I said. “How many wars can they ask a man to fight?”
His smile was wan. “They will ask you every day of your life and make you fight until you die. But at some point you acquire the wisdom to see that wars are hatched by cowards and fought by lunatics. If you’re neither, you find someone to take your place.” He issued a morose belch. “It’s not hard; there are plenty of both around.”
I toasted him once again. “Here’s to peace on earth.”
He shook his head. “Not in this lifetime.”
“Why not?”
“War is like communion—it’s too good a substitute for the genuine article for men to live without it. Phony piety and bogus courage—that’s the diet we have today, God help us. It’s the devil’s world we live in.”
After a stark and unblinking contemplation of his dark assessment, he adjusted the tilt of his tie and regarded me in the mirror once more. “I take it you have been under arms yourself.”
I nodded. “Vietnam.”
He turned to look at me directly. “Are you one of the mentals from up the hill?” He gestured in the direction of the Letterman Army Hospital, which lurked high on the post behind us.
I shook my head. “I got rid of my stress in a Saigon whorehouse.”
“How fortunate. For everyone but the whore.”
In face of his sharp censure, I took a drink myself. “What do they call you?” I asked after a minute.
“Arthur O’Shea.” He swiveled on his stool and stuck out a hand.
“Marsh Tanner,” I said as I took it. “Do they call you Art down at the shop?”
“The shop? Ah. My place of employment. Down there they call me Mr. O’Shea.”
I gestured at his uniform. “Must be a strike outfit. You’re dressed in style.”
He shrugged. “It’s a respected institution.”
“Do I have to guess or are you going to tell me?”
“I’m a custodial engineer,” he said after a moment. “A janitor, if you will.”
“Yeah? Who for?”
“The Sebastian School.”
“The place down the street?”
He nodded.
“I just passed it; hell of an establishment, it looks like.”
“That it is.”
“Bunch of rich kids, right?”
“Most of the students are wealthy, yes. A few are on scholarship.”
“They give you any trouble?”
“They try, on occasion.”
“You’re too foxy for them, I suppose.”
“Let’s just say that after twenty years at the school and eighteen before that in the armed service, there’s little devilry I’m not capable of disarming.”
Arthur O’Shea drained his beer, the light in his eye indicating the devil and his work were as tangible to him as the bartender who plied his trade in front of us. “And what might your business be, Mr. Tanner?” O’Shea asked, almost affably.
“Call me Marsh,” I insisted. “I’m sort of a historian, I guess you could say.”
O’Shea regarded me as though I’d declared myself an alchemist. “And who might your employer be? Surely not an institution of higher learning.”
I
shook my head and motioned for another round. “I’m more of a practical type of historian. I write the history people really want to know.”
“Such as?”
“Celebrity bios is my main gig. You know, dig up dirt on the jocks and the movie stars. People love the shit out of learning which are the perverts and the psychos and the dope fiends. Makes them feel like part of the family.”
“So what brings you to this neighborhood?” His smile was arch. “Don’t tell me there are celebrities about.”
“Wouldn’t matter; I’m into something else at the moment.” I leaned to a conspiratorial closeness. “I got a big advance to do a book about scandals. You know, the city’s most embarrassing moments, from the brothels of Sally Stanford to the murders of the gay councilman and the sexy mayor to the collapse of the savings and loans.”
“Savings and loans hardly seem sufficiently titillating for an audience like yours.”
“You’d be surprised, pal,” I said, my grin stretching to lascivious proportions. “Easy money makes everyone a sinner.”
O’Shea’s look suggested he agreed with me. “To what end do you stir such embers, sir? Filthy lucre, I presume?”
I shrugged. “It’s history. As some guy said, if we didn’t have history books we’d have to do everything twice.”
O’Shea laughed dryly. “I doubt scandal sheets and celebrity bios were what he had in mind.”
“Hey,” I said as though it had just occurred to me. “I think there’s something in my files on that school of yours. Sebastian. Yeah. Sure there is. Know anything about it?”
O’Shea looked in his drink as though the past was floating in it, its form and content as imperiled as his ice cube. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You must, if you’ve been over there for twenty years. Sex, it was—teacher and a kid. A coach, maybe; no, that was somewhere else. Pretty basic stuff, though, except in this case the kid must have been rich and the parents must have been power people. Heads rolled, as I recall. The teacher even did time, am I right?”
O’Shea wrinkled his lips with distaste. “As I say, I know nothing about it.”
“I’m trying to think of the guy’s name. The one caught with his pants down.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
“Come on, Art. It’s not like you were involved, for Christ’s sake. Or were you?”
He bristled. “I most certainly was not.”
“So you do remember. Don’t worry—I won’t quote you, if that’s what you’re worried about. Hell, I don’t have to quote anyone—that’s the beauty of these deals, no one wants to publicize the stuff even more by denying it or worse by filing a lawsuit. Or we can go the other way, make you a hero. Whichever you want.” I chose a whisper fit for my impersonation. “So was it as bad as they say?”
O’Shea stayed silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice rattled the glassware on the back of the bar across from us and proved I’d underestimated him. “If you’re smart, you’ll not disturb the school or its students, Mr. Tanner.”
I smiled lazily. “You wouldn’t be threatening me, would you, Mr. O’Shea?”
His eyes turned sad and weary, as though he’d been through all this before. “No. But if you persist in your inquiry there are those who will. Believe me.”
“Sounds like there were some matters more serious than sex involved. Like what? Money, maybe? Blackmail? Or did someone tap the till?”
“I really can’t say.”
There was just one thing left to try. “I’m going to write it one way or another, you might as well give it to me straight. If it’s as juicy as I think it is, there could be money in it for you. I’d need the publisher’s okay, but … Just give me a name—teacher, kid, whatever.”
“No.”
“Come on, it’s been ten years, hasn’t it? Who could it hurt?”
O’Shea folded his arms and regarded me from within the ice of inner rectitude. “You can’t be much of a historian, Mr. Tanner. Otherwise you would know that despite the most persistent imprecations, the O’Sheas have not named names for a thousand years.”
When the chairman of the board came to question me, the first thing he asked was whether I knew a student named Amanda Keefer. I admitted it readily. From the expression on his face, I was certain I knew what he was going to say next—that poor Amanda had committed suicide. Then he would ask if I had any idea why a young girl like Amanda would do such a thing. And I would sigh and tell him, “Yes. Of course I do.”
But that’s not the way it went.
Homage to Hammurabi, p. 166
10
By the time I knew my approach had failed and Arthur O’Shea had divulged all he was prepared to about past troubles at Sebastian, it was too late to set off in pursuit of the former soccer coach Betty Fontaine had told me about. Since she was my only other lead, I grabbed a cheeseburger at the Lombard Street Clown Alley, then went back to my apartment and accomplished a week’s worth of domesticity in about an hour and a half.
When the chores were done I listened to my old records of Benny Goodman’s concert at Carnegie Hall, started to re-read a novel of James Crumley’s, listened to the CNN news while I nipped a bit of brandy, then climbed in bed. An hour later I was still awake, reprising my past with Betty, wondering what would have happened if I’d done what was necessary for us to stay together, which meant wondering if our marriage would have survived this long, which meant wondering if either of us had any idea how to make that happen—trying, at some level, to come to grips with my mistakes. Which led me to wonder about Bryce Chatterton and the passion he had for publishing and his rhapsodic utterings about the functions of good books. Before drifting off, I resolved to check the price of a word processor in the morning, before setting out after Homage to Hammurabi’s elusive creator.
It took me an hour to convince the salesman I wasn’t a hacker, wasn’t likely to get the computer bug, wasn’t interested in spread sheets or computer graphics, that all I wanted was word processing. When he finally believed me, he suggested an IBM clone with 640K of RAM, a hard disc and WordPerfect, and he was good enough at his trade to make the package sound essential for writing anything more elaborate than a Post-it note. I was close to making the deal, until I remembered that Tolstoy had never heard of IBM and no novelist before Mark Twain had used anything as marvelous as a typewriter. So I did what I do best—I procrastinated, under the guise of waiting to see if my energies or abilities proved needful of a step I generally take care to avoid: a tango with technology.
With his commissionless grumbles still rattling in my ear, I got in my car and headed west. Betty Fontaine had told me her friend the coach was now a paralegal. I knew several paralegals from my work for various law firms around town, and I only had to call three of them to get a line on Betty’s friend. Her name was Emma Drayer and her current employer was the law office of Gillis and Hookstratten, a firm that occasionally employed me. Her job, it turned out, was not paralegal but office manager. A more interesting fact was that the firm was headed by Margaret Chatterton’s ex-husband, with whom Margaret was still locked in battle over the terms of their property settlement.
Although it was Saturday morning and Emma’s number was not in the book, that didn’t keep me from tracking her down. The current state of the law is such that the big firms never close—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the law factories churn out briefs and contracts, leases and petitions, writs and warrants, making the world more complex and lawyers as essential as oxygen. Once in a while it comes in handy.
When I called her office, there was a long pause until the receptionist came on the line to tell me what I knew already—Ms. Drayer wasn’t answering her phone. When I asked for her home number, the receptionist was reluctant to provide the information, but when I indicated I had a line on an experienced legal secretary who had expressed a desire to work for a particular lawyer in that particular firm, she relented. Any
lawyer I’ve ever met would suspend the Bill of Rights for a competent secretary, and every firm I’ve ever worked with had instructed its office manager to conduct a constant search for them. In a gush of helpfulness, the receptionist allowed as how I might reach Ms. Drayer at her apartment, which was in the Sunset District, on Twenty-eighth just off Noriega. When I called the number she gave me, I was told by the woman who answered that Emma was out but would probably be back shortly. I decided to believe her and drove there in my Buick.
No one answered my first three knocks, but as I was about to try the adjacent unit the door opened without a cautious preamble. The woman in the doorway looked at me with what was clearly disappointment from behind a basket of dirty laundry and a bright blue bottle of Bold. She was blonde and bright-eyed, so vibrant her muscles seemed to be twitching to protest their inertia. Her baby-blue headband and yellow running outfit suggested that for her, doing the laundry was akin to aerobics.
“I thought you were the guy who was going to tell me when his whites hit the spin cycle” was the way she introduced herself.
“Sorry. I’m the guy who called about Emma Drayer.”
“She’s not back yet.” She examined me more closely. “You can wait, I guess, but I’ve got to be in Sausalito by one, so … Who are you?” The question was easy and unconcerned. “One of the dads?”
“The dads?”
“You know, of one of Emma’s teamers.”
“Teamers?”
“That’s what I call them. The Toe Jammers is their official title, I think.”
“I still don’t get it.”
She blinked in exasperation. “The soccer kids. That’s where Emma is, over at the park, coaching her soccer team.”
“Ah.”
“You must not know her very well—except for Häagen-Dazs, soccer’s what she lives for.”
“I see.”
At this point, the nonverbal dynamics of the encounter caused us both to take stock. While we thought it over, she crossed her arms across her shirt, but not before I read its message—What Do You Think I Am? I wasn’t sure I got that, either.
Book Case Page 9