Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  She sat back from him, tugged a corner of the sheet free and draped herself with it. The shadow of an uncharacteristic pout crossed her face. "But now I see you have lied to me. And there can be only one reason."

  "What reason?"

  "There is someone else. Not your wife. Some other—■" She finished the sentence with a weary hand gesture.

  Lothrop sat up abruptly. To Dillon, Yergin's complaint had been obvious posturing, and he was shocked to see how it seemed to wound Lothrop. "That's not true. There is no one but you."

  "But what shall I think? You tell me you were in Washington when I know you were not."

  "How do you know?"

  She turned her back on him, shamelessly flaunting her naked spine, reminding him which of them was stronger, ordering him implicitly to grovel.

  "I can't tell you where I was. I can't."

  She neither faced him nor moved.

  "It's too important. It's secret." He put his hand on her shoulder, but she was marble. "It's my work."

  "Your work gives you a way to deceive me. I never believed I would be lovers with a man who did not trust me."

  Lothrop laughed and rolled away. "Don't trust you! I trust you with everything. You could ruin me."

  Dillon thought Lothrop had turned from her in a pout of his own, but he reached across to the nearby chair, fumbling in the pocket of the coat he'd flung there. He rolled back to Yergin and said in an unhappy voice, "Here." Still she did not move. "This is for you." He held a small brown package out.

  She faced him, letting the sheet slip, exposing her pearly breasts as she accepted the package.

  Dillon marveled at her lack of modesty.

  As she unwrapped the paper, Lothrop's face lit up expectantly.

  A piece of gold jewelry. Yergin carefully removed it from its wrapping and held it up, an oblong pendant on a chain. The thing seemed to draw to itself what light there was in the room. "It's beautiful," she said.

  "It's a cartouche. It's old."

  "A cartouche?"

  "Those are hieroglyphic figures engraved there, the name of some pharaoh. I mean it's very old. It's real."

  Yergin raised her eyes to him, shining with pleasure. "You were in Egypt?"

  Instead of answering, Lothrop took the chain and pendant from her. "Here." As she inclined her head toward him, he hung it on her like Caesar bestowing an honor. The flat gold swung between her breasts. Her breasts drew his attention, and he leaned down to them, kissing each one, a gesture of loving tenderness it seemed to Dillon impossible to feign.

  Then Lothrop took Yergin into his arms and held her.

  "Where did you find it?" Yergin asked quietly. "It is so beautiful."

  Lothrop touched his finger to her lips, but then he said, "Cairo. I found it for you in Cairo."

  "Cairo?"

  "My company has business there, my company in Cincinnati, I mean. I wasn't always in the War Department, you know. I still do a little business."

  "Your company? Business in Cairo?" Yergin laughed suddenly. "I thought your company made furnaces. Furnaces in the Sahara?"

  Lothrop stared at her, then said, "We did. That was before the war. How did you know what my company made?"

  "You told me."

  "No, I didn't."

  "What does your company make now?"

  "You tell me."

  "I don't know." She laughed again. "But you are testing me." She tickled his ribs. "Aren't you? You are testing me."

  Despite himself, Lothrop began to laugh. "It's ridiculous, isn't it? As if I can't trust you."

  "Yes, darling, ridiculous." She held the cartouche up. "I love this. Thank you." And she kissed him, pushing her tongue into his mouth.

  When they stopped kissing, she simply rested against him, apparently content.

  Lothrop said in the silence, "We make diesel engines, for the LCI."

  "LCI?"

  "Landing Craft–Infantry, the flat-hulled assault vessels we use to bring soldiers ashore on beaches."

  Yergin pulled away from him, to look in his eyes. "And you were in Cairo?"

  "Yes. Does that tell you something?" He grinned, a boyish I-know-a-secret grin.

  "It tells me perhaps something is happening in the Mediterranean."

  "Very good, darling. Very good. The truth is, everything depends on landing craft. For want of landing craft, the invasion hasn't happened yet. But not for long. Not to blow my own horn, but my company has turned out eleven thousand LCI engines in the last seven months."

  Yergin's eyes had brightened. "I had no idea you were so—" She shrugged happily. "So wonderful."

  He laughed again, but then said soberly, "I haven't been able to tell anyone, not even my wife. It's fantastic, what we've done!"

  "Tell me."

  "My trip was to the staging areas, Cairo, but also Tunis and Nicosia. Soon we'll have thousands of LCIs and LSTs in place all across the Med."

  "But everyone says the invasion will go across the Channel."

  "Yes, they do, don't they?" Lothrop smiled.

  "But it will be the south of France, instead of the north?"

  He shook his head. "The Balkans," he announced triumphantly. "The back door to Germany. The door Churchill had slammed in his face in the First War. This will be the vindication of his losses at the Dardanelles. Are you old enough to remember the Dardanelles?"

  Yergin grimaced, tugged the sheet free and once more covered herself with it. She left the bed and disappeared from Dillon's line of sight.

  Lothrop was too revved up now to stop. "And if we go in through the Balkans, we keep the Red Army out of Eastern Europe."

  He grinned at her expectantly: Isn't it brilliant? "The key is Bulgaria. Germany collapsed in the First War only when Bulgaria defected. We've spent all this blood on Italy, but Italy means nothing. Bulgaria! That's the linchpin!"

  From her place out of Dillon's view, Sylvia's response, if any, was silent.

  "I'll have one of those," Lothrop said, then caught the cigarette pack she threw at him, then the lighter.

  The silence curdled the air in the room while the two lit up and smoked.

  When Yergin spoke at last, her disembodied voice seemed ghostly. "Will it come soon?"

  "The Joint Chiefs just ordered materiel and supplies brought up to the forward staging areas."

  "Which are Tunis, Alexandria, Nicosia...?"

  "Heraklion in Crete, Tripoli and Valletta."

  "Valletta?"

  "The port of Malta."

  "And where is the headquarters?"

  Lothrop's head snapped as if he had just taken a blow, and for a long moment he could only stare at her. Color rose in his face. Finally he cleared his throat nervously. "That's an overly interested question, Sylvia. If you don't mind my saying so. You make me nervous all of a sudden." Lothrop inhaled his cigarette compulsively.

  Yergin came back to the bed, and Dillon could see her again. She laughed. "Oh, darling, I do not care. Tell me nothing more. I am only interested because it involves you." She stroked his arm, tracing the line of it with a crooked finger. "I had no idea your work was so ... near the center..."

  "Yes, well..."

  She had lost her advantage and saw it. She knew enough not to push. Instead, she took his cigarette and put it with hers in the ashtray on the bed table. Then, letting her sheet fall, she reclined alongside Lothrop and began to plant kisses on his torso. At first he refused to respond, like a pouting adolescent. But then she began to fondle him blatantly, and he became aroused. Abruptly, angrily almost, he pushed her over onto her back and mounted her.

  Dillon pulled back from the wall, aware suddenly of his parched throat. He wished Coles or one of the other watchers was with him so he could turn with a "Christ, you won't believe these two."

  He had no choice but to stay there and listen on the chance that Yergin would resume her sly interrogation. She did not. Their exchanges now were limited to Lothrop's stifled yelps of surprise and delight as he found himself
sustaining his rare second erection, and to Yergin's whorish cry of ecstasy, that abject lie with which, apparently, she'd leashed him like a puppy.

  ***

  Cass didn't know whom else to call, and that seemed to sum up her problem. She had called Patty and Norma, her two friends in the apartment house, but neither was home. She'd called Mrs. Connor, the head of the sodality at St. Thomas More's, but the parish line was busy, and busy again.

  If she were in Chicago, she'd have had a hundred others to call, beginning with her Ma. The thought of her mother lowering a chipped cup of steaming tea to answer her phone made Cass want to weep. Oh, Ma! Who shall 1 call?

  For three years they had been living in Barcroft, a garden apartment complex off Glebe Road in Arlington. The buildings at Barcroft were only three stories high, and had a crisp, colonial feel unlike anything in Chicago. There were lawns and flower beds, forsythia bushes and dogwoods, but the Dillons' neighbors were all government workers from elsewhere and they kept to themselves. A few FBI agents lived in Barcroft, though, and others had places nearby. Every few months, they got together for a picnic at Four Mile Run, if the weather was good, or in winter, for canasta parties. But even at those gatherings, the men stayed to themselves, playing horseshoes or, on card nights, poker in the other room—always talking shop. The women, young mothers all, it seemed, went on and on about their babies. No one seemed to notice or care that Cass did not have a child. If they had a clue about how desperately she wanted one, would they have tortured her so with their endless talk of diaper-rash ointments and formula? The FBI claimed to be a family, but where were Cass Dillon's sisters and brothers now? All she knew was that she was in trouble, and she was alone.

  She had called Dr. Lyons, who wasn't in his office. The woman who answered wasn't even a nurse. She had listened from behind the counter of her silence, then had said, "You just lie down, Mrs. Dillon. The pain will pass. Doctor will call you when he comes in."

  Now she was on the couch, the phone just out of reach, on the table behind her head.

  She was trying to focus on her rosary. The amber beads trickled through her fingers, and her lips moved automatically around the words her heart knew best.

  The rote prayer cut her mind loose and it rose to the Blessed Mother herself, how frightened she must have been, going into labor in a stable. But Mary had had her husband with her.

  Cass joined her hands on her swollen belly, the rosary still entwined in her fingers. She pressed gently against herself. "Dear baby, please," she said aloud, and those words released the nervous incantation of her prayer, "Hail Mary, full of grace," as if she were kneeling with the sodality ladies in St. Gabe's. "Holy Mary, Mother of God..."

  It was not that Mary was her closest friend, or that ordinarily prayer was such a consolation. She was running these words and images through her mind as a way of staying calm, of staying in control of herself.

  "Mary!" she cried, as pain shot through her body, a twisting of innards she had never felt before.

  Even with her eyes closed the light in her head blazed. She had never had such a headache. The scalding wire wrapping her stomach turned tighter and tighter until the sensation of pain exploded into something else—a feeling of pure terror. Now her unspoken prayer became, Punish me, but please don't punish my baby!

  She tried to get up, but the torment curled through her, cutting off escape, forcing her back down onto the couch.

  She reached up for the telephone as she realized that something serious was wrong with her. Something was wrong with her baby.

  No sooner did the phone touch her cheek than the operator came on, saying, "Number please," the most familiar, soothing voice Cass had ever heard.

  Oh, Helen! Oh, Maisie! She saw the girls lined up along the switchboards, leather-and-wire headsets framing their faces, her dearest friends waiting there to help.

  But it wasn't the girls she wanted.

  It was Sean! Her only Sean! He would take care of her. He would take care of their baby. He would make this pain go away. Never mind that she had never called him at work before. Never mind that she had never asked him to think of her first. She would ask him now. He would drop whatever he was doing. He would come for her. He would take her to the hospital. He would save their baby, and he would save her.

  "Get me the FBI," she pleaded.

  Nine

  The new War Department Building was already a year old, but Sean Dillon had never been there. It was impossible not to have seen it from a dozen angles across the river, though, and like everyone in Washington, he'd heard all about the place.

  Not one building actually, it was five distinct pentagonal structures arranged concentrically around a five-acre open court. They were called rings and were joined by ten spoke-like corridors. Its five stories (seven, counting the two below ground) were connected by broad ramps. The building covered thirty acres, had three times the floor space of the Empire State Building, was a mile in circumference and was surrounded by vast parking lots with spaces for ten thousand cars. Yet the rings, bays, corridors and ramps of the Pentagon were so efficiently laid out—corridors numbered, rings lettered, the walls of each floor a different color—that no two offices were more than a brisk six-minute walk apart.

  Sean Dillon was climbing the limestone steps of the mall entrance which, with its huge columns, rose up above the Potomac River like a Hellenic temple. The architects of the city behind him had reproduced pagan sanctuaries up and down several avenues, but not like this.

  Dillon swung his leather satchel into the curl of his own leg to keep from bumping the other men, all uniformed, who were streaming up and down the stairs with self-important urgency. Neither Dillon nor the FBI agent at his side knew the exact litany of numbers—eighteen dining rooms serving sixty thousand meals a day—that made the building a modern wonder of the world. But each man felt on entering it the charge of the spacious silence of the broad vestibule. The war energy of the entire nation was focused in this place. The two FBI agents were doing their parts in the great struggle and knew it, but they could not help but feel, there, a civilian's humility, and also, during that war, gratitude.

  And Dillon felt something else. As they produced their "creds" folders, passing through the security funnel, then up the crowded blue ramp toward A-Ring-Three, he thought of the chutes and ramps of the Chicago stockyards. But what a difference! Here the order embodied in a mammoth grid was real; in Chicago it had been a lie, a veneer laid over every kind of slaughter. Like the yards, Washington itself had been laid out at first in a perfect square—ten miles on a side instead of one—and that order too, in Dillon's experience, had proved trustworthy. For four years he had seen American institutions—the presidency, the Congress, the courts, his own Justice Department, the army—functioning at their best, and it was the knowledge that he was protecting those institutions, the order they enshrined, that enabled him to do his unsavory, cryptic work. The effect of Washington, even of the shadowy side on which he worked, had been to reverse the alienation he'd felt in Chicago. Washington had restored the sense of his own worthiness. Here, in this period when the contrast between good and evil was never sharper—Hitler's gift—Sean Dillon had become what he would be for life, a modest, but also an earnest, American patriot.

  The undersecretary of war, the immediate superior of the hapless David Lothrop, was a New York patrician named Randall Crocker. A fifty-four- year-old lawyer, he had left Wall Street after Pearl Harbor to take his position under Henry L. Stimson. Stimson was a Republican whom Roosevelt had appointed secretary of war in an effort to broaden support, and though Crocker was a Democrat and a staunch New Dealer, he had strong social ties to Roosevelt's Establishment enemies, and his appointment too was a bid for their cooperation.

  Crocker was very much a civilian overseer of the mushrooming military, but his background gave him advantages that the politician Stimson and other war administrators lacked. Crocker had distinguished himself as a young officer in World War I. He
had no need to refer to his record ever, for he wore the ultimate emblem of valor, having suffered the amputation of his left leg above the knee in a field hospital at Château-Thierry. Roosevelt, even more than others, had to find Crocker's lifelong refusal to act the cripple an infallible sign of character. When Crocker walked, his wooden leg clicked rhythmically at the knee joint, making a sound like a metronome that taunted the able-bodied to keep up with him.

  Now that leg was stretched out, paired with his good one inside the cavern of his huge mahogany desk. He had just resumed his seat as four men took their chairs in the semicircle in front of him. While waiting for them to get settled, his eye fell for an instant on the pair of leather-framed photographs on his desk, the two most familiar and precious objects in the room. One showed his wife Hillary posing happily with their Irish setter, and the other their son Geoffrey in the uniform of an army lieutenant. In the photo he was smiling broadly as he saluted, amused at himself and slightly embarrassed. Crocker could never register either photo without a pang. His Hillary was dead. The boy was their only child, and now he was in the infantry overseas.

  On the wall to Crocker's left was a floor-to-ceiling map, in pale greens and browns, of Italy and the Balkans. Colored pins highlighted various positions; a sinister line of black tacks bisected Italy just below Rome. Behind Crocker was a large window showing the ubiquitous view, a parking lot which in this case stretched toward the hills of Arlington.

  Crocker's office was one of the largest in the Pentagon. In addition to his desk, which once belonged to Edwin Stanton, it was furnished with eagle-tipped flagstaffs, a broad blue carpet, two leather couches, an oversized conference table and ten black Windsor chairs, half of which were arranged before him now. The uniformed men were seated in them.

  "You know each other," Crocker said with metallic abruptness. He knew that the officers and he were on opposite sides of a classic American divide, and after three years of stalking it, he had no more interest in bridging it than they did. Despite his own record, including the loss of his leg, he was a civilian to the core, and they were soldiers who could not even arrive at his office for a meeting without an implicit resentment at his having the authority to summon them.