Double Tap

by Steve Martini

  The Chinese separated the UN forces from support on their flanks. With quiet efficiency they set up barricades and fire blocks cutting off roads of escape to the south. They played havoc with UN communication lines. Allied forces, unable to reach headquarter units by radio because of the mountainous terrain, were forced to rely on miles of hastily strung field telephone wire. When the field phones failed, officers at the front had to figure it was due to the rapidly deteriorating winter weather. Scouts and repair parties sent out to fix them never returned.

  The U.S. soldiers lacked tents, warm footwear, and long winter coats. Nighttime temperatures dropped to sixty below zero, driven by a wind chill off the steppes of Manchuria that froze everything they had, including the saliva in their mouths and the bolts on their weapons.

  Just before midnight on the twenty-seventh, to the blare of bugles and whistles, under the flare and hiss of colored rockets, tens of thousands of Chinese troops rose up like a tidal wave. U.S. sentries, pickets asleep in their foxholes, were killed before they could reach for their rifles. Waves of Chinese troops washed over isolated American and UN forces. What little I gleaned from my uncle, listening to the accounts he told my father, was this: His unit was attacked from the side when the forces protecting their flank collapsed in chaos. They never knew what hit them.

  Hundreds of soldiers were caught; many of them lying out on open ground in sleeping bags were killed in place by Chinese using Thompson submachine guns, part of the lend-lease given to them by the Allies during World War II.

  UN forces scattered over hundreds of square miles were suddenly confronted by Chinese regulars in numbers that overwhelmed them. That anyone survived was a miracle.

  The Chinese stormed into rear areas, overrunning supply and headquarter units, killing clerks and officers by the score, shooting cooks and GIs on kitchen patrol in mess tents, cutting down anyone wearing an olive-drab uniform.

  The Chinese tore up motor pools, shooting mechanics and drivers. They stormed through a tented field hospital, shooting and bayoneting the wounded in their beds, and killed every doctor and nurse on duty. Thousands of American soldiers died in the remote frozen wastes of North Korea that winter, many of them with expressions of shock etched into what would soon become frozen, ice-covered faces.

  According to what I was told later by my father, my uncle saw only small slivers of this horror, but it was enough.

  In the forward areas, in the chaos and darkness, a few here and there survived. Some made it out of the killing zone before the enemy could close its grip. Others lay wounded or unconscious and were left for dead. They crawled behind snowbanks, scurried into the shadows, and waited for the opportunity to escape when the enemy was busy elsewhere. Some made it. Others were killed or captured in the attempt. Many wandered aimlessly in the mountains, leaderless and alone, where they froze or stumbled into Chinese units and were killed or captured, sometimes within sight or hearing of other American soldiers on the lam.

  From everything I have heard or read, it was horror on the scale of the surreal. There are accounts of dazed American soldiers wandering among rampaging Chinese whose bloodlust was momentarily chilled as they scavenged for food, weapons, watches, or clothing. Some of these GIs actually walked within a few feet of scores of armed Chinese soldiers who didn’t lift their rifles. The Chinese seemed not to notice as the GIs wandered off into the snow, some of them actually finding their way back to American lines. Others lying on the ground wounded were shot or bayoneted when they groaned in pain. From the written reports, neither logic nor the conventions of humanity seemed to have played any part in this. Years later, historians would conclude that many of the Chinese troops were themselves starving to death.

  A few GIs, navigating by the stars at night, hunkering down by day, gradually moved south, found buddies along the way, and formed small groups. These survivors stumbled, crawled, and ran for days without rations or water over barren, rock-strewn mountain passes covered by snow, across frozen valleys, and through rivers of icy slush. Largely unarmed, always just ahead of the Chinese, dragging frostbitten limbs through the snow, these half-dead soldiers stumbled toward the first pickets outside the defense perimeter of the Marine compound at Chosin. On their fixed faces was the thousand-yard stare that in later years I would come to know as my uncle’s undeviating expression, the haunted look that for decades was Evo’s deathlike gaze.

  I spend the morning in the office going over some ancient history. Janice, my secretary, has been culling old news articles from Nexis as well as material off of the Internet, items providing detailed background on General Gerald Satz. She has downloaded them onto the office network and this morning I go over them on the computer in my office.

  Like Haldeman and Erlichman, hot dogs and mustard, Gerald Satz and the word scandal go together, etched on my mind by the salty tang of southern politicians digging through the national trash on live prime-time television on hot summer evenings a decade ago.

  General Gerald Satz’s picture had been plastered on every front page in America for more than a month. The old newsprint photographs, digitized and coming alive on the screen of my computer, revive all the memories of what I had watched on television.

  It was the kind of fame you might reserve for your most despised enemy. Satz’s name had been mentioned by a legion of witnesses, all under oath at the bar of politics, a Senate investigative hearing. By the time Satz got to the green felt table and raised his right hand, the spit was already sharpened, hot and ready for the roasting.

  It was one of those scandals, the details of which no one is able to remember a week after they’re over, but that invariably enter history with -gate attached as their defining suffix.

  As a soldier, Satz had seen combat. Cast by the press in the role of an idiot, burdened by a zealot’s wealth of initiative and a fanatic’s dearth of judgment, he won that year’s Tony as the administration’s military court jester in the timeless Washington melodrama Plausible Deniability. He became a political bullet magnet, absorbing every shot aimed at his prince, devouring the scenery and stepping out even to grab a few ricochets lest they wing some minor functionary or a janitor in the White House. When it was over, the only group still scribbling notes was the White House Secret Service detail, all taking pointers on how to provide executive body protection.

  Of course, all of this left the multiheaded senatorial hydra seated at the committee dais writhing in anger, furious that none of their needle-like teeth had passed through the general’s body to nail the President. As a measure of satisfaction they took Satz down for perjury.

  Most people of sound judgment have long since concluded that any time mouths move among the members of Congress, they are either eating or lying, sometimes both simultaneously. Uttering lies from the floor of the Senate is one of those functions processed by the autonomous part of the brain, like breathing. Even when caught in a falsehood, it is thought to be a social lapse no worse than passing gas during a dramatic pause at the opera. But for outsiders who are testifying under oath before a Senate investigating committee to slip up, to say “Yes” when they meant “No,” or “Maybe” when they should have said “I don’t remember,” is viewed as an unforgivable and deadly sin. The fossilized serpents of the Senate went after Satz tooth and tong.

  He was convicted on two counts of lying under oath to a committee of practiced and confirmed liars who knew the product well when they saw and heard it. He was sentenced to six years in a federal penitentiary.

  When his trial ended, committee staff collared Satz before he was hardly out of the courtroom and tried to roll him to turn state’s evidence against his political handlers. Satz refused. Like a soldier tied to the stake and refusing a blindfold, Satz told them to go screw themselves, and he did it on live TV, replete with images of Senate staffers skulking away from the camera lights into the dim shadows of the courthouse. By then most of the members of the committee who had brought the hammer and nails to this particular crucifixion
were disclaiming any responsibility. They had read the tea leaves in the polls, and voters back home weren’t particularly happy.

  In the end, Satz never served a day. Like most of everything that comes out of a Congress laden with partisan poison, Satz’s conviction was flawed, overturned by the court of appeals on what critics called a technicality, the fact that members of the committee couldn’t stop talking and fawning for the cameras long enough for their attorney to establish the predicate.

  In order to convict for perjury, it is necessary to establish with precision the questions posed to the accused and in response to which he was supposed to have lied. This would seem straightforward to the average person.

  The problem with Satz came about as a result of one of the more august members of the committee, an octogenarian who couldn’t move without being carried, and whose mental as well as other bodily functions had last operated in a normal fashion several decades earlier. The man had been propped up at the committee table by staff who took turns kicking the back of his chair with their foot every so often in order to jar him back to reality. This presented some difficulty for a committee in which the live microphone moved around the table. Sooner or later this doyen of the Senate would be expected to produce something beyond a muted snore. As it turned out, he produced a reversal on appeal.

  On cue, when his turn came, staff kicked him awake and handed him a list of typed questions carefully prepared by committee counsel and printed out in sixty-four-point type. The man stumbled and stuttered, the single sheet of paper moving like a hummingbird’s wing in his palsied grip.

  In the end the senator managed to turn each of the two critical questions posed to Satz into a double negative. This left the court of appeals to conclude that while Satz may have said one thing at one time, in answer to the two questions for which he was convicted—though he may not have intended it—on the recorded transcript of the committee hearing General Satz had actually answered both questions truthfully.

  The fact is that in the last three decades congressional committees in political war paint have ruined enough Justice Department prosecutions to cause one to wonder if this is not intentional. Skulk around Washington too long and you’ll find the bones of Diogenes—frustrated in his lamp-lit quest for the last honest man in the American Athens—piled up somewhere in the Senate cloakroom.

  After the court hammered them in the decision in Satz’s appeal, the Senate investigating committee stumbled around, bumping into one another for a while until they decided some other burning issue from the previous Sunday’s 60 Minutes required their immediate attention.

  As for Satz, while his name was indelibly stamped with scandal, his reputation carried the Good Housekeeping Seal of Fidelity. The general was now known to the world as a man who would keep his mouth shut and do time if he had to. Whether it’s the mob or the White House, friends in high places usually appreciate this and can often be counted on to find positions in their regimes for these qualities.

  When it was all over, Satz found a dark corner of government in which he hoped no doubt to quietly serve out a few more years before merging his military pension with a fresh one from civil service and then disappear from the partisan hell that is the nation’s capital.

  Satz was given a job overseeing an obscure computer project at Defense, some pie-in-the-sky spywars project intended to create a massive computer database: Big Brother’s ultimate clearinghouse, Information for Security, or IFS, and the Primis software program.

  According to the news articles culled by Janice and downloaded to my computer, everyone knew that the IFS proposal was dead on arrival. The ACLU and opponents in Congress didn’t even bother to center it in their sights, as the project was already down on its knees, gripping its chest, when it was first proposed by someone at Central Intelligence. They would spend federal pocket change—forty or fifty million dollars—on feasibility studies, then the program would go the way of the dodo. General Satz would lose himself on some river in Oregon, where he could spend his retirement perfecting fly-casting techniques. That was the plan.

  All of this changed when two airplanes flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Like a wilted dragon who inadvertently squatted over an oil-field fire, Satz suddenly found his project aflame with political vitality. The whacko theory of some intelligence analyst at the CIA all of a sudden looked both politically compelling and technologically feasible.

  And Gerald Satz, once a convicted felon, found himself minister, soon to be in charge of the tree of knowledge—not just an opportunity to pluck a little fruit but fee-simple title, ownership, everything, including the roots, trunk, and branches. Even J. Edgar Hoover had been reduced to using three-by-five cards and wooden file drawers in his closet in order to compile dirt on his enemies. Satz, who had a long list of get-even announcements waiting to be printed, was being given a warehouse filled with the latest supercomputers and a portfolio to go forth and ransack the lives of everyone in the country. All Americans, including every member of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the press—their lives were part of his playground now. It was enough to put the fear of God into anything that moved.

  Opponents in Congress were suddenly howling that the administration, inadvertently or not, had put the poster boy for perjury in charge of the most sensitive government program in U.S. history.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The missing art glass has been a puzzler from the beginning. The district attorney is going to have to deal with it in his case. But how? The real question being what do they know that we don’t? It is possible that the cops are as confused as we are by a lonely part that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere, as if the picture on a puzzle’s box cover is a Currier & Ives print, but the piece in your hand is something from a Picasso.

  “You’re never gonna believe what Herman found.” Harry is smiling like a Cheshire cat.

  I shake my head: no clue. Herman is already inside my office, shifting around on the couch against the wall, trying to get comfortable.

  Harry is seated in one of the client chairs on the other side of my desk. He has a stack of papers and files in his lap. We have been meeting each Thursday morning to go through the evidence, new items that have come from discovery, motions to produce delivered to the police and the DA, and subpoenas served on private parties.

  “She paid a small fortune for it,” says Harry. “The Orb at the Edge. Guess how much?” Harry wants to play twenty questions.

  “How much?”

  “Almost six hundred grand,” he says.

  I whistle. “It must be nice to have that kind of pocket change for an afternoon shopping spree.”

  “Five hundred ninety thousand and change, assuming you don’t wanna put a fine point on it,” says Herman. He’s reading from a piece of paper he has pulled from his coat pocket, a pair of reading spectacles pushed down toward the end of his nose. He hands the paper to Harry, who looks at it and hands it to me.

  The document is a copy of the bill of sale. From the form, it looks like the kind you might buy by the booklet in any stationery store. In the upper left-hand corner is the name and address of the gallery in La Jolla. This appears to have been impressed on what was probably foolscap on the original form, since the inked stamp seems to have bled a little into the paper.

  “Apparently the thing, the Orb, had a history,” says Herman. “Once belonged to the widow of the Shah of Iran. I’m told that type of thing tends to drive the price up. According to an expert we talked to, the highest-end Tiffany lamps, the very tip-top, go for maybe two hundred thousand dollars. That gives you a kind of benchmark of what we’re talking about here.”

  This doesn’t help much, since I doubt that I have ever seen a real Tiffany lamp, much less purchased one.

  “Course, I ain’t no expert,” Herman goes on, “but listen to this.” He starts reading from a second sheet of paper he’s unfolded from his coat pocket. “The work christened Orb at the Edge is composed of the most expensive sa … sa …
sa-fussid …”

  Harry looks over his shoulder and reads, “Suffused.”

  “Yeah.‘ … suffused blue crystal known to man… .”’ From the ragged edge on the paper, I assume Herman is reading from something he probably ripped from an art catalog in the library when no one was looking. “‘The Orb is carved and shaped from a solid block of lead crystal that weighed nearly one hundred pounds before it was reduced. In its original form, the crystal took more than two weeks to cool.’ Can you imagine that? ‘The shimmering cobalt-blue Orb, with its filigreed threads of twenty-four-karat gold spun through the crystal in a style and using techniques known only to ancient Venetian glassmakers, last sold at auction in New York for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.’ That was more than ten years ago,” says Herman. “Probably before the Shah’s wife bought it.”

  “No wonder the cops didn’t want us to know about it.” Harry is indignant. “According to the shop owner, Chapman wrote him a check on the spot and took the piece with her when she left the store. The gallery offered to deliver it but she said no. She wanted to take it with her. They packed it up and helped her load it into the front seat of her car.”

  “And the cops have no idea what happened to it?” I ask.

  “Catch this: we hit ‘em with a motion for discovery,” says Harry. “Demanded everything they had regarding that object of art previously owned and in the possession of the victim, Madelyn Chapman, and known as the Orb at the Edge. We attached a photograph and a written description of the glass from the catalog.” Harry is holding an envelope. He removes a folded piece of paper, a single sheet through which I can see three or four lines typed on the other side. “Listen to this. This is what we get back. And I quote: ‘This office is not in possession of any object either identified as the Orb at the Edge or resembling the item described in your motion for discovery dated …’ blah, blah, blah.” Harry looks at me and smiles, teeth bared, like a shark. “That’s it. That’s all they say. Can you believe it? An item valued at more than half a million dollars is missing, the owner is dead, shot twice through the head, and they see no motive for murder in any of this.”