by Ross Thomas
Burns tucked the homburg against his left side with an elbow and used both hands to accept the flag reverently. He stared down at it for several seconds, as if to certify its provenance, looked up at Haynes and said, “Not longer, Granny; just better.”
After performing a slow-time about-face, which left him facing the Lincoln, Burns nodded at the uniformed chauffeur, who was leaning against a front fender. The chauffeur hurried over, relieved Burns of the flag and hurried back to the Lincoln.
Still facing away from the others, Tinker Burns bowed his head—in plot, if not in prayer, Haynes thought—looked up finally, turned and said, “I’m going to miss the shit out of Steady.”
“It was good of you to come,” Haynes said.
Burns sighed and looked at the former Agence France-Presse correspondent, who wore a navy-blue dress under her unbuttoned oyster-white trench coat that had a plaid lining.
“Ça va, Isabelle?” Burns said.
She shrugged. “Ça va, Tinker.”
Burns let his green gaze wander over to the tall thin elderly man with the posture of a crooked stick. Because the weather was unseasonably warm for late January, the man wore only a brown herringbone jacket, gray flannel trousers, scuffed brown loafers that may not have been polished in years, if ever, and a purple tie.
Haynes had wondered whether the tie was the nearest thing to mourning wear the man’s closet had to offer. Or maybe, he thought, somewhat cheered, he just doesn’t give a damn what he wears.
Tinker Burns finished his own brief inspection, gave the man a charming smile and said, “Don’t think we’ve met, friend. I’m Tinker Burns. You by any chance the official representative of a grateful government?”
“Gilbert Undean,” the man said. “I knew Steady in Laos.”
“That a fact? Who you with now?”
“I’m sort of retired.”
“Sort of?”
“They called me back. Temporarily.”
Burns nodded twice, as if confirming expected news. “Believe somebody did tell me they were running short of experts on that part of the world, especially after the dust-up in Burma.”
Undean frowned. “Who’s running short?”
“Langley. Who else?”
“Don’t think I mentioned them. Don’t think I said damn all about Burma.”
“Just a hunch, Mr. Undean. I figured that if you knew something about Laos, since that’s where you knew Steady, then you probably knew right smart about Burma, since it’s just across the fence. And I also had a hunch that Langley, as caring and sentimental as always, would’ve sent someone from the old days to represent it at the grave of a fallen comrade.”
Tinker Burns smiled again, a bit quizzically this time, as if in anticipation of Undean’s reply. But when the reply turned out to be only an indifferent stare, Burns said, “Why don’t the four of us take the afternoon off, Mr. Undean, and go have us a long wet lunch somewhere on me and hear all about you and Steady during the Vientiane follies?”
“Thanks,” Undean said, “but I wouldn’t much care to eat with anyone who’d want to listen to that old crap.”
Before Tinker Burns could respond, Haynes quickly went over to shake hands with Undean and said, “Thank you very much for coming.”
“Volunteered before I got sent,” Undean said, bending forward to examine Haynes more closely. “Thing I remember best about Steady is how well he did it and how easy he made it all look.”
“A matter of style?”
“Or nerve.” He peered even more closely at Haynes through thick bifocals. “You sure look like him—or at least how I think he used to look almost twenty years ago.” Undean paused, opened his mouth as if to say something else, clamped it shut instead, nodded good-bye, turned and walked away.
“What kind of report you think Brother Undean’ll turn in?” Tinker Burns asked, once the analyst was out of earshot.
Still staring at Undean’s back, Haynes said, “ ‘How I Alone Swelled the Crowd at Steady Haynes’s Grave by Twenty-five Percent.’ ”
Burns chuckled and made a quick survey of the cemetery slope with its rows of matching white headstones. “When I was fixing up my pass and getting directions, they told me they were burying Steady not far from where they’d buried two other great Americans, Lee Marvin and John Mitchell. How’d you get ’em to plant him here?”
“Isabelle arranged it,” Haynes said.
Burns looked at her. “Blackmail?”
“What else?” she said.
“They know it was you?”
“Of course.”
Burns shook his great head in appreciation, chuckled again and said, “Well, it by God deserves a great lunch and all we can drink.”
Without waiting for their acceptance of his invitation, which he obviously took for granted, Burns asked Gelinet whether she had a car. After she nodded, Haynes volunteered he had come by taxi.
“Then you ride with me, Granny, and Isabelle can meet us there.”
“Where?” she asked.
“What about Mac’s Place?” Tinker Burns said. “If it’s still in business.”
Chapter 3
The man with the courtly air and the bald head turned from the seventh-floor window at 1:13 P.M. and dropped into his high-backed leather chair with a sigh just as Gilbert Undean finished the last of his egg salad sandwich on whole-wheat toast.
The man in the high-backed chair was Hamilton Keyes, who had sent down for the sandwich after learning that Undean had not yet eaten. After Undean licked a trace of mayonnaise from the left corner of his mouth, carefully folded the unused paper napkin and stuck it down into the right-hand pocket of his brown herringbone jacket for possible future use, Hamilton Keyes said, “Steady was never in any branch of the service, you know.”
“Wrong,” Undean said. “He was in Korea in ’fifty and ’fifty-one.”
“But not in the service,” said Keyes, leaning back in the leather chair and resting his feet on one corner of the 137-year-old rosewood desk his rich wife had given him as a fifteenth wedding anniversary present. He had given her a copy of the 1915 Woodberry Society edition of The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, numbered (No. 27) and signed by George Edward Woodberry himself. Keyes had acquired the copy at a Georgetown garage sale (where it had been called an estate sale) for $3.50 after realizing it was worth between five and seven hundred dollars.
“We talking about the same Steadfast Haynes?” Undean said.
Keyes smiled slightly and nodded. A careerist, Keyes only recently had realized he had gone as high as he would ever go in the agency. The realization had come not as a shock, or even as a disappointment, but rather as a curious kind of relief, and he now took an almost morbid interest in the progressive atrophy of his ambition.
Undean said, “Well, if he wasn’t in the Army in Korea, what the fuck was he doing there?”
“He was a C.O.”
“Different Steady Haynes then,” said Undean, who had known the courtly man since 1962, when, fresh out of Brown with a full head of hair and even then a certain mannered courtliness, Hamilton Keyes had joined the agency as a probationer.
“Steady was with the American Friends Service Committee,” Keyes said. “The Quakers. He drove an ambulance or carried a stretcher or passed out doughnuts. Something humanitarian. He was attached to the Seventh Division when the Chinese hordes overran it on Thanksgiving Day in nineteen fifty. It was Thanksgiving, wasn’t it?”
“Around in there,” Undean agreed. “He get captured?”
“No, but during the retreat he hooked up with six GIs, all that was left of a rifle company, who were hell-bent on surrendering. Steady argued against it. The ringleader, or lead surrenderer, I suppose one might call him, aimed his piece at Steady and told him to shut up.”
“And?”
“And Steady, of course, refused. The ringleader shot at him and missed, probably on purpose. Our Quaker friend snatched a submachine gun, a Thompson, I believe, from the hands of one of the oth
er GIs.” Keyes looked doubtful for a moment. “They did use Thompsons in Korea, didn’t they?”
“Must’ve.”
“At any rate, Steady promised to shoot the first fucker who tried to surrender. The ringleader fired again and this time the round grazed Steady’s left arm just above the elbow. Steady shot him dead. After that he led the remaining five down to Hungnam, where they were evacuated.”
“Leaving his faith behind,” Undean said.
“He may not have lost it completely until after the five he led to safety preferred murder charges against him, which was their way of thanking him for saving their lives. The Army couldn’t decide whether to shoot Steady or give him a medal. So they shipped him back to the States and forgot him.”
“That must’ve been when he went back to school,” Undean said. “The University of Pennsylvania.”
“Where we tried to recruit him just before graduation in nineteen fifty-five.”
“Tried?”
“They say he laughed at us. Well, smiled anyway. He told our recruiters that if he ever went into the hearts-and-minds business, it would be for money, not country. So he landed a job with one of the big New York ad agencies and made such an impression that three years later they transferred him to their Paris office.”
“This was when?” Undean asked.
“ ’Fifty-eight, I believe. In late ’fifty-nine, the ad agency’s Paris office was approached by representatives of the Belgian government. The Belgians were concerned that there might be something of a mess in the Congo after independence—nothing to fret about, you understand—but they still thought an American ad agency might be useful in putting the best face on it. The ad agency’s Paris office, for various reasons, said no thanks. So our friend Steady quit, made his own presentation to the Belgians in his quite serviceable French and landed the account. And that’s how he wound up in the Congo during the troubles of the early sixties.”
“And where he met Tinker Burns,” Undean said.
“Apparently. Had you ever run into Burns during your travels?”
“I’d heard the stories about him, but today’s the first time I ever met him.”
“And your immediate impression?”
“White hair. Stiff neck. Smart mouth.”
“Then he hasn’t really changed,” Keyes said. “Except for the hair.” His right palm made an exploratory pass over his own bald head. “Tinker’s used to be coal black.”
“He really at Dien Bien Phu like everybody says?” Undean asked. “Or is that just more bullshit?”
“There were four of them with the Legion there. Four Americans, I mean. Tinker was the only one to survive.”
“How long was he in?” Undean said.
“The Legion? Ten years. From ’forty-six to ’fifty-six. Before that he was a paratrooper with the Eighty-second Airborne. A battlefield commission made him a second lieutenant. When he left the Legion after ten years, he was a captain, which, for an American, I understand, is quite extraordinary.”
“Why the fuck would he join the Legion?”
Hamilton Keyes smiled. “If you’d accepted his invitation to lunch, Gilbert, you could’ve asked him. He might even have told you.” Keyes paused. “Like some coffee?”
“Yeah. I would. Thanks.”
Keyes picked up his telephone and asked for two coffees. They waited in silence until a young man brought them in on a tray. After the young man left without speaking, Undean took a sip, put his cup down and said, “If Steady wasn’t ever in any branch of the service, why bury him at Arlington?”
“The woman who was at the graveside services thought it would be nice if we did.”
“Isabelle Gelinet.”
“Pretty name, isn’t it?” said Keyes. “Mlle Gelinet quit her job at AF-P a few years ago and moved in with Steady at that place of his in Virginia.”
“The farm near Berryville?”
Keyes nodded.
“Heard it was part of his divorce settlement from that rich widow he married.”
“I see you’ve kept up with the gossip, Gilbert.”
“I’m retired, not deaf.”
“In any event, Gelinet moved in, ostensibly to help Steady write his memoirs.”
“I’ll buy a copy.”
Keyes chose to ignore the comment. “The day after Steady died, the day of the inauguration, in fact, Gelinet called us. Her call was finally routed to me at home because Steady, there at the very end, had been one of mine. She refused to identify herself, but I’m sure she didn’t care that I could easily guess who was calling.”
“What’d she want?”
“She wanted him buried at Arlington with a bugler blowing ‘Taps’ over his grave. That was the last forthright statement she made. The rest was all hints and verbal nudges, the gist of them being that unless we agreed to bury him at Arlington, the manuscript of his memoirs would be expressed that same day to a most reputable literary agent in New York. I hinted back that if this indeed were to happen, we might be forced to take legal remedies. She said we were more than welcome to try and hung up.”
The courtly man stopped talking, looked somewhere past Undean’s left shoulder and added, “So we buried him at Arlington.”
“And sent me to count the house.”
“You were the only one left who had the slightest reason to go—except for me.”
Undean frowned. “What happened to your legal remedies?”
Keyes shrugged.
“A bluff, right? And after she called it, you caved in.”
When Keyes only stared at him, saying nothing, revealing nothing, Undean smiled sourly and said, “It doesn’t scan. You’ve stopped plenty of others from publishing. You even stopped two or three guys so hard they went bankrupt. So why not Steady?”
“Because one, he’s dead, and two, he never worked for us.”
“Number two is bullshit.”
“Not this time, Gilbert. You see, we never had a contract with Steady. He would never sign anything, never endorse any check of ours or even set up an offshore account we could move his funds into. From the very first—there in the Congo—he insisted on being paid all fees and expenses in either Swiss francs or gold. So how could we stop a dead man, who we couldn’t even prove had ever worked for us, from publishing his memoirs, which we hadn’t even read? And that’s why we caved in, as you so nicely put it, and buried him at Arlington.”
When Undean made no reply, Keyes picked up his cup and drank the rest of his now tepid coffee. As he put the cup down, he said, “What did you make of his son, Granville?”
“I thought he was nice and polite, maybe too polite for this day and age, and I think you just threw the switch.”
“To sidetrack you?”
Undean nodded. “What’re you really going to do about them?”
“Who?”
“His memoirs.”
“Oh. Those. Well, nothing more than we’ve already done, which is to pay a plot of what?—hallowed ground?—to prevent them from being published. Of course, I wouldn’t really worry if they were published because I’m sure they’re nothing more than the same old thrice-regurgitated public domain rogue elephant stuff. Warmed-over old hat, to mix yet another metaphor. At best, a slow read on a long flight.”
“I know better,” Undean said. “And if I know better, you damn sure do.”
Hamilton Keyes favored Undean with another polite but empty stare.
“Want some advice?” Undean said.
“Not really.”
“Buy ’em,” Undean said. “Buy the memoirs and all the rights thereto. It’ll save you one hell of a lot of grief and money in the long run.”
The courtly man rose with a smile that was neither warm nor cold. A room-temperature smile, Undean decided. A smile of dismissal.
“It’s been awfully nice chatting with you again, Gilbert,” Keyes said as he came around the rosewood desk, waited for Undean to rise, put a comforting hand on the old man’s shoulder and gently guided him
to the door.
Chapter 4
After nearly a generation it could still be found at the same location a few blocks north of K Street and a little less than that west of Connecticut Avenue. Because it had endured so long in Washington, where restaurants often have the life span of a mayfly, many thought of Mac’s Place as either an undesignated landmark or, if they were under thirty, a quaint and curious monument to the sixties.
That it still existed at all was largely because of a firm of prospering criminal defense lawyers who occasionally dabbled in real estate. In 1987 they had formed a syndicate to buy the land beneath Mac’s Place and much of that on either side of it.
The syndicate had then erected a seven-story office building over and around the restaurant, taking great pains to preserve its unprepossessing façade and excellent kitchen. When asked, the lawyers always justified the extravagant preservation by saying, “We needed a nice place close by to eat lunch.”
Long before the advent of either salad bars or nouvelle cuisine, and long, long before the fading craze for something called plain American cookery, which usually meant meat loaf redux, it was possible to find a restaurant, chop house or bar & grill very much like Mac’s Place in almost any American city. They were often long narrow quiet rooms with a slightly foreign, melancholy air that offered generous drinks, swift monosyllabic service and a varied menu that on Thursdays might even include spit-roasted sweetbreads.
Largely through inertia, Mac’s Place had managed to preserve a similar atmosphere. It was, as Michael Padillo, its co-owner, once said, “The sort of place you go when you have to meet someone and explain why you won’t be getting the divorce after all.”
It was 1:22 P.M. when Tinker Burns escorted Isabelle Gelinet and Granville Haynes into Mac’s Place, where they stood blinking and waiting for their eyes to adjust to the perpetual twilight. Glancing around, Haynes noticed the lunch crowd was beginning to disperse.
Herr Horst, the seventy-four-year-old maître d’ with the enviable posture of a martinet, gathered up three menus and slowly advanced on the new customers, much as if he were leading a procession of bishops. When he was a few feet away from Tinker Burns, whom he hadn’t seen in three years, Herr Horst stopped and greeted him with the single abrupt nod that regular patrons had named The Whiplasher. “Three for lunch, Mr. Burns?”