Official Privilege

by P. T. Deutermann

  “So what’d they do?”

  “They did a French Connection scene. Right outta the movies. Took after his ass with the van; guy ran around like a striped-assed ape, it’s one a them cinder lots, so there’s gravel and shit flyin’ and this guy’s runnin’ in an’ outta parked cars. Christ, I almost wish I’d been there, you know? But then the fuckin’ guy does something really stupid: He picks up this fuckin’ brick and throws it through the windshield of my guy’s van. My guy’s brand-new van.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Yeah, wonderful is right. My guy gets pissed off now. I mean, up to here, it’s been almost comical—it’s one o’clock in the morning, they’re chasin’ this spook around this five acre parking lot in a van, the piano horses in the back of the van hangin’ and bangin’ around like a coupla hippos in a bumper car. But now, he runs the guy to the dry-dock wall in the van, jumps out, and, this guy, if you can fuckin’ believe it— Mickey’s two fifty, two seventy-five, six three, awright?

  —and this guy runs his mouth, calls him a honky motherfucker, the whole bit. Unbelievable.”

  “I can believe it.”

  “Well, my guy grabs his ass and throws him up against the sill wall, and suddenly the guy’s out cold, bleedin’ all over the god damned place, with his head kinda like stove in a little bit. Like I told you, these things can sometimes get outta hand, you know? You remember me tellin’ you that?”

  “Yup.”

  “I mean, nobody went out there to whack nobody or anything. It was just gonna be a little three-on-one social, and your guy up and goes apeshit.”

  “I believe it. So what did they do?”

  “Well, now, Malachi, is that something’ you really wanna know? Because if it is, I’ll tell you. I mean, swear to God, it doesn’t make a shit to me. But you oughta think about it. You know, shit you don’t know is shit nobody can make you talk about, am I right?”

  “Absolutely, Angelo. Forget I asked. I just hope that everything got put away like the kingdom of heaven. As in forever and ever.”

  “Oh yeah. Forever and ever. Saecula, saeculorum, like when I was an altar boy. I like that. But, yeah, absolutely.

  Where the sun ain’t never gonna shine. I mean, hell, he’s a Navy guy.

  Where he is now, he’s gonna feel right at home.”

  “Well, okay. I guess that’s that. Sounds like the problem is taken care of.”

  “Absolutely. I mean, if I told you where they put him, you’d never fuckin’ believe it.”

  “I’d believe it.”

  “I feel like I oughta give you your money back,” An gelo said.

  Malachi smiled at the phone. Fat chance.

  “Shit, no, Angelo,” he said. “I wanted the kid to stop talking. Sounds to me like he’s stopped talking. There’ll probably be some heat down here from some guys, but as long as no bodies turn up, my problem and my client’s problems are over.”

  “Well, okay, then,” Angelo said. “Just so’s you remember: I did tell you. Sometimes these things get a little fucked up.”

  the very next morning, the captain summoned Malachi to an urgent one o’clock meeting at a bar called the Black Crystal in the Crystal City underground. The Black Crystal was a well-known watering hole for the thousands of Navy types, military and civilian, who worked in the maze of high-rise office buildings near the airport called Crystal City. It had the advantage of offering very subdued lighting and private booths, amenities much appreciated by anyone looking for a discreet meeting place for business or pleasure, and especially pleasure. Malachi took the Metro over to Virginia to the Crystal City station, walked up the escalator, and turned left into the underground, which was a labyrinth of shops, bars, service stores, parking garages, and restaurants that spread underground from one end of Crystal City to the other.

  He had to stand in the entrance foyer of the bar for a few minutes to adapt his vision; must be ladies’ day, he thought. It being one o’clock, the bulk of the lunch crowd had gone back to their office cubicles or over to the Sheraton. But with the black carpets and black painted walls, he still could not see very well. He finally went to the bar, turned around, scanned the darkened room until he found the captain in an end booth. He walked over, slid into the booth, waved off a miniskirted waitress, and looked over at the captain, who looked, as usual, agitated.

  “You called,” Malachi said.

  The captain gave him a speculative look. “Malachi,” he began. “We’ve had another development in the Har din business, and I’m beginning to think that you’ve not been entirely honest with me.”

  “I’m as honest as my clients,” Malachi replied. “No more, no less. What happened? He do it? Your lieutenant go public on you?” The captain continued to look at him. Malachi was surprised to see that he had a martini going. At the Black Crystal, martinis were taken seriously.

  Knowing what was coming, he suddenly wanted a Harper. But he didn’t need whiskey to handle this guy—especially if the captain needed a martini to talk to him.

  “The lieutenant,” the captain said, sipping some of his drink and then staring at Malachi again over the rim of the oversized glass. “The lieutenant has disappeared.

  Vanished into the pollluted air of South Philadelphia.

  There’s a message in from his ship.”

  “Vanished.”

  “Vanished. He’s the ship’s disbursing officer, so the first reaction has been to count the payroll. But there was nothing out of order. He’s just … gone. The Navy has queried the immediate family, which apparently now consists of only his mother; she knows nothing.”

  Malachi tried to ignore the cold feeling that was spreading around his stomach, but he waited to see where the captain would take it. The captain continued to just sit there, looking across the table at Malachi, nursing his martini. Malachi knew this game. There were some people who could not stand a break in a conversation—any prolonged silence, pause, whatever, had to be filled. The captain was trying to manipulate him into saying something. He waited. At length, the captain gave it up and broke the silence.

  “I need to know, Malachi. Did you have anything to do with this young man’s disappearance?”

  “Nope.”

  “Anything? Even indirectly?”

  “The last time I heard the lieutenant’s name and the word disappear in the same sentence, it was you doing the talking,” Malachi said. “Maybe I should ask you: What have you done?” The captain’s face hardened. “Yes,”

  he said, “I did say that. He was being a pain in the ass over something that did not concern him. He was capable of causing some real trouble, depending on who was ready to listen.

  But we were working on that. We had some pretty good damage control lined up. Now he’s over the hill without a trace.”

  ” ‘Was being a pain in the ass’? ‘Was capable of causing’?

  You’re talking about the lieutenant in the past tense, Captain. There something you know that I don’t?”

  The captain leaned back in the booth. “Making people change their minds, influencing the directions they’re taking, helping them to reconsider their positions —that’s your game, Malachi. We, people like my principal and I, we have the need for such services sometimes, but you, you have the means to get them done. We have political agendas, career objectives, turf to protect, privileges to protect, reputations to polish.

  You have big hands for hire. I’m thinking if anyone could make the lieutenant disappear, you could. You even have something of a motive.”

  Malachi was suddenly tired of all the dancing around.

  He needed to calibrate this horse-holder. He leaned forward, put those big hands on the table, let the captain see those big hands, and put an edge in his voice.

  “Seems to me, Captain,” he said, “that I was paid by you and your principal to indulge in some less-than legal coercion and intimidation.

  Paid. And it was not for the first time that I did some dirty work for you. I know what the lieutena
nt only suspected, remember? I know

  nothing about your lieutenant’s disappearance, but if I did, if I did, I’d be recommending that you stop asking questions if you can’t stand all the possible answers, understand?

  It seems to me that your principal’s problems with the Hardins are really over now. He should be forever grateful to you, and you to me.”

  The captain was shaking his head. “I was willing to give you the benefit of the “doubt when the girl had her ‘accident.’ My principal made no connection, but he was upset, visibly upset, when I told him what had happened.

  But now he’s concerned on a different level. The girl has a fatal accident. Her brother comes around making accusations, and before we can deal with it, and I mean deal with it on a civilized level, he disappears.

  My principal is not stupid.”

  “He was when it came to pretty young girls. I think your principal is mostly frightened.” The captain said nothing for a moment. Malachi moved to shut it off. He was glad Angelo had called him.

  “Here’s the thing,” Malachi said, leaning closer. “I know some things that could spoil your principal’s whole day, yours, too, you want to get right down to it.

  But I’ve taken money to work out some of those things, which means if you go down, I could go down. I’ve got something on you; you’ve got something on me. In certain circles, that’s known as a ‘lock,’ and locks are not all bad, see, because when there’s a lock, there’s no incentive for either side to run his mouth.”

  “That sounds like a threat.”

  “Wrong. That’s a statement of fact. And there’s some implicit advice in there, too.”

  “Advice.”

  “Yes, advice. Let me close with a little parable. It’s set during Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, you know, dead of the Russian winter, cold as hell, snow and ice everywhere. This French corporal finds a little bird freezing to death in a snow-bank alongside the road.

  Stop me if you’ve heard this.”

  The captain just blinked. Malachi smiled, enjoying himself now. What the hell, the lieutenant was history; the problem really was over.

  “This corporal finds this frozen little bird by the side of the road; thing’s half-dead. But a big old ox comes by, dragging a cannon, and drops a big, fresh, steaming flop in the road. The corporal stuffs the bird in that hot cowpat, right up to his neck, to revive it. The bird soaks up the heat from the cowpat and it’s so happy, it begins to sing.

  A big bad wolf out in the woods hears the singing, comes looking, finds the bird, and eats it. Now here’s the moral—you listening to me? You need to tell this story to the great man. He needs to know this. Because it’s not necessarily the bad guy who puts you in the shit, and it’s not necessarily the good guy who gets you out, but whenever you’re in the shit up to your neck, Captain, don’t cheep.”

  april 1994

  THE PHILADELPHIA NAVAL SHIPYARD

  they made it into the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard by ten that Tuesday morning and drove directly to the NISRA office on Broad Street. One of the desk officers gave them a copy of the preliminary report, then told them that base security was waiting to take them down to the waterfront to the crime scene. He then handed them each a pair of yard coveralls and showed them where the rest rooms were. They took a minute to skim through the report, then went to change. Ten minutes later, leaving their bags and street clothes in the Resident Agent’s office, they went out front, where a Sergeant Degiorgio of the shipyard police department picked them up in an ancient white Navy police car for the drive through the controlled industrial area. Degiorgio was a pleasant individual whose overstuffed blue uniform bespoke a fondness for the excellent Italian restaurants outside the yard’s main gates in South Philadelphia.

  He amiably pointed out the various yard shops—boilers, electrical, hull mechanical, propellers, the foundry, combat systems—as he threaded the cop car between the huge industrial buildings, avoiding rumbling yard cranes, smoke-belching yellow forklifts, clumps of shuffling hard hats carrying tool bags and lunch pails, and stacks of palletized materials that littered the sides of every street.

  Dan sat on the right-hand side of the backseat, the customary position of an officer in an official car. Grace Snow sat on the right side of the front seat, a white plastic hard hat bobbing incongruously on her head.

  She held on to the armrest as the cop car bounced and bumped over cobblestones, potholes, and crane tracks.

  Their coveralls smelled in equal proportions of old grease and a very strong detergent. The grimy brick and stone buildings with their dirt-encrusted glass windows ranged along their upper walls made for a depressing sight, reminding Dan that the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard was over a hundred years old, accounting for its haphazard layout along the banks of the Delaware River. As a surface line officer, he also knew its reputation as one of the sloppiest yards on the East Coast—an installation where indifferent work and costly, impacted unions had prompted repeated, if futile, attempts by the Navy Department to shut it down.

  “There,” Sergeant Degiorgio said, pointing through the dirty windshield.

  “That there’s the Wisconsin. Ain’t she something?”

  Both Dan and Grace leaned forward as the car cleared the last of the big dry-dock sill walls and pointed down a long, flat pier that lay parallel to the river, where the dull gray bulk of the sleeping battleship filled the horizon. Across the river, the flares from two oil refineries seemed to frame the majestic silhouette of the sixty-thousand-ton ship, her sixteen-inch guns pointed flat along her teak-covered decks, her almost nine-hundred-foot-long hull rising in a graceful sheer of armored steel from waist to stem. As they drew nearer, however, they could see the hallmarks of the mothball fleet: gray paint that was fading and flecking, with several vertical lines of running rust smeared down her sides. The enormous white bow numerals proclaiming battleship number 64 had begun to fade into the background of the surrounding hull paint. The five-inch mounts ranged along her port side were covered in blister canopies, and the windows of the captain’s and flag bridges were boarded over with sheets of plywood. The lifelines sagged along her decks and the signs of a flourishing pigeon colony desecrated, the looming director towers. A large umbilical bundle of cables and steam lines rose from the pier amidships to the main deck, where there was a wooden guard shack mounted at the top of the cage-covered gangway. Dan could see that there was a small clump of men standing at the top of the gangway, four of whom were dressed out in coveralls and wearing yellow-colored plastic hard hats. Several of the men were wearing what appeared to be a harness rig that supported a single yellow air tank of a breathing-apparatus set. There were two other shipyard security police cars and an ambulance parked at the foot of the gangway.

  As their car pulled up, Dan thanked Degiorgio and reached for his own hard hat. They got out and Dan led Grace up to the gangway. She tried to stuff her hair underneath the hard hat with minimal success as they climbed the gangway up the sheer slab sides of the battleship.

  At the top of the gangway, they were met by the ship’s superintendent for USS Wisconsin, Lieutenant Graveley, Civil Engineering Corps, USN, and the Philadelphia Naval Investigative Service resident agent, who introduced himself as a Mr. Carl Santini. Santini greeted Dan in a civil manner but appeared to be somewhat less pleased to see Grace Snow.

  Dan found out that the four yellow hats were riggers who would escort them to the fire room in which the body had been discovered. The ship’s superintendent, who was also dressed out in a breathing rig and coveralls, handed both of them a harness and a breathing apparatus set.

  Dan saw that the riggers were ogling Grace; the coveralls, unlike her fashionable business suits, revealed that she was definitely a woman.

  “Why do we need these?” asked Grace as Lieutenant Graveley showed her how to put on the harness.

  “The ship has been deactivated for quite a while,” Gravely said, as if this explained everything. Seeing Grace’s blank expressio
n, Dan cleared it up for her.

  “When they long-term mothball a big ship like this, they seal her up hermetically below the main deck.

  Then they evacuate all the air and replace the atmosphere in the interior compartments with nitrogen. The nitrogen displaces all the oxygen, and without oxygen, nothing rusts. There’s no breathable air anywhere inside there.”

  “Oh my goodness. Then how did the body get down there?”

  “That’s the main reason we’re calling it a homicide,” said Santini with an air of exaggerated patience. He was a middle-aged man with a completely bald head, and he was talking to Grace like an uncle who was less than thrilled that the nephews and nieces were here for the summer.

  “Somebody had to take him there, or at least put him in there. There’s no sign of a mask on the body.”

  “Somebody wearing breathing equipment.”

  “Absolutely. If the dead guy was alive, say, maybe unconscious, when they took him in there, he would have been dead by the time they got to the fire room.”

  Grace looked at Dan. Pretty clearly a homicide, she thought.

  “If we’re ready to go in, I need to give you a quick safety briefing,”

  Lieutenant Gravely said. He checked both of their harness rigs, blushing a little when he had to explain to Grace that those last two straps went between the legs. He then helped them hook on their air bottles and explained the mechanics of the masks and the lights that strapped onto their hard hats. He had them size their mask straps, then reviewed the main safety rules.

  “I’ve got to emphasize there’s no air down there— only nitrogen. That tank you’re wearing is good for an hour of walking-around activity; we use forty-five minutes as a safe stay time, and that’s what I’m going to set your timers for. The more strenuous the activity, the less time.

  We’re going to walk into the ship, go down a couple of decks to Broadway, from which access to the fire rooms and engine rooms can be gained. We’ve had a set of temporary lights rigged along the route, but there’s still not much lighting, so watch your step and watch your shins on the bulkhead dividers. There’s a box of flashlights over there and everybody will carry one, and your hard hats have headlights, of course.”