Two Songs This Archangel Sings m-5

by George C. Chesbro

  "What had happened to him had to have been eating up Veil inside, but he couldn't talk about it to anyone. What he did was to paint it, after almost self-destructing, and that got it out of his system. Eventually he began to sell his work, but before he sold any painting he would photograph it, number the photograph, and probably record the name of the person or institution that had purchased the painting. The packet contained a photographic record-probably slides-of all the Archangel paintings, along with a number key for putting all the individual canvases back into their original sequence to form the larger mural. There would also be a list of people and museums that had the paintings. In fact, I had number one, the very first painting in the first sequence. I had it hanging on my bedroom wall, but it was lost in the fire that Madison's men started when they tried to kill me. But the rest of the paintings still exist, scattered all over the country." I paused, smiled thinly at Andrews. "How am I doing, you amoral son-of-a-bitch?"

  Andrews, dripping blood all over the front of his shirt and vest, rolled over on his side, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and pressed it to his nose. "How could you know?" he said, defeat in his voice as well as his body. "The package was sealed."

  McGarvey's breath came out of him in a small explosion, and the big trooper reached over and gripped my shoulder. "Goddamn," he said, a huge grin on his face.

  "I'm tired of you, sleazeball," I said, leaning over Andrews and fairly spitting the words at him. "I'm also tired of your sleazeball boss, the president of the United States. I can't believe I voted for the bastard. Damn, you're small men."

  "Frederickson, listen-"

  "Shut up. I've already listened to everything I want to hear from you, or anybody else in this administration. All the people Madison has killed and the lives he's destroyed… and you treat us like criminals. You didn't think that Garth and I were concerned over the impact this information might have?! You didn't think Veil was concerned?! Yet, you would have destroyed Veil Kendry and us, and sent Madison into a cushy retirement someplace, just so that your administration wouldn't be embarrassed. You helped to save our lives, and we appreciate that, but it's not enough; nothing you seem able to do or propose is enough. Too many other people have died at the hands of your secretary of state. All we ever wanted and want, all Veil wants, is justice. You knew what we'd been through, and still you couldn't come here and deal with us in good faith." I paused, sucked in a deep breath to try to tamp down my rage, turned to McGarvey. "Are Garth and I free to go, Captain?"

  "You certainly are, Frederickson. The sergeant out at the front desk has your guns. Tell me where you want to go; one of my men will drive you, or we'll get you plane tickets-courtesy of New York State, of course."

  Garth walked over to me, put his arm around my shoulders, and gave me an appreciative pat. "Is it the Times or the Post, brother?"

  "Let's start with the New York Times. Captain, may we use your telephone?"

  "Certainly," McGarvey said, picking up the telephone on his desk and moving it to the edge closest to me.

  "I know a few reporters on the Times, Andrews, and I'm going to begin by talking to one on the phone; that's just in case something happens to us after we leave here. Once the story gets going, our deaths won't make a difference; the reporters will have Veil's paintings to look for and piece together to verify that story. You may have the sequence key and catalog of owners, but that's fine. Keep them. Even if you've destroyed them it won't make a difference. Viktor Raskolnikov has slides of every painting Veil has ever sold; with his eye, sorting out the early slides and piecing them together into the Archangel mural or murals shouldn't be too great a trick. Raskolnikov also has a list of the original owners, so reporters across the country will not only know what to look for, but where to look. It won't prove Madison's a murderer, but it will make a great story, and it will reveal what kind of a man Madison really is. That may be all we can hope for. Then, when Veil kills him, at least people will know why. It will be a great media event-an entire nation, through newspapers and television, putting together one huge jigsaw puzzle with themes of treachery, betrayal, and death by Kevin Shannon's secretary of state. Every time another piece of that puzzle is found, a big, bloody chunk of this administration goes down the toilet. And, who knows? Maybe, as the process goes on, something will be found to prove that Madison's a murderer, and Veil won't have to do your dirty work for you. It's certainly going to be interesting, don't you think?"

  Andrews looked up at me, fear in his eyes. "If you do this, Frederickson, you'll be a traitor," he said hoarsely. "The damage you'll do to this country will be unimaginable."

  "Bullshit. The damage we'll do to the Shannon administration will be unimaginable, but you're the one, acting on orders from Shannon, who decided he wanted to play what you politicians love to call hardball. People like you and your boss are the ones who do unimaginable damage to this country when you lie, and when you use your power to twist or circumvent laws for your own convenience. You have no soul. This country doesn't need sleazeballs like you in power. The bad taste this story leaves in people's mouths will be more than offset by the tale of one unbelievably courageous man, a fierce patriot and the greatest soldier this country has ever produced, fighting against impossible odds, not only with his combat skills, but with his art. And he wins when the truth finally comes out. The image Veil projects will be what Americans are attracted to, and what they will identify with. Your whole sleazy crew will soon be forgotten, but not Archangel. Maybe Veil will give Americans new respect for themselves, and help us finally to get the Viet Nam war behind us once and for all. In fact, I think it might be jolly good fun if we dubbed this whole process Operation Son of Archangel. You like that idea, Mr. Andrews?"

  Garth smiled crookedly, said: "I like it, Mongo."

  McGarvey said: "I don't understand half of what the hell you're talking about, but I like it too."

  Andrews said: "Captain, I need to use your phone."

  "Just as long as you call collect, creep," McGarvey said, then turned and walked to the door. "I'll get a medical kit for His Highness."

  Garth and I followed McGarvey out of the office, and I closed the door behind us. Five minutes later the door opened and Andrews, his face still covered with his bloody handkerchief and fear in his eyes, stood and stared at us for some time without speaking. McGarvey, Garth, and I stared back.

  "Would you two come with me, please?" Andrews said at last.

  "Sure," I replied. "Right after I make my call to my reporter friend. I'm a little anxious to get Son of Archangel rolling."

  "Please, Frederickson; no calls yet. You've won, and you are in a position to destroy this administration. I… mishandled this situation badly. Perhaps you'll be more gracious than I was, and give this administration and this country just a bit more time."

  "Give me back the package of slides, the list of owners, and the sequence key. We'll give it all to Captain McGarvey for safekeeping."

  Andrews lowered his eyes. "I'm sorry. I destroyed the package after I saw what it contained."

  "He's telling the truth," McGarvey said, the disgust in his voice directed at himself as well as Andrews. "He had me start a fire in a trash can in the back. For your information, it looked like there were four pieces of paper along with the slides. One had names and numbers on it, and the other three looked like sketches."

  I grunted. "Three murals to piece together."

  "There are still the slides belonging to the art dealer," Andrews said. "You have nothing to lose by holding off just a little longer. Will you come with me? There's a plane waiting for us at Albany Airport."

  "Where are we going?"

  "Washington. The president of the United States would very much like to speak to the two of you."

  21

  "How the hell did you know what was in that packet?" Garth asked me when, hours later, we were finally alone.

  "What else could it have been?" I replied as I stretched out on a monster bed in a monster s
uite in the most monstrously expensive hotel in Washington. In the bedroom there was a spectacular view through a huge picture window out over the Ellipse. In the distance, the sun was going down behind the Washington Monument; the last, blood-red rays were split and scattered by the tip of the spire, making it appear as if the concrete spear had pierced the ball of fire in its heart. There were two Secret Service agents in the hallway outside the suite-whether to guard us or keep us from leaving, we weren't sure, but at the moment it didn't seem to make much difference.

  "Whatever was in the packet almost certainly had to relate to the Archangel business," I continued. "Otherwise, Veil wouldn't have gone to so much trouble to make sure it was in a safe place, with Gary Worde in the mountains; a safe deposit box was no good, because Madison could have gained access to that. He put the record into a kind of time capsule without knowing if, or how, he would ever use it. But what kind of record? Veil certainly didn't walk out of any army stockade with secret documents in his pocket, and he would have had no access to any kind of documentation after he was out. So whatever was in the packet had to have been created by him. When I realized that, everything else fell into place. Vivid reds, browns, and greens combined with flesh tones are the colors he used when he first began to paint. Those are also the colors he'd used in the painting he left for me in the secret compartment in his loft, the colors of men, blood, and jungle."

  "Kendry could have gone up there and gotten the slides himself, at the beginning," Garth said, unrelieved bitterness in his voice. "Instead, he let you and me roam around on a Goddamn scavenger hunt."

  "It's arguable whether he could have gone himself, Garth. Remember that he'd been under constant surveillance from the time he'd been kicked out of the army. Madison must have known about his visits to Worde, and after the botched assassination attempt Madison's men were almost certainly watching those mountains; they could have been waiting for him to try to go to Worde long before we ever went up there. We provided the necessary distraction for Madison's forces. It's also arguable whether he could have done anything with the slides himself even if he had been able to get them out without being ambushed. Without someone else to bear witness to the truth, he would have been just a discredited man peddling a bizarre slide show while constantly having to look over his shoulder."

  "So now we're the ones who constantly have to look over our shoulders."

  "He couldn't have done it alone, Garth. He needed us."

  It was obvious from the expression on Garth's face that he didn't agree, but he let it go. "A hell of a piece of quick thinking under pressure, brother," Garth said, putting a huge hand affectionately on my shoulder.

  Garth sat down on the edge of the bed, and we remained silent for some time, staring out the window as the wounded sun continued to sink down behind the monument.

  "I should have killed that fuck, Andrews," Garth continued at last in a matter-of-fact tone that startled me and sent a little chill up my spine.

  I eased myself up into a sitting position, next to Garth, and looked into his face in the gathering darkness. What I saw, I didn't like. "I'm glad you didn't, brother. I don't think we could have gotten clear of that, and I like happy endings."

  "We're never going to get clear of this, Mongo. Madison's been trying to kill us with bullets; these guys are trying to do the same thing, in a different way. There isn't going to be any happy ending."

  "Why not? You said the same thing when we were caught up in Valhalla, and we were in one hell of a lot worse shape then. I think we're in a pretty good position right now."

  "I just wish I'd killed him when I had the chance," Garth said distantly, after a long pause.

  I couldn't think of anything to say, and we again lapsed into silence. After a few minutes I stood up and groped my way around the suite until I found a light switch.

  We had been asked to be patient and wait. We were patient, and we waited. At six thirty there was a knock at the door. It was one of the Secret Service agents asking if it was a convenient time for us to be taken to dinner. It was a most convenient time, and if our attire-jeans, denim shirts, and hiking boots-did not seem quite appropriate for going out to dinner in Washington, nothing in the demeanor of the agent indicated that he thought so, or that there would be any problem.

  There wasn't. We were taken to one of Washington's better restaurants. Arrangements had obviously been made beforehand, for the maitre d' nodded to the two agents as we entered, and we were ushered through a velvet-roped gate, past a number of startled diners, to a candle-lit table in a private booth at the rear of the main dining room.

  "Shannon's laying it on a bit thick, isn't he?" Garth said to one of the agents sitting across from us.

  "The captain has been asked to order for us, Lieutenant," the stern-faced man replied evenly. "I hope you approve. You won't be disappointed."

  We weren't. An hour and a half later, stuffed with French cuisine and fine wine, Garth and I followed the agents out of the restaurant to the waiting limousine that had brought us.

  Followed by a second car with four Secret Service agents in it, we rode slowly through the night streets of Washington. I had assumed we were going to be driven to the White House, but that wasn't the direction in which we were headed. Finally the car pulled up to the entrance of a park, and I knew where we were. Up and down the street, spaced twenty yards or so apart, were police cars, with their lights off. The officers standing on the sidewalk were alert and watchful.

  "The president will meet you at the war memorial," one of the agents said as he opened the car door for us. "Just follow the sidewalk."

  Garth and I ducked under the wooden barricade that had been placed across the entrance and headed down the sidewalk into the park. There were lights over the walk, but they had been dimmed to the point where they were not much brighter than the dappled moonlight. We walked in silence, for there seemed nothing left to say to each other. We had "come in from the cold" only to end in an even colder place, and now we were on our way to meet the supreme commander of what was beginning to look like just one more enemy army.

  We came around a bend in the path and suddenly found ourselves confronted by the startling sight of the Viet Nam War Memorial, its long slab of polished black stone faintly glowing in the moonlight like a sacred obelisk left behind by some ancient, extinct tribe of warriors.

  Suddenly a man with a walkie-talkie stepped out from behind a clump of bushes to our left. "The lieutenant has to say here," the Secret Service agent said, blocking Garth's path.

  "Bullshit!" I snapped, moving closer to Garth. "My brother and I go down there together, or we don't go at all."

  "Then you don't go at all," the agent said evenly, looking directly at me. "You won't get around us on this one. We didn't approve of meeting here in the first place. We lost the battle on choosing the meeting site, but we won't budge on choosing who goes down there. We're responsible for the safety of the president. The lieutenant is dangerous; he attacked a presidential aide."

  "Fuck you, thank you, and good night." I said, and turned around. I started to walk away, but was stopped when Garth gripped my shoulder and turned me around again.

  "Go ahead, Mongo," Garth murmured. "This man's just doing his job, and he happens to be right. You go ahead and see what Shannon has to say. I'm feeling very spooky, and I really don't care to meet with the son-of-a-bitch anyway."

  "Okay, brother. You all right?"

  "I'm all right. Go take care of business, and don't give him shit."

  I squeezed Garth's hand, then walked ahead, across a short open expanse, to the lip of the recess in which, like a monster shard in a great, rectangular bomb crater, the Viet Nam War Memorial stood. Again, I found myself profoundly moved by the stark simplicity and awesome power of the sculpture. As had been intended, the black stone slab cut not only through space, but also through all the pretensions and desperate, muddled rationales all sides offered to try to explain the most complex and ultimately futile war the Uni
ted States of America had ever fought.

  I slowly descended a ramp into the magnificent hole in the ground, walked up to the granite, and touched my fingertips to the sharp lines of the stonecutter's art in the center of the wall of names. Keeping my left hand on the wall, I moved to my right until I finally came to the last of the names. The rest of the wall was naked black stone awaiting more bad news about bones unearthed from unmarked graves halfway around the world.

  There were some names that should be added, I thought-the victims, including two children, who had died in the fire that had destroyed my apartment building; Loan Ka and his family, and Kathy; Gary Worde, and the six fighting men of America's armed forces sent to die in shame on a madman's murderous errand.

  I was most impressed by the monument-and angry that Kevin Shannon should use the mystery of the site in an embarrassingly obvious effort to manipulate my feelings. I resented the banality and predictability of his action and found it depressing.

  I heard footsteps behind me, and I turned as Kevin Shannon, casually dressed in charcoal slacks, black loafers, black turtleneck, and a heavy white cardigan sweater, came down the ramp and walked toward me at a brisk pace. He was shorter in person than he appeared on television or in photographs. His thick, gray-streaked black hair was cut sharply in the swept-back style that was his trademark. His craggy, fifty-seven-year-old face could not be described as handsome, but his features were nonetheless striking, with a square jaw, pronounced cheekbones, and bright, black eyes. He looked like a man who could control himself as well as situations, and it was this bearing-along with his political views-that had first attracted me to him. I had believed in Shannon, believed he was somehow different from the mangled politicians who usually survive the internecine warfare that is our political system to gain election to high office. Now I felt like a fool.