Weapons of Choice

by John Birmingham

  “Were they an item?” he asked.

  “The Jap and Anderson? They tell me not. It looks like a pretty vicious murder. There’s some, uh, sexual matters associated with it. But more in the line of, you know, rape.”

  The word hung between them for an eternity. This was going to make things even more difficult.

  “Has word gotten around yet?” asked Black.

  “There’s been no official statement,” Spruance said. “Won’t be for a while. Officially, they’re not even here yet. But I’d say everyone in that task force of theirs will know by the end of the day. And everyone will have an opinion about the likely culprits, too.”

  “One of ours, you mean.”

  “It’s human nature to blame the other guy,” Spruance suggested.

  Black forced down a last mouthful of cold, foul-tasting coffee. He wondered whether Julia had heard of the deaths yet. As soon as she did, he guessed that she’d be straining at the leash to get off the ship and do some digging herself.

  Spruance obviously found the topic of the murders upsetting and certainly distasteful. He put them aside by pushing himself up out of his squeaky swivel chair and pacing over to the window. Hot sunshine fell on him through the glass. In his white uniform it made him quite uncomfortable to look at.

  “So what do you think, Dan?” he asked. “Do you think it’s going to work out between us all?”

  Black mulled it over.

  “They’re not like us, sir, but they’re okay. I guess they’re what we become.”

  “And you’re comfortable with that?” asked Spruance.

  “Not entirely. I’ve learned a lot about them that scares me, frankly. But on the whole, they mean well.”

  “They killed a lot of our men, Dan.”

  “They saved a lot, too. And don’t forget we killed our fair share of them in return. Far as I can tell, they’re not holding that against us.”

  A look of fleeting irritation passed across the admiral’s face. “They wouldn’t want to go comparing scars,” was all he said in reply.

  Neither man said anything for a while. Black was stilling pondering Spruance’s question. Like Curtis, he’d been told to stay on the Clinton, to get acquainted with their procedures and technology. Like Curtis, he spent a lot of time reading. He wasn’t a great reader and it frustrated him, but the guided tours he’d taken hadn’t gone well. His guides assumed a level of knowledge about their ship and its technology that he just didn’t possess.

  “And this woman you’ve met?” said Spruance, breaking into his thoughts.

  “Julia Duffy.”

  “She’s a reporter, am I correct?”

  “For the New York Times. I believe she wants to keep working for them,” said Black, who had little doubt she’d get what she wanted.

  “I’d like you to spend some more time with her while she’s here, Dan. Get her reading on Kolhammer’s people. She was writing about them. She must have her own opinions.”

  “She certainly does,” he agreed. “As a matter of fact, she’s kind of ticked off at Kolhammer. I think she blames him for bringing her here. I think she’d much rather be home.”

  “Wouldn’t we all. You got on well with her then?”

  “I like her, sir. Quite a bit.”

  Spruance started to say something, then he seemed to think the better of it. “That’s good. Spend as much time as you want with her over the next week or so. I’d like to get an independent opinion about what might happen if these characters are forced to stay. They certainly don’t seem very hopeful of getting back.”

  Dan Black shifted uncomfortably on his hard wooden chair. He’d already grown used to the vacu-molded seating on the Clinton. If he understood Spruance right, he was being asked to snoop on a girl he might have some feelings for. It didn’t sit well, and he saw no alternative but to say so.

  The admiral must have read his expression.

  “Oh, I don’t want you to betray any confidences, Commander,” he said. “Frankly, you’re not nearly pretty enough to play Mata Hari. I think we just need to know what sort of people we’re dealing with. How they’re likely to react to these killings, for instance. If you feel uncomfortable with that, why don’t you invite her to dinner with the both of us? You can tell her up front that I want to pick her brain.”

  Black’s mood lightened considerably at that. “She has a friend, another reporter, sir. She’s a loudmouth, too. I think we should take both of them along.”

  Spruance seemed alarmed by the prospect of anything that might look like a double date. “My wife would kill me!” he objected.

  “Then we could invite Ensign Curtis along. I think he has eyes for Ms. Natoli.”

  “Mzz?” said Spruance.

  “Oh, believe me, sir,” Black sighed. “You’re going to hear all about it.”

  23

  AMBASSADOR HOTEL, ROOM 522, LOS ANGELES, 1100 HOURS, 9 JUNE 1942

  The room felt like a museum piece, or perhaps a bedroom display in a department store that hadn’t seen a paying customer in eighty years. Kolhammer’s nose wrinkled at the smell of stale cigarette smoke. It was everywhere, blending with the body odor of a thousand previous guests, and the diffuse reek of old socks, sour perfume, and greasy, broiled meat. He found it hard to believe that the past stank so badly. It was a sick joke, really. He’d never thought he could be nostalgic for blank glass towers and thousands of miles of ribboning freeway. But he was.

  Gazing out of the window, across Wilshire Boulevard to a diner shaped like a derby hat, and beyond that to blocks of low-rise, brown brick art deco apartments and office buildings, Phillip Kolhammer felt his mind drifting again toward disintegration.

  He’d arrived before dawn in a DeSoto, been driven into the basement parking area, and shepherded up to his room by a Secret Service agent. The drive in had been like a carnival ride at first. The DeSoto was the real thing, a great cavernous chunk of heavy metal with leather seats that looked like they could have been taken right out of the hotel lobby. But he quickly tired of his fellow passengers, who smoked the entire time, and of the steel springs that dug into his back. Not to mention the lack of anything he’d recognize as a decent suspension system.

  He’d tried to grab a few hours’ sleep on the bed, but the uncomfortably dense and inflexible mattress felt wrong, and the air in the room tasted dead in his mouth.

  A wardrobe full of civilian clothes awaited him, but Kolhammer had found them to be too heavy and prickly. He’d feel like he was in costume, wearing the dark, double-breasted woolen suits. Instead he’d showered and changed into a clean uniform that he’d brought in a travel case, stored in the small luggage bay on the in-flight refueler. LA was full of uniforms. And not just Americans. Contingents of Canadian, British, Australian, New Zealand, Free French, and even Dutch officers were quartered on the West Coast. He wouldn’t stand out.

  Kolhammer thought of his own people stuck at Edwards AFB—or Muroc as it was currently known. He hoped they were being treated well. You had to figure that facilities were pretty primitive out there.

  He checked his watch. Two hours until he was to meet with Roosevelt again. He was supposed to rest, but instead he picked up the heavy handset of the phone on his bedside table. It wasn’t even an old dial phone. The face was completely blank.

  A male voice answered. “Yes, sir.”

  “I’d like to go for a walk, clear my head.”

  “We’ll be right there.”

  He waited. The door wasn’t locked, and he could have left anytime he wanted to, but he accepted the need to maintain strict security. The papers were already full of rumors out of Hawaii. A copy of the old Examiner that had been pushed under his door had a lead story about the Japanese being driven away from Midway by a secret navy superweapon.

  The real story was going to break soon. Everybody could feel it. The embedded journalists were screeching like caged baboons back in Pearl, demanding to be let off the leash. Personally, he would have let them go well bef
ore now. He was used to working with the embeds. They’d generally do the story you wanted, as long as you spoon-fed it to them. But the locals were still trying to get their heads around the reality of the Transition and the destruction of the Pacific Fleet. They wanted to keep the lid on a little longer. And Kolhammer could feel the pressure building.

  Somebody rapped on the door, twice, softly. “Admiral?”

  “Come in.”

  The special agent who’d led him up to the room entered with another man. From the generic cut of their clothes, and a common air of high-tone thuggery, Kolhammer took the new guy to be another special agent.

  “Agent Stirling will secure your room and equipment, Admiral,” said the first man, confirming the assumption.

  “You mind if we call on Professor Einstein?” Kolhammer asked. “I’d like to talk to him before the meeting.”

  The agent shrugged. Clearly it meant nothing to him.

  They padded along the thickly carpeted corridor to a room six doors down. The whole place put Kolhammer in mind of an expensive bordello. The thin squeal of a violin behind the door told him that Einstein was up and about.

  “I’m sorry, Agent,” Kolhammer said quietly. “I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “Agent Flint, sir,” the Secret Service officer replied as he rapped on the door, twice, firmly, to be heard over the violin.

  The sound of the instrument ceased with an abrupt, atonal note.

  The door opened and the sight of that famous shock of hair greeted them. Standing there in his boxer shorts, Einstein looked a little ticked off, until he saw Kolhammer.

  “Ah! Come in, come in. Good morning to you, Admiral.”

  “Actually, I was wondering if you’d like to come out for a short stroll, Professor. Maybe we could grab a coffee.”

  Einstein laughed, a short sharp bark.

  “Not much caffe to be had in Los Angeles, I’m afraid, Admiral. Not that you’d want to drink what they do have, anyway. But, yes, a stroll would be nice. And I’m a little hungry, too. Just let me get my pants on. With pants comes dignity, yes?”

  The old man shuffled back into the room, which Kolhammer could see was fogged up with smoke from his pipe. He and Agent Flint stared at the walls while Einstein wrestled himself into a pair of brown corduroy trousers and pulled on a pair of slippers before joining them in the hallway. “I have been using your superb electric book, Admiral. Amazing. Simply amazing.”

  “We thought you’d like it. Did you see yourself in the movie we saved on there, Insignificance?”

  Einstein roared with laughter. “I did! I did! Who would have imagined, me with Joe DiMaggio’s wife? An actress, yes, this Marilyn?”

  “She will be, I suppose.”

  Einstein’s mood sobered as they reached the elevators.

  “But with such a long face, that’s not what you wanted to talk about, was it?”

  “No, sir. It’s not. You saw the other movies?”

  “From the concentration camps,” said Einstein as all happiness washed out of him.

  “We call them death camps,” said Kolhammer.

  The scientist sighed heavily. A chime sounded, and the elevator door opened. Agent Flint’s eyes, which never stopped moving, swept over the man seated at the controls. Otherwise the lift was empty. He ushered in his two charges.

  “Yes, I saw them,” said Einstein, as they stepped in. “That’s why I was playing when you knocked. I play to relax, to forget about the world.”

  Flint told the operator to take them to the ground floor.

  “Sometimes,” said Kolhammer, “it’s best not to forget.”

  They walked in silence for a while, each man lost in his own thoughts, until the dead neon signs out on Wilshire Boulevard gave Kolhammer a split second of dizzying dislocation. In his day, the city had funded the restoration of nearly 150 neon signs along this strip in mid-Wilshire. The very same hoardings, unplugged now because of the wartime blackout, greeted him under a hot blue sky as they stepped out through the Ambassador’s grand, gated entrance. Jarring the moment of déjà vu, however, a yellow streetcar went rattling by, full of Angelenos on their way downtown. Gone were the Koreans and Taiwanese. Replacing them was a homogenous population of middle-class whites. Gone, too, he noticed, was the brown sky and the close, sticky feel of heavily polluted air on his face.

  “Are you okay, sir?” asked Agent Flint, taking Kolhammer lightly by the elbow.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “It’s just a shock, that’s all.”

  The three men came to a halt on the side of the road. Einstein managed to appear simultaneously amused and moved by Kolhammer’s obvious plight.

  “You know, Admiral, your world is still here,” said the scientist. He rubbed the tips of his fingers together. “It is this close, right here and now. You came here. You can get back. You have family, yes?”

  Another streetcar clattered past. Old car horns blared. Wilshire looked like the venue for a vintage auto festival.

  “My wife lives over in Santa Monica. Or she . . . well, you know.”

  “Are you going to be okay, sir?” asked Flint. “Would you like to go back to the lobby and sit down?”

  Kolhammer drew in a long, deep breath. He could smell gasoline and exhaust fumes, but they stood out against a clear background. To his twenty-first-century sinuses, the air was mountain fresh. He gathered himself together and nodded across the street to the bizarre dome of the Brown Derby Restaurant.

  “Is that the original Brown Derby?” he asked.

  Neither Flint nor Einstein knew.

  “Is it supposed to be a hat?” asked Einstein.

  “Well, the sign says EAT IN THE HAT. If you’re hungry, Professor, we could get a light lunch over there. They might’ve invented the Cobb salad by now. They’re the guys who came up with it in the first place.”

  As they crossed the street, Kolhammer could have sworn he caught sight of a young Ronald Reagan taking a seat in the restaurant’s tree-shaded courtyard fronting on the street. He suddenly worried that this was going to be a Hollywood place, where they stood no chance of gaining entry. Einstein might even suffer from some egregious episode of discrimination—being Jewish, and wearing slippers as he was.

  He needn’t have bothered himself over it. Agent Flint pushed through a small group of young women hanging around the front steps, clutching autograph books and occasionally standing on tiptoe as they tried to peer in through the swinging doors. The girls ignored Kolhammer, but a couple of them gave Einstein a quizzical look as he followed the admiral inside.

  Kolhammer watched as Special Agent Flint badged the first dish monkey in a white tux he came across. He couldn’t hear the exchange, but the waiter’s palpable reluctance—to admit a strange old man into such refined company—ran headlong into Agent Flint’s hard-boiled refusal to take no for an answer. A maître d’ came over to buy into the scene. Flint flashed him the badge, as well, then gripped the man’s bicep so strongly his knuckles turned white. He leaned over to mutter something into the man’s ear, jerking his head back at Kolhammer and Einstein. The headwaiter began nodding vigorously, then shaking his head, then nodding again.

  “I wish I knew how to do that,” whispered Einstein.

  “Confidence is half the battle,” said Kolhammer. “This is my treat, by the way.”

  Flint returned, the ghost of a smile playing across his features.

  “They found a nice table for you out on the terrace,” he said. “Right next to Mr. Crosby’s party.”

  Einstein didn’t visibly react to the news. Perhaps he wasn’t a Bing fan. Kolhammer nodded once, briefly, trying to conceal a sensation of free fall. He’d already checked out the Reagan look-alike. It wasn’t the future president. But there were a couple of familiar faces out on the sun-dappled balcony. He couldn’t place them, but he was certain that he knew three or four of them from somewhere. It had to be from old movies. Marie loved them. She had about a thousand on video sticks back home.

>   They threaded though the nearly empty dining room, with its walls completely covered by hundreds of framed sketches of movie stars, and out into the fierce radiance of high summer in LA. The patio was already buzzing with lunchtime trade. Kolhammer squinted into the sun to hide a mild grin at the sight of the food. A goodly number of the guests were tucking into hot dogs and cheeseburgers. He wondered how he’d go ordering a truffle-infused salad of wild porcini mushroom on arugula and witlof, or a bowl of hokkien noodles and wilted bok choy with flash-fried tofu croutons—two of the menu options in his stateroom back on the Clinton.

  Agent Flint showed them to a table, blocking the waiter with his body until both men had sat down.

  “Are you not joining us?” asked Einstein.

  “I’ll be around,” he said, before giving the waiter a glare and disappearing back inside. Kolhammer tried not to stare. But it was true. At the table next to them sat Bing Crosby and a party of three. The crooner, who looked impossibly young to Kolhammer, had split his lip recently. His guests, two men and a woman, gaped openly at the military man and the badly dressed oddball. They had been discussing something quite intently, but now they just stared. An uncomfortable silence began to spread to other nearby tables. The waiter started to shift from one foot to another, glancing back inside the main dining room.

  Kolhammer stood up, gave Crosby the benefit of a scornful look, informed by his awareness of the actor’s violent, drunken home life, then smiled and said, “Mr. Crosby, you seem to recognize my colleague here. It’s Professor Albert Einstein, winner of the Nobel prize for physics. He’s helping us with the war effort.”

  Crosby flushed a deep shade of red, and stammered a greeting.

  “Professor. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  Einstein grinned hugely, nodded hello, and said to the waiter, “I’ll have what he’s having. If that is the famous Corncob salad.”

  The waiter coughed nervously. “It’s a Cobb salad, sir. Named after Mr. Cobb, the owner. There’s no corn in it.”

  “The professor will have the salad. Just bring me a coffee,” said Kolhammer in his unmistakable command voice.