Warrior in the Shadows

by Marcus Wynne

  The two of them led separate lives that intersected in the bed they shared, mostly hers but occasionally his, with sometime dinners at the tiny hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants they both favored, or brief excursions as each other's companion into the floating nightlife of the Minneapolis art world. Charley had found, much to his surprise, that he enjoyed the brief visits to art openings at the galleries in the Warehouse District and the little parties at the Loring Bar or the Walker Art Museum. Since he'd thrown away the need for secrecy that had dictated his social doings for so many years, he enjoyed playing the man of mystery in Mara's life when the two of them were among her artist friends.

  "Who is he, Mara? Do tell," her friend pled. "He seems as though he might be dangerous."

  "He was a war photographer," Mara said. "He doesn't like to talk about it."

  And while that wasn't exactly accurate, Charley let it stand.

  Charley had met Mara at a Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective, a traveling exhibit of the wonderful photographs the old master had done, which was showing at the Walker. They met, they talked, they went to bed.

  And sometime after that they had been at the Loring Bar, having drinks after seeing a private show of local artists in which Mara had a painting. It was late in the evening, and several people were noticeably drunk, including one yuppie professional in his early thirties in an expensive suit and a handmade Italian silk tie. Charley noticed things like that, not just with a photographer's eye, but because the remnants of a previous professional life required him to note every significant and telling detail and interpret it so as to give him insight into the individual.

  The insight he got was young professional, single, drunk, and horny.

  The drunk came up to Mara and said, "Was that your painting, the big red one?"

  "Yes," she said, holding her wineglass in front of her face to disguise her slight smile.

  "Seems kind of sexy."

  "That's an interesting interpretation."

  "I can be interesting," he said.

  Mara smiled openly at Charley, who smiled back and winked.

  "Is this your boyfriend?" the drunk said.

  "He's my date, yes," Mara said.

  "Lucky man."

  "Yeah, I think so," Charley said.

  "Think what?" the drunk said.

  "That I'm lucky."

  "No shit you're lucky," the drunk said. He smiled in the nasty fashion of those who imagine they have power, an oily sliding of the lips past the teeth. "Why don't you share a little bit of luck with me? I'd be willing to pay."

  Several of Mara's friends, who'd turned to watch the play, froze.

  Charley just smiled. "Time for you to go, buddy," he said. "You're boring everyone, and that's inexcusable."

  "Why don't you just…" the drunk began.

  Charley positioned himself with his left foot forward putting his body at a forty-five degree angle to the drunken man. He flicked his left hand at the man's eyes. His body position blocked the view of his right hand slipping the Emerson CQC-7 out of his right pocket of his black Levi's, but the click was audible and the knife could be seen by the gasping onlookers behind him. The drunk's hands went to his face to protect his eyes from Charley's flick. Charley brought his left hand back, low, and gripped the bottom of the expensive tie. The razor edge of the CQC-7 sliced through the tie like a fresh scalpel in the hand of an impatient surgeon, and suddenly the drunk was stumbling back, his eyes wide with fear, both hands out in front of him so as to ward off Charley, who stood with the tie in one hand and the knife in the other.

  "Learn some manners," Charley said in an even voice. "Get out of here." He threw the scrap of tie on the floor. "Now."

  The drunk man, his face pale, turned and walked out of the bar. Through the big plate-glass windows, everyone could see him pause between two parked cars and vomit into the street.

  That gave Mara's friends all sorts of things to talk about.

  And their sex that night was spectacular.

  Charley slid carefully from beneath the sheets and tangled comforter. The slight chill of the room raised goose bumps on his flesh. He left his shorts on the floor and slid into his Levi's, put on his socks and his flannel shirt against the cold, and went into the kitchen. The glowing Mickey Mouse figure on the clock showed 1:30 in the morning. Charley opened the refrigerator, the front covered with magnet letters spelling out poems and messages, and took out a pint carton of half and half and some roast coffee from the freezer. He ran water into a pot and prepared the Melitta drip carafe that Mara favored.

  He was used to waking up in the middle of the night. After he had quit his contract operator position with the Central Intelligence Agency's elite Special Activities Staff, he'd woken up every night for three months at three in the morning, reaching for his pistol, his ears straining for the sound of footsteps or someone trying his door. His small apartment in Fairfax, Virginia, seemed to close in around him, but he stayed there because he couldn't think of anywhere else to go.

  The call from Bobby Lee had saved him from going down a dark road into depression or death. Bobby had never known what Charley was doing in Virginia, and he didn't know about Charley's dramatic exit from the program. But somehow, in the strange and near psychic fashion that best friends have, especially those who have huddled together in combat, he knew that Charley needed help. And the help he came up with was an offer of a contract forensic photographer position with the Minneapolis Police Department.

  And that was exactly what Charley needed.

  Charley sold what little furniture he had, packed up his books, his guns, his knives, his clothes, his cameras, and his precious negatives, and drove across the country in the beat-up station wagon he'd bought for himself.

  He grinned as he looked for a filter cone for the Melitta drip, thinking how he must appear to other people who didn't know his history, which was everyone in Minneapolis. He looked like a marginally employed artistic photographer working to establish a name for himself, and he fit in as a fringe dweller on the edge of the Twin Cities art world. He held his own feeling of being a hawk among sparrows closely, even though it felt as though his thoughts leaked around his cover like light around the edges of a closed door.

  Mara said from close behind him, "What is it that you like to say? Chemicals, chemicals, you need chemicals?"

  Charley took down another mug without looking behind him. "I was saying I need more Mara."

  "You can have that anytime. But you're making a mess of that coffee. Let me do that for you."

  She brushed close by him, the smells of her washing over him: clean sweat, perfume, the bleachy hint of semen, the dry smell of her kimono. She put a fresh filter cone into the carafe, carefully measured the French roast into the cone, and then poured boiling water slowly into the paper cone so that the grounds rose evenly along the lip of the carafe.

  "Like this," she said. "Slowly."

  Charley slipped his hands around her thin waist. "Slowly?"

  "Yes," she said, leaning back against him. "Slowly."

  Afterward, he went back to the kitchen and retrieved the coffee mugs and poured the still hot coffee into them.

  "That wasn't so slow," Mara said.

  "Are you complaining?"

  "No," she said, reaching for her coffee mug, then wrapping both thin hands around it. "Thank you."

  Charley got back beneath the covers with her, his own mug in his hand, and propped himself up with the pillow doubled over and braced against the headboard. Stray light from the streetlamps outside the window filtered around the edges of the thick curtains into the dark room.

  "You're thoughtful and tense tonight," Mara said. "What are you thinking about?"

  Charley sipped his coffee, hissing when it burnt a raw spot on the inside of his lip where Mara had chewed him.

  "Are you all right?" she said.

  "Just thinking," he said.

  "About?"

  "Did you do primitive art when you were in schoo
l?"

  "I experimented with it…"

  "I mean classes in art history on cave art, native arts, that sort of thing."

  "Yes. When I was doing textile art I studied Japanese art, but that's not really primitive at all. I did take a class in African art, body adornments, that sort of thing… fascinating. I have a few books on it… why?"

  "We respect each other's privacy, right?"

  "That's why we stay together, Charley."

  "You've never told me that."

  "It's one reason."

  "I want to show you something but I don't want you to speak to anyone else about it."

  "I can do that," Mara said. She drew her knees to her chest and retucked the sheet around her. "Does this have something to do with your police job?"

  "Yeah."

  "Then of course I won't speak of it."

  Charley slid from beneath the sheets and went to his battered camera bag. He took out the package of prints he'd kept for himself and selected one that showed the wall image in its entirety.

  "This," he said when he slid back beneath the sheets. "Have you ever seen anything like this?"

  Mara handed Charley her coffee cup and took the photograph in both hands. She held the 4© 6 print and studied it long and carefully.

  "I've never seen anything exactly like it, but the proportions of the features and the inner drawing within the main figure, those are characteristic of some schools of Aboriginal art."

  "Do you have a book on that?"

  "I have a good one. Over there, third shelf down, it's the end book, the tall one."

  Charley fetched the book from the tall oak bookcase. Mara handed him the photograph and thumbed quickly through the book. She turned to one page and pointed at a photograph of an Aboriginal man with an intricately drawn series of squares on his chest. "See?" she said. "That's not the same, but it's similar."

  Charley held the photograph beside the illustration in the book. "I see what you mean."

  "I know someone who could tell you for certain," Mara said, gazing wide awake at Charley over her raised knees.

  "Who?"

  "Kativa, Kativa Patel. She's an art historian doing an internship down at the Walker. She's a friend of mine, we met at a party there. She specializes in primitive art."

  "I'd like to talk to her."

  "We can do that tomorrow."

  "Tomorrow's Sunday."

  "She works Sundays… I can call her in the morning, we can go to the museum after church."

  "Church?"

  "I'd like you to go with me. Then we can see her, after church."

  "This should make for an interesting day."

  "All your days are interesting."

  "There's that."

  "Hand me my coffee, please." Mara took the cup and cradled it, sipping lovingly at the warm brew. She held the cup on her knees.

  "What do you want from me?" she said as though she were asking the time.

  Charley looked up in surprise. "What do you mean?"

  "I never ask you. I take you as you are. But I'm curious. What keeps you in my bed?"

  Charley licked his lips, looked away, set the photograph down carefully on the headboard behind him, laid the art book down on the covers.

  "I know about the sex," Mara said. "That's fine. It's good for me, too. But it feels as though there's something else. Is there?"

  "I don't know," Charley said. "I don't think about that."

  "Sometime you should. I see a lot of things in your face. You're very frightening sometimes, Charley. I see things in you, my friends see things in you… I know about your violence and that tells me something about your past. Things come up in you and you put them away. Why is that?"

  Charley felt something stirring deep inside him, something that wasn't his dinner or his middle of the night coffee.

  "I don't like to dwell on the past," he said. "I try to live in the present, to pay attention. But I've got history. It's my history."

  "Yes," Mara said.

  She set her half-finished coffee down on the headboard, then slid down beneath the covers. She turned on her side, her back to Charley. Her hip swelled, then fell into the valley of her waist before it rose to join her torso like a great wall, like the wall of mountains around Annapurna in Nepal as Charley remembered it from all those years ago.

  "Good night, Charley," she said in a faint voice. "I love you, but I don't want to talk anymore."

  1.5

  Bobby Lee Martaine sat in the Great Wall restaurant in splendid isolation in the back dining room. Andy Chen, the owner and a long-time friend, always put Bobby Lee and any of his cop buddies in the back dining room and closed it off to other customers if the restaurant wasn't busy. If it was, he went out of his way to make sure that Bobby got the best table. Andy was an immigrant from Mainland China who'd worked his way up from sleeping on the floor and eating rice to save every penny to the highly successful owner of three restaurants. But the Great Wall on France Avenue was the flagship restaurant, and Andy was there every day for lunch and for dinner, greeting all his old customers by name and making sure that everything was done to his hard-nosed standard.

  Bobby Lee picked through the roast duck for a good piece and followed it with rice, then a sip of Tsing Tao beer. Occasionally he would reach out and tap with his free hand on the manila folder that held the crime scene photos, the autopsy report, and the case file he'd started. Every so often he would stare at the empty seat across from him and wish that he could call up his old partner, Bob Martinson. The "Bobbsey Twins" everyone had called them, the Bob and Bob show, but the two of them had racked up the best closure rate in the department and had a lot of laughs while they were doing it. Bob had retired only two months ago, but with money saved, no kids to provide for and still married to his childhood sweetheart, he was able to take off for Florida to live large in his own fashion down in St. Petes Beach. He and Margie lived on a big boat. When they got tired of being on the water, they lived in a small mobile home in a retirement village that was full of ex-cops from New York, Boston, Chicago, and other big city cold spots.

  Bobby Lee had almost called him, but decided against it. For now he worked without a partner, even though he had the pick of the whole Special Investigations Unit to draw from. He'd thought of calling Charley, but looked at the time, and thought again. It was against department regs and flew in the face of common sense, but Bobby Lee only obeyed those things that made sense at the time, and what made sense was to get a different perspective on this case.

  He'd bring Charley in on it. He could use that brain.

  Charley had changed from their days in the Eighty Deuce. He'd been Charging Charley then, hard-core, and ready for the Special Forces Qualification Course. He'd done his best to try and talk Bobby Lee into it, but Bobby Lee had his mind on Max and a family, and so they'd gone their ways when it came time to re-up— Charley to Special Forces, Bobby Lee to Minneapolis and a job as a patrol officer. Bobby Lee had come a long way in ten years… from patrol officer to tactical officer on the ERU to detective sergeant.

  So had Charley.

  Even though he didn't talk much about it, Bobby Lee knew his old friend well enough, and a couple of sessions over long-neck beers had told him what he needed to know. Charley had done real well in his Q Course, and done well on the door-kicking team he was assigned to in Okinawa. But that door-kicking team had a close special relationship with the secretive Delta Force, and somebody there had dropped Charley's name when it got time for him to be short. Four years as a door kicker in Special Forces, and then Charley dropped off the map for a year, then reemerged with postcards sent to Bobby Lee and to his son Nicolas from all kinds of exotic locales: Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Russia, Chechnya, South Africa, Tajikistan, India, countries and cities all over the world with one thing in common— they were dirty, violent, and dangerous.

  And then something happened. Bobby Lee didn't know what, but when he heard from Charley he knew something
was up. That's when the forensic photographer position came up in discussion with the chief, and Bobby Lee sold them on his friend. A faxed résumé and portfolio of photographs had clinched the deal, and then Charley showed up, driving a beat-to-shit Toyota station wagon filled with some clothes, his cameras and negatives, his books, and an assortment of guns.

  Bobby Lee knew about Charley's fondness for firearms, something that went back to their grunt days, but the weapons he had now all had certain things in common. Bobby Lee had expedited Charley's civilian carry permit, even though he knew Charley rarely exercised the privilege. The handguns were the choice of a seasoned professional who carried concealed for a reason, his few long guns were the choice of someone who might have to fight seriously at close quarters in an urban environment.

  That and his reticence and habitual silence about what he'd done told Bobby Lee a lot.

  But those snake eyes Charley got when he wanted to get in the middle of things told a lot as well.

  Bobby Lee wanted to sound him out on this and hear what Charley made of it, but it was too late. Time to go, time to go home to Max and Nick, sleep and start it all over in the morning. He pushed his plate back and waved at the attentive waiter who brought him his check immediately. He paid his bill and left a healthy tip, then walked out to the parking lot with the file under his arm.

  Time to go home.

  As he pulled out of the lot, a motorcycle rider, crouched over his crotch rocket, zipped by him and took the turn onto Forty-fourth Street toward Lake Harriet. The rider glanced at him as he zipped by, then seemed to double take again, right before he made the turn.

  Bobby Lee laughed out loud. The guy was speeding and probably saw the light panel in the back window of his unmarked squad as he was pulling out.

  Everybody worried about the Pooooolice, as Bob Martinson used to say.

  1.6

  Alfie Woodard turned his jet-black Ninja motorcycle down Forty-fourth Street and slowed down after he saw the unmarked police car pull out of the restaurant parking lot. His side mirror showed him that the cop was going the other way on France Avenue, so he cranked back up the speed to the next stop sign, then zoomed again to the one after that, and then through the sole stoplight on Forty-fourth Street.