William McGivern - A Matter of Honor

When she left Staub said sharply, “When you requested a tap on the X-14th, did you tell the FBI in Chicago why you wanted it?”

“No, I told AIC it was a random check.”

“Good. The fewer who need to know the better. In this instance, it’s imperative.”

“Major, can you tell me what your problem is?” Froggie Jetter asked. “We’ve been proceeding on the conjecture that a pair of high placed noncoms may be running a minimally profitable courier service between Germany and the United States. Petty thievery, industrial diamonds, perhaps — we don’t even know that for sure, but we conjecture. We’ve got nothing definitive yet, a tap on a wire but our man’s cautious. We’re waiting for a wrong move so we can nail him. That’s the way I see Siegfried. Has something come up that makes that evaluation nonoperative?”

“Yes,” Major Staub said. “The colonel was summoned to an emergency meeting with Senator Copeland this afternoon. Copeland was aware of certain events in Chicago and had some theories on the matter. That came as an unpleasant shock to the colonel. We think we’re monitoring a routine, low-grade racket and suddenly House Military Affairs works up its own position paper.”

“What’s Copeland got that we don’t have?”

Before Staub could answer, the door opened and Colonel Benton came into the study. The colonel was in a dinner jacket with black tie, the rosette of a military decoration gleaming from a silk-faced lapel. He was tall and lean, with thick, gray hair cut short and when he smiled, which was seldom, the effort tightened the muscles around his mouth and pulled and sharpened the angles of his square, aristocratic features. Colonel Benton was often remembered for the strange quality of his eyes. They were a flat, opaque brown; as though he was wearing dark, rimless glasses.

He was forty-two, third generation West Point, a member of the Army’s aristocracy, his roots deep in the South and linked by family and marriage to the closest and most influential branches of the military. His wife was wealthy. In Washington the Bentons lived with appropriate austerity, but the horse-breeding farm in Virginia was a showplace, the air-conditioned stables famous, as were the annual yearling sales.

The colonel poured himself a glass of dry vermouth, then stirred in cracked ice and a twist of lemon peel. “Froggie, are you up with us? How much has Merrill told you?” He drank quickly, then looked down at his half-empty glass.

“Only that Senator Copeland...”

“I’ll fill you in then,” he said briskly. The colonel’s voice was flat, uninflected but resonant, a voice accustomed to being listened to. “It was goddamn awkward to have Dexter Copeland tell me things I didn’t know about our ongoing investigations. But you know Copeland. He had to dump on me first with his lectures on the state of the union.” Benton began to speak in agitated, mimicking tones.

“... one million or more young Americans haven’t bothered to register for the draft. That’s one-sixth of the eligible service pool. They didn’t sign up and burn their draft cards, they just said, ‘Fuck off, Uncle Sam. We can’t be bothered.’ ” The Colonel let his voice return to normal.

“Then he tells me the Abrams ML-tank came in millions over budget and the fucker doesn’t work too well to boot, problems with treads and firing.

“And he did his bit about nuke silos in Utah and all those antisub peaceniks demonstrating along the coastline in Scotland. Finally he got around to Germany, which he wanted to talk about in the first place.

“Copeland is convinced that the Russians have enough firepower on their borders to lob rockets right into the chancellor’s office in Bonn.”

Colonel Benton walked to the table, put another splash of vermouth in his glass and then filled it with gin. He stirred the mixture absently with his little finger.

“His approach was oblique but the senator had called our meeting to ask me one all-important question. He wanted to know how in hell he could stay in office and get re-elected if Army Intelligence couldn’t clear up that problem percolating in Chicago.

“Dexter Copeland is from Illinois, you know,” the colonel went on. “He’s been in office for a long time — some voters think too damned long. So Copeland wants to hedge his bets guaranteeing all the votes he can get, and that includes every black vote from Cabrini Green down to South Cairo.”

Benton snapped a finger at Captain Jetter. “What are those names, Froggie?”

“Privates Cullen, Baggot, Jones—” The captain hastily opened his attaché case and glanced at a memo. “The last one was a Private Randolph Lewis.”

“Copeland had all those names,” Colonel Benton went on, “plus where, how and at what tick of the clock each man was killed. He got his information in a direct, private number phone call from one of his most important constituents, a voter he cannot afford to displease, the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

“Reverend Jackson told the Senator in no uncertain terms that four dead black brothers were four dead men too many. And since all of them were in uniform, supposedly fine young citizens in the service of their country, he wanted to know exactly what Senator Copeland was going to do about it.”

Captain Jetter stifled a pang of uneasiness as the colonel turned to look at him with a hard stare. “We’ve had no indication that the Reverend Jackson would involve himself,” Froggie Jetter said defensively, “and I can’t see why he should.”

“I do,” the colonel said. “My dear mother, God bless her southern soul, used to like to have me think when I was a boy that she knew everything I did, everything, good or bad. When she found me out on something I tried to hide, she’d say, ‘God can’t be everywhere, Richie. That’s why He invented mothers.’

“And that’s how I feel about the Reverend Jackson,” the colonel said. “God can’t be everywhere and that’s why He made the Jesse Jacksons of the world, to watch out after all the shat-upon brethren and take some of the load off our shoulders.”

The brief moment of softness left the colonel’s face. “I spared Senator Copeland that whimsy when he told me what else was on his mind. Copeland wouldn’t name his source, but I believe God and the Reverend Jackson know everything. The Senator said he had information that the rumor in Chicago, and particularly with the drug operators around black housing developments, is that the caper you’ve so humorously nicknamed Siegfried Express is not just a petty cash, small-time contraband operation, after all.

“What is coming in, and from sources outside the Syndicate, is pure white heroin, a high-grade, high-cost product. And because many of the customers for this trade and all four suspected couriers are black, Reverend Jackson wanted to know urgently just how the good senator was going to handle this malfeasance...

“Fortunately,” Colonel Benton said, “I had done my homework before the meeting and could convey the impression we were on top of this thing. I told Copeland we believed we could make a direct connection, that we had anticipated the next courier.

“With the materials received from Colorado, my staff had brought the Durham Lasari records up-to-date, so to speak. We knew he was born and enlisted in the North Carolina area, got most of his post-’Nam medical treatment at Fitzsimons in Denver and disappeared from the military in that area. I told all that to the senator.

“My side had attacked the obvious — the local phone directories. Lasari is not a common name, it turns out. There were two in Raleigh, North Carolina, both in the pizza business, no relations. A professor at the University of Colorado, in his fifties, not our man, and a Jane Lasari in Colorado Springs who drives a school bus. We ran a Motors check in each area, four Lasari registrations, no Durham.”