William McGivern - A Matter of Honor

“It’s never as bad as it looks” ... the general had said that twice. And Lasari was determined to believe him.

The airport at Frankfurt had been a maelstrom of confusion, hundreds of passengers hurrying in every direction toward the more than fifty international airline terminals that left from the aerodrome. The city itself, rebuilt from World War II rubble in neomodern style, was a sprawl of blocky concrete in the late afternoon light. As Lasari looked down from the plane window, the movement of cars and autobahns below spent spasms of nausea through his body, and when the plane passed over the broad band of the River Main reflections from the water sent slices of pain through his eyeballs. He would like to have shaded his eyes, tried to sleep, but he was hoping for at least a glimpse of the Am-Main Military Hospital. General Weir had been flown there from Ludensdorf in a military transport, John Grimes had told him.

Their conversation had been brief, a collect call made to the Tarbert Weir home outside Springfield from a phone booth in the airport. Even in the privacy of the booth Lasari had talked urgently, a hand cupped around his mouth and his back to the shuffle of traffic passing the glass door.

He had asked first about the general. “He’s holding his own,” Grimes had said.

“Did you talk to him?”

“No, he’s not up to that yet. A doctor called.”

“What do you think, Mr. Grimes?”

“He’s got the constitution of a horse, always had.”

Lasari hesitated a moment. The connection was good, Grimes’ voice was clear, but Lasari had the impression that someone might be listening in on the line, at the Springfield end. It was not a noise that alerted him but rather a feeling of presence, the silence of breath being withheld.

“Is it safe to talk, Mr. Grimes?”

“Shoot, fellow. Say what you’ve got to say,” the man said. “I’ve been expecting some sort of instructions from the general. He gave me a rough idea what he was up to.”

Lasari gave Grimes the number of the Lufthansa flight, his arrival time in Chicago and a description of the single item he would be carrying. And then he gave him General Weir’s instructions about Sergeant Gordon and General Stigmuller.

“I have their numbers,” Grimes said, his voice suddenly hard. “I’ll tell them what the general wants them to know.” He broke the connection.

Before entering the waiting area for his flight, Lasari stood to one side and watched as passengers were guided through the metal detectors used to search out concealed weapons. On a moving belt attendants arranged hand luggage to pass through a separate detector, to be picked up on the other side of the barrier.

Two minutes before flight time he handed his duffel to an attendant and walked through the detector arches. A variety of luggage moved past him before he saw his duffel emerging on the belt. He stepped over to pick it up, as casual as any other traveler, then blended into the line of passengers holding boarding passes.

Sergeant Karl Malleck had rung for fresh coffee. Since five o’clock he had been out of bed and restless. With the business on schedule, it was too early for whiskey, yet he desperately needed a pickup. The waiting, the goddam silence, the creaking floors, the smells of the horse stalls that became miasmic in the damp — it was all getting on his nerves. He needed someone to talk to.

When Private Andrew Scales came in with the tray Malleck thought of sending him back for another cup. Instead he said sharply, “You been checking up on your mailbox regularly, Scales?”

“Yes, sir,” the black man said. “I goes over every two days or so.”

“You know I don’t want those pickup notices lying around any longer than absolutely necessary.”

Scales responded with a nervous chuckle. “No, sir, Top, I’m on the ball. I’m as worried as you are to pick up Uncle Andy’s presents.”

Malleck looked at Scales, experiencing a sharp distaste, not because the man was black, not because he stood there shuffling like some back-country Jim Crow, but because he was so dumb; because in a society where he’d been ass-kicked since day one, in a world where his only pleasure came from a needle, he was still dumb enough to take on worries for somebody else.

“You know what I’m really waiting for, Scales. The golden goose is coming in for a landing.” He looked at his watch. “That fucker Salmi is late again. His wife says he’s having stomach troubles, but I told him to get in here today.”

“He’ll be round, sarge, he’s a good man.”

“Well, you go out front and wait for him, Scales. Get him in here. And tell me the minute Neal and Castana pull into the courtyard.”

“I can watch good from my window, sarge. It’s raining outside.”

“So what, so what, Scales? You never been wet before? Take a broom, sweep off the steps or something. If there’s one thing I hate more than a dumb nigger, it’s a lazy nigger.”

Lasari fell in line behind several civilians at the farthest customs counter, where the queue was shorter. He gave the uniformed official his customs slip checked Nothing to Declare, then swung the duffel up on the counter.

“... just one more GI on leave, carrying regulation duffel, rightsize, right weight, right initials, right ID number,” Sergeant Strasser had said. The customs official was young, Lasari noticed, probably not much older than he was, with a name tag, Kelsey, pinned to his twill pocket, “... customs does want to look at your gear, all they see is a couple of presents for the girl friend back home and a few changes of Army underwear.”

Kelsey unzipped the bag, looked inside, ran a hand through the garments and closed it again. He made a chalk mark on the canvas and pushed the bag toward Lasari. “Welcome home, soldier,” he said.

Before the two big MPs fell into step with him, Lasari was aware of someone else who seemed to have him under observation, a traveler in well-tailored clothes and carrying a briefcase, a middle-aged black man with skin the color of light soot and lips that were almost purple. But when Joe Castana and Eddie Neal came out of the crowd to walk on either side of Lasari, the black man disappeared. Both men were in uniform with shiny boots and MP armbands on their sleeves.

“You’re looking downright sickly, Jackson,” Eddie Neal said. “You look like a bone the dogs worked over.”

By the sheer bulk and press of their bodies the two men guided Lasari away from the main airport lobby and toward a side door leading to a maintenance parking lot.

“Don’t try to run, Jackson,” Neal said. “We’re both armed.”

“Run? He’s too scared to run,” Castana said. “He don’t even ask questions. He even try to speak, he’d be spittin’ cotton.”

Lasari’s eyes swept the maintenance area, not knowing what to expect but determined to be ready for it if he saw it. A chain-link fence, twelve feet high and topped with coils of barbed wire, circled the lot. A dozen or more employees’ cars were parked in a row, as well as one long limo with shaded, opaque windows, several baggage carts, and a pair of food and beverage trucks jacked up for repair. Four employees in airlines overalls were tinkering with the mechanism of a moveable staircase.

Parked in a far corner of the yard, near an exit gate, was an Army vehicle with a jeep understructure, high wheels and a windowless van body on top. Lasari knew that was where they were heading.

He felt a sudden urge to pray, to make a bargain with God, promise some contribution or sacrifice so difficult or stunning it would attract divine attention even down to this remote maintenance lot. As a boy in North Carolina he had often bargained with some imagined heavenly being for good grades in school, or a day at the circus by promising to rake the yard or paint a shed without being asked. Down in the minor leagues, in the swamp country of Florida he had once offered to do a hundred pushups before breakfast, every day, all season, in return for a good batting average. In Vietnam he had used pain as barter, offering to take any and all suffering without recrimination or complaint if only he was allowed to live.