James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

Something else was bothering him. Historians wrote of battles as epic events involving thousands of soldiers acting in concert, all of them directed by a brilliant strategist such as Alexander or Napoleon or Stonewall Jackson. But for the grunts on the line, the reality was otherwise. They took home a limited perspective, a few shards of memory, flashes of light, a name being called out, the whirring sound of a projectile flying past one’s ear. In the larger context of the battle, the individual’s perspective was little more than a sketch on the back of one’s thumbnail. The invasion at Inchon saved United Nations troops from being pushed into the sea. But Hackberry remembered only one detail from it. A group of marines under the command of a young naval lieutenant had captured a lighthouse. They were aided by Korean civilians. Had they not held the lighthouse, the peninsula would have been lost. In retaliation, the North Koreans began executing civilians. Some of the civilians armed themselves with captured weapons and fought back at a railway station, where they filled suitcases from the baggage room with dirt and barricaded themselves inside. They should have survived, but they didn’t. A shell from either a railroad gun or an offshore battery hit the depot and killed everyone inside. The shell must have contained phosphorus, because the bodies of the dead were burned uniformly black, as though they had been roasted on a slow fire, the skin swelling until it burst.

Hackberry had never forgotten the image of the dead Koreans and their frozen posture inside the ruins of the building. Nor would he ever forget the image of Ethan Riser dying in a spray of. 45-caliber bullets fired into his face by Jack Collins. People said time healed. If it did, Hackberry thought, the pocket watch he had inherited from his father must have been defective.

“Pam?” he said through the open door without getting up.

“Yes, sir?” she answered.

“See if Anton Ling is home. If she is, tell her we’re on our way out.”

“What’s up?” Pam said, standing in the doorway.

“It’s time for Miss Anton to get honest about her past.”

“You talking about that Air America bullshit?”

“No, arms to northern Nicaragua, courtesy of Josef Sholokoff. Would you stop using that language?”

Pam looked out the window at a woman coming up the sidewalk. “She must be psychic,” Pam said.

Hackberry wasn’t sure whether there was a thread of resentment or jealousy in Pam’s voice. He had given up dealing with the mysteries of eros and was sure that at some linguistic juncture in ancient times, the words “error” and “erotic” had sprung from the same root. The truth was, he could not define his own feelings about either Anton Ling or Pam Tibbs. One reminded him of his dead wife, Rie, who would always remain the love of his life. The other woman, Pam Tibbs, was as brave as Rie had been and equally protective of him, even to the point of causing him public embarrassment, and the look in her eyes always told him that she saw the young man inside him and not the man who was almost eighty. Also, she gave no quarter in either love or war, and her level of loyalty was ferocious. No man could have a better companion as a lover or friend. He could have worse problems, he thought. But damn it to hell, an old fool was still an old fool.

Anton Ling walked past Maydeen and R.C. and Felix and a bail bondsman and Pam Tibbs and a drunk cuffed to a D-ring as though they were not there. “I just heard about Ethan Riser on the radio,” she said.

“Chief Deputy Tibbs and I were just about to come out to your place,” Hackberry said.

“Agent Riser called me this morning on his cell phone. I wish I’d gotten ahold of you.”

“Called you about what?”

“He apologized for invading my privacy. He told me to be a friend to you. He sounded like a man making his peace. I asked him if he was all right. He said if I heard from him again, that would mean he was doing just fine. Why are all these people standing around here?”

“We work here,” Pam said.

“Do you want to sit down, Miss Anton?” Hackberry said.

“No.”

“How do you know Ethan was on a cell phone?” Hackberry asked.

“He was breaking up. Jack Collins just called me.”

“Wait a minute. I don’t understand. Collins called to tell you Ethan was dead?”

“No. He didn’t mention anything about Mr. Riser. He asked me if I had given the FBI his location. I told him I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. He asked if I had learned of his whereabouts from the illegals who come to my house. When I told him I had no interest in either him or the FBI, he told me I was a Jezebel. On the way into town, I heard the news report about Agent Riser on the radio.”

“Sit down,” Hackberry said.

“No. I have to go.”

“Where?”

“Home. Collins is insane. I have people coming tonight. He’ll take his revenge on them.”

“I doubt it. Come in and close the door, Deputy Tibbs.”

“You’re holding me?” Anton Ling said.

“The sheriff in Brewster County found Ethan’s cell phone inside the ashes of a bonfire that Collins set. Collins probably threw the phone there after he recovered the list of calls Ethan had made in the last few days. That’s why Collins associated you with Ethan discovering his whereabouts. He also has a way of blaming women for most of his problems.”

“Why were you coming out to my house?”

“We want Josef Sholokoff in a cage,” he said.

“Then talk to the government agencies that have let him run loose all these years,” Anton said.

“You recognized a man outside your hospital room. He was connected with smuggling guns into Nicaragua and introducing cocaine into the United States. He was with the guy whose face you put a screwdriver in. You’ve worked intimately with Sholokoff’s people, and you have information about them that we don’t. You have to give us some leads, Miss Anton.”

“I don’t have any.”

“What you mean is you don’t want to give us any,” Pam said.

“Do I look like a professional informant?” Illogically, Anton said, “Most of the people I knew years ago are probably dead.”

“This isn’t Cambodia. We’re sick of people working out their problems at our expense,” Pam said. “It’s time to get your head out of your ass, Ms. Ling.”

“Why don’t you get your head out of yours?” Anton said. “The electorate in this area puts people in office who belong on chain gangs.”

“I guess that includes the sheriff,” Pam said.

“You know what I mean,” Anton said.

“No, I don’t,” Pam said. “We know you’re sheltering illegals. We also know you were part of an Underground Railroad that hid them in Kansas back in the eighties. But we look the other way. Maybe you should decide who your real friends are.”

Hackberry felt a pain spreading through his head as though someone were tightening a vise on his temples. “This isn’t solving our problem,” he said.

“The man I recognized outside my hospital room was a handler of animals,” Anton said. “Exotic animals of some kind. I didn’t like him. But I was part of the gun-smuggling operation, Sheriff Holland. I’m responsible for the deaths of innocent people.”

“Did this guy supply exotic animals to game farms?” Hackberry asked.

“Maybe. He talked about it. I remember his complaining about driving a truckload of them into West Texas,” Anton said.

“Where in West Texas?” Hackberry asked.

“This was twenty-five years ago.”

“Where?” he said.

She shook her head. “I don’t remember. He probably didn’t say. Wait a minute. He made a nasty joke once about a brothel in Phnom Penh. It specialized in… I don’t care to talk about what it specialized in.”