Ross Thomas: Ah, Treachery!

“She knew who I was, for Christ sake,” Millwed said. “She wasn’t supposed to know that.”

“Forget the tape,” the General said.

“Forget it?”

“Certainly. Now that Viar’s killed himself, what does it prove? That an unmarried colonel on extended temporary duty took time off to bed the attractive daughter of an old friend and, being the soul of discretion, used an out-of-the-way motel. If the tape should surface somewhere, I might have to place a naughty-naughty letter in your file. But what the hell, they’ll say. At least it wasn’t some fifteen-year-old boy.”

“I don’t want any letter,” Millwed said.

“Forget the letter. It hasn’t happened, it probably won’t and we have something else to decide.”

“Twodees,” the Colonel said.

“Twodees,” the General agreed.

Millwed turned to reach for the bottle of Wild Turkey and poured an inch of whiskey into his glass. He raised the bottle questioningly at the General, who shook his head. The Colonel replaced the bottle, tasted his drink and said, “You know what I really want?”

“Sure, Ralph. You want your own personal copies of Hank Viar’s little red notebooks.”

“Yes, sir. Exactly, sir.”

“You’ll get copies.”

“When?”

“After Kite does Twodees.”

“I want them now, General,” Millwed said, not quite making it an order.

The General nodded patiently, as if dealing with a fool. “I didn’t quite finish, Colonel.”

“Then finish.”

“You’ll have your very own Xeroxed copies of Viar’s journals as soon as Kite does Twodees — and you do Kite.”

The Colonel leaned back in his chair, nodding contentedly. “I wouldn’t mind doing Kite. With him and Twodees both gone, that’d leave who?”

“Nobody.”

“What about the Altford woman, Patrokis and General Winfield?”

“They weren’t in El Salvador.”

“Neither was Kite.”

“We’ll just have to pretend he was,” General Hudson said.

The four of them ate a late dinner at the Kudzu Café on upper 14th Street in northwest Washington. The café featured what some call soul food and others southern cooking. Everything was served family style in large dishes and bowls that offered fried chicken, country ham, mashed potatoes, chicken gravy, redeye gravy, corn bread, biscuits, turnip greens, okra fried and boiled, sliced tomatoes, black-eyed peas and, for dessert, a choice of pecan or lemon meringue pie or both.

Shawnee Viar ate little. Jessica Carver ate a little of almost everything, passing on what she called the “slime okra.” Partain sampled nearly everything and Patrokis ate large quantities of everything, especially the fried chicken, then leaned back in his chair and announced, “God, I love stuff cooked in lard.”

The bill came with the coffee. Partain paid it, added a 20 percent tip and wrote the total into his expense notebook. Shawnee Viar watched him curiously.

“This a business expense?” she said.

He nodded.

“And here I was thinking my newest and dearest friends had gathered to feast and reminisce about the late Henry Viar, bad husband, worse father, aged spy and, late in his career, the disappearer’s failed apprentice.”

“The what?” Jessica Carver said.

“In Central America,” Shawnee said, “in San Salvador, to be precise, old Hank sort of apprenticed himself to those who made people disappear. But he really wasn’t any good at it. ‘The mind accepts,’ he wrote, ‘but the stomach rejects.’ ”

“He wrote that or said it?” Partain asked.

“Wrote it. Up until almost the very end he’d pound out his daily pensées on the old Smith-Corona, then copy them into red spiral notebooks with a Mont Blanc pen that some shit gave him. The Shah’s sister, I think, just after the Kurds got dished.”

“You read them — these journals?” Partain said.

“Sure. Sometimes I’d read the wadded-up typewritten pages in the wastebasket and sometimes I’d read the notebooks themselves. All thirty-two of them. One for each year.” She paused, still staring at Partain, then said, “You had a wife, I think. In fact, I know you did because old Hank always referred to her as Senora Partain.”

Partain thought he felt the blood drain from his face. It prickled. Then his face turned hot and he wondered if his color had gone from flour white to Valentine red. When he saw them all staring at him, he sucked in air, held it, let it out slowly, then smiled what he knew must be a ghastly smile at Shawnee Viar and asked, “What else did he say about her?”

“Your wife?”

“Yes.”

“You want it verbatim?” she said. “I have this trick memory that recalls stuff like that verbatim — well, almost verbatim. It’s how I made Phi Beta Kappa, fat lot of good it did me.”

“As close as you can,” Partain said, his voice cracking on “can.”

“Okay,” she said. “About your wife my old dad wrote something like this, but remember, it’s not exactly word for word.”

Partain made himself nod. Shawnee Viar closed her eyes for a moment, as if trying to visualize the words, then opened her eyes, stared at something that seemed to hover a foot above Partain’s head and began to recite:

“ ‘Colonel H. and Captain M. dropped by to discuss the wife of Major P. Seems they’re getting pressure from our hosts to do something or other about the lovely Senora Partain. What, pray? I ask. My two militarists suggest she might disappear — at least for a while. How long is a while? I ask. Just arrange it, Hank, says my Colonel. Put it in writing, say I. They refuse, brave lads, and I think of calling Major P., but such a call could be self-incriminating and, after all, perhaps nothing will happen. Still, something probably should be done and I must think more about it. It’s now three days later and I apparently thought too long. Yesterday, Senora Partain disappeared one hundred meters from her house. Perhaps I should try to buy her back. Or is it too late? I’ll talk to Colonel H. about it. And Captain M., of course. Later. I’ve talked to them and it is, alas, far too late.’ ”

Shawnee Viar stopped talking, lowered her gaze to Partain’s face, saw what was there, said, “Christ!” and shrank away from it. The others were also staring at Partain, whose eyes glittered and whose lips were twisted into a snarl. The color in his face had again deepened into a dark dangerous-looking red. He closed his eyes then, willing them back to normal. The snarl went away and the dark red face changed quickly to bright pink and then, more slowly, to normal.

Partain opened his eyes and very softly said, “I’d like to read that one journal, Shawnee.”

She gave her head a single slow shake. “It’s gone. They’re all gone. The day Hank was killed I looked for them. They were behind a baseboard that was behind his couch upstairs. The photo’s gone, too.” She looked at Patrokis, as if for corroboration. “Remember when I went upstairs to pee?”

He nodded, still watching Partain.

“That’s when I looked for them,” she said. “Maybe that’s why they killed him. For the journals. I’m very sorry, Major.”

“I’m not a major.”

“I’m still sorry,” she said and turned to Patrokis. “I can’t go back to Volta Place tonight.”

“Stay with me,” he said.

“At VOMIT?”

“I don’t really live there. I’ve got an apartment on Nineteenth.” He paused. “You can have the couch or the bed.”

Shawnee’s glance toured the table and stopped at Jessica Carver. “What d’you think?”

“I think you might be a little spacey right now and if you don’t take Nick up on his offer, I’ll know you are.”