Michael Dibdin: Dark Specter

Wayne Sullivan looked at her, shaking his head slowly. Tears trickled from his eyes and fell, getting tangled up in the mesh of his beard like dew in a spiderweb.

“Can’t do that,” he mumbled.

“That buddy of yours paid your fine,” said Kjarstad. “You’re free to go.”

The movements of Sullivan’s head became ever faster and convulsive.

“I don’t care about the fine!” he said. “It’s the babies I care about.”

His tone was so pathetic that Kristine Kjarstad had to look away. Dead bodies didn’t bother her, precisely because they were dead. The grief and suffering of the living was much more difficult to deal with.

“We’re doing everything we can,” she said in a kindly tone, forgetting for a moment that Sullivan himself was the principal suspect, in fact the only one. “I’m sure we’ll find out pretty soon who did it.”

Wayne Sullivan looked up at her in astonishment.

“Find out?” he exclaimed. “What the hell’s to find out? I did it! That’s what I came to tell you. I didn’t want to do it, but there was no other way to save them from that bitch.”

I never expected to see any of them again, and when I did it was pure coincidence. I was passing through O’Hare on the way back from Boston, having visited my parents on the occasion of my father’s sixtieth birthday. He had recently retired, and they had moved to a house on Cape Cod. Because of my mother’s poor health they had been forced to cancel a planned trip to come to see us, and since Rachael hadn’t wanted to travel so far with David, I ended up going there alone. On the way back my connection in Chicago was delayed, and I was killing time in the bar when someone walked up to me and said, “Phil?”

The face looked vaguely familiar, but it was only when the man noticed my blank expression and said his own name that I realized who it was. Recognition came tainted with a sense of unease. Of the whole group, Vince was the one I had been least close to. His interests-sex, drugs and rock-and-roll-were also ours, but the single-mindedness with which he pursued them set him apart. To Vince, time not spent balling, tripping or bopping, preferably all at once, was time wasted. We admired his purity, but even then it seemed a little extreme. I had never forgotten the time I’d unguardedly mentioned some novel I was currently enthusiastic about, and Vince had remarked crushingly, “You still read books? I’m too busy living.” After that I’d never quite known what to say to him. What on earth would we have to say now?

It immediately became clear that Vince was no longer Vince. The former acidhead, sack artist and lead guitar manque was now a highly paid sound technician for a TV station in Chicago with a profitable sideline in freelance assignments. He looked fit, tanned and relaxed, and sipped a Perrier while I slurped my scotch. The duds he had on looked like they cost more than my car, and instead of a commuter plane to St. Paul he was catching a direct flight to Tokyo, club class, to film a documentary on sumo wrestling.

Worst of all, he was nice about it. He made no attempt to cold-cock me with a blow-by-blow account of his glamorous lifestyle, and even showed some polite interest when I filled him in on the banal data of my own. I told him that I was teaching English at a community college, that I was married, that we had a child. What more could I say? That I liked my work? That I loved my son to distraction? That I was happier than I had ever been in my life? It would have sounded false and forced. I let the lame facts speak for themselves with no attempt to explain or excuse. Vince was very kind and correct.

“Boy or girl?” he asked.

“A boy. David.”

“How old is he?”

“Going on seven.”

“Great. I’d love to have kids one day. Right now, though, a family life’s kind of impossible.”

He even managed to sound slightly envious! I started to warm to him.

Having exhausted every other topic we had in common, we began to talk about the others. Vince had lost touch with Greg, who had last been heard of working on the Alaska pipeline, but he had news of Sam and Larry. It was bizarre and a little disturbing.

“When they got drafted, we all figured Sam would get some cushy desk job while Larry ended up as a grunt, right? Wrong! The army found out that Larry had worked as a painter, and he got to stay right here fixing up the mess and recreational facilities at the base. Never even went to Vietnam.”

I laughed.

“Good for him.”

Vince shook his head.

“Two days before he was due to go home, he got hit by a truck. Some guy had been drinking, came around the corner with no lights on, didn’t even see him. Larry didn’t stand a chance.”

I was shocked. I’d read about the war, of course, and seen the familiar, horrific pictures on TV, but it had all seemed as remote from my own existence as gangland killings in Miami or race riots in Los Angeles. But Larry was someone I’d known. He’d painted our house in his spare time, using up leftovers from whatever job he happened to be working on. The results were quite spectacular: strips and patches of every hue, shade and finish, some matt, others shimmering satin, a few in high gloss. I’d joked and smoked with Larry, eaten and drunk with him. Once in a while we even talked. I suddenly remembered that last time, down at the Commercial Hotel, when he’d clashed with Sam over the existence of God.

As so often in the past, when the joint had passed and the vibes were good, Vince must have been having the same thought.

“Well, I guess Larry knows the answer to all the big questions now,” he said. “Shame he can’t come back and have the last word.”

“Sam made it OK, then?” I asked, glad to change the subject.

“Uh huh. Which is almost as weird as Larry getting killed.”

“How do you mean?”

Vince looked at me.

“You remember how the system worked? After induction you did two months basic training, and then you got to find out what classification they’d assigned you. The one no one wanted was Eleven Bravo. That meant you did two more months training as a rifleman, then got shipped to Nam to replace the guys who were coming home in body bags. But there were eight support personnel for every man at the front, so if you had any kind of qualifications or education your chances of avoiding combat were pretty good.”

“Like Sam,” I prompted.

“Yeah. Except Sam volunteered.”

“Volunteered?”

Vince nodded.

“Doesn’t make sense, right? Anyone that crazy to see action had already joined up, and they’d mostly all been in ROTC at college and were into all that military bullshit. But for someone to wait to get drafted and then deliberately lay his life on the line when he could walk away with a job as a filing clerk! And a guy like Sam!”

I shook my head.

“I don’t get it.”

“Me neither. But that’s what he did, and he spent his whole tour of duty under fire. The company he was in took eighty percent casualties in one firefight. He was out there the full year, and he came back without a scratch on him.”

“You met him, then?”

“He wrote me. We talked about getting together, but nothing ever came of it.”

We chatted some more about this and that, and then my flight was called. Vince and I hurriedly exchanged addresses, phone numbers and formulaic promises to keep in touch. By the time my plane was airborne, the whole encounter seemed unreal. I didn’t bother to mention it to Rachael when I got home.

It must have been almost a year after that when Sam called me at home one evening. It was not a good moment. David had recently developed chronic asthma, and although the medication normally kept the symptoms in check, he was still liable to have periodic crises. This was one. He had caught a heavy cold the week before, and this had precipitated an asthma attack which kept him-and us-awake for hours every night while he coughed and cried and struggled for breath.