Carol O’Connell - Shell Game

But according to Mr. Roland’s service record, obtained by midnight requisition from a military computer, the old man had never been promoted past the rank of lieutenant, and he had been dishonorably discharged before the end of World War II.

Mallory and the nurse walked down a hallway of tall windows. The glass sparkled with a recent cleaning and gave them a clear view of the dead garden. This long gallery was lined with chairs of wicker and chairs on wheels, each one only marginally occupied by an elderly person in a green robe and paper slippers. Their faces were devoid of expression, not enjoying the vista of bare trees and brown grass, their only activity, for they seemed to have been parked here and abandoned.

And now Mallory better understood the old man she had yet to meet. „You humor Mr. Roland, don’t you?“

„Oh, yeah, everybody does,“ said the nurse. „My grandfather was in World War II. He’d flay me alive if I didn’t show the old man some respect. So I call him ‘General,’ and sometimes I even salute. He likes that.“

Perhaps Mr. Roland was not deluded, but merely cagey. She turned back to look at the chair-bound people in a holding pattern at the windows, disengaged from life and unattended. Yes, Mr. Roland had been wise to elevate his rank in the world.

„You’ll be two minutes late for your appointment, ma’am. My fault – sorry. He might make you pay for that.“ The nurse stopped by a door at the end of the corridor and opened it for her. „He’s all yours.“

When she entered the private room, she found a withered little man with stray wisps of white hair sprouting in soft horns on either side of his balding head. He seemed lost in the network of technology. A plastic bag hung on the arm of a metal pole and dripped liquid into his veins. She could see the bruises on his arms from many other needles. A cable from his bedside monitor wove between the buttons of his red pajamas and stood out in a bold line to his heart. More tubes carried oxygen from the wall unit to the plastic device under his nostrils.

„So you’re Detective Mallory.“ Mr. Roland’s voice was the last remnant of strength, and it carried the authority of his falsely escalated rank. He looked her up and down, as if he were indeed a general reviewing his troops. His eyes came to rest on a bulge in the line of her blazer. He pointed to it with one gnarly finger. „Is that a gun? Now who’d give a gun to a little girl like you? Show me your identification.“ This was an order.

Mallory reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out her shield and ID. She held it up to him, and he squinted to read her name and rank.

„Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,“ she said, stepping back out of range from any spittle that might come her way.

„The police are all children now.“ The old man shook his head. „But girls with guns. If that ain’t the limit.“

Mallory settled into a chair beside the bed. „I need information about a man under your command in World War II.“

„Oh, the real war. Now that was a time and a half. I was career army, you know. In my first command – mostly sabotage details – damn few came back alive, and that’s a fact. That’s how much action my battalion saw.“

By Mallory’s count, it was hardly a battalion, and only two men out of twenty had come back alive. The U.S. Army had been less than satisfied with Roland’s explanation for this carelessness. „You could save me some time, sir. You know how long it takes to get anything out of the military.“

Actually, it had taken very little time. Hacking into the Pentagon computer was a rite of passage for the high-technology generation. A child could do it, and many children did. The military system suffered thousands of hits every year. But her time inside the files was limited by the bells and whistles of electronic watchdogs. „The soldier was Private Malakhai. Do you – “

„Do I remember him? Hell yes, I do. I did my level best to kill that son of a bitch.“ He paused to gauge the effect on her, and he was clearly disappointed that she was neither shocked nor impressed. „On his last mission, I made him jump from a plane in a daylight run. Damn fluke. The German gunners on the ground must’ve been napping when the boy’s parachute opened.“

„You wanted him dead – one of your own men.“

„Oh, yeah.“ He seemed more pleased with himself now that she had recognized his godhood. „The corporal – Edwards was his name. Damn kid, younger than you are. Well, that pissant tried to keep Malakhai in the plane. I had to pistol-whip the little bastard to keep him from blocking the door. Then I ordered Malakhai out of the plane. I should’ve pushed Edwards out too. But he wasn’t wearing a chute. I like to give a man a sporting chance.“

Mallory nodded. Edwards was the one who had chased down the lost medals belonging to his unit. Among the decorations he had secured for Private Malakhai, there were too many Purple Hearts, each one standing for a wound. She could not get them out of her mind.

„Oh, yeah,“ said the old man. „I saw it as my responsibility to make sure Malakhai never went home from the war. That boy wasn’t something you could turn loose on a peacetime population – not in good conscience.“

„He won a lot of medals.“ Her voice was soft but obstinate.

„Mostly shrapnel.“ The old man waved his hand in the air to say this was of no consequence. „It was a mistake to give him medals. He didn’t assassinate his targets one at a time, you know. He blew up troops by the dozen, by the damn truckload. And sometimes he forgot to make distinctions between soldiers and civilians. That kind of butchery never makes it into the permanent record.“

Covert missions. That would explain the lack of detail on Malakhai’s records and the alarms going off each time she had peeled back another layer of security codes.

The old man raised one clenched fist. „We took all the risks and got damn little glory.“

We? „So Malakhai did a lot of high-risk missions.“

„Mostly suicide runs. But he kept finding his way home again, turning up at field camp, torn up like a damn alley cat. And all the time, his eyes were getting colder and colder.“ Roland smiled, warming to his subject. „Hollow Boy – that’s what I named him. After a while, he even answered to it. Toward the end, he wasn’t human anymore. I should have done it right – just taken out my gun and shot him the way you’d put down a dog. I had the sweetest little pistol, a gift from General Patton.“

Yeah, right.

„Did you know his wife died two days before he enlisted?“

„That’s what the British said. Malakhai did basic training with their boys. Damn doctors wanted to sedate the shit out of him and put him in a hospital. In 1942, they were taking kids and old men, but they didn’t want any part of Malakhai. Said he was out of touch with reality. They didn’t think he’d stand the chance of a child in battle. Yeah, he was sick all right, but such a useful kind of crazy – no sense of fear. You could fire a rifle right next to that kid’s head – no reaction. So I figured, why waste him? I had a clerk fiddle his papers for repatriation and reassignment. He was born a Polish bastard, so we gave him an American father. Pulled him out of basic training before the Brits could ship him off to the funny farm. Now that was a neat piece of work.“

„You fiddled a lot of paperwork for your unit. Weren’t you supposed to send your men home after they’d been shot to pieces? Wasn’t anyone counting Malakhai’s Hearts? He was wounded seven times, seven Purple Hearts.“

„The paperwork was delayed. Wartime bureaucracy.“

„And there were other medals for valor. They caught up to Malakhai five years after the war. You never wanted him to have them, did you?“