John Katzenbach: Hart’s War

She paused, waiting for a response, which came merely as a grunted negative, which was precisely what she'd expected and made her smile as she ran the brush through the silver cascade she still wore down around her shoulders. Then she added, "How are we doing on time?"

"We have all the time in the world," Tommy replied softly.

He was seated by the large window of their hotel suite, and from where he was positioned, he could see both his wife's reflection in the mirror and, when he pivoted and looked through the windowpane, all the way to Lake Michigan. It was a summer mid-morning and streaky sunlight flitted off the dark blue surface of the water. He had spent the past quarter hour studiously watching sailboats pirouette across the slight roll of the waves, cutting back and forth in seemingly aimless patterns. The grace and speed of each sleek hull, circling beneath a billowing white sail, was hypnotic.

He wondered a bit why he'd always gravitated to fishing boats and noisy motors, guessing this preference had something to do with his inclination for destinations, but then decided also that he would have had too much trouble handling both the tiller and the mainsheet of a sailboat driven fast before the wind.

Tommy looked down and stole a glance at his left hand. He was missing his index finger and half of the little finger. Purplish scar tissue had built up in the deep gouges ripped from his palm. But, he thought, the hand appeared to be far more crippled than it truly was. For more than fifty years his wife had been asking him if he needed help tying his tie, and for all that time he'd always replied that he did not. He had learned how to tie knots in both the ties he wore to his office and the fishing lines he used on his boat. And every month when the government had dutifully sent him a modest disability check, he'd just as dutifully signed it over to the general scholarship fund at Harvard.

Still, his war-damaged hand had lately developed a tendency to the stiffness of arthritis, and on more than one recent occasion had frozen painfully on him. He had not told his wife about these small betrayals.

"Do you think there will be anyone there we know?" his wife asked.

Tommy reluctantly turned away from the vision of sailboats, and fixed his eyes on his wife's reflection. For a single heady moment he thought she had not changed one bit since the day they were married in 1945.

"No," he said.

"Probably just a lot of dignitaries. He was pretty famous. Maybe there will be some lawyers I met over the years. But not really anyone we know."

"Not even someone from the prisoner-of-war camp?"

Tommy smiled and shook his head.

"No. I don't think so."

Lydia put the hairbrush down, replacing it in her hand with an eyebrow pencil. She worked on her face for a moment, then said, "I wish Hugh were still alive so he could keep you company."

Tommy felt a sudden twinge of sadness.

"I do, too," he said.

Hugh Renaday had died a decade earlier. A week after being diagnosed with terminal cancer and well before the inevitable progression of the disease could rob his limbs and heart of strength, the hulking hockey player had taken down a favorite hunting rifle, gathered up snowshoes, tent, sleeping bag, and a portable backpacker's stove, and after writing a series of unequivocal farewell notes to his wife, his children, his grandchildren, and one to Tommy, he had loaded everything into the back of his four-wheel-drive truck and driven deep into the cold wilderness of the Canadian Rockies. It was January, the dead of winter, and when his car would go no farther through the piled snow of an old, abandoned logging trail, Hugh Renaday had started to hike in.

When his legs tired of fighting through the northern Alberta drifts, he had stopped, made a modest camp, cooked himself one last meal, then patiently waited for nighttime's falling temperatures, plummeting far below the freezing point, to kill him.

Tommy understood later from one of Hugh's fellow Mounties that freezing to death was not considered a terrible way to die in the North country.

One shivered a few times, then eventually slipped into an unconsciousness that mimicked a deep and restful sleep, the years' memories sliding away slowly along with the final breaths of life. It was a sturdy and efficient way to die. Tommy had always thought, as organized and steady and dependable as the longtime policeman had been every second of his life.

He did not like to think of Hugh's death much, though once, when he and Lydia had taken a cruise ship to Alaska and he'd stayed up late into the night mesmerized by the aurora borealis, he'd hoped that the great sheet of colorful lights startling the black sky had been the last thing that Hugh Renaday had seen of this world.

Instead, when he remembered his friend, he preferred to think of a moment the two men had shared, fishing not far from Tommy's retirement home in the Florida Keys. Tommy had spotted a huge barracuda, a torpedolike brute, lurking on the edge of a flat, just hanging in a few clear feet of water waiting in ambush for some unsuspecting jack crevalle or needlefish to wander by. Tommy had rigged up a spinning rod with a fluorescent red tube lure and a wire leader. Hugh had thrown the lure just a few feet from the 'cuda's gaping mouth.

The fish had surged forward without hesitation, and then, once hooked, had cartwheeled and exploded, its long silver sides tearing free from the water's surface, blasting immense white sheets across the waves.

Hugh had landed the fish, and while posing for the obligatory photographs to send home, had taken a moment to stare at the great rows of almost translucent razor-sharp canine teeth in the massive jaws of the fish.

"The business end of a barracuda," Tommy had said.

"Reminds me of some of my honorable fellow members of the bar."

But Hugh Renaday had shaken his head.

"Visser," the Canadian had replied.

"Hauptmann Heinrich Visser. And this is a Visser-fish."

Tommy glanced down at his hand again. Visserfish, he thought.

He must have mumbled the word out loud, because Lydia asked from the bathroom, "What was that?"

"Nothing," Tommy replied.

"Just wondering. Do you think the red tie is too bright for a funeral?"

"No," his wife said.

"It's just right."

He guessed that the morning's gathering would be a little like Phillip

Pryce's funeral, which had been held in one of London's finer cathedrals a dozen years after the war had ended. Phillip had had many prominent friends from both the military and the legal profession, and they had crowded into the pews while a boys' choir sang in high-pitched and pristine Latin. Tommy and Hugh often later joked that undoubtedly many of the barristers who'd occupied the opposite side of some issue had attended only to make absolutely certain that Phillip was indeed dead.

Phillip Pryce had died, both Tommy and Hugh had agreed, most wondrously.

On the night he'd managed to extricate a conservative member of Parliament from a messy entanglement with a woman half his age plying the most ancient of traditions, Pryce had allowed the junior members of his firm to take him out for a lengthy, elegant dinner in celebration.

Afterward, he'd stopped off at his private club for a late-night brandy.

Napoleon. Over a hundred years old. One of the butlers had assumed that Phillip had fallen asleep, resting deep in the overstuffed leather of a wing chair, snifter in his hand, only to discover that Pryce had actually died quite quietly of sudden heart failure. The old barrister was smiling ear-to-ear, as if someone familiar and beloved had been at Death's side when he came beckoning. At Phillip's funeral, his entire law firm, from most senior to most junior, had marched into the cathedral, shoulder to shoulder, like a Roman cohort, tears filling their eyes.