Gordon Kent - Peacemaker

“The perfect hostess,” Alan said, smiling.

“Yeah, somebody compliment me on the food, or something. Wonder Woman Cooks!” She picked a crumb of cassata from Bea Peretz’s plate and ate it. “Not bad, if I do say so myself.”

Dukas looked whipped. “I ruined your dinner.”

Rose came around the table and kissed his balding head. “You didn’t ruin anything.” But Alan felt a chill, as if an unwanted future had put its hand on him. It was as if Bea’s daughter, growing older out of his sight, out of his awareness, had become the cause of the break. He thought of his own son, sleeping upstairs: was he, innocent, a kind of time bomb? He found himself thinking, Why can’t things just stay the same?

They all did the dishes and then poured out more wine, and Rose went to check on Bea and Mikey.

“I feel like shit,” Dukas said.

“Shut up about it, it wasn’t your fault.”

They were getting a little drunk, Alan decided. He’d better make coffee.

“I’ve put in for a transfer,” Dukas said. “I’m leaving, too.”

“Good God, why—you love NCIS,” Peretz said.

“It’s Al’s fault—he wrote me this letter. About Bosnia.” He looked accusingly at Alan. “You said they needed cops like me! Well, now they got one!” Now, almost apologetically, Dukas said, “I’ve volunteered for a war crimes unit. NCIS would have sent somebody anyway.”

Alan went to the kitchen to make coffee, shouting back to Dukas to talk loud so he could hear.

“I got no family, no kids, so what difference. Mainly I’ll put together this unit and try to go after some of these bastards.” He talked about the program he was joining, mostly a sop to the conscience of NATO. “Don’t get your hopes up,” Alan said, coming back. “You can’t save the world.”

“I can do something .”

“We were there six months, what did we do? We did Operation Deny Flight, did we save the old man who had his feet cut off? The guy who was tortured so badly he died of pneumonia? The UN set up enclaves, so-called safe zones, ‘safe havens,’ they’re where some of the worst fighting has been. Now they’ve signed a so-called ‘peace accord’ and divided Bosnia with a line like a snake’s intestine that makes ethnic cleansing permanent. It’s a rat’s nest. The Serbs aren’t the only assholes, either. Fucking Croatians are not exactly saints. The Bosnian Muslims are in bed with Iranian Intelligence. You can’t save them from themselves!”

Dukas was stubborn. “We have to do something.”

Peretz put on his skeptical face. “Who made us the moral guardians of the world, Mike?”

Dukas stuck out his lower lip. “We’re the most powerful nation on earth. It comes with the territory.”

“Maybe it comes with the territory to try . What doesn’t come with the territory is succeeding. It always works in sci-fi novels—you hover over the uncivilized planet and you say, ‘If you guys don’t stop the bullshit, the Moral Federation will squeeze your planet down to a bowling ball,’ and wham-bam, they all turn into good guys! Magic.”

Alan sighed. “Maybe that’s what we need—magic.”

“A magic weapon.”

“Interplanetary ballbuster.”

“Right. Meanwhile, we can’t keep one old man from getting his feet cut off.”

“Well—I gotta try, guys. I gotta try.” Dukas looked up, his eyes agonized. “You judge yourself by what you have the guts to do—not what it accomplishes in the big picture. If I stay here and do my job while all that shit goes on, I’m not a moral person.” He seemed embarrassed by using the word “moral.”

“A guy can get killed,” Alan said.

Dukas half-smiled. “I’m just so sick of shit. Like the Pollard shit. I want to—take a stand on something!”

Alan had a flash of the photo he’d found on the wall of the house in Pustarla. Colonel Zulu. He had been taking a stand. “Ever hear of the Battle of the Crows?” he said.

“What about it?”

“It happened six hundred years ago, and the Serbs lost. And it’s the biggest thing in their mystique—like the burning of Atlanta to the Daughters of the Confederacy. Those people have a long memory, Mike. Long passions.”

“Those people are insane,” O’Neill said.

“Some of ‘those people’ are Americans,” Alan said. He told them about the Chicago Bears ashtray in the house at Pustarla.

Dukas was taking out a little notebook and a pen. “There’s Americans all over that scene. No shit; I been reading the traffic. Fucking Croatians have a special-forces unit is two-thirds American—skinheads, Nazis, Aryan Nation, crazies—because they give them a historical link to Hitler, no shit.” He was making notes—Zulu, the ashtray, Pustarla. “Maybe it’s like the Pollard thing and it’s why I get so mad—people with two loyalties. You can’t have two loyalties; you got to decide. This mercenary, Soldier-of-Fortune shit sucks. You’re an American, you should act like an American, you don’t go someplace else and chop people’s feet off and rape little girls.” He was writing, talking to himself. “Maybe I’ll run into him, who knows? ‘Colonel Zulu at the Battle of the Crows.’ What an asshole.” He looked up as Rose came into the room, Bea a step behind her. His face broke into a smile when he saw Rose. “You light up the room, Babe.”

Bea was carrying a tray with a bottle of champagne and six glasses. Her eyes were red. “There’s six of us, nobody will get very much—it’s late—” She put the tray down. “But it’s a going-away.” She looked around at them. “I’m sorry about what happened.”

“Hey,” Dukas said. He went to her and put his arms around her. “Hey, me too.”

Rose poured the champagne into the tall tulip glasses. When she was done, she stood holding the bottle and looking down. “When we drink this—it’s kind of over, isn’t it. I think I’m gonna cry,” she said. She and Bea had an arm around each other’s waist.

“Don’t,” Dukas said.

“Harry’s going to Africa, and Mike’s going to Sarajevo, and I’m off to this new job, and in a few weeks Alan leaves the air wing—We’re all going—like pieces of paper, or something.”

“Except Bea and me,” Peretz said. “We’re not going anyplace.”

Alan took his wife’s hand. “We all volunteered.” He meant, It comes with the territory .

She sniffed and smiled and picked up a glass, and with eyes shining she raised her head. “Let’s look on the bright side! A year from now, we’ll be riding high! It will all have been swell, and everything will be great!” She sniffed again. “Somebody for Christ’s sake make a toast!”

Harry O’Neill stood. Alan and Dukas stood, and the six of them made a circle, their wineglasses almost touching in the middle. O’Neill said, “Good food—good wine—good friends.” He grinned. “I read it on a restaurant menu.”

“Friends,” they said together, and they drank. Then Rose did cry, and O’Neill looked across her head at Alan, his eyes wet, and Dukas sniffed.

Time seems to freeze, and he is able to look at them and to think but not to move, and he sees that they will never be like this again, not merely never so young again but never so comfortable; nor will life seem so easy. It is a turning-point, and what he senses but cannot put into words is that time brings trouble and pain, and it is coming to them. And, as if the effort to warn them causes time to run again, he moves, and the moment is shattered .

It is for such times that you keep a dog, because when it pushed its head into the circle and sneezed, everybody could laugh, and the mood was broken.

They wanted the others to stay the night in case they’d drunk too much, but people gulped coffee, and O’Neill said he had to get back and pack. He went out the door, drawing the others like leaves in the track of a car. Then Rose and Alan stood together in the driveway, watching them get into their cars and start them up, and they told each other they were okay. The tail-lights diminished down the street and disappeared, and they held each other in the warm darkness.