05.Under Siege v5 Page 5

  “They’re abandoning the faith. They’re abandoning their friends, those who have believed and sustained them.”

  “Then, in your opinion, communism hasn’t failed?”

  The professor’s lips quivered. “It’s a great tragedy for the human race. The communists have become greedy, sold their souls for dollars, sold their dream to the American financial swashbucklers and defrauders who have enslaved working people….” He ranted on, becoming more and more embittered.

  When he paused for breath, Yocke asked, “What if they’re right and you’re wrong?”

  “I’m not wrong! We were never wrong!” Conroy’s voice rose into a high quaver. “I’m not wrong!” He backed away from Yocke, his arms rigid at his sides. His empty glass fell unnoticed to the carpet. “We had a chance to change mankind for the better. We had a chance to build a true community where all men would be brothers, a world of workers free from exploitation by the strong, the greedy, the lazy, those who inherit wealth, those …”

  All eyes were on him now. Other conversations had stopped. Conroy didn’t notice. He was in full cry: “… the exploiters have triumphed! This is mankind’s most shameful hour.” His voice grew hoarse and spittle flew from his lips. “The communists have surrendered to the rich and powerful. They have sold us into bondage, into slavery!”

  Then Callie Grafton was there, her hand on his shoulder, whispering in his ear. Wilson Conroy’s eyes closed and his shoulders sagged. She led him gently from the silent room and the startled eyes.

  Subdued conversations began again.

  Jack Yocke stood there isolated, all eyes avoiding him. Tish Samuels was nowhere in sight. Suddenly he was desperately thirsty. He headed for the kitchen.

  He was standing there by the sink working on a bourbon and water when Jake Grafton came in.

  “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Jack Yocke, Captain. Look, I owe you and your wife an apology. I didn’t mean to set Conroy off.”

  “Umm.” Jake opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer. He twisted off the cap and took a sip. “What kind of work do you do?”

  “I’m a reporter. Washington Post.”

  Grafton nodded once and drank beer.

  “Your wife is a fine teacher. I really enjoyed her course.”

  “She likes teaching.”

  “That comes through in the classroom.”

  “Heard anything this afternoon about that Colombian druggie, Aldana? Where is he going to end up?”

  “Here in Washington. Justice announced it three or four hours ago.”

  Jake Grafton sighed.

  “Think there’ll be trouble?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” Yocke’s host said. “Seems every age has at least one Caligula, an absolute despot absolutely corrupted. Ours are criminal psychopaths, and we seem to have a lot more than one. I hear Chano Aldana has a net worth of four billion dollars. Awesome, isn’t it?”

  “Is the American government ready to endure the problems the Colombian government is having?”

  Jake Grafton snorted. “My crystal ball is sorta cloudy just now. Why’d you take a Spanish class, anyway, Jack?”

  “Thought it would help me on the job.” That was true enough, as far as it went. Jack Yocke had taken the course so he could get bargaining chips to talk his way onto the foreign staff where reporters fluent in foreign languages had a leg up. Still, he wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to meet anybody who might help him later in his career, so he had come to the end-of-semester party to meet Jake Grafton. “Maybe I can get a jail-cell interview with Aldana.”

  That comment made Grafton shrug.

  “I understand you’re in the Navy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “On the staff of the Joint Chiefs?”

  Those gray eyes behind the steel-rimmed spectacles appraised Yocke’s face carefully. “Uh-huh.”

  Yocke decided to try a shot in the dark. “What do you think will happen when they bring Aldana here for trial?”

  Jake Grafton’s face registered genuine amusement. “Enjoy the party, Jack,” he said over his shoulder as he went through the door.

  Oh well, Yocke reflected. Creation took God six days.

  He heard someone knocking on the hall door and stepped to the kitchen door, where he could inspect the new arrival. The daughter, Amy, passed him and pulled the door open.

  “Hey, beautiful.” The man who entered was about thirty, five feet ten or so, with short brown hair and white, even teeth. He presented Amy with a box wrapped in Christmas paper. “For you, from some ardent admirers. Merry yo ho ho and all that good stuff.”

  The girl took the box and shook it enthusiastically.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the newcomer said seriously. “That thing breaks, the world as we know it will cease to exist. Time and space will warp, everything will be twisted and grossly deformed and sucked right in—rocks and dirt and cats and kids and everything.” He made a slurping sound with his mouth. “The moon’ll probably go too. Maybe a couple planets.”

  Smiling broadly, Amy shook the box vigorously one more time, then threw her arms around the man. “Oh, Toad! Thank you.”

  “It’s from me and Rita.” He ran his fingers through her hair and arranged a lock behind an ear.

  “Thank her too.”

  “I will.”

  As Amy trotted away, Jack Yocke introduced himself.

  “Name’s Toad Tarkington,” the newcomer informed him.

  Another navy man, Jack Yocke thought with a flash of irritation, with another of those childish buddy-buddy nicknames. He wondered what they called Grafton. “Toad, eh? Bet your mother cringes when she hears that.”

  “She used to. The finer nuances, sometimes they escape her.” Tarkington gestured helplessly and grinned.

  Jack Yocke suddenly decided he didn’t like the smooth, glib Mr. Tarkington. “Most civilians don’t understand the subtleties of male bonding, do they? But I think it’s quaint.”

  The grin disappeared from Tarkington’s face. He surveyed Yocke with a raised eyebrow for two or three seconds, then said, “You look constipated.”

  Before he could reply, Jack Yocke found himself looking at Tarkington’s back.

  A half hour later he found Tish in a group on the balcony. The view was excellent this time of evening, with the lights of the city twinkling in the crisp air. Washington had enjoyed an unseasonably long fall, and although there had been several cold snaps, the temperature was still in the fifties this evening. And all these people were outside enjoying it, even if they did have to rub their arms occasionally or snuggle against their significant other. To the left one could catch a swatch of the Potomac and straight ahead the Washington Monument rose above the Reston skyline.

  “Everybody, this is Jack Yocke,” Tish told the five people gathered there.

  They nodded politely, then one of Yocke’s fellow Spanish students resumed a monologue Yocke’s appearance had apparently interrupted. He was middle-aged and called himself Brother Harold. “Anyway, I decided, why all the fasting, chanting, special clothes, and mantras to memorize? If I could reduce meditation to the essentials, make it a sort of subliminal programming, then the balance, the transcendence, could be made available to a wider audience.”

  “You ready to leave?” Yocke whispered to his date.

  “A minute,” she whispered back, intent on Brother Harold’s spiel.

  Yocke tried to look interested. He had already heard this tale three times this fall. Unlike Jake Grafton or Wilson Conroy, Brother Harold thought it would be a very good thing for Yocke to do a story about him for the newspaper.

  “… So I introduced music. Not just any music of course, but carefully chosen music of the soul.” He expounded a moment on the chants of ancient monks and echo chambers and the spheres of the brain, then concluded, “The goal was ecstasy through reverberation. And it works! I am so pleased. My followers have finally found quiescence and tranquility.
The method is startlingly transformative.”

  Yocke concluded he had had enough. He slipped back through the sliding glass door and waited just inside. Toad Tarkington was standing alone against a wall with a beer bottle in his hand. He didn’t even bother to look at Yocke. The reporter returned the compliment.

  In a moment Tish joined him. “What is quiescence?” she asked as she slid the door closed behind her.

  “Damned if I know. I bet Brother Harold doesn’t know either. Let’s say good-bye to the hostess and split.”

  “He’s so sincere.”

  “Crackpots always are,” Yocke muttered, remembering with distaste his scene with Conroy.

  Callie Grafton was at the door saying good-bye to another couple, her daughter Amy beside her shifting from foot to foot. Callie was slightly above medium height with an erect, regal carriage. Tonight her hair was swept back and held with a clasp. Her eyes look tired, Jack Yocke thought as he thanked her for the party and the Spanish class.

  “I hope Professor Conroy is all right, Mrs. Grafton. I didn’t mean to upset him.”

  “He’s lying down. This is a very trying time for him.”

  Yocke nodded, Tish squeezed her hand, and then they were out in the corridor walking for the elevator.

  “I really like her,” Tish said once the elevator doors had closed behind them. “We had a delightful talk.”

  “She has strange friends,” Yocke remarked, meaning Wilson Conroy.

  “Since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,” Tish explained, “people have been laughing at Conroy. He never minded being hated, reviled—”

  “Never minded? The poisonous little wart loved it!”

  “—but the laughter is destroying him.”

  “So Mrs. Grafton feels sorry for him, eh?”

  “No,” Tish Samuels said patiently. “Pity would kill him. She’s Conroy’s friend because he has no others.”

  “Umph.”

  In the parking lot she asked, “Did you meet Toad Tarkington?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He and I had a nice chat. His wife is out of town, so he came by himself. He’s very nice.”

  “Navy, right?”

  “Golly, I’m not sure. I didn’t ask.”

  “The military is what’s wrong with this town. Every other guy you meet is in the service.”

  “So?”

  Yocke unlocked the car and helped her into the passenger seat.

  “I don’t like the military,” he said when he was in the driver’s seat. He stuck the key into the ignition and engaged the starter. “I don’t like the simplistic way they look at the world, I don’t like the rituals, the deference to seniority, the glorification of war and suffering and death. I don’t like the demands they make on the public purse. The whole gig irritates me.”

  “Well,” said Tish Samuels tentatively, “I’m sure that basically the people in the service are pretty much like the rest of us.”

  Yocke continued his train of thought, unwilling to let it lie. “The military is a fossil. Warriors are anachronisms in a world trying to feed five billion people. They cause more problems than they solve.”

  “Perhaps,” said his date, looking out the window and apparently not interested in the reporter’s profound opinions.

  “Did you meet Mrs. Grafton’s husband?”

  “Oh, I said a few words to him. He seems very nice, in a serious sort of way.”

  “Want to go get a drink someplace?”

  “Not tonight, thank you. I’d better be getting home. Maybe the next time.”

  “Sure.” Jack Yocke flicked the car into gear and threaded his way out onto the street.

  After he dropped Tish Samuels at her apartment building, Jack Yocke drove downtown to the office. As he had expected, Ottmar Mergenthaler was working late. The columnist was in his small glassed-in cubicle in the middle of the newsroom tapping away on the word processor. Yocke stuck his head in.

  “Hey, Ott. How’s it going?”

  Mergenthaler sat back in his chair. “Pull up a chair, Jack.” When the reporter was seated, the older man asked, “How did it go this evening?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “Well, what do you think of him?” Mergenthaler had been the one who suggested he try to meet the husband of Callie Grafton, the Spanish instructor.

  “I don’t know. I asked him for a simple opinion and he grinned at me and walked away.”

  “Rome wasn’t written in a day. It takes years to develop a good source.”

  Yocke worried a fingernail. “Grafton doesn’t give a hoot in hell what anybody thinks, about him or about anything.”

  Mergenthaler laced his fingers behind his head. “Four people whom I highly respect have mentioned his name to me. One of them, a vice admiral who just retired, had the strongest opinion. He said, and I quote, ‘Jake Grafton is the most talented, most promising officer in the armed forces today.’ ” Mergenthaler cocked an eyebrow and pursed his lips. “Another senior official put it a little differently. He said, ‘Jake Grafton is a man of war.’ ”

  Jack Yocke snorted. “We really need guys like that with peace breaking out all over.”

  “Are you a natural-born cynic, or are you trying to grow into one?”

  “These military people—a damned clique of macho knotheads worshiping the phallic gun. Grafton is just like all of them—oh, he was pleasant enough—but I could feel it.”

  Mergenthaler looked amused. “My very young and inexperienced friend, if you have to like the people you write about, you are in the wrong line of work.”

  Yocke grinned. “What’re you writing tonight?”

  “Drugs again.” Mergenthaler turned back to the screen and scrolled the document up. He tapped the cursor position keys aimlessly while he read. Yocke stood and read over his shoulder.

  The column was an epitaph for three young black men, all of whom had died yesterday on the streets and sidewalks of Washington. All three had apparently been engaged in the crack trade. All three had been shot to death. All three had presumably been killed by other young black men also engaged in the crack business. Three murders was slightly above the daily average for the metropolitan area, but not significantly so.

  Mergenthaler had obviously spent most of the day visiting the relatives of the dead men: the column contained descriptions of people and places he could not have acquired over the phone.

  When Yocke resumed his seat, he said, “Ott, you’re going to burn yourself out.”

  The older man spotted something in the document he wanted to change. He punched keys for a moment. When he finished he muttered, “Too sentimental?”

  “Nobody cares about black crackheads. Nobody gives a damn if they go to prison or starve to death or slaughter each other. You know that, Ott.”

  “I’ll have to work some more on this. My job is to make people give a damn.”

  Yocke left the columnist’s cubicle and went to his desk out in the newsroom. He found a notebook to scribble in amid the loose paper on his desk and got on the phone to the Montgomery County police. Perhaps they had made some progress on the beltway killing.

  Jack Yocke had two murders of his own to write about, whether anyone gave a damn about the victims or not.

  After all the guests had left, Toad Tarkington was washing dishes in the Graftons’ kitchen when Amy came in and posed self-consciously where he could see her. She had applied some eyeshadow and lipstick at some point in the evening, Toad noted with surprise. He consciously suppressed a grin. This past year she had been shooting up, developing in all the right places. She was only a few inches shorter than Callie.

  “Little past your bedtime, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, Toad, don’t be so parental. I’m a teenager now, you know.”

  “Almost.”

  “Near enough.”

  “Grab a towel and dry some of these things.”

  Amy did as requested.

  “Nice party, huh?” she sa
id as she finished the punch bowl and put it away.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is Rita coming for Christmas?”

  “I hope so.” Rita, Toad’s wife, was a navy test pilot. Just now she was out in Nevada testing the first of the Navy’s new A-12 stealth attack planes. Both Toad and Rita held the rank of lieutenant. “Depends on the flight test schedule, of course,” Toad added glumly.

  “Do you love Rita?” Amy asked softly.

  Toad Tarkington knew trouble when it slapped him in the face. His gaze ripped from the dishes and settled on the young girl leaning against the counter and facing him self-consciously, her weight balanced on one leg and her eyes demurely lowered.

  He cleared his throat. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well,” she said softly, flashing her lashes, “you’re only fifteen years older than I am, and I’ll be eighteen in five years, and …” She ran out of steam.

  Toad Tarkington got a nice chunk of his lower lip between his teeth and bit hard.

  He took his hands from the water and dried them on a towel. “Listen, little one. You’ve still got a lot of growing left to do. You’ll meet Mr. Right someday. Maybe in five years or when you’re in college. You’ve got to take life at its natural pace. But you’ll meet him. He’s out there right now, hoping that someday he’ll meet you. And when you finally find him he won’t be fifteen years older than you are.”

  She examined his eyes.

  A blush began at her neck and worked its way up her face as tears welled up. “You’re laughing at me.”

  “No no no, Amy. I know what it cost you to bring this subject up.” He reached out and cradled her cheek in his palm. “But I love Rita very much.”

  She bit the inside of her mouth, which made her lips contort.

  “Believe me, the guy for you is out there. When you finally meet him, you’ll know. And he’ll know. He’ll look straight into your heart and see the warm, wonderful human being there, and he’ll fall madly in love with you. You wait and see.”

  “Wait? Life just seems so … so forever!” Her despair was palpable.

  “Yeah,” Toad said. “And teenagers live in the now. You’ll be an adult the day you know in your gut that the future is as real as today is. Understand?”