A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror Page 2

  Blue serge and white silk and lace trailed away from the huge, four-poster bed on which he made ringers with her garter and panties.

  “Put your hands behind your head,” he said.

  After which she said, “Mama told me to make this fantasy last a lifetime.”

  In the beginning, neither of them thought much about anything, giving in, instead, to raging hormones. Two months after he’d pulled her out of the Benning pool, they were joined for life. He was ambitious; she was vigorous. And in two and a half years, they managed to produce two healthy boys and a Danish modern dining room set. Now, after traveling around the world through twenty-five years of Army life, they were back in Glen Rock, struggling with the transition to civilian life.

  “I’m not wild about the wingback, Mag. The seat’s too short. It catches me right in the back of my...”

  “Just checking,” she interrupted. They’re a lot cheaper here than they would be down at Gorman’s.”

  “See anything else?”

  “The butter mold’s nice.”

  “How about one of those window fans up front? If we can get one for a song...”

  “I was thinking about that too.”

  Mag watched Gordon Peters, the auctioneer, settle behind his podium. He was tall and beefy, with a reddish tinge to his thinning hair. He went through his preliminary instructions like a volunteer at a blood donor center checking off diseases, warning them not to bid if they hadn’t inspected the item, explaining about sealed bids, blah, blah, blah. He had a gavel and a little block of marble to bang on. But when things got started, he forgot about the gavel and instead clapped his hands when an item sold. He dwelled on the cheap box lots, holding up the cheesy contents—a can opener, a ball-peen hammer—trying to squeeze the last six bits out of each box. Christie’s, it was not.

  In the four years since they’d driven through the gates of Fort Dix for the last time, Lou still struggled with the transition to civilian life. Having commanded a three-thousand-man infantry brigade, he now found himself sitting in a closet-like room dominated by a desk littered with paper: the office of Sal Marino, branch operations guru, a small man with grayness sneaking in on all sides. Sal deftly handled all the niggling admin problems in the branch, and, when time allowed, dabbled in commodities – pork bellies, wheat, corn, and soybean oil. Sal was important, about as important as the warrant officer who ran Lou’s brigade motor pool years ago. And this little confab was tantamount to Lou dodging grease rags while shooting the bull with his head mechanic, something that would never have happened in the old days. Nevertheless, of all the people he’d met in the civilian business world, Sal’s quiet sureness felt best.

  He spoke in a gravelly voice. “Not so easy slipping out from under the eagles, I bet, Lou,” he said. “Not that I ever wore eagles.”

  “I thought I had it locked,” Lou said. “Then...”

  “What do they call it? A seamless transition?”

  “Yeah, infantry bull colonel to financial services executive in one little step. Ha.”

  “Hey, you did it.”

  “I did?”

  “You’re here aren’t you? You’re drawing real checks every month.”

  “I wanted to hit the ground at a fast trot in full gear, so to speak. No moping around. No muttering about soldiering circles around all the young studs nipping at my butt for the last four years.”

  “It’s not an easy jump, Lou. What did you know about stocks and bonds? What had you ever sold before you made your first cold call?

  “I never thought about selling, Sal. I was heading for a big office in a big bank.”

  “Sometimes all you get is a consolation prize.”

  “‘Hop on that civvie fast track,’ I’d said. ‘Get fired up. Let go of the shelter of the US infantry.’ I had big plans.”

  “The market won’t stay in the toilet forever.”

  “Sure. Besides, it’s already too late to make a move to something else. I’ve been out there looking. The whole frigging economy is based on downsizing fifty-year-olds.”

  “Hang with it, Lou. Swisher loves you.”

  “I don’t know, Sal. It’s this image that keeps me up at night: the clean edge of an axe on the back of my neck.”

  It was all true. In twenty-one years, he’d rocketed up the ranks of the infantry to full bird, commanded every unit from a rifle platoon to infantry brigade, and written the book on mechanized infantry river crossings. He’d swallowed the carefully nurtured image of the career soldier as the modern-day knight in shining armor—above the shit of normal life, prepared to give his all for the hopelessly undisciplined civilian herd.

  He’d seen the axe falling on comrades all around him, yet had kept the delusion that they’d never sever him from the Corps. Never. But it was all over with the stroke of a pen. Finished. Done. A whole career. Like his footprints in the mud and rain at Ban Me Thuot, the only trace left of him after two years of combat duty eroding before his eyes in two minutes flat.

  He and Maggie had clung to the world they invented together when Lou gambled with this choice of the securities business as his new career, a decision that haunted him because he knew he forced it on himself out of pride again, and it had come back to bite him. Out of necessity, they’d scaled back on some of the elements of the good life as they knew it. But he wasn’t about to cave. He was still the same man, and their life together was still alive. And just to prove it, he resolved to haul his old swagger out of moth balls. His step would project conviction again—a certainty that some things were due him after all the years. He didn’t have to answer to anybody about them. It was just the way it was going to be. He would travel light and ready. He would never leave the house again without three hundred bucks in his wallet.

  For her part, Maggie had seized on the auctions as a way for them to get back to where they’d been long before. And so, when she’d proposed the auction tonight, it would’ve been tantamount to unrequited faith for him to refuse.

  And it wasn’t the worst way to spend time. Mostly he sat and let Gordon Peters’ voice trail away. It was a safe place; the two of them together, alone with their thoughts, waist deep in a broth of uncertainty, but at one with the white elephants of other people’s lives.

  “How much do you think the butter mold’s worth, hon?” she asked.

  “Hmm? The butter mold...If you can’t get it for a...”

  “I wouldn’t go any higher than fifteen for it. It’s cracked.”

  “You better get in quick then,” he said.

  “He probably won’t even get to it at this rate.”

  “How about a cup of coffee? They still sell it downstairs?”

  “I’d like a cup,” she said.

  “Don’t buy the wingback while I’m gone.”

  In the basement he found a couple of women selling coffee and Coke for the benefit of Meals on Wheels. There was a line of about five people ahead of him. The shuffling of feet on the floor above blended into the hissing chat in the basement. The auctions were now a constant in their life, and they clung to them as a link to their early days together, when they needed to work at acquiring the accouterments of a household in a way that was as far as possible from thrift shops or lawn sales. They could always give the impression of being hot on the trail of a good Sheraton drop leaf table. Yes, auctions filled their evenings in a way far better than small talk, television, or stale sex could. It had come that far.

  “Here, don’t let it get away from you, Mag. It’s hot. Did I miss anything?”

  “The wingback went for a hundred and ninety.”

  “Is that good?”

  “I’ve seen cheaper.”

  Peters grunted and held the cheesy window fan over his head. It was a GE, three-speed. “Good as gold,” he said.

  “Who’ll start if off at fifteen dollars? Who’ll give me fifteen? You couldn’t buy it at K-Mart for three times that. Fifteen dollars. Who’ll say fifteen?”

  A very young guy, his teenag
e, pregnant wife sitting beside him just two rows up, raised his card and called out, “Three dollars,” not too loudly.

  * * *

  Lou and Mag’s trouble had started with his peacetime tour of garrison duty in Korea—his first hardship tour, during which Mag and the kids couldn’t be with him. It was back twenty-five years or so, only five years into their marriage, when she was twenty-seven and he was thirty-three. It was because of a clown named Morrison who resembled Fred MacMurray grinning his ass off all the way through Flubber. If she hadn’t told him about the affair in that long, sorrowful letter, it probably would’ve been better all the way around.

  He had taken some leave and flown back home. They had talked it to death, concluding that it hadn’t been planned, it had just transpired—as in the “shit happens” school of human relations. It would never happen again and they each would always be an open book to the other, which was a piece of cake for her and hell for him.

  She had fundamentally changed in his eyes and seemed to wear guilt like mittens in August, while he carried moral superiority like an ice cube in his mouth. To him, this unfaithfulness of hers had no roots in anything that he had or had not done. In his mind, he had always been scrupulously without fault. The affair just confirmed what he’d always known about human nature and set the invisible cassock he wore even firmer round his shoulders.

  That was before his own tumble.

  * * *

  “Ten dollars. “Who’ll bid me ten and go?”

  A skinny man in a hunter’s hat, leaning against the side wall yelled, “Five dollars!” Peters, with the gavel, ignored him.

  “Who’ll bid me seven? Seven. Seven dollars. Who’ll bid me seven dollars?”

  “Six!” said the kid.

  “Six? You can’t buy a block of ice for six bucks. Six?” The young guy nodded and Peters sneered.

  * * *

  In Maggie’s mind, it had been cold, calculated retaliation, and in Lou’s, spontaneous combustion. Lou had been banging away as usual at his office, trying to make the draw. He asked Suzy, the secretary he shared with two other guys, to stay late and help him get out a mailing—stuffing and addressing envelopes for a lecture he was planning for the next week. He had just made his last call of the night, trying to get old Arthur Hemberger to go for some Connecticut Turnpike revenue bonds. It was about nine o’clock.

  He’d assumed Suzy had finished up with the envelopes and taken off because he couldn’t hear any noise behind him. But then there she was, standing right beside his chair, close. As she spoke, she put her hand on his shoulder and then to his neck.

  “About finished?” she asked.

  “I thought you’d left, Suzy. Yeah, I’m finished.”

  As he spoke, he halfway turned in his chair to look behind him at the pile of mail she’d been working on. She didn’t move.

  “I’m finished too.” she said.

  He was twisted in his chair. She was standing right beside and over him. Reflexively, he had very nearly patted her fanny when he said, “Good girl. I really appreciate that.”

  * * *

  “I got six. Who’ll give me seven? I got six and who’ll go seven? Seven. Seven. Who’ll give me seven dollars for the fan?”

  Against the side wall in the hunter’s hat, the card flashed.

  “Seven!” Peters boomed, clapping his hands.

  * * *

  She was young and lithe and Eurasian. For as long as she’d been in the office, maybe six months, he’d spent more than a few seconds admiring her slim frame and then trudging upstairs to the lunch room to lash himself with birch branches.

  “Coffee?” he’d asked.

  They spent about forty-five minutes together, counting the time closing the office and in the coffee shop, ordering and then sitting around. For starters, he guided the conversation around to her schooling and favorite subjects. She wanted to know about his family. He quickly changed the subject back to her schooling. She asked about his home town and college. He asked about her boyfriends.

  She said she didn’t have any boyfriends, that none of the men her age seemed to know what was going on. He was glad that it was close to ten o’clock.

  * * *

  “I got seven and who’ll go me eight?”

  Again the young guy. And the bid went to eight.

  * * *

  The parking lot had been nearly deserted. A very light August sprinkle fell like chalk lines in the light from the fluorescent street lamps. He should’ve said, goodnight and let that be the end of it, but he found himself walking her to her car. When she was inside, she rolled down the window and looked up at him. Little drops of rain dotted her chin, and her eyes glistened in the light from the overhead lamp.

  “France Nuyen,” he said.

  “Who’s he?” she answered.

  “I guess you never saw ‘South Pacific.’”

  “What’s that?” she asked. And then before he could answer, she continued, “Would you like to go somewhere else?”

  “Where? What?” was all he could manage.

  “To my place,” she said.

  Her place was a small, modern apartment in Hackensack. Almost as soon as they were through the door, she was down to her underwear and he was sliding his leg out of his pants. The affair was short and athletic, and Maggie knew about it within two days.

  * * *

  “And I got eight, who’ll give me nine? I got eight and who’ll say nine? Nine. Nine. Who’ll bid me nine?” Peters said, looking toward the side wall and the hat.

  Mag consulted the list of possible acquisitions she’d penciled on the back of the bidding card at the start of the auction, and then scratched them out one by one. Gordon Peters was outdoing himself, wringing the last nickel out of every item. It looked like it was going to be a long night, and Lou was already drumming his fingertips on the seat of his chair.

  “I called home while you were downstairs,” she said. “There was a message on the machine from Cal Swisher. He wants you to call tonight.”

  “Well, here we go. It’s going to hit the fan this time.”

  “Finish your coffee and then call. Maybe he wants to give you a raise.”

  “Maybe he wants me to fly to the moon.”

  Lou worked his way down the row of bidders, doing his best to avoid toes and handbags stashed on the floor. Down the hall and past the men’s room, he could hear the jukebox and the sound of tinkling ice. The telephone was right outside the bar. He plugged his free ear and listened to the ringing of the phone on the other end of the line.

  “Hello, Cal, this is Lou. Somebody leave the office door unlocked again?”

  “No, no, nothing like that, Lou. I just wanted to pass a message to you from up the line.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “C’mon Lou, loosen up. I’m on the horn with Patricia Buck this morning, gabbing about all kinds of stuff, and the military pops up out of nowhere, honest to God. And before I know it, she’s asking about you, specifically.

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you. That’s what all my questions were about this afternoon. Listen, I have no idea what it’s about. It could mean almost anything. My advice is, go with the flow. Patricia would like to see you in her office tomorrow around nine-thirty. Think you can make it?”

  “Do mink stink?” Lou replied.

  * * *

  He worked his way back to his seat beside Mag. What the hell can this be? he wondered. He gazed all around the smoke-filled room and saw Peters droning on. And, for the first time, he saw a man in a dark overcoat and “Indiana Jones” fedora standing at the front of the room. Their eyes met, and the man looked away. Lou kept watching, and then he locked eyes with the man again.

  * * *

  “Nine dollars. Nine dollars. Anyone for this GE fan? You all through? SOLD to number... thirty-four for eight dollars.”

  “I’m glad the kids got it.”

  “The kids?”

  “The fan. They got the fan. Never mind. Le
t’s go home. He’ll never get to the butter mold anyway. What did Cal say?”

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  * * *

  Lou pushed open the door of the Elks Club and luxuriated in the silence of the parking lot and the night air that pressed against his eyelids. He walked beside Maggie with her fingers clutching his biceps. Patricia Buck wants to talk infantry. Across the lot, for just a moment, he thought he saw the “Indiana Jones” fedora again, ducking into a dark, two-door sedan.