Private Screening (28 page)

Why had Rachel happened, he asked himself.

Was it fatigue or loneliness or fear? Or memory, turned to anger that he might never feel that for a woman again, or a woman for him. That he would serve out his marriage to Marcia, pay the bills and be blamed for it, send Christopher to college.

As his father had done for him.

Fool, he thought. To hurt for Christopher now, filled with martini regret. Now, when Marcia knew that the one way she could hurt him was through their child. Why hadn't he lied?

For what reason, he suddenly wondered, had Damone not wished to testify?

An ice cube splashed in his cup.

Startled, he looked up at the flight attendant. “Another cocktail?” she asked.

“Thank you.”

She poured it expertly. “You're the lawyer, aren't you? Anthony Lord.”

A gaunt man in the middle row turned to listen. Lord nodded, then remembered to smile.

“Good luck.” She glanced at his wedding ring, and went on. The man watched Lord drink.

It's all changing, he thought. You don't know what will happen, and you're scared.

When he deplaned, TV cameras were waiting.

“Mr. Lord,” someone called, “do you expect to locate the film?”

Sluggish from gin, he stood blinking in the TV lights, obscuring the faces behind them. “I hope so,” he finally answered. “Harry Carson deserves at least that much luck.”

Angling through them, he took a taxi to his hotel, and dialed Christopher.

“Hello,” Lord's own voice answered. “This is Tony Lord. Neither Marcia nor I can come to the phone.…”

“Christopher?” Lord said above the tape.

“But if you'll just leave a message.…”

Damned machine. Lord's voice rose. “Christopher, it's Daddy.…” Please, be there.

“Daddy?”

Breaking in, his son's voice was cautious. “How's things?” Lord asked in relief.

“Fine.”

“Good.” Lord smiled into the telephone, trying to coax animation from the space between them. “I'll bring something back,” he promised. “A surprise.”

“Okay.”

At seven, had he been so reticent on the phone? Or was Christopher starting to protect himself? “What are you doing, son?”

A pause. “Mommy's letting me watch ‘Dawn Rider.' 'Cause she knows I like it.”

Why didn't
he
know that, Lord wondered. “Then I don't want you to miss it, mugwump. I just called to say I love you.”

“Okay.” I love you, too, Lord silently added for him, and then Christopher finished, “'Bye.”

Hanging up, Lord stared at the telephone.

By calling Marcia, a stranger had done to him what threats could not. Who could hate him so intelligently?

Lord double-locked the door.

There was a wad of pink slips in his coat pocket—reporters' calls, the last from Rachel. He threw them away, and asked the desk to hold his messages.

Lying on the bed, he inspected the signs of his disorientation. A still life, the whirring air conditioner, a Gideon Bible, the TV bolted to the wall. Strange channels.

SNI was running highlights of the trial.

Lord watched himself, as he would watch a stranger. Saw someone fluent, graceful, never confused—an illusion, losing to DiPalma. Turning it off, he could not sleep.

The next morning, he presented himself at the Army film archives, followed by reporters.

A huge metal warehouse—green metal shelves, lamps hanging from high ceilings. At one end were rows of file cabinets with Asian names, battalion numbers, vague dates. In some strange way, the sheer volume convinced Lord that the film did not exist.

The Army's politeness reinforced this. A smooth-faced employee explained the filing system in a drill sergeant's cadences, until Lord was sure that he was being taken on a Kafkaesque tour of the irrelevant. Trapped, he felt the trial, waiting to be finished and lost.

They'd set up a projector in a cramped room to the side. Alone with each day's cans of film, Lord watched half-forgotten reconnaissance missions in black and white, silent movies of people dying and killing. But not Carson.

Returning to the hotel, he would pass reporters asking what he had found. He developed stock answers to their questions, suppressing his tense anger over the flickering, endless films which would not save Carson. After the first night, he ordered from room service.

On the morning of the fourth day, Lord found the film.

A nineteen-year-old boy, his movements jerky from drugs and fear, his eyes unmistakably Carson's.

Alone in the witness room, the same eyes watched Lord, much older. “You look tired,” Carson said.

Lord tried to conceal his tension. “It's a long flight home.”

Tapping a cigarette, Carson still watched him.

“There's a film, Harry.”

A change in the eyes, like dilation—fear, perhaps hope. “Does it show what happened?”

“Some.” Lord lit Carson's cigarette. “Can you remember anything?”

“Capwell.…” Carson's fingers twitched. He inhaled deeply, then exhaled, watching the smoke as it vanished. “He's bleeding.…”

“And then?”

His eyes flickered. “I'm landing in Oakland.”

The cigarette burned in Carson's hand. “I want you to see this,” Lord said finally.

A quick, shallow puff. “When?”

“Tomorrow.” Lord hesitated. “On the witness stand.”

Carson's eyes flew open. “In front of them?”

“Yes.”

A tremor of one hand, covered with the other. “Why then?”

“To help you testify.”

The cigarette kept burning. “I don't want that,” Carson murmured.

“Want what?”

A flush appeared on his neck. “To know what went down.”

“Why?”

“The stuff I remember—what John said. It's bad, still.”

Lord watched him—cornered, fearful-looking. “Is there something else you didn't tell me?” An ash fell on the table. “Maybe something you told Damone.”

Staring at the ashes, Carson shook his head. “Why, man?” he murmured finally. “Why do you want me to talk?”

“Because I can't prove you didn't plan to shoot Kilcannon.” Lord leaned forward. “You're our only chance, Harry.…”

“Then show me the film. Before.”

“DiPalma's waiting for you.” Lord paused. “If you watch now, then he'll say we put together a story to go with it. I'd rather you try to remember in court—whatever comes out.”

Carson opened his mouth, but could say nothing.

Lord clasped his arm. “You said you wanted to see Cathy someday, away from this. However it goes tomorrow, I'll do my best to make that happen.”

There was a long silence. Finally, Carson nodded.

Lord waited for his own tension to ease; it wouldn't.

“Let's get ready, then.” He took the cigarette from Carson's fingers, before it burned them. “I'll be DiPalma.”

There was something wrong.

Finishing the milk shake, Lord stared at the ceiling of his motel room. In the role of DiPalma, he had done too well. Except that DiPalma might falter on motive.

If Carson had no rational motive, what had made him mention politics the night he shot Kilcannon? To cover his own confusion?

Who had called Marcia?

He looked at the stuffed bear, hastily purchased at National Airport, still in its bag. His wristwatch read 12:01—too late to call Christopher.

In nine hours, the trial would resume, and he would gamble everything. Now he waited, in a motel room near the courthouse. Registered under his father's surname, the Polish one, before his father had changed it.

Another cubicle, he thought. Another television. He crumpled the empty milk shake carton.

He had to win. There was no margin in his life for losing.

2

E
XCEPT
for Lord, the courtroom was still.

The bailiff's finger rested on the light switch. The gallery had stood, including Shriver, pressed to the glass. Inside, the jury faced a blank screen. Kleist had put away his notepad; DiPalma and his assistants formed a silent row. Behind the partition, Lord saw Rachel with Hart Taylor, watching Carson.

He had borrowed Lord's red silk tie; jittery on the witness stand, he kept checking the knot.

“Harry,” Lord said, “I'd like you to watch the screen.”

In a seeming reflex, Rainey nodded for him, and then Carson's eyes moved, head following.

Lord saw the TV camera turning with him. A hall of mirrors, he thought, then realized he had forgotten to signal. He glanced at the film technician, then the bailiff.

The room went dark. On the screen, numbers flashed downward.

A picture—the burnt stalks of trees, silvery black and white. As the camera swept them, a figure appeared.

Carson was dressed as a Vietnamese.

He walked bent, disguising his height, sandy hair concealed by a conical hat. It might have been more comic than frightening, except for the trees and the look of his eyes, like burn holes.

The focus widened.

Dressed like Carson, two other men moved with him in what had once been forest—on a hillside, sloping downward, its trees seared with an eerie uniformity. That there was no sound made it surreal; the midday sun looked like the moon.

They stopped together—Carson, a radioman, a third man with a beaked nose and white, sudden grin, pointing forward. Capwell, Lord was certain.

The camera followed where he pointed.

At the bottom slope, the burnt forest became lush jungle, so thick its treetops merged in a canopy. Perhaps a mile farther was a clearing, with thatched huts that looked like toys. Four inches of film from Capwell's finger.

Facing him, Carson nodded.

The film was crisp, astonishingly professional. As the camera recorded them, the three men started down the hillside with knives, machetes, M-16s. The village disappeared from view, and then they reached the jungle.

In front of them, odd-shaped leaves and shrubbery came from every angle. Swinging his machete at the wall of foliage, Carson hacked his way inside, toward the village.

Suddenly, it was dark.

A flash of white sun on a machete blade—an adjustment in the lens, admitting light. The three men reappeared as shadows, swinging machetes between shafts of sunlight, filtered by trees. The effect was claustrophobic; dense, shapeless leaves, a few feet of vision, the drugged, frenzied rhythm of blades hacking darkness. A figure knelt—Carson, then the others, to rest.

As Capwell wiped his forehead, the camera zoomed in on Carson's foot. It was bare; the leech became a stain when Carson slapped it. His eyes fixed on the camera, hostile.

Capwell pulled him up.

Their blades beat forward again, feet at a time. The light gave off a kind of steam.

Lord tensed, waiting.

Suddenly the radioman dived; what looked like a grenade rolled between his legs. Carson jerked up his rifle. It recoiled; something fell from above; someone in the courtroom gasped.

The camera veered.

On the ground, near the radioman, was the headless body of the monkey Carson had shot. Capwell reached, grasped the grenade, and held it to the camera. His smile was fixed, unnatural. The grenade was a coconut.

He turned to Carson; as if synchronized, their heads tilted. Lord imagined them listening to the echo of the bullet, wondering how far the sound had carried.

The radioman rose, fumbling with his equipment. His fingers did not seem to work. When Capwell lobbed the coconut, it bounced off his chest.

The three men stood in a semicircle, staring at each other, surrounded by dark. Deciding.

Capwell's neck twitched toward the village.

Carson turned, facing the same direction. Slowly, he nodded.

Across the courtroom, Lord looked toward Carson. The beam of the projector was between them; in its light Carson's face was yellow, older, as he watched the boy he had been start cutting toward the village again.

They seemed even tenser now; every few feet, they stopped to listen.

All at once, the men sheathed their machetes. As they crept forward, there was a change in the quality of light—the leaves were sharper, the darkness at their feet became damp ground and brush.

Over Carson's shoulder, framed by leaves, was the clearing.

For minutes, the camera was still. Pieces of life moved past—a chicken, a covey of children, a woman bearing water. Normal, even banal, except that there were no men.

Carson and Capwell turned to each other. Capwell's lips opened; somehow Lord knew this had been silent, a warning. Carson's eyes were hollow.

Together, they looked at his watch. From the angle of light before them, Lord guessed it was late afternoon.

Jerkily moving on the balls of their feet, the three men broke from the jungle.

The village was nine or ten hooches, surrounding a center courtyard. The women and children there were already still, backs to the camera. Loping toward them were three other men in pajamas, too tall for Vietnamese, their rifles unslung.

They began raiding hooches.

Turning from them, the camera followed Carson.

Necks turning from side to side, he and his team entered a hooch with their M-16s pointed.

The hooch was dim, cramped, with three cushioned chairs and a thatched table. On the wall was a wooden carving of Ho Chi Minh; beneath that was a washbasin, half-filled with filmy water, scissors, and a straight razor balanced on its edge. A primitive barber shop, Lord guessed.

Carson was staring at the table.

There was a bamboo cup, next to a bottle that looked like rice wine. The bottle seemed empty. Carson grasped the cup; wine sloshed when he slapped it down.

The camera kept moving, to an indentation in the cushion of one chair.

Carson reached out, touching it, turned to the others. Lord mouthed it with him: “Warm.”

Capwell spun as if startled. Suddenly they were running past the camera, Carson holding a grenade.