War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (42 page)

But I hadn’t seen anyone in those places, just on that partially finished skyscraper to the east.
I faced it, saw that the level where I had seen the man was visible, even from this spot.

One of the military police saw me and
,
with a slight movement of his right hand, beckoned someone from inside.
An officer came out, his uniform crisp despite the heat.
He was black and had that official don’t-fuck-with-me attitude that I had taken for confidence before I joined the service.

“Help you?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, deciding I had nothing to lose. I had already given my information to the police, and O’Connor knew I’d be down here.
“My name’s Bill Grimshaw.
I’m a private detective from Chicago.
I’m looking for a young man who might have been here yesterday when that girl was shot.”

The corners of his eyes narrowed, and I hoped he wouldn’t ask for my
PI
license.

“That young man wouldn’t be here today,” he said, not denying there had been a shooting, as I had expected.

“I thought maybe he might be.
I was playing a hunch.
I figured he got his notice to report.
I figured he might have been here yesterday to plan something to shut the place down so that he wouldn’t have to.”

“If that’s what they were planning, those kids weren’t here long enough yesterday to get anything done.”

So the officer had been here.
Good.
He might be able to give me more information than O’Connor, provided I didn’t ask too many leading questions.

“Really?
I thought they were here for a couple of hours.
I couldn’t tell from what I’d heard.
I thought that it was some kind of Fourth of July protest.”

“Nope,” he said. “We were prepared for that after last year.”

“What happened last year?”

“Some distraught mother put the blame on the
a
rmy instead of the Communists for the loss of her son.
She chained herself to the building, along with a few other protestors.
I always thought
it
a shame.
Her son died a hero.
He wouldn’t’ve wanted her to tarnish his legacy.”

“So you were prepared for the same thing this year,” I said.

“We had some people stationed inside, and no,” he said, seeing my next question, “they couldn’t have had anything to do with the shooting.
The girl was shot right there.”

He swept a hand toward the closest corner of the granite.
It was whiter than the rest, and had obviously been cleaned.

“No one from inside the building could’ve made that shot,” he said.

“I wouldn’t have expected it,” I said.
“I’m a veteran
,
too.
I know we don’t go around shooting people for expressing opinions, as much as we disagree with them.”

For the first time, he smiled at me.
“Where’d you serve?”

“Korea,” I said.

“You volunteer?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.
“Truman inspired me.”

His smile was wistful.
“Me
,
too.”

“But you stayed.”

“I fit.
At least we can get promoted on merit here,” he said.
“The rest of the world isn’t like that.”

“I know.” I glanced at the cleaned-up wall.
“Kids today are different, aren’t they?”

His gaze followed mine and he sighed. “Some aren’t.
I’d say the majority of kids we get are ready to serve.
Some are scared, but that’s healthy to me.
Then we get these….”

He paused, obviously censoring himself.

“It’s all right,” I said.
“I’ve heard it before.”

He shook his head.
“You said it already.
They got a right to their opinion, even if I don’t agree. And I don’t agree.
We all owe this country.
If we’re called to serve, we serve.
We don’t lie about our intelligence or try to get out of it.
Some of these kids come in and haven’t bathed for days.
Some of them purposely stain their underwear and don’t wash them, trying to make us believe they’re too crazy to know hygiene.
Most of them got out in the early years.
We’re onto them now.
Them and those doctors who write phony passes, and the goofy drugs they take to make them seem weirder than they are.”

I shook my head.
Maybe someone had thought to do that to get out of Korea, but I had never seen it.
Once upon a time, I wouldn’t even have been able to imagine it.

“However,” I said, “I do understand these kids’ desire not to get shot.”

The MP laughed.
“Hell, we all felt that at one time or another.”
Then his smile faded. “But you know that sometimes freedom is worth dying for.”

I knew that
,
too.
I knew a lot of people who had died for freedom in our own country, including my friend Martin.

“I talked to a cop a little while ago about the shooting,” I said.
“A detective O’Connor.”

The MP spat, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, making his opinion of O’Connor known without saying a word.

“He told me that—”

“A soldier did it, right?” The MP couldn’t wait for me to finish.
“Bastard has no clue what it’s like down here.
None of the people in our building would’ve shot anyone, and no one would’ve climbed on any roof to hit those kids.
I
told
him that.”

His anger surprised me.
I decided to run with it instead of ask
ing
my original question.

“He blamed you?” I asked.

“Me and all the others in the building.
But like I said, anyone who understands how sniping works would’ve known that we didn’t shoot that kid.”
He glanced at the wall.
People walking past us looked curiously at me, then looked away.
They seemed to think I was in trouble.
“It was bad enough that those kids wouldn’t even let us help her. We had a medic in the building, but the kids wouldn’t let us near her.
One kid picks her up and hauls her off like she’s a sack of flour.
I mean, don’t they teach kids anything in schools? He could’ve made her worse.
I’ll bet he did.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “She had a second emergency surgery this morning.”

“I wasn’t even sure she’d make it to the hospital the way she was bleeding. Those kids were lucky they had a car.” He shook his head.
“How’d we end up the enemy here?
You know? The kids think we’d hurt the girl, the cops think we shot her.
We’re just doing our job — and that does not include shooting young people, no matter how irritating they are.”

I had found some well within him, or maybe he’d reached his last straw yesterday.
I decided to push.

“I’d heard,” I said slowly, “that
the young man,
Daniel
,
was involved in a group called the War at Home Brigade.”

“Yeah, they’ve been leafleting us.
A coupla other places
,
too.
Telling us to pull out of Nam or they’d show us what it was like to experience war.”

“Just recently?” I asked.

“The last month or so.
But we get so much nutty stuff, we just put it in a file and hope it never becomes useful.”

“It makes me wonder,” I said, “perhaps these kids are living up to their name.”

It wasn’t hard for him to make the leap. “And shooting one of their own?
That’s a hell of a thing to accuse them of.”

“They don’t trust the police or the military and these are kids of privilege, not raised the way you and I were.”

“Except maybe a couple of them,” he said. “There were one or two blacks in the group, including the kid who ran off with the girl. They might have reasons for distrusting uniforms. That’s one of the reasons I got one, so our people have something to trust.”

I nodded. I remembered that impulse too. Only it had failed for me. “I was just thinking that maybe they’re trying something, maybe they’re trying to use a creative method to shut you down.”

He frowned, then glanced over his shoulder to see if he was needed at the main doors.
People were still going in and out — a secretary carrying files like they were schoolbooks, a young man with his head down, his hair flopping over his eyes, as
he carried a briefcase inside, a middle-aged man with perfect posture walking with military precision — but the other two MPs weren’t moving at all.

This MP had made that move to give himself time to think about what he’d say to me.
I wondered if he was beginning to regret the conversation.

“You know,” he said as he turned back toward me.
“If it’d happened any other day, I might’ve thought you were right.
But no one’s here on the Fourth. The building would’ve been locked up tight, no one around, if it weren’t for last year’s protests, and no one knew that there’d be soldiers anywhere near the place. We didn’t announce it.
And even if they knew, they’d need witnesses, and there were none.
Maybe if they’d done something in Battery Park or near the Statue of Liberty, maybe then. But the timing’s off. And it doesn’t fit with the threats.”

“The leaflets?” I asked.

He nodded. “Those things threaten to wipe us off the map.
You can’t do that with a rifle.
I’ve been thinking bombs.”

I felt my breath catch. “Can I see the leaflets?”

“Sure,” he said.
“Let me get them for you.”

* * *

It only took him a minute to get me the leaflets.
He let me look at them, watching me the entire time.

The leaflets were crude.
Mimeographed on yellow paper, they all seemed to be the work of the same machine if not the same hand.
Some of the drawings looked familiar — giant soldiers hovering over tiny Vietnamese people, an evil-looking Uncle Sam squashing a tiny Asian child, and drawing after drawing of explosions.

Some of the leaflets were just rhetoric, obviously written by an educated person:

The genocidal war in Vietnam continues, even if the futility of America’s military effort there and the aroused conscience of the American people have forced the government to make gestures toward a negotiated peace….

I skimmed most of it, having seen similar arguments before.
When the MP had handed me the leaflets — extra copies that he didn’t need — I had been stunned at the number of them.
He said they’d been receiving dozens of them every week, often on different color paper and with different wordings.

Finally, in the middle of the stack, I found it.
Buried in a page of argument against Vietnam was this:

We also cry out against the other war, the war against black America.
The funeral of Dr.
M
artin Luther King
,
Jr.
,
was followed by close to forty black funerals…

…We demand that black intellectuals in our country be given the opportunity to speak to the young generation, through schools and other platforms, in terms of black cultural tradition, dignity
,
and militancy…

T
he document ended with a demand to stop both wars — the war on blacks and the war in Vietnam.

That smacked of Daniel to me, and jibed with what I’d been hearing about his concerns at Yale and in New Haven.
I folded that leaflet up and tucked it in my back pocket.
The rest I handed back to the MP.
I didn’t need them, and if anyone else wanted them, I knew where to direct them.

I thanked the MP for his time, then left the
i
nduction
c
enter, feeling more disturbed than I had when I entered it.

The War at Home Brigade had certainly left
its
mark on this neighborhood.
And Daniel’s reaction to that shooting hadn’t given me any additional confidence in the rationality of his actions.

I found a coffee shop nearby on Pearl
S
treet and had a light lunch, mostly because I wanted the chance to sit and think rather than because I was hungry.
The day had turned oppressively humid, and I was glad to get off my feet.