Two Songs This Archangel Sings

10

Garth heartily concurred.

"What are you, the fucking village idiot?!"

"It seemed like a good idea at the time," I replied lamely, reaching across the kitchen table for another doughnut. Garth's shift didn't begin until one in the afternoon, and we were enjoying a late breakfast while we considered together what I had-and hadn't-learned from the Hmong in Seattle. "I wanted to see if I could get some kind of line on the guy."

"You got a line on him, all right. Now he knows you're on to him."

"Not necessarily," I said without conviction. "There were enough people on the plane to make it seem reasonable for me to choose to sit next to him purely by chance."

"You still acted like the village idiot. You should have taken up the Hmong on his offer to have the man taken out."

"No. They'd just have sent somebody else."

"Yeah, but probably a smaller edition. This big guy sounds really spooky."

"That's a pretty good description."

"And we still don't know who's behind him."

"True, but it's interesting that they've decided to follow instead of kill me. These people aren't stupid."

Garth nodded in agreement as he took a bite out of a doughnut and washed it down with black coffee. In the morning light his skin seemed to have a greenish pallor, which I didn't like. He'd lost weight, and it occurred to me that he hadn't looked well for weeks. It bothered me.

"They tried to kill you in the beginning because they figured you as a loose end that could be chopped off quickly," Garth said when he had finished chewing. "Their main concern was in catching up with Kendry, but they quickly learned that finding Kendry wasn't going to be as easy as they'd thought. He was playing games with them, mostly hide and seek. Then two of the front-line players lost their lives and their right thumbs, so they decided that it might be easier to let you find Kendry for them. They're using you as a stalking horse." Garth paused, smiled thinly. "After all, you're the one whom Kendry's considerate enough to leave clues for."

"Yeah."

"Your friend Kendry is a real prick, Mongo. He's tied you across the mouth of a cannon. He's using you as a stalking horse, too."

"It does look that way. It seems like he needs me to gather evidence that will indict a person or persons unknown."

"Damn it, he's the evidence!"

"No, not evidence; he's the story, and it has to be corroborated."

"Well, he should have told you the story. Kendry damn well knows who wants to kill him, and it would have been nice for him to share the information with you before he sucked you into a situation where you almost got your ass cooked and could still end up with bullets where your brains used to be. Nobody else might have believed him, but you would have. He not only put you out in front of him, the son-of-a-bitch left you blindfolded on a killing ground."

"We've played this number, Garth, and there's no sense in doing it again," I said with some impatience. "Before we can pass judgment on Veil's methods, we have to find out who's trying to kill him, and why. When I found out that Liu Sakh Po was involved in this thing, it crossed my mind that he was the man we were after; after that last series of articles on him appeared in the Times, he could have started worrying about the loss of his low profile and wanted to erase links to his past. Or he could have feared that Veil would find out where he was and come gunning for him."

Garth looked skeptical. "You said the articles appeared six months ago."

"Precisely; too much time between events. If it is Po who's gunning for Veil, it wasn't the articles that triggered him. But I don't think it is Po. The men who tried to cremate me and the big guy on the plane aren't Po's type of people. Po's a low-class thug, and he uses other low-class thugs. The thugs I keep bumping into are nothing if not high-class. Still, the good colonel most certainly knows things we want to know, which is why I'm going to take a spin up the Thruway to see him."

"Dumb idea, Mongo; seriously dumb. There's no way he's going to talk to you about anything, much less about things he wants kept hidden. You'll just end up with low-class thugs chasing you along with the high-class ones."

"You're probably right. But I have to follow the bread crumbs wherever they lead, and right now Colonel Po is standing right in the middle of the trail. How can I go around him? He was one of the three men in the helicopter that came to take Veil away from the Hmong village, and he'll know the names and functions of the other two. He may know who wants Veil dead; it could be the man whose blood was on Veil's uniform."

"What blood?"

"Loan Ka told me that Veil had blood all over the front of his uniform when he came to warn the village of the attack."

"It was probably Kendry's blood."

"That's possible. But if it was Veil's own blood, it means he was wounded after he cleaned out the brothel and took the children to the Catholic Relief Agency. Kathy, the Hmong girl, was very clear on the point that Veil's uniform was clean when he walked out of the brothel, so the blood got there sometime between early morning, when he dropped off the children, and the afternoon, before he got into the helicopter. It was sometime during those hours when he found out about the plan to attack Loan Ka's village."

"You said the girl told you Kendry looked like hell. Maybe he already knew about the operation and had been brooding about it."

"Veil would have flown to warn the village as soon as he learned of the plan. If he'd known earlier, he could have avoided a situation where he had to shoot at his own people. No. He learned about it that same day, with only hours to go before the American and South Vietnamese commandos were scheduled to reach the village."

"Who did he learn it from?"

"The person or persons he went to see right after dropping off the children. Veil was enraged, so he would logically go to see the person he held responsible for the children ending up in a brothel-the man who'd made the decision to replace Veil with Colonel Po."

"One or both of the other two men in the helicopter."

"Right. Po was a monster, and everyone in the American and South Vietnamese command structure knew he was a monster. But not the Hmong. The Hmong finally unmasked him and drove him and his men out of the village, but not before they'd done irreparable damage to the children. This was the account Veil went to settle. There could have been a fight, with fists or guns, and Veil wound up with blood all over him. During the course of the confrontation, he learned about the plans for the attack. He just had time to abort it, but not to avoid actions that would brand him a traitor. It's doubtful that Veil would have known where to find Po so quickly; it was an American he went to see."

Garth absently sipped at his cold coffee, finally looked up at me and nodded in approval. "I like it, brother," he said simply. "It could very well have gone down that way."

"But it's still conjecture, without a shred of proof. And all the big pieces of the puzzle are still missing. That's why going upstate to at least try to talk to Po has to be the next step."

"Why don't I pick up the big guy who's tailing you and sweat him? It would be a hell of a lot safer."

I shook my head. "He won't sweat. Besides, he's nothing more than a hired hand who won't necessarily be able to tell us what we need to know. He was just told what to do, not given a look at the skeletons in the closet."

"He'll know who hired him."

"He was probably hired by some flunky way down the chain of command. Snatching him won't get me any closer to Veil, and it will only tip my hand. First, let me try to get next to Po. If that doesn't work and there are no other leads, then we can always try sweating the big guy."

My brother grimaced. "I don't like it, Mongo. I've got no jurisdiction in Albany, and no close contacts with any Albany cops. In fact, they might well resent me poking my nose into what they consider their business."

"I'll go alone. In fact, Po might be more willing to talk to me if I go alone."

"Bullshit. Even if I weren't specifically assigned to the arson and murder aspects of this case by the NYPD, I most definitely would be assigned to you by me. No heavy moves without checking with me first. Agreed?"

"Agreed. Garth, you don't look good."

"I don't feel good," Garth said, with what for him was remarkable candor in regard to his health.

"What's the matter?"

"I don't know. I've got headaches, nausea, loss of appetite, and general all-around crankiness, but those are just symptoms."

"Why don't you go see a doctor?"

"I did-while you were in Seattle."

"And?"

"He couldn't find anything wrong. He suggested it might be psychosomatic." Garth paused, laughed without humor. "He wanted to know if I'd been under any unusual kinds of stress during the past year or two."

That got me to laughing too, and we ended by slapping each other's arms. But Garth's pallor wasn't funny, and the bittersweet laughter died in my throat. "What kinds of tests did he run?"

Garth shrugged disinterestedly. "How the hell do I know?"

"You should check into a hospital."

"That's a great idea. Hell, we'll just ask the nice men who are after you and Kendry for a truce."

"Garth-"

"I'll be all right, Mongo. Right now, we've got business to take care of. Before you go merrily on your way into Po's nest of vipers to ask him pretty please to tell you the details of his dirty past, I think it would behoove us to sum up what we know, or can reasonably assume, to this point."

"Okay. We know that Veil was part of the C.I.A.'s secret war in Laos for better than four years, almost to the end of the war. If Kathy remembered correctly about the insignia on his uniform when she saw him in Saigon, he was a full colonel in 1972. He wasn't thirty yet, which means he had to be the youngest bird colonel in the whole damn army. And that means he was one hell of a soldier before he was sent into Laos.

"He was Special Forces. Because of the nature of his assignment, it's almost a sure bet that he was also a C.I.A. operative, possibly also highly ranked in that organization. We can reasonably assume that the man in the green raincoat who came to see him was his controller. They didn't get along.

"For whatever their reasons, the C.I.A. agreed to help the South Vietnamese solve the embarrassing problem of what to do with Colonel Po after his extracurricular activities were exposed. We don't know why Veil's sector was chosen, only that it was-despite the fact that the move didn't make any sense from a military point of view, since Veil was obviously very effective doing what he was doing, harassing the Pathet Lao and Viet Cong. To try to explain it, we have to start doing some heavy speculation."

"You're just the man to handle heavy speculation," Garth said dryly. "Let's hear it."

"The army and the C.I.A. had a new assignment for Veil, one that they considered even more important."

"At the end of the war?"

"Hey, c'mon: Don't you remember all those lights at the ends of tunnels? The generals didn't know it was the end of the war."

"Good point. Go ahead."

"Veil took strong exception, certainly to being taken out of Laos-and maybe to this hypothetical new assignment. Both the army and the C.I.A. knew Veil was going to resist, so the controller brought along Veil's commanding officer-the man in uniform-to back him up and enforce discipline."

Garth cocked his head to one side and scratched behind his left ear-a sign I was being less than convincing. "Four years in the jungles of Laos is a long time, brother, especially in view of the fact that the average tour of duty for officers in Viet Nam was one year.

Maybe Kendry's tour was simply up; it was time to give him a rest, whether he wanted it or not."

"There was nothing average about Veil, or his assignment. Besides, if it were just a matter of Veil's tour being over, he almost certainly would have been back in the United States six to eight weeks later, not wandering the streets of Saigon in the middle of the night. But he was in Saigon-and he may have had something very heavy on his mind.

"After rescuing the Hmong children and cleaning out the brothel, he probably went to see the big honcho who'd reassigned him and put Po in his place. He probably found out about the impending commando attack from this man, and may or may not have physically fought him. He most certainly did fly into Laos to warn the village and ended up shooting at his own countrymen. His helicopter was shot down, but he survived the crash. He must have made it through the jungle back to Viet Nam, where he either turned himself in or was captured. A relatively short time later he was a civilian, newly arrived in New York City."

Garth rose from the table, took the coffeepot off the stove, and refilled both our cups. He took his cup to the window, where he stared out into another wet, gray winter day. "The last part doesn't make any sense at all," he said quietly.

"Indeed."

"So we get to what we don't know. We don't know why he was abruptly yanked out of Laos; we don't know where he was or what he was doing for six to eight weeks afterward; we don't know who he went to see after dropping off the children-if he went to see anyone; we don't know why the military simply cut him loose instead of throwing him in prison or shooting him. Finally, we don't know why some very heavy people who were probably involved in those incidents and decisions decided to come after him now, a lot of years after the fact."

"If we could find out the name of the officer who came in the helicopter, or that of the man in the green raincoat, we could probably get all of the information we want, without having to try to play footsie with Po."

"We may have one of the names."

"Oh?"

"Hey, I haven't exactly been sitting on my ass while you were away. Hang on a minute." Garth went into the other room, and I heard a drawer in his desk in the den open and close. He reappeared holding a thin manila file folder, which he tossed on the table in front of me. "Check out this masterpiece. It came through yesterday."

I opened the file, found myself looking at an official, stamped photostat of Veil Kendry's service record. It consisted of two pages, and took me less than a minute to read. "It's bullshit," I said, closing the file and pushing it away from me.

"Sure," Garth replied evenly. "But the fact that the Pentagon would go to so much trouble not only to expunge facts, but to create new ones, makes it interesting bullshit."

"I love it. The army claims Veil was a supply clerk in Saigon from 'sixty-four to 'sixty-nine, and never saw combat. Highest rank: corporal. Committed to a mental hospital for four years, diagnosed by the military shrinks as a paranoid schizophrenic with a borderline personality. Finally discharged in 'seventy-three as stabilized with chemotherapy, but still hopelessly psychotic. This is what would have surfaced if Veil had tried to go public with whatever it is he knows."

"Right," Garth said curtly. "Jesus, Mongo, that's an official photostat, and the damn thing's a phony. A lot of high-ranking people conspired to break a lot of laws in order to produce that thing."

"And Veil went along because that was the price for his life and freedom. Now somebody wants to cancel that contract." I retrieved the file, glanced again at the last page. "Here's the name you mentioned: General Robert Warren is listed as Veil's C.O. He signed the discharge papers. You think he's real?"

"He's dead. He was killed in an automobile accident in Saigon three days after those papers were signed. I double-checked it."

"They could have picked the name of somebody they knew was dead, forged it on the paper."

"It's possible," Garth said with a shrug. "We have no way of knowing."

"Po would know. What about the personal data on Veil? Did you check that?"

"I did, and that much is accurate. He did grow up in Colletville. I called the high school; he went there, and he came up through the school system."

"What about the home address?"

"Accurate. The problem is that the Kendrys moved away ten years ago, forwarding address unknown. The people living there now don't know anything about them."

"Where the hell is Colletville?"

"It's a farming community in a depressed economic area about a hundred and thirty-five miles northwest of here, in the Catskills."

"If those are the only accurate things in this record, it's probably because the people who phonied up everything else considered the information useless. Veil didn't go home when he left the service, he came to New York. He probably doesn't have anyone, friends or relatives, left there."

"Arguable. He lived there a long time. What about the times when he dropped out of sight for two or three weeks at a clip? He could have gone back home then."

"Maybe, maybe not. If the Pentagon doesn't care if people know where he grew up, it probably means there's nothing there worth finding out. Besides, why clump around up in the Catskills when we have Colonel Po? I say we go to Albany first and save Colletville for another day. If Po will talk, we probably won't have to go anywhere else."

Garth stared into the bottom of his coffee cup while he thought about it. "All right," he said at last. "But hold off for a while."

"Why wait?"

"To give me time to check out some things and talk to a few people. We know the Albany cops and State Police are on Po's ass, so let me find out what stage their investigation is in now. It's just possible that the Albany D.A. or the state cops will give us a bone or two to throw to Po in exchange for him giving us the information we want. Po isn't going to give us anything for free. On the other hand, what happened in Viet Nam and Laos was a long time ago, and doesn't have anything to do with his current problems. He'll probably be more than happy to talk to us if we can offer him, say, a reduced charge or two. At the least, we'll be showing the authorities upstate that we're properly humble where their jurisdiction is concerned, and I should be able to get a good line on Po's operations. Without some kind of leverage to use on him, we'll be wasting our time and gas going up there."

"Okay. I've got some things to do, anyway. How long do you think all this humble maneuvering is going to take you?"

"It depends on who's available to talk to me, and how much negotiating I have to do. Maybe two or three days."

"Two or three days?! You've got to be kidding me!"

"Don't be so Goddamn impatient. These things take time." Garth paused, narrowed his eyes. "Just what 'things' do you have to do?"

"Just minor errands."

"With you, a 'minor errand' is likely as not to end with you hanging by your heels from the top of the Empire State Building. I hate to let you out of my sight, brother. Tell me what you're going to do."

"First, Mother, I'm going to use your phone to take care of some personal matters. Then I'm going downtown to the Federal Building."

"Why the hell are you going to the Federal Building?"

"I'm going to file a request under the Freedom of Information Act for any and all information concerning Colonel Veil Kendry, code name Archangel, specifically the nature of his assignments for the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency during the time he was in Southeast Asia."

Garth winced. "I don't like it, Mongo. It could get you in trouble."

"You're making a joke, right?"

"Why bother? Do you seriously think the people in Washington are going to give you anything that contradicts the service record they manufactured? Freedom of Information Act or not, you'll get diddly-squat."

"That's probably true, but it still might be interesting to see what kind of diddly-squat they try to hand me."

"You want to throw a piece of paper at these guys? At least Kendry throws thumbs. Now there's an attention-getting mechanism."

"I'm short on thumbs. Granted, it's a shot in the dark; but it could be a noisy one, and there's no telling who might hear it. Not everyone in Washington is necessarily our enemy. Also, I'm going to try to make an end run around the bureaucracy. I'm going to call Lippitt at the Pentagon. What's the use of being a personal friend of the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency if you don't use the contact from time to time?"

"I already thought of that," Garth said in what seemed to me an oddly bitter tone of voice. "I put in a call to him on his private line right after I received the phony service record. He's supposedly out of the country for an indeterminate length of time."

"Supposedly?"

"I called him two days ago, Mongo."

"You think he's ducking us?"

"Not us; he's ducking this Archangel business."

"It amounts to the same thing. Lippitt wouldn't do that, Garth."

"Wouldn't he? As I recall, the last time we spoke with him was after he'd spent six months with us on Mom's and Dad's farm. Before we went there, we were all marked for death; by the time we left, he'd been appointed Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was the one who personally gave us that number I called, along with a code word to use in case we ever needed him in an emergency and he wasn't there. According to him, his people would immediately patch him in to us, no matter where he was in the world. If that wasn't possible, he'd get back to us within an hour or two. It's been two days."

"Who answered the phone?"

"How the hell do I know? A woman; probably his secretary."

"You told her who was calling, and mentioned Valhalla?"

"I did. Not a peep from our dear friend, Mr. Lippitt."

It disturbed me, too. The ageless old man had shared two of the most dangerous times in my brother's life and mine, had suffered many of the same emotional scars in the aftermath of the deadly Valhalla Project. It was from our parents' farm that he had directed the cleanup of the operation but, like us, he was there to decompress, to let the memories of the horrors we had witnessed fade away. We owed the old man our lives, and he owed us his, many times over. After all we had been through together, it was incomprehensible to me that he would ignore our call for help. That was what I told Garth.

My brother shook his head. "Remember what concerned Lippitt most about the Valhalla Project? He couldn't accept that the government of the United States could be involved in something like that. Well, he turned out to be about half right on that one. But not this time. Now he's part of the establishment, and his own people are involved in this Archangel shit right up to their eyeballs."

"He was always part of the establishment, and he was never one of your favorite people."

"Christ, Mongo, he's the head of one of the most important agencies of the Pentagon. When it's a choice between helping us and doing all he can to protect his outfit, the outfit comes first. That's how I read his silence. This gives you some idea of just how isolated we are on this thing, and what we have to look forward to. If you want my opinion on something else, I'm beginning to smell something bad about the way I was so quickly transferred over to this case. You remarked on it. It could be that strings were pulled. Somebody knew that I'd be making moves to protect my brother in any case; by officially putting me next to you, they're getting written reports on everything we turn up. It's a good way to keep an eye on you, courtesy of the NYPD."

"It sounds a little paranoid, Garth," I said, chilled by the thought that he could be dead on the mark. "And I still believe Lippitt will have a good explanation."

"Good. When Lippitt calls, you let me know what it is." Garth rose from the table, removed his coat from a rack in the corner of the kitchen, shrugged it over his broad shoulders. "In the meantime, I'm going down to the station house and see if I can get a line on the best way to approach Po." He started to leave, turned in the doorway and pointed his index finger at me. "Remember; no heavy errands on your own. I want you in one piece when I get back."

"Lippitt will call."