The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (23 page)

Gus turned, shocked. “Then why the hell are you here? What’s going on?”

“Didn’t you hear what I said earlier? We’re getting old questions answered, puzzles figured out. I didn’t say anything about arrests, now, did I?”

The old man slowly turned his head back. Michael said, “Look, the JFK squad. They’re compartmentalized, so I don’t know what they’re learning. But suppose they did find something out. Like somebody in the KGB ordered the hit on JFK. Or if Oswald really was sent over as a patsy to cover up for whoever really did it. What, you think the president will hold a news conference and say nearly thirty years of official history and explanations were wrong? And by the way, let’s start a new Cold War to get revenge for what the Reds did back in ’63?”

There was a siren sounding out by the shipyard, which eventually drifted silent. “Same thing with you, Gus. We just want to know how it happened, why it happened, and fill in those gaps in the secret histories. And once those gaps are filled, I’ll leave you here and I promise, you’ll never be disturbed, ever again.”

Gus seemed to ponder that for a few moments, and, his voice quiet, he said, “My dad.”

“What about him?”

“It was his fault.”

Michael was so glad he hadn’t rushed things, because this was certainly a new bit of information. Gus sighed. “My dad. A gentle guy. Never once hit me. Was a deacon at our local Congregational church. Didn’t really belong in the military at all. But they were calling everybody up back then, teenagers, fathers, guys with glasses or some medical conditions. A cousin of his, he said to my dad, Curt, ‘Curt, join the navy. You’ll sleep at night in a bunk, you won’t be in a muddy trench, you’ll have food three times a day, no cold rations, and no marching.’ So he joined the navy.”

Gus rotated his cane twice. “Since he was so smart and quiet, he was assigned to some military evaluation team. He and a bunch of others were sent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to check on what the places were like after the atomic bombs had been dropped a month earlier. It was horrifying, he told me later, all these blasted buildings, the trees burnt stumps, and wounded and burnt people still stumbling around.”

“That’s war,” Mike said.

Gus shook his head. “No, Dad thought differently. It may have ended the war, but it also opened the door to something much more terrifying, something that could go beyond destroying cities to destroying whole peoples, whole countries, even the damn planet itself. He said every day and night there just sickened him. He said going across the Pacific, not once did he get seasick, but he was nauseous and threw up a lot when he was in Japan.”

“That’s why he didn’t want you to join the military, do anything that had to do with defense.”

“You got it. He only talked about it as he got older, and then, in 1962, he got lung cancer. Pretty funny, since he never smoked a cigarette or a cigar in his life. His doc told me privately that he probably kicked up a lot of radioactive dust when he was going through Nagasaki and Hiroshima, kept on breathing it in. By then I was married, to a nice girl called Sylvia, had two young boys, and I was working at the shipyard, making good money. My dad died that October. I was his only son, so I went through some of his things. That’s when I found the movies.”

“What kind of movies?”

“My dad, he told me that he and the others, they were forbidden to take photos at Hiroshima and Nagasaki unless it was part of their official work. But somehow Dad got a hold of an eight-millimeter movie camera, even used color film. I think he went out on his own and took these short little movies. No sound, of course, but you didn’t need sound to figure out what was going on.”

Michael let him sit quiet for a few moments, wind coming off the water flapping the loose ends of Gus’s white zippered jacket. “What were the movies like?”

A heavy, drawn-out sigh, like the man next to him had just finished climbing an impossibly high peak. “I still dream about them, even though it’s been thirty years. I found a projector and one night hung up a white bed sheet in the basement and played them. The city . . . you see those TV reports, about a tornado hitting some city out in the Midwest? Just piles of rubble and debris. That’s what it was like. Except the rubble had burned . . . there were places along the sides of bridges or cement walls where the flash from the bomb had burned in shadows . . . and the last bit of the third film, it was the people. Still walking around in shock at what had happened to them. One plane, one bomb . . . there were these two little boys . . . about the age of my own little fellas . . . looking at the camera, looking at my dad . . . they were barefoot . . . the clothes they was wearing was filthy . . . and each was holding a little ball of rice. And you could tell they was brothers, they looked the same . . . even were hurt the same . . .”

The old man’s voice dribbled off. Michael cleared his throat. “How were they injured?”

“The right side of their faces. Scabbed and crisscrossed with burns. Like they were walking down a street, going in the same direction, when the bomb hit and burned them. Oh, I know they were the Japs, the enemy, and lots said they deserved it for what they did at Pearl Harbor and Bataan. But when I saw it, in 1962, the war had been over a long time. All I saw was two kids, all I saw was my two boys, burned and barefoot in the wreckage of their city.”

Michael saw the emotion in the man’s face, the tears coming up in his eyes, and it came to him. “You said your father died in October 1962. That’s when the Cuban missile crisis was, when we almost got into World War III with the Russians. You put the two together, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Had Sylvia take the two boys up to a hunting camp of ours, over in Maine, with food and supplies. She said it wasn’t right to take ’em out of school, but I also said it wouldn’t be right to have ’em vaporized or burned in Portsmouth, because, by God, we were a goddamn target for the Russians. That and the SAC base over in Newington. And a couple of times I went out drinking in some of the bars in Portsmouth, and got drunk and pissed off, and said that damn fool Kennedy was going to kill us all, burn us and flatten our cities, because he got kicked in the nuts at the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, and had to prove he was a real man to his bootlegger daddy.”

“Somebody heard you, then.”

Gus said, “Oh yeah. Somebody heard something, who passed it on to somebody else, and one day a guy came by and bought me some drinks. Said he was in the government, trying to work for peace, but he and the others were fighting against the hawks that were controlling JFK. He spun a good yarn, the bastard, and said if I was truly for peace, I could help things out. And I said, how? And he said, well, the
Thresher
’s being overhauled. If the overhaul took longer and longer, if problems cropped up, if things were delayed, that would help him and the others. Put things over budget. He and the others could help JFK rein in the Defense Department, help him work for peace with the Russians.”

“And what did you say?”

“I told ’im to go to hell . . . but he was sly, he was wicked sly. Wouldn’t take no for an answer. Showed me his ID, said he worked for the Department of Defense. Even took me to his office, just outside of the SAC base.”

“All faked, wasn’t it?”

“’Course it was,” Gus said. “But I was too young, too dumb. He kept on going back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He said, Look, back then, the Japs were our mortal enemies. Now we’re best buds. We’re buying their radios and soon we’ll be buying their televisions. That’s what happens in wartime. Your enemies become your friends. Look at Germany and us. So who can say what we and the Russians will be like ten or twenty years down the line? But the big difference was the bomb. The next war would be fought with the bomb, and this guy—Chandler was his supposed name—said, You know what Einstein said about World War IV?”

Michael said, “Beats the hell out of me.”

“Einstein said the fourth world war would be fought with sticks and stones. That’s what he said.” Another long sigh. “I watched those movies again, and I made up my mind. I told Chandler I’d help, but only to delay things. Not to hurt anybody. He gave me a tiny black box to smuggle in during my next work shift, which is what I did. A week later the
Thresher
went out on a shakedown cruise, never came back . . .”

Gus coughed. Tears were rolling down his cheeks. “What was worse . . . I mean, the whole thing was bad. All those poor sailors, all those poor families. But what made it worse was knowing there were seventeen civilians on board, guys from my own shipyard, guys from companies like Raytheon. You think, hey, the military, they sign up to put their lives on the line, that’s the risk. But these civilian techs . . . I’m sure they thought it was a thrill, to go along on this test dive, to make sure things worked . . . and then they sure didn’t. Can you imagine that, you’re a civilian, having a blast on this top-secret sub, thinking about bragging to your coworkers when you got back, figuring out what you could tell your wife and kids . . . and then alarms. Navy crewmen running around. Shouting. The sub tilting its nose up, sinking by the stern . . . knowing in your bones that the water wasn’t shallow enough to hit bottom . . . only knowing you were going to be dead within seconds . . .”

Michael said, “The naval inquiry said it appeared a pipe broke, releasing water that shorted out instrument panels, that led to the reactor shutdown . . . and they couldn’t keep her up, until she went to crush depth . . .”

Gus said, “Sure it said that. What else would they say? Sabotage, at one of the most secure shipyards in the country? I went to that office building where Chandler was supposedly hanging out. Empty. It was all a front. I thought about killing myself, about giving myself up . . . and I thought about Sylvia and the boys. And I tried to forget it . . . tried really hard.”

“But here you are, Gus. Every Wednesday.”

Gus leaned forward on his cane. “I lost Sylvia two years ago. Both boys are married, doing fine. One in Oregon, the other in California. I’m here by myself, and every Wednesday I come here. Pray for them. Pay tribute to them. And ask forgiveness.”

“For how much longer?”

Gus shrugged his shoulders. “Until the very end, I guess.”

“Does anybody else know about you and . . . what happened?”

“God, not at all.”

“Do you have any evidence from what happened back then?”

“Like what?” Gus shot back. “Pictures of me with that damn Russian? Written instructions on how to sabotage a submarine?”

Michael slowly nodded, and then Gus turned to him, eyes still watery, face flushed. “But what about me now, eh? You and the FBI, you know it all. What now?”

“What I promised,” Michael said, taking out a little notepad and a ballpoint pen, which he clicked open. “That you’ll never be bothered, ever again.”

And with one practiced motion, he took the pen and jabbed it into the base of Gus’s neck.

Gus looked stunned. He coughed, gurgled. A few words were whispered, the last one much quieter than the first.

Michael checked the old man’s neck for a pulse.

Nothing.

He put the pen and notebook away and walked back to his rental car.

Two days later, after his supervisor held a debriefing, his boss shook his head and said, “Misha, you need to know your history better.”

“How’s that?”

“Two things,” the stern man said. “First, you told the American that your grandfather had fought the Germans for four years. Maybe your grandfather did, but the first time Americans fought Germans was in North Africa in 1942. That would be three years, not four. And you said your grandfather was proud to fight fascism. That’s crap. Americans fought the Krauts, the Germans, the Nazis. They weren’t fighting fascism.”

He just shrugged. “Got the job done, though, didn’t I?”

“But you didn’t have to be sloppy. We can’t afford to be sloppy. The damn Americans are in a loving and forgiving mood. Ready to lend us billions so long as we play nice. If they find out some of our old secrets—like that damn attack submarine and how we sank it—they won’t be in a loving and forgiving mood. Got it?”

He sighed. “Heard you twice the first time.”

The supervisor walked past the office window, which offered a good view of the Kremlin’s buildings and where the white-blue-red flag of the new Russian Federation flew.

“Misha, you’re a romantic at heart. You probably write poetry in your spare time . . . but stay focused. Now. What did you leave out of your official report?”

“What makes you think I left anything out?”

“Previous experience from that Swedish schoolteacher who helped Olof Palme’s assassin escape.”

He crossed his legs, shook his head, still in disbelief. “The shipyard worker, he managed to say something as he was dying.”

“What did he say—‘Go to hell, you bastard’?”

Another shake of the head. “No. He said thank you. That’s what he said. Thank you. Like he was thanking me for ending his life, ending the guilt. Can you believe that?”

His supervisor sat down heavily in his chair. “When it comes to Americans, I can believe almost anything. They spend fifty years threatening to burn us off the map, and now they offer us loan credits and McDonald’s. What can you say about a foe like that?”

“Makes you wonder who really won the Cold War.”

His supervisor, a sharp-eyed man named Vladimir, said, “Who says it’s over?”

JOHN M. FLOYD

FROM
The Strand Magazine

T
HE BANK STOOD
at the west end of Palmetto Street, an old gray lady of a building in an old gray part of town. Only two things made it remarkable. First, it had a long porch with incongruous white columns, as if someone had started to build a plantation home, then, during the process, had forgotten how one looked. Second, it was located on a semicircle of buildings where a mile of featureless pavement with no side alleys and only one cross street came to a dead end.

This strange setting, a fireman’s nightmare, had an unplanned but definite advantage: the bank had never been robbed. The street was narrow and often clogged with delivery trucks and double-parked cars. Its west end was a sort of commercial cul-de-sac containing the bank and two other buildings with iron fences between them, and its east end was home to one of the city’s largest police stations. There was simply no good escape path for would-be bank thieves, and as a result they practiced their trade elsewhere. Smart rustlers tend to avoid box canyons.