A Matter of Honor

Chapter Thirty-five

The general swam a dozen laps in the Rhein-Baden pool, then took an icy shower in a stall fitted with crisscross jet sprays. In his third-floor room he opened the windows and looked out on the parks and graveled walks of the spa’s expansive grounds. It was not yet eight o’clock, and sharply cold, but a few of the healthier guests were out in jogging clothes and an elderly man and woman in wheelchairs, plaid robes tucked around them, were being pushed along by uniformed spa attendants under the bare linden trees.

Weir did a half hour of setting-up exercises, then sat down with a towel around his waist for a breakfast of fruit, boiled eggs and toast that had arrived from the room service on the same knock as the items from the pressing room. Fritz Vestrick was not yet in his office when Weir registered, but the desk clerk assured the general that Herr Vestrick would be informed of the honored guest’s presence the moment he arrived.

On the stroke of nine o’clock the phone rang and Vestrick’s voice, showing traces of a southern accent, said, “Hiya, Scotty! Am I coming up or are you coming down?”

“Give me five minutes, Fritz. I’ll be down.”

“Can’t wait to see you, pardner.”

Tarbert Weir put on his freshly pressed Class-A uniform, gray twill trousers, cordovan ankle boots with buckled straps, khaki shirt and tie and an olive drab tunic with three rows of campaign ribbons and decorations and the stars of a general. He checked the insignia on his garrison cap and slapped it across his knee to soften the folds. At the open window he took several deep breaths, then flexed his muscles so the fabric of the tunic stretched tight over his shoulders but moved with ease at the armpits. There was no need to look in the full-length mirror. Weir knew by the flex and stretch exactly how trim he looked.

Herr Vestrick’s office, opening directly off the lobby, was furnished in bleached leather, shining wood and circular carpets with patterns woven in varying shades of blue. In the background, from a tape cassette, came the throaty, sugared tones of Al Jolson singing “My Old Kentucky Home.”

The two men embraced and Vestrick motioned Weir to a chair while he seated himself behind the big desk. Vestrick nodded at the cassette player. “Just once through, Scotty, for old times’ sake. I had it transposed from the old seventy-eight.”

Vestrick was older than Weir by four or five years, a big man with high coloring. He wore the striped trousers and cutaway coat of a traditional boniface. He had been one of the first Luftwaffe pilots shot down over Britain after the United States’ entry into World War II, and had spent the next four years in prisoner-of-war camps in the deep South. After his release, Vestrick had returned to Frankfurt and was working as a busboy in the dining room at the Frankfurter Hof when Weir and Maggie had stopped there on their wedding leave. Weir had been impressed with the German’s fluent English, surprising accent and passionate love of the South. He had arranged for Vestrick to get work as a translator at the Am-Main Army Headquarters. The Jolson recording, now on tape, was one that Tarbert Weir had found in a second-hand record store near the Army College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and sent to Vestrick nearly twenty years ago.

On the last falling tones, Vestrick switched off the cassette and said, “I know about Mark, Scotty. I still subscribe to the Louisville Journal, they covered it under national news.”

For a moment Weir did not trust himself to speak.

“I already called you in Springfield,” Vestrick said, “but they told me you had gone to Virginia.”

“You talked to John Grimes?”

“No, a young lady. I didn’t ask her name.”

“A friend of Mark’s,” the general said.

“Helga wants you at the house for lunch, Scotty. It’s up to you, of course.” Weir shook his head. “I’ll do anything,” Vestrick said. “I’ve got fine staff here. I’ll take a few days off, we’ll go to the mountains, I’ll get drunk with you.”

Weir shook his head again. “That just won’t do it, Fritz. Not this time. There might be something, however. You still flying?”

“Yes, I keep an A36 Bonanza at the local airport.”

“What are you cleared for?”

“Almost everything. What do you want, Scotty?”

General Weir put his garrison cap on his head and held out his hand. “Thank you, Fritz. I’ll let you know later in the day.”

A cab took him to the headquarters of Belgium’s NATO mission in Germany, a three-story, salmon-colored building situated in the district of Wilhelmshohe, on the outskirts of the immense park which served as a frame for Ludensdorf’s elegantly restored summer palace.

Captain Alain Tranchet-LeRoi was waiting for his visitor in an office on the second floor of the building, a corner room with narrow, leaded windows which faced the park and the shining curve of a river in the distance.

Alain was tall, though not as tall as Weir had expected him to be, and stocky rather than muscular, not quite the athletic appearance the general had expected to see. He must be twenty-nine now, nearing thirty, the general thought, younger than Mark.

They had last met when Alain was eighteen. It had been his birthday and the general had visited him at the university with his mother to celebrate that and a prized soccer victory. Emile LeRoi had been in Holland on business that weekend, Marta had explained to her son. Alain had played for his district and now the university and there was talk that day about a tryout with a professional soccer team in South America.

It had been a festive afternoon, as Weir remembered it, idyllic and mannered, like an Impressionist painting, the college buildings of Louvain purple in the sunlight, the quads emerald green, the soccer field lined with picnic tables.

General Weir offered his hand and then patted Captain Tranchet-LeRoi warmly on the shoulder. “So good to see you, Alain, after all these years. I would not have been surprised if our appointment had been at a stadium somewhere, rather than the military.”

The captain smiled thinly, there was a touch of chill in his clipped careful English. “Establishment football was just a passing thing. I had a head for the game, no pun intended, but on the professional level I was outclassed. I think my father was more disappointed than I was.”

He lit a cigarette from the embossed leather box on his desk and walked to the windows. “My mother told me how glad she was to see you,” he said. “ ‘I feel almost young again, Alain’ was the way she put it.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, as if to relieve tension. “Christ! If we could give both generations prefrontal lobotomies it might be all to the good.”

“We all have our pasts to live with,” Weir said. “Marta’s and mine happened to cross.”

“Ah, yes, and our futures.” The Belgian gestured with his cigarette, sending a whirl of smoke through the office. “May I show you, sir?”

Tarbert Weir joined him at the window and looked down to the area in the parking lot at which the captain was pointing. He singled out a Belgian staff car, a Mercedes Benz 300 Diesel with black panels, brown fenders and heavy-duty tires. It carried NATO license plates and NATO and Belgian flags bolted to the bumpers. Tranchet-LeRoi’s smile was enigmatic, barely amused. “You couldn’t get that from a soccer player,” he said.

For the next ten minutes General Weir sat on one side of the desk while the captain spread out certain items between them. He was a chain smoker, and he sipped frequently at a coffee cup on his desk though the liquid was obviously cold. He must be more like his father than his mother, Weir thought; there was little of Marta’s vitality and warmth in his manner. The general was aware that the younger man was not meeting his eyes and that his face could have been that of a man of forty rather than a decade younger. There was a look of weariness in the lidded expression. Alain’s hair, while still full, was a fading ash blond, a shade away from gray.

When the items were lined up between them, the captain pushed each one across the desk toward Weir with a well-manicured finger. Besides the key to the Mercedes there was a leather case with NATO markings for the general’s identity cards and a packet of documents with appropriate seals and stamps, defining the temporary assignment for General Tarbert Weir, U.S. Army, retired, now serving as an accredited observer at the NATO field maneuvers in the proscribed areas outside Ludensdorf.

“I would advise you to wear these at all times in the field,” the captain said, pointing to a pair of stretch armbands, each marked: OFFICIAL OBSERVER. “Another one of the improvements since your time,” he added. “These have reflecting threads, and can be seen in the dark.”

He picked up a waterproof pouch, untied the binders and pulled out a small-scale grid map. A long gray ash from his cigarette fell on the map and he blew the residue away with impatience, sending a dust of ash onto the sleeve of Tarbert Weir’s uniform. For a moment the two men’s eyes met and it was Tranchet-LeRoi who turned away first. “My apologies, general,” he said coolly. He made a cross with a pencil on the map. “I have checked rosters and here is where your man should be at 2:00 a.m.”

“And you want this, of course,” he said, dropping a pair of keys on a metal ring to the desktop. “The key to — what was the quaint phrase my mother said you used?”

“ ‘Maison Gris’ is what your group calls them, I believe,” Weir said. “The United Kingdom uses ‘Bluebirds’ and the Germans say ‘Falltur’ or ‘Trapdoor’. The American code word has always been ‘Case Ace’.”

“My mother tells me you were one of the bright military minds who helped organize this ‘safe house’ system, for top political personnel and high Army brass, an emergency escape route.”

“Marta’s wrong there,” Scotty Weir said. “Those escape houses, old ski chalets, country schoolhouses, isolated farms — that route was selected, laid out and supplied in the late 1940s, the time of the first Berlin airlift, in preparation for a ‘worst possible scenario,’ an invasion of the continent by the Russians. It was a concern even then, captain.

“I didn’t organize or pick these hideaways originally, but I did assist in reorganizing and relocating the system in the middle sixties.”

Weir picked up the key ring and examined the small metal tag with the numeral two imprinted on it.

“There are three Case Aces within a fifty mile radius of these maneuvers,” Weir said. “I requested number two because it’s up the mountain, secluded, and the closest to Ludensdorf.”

General Weir gathered the identification documents into the leather folder and put it, with the map pouch and armbands, into his inner tunic pocket. Then he hooked the keys to the Mercedes and the key to Case Ace, number two, onto his personal key ring.

The silence in the office stretched out. The general knew their business was not finished but he was determined the captain would speak first.

Tranchet-LeRoi lit a fifth cigarette with fingers that trembled in anger. “Goddamn your Yankee stubbornness,” he said at last. “You’re not going to ask about the gun, are you?”

“I figured you’d bring it up.”

“All right. A gun is something else, Weir. So far the car, the observer’s credentials, those things are harmless, almost official. But I can’t issue a permit for a regulation service revolver unless you tell me exactly what your plans are.”

“I can’t do that, Alain,” he said.

“Then I have only one option,” the captain said and opened the top desk drawer. “I offer you something personal, something of a family heirloom on my father’s side.” He put a self-loading pistol, the barrel etched with silver inlay, and a small box of ammunition on the desk. “It is in perfect firing condition. I have checked it out myself.” He paused. “It could do the trick for you.”

Weir looked at the gun without touching it. “And it could also get me arrested for carrying an unofficial firearm, couldn’t it? You could pick up that phone before I got out the front gate.”

There were touches of color in the captain’s cheeks and he ground out his cigarette in the ashtray with a savage twist. With the other hand he swept the pistol and ammunition back into the top drawer.

“Just one more question before you leave, my friend,” he said. “Where do you get your guts? Why in hell did you expect me to put my ass on the line for you?”

The insolence, the hatred in the question forced Weir to pause, to try to read the Belgian’s face, to put order into his own thoughts. Then he spoke firmly, but with restraint.

“Something happened a long time ago, captain. I thought you knew that. For that action I was awarded the Medal of Honor by my own government. And I was awarded two decorations by your government. One gives me the freedom and courtesy of that city through the Order of Brussels, the other extends the gratitude of His Belgian Majesty, King Leopold, to Tarbert Weir in perpetuity. And I figured if your king was willing to lay his gratitude on the line, you — as an individual Belgian — also owed me something. It’s an American concept, Alain. In Las Vegas it’s what’s called ‘an open I.O.U.’ I’m calling in my markers.”

The two men stared at one another for a long moment, then Captain Tranchet-LeRoi nodded abruptly. “So be it. And since I’ve paid my debt, may I ask a special favor of you, general?”

Tarbert Weir nodded.

“Make this the last time you see any of the Tranchet-LeRois,” he said. “My father was not out of town on business yesterday. He was in a pub in the village, waiting to see your car drive out of town. I may not speak for my mother, but I am certain I speak for my father and myself. We have had enough. Can you imagine what it has been like to compete for a lifetime against the great and glorious Scotty Weir? What more do you want of us? A war that’s been over for more than three decades and whose fire still blows through our lives, how long must we be grateful?”

His voice was shrill with emotion, and he stood abruptly, placing his hands flat on the desk, the knuckles pressed white with tension.

“We are Belgique and proud of it. We want now only to be ourselves. Is that not something you could force yourself to understand? Have you any concept, General Weir, how tired we are of Americans, how tired we are of heroes?”

Weir stood and walked toward the office door. His own anger was so sudden, that he put his hand on the doorknob to steady himself. He wanted to turn back and tip the desk onto the floor, spilling papers and files, and flinging the desk drawer with the antique pistol out over the carpet. He wanted to take the young officer by his tunic and shake him until there was no longer any look of judgment or rebuke in his pale eyes. He wanted to kill this smug, vengeful European who knew neither the young man Scotty Weir had once been, nor the young Mark Weir who was dead while this Belgique still lived.

Instead he forced himself to speak almost kindly. “Think sometime, captain, where you Belgiques would be, where all of Europe would be if it weren’t for Americans and heroes.

“Most mortals, soldier and civilian, go through life on secret orders till a moment of crisis, when something bigger than human measure is asked of them. It’s then they open those orders. That’s how heroes find out who they are.”

General Weir put on his garrison cap and opened the door. “ ‘A hero is a man who endures for one moment longer...’ I’m not the first man who said that, Alain, but I’m obviously the first one who said it to you.”

Weir nodded thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said, “you have my word on your last request. I will not see you or your family again, but on one condition only.” The kindness left his voice. “If you double-cross me, captain, if you fuck up my plans in any way at all, I’ll come back here in person and break your Belgique neck with my own bare hands.”

He walked down two flights of marble stairs, cut across the main courtyard and began the walk back to Ludensdorf. The staff car would stay in its official parking slot until later.

The general glanced at his wristwatch. The entire interview had taken less than half an hour.