A matter of time

1975

The collapse of South Vietnam had begun in January, a slow, snowballing thing that had not seemed serious at first. But when Hue and Da Nang went and the North Vietnamese started whooping down the coast routes like a juggernaut, it became obvious that the end had finally come. Those with an emotional investment in the country could, like watching the football Cardinals go into the second half down by seventeen, hope for a miracle, but that hope was wan.

One night Cash woke to find Annie sobbing beside him. He pretended not to notice.

Later that week he found her sniffling in the kitchen when he returned from work.

"What's the matter?"

"Been a rotten day. Everything went wrong. And now I burned my finger."

She was lying. The stove wasn't hot. But he let it slide. Even shared griefs had to have their private facets.

"Nancy's bringing the kids over tomorrow."

"Yeah? Second time this week. What's up? I thought she didn't like us that much."

"People change."

"I guess." They just could not get it out in the open.

The worst cruelty, for Cash, was the indifference of the people he encountered. But they were dead-tired of Vietnam. Most would have been pleased to see the damned country follow Atlantis's example.

Cash was angry and unapproachable most of the time.

During the downhill plunge to the fall of Saigon he remained utterly distracted. Nothing could draw him out of the netherworld to which he had retreated. He had little time for murders or murderers. His thoughts all revolved around that one little country, that pimple on the ass of the world, where his oldest son was still missing…

He did not really care about Vietnam per se. He was no rabid anti-communist. The system had done wonders in China. Through the later years of the war he had been critical of United States involvement, though for reasons at variance with those vocalized in the streets. Those he could not comprehend at all. They had no apparent relation to reality, only to wishful thinking about how the world should be. He felt that, like a too cautious coach, the United States had gone, at best, for a draw. He felt the military should have been allowed to go for a victory with everything but nuclear weapons, and to hell with futile arguments about the propriety of being there in the first place. Once you're wet, you should go ahead and swim, not cry about falling in, he thought. But he kept his opinions to himself, being rational enough to know they were opinions and not something Moses had brought down from the mountain in his other hand.

He had greeted the January, 1973, news of United States withdrawal with relief. The Kissinger "peace" had seemed a last, comic punctuation to an era of futility. He had predicted the disaster even then, and had tried to school himself to live with its inevitable consequences.

Vietnam was dead. The people who had buried it wanted everyone to forget. That would be nice, Cash thought. He wished he could. If he had known for sure about Michael, he might have been content to stick his head in the sand with the rest. But he knew the other side wouldn't forget. They knew, now, that they had carte blanche in that end of the world. They knew, from peasant to premier, that the fall of Saigon symbolized far more than the culmination of years of warfare. It marked the east's watershed victory in World War III. Solzhenitsin had pointed it out: the west had been fighting a halfhearted and half-assed delaying action since 1945; Vietnam had marked the beginning of the end. From the fall of Saigon onward the collapse would cease to be gradual. The west, whether good or evil or whatever, was about to come apart, and at a rate which, historically speaking, would be precipitous. Cash supposed he would live long enough to see the barbarians at the gates himself.

But, from a historical perspective, it would not matter much. Life would go on. The big change would be in which gang of mental cases would be running things.

Times were when Cash grew extremely cynical. Especially about government and the people in it.

Annie, in her anger, in her passion to show others her feelings, volunteered to adopt an orphan. There weren't enough to go around. After the collapse, she decided they would sponsor a Vietnamese family. Cash acquiesced, hoping she would not start blaming them about Michael, expecting she would forget the whole thing when she calmed down.

Mayagыez put everyone on an even keel again. It was silly, being such a small incident, not well executed at all, and likely to be nothing more than a fix for the national pride.

Yet next day Cash was able to get back into his world, to work by more than the numbers.

John Harald was more perceptive than Cash had suspected.

During the grim months he had not said a word about the mystery corpse. That morning after Mayagыez, quiet because even the bandits were home following the news, he strolled into Cash's office and dropped the ancient file onto his desk. "Want to glance through this?"

"What?"

"Carstairs's file on the Groloch investigation. The missing man."

"That again?"

"Just have a read. I'll be catching up on my paperwork."

They had been a lot less formal in the old days, Cash discovered. Carstairs's report contained a lot of opinion and suspicion that was hard to separate from evidence. The story was much as Annie had described, though Carstairs had been convinced that Miss Groloch had murdered Jack O'Brien. Good riddance, he had observed. But the extent of the report indicated that he had put a lot of hours into hunting a solution.

Initially, Cash's strongest reaction was an eerie feeling of dйjа vu. Carstairs's emotional responses had been identical to his own.

Atherton Carstairs had felt driven to find out what had happened to O'Brien. And had faced the same reluctance to push it on the part of his superiors. They had wanted to write it off as a simple disappearance after only two days-despite the fact that there had been a dozen witnesses willing to testify that O'Brien had been seen entering Miss Groloch's house, that later there had been the screams of a woman being beaten, then a masculine voice pleading for mercy. And O'Brien had never come out.

The file included a thick sheaf of letters. For years Carstairs had kept up a correspondence with friends in other cities, hoping someone would stumble on to O'Brien alive. A search of Miss Groloch's house, in a day when such things need not be done so politely and proper, had produced nothing. He had not found a doily out of place, let alone bloodstains or evidence of violence. For weaponry the woman had possessed nothing more dangerous than a few kitchen knives.

Carstairs had made his final entry in 1929, on the eighth anniversary of the case, and the eve of his assignment to the Board of Police Commissioners. He had left best wishes for anyone who became interested in his hobby case.

He had finally surrendered.

Pasted to the last page was a snapshot of a man and a woman, in the style of the early twenties. Penned on the yellowed sheet was "Guess who?" in John's hand, with an arrow indicating the man.

The resemblance was remarkable. Even to the suit. And the woman was undeniably Fiala Groloch.

"John!" Cash thundered. "Get in here!"

He appeared quickly, wearing a foolish grin. "Saw the picture, eh?"

"Yeah. You didn't fake something up, did you?" John and Michael, as teenagers, had loved practical jokes. John had once gone through a camera stage. He and Michael had made some phony prints showing Cash and a neighbor woman leaving a motel. There had been virtual war with Annie before the boys had confessed. Cash had never forgiven them.

Because he really had been guilty, his feet of clay had been innocently, accidentally exposed, his darkest secret had been hauled, bones rattling, from its casket by children who knew not what they did. The experience had made him suspect there might be something to the law of karma after all.

John's smile faded. "Not this time. You want to run tests?"

"No." Cash believed him. He didn't want to, though. "Wait. Maybe. This's impossible, you know. It can't be him."

"I know." Harald seemed proud of his little coup, but frightened. As was Cash, who felt like a wise Pandora about to open the box anyway.

"There're no prints in the file," Cash observed. "Did they use them then?"

"Got me. I don't even know how to find out."

"They started in the eighteen hundreds, I think. Didn't Sherlock Holmes use them?"

"Shee-it, I don't know. Never made any difference to me."

"Okay. Okay. We got a problem. How to prove our corpse isn't Jack O'Brien. We need something concrete. Dental records?"

"No way. You saw the coroner's report. No dentist ever saw the inside of that mouth. Perfect teeth."

"Yeah. Wouldn't find anything medical, either. It'd be here in the file. Scars and things. Carstairs doesn't mention a one. You'd think a guy with O'Brien's street record would've gotten cut up a little. Must've been a lucky bastard. Bet you couldn't even find a birth record… Wait! O'Brien. Catholic…"

"Got you." John started to leave.

"Hold on here. Let's have a plan. All we can do is find out if he was born here, maybe if any relatives are still alive… Yeah, that'd help. Find somebody who really knew him besides Miss Groloch. Wouldn't be conclusive, though."

Cash paused, thought for nearly a minute. "We need to get ahold of something with his prints. You think any would still be around?"

John spread his hands, shrugged. "They found pterodon bones in Texas a couple months ago."

"Okay. Anything's possible. Slide out when Railsback isn't looking and start checking parish records. I'll cover for you."

"But Railsback is looking," the lieutenant said from behind Harald. "What're you up to now?"

"Not much. A little hobby case, you might say."

"Yeah," said John. "Just a check on a birth certificate. It'll only take half an hour."

Railsback spotted the file. And picture. "Hey, the John Doe. Where'd you get this? Who is he?"

Harald and Cash exchanged looks.

"Well?"

"Name's Jack O'Brien," said Cash. "That man disappeared in 1921. This is the file on the investigation."

"Eh?" Railsback frowned. "What the hell? You're shitting me."

"Nope." Improvising, Cash added, "We thought the John Doe might be a relative."

"Really?" Railsback gave them both the fisheye. "You got the Donalson thing straight?"

"He's in the can, ain't he?"

"Sure. But for how long? Judge'll probably release him on his own recognizance."

They had brought Donalson in for a double murder. He was an enforcer for one of the drug gangs, had been on bond awaiting trial on two previous murder charges when they had grabbed him. One case had gone more than a year without disposition. It was the sort of thing that made them wonder why they bothered.

"The paperwork's current," said Cash. "Won't be anything more till the prosecuting attorney asks for it."

"Okay, you want to chase some crackpot time machine notion, go to it. Just keep in touch, huh?"

John disappeared before the lieutenant changed his mind. Once he was gone, Railsback exposed a bit of his normally hidden human side. "You feeling better now, Norm? Maybe if you get into something really zany like this…?"

"Yeah, Hank. I think we got it worked out now. It hit Annie pretty hard, though."

"I heard she wants to sponsor one of the families."

"We've talked about it." From there they let it slide into shop talk. Railsback had lost his idealism in the trenches of the Us-and-Them War of their business. He had worked his way up from patrolman, and patrolmen often became disillusioned early. They began seeing their lives in terms of cops against the world. Sometimes the people they protected became indistinguishable from the predators. An Alamo psychology developed. Guys who understood what was happening to them usually got out. The others stayed in and exacerbated the profession's bad image.

After fifteen minutes Railsback wandered off. Cash wondered if he were having family trouble again. He had seemed distracted. He did not socialize much on the outside. No one really knew the private Railsback, though it had long been apparent that he and his wife lived in a state of armed truce, which explained why he often worked a double shift. The one time Cash had met Marylin Railsback he had come away wondering what Hank had ever seen in her. The ways of love were as strange as those of the Lord.

What with keeping up on the daily casualty list and not making much headway with parish records, John didn't find anything for a week. Cash's own workload, which now included covering for Harald where he could, gave him no time to get involved. And on his own time he had private problems. Annie kept fussing about taking in a Vietnamese family. For reasons known only to herself, Annie had asked for a police official. Cash wasn't sure he would be able to handle that. Some of them, surely, had earned their reputations.

But John eventually came rolling in. "I've got it: a sister. Twelve years younger than O'Brien, but she's still around. All his other relatives have moved or died. What took so long was, she was married, then her old man got blown away in World War Two, then she went into a convent. Lot of name changes."

"Which one?"

"Saint Joseph of Carondelet."

"Hell, that's right over on Minnesota."

"Yeah. Thought you'd want to go along."

"Damned right. So let's hit it."

They slid out while Railsback was on the phone home, arguing. That didn't bode well for their return.

"Think we ought to take her down to the morgue and spring it on her?" John asked while on the way.

"What for?"

"To look at the corpse."

"You mean they still got it?"

"Yeah. I checked this morning. Since nobody ever claimed it, they just sort of forgot it. Sloppy, leaving a stiff laying around the meat locker like that."

"Isn't that against the law, or something? I mean, there'd have to be all kinds of screw-ups. Should've been an inquest, should've-"

"Probably. Anyway, they're talking about doing something with it now that I reminded them."

"That's the weirdest thing about this guy. Everybody's in a rush to get rid of him, if only by forgetting. Even us. Look how long we let it go. It's like he don't belong and everybody can feel it just enough to want to ignore him. How'd you stop them this time?"

"Told them I thought we'd found a relative."

"John…"

"So I fibbed. Just wanted to see what she thought."

"This is an old lady, John, a nun. Maybe it's too rough…"

Sister Mary Joseph was no aged but delicate flower. A glance was enough to show them that she was a tough old bird. Had to be. She was a first-grade teacher with twenty years service in the witch's cauldron walled by children, parents, and superiors in the archdiocese.

"Sister Mary Joseph? Norman Cash."

"You're the policemen?"

"Uhm. This's Detective Harald. John Junior. His dad was a competitor. Episcopalian."

"Why'd you want to see me?"

"Just to ask a few questions."

She seemed puzzled. "About what? Will it take long? I have classes…"

"This man?" Cash handed her the picture of the corpse, the same one that had gotten a reaction from Miss Groloch.

She frowned. Her breath jerked inward. One hand went to her mouth, then made the sign of the cross.

"Sister?"

"He looks like my brother Jack. But it can't be. Can it? He died in 1921."

"Disappeared," Harald corrected. He presented the picture from the file.

"Fiala Groloch. The heathen foreigner." This time she made a sign against the evil eye, then reddened when Harald and Cash looked puzzled. Cash had never seen an embarrassed nun.

"Sorry. There was a lot of animosity. Would you explain now?"

Cash took it, kept it simple, did no editorializing. "We're playing a long shot. Hoping this man might be your brother's son or grandson."

John added, "We hoped you'd be willing to view the corpse. To let us know if you think that's possible."

"Well, I suppose. Sister Celestine won't mind an extra hour with the children." She smiled a delightfully wicked little smile.

Cash couldn't help observing, "I think you'd like my wife's aunt, Sister Dolorosa. She's a Benedictine. At a convent in northwestern Pennsylvania."

"Oh? Well, I'd better tell Mother Superior. Be right back."

Sister Mary Joseph returned while John was on the phone to the morgue. "I've always had a feeling this would come back on us. Fiala Groloch should've been burned for witchcraft."

Cash didn't respond verbally, but his surprise was obvious.

"I know. That's not charitable. Not Christian. But if Satan ever sent his emissary, Fiala Groloch's it."

"That much bitterness? After all these years?"

"Oh, it's not Jack. I was too young to understand at the time, but he was the devil's disciple himself. He probably deserved whatever he got. Did you meet her? I hear she's still there. And strong as ever."

"We did. She seemed like a nice old lady."

"Old? I wonder how old she really is."

"About eighty-five, I guess. She only looked about sixty, though."

"At least she's aged some."

"I don't understand."

"When it happened… whatever happened with Jack… she looked about forty…"

"Early thirties, I heard, but you're the only one I've talked to who knew her then."

"About forty. And even then there wasn't anybody who remembered when she didn't live there. Her house was built when that part of the city belonged to the private estate of a Mary Tyler. When I was a child, the old folks said it'd been built right after the Civil War."

"I figured the eighteen eighties, just guessing."

"My grandparents came over in eighty-three. She and the house were there then, and had been for a long time. My grandmother told me she'd heard that there'd been a man who was supposed to be Fiala's father. He disappeared too, I guess. Miss Groloch told people he went back to the old country. Nobody ever heard which one it was. She used to get out and around in those days. Didn't lock herself in till after Jack disappeared."

"The name sounds like eastern European." He wasn't really hearing the sister. That Miss Groloch might be 130, or even older, seemed so ridiculous that her words just floated across his consciousness like unsinkable ice. His only reaction was to make a note to tell John to check the tax and building records on the Groloch house.

Harald returned. "Okay. All set, Norm. Got to hit it now, though. The morgue people are spooked about having the stiff around so long."

"Sister?"

"I'm ready."

During the trip downtown Cash tried to draw the woman out on her feelings toward Miss Groloch. He failed. She retreated into a shell not at all in keeping with the warmth and spirit she had shown earlier.

Sister Mary Joseph made the sign of the cross again when the attendant rolled the corpse out. Several times. Cash feared she would faint.

But she got a grip on herself. "Do you have his clothes?"

Harald spent a half hour hunting them up. Then the Sister merely glanced at them. She found a chair, sat, thought for several minutes. Finally, "You'll think I'm crazy. And maybe I am. But that's Jack. Those are the pants he was wearing the day he disappeared. I remember. I was sitting on the front steps with Colin Meara from upstairs. Jack gave me a dime and told us to get a soda before the old man heard about us holding hands on his own doorstep. He winked at Colin and went off whistling. He had his lucky tarn on, and his hands stuffed in his pockets. Sergeant, it's him. How can that be?"

Harald grinned like a Little Leaguer who had just pitched a no-hitter. Cash just sat down and put his face in his hands. "I don't know, Sister. I don't know. This thing's getting crazier and crazier."

"How did he die?"

"Scared to death, the coroner says."

"Is that possible? I mean…?"

"It's possible. Not common, but possible."

"But how'd he keep so long? They didn't have freezers."

"He died March third. About 9:30 p.m."

"This March? That's impossible."

"I know it. You know it. But that there Jack O'Brien don't know it. Didn't know it. He was barely cold when they found him. His body heat had melted the snow…"

"But it's impossible. Fifty-four years…"

"I know. I know. I know."

John continued to grin-with worry beginning to nag around the edges as he recognized more and more improbabilities. Cash and the sister sat in an extended silence. Finally, she said, "I think you'd better take me back now." To the puzzled attendant, who had been hovering about all along, "What do I have to do about the body? About arrangements?"

She was convinced.

Railsback was at his foulest when they returned. He looked, Cash thought, like a tornado about to pounce on a trailer park.

"Cool it, Hank," Cash said. "Sit down and shut up till we're done. We just bought a time bomb."

Railsback recognized distress, was reasonable enough to realize a tantrum was inappropriate. "Talk to me," he said.

"We got a claimant for our John Doe. Guy's sister. Positive ID. Absolutely no doubts. But…" And Cash gave him the buts.

As was becoming more common, Railsback thought before he growled. But he growled anyway. "Norm, I don't want anything to do with it. Get it out of here. There's got to be some way we can dump it on somebody else…"

"There's still a murder file open."

Railsback pulled a bottle of pills from a drawer, gobbled a couple. "Who knows? You and Harald. Me. The sister. Anybody else? This hits the papers and TV, they'll clobber us."

"Not today's developments. I guess the wives are current through yesterday. Oh, and there was the attendant at the morgue, but he didn't know what the hell was going on."

Railsback rubbed his forehead. He got headaches when the pressure was on. He was an ulcer man, too. He ate Valium like candy. "Too many. It's going to leak somewhere. All right, you guys dug it up, you bury it. One way or another, you get out there and prove she's a nut. Maybe we can't find out who he is, but we damned sure better find out who he isn't."

"How? "John asked.

"I don't care. It's your problem. Use your imagination. Roust this Fiala Groloch. Way you describe her, she's got trunks full of mementoes. Look for prints. Do whatever you have to, but do something."

VI. On the Y Axis;

Through 8 August 1964;

The Chinese Puzzle

A man named Huang Hua, whose true name was something else entirely, spent the years 1956-1973 in virtual self-imprisonment in a two-room office in a basement in Peking. He was a veteran of the Long March and the engineer of the POW defections during the Korean War.

One room was living quarters. It contained his bed and toilet. The other contained cooking facilities and a small desk with a single telephone. Along one wall stood a bookcase containing numerous looseleaf notebooks of western manufacture, each filled with the tiny, precise characters of his pen, plus several hundred books, mostly in English. Along the base of another wall were cartons of office supplies, more than Huang could use in two lifetimes. He was a hoarder.

Only four men knew why Huang had gone into hibernation: himself; the chairman; Lin Piao; Chou En-lai.

In 1971 Lin would feel compelled to let the Muscovite revisionists in on the secret. Air Force fighters caught his aircraft over Mongolia on September 12.

Huang's telephone linked directly with a small underground establishment in Sinkiang. It was the only regular connection. Security was more strict than at the Lop Nor facility.

Huang's life and project reflected the Chinese character. He had failed in Korea. Certain that other chances would arise, he had kept his project going and growing. Not once did the policy-makers ask him to justify the expense or necessity. Tibetans, Indians, recalcitrant regionalists, old Nationalists, even a few Russians from the 1969 clashes on the Ussuri River, and Burmese from the border skirmishes there, came to his facility. He learned. He polished. He refined. He persevered.

August 8, 1964, provided one of the great moments in his life. That was the day the Chairman himself phoned to give him the news about the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

All things came to the man who was patient.

VII. On the Y Axis;