A Matter of Honor

Chapter Three

“I just happened to be walking by,” Duro Lasari told the red-haired girl.

She smiled at him. Her skin was smooth and white and probably freckled when she was young, he thought. Under the high neon stripping in the ceiling, her eyes looked dark and shadowed, almost bruised, as if she were overworked and tired. “But what you did, that was very brave, George.”

He’d told the police that his name was George Jackson, that he was from out of town and they’d let it go at that, hadn’t asked for a driver’s license or other ID. Lasari helped to search the street until they found a four-inch switchblade in the gutter.

“You’re lucky, pal,” the sergeant said. “You don’t know this town. Them scumbags are just bucking for a chance to open you up.”

The woman who led Mrs. Lewis, followed by Lasari, into the office was Dr. Irene Kastner. She introduced them to the staff and poured cups of coffee. One of the two clerks who had watched the action from the doorway put out his hand and said he was Rick Argella. Argella was slim and youthful in jeans and turtleneck and a pale blue cardigan. “I’d like to apologize for not helping you out there,” he said. “I just froze. I just don’t cotton to those friggin’ españoles.”

The red-haired girl was named Bonnie Caidin. Lasari took his mug of coffee and accepted the invitation to use the extra chair at her desk.

The office was warm, almost hypnotically bright, an insulated cocoon against the cold, dark streets, and touched with odors of chicory blend coffee and the girl’s faint perfume. She sat with him, fragile hands folded neatly on the top of the desk, as if she were resting or taking a break in the night’s work. Lasari saw the expectant look in her eyes and was aware of the silence between them. He shifted in his chair, put his coffee cup on the desk and stared down at his tight jeans and his feet in the heavy work shoes, carefully crossed at the ankles. He was surprised to see a slash of blood on the coarse welt of his right boot.

He said then, “As long as I’m here, maybe I could ask you something. It’s about some trouble a friend of mine got himself into. Carlos his name is, Luis Carlos.”

Bonnie Caidin pulled a yellow legal pad in front of her. “Carlos,” she said as she wrote. “Luis Carlos. How can we help him, George?”

“He’s a deserter,” Lasari said, “but he’d like you to know that he volunteered in the first place, miss. He was nineteen, almost, when he signed up. He was in ’Nam for more than two years, nearly to the end. He got hit twice, the first time a flesh wound in the hand that put him out for a month. Carlos doesn’t count that one, but it’s on his record.”

He forced himself to pause, to slow down the rush of his words. “The second time he got hit twice in the leg. It was bad and took a lot of surgery in Saigon to put it together. That treatment didn’t work out right, and he was in a hospital in the States, after the second operation, when he saw the end of the war on TV. You probably saw it, everybody trying to crowd onto planes and get out of Saigon in those last days.” He paused and looked at the red-haired woman, aware that she was listening carefully, writing nothing on the legal pad.

“How’s your coffee, George?”

“It’s fine, thanks, ma’am.”

“So Carlos was back in the States when the war was winding down. What then, George?”

“There was a lot of time in Fitzsimons, and things didn’t always go right,” he said. “Carlos had personal problems, a kind of overload, and he never finished out his time in the service. He just walked away from it all. That’s more than ten years ago and he never went back. So he’s a deserter, miss, plain and simple. He knows the Army kept records on him, and Carlos would like to get that straightened out.”

“We’re on a first name basis here, incidentally, George. Except for Dr. Kastner, that is. Only her husband and the mayor call her Irene. I’m Bonnie, if you like.” She sipped her coffee. “It’s obvious that you and Carlos are good friends.”

“That’s right. We’ve been close ever since he came to the Midwest. We both work in the same body shop...”

“As his friend, don’t you think you should ask Carlos to come in and talk to us in person?”

“I suggested that to him, ma’am,” Lasari said, “but he’s at the place where he doesn’t trust anybody. He doesn’t feel he owes anybody an apology. He doesn’t feel ashamed or guilty. He got hit twice and he put in all those good years. That should entitle him to something, he figures.”

Dr. Kastner and Mrs. Lewis walked over to Caidin’s desk. Dr. Kastner said, “Excuse me for breaking in, but our friend here wants to say goodbye to the young man.”

When Lasari stood, Amanda Lewis took one of his hands in both of hers and pressed it warmly. “I got to thank you, young man. I was too scared to talk when we first came in. But I’m grateful to you, I surely am.”

“Her nephew, Randolph Peyton Lewis, was supposed to leave Frankfurt early yesterday,” Dr. Kastner said to Caidin, “on a MATS flight scheduled for O’Hare about eight-thirty this morning. But she hasn’t been able to locate him yet.”

“Was it a direct flight?” Bonnie Caidin asked. “Do you have a number?”

“Yes, MATS 94, out of Frankfurt,” Dr. Kastner said. “But the MATS switchboard is closed for the night. Mrs. Lewis is going home now, so here’s her phone number and address in case we hear anything.” She put a slip of paper on Caidin’s desk. “I told her I think her nephew will probably try to get in touch with her there anyway. No need to presume he’s in any trouble.”

Mrs. Lewis nodded. “I’ll go home and wait by the phone. He’s only twenty-two, and I just pray the good Lord the boy’s all right. But I had to thank this young man here before I go anywhere.”

Caidin excused herself, picked up her coffee cup and went into a small, dimly lighted storage room behind the office. Supplies were stacked there, boxes of stationery and pamphlets and several five-gallon bottles of drinking water. A counter against one wall supported a mimeograph machine and cartons of paper and a two-burner Silex coffee maker. Bonnie Caidin filled her cup and then walked to a wall phone.

Mrs. Lewis squeezed Lasari’s hand again. “You’re one of God’s own,” she whispered as Dr. Kastner took her arm and walked her to the front door.

It hadn’t been too difficult so far, Lasari thought as he sat at the desk. The office was quiet except for the occasional sputter of the steam radiators and a rhythmic thumping from a side table where Argella and the other clerk were stapling papers.

He’d spelled it out for the lady as he’d practiced it for so long, keeping his voice easy and casual, like he was talking about someone else, keeping the personal anger where it belonged, so deep inside him that no cracks showed on the surface.

He had told the whole detailed story to Luis Carlos, of course, not once but a dozen times or more, sitting in Mrs. Swade’s rooming house, playing dominoes; Carlos, the old Filipino, watching, nodding, sipping dark rum and smoking twisted little brown cigars. It helped that Carlos had little English, didn’t understand everything Duro Lasari told him. He listened, that was the important thing, listened with his brown eyes creased against the drifting tobacco smoke, his tired, old face watchful and attentive, and he never showed any recrimination or disapproval for what Duro Lasari had done or not done, letting him decide for himself to do what he was doing now, talking to the lady, trying to find some way to clean up that bad paper with the Army.

The office walls were painted hospital green, Lasari thought, a color that smelled of institutional economy and nursing routines; and pain, the green-gray monotony of military hospitals where he had lain so long, flat on his back with his leg in traction, burdened by thoughts of where he had been and where he was going, and violent memories of Vietnam coursing through his brain again and again. Outside on Diversey Boulevard, a single car sped by, its lights flashing a brief arc of color on the rain-streaked window. Lasari wrenched his thoughts back to the present.

Bonnie Caidin was talking on the phone in the storage room, the door open. She looked comfortable with herself, he thought, sipping coffee, the phone wedged between her chin and shoulder. She wore a beige sweater, a pink shirt and a gray skirt, and she leaned back against the counter, one slim ankle swinging idly. He could hear the low, soft murmur of her voice but the words were indistinct, and there were long pauses while she listened thoughtfully to whoever was on the other end of the line.

Lasari sat up straight when she walked to her desk, as if she were a teacher returning to a classroom.

“I hope you’ll excuse me,” she said. “That was a call I had to make about another matter.” She put her coffee cup on the desk.

“Now. I’d like to get all the details you can give me, George,” she said. “I won’t use your friend’s name, of course. That’s policy here. I’ll make out a card and we’ll refer to him by a case number. You can assure Luis Carlos there won’t be anything in our files that can be traced to him. Whatever you tell me will be kept in strictest confidence and all the references will be coded, so there can’t be an accidental leak.”

She picked up a sharpened pencil and dated her note pad. “First of all, I’d like to review Carlos’ service record — where he was inducted, his tour of duty, rank, decorations and medals, if any, the names of his superior officers, his family and civilian contacts, educational background, whatever might be helpful if we want character references and so forth.”

“You really need all that, a complete profile, Rorschachs, sex kinks, everything?”

Bonnie Caidin’s smile was polite but it didn’t touch the cool appraisal in her eyes. “George, the Army holds all the aces when it deals with deserters. They made the rules, Carlos broke them. The Army controls all the options. If your friend hopes to clear his record, to be allowed to serve out his time, he’s got to convince them there were extenuating circumstances for his desertion, that he’s a good and loyal risk for any further investment they have to make in him. So it’s necessary for us to have all the facts before we can advise Carlos. Because, and we should be clear about this from the start, if the Army rejects your friend’s application of reenlistment and/or an honorable discharge, the alternatives can be pretty severe.”

“A hitch in a federal prison, is that the alternative?”

“That’s one of them. Sometimes the Army likes to let a desertion charge drop. They examine the case, decide to issue a discharge without honor and sever all connections with the ex-soldier. But the Army does have the option of sending a bona fide deserter to a federal penitentiary for two years or even longer, plus a dishonorable discharge.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you what I know about Carlos,” Lasari said. He fixed his eyes on a wall calendar a few feet away from where Rick Argella was sorting papers. He kept his tone casual, but careful, every word measured before he spoke.

“... Raleigh. He enlisted for four years and entered the Army at Raleigh, North Carolina, that was in 1970, May twenty-second. He was out of school and working in a gas station, eighteen years old, a few months shy of nineteen. He’d had some sports interest but that didn’t pan out. Carlos had a low draft number, but he decided he ought to go.

“After basic training he was sent to Fort Bragg for awhile, then he was assigned to canine training in a semiamphibian operation in Virginia — Norfolk, the Navy base there. It was a joint training operation,” he explained in reaction to Caidin’s puzzled expression. “The men trained and jumped with dogs, Army shepherds, from the fan-tail of Navy seacraft. Units were trained to work as teams, to see how the dog might coordinate in beach assaults. It was an experimental program, and Carlos was part of it while it lasted.

“Later he was sent to Vietnam with a regular infantry unit. He got hit first in the hand, I told you that. The big hit came ten months later, hip and thigh and a lot of torn cartilage in the right leg. Like I said, he had surgery there and then surgery again and therapy in the States, in and out of hospitals for nearly two years, twenty months all counted. And he was in the hospital Stateside when the war ended.”

Duro Lasari talked for another ten minutes, filling in, backtracking, encapsulating those years of his life, years of endurance, confusion and ultimately angers and doubts so deep that even now, when he was at Mrs. Swade’s or walking the streets of Calumet City, he sometimes had to stop and grip something solid, a telephone pole, a mailbox, or even Carlos until the spasms of rage ceased and he could breathe normally again.

Bonnie Caidin took careful notes. Her handwriting was tiny but legible and she was fast. Several times she erased a word or phrase and substituted something else, determined to get his meaning down as accurately as possible.

“Decorations?” she asked.

“My friend got the Purple Heart twice, a Bronze Star and a lot of those ribbons that just mean you’ve been there, like buying a T-shirt at the Grand Canyon to show you looked but didn’t fall in.”

Caidin smiled, her pencil poised, her eyes watching him impersonally. Lasari frowned. “What bothers Carlos is — if he was going to desert — why he did it when he did. His record was good, he was still in the hospital, but the leg was healing and he was going to be one free civilian. In basic, when the going was tough, and in ’Nam, which was a real firelight, why didn’t he try to desert then?”

“Did he explain that to you?”

Lasari shook his head. “He’s not too much for talking, really. He says he needed time to make sense out of the whole thing. In the hospital he did a lot of reading, books, magazines, newspapers. He told me he didn’t know if that made him smarter or more scared. He told me the happiest guys in the wards were the paraplegics, the guys who would never be released, didn’t have to figure out what to do with their lives. They had all the answers spelled out for them.”

She was writing rapidly, and he stared at her bowed head. “I don’t think why is the problem, ma’am. It’s the fact that he did it. He packed it in, just walked away. So he’s a deserter.”

Her pencil was poised over the yellow lined paper. “You mentioned that his last treatment, before he walked, was Fitzsimons. Is that Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Denver?”

For the first time Duro Lasari felt a flick of caution. “... we won’t use your friend’s name... that’s policy here... there won’t be anything in our files that could be traced to him...”

But dates, place names, sequences, that could make a traceable map. He thought suddenly of the years of lying low in Jackson Hole, the peace and anonymity of the Wyoming countryside, and then the suspicions and panic that sent him hitchhiking in a frantic, broken path from the west to the midwest and finally, for the last two years, hiding in a safe Calumet City body shop, with a bedroom and shared bath in a fifty-dollar-a-week boardinghouse.

“He didn’t tell me everything, ma’am. I think he was in a number of hospitals. I don’t know exact dates at Fitzsimons.”

Bonnie Caidin put her pencil aside and tilted back in her swing chair. She clasped both hands behind her head, turning her neck as if to relieve tension, then said, “Your friend, Carlos, was he on drugs in Vietnam?”

She had shifted moods and topics suddenly, almost making him forget the role he was playing.

“I don’t think so, ma’am,” he said carefully. “But he told me once that the stuff was everywhere, joints, Mao’s one hundreds, speed, morphine. There was heroin so pure you didn’t have to cook it, just mix it with cold water and bang it. Carlos said you could get anything you wanted, any time and at the right price. That’s what he told me.”

“But Carlos himself wasn’t a user?”

“Joints maybe, nothing else.”

“Was he involved in dealing or pushing? I’ve got to know these things, George.”

“He knew what was going on. You’d have to be blind not to, but he wasn’t into that scene.”

“So Carlos told you, in substance, that he’d been a good, responsible soldier, and you believe he has been telling you the truth about all this, George?”

“About being a good soldier? Who knows? If he’d thrown away his rifle and refused to fight, a lot of Americans would have thought that was just fine. But he didn’t do that, he stood his ground, and I’ve seen the scars on his legs to prove it. He’s not lying about that.”

“I’m trying to get at the heart of the matter. Why do you think Carlos deserted when he did?”

Duro Lasari shrugged, his eyes became still in his dark, narrow face. He looked at her with defiant appraisal. “Maybe I walked into the wrong office, lady. ‘... we will be here to listen, understand, and resolve never to interrogate or interpret.’ Isn’t that what you wrote in the newspaper article on this place?”

“Yes, I did,” Bonnie Caidin said. She tapped the tip of her pencil against her teeth. “You understand, I mean your friend understands, that when he turns himself into the Army... if that’s what he decides to do... what happens next is out of our hands. This office can advise him, make an appointment with the right person at the right time. But by deserting Carlos broke his contract with the Army, and the Army still owns him. That doesn’t leave him much to bargain with.”

“He knows that,” Lasari said. “This guy’s at a point of no return. He can’t go forward till he goes backward. Maybe it’s the symbiotic relationship between the outlaw and the system. He’d like to serve out his time and be the best goddamn soldier ever, just as long as there’s hope he can walk out at the end of his tour with a clean discharge. He’ll pay whatever it takes to get that.”

The clerk, Argella, walked over to Caidin’s desk, buttoning a leather jacket over his blue sweater. “Excuse me, Bonnie,” he said. “I’m taking a snack break.” He looked at Lasari, his soft brown eyes friendly. “Maybe I could feed a dime into the parking meter for this gentleman here.”

Lasari explained he was parked in a free zone in the next block. “Thanks anyway, amigo.”

“Por nada, compadre.”

As Argella left, a cold wind from the open door surged around their ankles and fluttered papers on desk tops.

“I’m going to check out every Army regulation on desertion and/or reenlistment, of course,” Bonnie Caidin said. “But the best advice I have right now is that Luis Carlos come here in person and let us prepare a complete file on his service record and personal background. Will he do that?”

“I can’t guarantee anything, but I’ll ask him.”

“One thing that will be of prime importance in this case is intent. If Carlos turns himself into the military authorities voluntarily, that could be the best thing going for him. But if someone else turns him in, such as an informer, or if he’s picked up by Military Police, well, I wouldn’t count on the Army believing his good intentions.

“The Army doesn’t want ‘bad apples’ — that’s their phrase, not mine, and they’re not in the rehabilitation business. If Carlos is heavily in debt, has bad gambling habits, if you’re wrong about his drug use, or if he’s got deep legal problems, like serious arrears in wife or child support, I think you know what to advise him to do.”

“Stay away from the Army.”

“I can’t say that on my own authority, George. We just want your friend to know what he’s up against. And we’ll do everything we can to help him, that’s a promise.”

Lasari stood and zipped his windbreaker. “I’ll tell him. I appreciate you giving me this much time, ma’am.”

It was strange, he thought, he was almost sorry it was over. He had felt good here, the warm, bright office, the fragrant coffee, this thin, pale woman so willing to listen.

She picked up a raincoat with a wool lining from the back of her chair. A round plastic PRESS disc hung by a thong from a buttonhole. “I need a breath of fresh air,” she said. “I’ll type up our notes before I check out.”

The rain had stopped but the wind was high and they stood close, lifting their voices above the chill gusts. “I was a senior in high school when it was winding down,” she said, “not quite eighteen. I marched and demonstrated and carried placards. I sent letters to the editors, and I wrote things for the campus newspaper. I hated that war and didn’t believe any American soldier should be in it. What does your friend Carlos think about people like that?”

“They don’t bother him.”

“You said he was angry.”

“There are a lot of things to be angry about.” He stared down the street. “ ‘Civilians get the kind of Army and the kind of wars they deserve.’ I read that somewhere, and I’m still trying to figure it out. If it means what I think it means, I was in ’Nam for all the wrong reasons. That can make a guy angry.”

“You waited three nights before you came in,” she said. “What made you decide?”

He looked at her in surprise, then at the shadowed doorway across the street. “You saw me over there?”

“I’m a reporter. I’m supposed to notice things. What made up your mind?”

“Nothing you’d understand probably. It was those damned baseball caps.”

“You don’t like baseball?”

“I love it, Miss Caidin. It’s just another game I’m not very good at.”

As the low roar of Lasari’s GTO trembled through the silence, Rick Argella stepped from the darkness of an alley. The glow from the rear lights clearly revealed the license plate. When the car pulled away from the curb, Argella crossed the street to the all-night luncheonette.

The waitress smiled and brought him his usual order, a glass of milk and two sugar doughnuts. “Some fancy car, Millie,” he said, nodding in the direction of the fading reverberations. “Them power cars are collectors’ items now.”

“My brother had one,” she said. “The fellow who owns it was in here and I was telling him about it. Nice Italian type guy.”

Argella licked the sugar from his fingers and went into the men’s room at the rear of the restaurant. He slid the door bolt into its hasp, put some coins into the wall phone, dialed the detective division of a south-side precinct and asked to be connected with extension 400.

When Detective Frank Salmi picked up the phone, Argella spoke without identifying himself.

“I’ve got one for you, Frank. A ’Nam vet came in tonight, went AWOL a few years back and he’s nervous. Good record, he says, no habit, no drug busts but talks like he knows the scene. Says he wants to clear his record, re-up if necessary, that shit. Alley smart, if you ask me, a tough fucker. I saw him fight.”

“Got a name?”

“He calls himself ‘George,’ made out that he was asking information for a friend. That Tribune chica talked to him. He opened up to her some, but he was careful. No way I could move in or push it.”

“A deserter with a good record? A spade?”

“No, he’s pure honky, man. Maybe Italian.”

“What the fuck good is it without a name?”

“I got a plate number.”

“But is it his car?”

“Claro. I checked that twice. He told me where he was parked and he talked to a waitress.”

Argella gave Detective Salmi Lasari’s license number in spaced intervals. “Seven — four — bravo — six — dancer — nine.”

Salmi read it back “74B6D9?”

“Correcto, compadre. You’ll tell Sergeant Malleck where you got it?”

The phone clicked in Argella’s ear. He gave the hook a final shake, checked the coin chute automatically and returned to the counter. He told Millie the coffee was cold and that he’d meant he wanted the doughnuts with the coconut sprinkles.

Argella lit a cigarette and looked with sensuous contentment at the curve of the waitress’ hips as she reached to get the doughnuts from a shelf over the coffee urn.