Hard Rain

Five

There weren’t many places I could go after a revelation like that. So Masters was leaving the Air Force. Shit… now I wanted to get up and leave, even if it was just the coffee shop. But the reality was that, like it or not, the two of us were joined at the hip. Stuck in this country, investigating a high-priority case. I chewed without tasting anything.

‘This is going to be difficult, isn’t it?’ Masters said.

‘Nothing a lobotomy wouldn’t fix. You first,’ I suggested.

‘You and I need to forget we have a history.’

‘Like I said, you first.’

Masters wiped her lips with a napkin.

‘You met this fiancé of yours in Istanbul,’ I said. ‘When, exactly?’

‘Vin, I’m not —’

‘So anyway, the devil says to this lawyer, “Yeah, I can fix things for you. Your income? I’ll increase it ten-fold. Your partners? They’re gonna start loving you. Your clients will give you the respect you think you deserve; you’ll get four months vacation each year and you’ll live to be a hundred, finally dying on the job with a young mistress — I’ll organise her, too.”’

Masters’ arms were folded and she’d fixed me with that flat stare I knew so well.

‘“In return, I’ll just take your wife’s soul, your children’s souls, their children’s souls and they’ll all rot in hell for eternity.”

‘To which the lawyer says, “So what’s the catch?”’

‘You can be a real asshole, Vin. You know that?’

‘This would be one of those rhetorical-type questions, right?’ I said.

One of her hands balled into a fist. ‘Okay, you asked for it. You already know I met him three years ago when I was here as a tourist. We were in a tour group. We started talking. He happened to let slip that he’d just made lieutenant colonel. We were both in the Air Force — that gave us an instant bond. We hit it off, spent a couple of weeks together here in Istanbul. It didn’t go further because he was involved with someone, but we kept in touch over the years. Then, out of the blue, he turned up at OSI, Ramstein. Seems the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force volunteered us to help the JAG prepare a case for the Department of Defense. Things just happened between us, and they happened fast.’

Again, I didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say.

‘I’m sorry, Vin,’ Masters continued.

The front door of the café burst open and a bunch of noisy people swirled in. From the way they dressed and from all the chatter and laughter, I pegged them as locals. I turned to face Masters. I wanted to get angry, but I didn’t have the grounds. Apart from the fact that we had decided to call it quits before she’d reconnected with her JAG jerk, I reminded myself that I was also no angel. I’d only recently returned from Florida, where I’d been on a case and met a colonel of my own. She’d helped me nail a guy who’d cut a buddy of mine out of his parachute and let gravity do the rest. And things had just happened pretty damn fast with the colonel and me, too.

‘All right… you win,’ said Masters finally. ‘His name’s Richard Wadding, okay? Lieutenant Colonel Richard Wadding.’

The name of her fiancé, delivered to me like that — like some kind of confession — caught me by surprise. ‘Sorry?’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I heard you right. Did you say, “Richard Wadding”?’

Masters nodded, relieved, perhaps because the secret was out in the open.

I wasn’t so sure. That’s because I knew the guy. Only I knew him by a different name — the one he’d been given by the Gulf War I and II vets flocking to join the growing class action against the military for exposure to depleted uranium ammunition. A buddy of mine by the name of Tyler Dean was one of them. Tyler used to drive an M1 Abrams tank and lived around the stuff in the Iraqi desert for eighteen months. A year ago he went to the doctor to complain about a sore throat and ended up in hospital having most of his oesophagus removed. While they were mucking around in his insides, they also found that one of his kidneys had died inside him. They stitched his stomach to his tonsils, removed the kidney and introduced him to a dialysis machine. Tyler was only twenty-nine. Masters’ fiancé was point man for the defendant, the Armed Forces of the United States of America, doing his best to see that the vets got nothing more or less than a kick in the keester. So, like I said, I knew this Richard Wadding by a different name. I knew him as Colonel Dick Wad.

‘So you do know him?’ she asked, exercising that annoying ability of hers to read my thoughts.

Before I could answer, the front door opened and more folks surged in. Music blared and the party reached critical mass in an instant. A young boy crowd-surfed from the front of the café to the back on a roar of approval. An old guy with five-day growth on his face and wearing a coat tailored from what looked to me like compressed lint materialised in front of Masters and pulled her up and out of her seat. He wanted to dance with her. She protested but gave up when it seemed he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

A large old woman came over to me, her hair clamped down by a colourful scarf tucked into a beige ankle-length coat buttoned to the neck. She was holding a plate of pastries doing breaststroke in what I assumed was honey. ‘Here, here,’ she said, waggling the plate under my nose. I smelt nuts and cinnamon. ‘We cele… celebrate — you eat.’

I gave her the only look I could manage, which was blank.

‘Please, please…’ she insisted, waggling the plate more urgently this time. I accepted one of the pastries being offered because, like the dancing for Masters, following orders appeared to be the only option here. I took a bite.

‘Very good,’ I said, because it was. The music and the laughter were loud enough to feedback through my ears like they were old speakers about to blow. ‘What are you celebrating?’ I shouted.

She shrugged, unable to penetrate the language barrier.

‘Married?’ I yelled, holding my arms out to indicate the party. ‘Someone getting married?’

The woman frowned. And then what I was saying seemed to dawn on her. ‘No, no. No marry,’ she said, cackling, revealing the remaining three teeth still planted in her gums. ‘Bir ca? Um… circum… Ünnet! Ünnet!’ And in case I still didn’t get it — because I obviously still didn’t — the woman used a couple of fingers to snip at the air.

And then I got it. ‘You’re celebrating… a circumcision?’ The kid did another turn of the café above the heads of the crowd and everyone cheered their approval.

‘Yes, yes!’ she replied, again using her fingers as scissors.

Masters managed to disengage herself from the dancing. ‘C’mon,’ she shouted. ‘Let’s get out of here. This place has gone mad.’

We stepped out the door and closed it, sealing off most of the noise behind us. I noted that the weather had warmed up a little and the wind had dropped. My jacket and T-shirt were now able to cope with what remained. ‘Do you know what all that was about?’ I asked Masters as we stood for a moment to get our bearings.

‘Yep,’ she replied, zipping up against the cold. ‘The boy had been circumcised. That’s a big deal hereabouts.’ She threw me a wry smile. ‘You got a problem with that?’

‘Me? Problem? I think it’s great that the penis is celebrated. There should be more of it. There should be a World Penis Day. I can see it being a hit back home in the Bible Belt.’

I stepped off the sidewalk to hail a cab. It was coming up to 11:00 hours — time to put in an appearance at the scene where Colonel Portman had been julienned by a crazed Veg-O-Matic.

Ten minutes later we were in a cab crawling along streets where the folks who were loaded lived — lawns and walls and towering gates with intercoms. Even the trees looked snooty. Overhead a massive suspension bridge joining two continents blocked out the sun. I was busy making architectural comparisons between the homes on either side of the street when Masters spoke.

‘So, you didn’t answer my question.’

‘Didn’t I?’ I replied.

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘Hey, look at that pink building with the columns,’ I said, attempting a diversion. I knew where Masters was going. ‘You could cut that into slices and serve it at a wedding reception.’ Duh — cake… marriage… fiancés… Colonel Dick Wad.

‘I asked you whether you knew Richard Wadding.’

The cab pulled to a stop. We paid and got out.

‘Well, do you?’ she asked again.

I compared the address of the residence in front of me with the one scribbled in my notebook. I didn’t need to do that — check we had the right house. This was Portman’s place, all right. How many others in the street were guarded by uniformed policemen behind portable bulletproof shields? I couldn’t stall any longer. ‘Yeah, I’m familiar with a guy by that name. From a rich family been farming cotton down in Mississippi for half-a-dozen generations?’

‘Yes, that’s him.’

‘Then you’re going to marry a known fuckwit,’ I informed her.

‘What?’ She was staring at me, her cheeks suddenly red and her hands moving to her hips, unsure about whether she’d heard it right. But she had, she knew she had, and she also knew she didn’t want to hear me repeat it. ‘Jesus!’ she said, and spun away like a twister off up the worn stone steps to the front door.