The sniper's wife

Chapter 7

Willy Kunkle hadn't spoken with or seen Andy Liptak in over a decade. Close friends once, having met fresh off the plane in Vietnam, they'd actually been an unlikely pair from the start. For one thing, unusual in a military friendship, they weren't in the same unit. They'd bumped into one another purely by chance, had immediately discovered their mutual New York backgrounds, and had hit it off before being pipelined to their final assignments: Andy to a supply company, and Willy to the closest thing that bizarre war ever had resembling a front line-or, in his case, beyond it. During their time in country, they kept in touch, spent their off-duty time together, and bonded over the standard fare of overpriced alcohol and underage women. The fact that they endured utterly different experiences in the war both helped keep their connection alive while they served and explained its erosion afterward. What to Willy turned out to be a crucible of cruelty, violence, fear, and loss had amounted to little more than an interesting stint in an overseas warehouse to Andy, even though all this occurred during the war's chaotic waning days. The contrasting aftereffects were predictably undermining to a relationship based primarily on escapism.

And that didn't even factor in Mary.

Willy had brought Mary to the city shortly after their marriage, largely as a gift to her. It had been her first trip outside of Vermont, not counting a few quick illegal border crossings into Canada to get booze during her youth, and she'd been predictably overwhelmed by both New York's vast, flat expanse and the millions of people inhabiting it. Beginning the trip shy and intimidated, she'd ended up loving the twenty-four-hour vitality and diversity of the place.

Meeting Andy Liptak had merely been part of the schedule, and at the time not something of any great significance. Andy had been gregarious as always, but with a newfound man-on-the-make charmer's sheen that had encouraged Willy in his belief that some memories, and most people, were best left in the past. Liptak had hit the ground running back in New York, using his contacts and entrepreneurial savvy to start up a variety of businesses, and he'd developed into the sort of man Willy had come to loathe, all the more so in this case since Andy had survived Vietnam without a scratch, while Willy, as in a psychological dress rehearsal to the eventual loss of his left arm, had been crippled forever.

After Mary and Willy had returned home, therefore, he'd been disappointed by how impressed she'd been by the very man he'd wished they hadn't visited. As he saw it, she'd fallen prey to all the superficial trappings and mannerisms that merely advertise such people as flagrant phonies.

Not that he was qualified to pass judgment. In the end, drinking hard, increasingly abusive, and hanging on to his job only through Gunther's resented good graces, Willy Kunkle eventually understood that he was functioning as deviously as he'd ever done in the jungle, but with only a fraction of his former skill. His earlier, shortlived pretense in showing an interest in Mary, in what she was doing, and in sharing a life with her, all fell prey to his own toboggan ride straight to the bottom of selfindulgent despair.

Before the final crash, however, he'd acceded to their seeing Andy Liptak again during a couple of the latter's ski vacations to Vermont. It didn't go well. Mary betrayed how taken she was with Andy's world and its trappings, and Willy was all but incapable of hiding his contempt. Traditional jealousy never played a part, and in fact Andy was perfectly behaved throughout, but it didn't matter, given the rift following the last of Andy's visits. Later, after the divorce, Willy had heard that his ex-wife and Andy had linked up in New York, and in a rare moment of lucidity he'd conceded both the logic and the suitability of the match. At the time, he'd thought that Mary might have even found happiness at last.

Which now served to remind him of how wrong he could be.

On the phone, Andy had sounded only surprised and pleased to hear that Willy was in town, and quickly suggested they meet over dinner at Peter Luger's, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Mary's name didn't come up.

Luger's is tucked away in a typically eccentric Brooklyn corner, close to the looming Erector Set span of the Williamsburg Bridge, and right across the East River from Manhattan's Lower East Side, the Seventh Precinct, and Mary's apartment. Willy knew that Andy lived somewhere near Brooklyn Heights, across the sprawling old Brooklyn Navy Yard from Williamsburg, but the coincidence was curious.

He got off the Marcy Avenue subway stop, having stashed his car earlier in an open-air lot near Bellevue Hospital, and doubled back, heading toward the riverbank and the darker, grittier buildings there.

Despite the buffed, shiny, man-made glory of Manhattan's skyline, poking up above the run-down buildings before him, Willy had always been attracted to New York's older, seamier neighborhoods, many of which lined the rivers that had once functioned as commercial arteries and made of the city a world-class port.

New York was still a large port, of course, but not to the standard of its heyday, when every inch of its almost six hundred miles of shoreline was lined with a pier, a dock, a warehouse, or some other shipping facility. As he neared the restaurant, he noticed, here as in so many other places, that the streets were often paved over cobblestones, and sported traces of the short rail lines that had once run between the loading docks and the storage houses.

Now most of that muscle was atrophied-empty, soiled, quiet, and awaiting someone or something with enough money to either destroy it, turn it into condos, or revitalize it commercially. Huge deserted lots lay pinned between the water and the metal fencing put up to hide them from view, and grimy, hulking, factory-style buildings, incongruously detailed here and there with quaint architectural flourishes, sat as if in suspended animation, pending the proper financial kiss to bring them back to life.

Or maybe not.

Willy crossed the intersection, noting a cluster of SUVs, limos, and high-priced cars parked like a circling of frightened upper-class wagons, and entered Peter Luger's front door, blinking to adjust his eyes as he walked straight into the long, crowded bar. The smell of food and beer commingled with a steady rumble of conversation, adding warmth to a setting that he found surprisingly lacking in decor. Aside from the finely worked pressed-tin ceiling overhead, the rest of the place was almost drab.

A shadow separated itself from the crowd before him, still looking like a wrestler in shape and size, but gone adrift around the middle. "Holy Christ. If it ain't the Sniper."

Andy Liptak shook his hand, both smiling and solicitous. "I heard about the arm. I couldn't believe it, after all you went through in 'Nam. Some raw deal. You want a drink?"

His eyes now focused, Willy looked into the face of his old friend, wondering about the depth-or the truth- of his ignorance. "I'm on the wagon," he answered, reflecting also on the use of his old nickname-the Sniper. Serving as such had been just one of his official functions in Vietnam. But his machinelike technique, his remote demeanor, and the way others treated him had all earned him the title. Snipers were outsiders, despised by the enemy and usually shunned as cold killers by their own. At the time, he'd enjoyed the distinction. Now it embarrassed him.

Andy didn't falter, giving Willy's good arm a squeeze. "That's really great. I wish I had the discipline. Come on back. I got a nice table reserved."

He led the way through the back of the bar and around a corner to a large, open dining room sprinkled with a haphazard collection of tables and chairs. He took Willy to a corner near the windows where the noise seemed less and the mood more intimate.

"Here we are," he said, the affable host. "Have a seat."

Willy slid into his chair, thinking back to when the two of them, dressed in sweat-stained tropical khakis, their faces sheening in the heat, would share beer after beer in noisy, hot dives with names they couldn't pronounce or remember, hoping to find in each other's company some touchstone of a home far away in time and place.

That necessity now having been removed, Willy wondered what he'd ever seen in this man.

Andy seemed to pick up on his thoughts, cupping his cheek in his hand and staring at Willy with a faint smile on his face. "Asking yourself how we got here?"

Willy hesitated before answering. Since the moment he'd returned to this city, he'd been tiptoeing through a minefield of other people's good graces. He'd kept his true nature from Mary's apartment superintendent, Ward Ogden, Rosalie Coven, Louisa Obregon, even his brother, Bob, presenting to them all a measured, even muted front.

Doing so had bordered on agony. Ever since he'd begun his recovery from alcoholism, he'd gotten used to using honesty with surgical precision, regardless of how it was received. Total candor had been the Stateside equivalent of his Vietnam-born contempt of adversity-a showy conviction that he had nothing left to lose. He'd known even then it was merely a mask, of course. His chilling aloofness in combat was mostly self-loathing and despair, and his plain speaking nowadays was largely to stave people off, but there was no denying the advantages the mask had over the reality. There were times, in fact, when his self-deception was running strong or his confidence hitting bottom, when even he believed that his crippled arm and verbal bluntness were somehow things to be proud of.

Which was why right now, with his entire past overtaking him, he so urgently wanted to speak honestly- truly-and tell Andy Liptak of all the anger, contempt, nostalgia, even love and confusion that he felt welling up inside him as he watched his friend smiling from across the table.

But once more, he kept his guard.

"It's been a long time," he said blandly instead. Andy gestured to the waiter, an older man with an apron tied around his waist. "Give me a Brooklyn Lager, and a…"

"Coke," Willy finished for him.

The waiter disappeared as Andy shook his head. "Yeah, long time. Who would've thought way back that we'd end up where we are? The Sniper and me, after all these years. Jesus. How's life in Vermont? Didn't I hear through the grapevine you got a new job?"

Now that the conversation had begun, especially along such superficial lines, Willy felt more comfortable biding his time about his true purpose for being here. The brief emotional flurry of a moment ago was snuffed out by the hard, cool veneer he called on so often.

"Yup. Kind of a crazy deal. It's like a statewide detective unit, except nobody knows about us and no local cop wants us around stealing his cases. Typical bureaucratic bullshit."

"Sounds fancy, though."

"Till they pull the plug on it," Willy admitted. "We're so new, no one would notice. Things going okay with you?"

Andy made an expansive gesture, like a lord displaying his acreage. "Pretty good. Got a lot of irons in the fire. Never could resist a deal, and this town's full of 'em. Real estate around here is like trading pork bellies: it's fun and a little scary and when it pays off, it's like knocking off a bank. So, I do some of that, and I own a few businesses I don't even know what they do, and a bunch of other stuff. When we were in 'Nam and I was wrestling palletloads of condoms and shit like that, I never figured I'd be swimming these waters. But I've gotten into it, and I can't complain. It's almost like a sport, like rock climbing or white-water canoeing or something-full of unpredictables. No day's like the last."

Their drinks came, and after that the traditional Peter Luger meal of porterhouse steak, onion and tomato salad, and creamed spinach. Willy didn't have to do much to keep Andy going, especially as the beers kept pace. Like most self-made social scramblers, Andy Liptak loved talking about himself, and the more he did, the more Willy learned, and the less he had to worry that the tables might be turned.

But the substance, and eventually the point of it all, finally became elusive. The more Andy rambled on, the less Willy paid attention, until he finally realized he'd been subliminally avoiding the very reason he'd contacted this man. The purpose here was Mary, as it had been when he'd arranged this reunion. But seeing Andy again, and being hit by a wall of meaningless chatter, Willy felt hunkered down as in a trench. He became loath to break cover by asking questions that would only speed up his revisiting the past. He had expended such effort in closing off those years, and had lost so much in his blind, enraged fumbling, it felt like leaping off a cliff merely to ask a simple leading question.

But ask it he finally did.

It wasn't out of context. Andy by now was expounding on family values and the benefits of settling down. He apparently had a wife who preferred their Long Island beach house to the city place he favored and used as an office. He was bragging about yet a third home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire-a huge, blue-blooded estate, reminiscent of the Astors summering by the sea- that he'd picked up in a roundabout way, and implying he might have a girlfriend or two on the side, when Willy casually asked, "Did you ever keep up with Mary after you two split up?"

That brought on a pause, and an expression touched with both sorrow and guilt. Finally, Andy chewed his lower lip briefly and leaned forward, his elbows on either side of his after-dinner coffee.

"Did Bob or anybody give you the scoop on Mary and me?" he asked.

Willy wasn't about to suggest they had, and he was surprised that Bob's name had cropped up. He didn't realize they knew one another, although he now remembered Bob saying Andy "sounded" like a decent guy.

"Just that you'd gone separate ways," Willy said.

"You didn't keep up with her?"

He shook his head. "Too many ghosts."

Andy nodded sympathetically. "I know the feeling. She told me you two had it pretty rough toward the end."

Willy couldn't stop himself. "What'd she say?"

"That you fought a lot, that you had a drinking problem and a lot of anger. That you kept obsessing about 'Nam. I hope this doesn't sound wrong, but she really loved you. She brought that up so much, I kinda got sick of it. That might've had something to do with why her and me didn't work out. She was still stuck on what happened between you."

Willy regretted having broached the subject, and tried to get back on track. "Why did you break up, though? You said that was only part of it."

Andy put on a philosophical look. "Part of it, all of it. Hard to tell, when you think back. I mean, I'm no shrink, and she had a lot of issues, probably before you ever met her, so who knows where all that crap comes from? And I wasn't in such a great place, either-a super bad choice for her, looking back. But you know how she was: all that energy… hard to resist. And I don't resist too well anyhow."

He toyed with his coffee cup a little before adding, "I always felt weird about that, you know? Her being your ex. I hope that never pissed you off too much."

Here, at least, Willy could be perfectly honest. "Never did. I thought you'd be a good match."

Andy smiled ruefully. "So did I. We might have been, if she'd gotten you out of her system. And even with that, the first two or three years were great, after she finally moved in with me." Suddenly he laughed with embarrassment. "That's pretty good, huh? Turns out I was more ticked off at you than you were at me, and I was the one living with her. Boy."

After a moment's stilted silence, Willy asked, "How'd she get hooked?"

Andy looked pained. "Know what I said about my being a bad choice for her? That was no lie. I didn't see it coming…I guess that's nothing new. What with the divorce and living with me and her mom rejecting her, I should've known better. But I was too busy doin' deals and living hard. By then, I'd taken her for granted, too. She was just sort of there all the time."

He was having trouble forming his words. He passed a hand across his face as if to clear it of cobwebs. Willy thought the beer might be having both a liberating and a fogging effect by now.

Finally, Andy sat up straight and admitted, "Look, you got good reason to punch me out for this, but I guess I got her into that shit. I was doing a little myself then-pills and some heroin, and the booze like always. I hate to admit it, but that's what got her started. She didn't want to be left out more than she already was, and since I was doin' it anyhow, I didn't see any harm. I know it sounds bad-I mean, it is bad-but we were clueless. It was fun, felt good, the money was startin' to roll in. By the time I woke up, she was pretty far gone. Heroin's a hard habit to break."

He didn't add anything for a while, concentrating on the empty coffee cup as if it contained nitroglycerin.

Willy prodded him in a quiet voice. "What happened, finally?"

Andy didn't meet his eyes. "Well, we did break up, of course. Her talking about you, me bitching that she was either zoned all the time or out trying to score. It got pretty ugly, and I didn't have the patience for it. I never been too good with that, either."

"You threw her out," Willy suggested, paying him back a little for the you-broke-her-heart refrain.

Andy looked at him then, an almost pleading expression on his face. "No. I mean, she did move out and we did have one last big fight. But I was too screwed up to be that decisive. It just sort of fell apart. I guess, though," he added after a pause, "that I didn't stop her, either. And I didn't go after her."

"How long ago was this?"

Andy rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. "Years. A few years. Shit, I don't remember."

"You ever keep up with her?"

He shook his head. "Nah. Damn, this sure doesn't look good, does it?"

Willy pursed his lips, thinking, it's not about you, but said instead, "When she was out trying to score, do you know who she dealt with?"

Andy was obviously confused by the question. "Who she got her stuff from?" He scratched his head. "Jesus… I don't… she started with people I introduced her to, but after things got crazy, I put the word out to shut her down. I don't know who she used after that. It doesn't matter anyway-even my old dealers are all dead, gone, or in the joint by now. Why all the questions?"

"You heard she'd cleaned up, though, right?" Willy persisted, ignoring him. "You said you'd talked to Bob. You knew about my new job."

Andy squirmed in his seat. "Damn, you really are a cop, aren't you?" He smiled guiltily. "Okay, yeah. I did hear. I mean, I asked and Bob told me. I was curious, you know? You reach a certain age, you get married, settle down, begin to think back-you and me, 'Nam, Mary… I started to wonder. The stuff you did when you were young starts to mean more."

"You called Bob out of the blue?"

"I had his number from when Mary was still around. She used to call him to find out about you. Pissed me off, actually. I told her to cut it out, but I kept the number. He was surprised to hear from me-I think even a little embarrassed-but he sort of gave me the condensed version of what was going on. I felt bad about putting him on the spot."

Which explained why Bob hadn't admitted to the phone call, Willy thought.

He noticed Andy was looking at him with a pointed seriousness all of a sudden, his drunkenness apparently evaporated.

"Enough, Willy. Why the third degree?"

Willy hesitated, pondering the value of his information and when its release could serve him best. Now seemed as good a time as any.

"She's dead. That's why I'm down here."

Andy stared at him in silence for a moment, his mouth half open, his hands tight around the coffee cup.

"Jesus," he finally murmured, barely audible amid the noise around them.

"They found her with a needle in her arm," Willy added for effect, wondering why, right after the words left his mouth. Andy had been helpful and straightforward, undeserving of such brutality. But by his own admission, he'd also taken a fragile woman, introduced her to drugs, and then tossed her out. Regardless of his sensitivity now, he'd been as bad as Willy on this score, if in a different manner, and Willy didn't see treating him any more lightly than he treated himself.

Andy sat back in his seat and swallowed hard. After taking a shuddering breath, he said softly, "That's pretty cold, Sniper. Just like the old days."

"I didn't introduce her to the shit in that needle," Willy said.

Andy's face turned dark red. He awkwardly rose to his feet and glared down at him. "The hell you didn't. You don't know the basket case I inherited. You fucked with her head so good not even the heroin had any effect. Shit…I was just the poor dumb slob standing between what you did to her and where she ended up. She was like on autopilot all the way." He leaned forward, his anger climbing. "Don't you lay that shit on me, you goddamn cripple. You don't get off the hook that easy."

He stood there breathing hard for a moment, before finally straightening and adding as he left, "The meal's on you, jerk. I hope it wipes you out."

Willy sat at the table for a long while afterward, almost motionless, trying to do what he'd done so well for years: batten the hatches and bottle up the turmoil.

But as he'd suspected they might even before he'd arrived in this city, certain survival techniques were beginning to fail.