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As it turned out, Mike Dukas’s date had canceled and he came alone, a little sheepish that he had been stood up but probably glad, really, that he had more time in the kitchen with Rose. Alan could imagine Mike’s mental pictures of himself in their house, a kind of uncle to their child (who had been named after him), a kind of protective presence to Rose. Alan was not sure that those pictures had much to do with reality, except that Mike was a very good friend and they had been through a very tough time together and almost got themselves killed. Now, he listened to Mike and Rose chattering in the kitchen about food, and they made him happy.
Then O’Neill came, and he and Alan made a lot of noise because they hadn’t seen each other in eight months or so. O’Neill was hardly in the door before Alan lunged toward him; O’Neill swayed back and said, “Oh, I say, old chap!” and shook Alan’s hand. Then they boogied for three seconds, then gave each other high fives, and then fell on each other, squeezing and whacking and saying, “Hey, that’s fat, man, you put on fat!” and “Muscle, that’s muscle!” and each told the other he looked great, and they held on to each other and just grinned. Rose came in and smiled at them and kissed O’Neill, and Dukas asked him how the Ranch had been. O’Neill made a face and they all laughed.
“Can you eat vegetarian lasagna?” she said. She sounded worried. O’Neill was big and looked as if he ate whole cows or roadkill or something.
“If I could eat grits, I can eat anything. They gave me grits every goddam morning. I think it was a test!” He and Alan began to remind each other of horrible food they had eaten on the boat. They did a lot more happy shouting. Dukas and Rose looked at each other and shrugged and went back to the kitchen.
The Peretzes were late. The Peretzes were always late. Abe Peretz had been a kind of mentor to Alan, even though his own Naval career had ended when he hadn’t made the cut for commander. Now he worked in the J. Edgar Hoover Building and made sad jokes about being a G-Man.
“How’s the G-Man?” Alan said as he took their coats a few minutes later. They were embracing O’Neill and asking him how the Ranch had been. Alan grinned at Bea. “How’s Mrs G-Man?”
“He got a promotion!” Bea shouted. Bea shouted everything. She was handsome and noisy. “Tell them about your new job!” Bea was wearing black pants and a pale yellow, shiny blouse with a huge saxophone on it in green—the saxophone was a bizarre touch, some kind of joke? Some reference he didn’t get?—and enough buttons left unbuttoned so her very attractive cleavage showed to good advantage. She seemed very up, maybe too much so.
Abe shrugged. “So I got a promotion.”
“To what?”
“I don’t know; it’s classified.”
Bea bounced into a chair, bounced right out again. “You make me so damn mad, Abe, I could kill you! He’s been made department head. I hate false modesty!”
Abe kissed her. “Nobody would ever dare accuse you of it.” He began to explain the organizational structure of FBI headquarters, which was so complex that Alan wondered if he’d finish before the evening ended. Then he realized that O’Neill was chuckling and that what Abe was saying was an elaborate shaggy-dog story, an invention. He began to laugh, too, and Abe, seeing he’d got the joke, roared.
Then Mike and Rose came in with wine, and they all got noisier, and the dog made his rounds, poking his big nose into everybody’s crotch and spilling a wineglass, and there was a lot of loud talk. Dukas told a couple of his Clinton jokes, and Alan glanced over at Rose and saw her face shining, and she gave him a wink and he was glad that Mike’s girl or woman or whatever she was hadn’t come, because these were the people he most liked to be with. He and O’Neill sat next to each other and started saying, “Hey, remember when—” and the others tuned them out. When Alan started listening to them again, Rose was trying to talk Abe Peretz into doing his two weeks of Reserve duty at her new station, someplace called Interservice Virtual Intelligence.
Peretz whistled. “Interservice Virtual Intelligence! Wow, how’d you like them apples? Virtual intelligence, that’s for me! If you can’t have real intelligence, by all means have virtual! What do they do, Rose, teach monkeys to talk, or something?”
“I don’t start for another week. All I know is, it’s a great-looking place, they’ve got a fantastic cafeteria, and they’re hungry for analysts.”
O’Neill squinted his eyes. “As a trained interrogator, I sensed a missed step there. What is a helicopter pilot doing in something called ‘virtual intelligence’?”
“She’s hiking her ass up the ladder toward being an astronaut. I need space-related duty for my next tour.”
O’Neill looked at Alan and swung into his WW-II-Japanese-officer voice. “So, American flygirl, your intelligence is space-related!” And then to Humphrey Bogart: “You’re good, Shweetheart, you’re really good, but there’s something you aren’t telling me.”
Rose batted her eyes. “It’s something about satellites, Mister Spade, and I can’t say more because it’s classified.”
And O’Neill swung into his Big Badass voice and growled, “Who you callin’ a spade?”
“That kind of joking makes me nervous,” Bea Peretz said. Rose and O’Neill laughed, the indulgent way that people laugh about their parents, and Rose began to shepherd them all toward the table. When they were all seated, there was a sudden silence, everybody looking at everybody else, and Bea said, “I think the CIA sucks.”
“I’ll drink to that,” O’Neill said.
“Yeah, that’s about how I’d put it,” Dukas said. “You got a way with words all right, Bea.” He smiled at her. “So how’d our boy O’Neill do at the Agency’s finishing school?” he said.
“Well, our boy O’Neill got through,” O’Neill said. “But not first in his class.” He twirled his wineglass. “Folks, I want to be pampered tonight, because I just spent three days with my parents explaining why I wasn’t first in my class. I mean—it was expected.”
“Ah, why would anybody expect you to be first at that zoo?” Dukas said.
“God, yes,” Alan said. “You’re the wrong type, O’Neill. Harry’s an aristocrat,” he told the others, as if that explained everything. He had heard this theory from O’Neill in the long days and nights on the carrier, years before.
“I thought the CIA was the Old Boys’ Club for Ivy League graduates,” Bea said. She was shoveling down vegetarian lasagna. “William F. Buckley was CIA. George Throttlebottom Bush was CIA. I thought the CIA was the Washington branch of Skull and Bones.”
“Yeah,” O’Neill said, holding out his wineglass as Rose went around the table with a bottle, “but I’m a real aristocrat. My father’s a federal judge, my mother’s a partner in quite a good law firm. One of my ancestors was a governor during Reconstruction. I went to Harvard, not Yale, which is a far, far better place, and you’re talking about the CIA of fifty years ago, which is where I would probably have felt at home, except there was the problem back then of my, um, hue.” He sighed. “My mother thinks I’m slumming.”
Rose did her imitation of O’Neill’s mother. “I just wish he’d meet a nice Spelman girl.” More laughter.
“Anyway,” Alan went on, “you got through the course, which is better than about eighty percent of the people do. So, did you get the orders that you wanted?”
O’Neill raised his eyebrows. “Not quite. No-o-o-t quite. In fact, as the Brits say, not by a long chalk.” He speared a floweret of garlic-sauteed broccoli. “I’m afraid I promised my parents that I was going to France. They thought France was where I deserved to go, being their son, and so they made up their minds that I was going there as a glorious addition to the giddy whirl of Parisian embassy life. But that’s not where Harry is going, and Harry can’t bring himself to tell them.”
There was a silence. “So where is Harry going?” Abe said to break it.
“Well, I was able to tell them a, mm, partial truth. I told them that it was classified and secret and terribly hush-hush, and so I couldn’t say much, but I could say that I was going where the people spoke French. They kind of winked and smiled and looked at each other and were real pleased. So I let it go at that.”
Alan grinned at him. “But you’re going to the other place where they speak French. Montreal?”
“Umm—close, but no cigar.” He gave a half-smile. “Africa. The middle part.”
After another silence, Dukas said, “Well, there’s a certain logic in that.”
“What logic?” Bea roared.
“I know you never noticed, Bea,” Dukas said, “but Harry is black. So are the people in Africa.”
“That’s sick!” she shouted.
Did Dukas and Bea dislike each other? Alan wondered. Maybe at base there was something sexual—an attraction gone wrong?
Rose jumped in to make peace, and Abe said something to his wife, and Alan poured more wine. Uproar, uproar, he thought. Well, it was friendly uproar. So far. Trying to make peace, Dukas muttered, “Well, at least Africa’s kind of quiet just now.”
“Like hell,” Alan said. “I’m worried about him already.”
“I thought the good guys took over in Rwanda and the bad guys got shoved out and the killing was over.”
“There aren’t any good guys,” O’Neill growled. “What there is, is three-quarters of a million refugees who’ve crossed into Zaire, which is ready to go up, anyway, and Uganda and Tanzania thinking it’s a great opportunity for them to make out, and there’s me in the middle of it. Thanks for being worried, Al.” He took more lasagna, to Rose’s obvious relief. “They offered me a choice, Bosnia or Africa. I took Bosnia, because I thought I could do the Jugs a spot of good, as the Brits used to say. So they sent me to Africa.”
“Sounds like the Navy.” He knew that under his jokes, O’Neill was worried. Probably about his parents’ reaction. They demanded a lot of him, and getting a posting to Africa would be “disappointing”—as in We’re disappointed in you, Harold. His parents would have preferred even Bosnia, was the implication, because it was in Europe—a place with a history and civilized people who just happened to be massacring each other. Alan thought of the torture barn and the man who had been on the “airplane.”
They were into dessert—Sicilian cassata from a recipe of Rose’s mother’s—and the uproar had quieted down when Bea got on the subject of Israel and then of Jonathan Pollard, the man convicted of turning American classified materials over to the Israelis.
“Pollard is a hero!” Bea cried.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dukas growled.
Bea threw down her napkin. She was goddamned if she was going to listen to anti-Semitic crap, she told them all.
“I don’t have to be an anti-Semite to think an American who sells out his country is a traitor, Bea. Get a grip.”
She scrambled to her feet and her chair tipped over. “I take this seriously!” she cried. Abe was on his feet and waving them both down, saying Don’t, don’t, and they were out of the room.
“You guys shut up,” Rose said. “She’s stressed out about something.” She went after them; seconds later, Abe came back.
“I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m sorry—Al—She’s upset, it’s been—She found that Jessica’s on the pill, okay? Just found out today.”
Jessica was fourteen.
Dukas reared back. “I’m sorry, Abe. I won’t take that crap about Pollard from anybody.”
When Rose came back, they were all looking at their hands. “She’s going to lie down for a little. Lighten up, guys.”
“The perfect hostess,” Alan said, smiling.
“Yeah, somebody compliment me on the food, or something. Wonder Woman Cooks!” She picked a crumb of cassata from Bea Peretz’s plate and ate it. “Not bad, if I do say so myself.”
Dukas looked whipped. “I ruined your dinner.”
Rose came around the table and kissed his balding head. “You didn’t ruin anything.” But Alan felt a chill, as if an unwanted future had put its hand on him. It was as if Bea’s daughter, growing older out of his sight, out of his awareness, had become the cause of the break. He thought of his own son, sleeping upstairs: was he, innocent, a kind of time bomb? He found himself thinking, Why can’t things just stay the same?
They all did the dishes and then poured out more wine, and Rose went to check on Bea and Mikey.
“I feel like shit,” Dukas said.
“Shut up about it, it wasn’t your fault.”
They were getting a little drunk, Alan decided. He’d better make coffee.
“I’ve put in for a transfer,” Dukas said. “I’m leaving, too.”
“Good God, why—you love NCIS,” Peretz said.
“It’s Al’s fault—he wrote me this letter. About Bosnia.” He looked accusingly at Alan. “You said they needed cops like me! Well, now they got one!” Now, almost apologetically, Dukas said, “I’ve volunteered for a war crimes unit. NCIS would have sent somebody anyway.”
Alan went to the kitchen to make coffee, shouting back to Dukas to talk loud so he could hear.
“I got no family, no kids, so what difference. Mainly I’ll put together this unit and try to go after some of these bastards.” He talked about the program he was joining, mostly a sop to the conscience of NATO. “Don’t get your hopes up,” Alan said, coming back. “You can’t save the world.”
“I can do something.”
“We were there six months, what did we do? We did Operation Deny Flight, did we save the old man who had his feet cut off? The guy who was tortured so badly he died of pneumonia? The UN set up enclaves, so-called safe zones, ‘safe havens,’ they’re where some of the worst fighting has been. Now they’ve signed a so-called ‘peace accord’ and divided Bosnia with a line like a snake’s intestine that makes ethnic cleansing permanent. It’s a rat’s nest. The Serbs aren’t the only assholes, either. Fucking Croatians are not exactly saints. The Bosnian Muslims are in bed with Iranian Intelligence. You can’t save them from themselves!”
Dukas was stubborn. “We have to do something.”
Peretz put on his skeptical face. “Who made us the moral guardians of the world, Mike?”
Dukas stuck out his lower lip. “We’re the most powerful nation on earth. It comes with the territory.”
“Maybe it comes with the territory to try. What doesn’t come with the territory is succeeding. It always works in sci-fi novels—you hover over the uncivilized planet and you say, ‘If you guys don’t stop the bullshit, the Moral Federation will squeeze your planet down to a bowling ball,’ and wham-bam, they all turn into good guys! Magic.”
Alan sighed. “Maybe that’s what we need—magic.”
“A magic weapon.”
“Interplanetary ballbuster.”
“Right. Meanwhile, we can’t keep one old man from getting his feet cut off.”
“Well—I gotta try, guys. I gotta try.” Dukas looked up, his eyes agonized. “You judge yourself by what you have the guts to do—not what it accomplishes in the big picture. If I stay here and do my job while all that shit goes on, I’m not a moral person.” He seemed embarrassed by using the word “moral.”
“A guy can get killed,” Alan said.
Dukas half-smiled. “I’m just so sick of shit. Like the Pollard shit. I want to—take a stand on something!”
Alan had a flash of the photo he’d found on the wall of the house in Pustarla. Colonel Zulu. He had been taking a stand. “Ever hear of the Battle of the Crows?” he said.
“What about it?”
“It happened six hundred years ago, and the Serbs lost. And it’s the biggest thing in their mystique—like the burning of Atlanta to the Daughters of the Confederacy. Those people have a long memory, Mike. Long passions.”
“Those people are insane,” O’Neill said.
“Some of ‘those people’ are Americans,” Alan said. He told them about the Chicago Bears ashtray in the house at Pustarla.
Dukas was taking out a little notebook and a pen. “There’s Americans all over that scene. No shit; I been reading the traffic. Fucking Croatians have a special-forces unit is two-thirds American—skinheads, Nazis, Aryan Nation, crazies—because they give them a historical link to Hitler, no shit.” He was making notes—Zulu, the ashtray, Pustarla. “Maybe it’s like the Pollard thing and it’s why I get so mad—people with two loyalties. You can’t have two loyalties; you got to decide. This mercenary, Soldier-of-Fortune shit sucks. You’re an American, you should act like an American, you don’t go someplace else and chop people’s feet off and rape little girls.” He was writing, talking to himself. “Maybe I’ll run into him, who knows? ‘Colonel Zulu at the Battle of the Crows.’ What an asshole.” He looked up as Rose came into the room, Bea a step behind her. His face broke into a smile when he saw Rose. “You light up the room, Babe.”
Bea was carrying a tray with a bottle of champagne and six glasses. Her eyes were red. “There’s six of us, nobody will get very much—it’s late—” She put the tray down. “But it’s a going-away.” She looked around at them. “I’m sorry about what happened.”
“Hey,” Dukas said. He went to her and put his arms around her. “Hey, me too.”
Rose poured the champagne into the tall tulip glasses. When she was done, she stood holding the bottle and looking down. “When we drink this—it’s kind of over, isn’t it. I think I’m gonna cry,” she said. She and Bea had an arm around each other’s waist.
“Don’t,” Dukas said.
“Harry’s going to Africa, and Mike’s going to Sarajevo, and I’m off to this new job, and in a few weeks Alan leaves the air wing—We’re all going—like pieces of paper, or something.”
“Except Bea and me,” Peretz said. “We’re not going anyplace.”
Alan took his wife’s hand. “We all volunteered.” He meant, It comes with the territory.
She sniffed and smiled and picked up a glass, and with eyes shining she raised her head. “Let’s look on the bright side! A year from now, we’ll be riding high! It will all have been swell, and everything will be great!” She sniffed again. “Somebody for Christ’s sake make a toast!”
Harry O’Neill stood. Alan and Dukas stood, and the six of them made a circle, their wineglasses almost touching in the middle. O’Neill said, “Good food—good wine—good friends.” He grinned. “I read it on a restaurant menu.”
“Friends,” they said together, and they drank. Then Rose did cry, and O’Neill looked across her head at Alan, his eyes wet, and Dukas sniffed.
Time seems to freeze, and he is able to look at them and to think but not to move, and he sees that they will never be like this again, not merely never so young again but never so comfortable; nor will life seem so easy. It is a turning-point, and what he senses but cannot put into words is that time brings trouble and pain, and it is coming to them. And, as if the effort to warn them causes time to run again, he moves, and the moment is shattered.
It is for such times that you keep a dog, because when it pushed its head into the circle and sneezed, everybody could laugh, and the mood was broken.
