The Bureau, page 23
Des had been wandering the grounds, but now he stood just behind Kurt, so close that the puffs of his breath tickled Kurt’s nape.
“I killed men like these.” Kurt hadn’t planned to say anything. The words just burst out as if he were momentarily possessed.
He heard the long intake of Des’s lungs. “Vietnam?”
How grateful Kurt was to not have to explain every little thing! “Yeah. Most of them were barely men. Just boys, really. My son Jason’s age. I wasn’t much older.”
“You were all soldiers.”
“We were doing what we had to do. What they ordered us to do. At least that’s what I told myself. But it was my finger that pulled the trigger, not anyone else’s.” The only person he’d ever spoken to about this was the Bureau shrink. He’d never said anything to Maryann, not even when she’d gently hinted that she was willing to listen. So he was mystified as to why he was blabbing about it now, to a prisoner and in a Mississippi cemetery.
“It’s what you’re supposed to do in a war, isn’t it?” Des asked.
“Supposed to. I had a choice, Des. I could have set my gun down, and then maybe those men would have lived.”
“And maybe you would have died instead. At the very least the Army would have punished you.”
Kurt turned around to see Des’s brows drawn into a deep frown. “Yes,” Kurt admitted, “that’s true. I chose my own life and freedom over theirs.”
“Nobody could blame you. They were the enemy. Strangers.”
“They were human beings. They had homes and families and hopes, just like me. But I chose myself.”
Des backed up a step as if the words were dangerous. “You couldn’t help it. You were drafted, and as you said, you were very young.”
“I could help it!”
Kurt saw something like panic in Des’s eyes and suddenly understood why he needed to be doing this here and now—and with this particular man. He closed the space between them and settled his hands on Des’s shoulders, firmly but not forcefully. And when he spoke, his voice was clear and even. “I was in a bad situation. Partly because of stupid decisions I’d made but partly because of decisions other people made. I was a kid and far from home and scared shitless half the time. But I made the choice to kill those people. A lot of them, Des. I was a skilled sharpshooter. All the rationalizations in the world won’t bring them back to life. I did it, and it’s a burden I’ll carry until the day I die.”
Kurt was crying, dammit, because what he’d done had ripped him apart. Time and therapy had taped some of the pieces back together—enough to keep him going—but his insides were still filled with broken bits and jagged edges, and they continued to hurt like hell. Even though tears blurred his vision and tickled his cheeks, he didn’t wipe them away. He kept his hands on Des’s shoulders.
“No.”
Kurt had heard dying men sound less stricken than Des, but he didn’t let go. “Feel it, Desmond. Look in your heart and you’ll know it’s true.”
“You didn’t know….” Des whispered.
“I knew. We knew.”
Des moaned and collapsed to his knees, then fell onto all fours. He wasn’t making any sound, but his entire body shook and his head was deeply bowed, hair trailing onto the leaf-strewn ground.
After hesitating only a moment, Kurt knelt beside him and stroked his back. He didn’t say anything; no empty words of comfort or consolation because he had none. Besides, some situations were best met with silence and a steadying touch.
After a long time, Des rose onto his knees. His eyes were puffy and red, and he looked years older. Well, Kurt probably wasn’t looking his best either; his nose was snotty and he didn’t have a tissue. He oofed in surprise when Des clutched him in a mighty hug. There was nothing sexual about this embrace, but it felt wonderful nonetheless. Des was solid and powerful, and to both give and receive strength like this was a blessing Kurt rarely enjoyed.
“In control,” Des said, his head against Kurt’s, and for a brief moment Kurt almost thought Des had read his thoughts. Then he remembered their conversation from two nights ago.
“In control,” Kurt agreed. “The world wraps us up in all kinds of chains, but in the end we’re each responsible for our own decisions. Took me a while to accept that, but it’s true.” He patted Des’s back, untangled himself, and stood, then held out a hand to Des, who took it with a grim little smile.
“How do you… keep on going?” Des asked
“Sometimes it’s hard. There’s a reason why all that booze and all those drugs seemed like a good idea. AA tells you to take it one day at a time, and man, sometimes remembering that really helps. But also, somebody really helped me put it in perspective.” Oddly, that somebody hadn’t been the Bureau psychiatrist but rather Townsend, who’d dragged Kurt to a downtown diner for one of his speeches.
“Yeah?”
“He said that as long as I remember that I’m in control, I can decide my fate. Not all of it, of course. How did he put it?” He searched his memories and recalled the sound of a jukebox, the taste of mediocre coffee and an excellent Reuben sandwich. “I am the captain of my ship. I’m going to encounter storms and deadly calms. Pirates. Sea monsters.” He chuckled at that. “Literally, as it turns out. I can’t stop those things from happening. But I decide on my course, and I choose what to do when there are unfriendly seas. I like that image a lot.”
Des gave a slow nod. “Free will, yeah?”
“If you want to think of it like that, sure. There’s another part of it too. If I’m responsible for the dumbass things I do and even the downright evil ones, I’m also responsible for the good things. I’m a good father, Des, and I’ve done my damnedest to never let Jason suffer because of my addictions or the divorce. People at work know they can count on me to protect them when they need it. I’m really careful about how I approach my missions; I don’t assume something needs to be blown away just because it’s not human. I’ve saved lives. And all of that’s on me, just as the men I killed, their deaths are on me as well.”
Wow. He’d never been one for speechmaking, not even to Jason. Kurt would correct his son with a word or two, but it was Maryann who delivered the parental lectures. Yet here he was, pontificating.
“You’ve treated me a lot better than you had to,” Des said. “And didn’t take advantage of me when you could have. That’s on you too.”
“I guess so.”
“But I haven’t done… anything good. There’s nothing on the other side of my ledger.”
“It doesn’t work like that. Nothing is ever going to balance out in the end. It’s not about salvation, Des. I don’t even know if that’s a thing. It’s about doing the best you can with what you have.” He’d never sat down and purposefully delineated his philosophy, but he figured that phrase captured it well enough.
“Okay. But I haven’t done much.”
“You’re helping me now. Helping the Bureau.”
Des snorted and shook his head. “I’ve done almost nothing. And anyway I’m doing this because I get something out of it.” Now he sighed. “I get a bloody lot out of it.”
“Well, you haven’t exactly had a lot of chances for philanthropy in prison. But you are making some good choices there. You spend your time as well as you can, with books and exercise. You take care of yourself. And you haven’t let yourself become hopelessly bitter.” Kurt smiled. “Your ship is in dry dock, I guess. But it’s still yours.”
Their laughter brought a measure of healing to them both.
They’d exited the cemetery gate and turned onto the road when Kurt grabbed Des’s arm to stop him. “You’re limping.”
Des looked down; his jeans were dirty from kneeling. But then he lifted his left pants leg and revealed a nasty scrape. “I think I landed on a rock.”
“Can you walk all right?”
“Yeah. It’s only a little sore.”
“I have a first aid kit in the car. We can patch you up at the cottage.”
“Okay.” Des pulled the jeans back down. Then he chuckled. “For only blood can wipe out blood, and only tears can heal. Thank you, Oscar Wilde.”
Des chatted lightly the entire way back, lightening Kurt’s heart with every word. The two pedestrians they passed on the downtown sidewalk gave a friendly hello, and even the gray sky seemed less oppressive. Kurt decided it was still early enough to search one more outbuilding, and then maybe they’d find a restaurant for dinner. He could really go for fried catfish and collard greens tonight.
He unlocked the cottage door, stepped inside, and froze.
The interior looked as if a tornado had passed through.
Chapter Fifteen
Des struggled not to mourn his books, even though they’d been torn to pieces. He hadn’t even had a chance to read them all. But that loss was much less important than the fact that someone had come into their cottage and pawed through everything, destroying all of their belongings. A quick check revealed that the car had been ransacked too, although that damage was minimal. The first aid kit remained, so Kurt had insisted on disinfecting and bandaging Des’s knee.
“Are you sure it’s not the clerk?” Des asked as he stuffed the remains of Reading Gaol into a trash bag.
Kurt was sorting through his clothing to see if anything remained wearable. “Don’t think so.”
“He doesn’t like you, though, and he must have a key. Maybe this is his way of getting revenge.”
“He wouldn’t have wrecked motel property, though. At least I don’t think so.”
Kurt had a point. The ceramic bases of both bedside lamps had been shattered, the table was upended with one leg broken, and all of the plates and cups were in pieces. The overhead light hung unevenly, its bolts partially pulled from the ceiling. Even some of the switch plates had been torn from the walls.
“Maybe he wants you to get in trouble for the damage,” Des suggested.
“But do you really think that idiot knew how to break into a locked car?”
“Yeah, all right.” Des tied up the trash bag and left it on the front porch, then grabbed another from under the sink and started to discard their torn clothing. The invader seemed to have taken a blade to all of the seams and pockets. It looked as though the only things to survive the assault were a couple of socks.
Kurt righted one of the chairs. “We’re going to need to go clothes shopping, probably in Jackson.”
“Not confident in Roebuck Springs’ fashion options?”
Kurt snorted.
By the time they finished tidying the cottage, they’d determined that their only remaining possessions were the socks, the clothes they were wearing, and the items they’d been carrying. Even their suitcases were ruined. “Your notebook?” Des asked.
“I always have that on me. Along with my gun.”
“What are we going to do?”
This time, Kurt made a face. “I’m going to tell the asshole in the office what happened, and that we need a different room. We’ll probably have to talk to the cops. Let me do that part, okay?”
That was fine with Des, who’d never been a fan of law enforcement. After running away from the Chicago-area relatives and then living on the streets, he’d been harassed regularly by the police. He’d been arrested a few times. And there’d been a couple of cops who’d promised not to drag him to jail—as long as Des blew them for free.
“This wasn’t an ordinary thief,” Des said, dragging his mind back to their present situation.
“Not ordinary, no.” Kurt tossed a shredded pillow aside in disgust. “They were after the fucking boxes.”
Oh. Honestly, in the lingering emotional turbulence of the day, Des had almost forgotten why he and Kurt were in Mississippi. And the fact that other people were also searching for the boxes had completely slipped his mind. He’d have made a shitty agent.
“Was it those people we saw in the diner?”
“No. I told you, I think they’re from the Bureau. I don’t know who did this.”
“How do these people know where to look? Do they have a list of places Larry and I stayed?”
“How the hell do I know?” Looking chagrined, Kurt blew out a puff of air. “Sorry. It’s not you I’m mad at.”
The interchange with the clerk started off as unpleasantly as Des had expected, although at least it confirmed that he had nothing to do with the burglary. He couldn’t possibly have been a good enough actor to feign such outrage over damage to the motel. But the little man’s huff was no match for Kurt’s foul mood. Soon the local deputies arrived, and when one turned out to be a white woman and the other black man, Des almost laughed. The cops were polite. Kind, even. Kurt fed them an embroidered version of the road-trip-with-Irish-friend tale he’d given to the waitress, and the deputies ate it up. In fact, they kept apologizing to Des for treating a guest so poorly. “I promise you,” the woman said, “all Americans aren’t like that. Most of us are good, upstanding citizens.” Des deserved a bloody Oscar for keeping a straight face over that.
In the end, the cops concluded that some stranger had probably driven through town in search of things to steal. They weren’t optimistic about catching anyone but promised to file a report. They also gave directions to the nearest store for replacing their items, in a town half an hour north.
“Walmart?” Des read as they pulled into a parking lot. “What’s that?”
“Jesus,” Kurt mumbled under his breath. Des had no idea why.
It was a huge store, stocked with almost everything imaginable, and Kurt let Des browse the entire thing. That was fun. Des grabbed books and packages of snack foods, and he laughed when Kurt grumbled over the cheap quality of the clothing. “Still loads better than that bloody prison jumpsuit.”
“I guess.”
After shopping they ate Chinese food and, at Des’s suggestion, had ice cream for dessert. Ice cream! He hadn’t had that in almost twenty years, and it was even better than he remembered. Then Kurt found a pay phone and called his boss, who apparently had nothing useful to say.
“Does he know how the thief knows where we are?” Des asked as they started the return drive to Roebuck Springs.
“No. Or at least that’s what he says.”
“How can you stand to work for someone who lies to you?” The question made Des wince as he recalled his recent epiphanies about Larry.
“I don’t know. Maybe he has a reason to lie sometimes. He plans things out about ten steps ahead of the rest of us, and things usually work out well for him. I just have to trust he’s on the right side. He’s the one who convinced me to join the Bureau when I wasn’t much more than a junkie.”
That was interesting. Des had assumed Kurt had independently made his decision to join, maybe as one step along the path of making better decisions. “He just came up to you and told you to become an agent?”
“Almost. I was barely holding myself together, just enough to hang on to a job at a convenience store. I’d have a couple of drinks before work, sneak a few more during the shift, and then pop pills when I got home. Townsend used to come in to buy cigarettes, and he’d talk to me a little. Ask a lot of questions. Believe it or not, I’m not usually much of a talker—”
Des laughed. “I believe it.”
“Yeah. But Townsend has a way of pulling things out of you. Hell, a lot of the time he knows shit even if you didn’t tell him. About six months in, he offered me a job. I thought he was kidding at first. But… he wasn’t.”
Although Des still felt uneasy about Townsend, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He turned on the radio, fiddled with the tuning until he found something that made Kurt smile, and then relaxed back in his seat. In a way, he was grateful for the burglary. It gave him something to think about other than the scene in the cemetery. Other than the insight into his own culpability.
* * *
A couple of days later, they were searching the last of the outbuildings—the combined pump house and mechanics’ shed—when Kurt shouted triumphantly. He’d crammed himself into a narrow space behind a rusting piece of equipment and beside an empty wooden shelving unit that sagged severely. “Got a hit! Come here.”
Useless as always, Des had been systematically dismantling and reassembling three ballpoint pens he’d stolen from the motel office. He’d used up all the ink from one of them already, doodling little cartoons onto the wooden walls: animals, people, trees, houses, silly little scenes. Now he dropped the pens and rushed to Kurt’s side.
The shelving was in the way, but after Kurt and Des pushed with all their strength, its collapse created a space big enough for Kurt to work. He used a hammer to pound and tear at the wall, creating a hole, and then shined his flashlight inside. He swore.
“It’s not there?” Des’s heart raced, and he kept checking over his shoulder as if Larry might be lurking nearby.
“It is.” Kurt set down his tools and peeled off one of the cheap T-shirts he’d bought at Walmart.
Despite the tension of the moment, Des was distracted by the revealed skin. It was lovely. Kurt was all wiry muscles and sinuous veins, and although the air was a bit chilly, a few droplets of sweat beaded on his nape. Des wanted to lick them away.
“Not the time for it, Desmond.”
“What?” Kurt gave him an irritated look.
“Nothing. Sorry.”
Kurt wrapped his hand in the shirt, reached into the hole, and slowly pulled back. He was holding a cedar cube roughly four inches on each side. The wood, once pinkish-orange, had aged to silvery gray, but the weird figures burned into it remained clear: little squiggles that seemed to move if you didn’t look straight at them.
