Vitals Read online

  Sudden cut to mounds of heads in big tin basins outside a wooden lab building, jaws slack, tongues protruding, hair matted with blood, waiting to be processed.

  That was not the worst of it.

  The next title card read,

  CITY OF DOG MOTHERS

  1938–1939

  I could not turn away. I watched dozens of whistling men, marching about, lips puckered and cheeks puffing in cheerful, silent tunes. Their methodic executioners walked down the streets like marionettes, clutching pistols at the end of stiff, straight arms. The arms jerked up with each methodical shot.

  I watched starving women clasping fat, squirming puppies to their shriveled bosoms, smiling for the photographer.

  The last few seconds of film showed Lavrenti Beria strutting up and down the cobbled streets. He waved at the lifeless buildings, grinned proudly at the camera, nudged a woman’s headless corpse with his boot, then lifted a hand in a victorious thumbs-up.

  Happy, happy man.

  As I shut off the tape, I wondered about the photographers. How long had these horrors stuck in their minds like dirty pins and needles. I vowed I would never read a history book again.

  I fell asleep on the couch wrapped in Janie’s last afghan.

  And woke less than two hours later. Rolled off the couch and made a sound I had not heard come from my mouth in over sixty years, the frightened whine of a child. I could not stand being human. My skin was too filthy to wear. I moaned as I pissed, handling myself, thinking that these organs of generation had given rise to children not so different from the shadows on the old films. I washed my hands and face over and over, then took a shower. The hot water did a little trick for a few minutes, lulling me into warm blankness, but when I toweled myself dry, standing on the thin, ragged bathroom rug, the sense of oppression rushed back like a cloud shadow.

  I walked around the house with my privates hidden by the towel and my hair sticking up like a grizzled Kewpie doll. I couldn’t get the pictures out of my head. I cursed Rob Cousins.

  Then I asked myself, what if it was all a ripe, royal fake? Assembled from old files, altered copies of documents, forgeries, sure, that was it, wasn’t it?

  Much easier to accept than a world controlled by monsters.

  Rob Cousins had pulled a fast one on old, gullible Ben Bridger, setting me up for another crazy Rudy Banning book, this one guaranteed to be a huge best-seller—and all of it a lie.

  But I knew better.

  The sun was coming up over the hills. It was going to be a bright, pretty day.

  Using some of my old mental tricks, learned back in Vietnam and Laos, I had “photographed” a couple of the documents Cousins had shown me, and I wanted advice on names and dates. I got on the Internet and sent a coded inquiry to five of my friends. They had all served, some in the CIA, some, like me, in Naval Intelligence. We were all retired and we had set up a kind of Old Boy’s Internet Tom-Tom club to alert each other to stuff, mostly new history books and Web sites with good photos of naked ladies.

  Some of the guys on the Tom-Tom were pretty old—they had trained and run the rest of us—and they had been around back in 1953.

  I had responses in a couple of hours. Two drew blanks. Two said they couldn’t tell me anything and their messages winkled away before my eyes. Clever trick. One didn’t reply.

  I can never leave a wasp nest well enough alone. What Cousins had shown me was ugly beyond measure, and frightening; it was also the most important historical revelation of my life.

  I was just a stupid, lonely old man who wanted to be important again.

  I dressed, poured my fourth cup of coffee and stood in the kitchen, trying to think what would be the best course to follow, when I heard trucks and cars turn up the long concrete driveway. I opened the front door to the sun and heat, and saw three white Tahoes and two San Diego County Sheriff Crown Victorias. Guys in black, dressed in bulletproofs and combat helmets, poured out of the trucks with assault weapons and automatic pistols in plain view, safeties off and fingers resting on the trigger guards.

  The deputies stayed in their cars, heads bobbing, mikes pressed close to their mouths. They seemed confused.

  I pushed open the screen door and the guys in black assumed the necessary positions to turn me into hamburger. I had to admire the choreography, but thought it a tad ironic that just as I had a reason to live, this was going down.

  I slowly stooped over and placed my cup of coffee on the ground, then held out my hands with all fingers showing. I had been busted for possession upon returning stateside in 1973. I knew the drill.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “DEA,” said the lead guy. “We have a federal warrant to search the domicile of Benjamin Bridger.”

  “That’s me. What are you looking for?” I asked. “Maybe I can save you some time.”

  The man gave me the same hard stare I had once given the Pathet Lao. He flashed papers as his team moved into my house, doing their dance of dash, take cover, inspect, present weapons, move in, all very Foxtrot Tango Delta. I would have been impressed if my blood hadn’t taken a chill.

  “Anybody inside?” he asked.

  “Just me. My wife died—”

  “Shut up,” he said.

  Agents lifted two happy beagles from the back of one truck. The dogs had their own little black bulletproof vests. They lolled their tongues and whined while their boss turned the handle on my garden spigot and filled two red plastic bowls marked “DEA.” The dogs lapped eagerly, spun about, and went to work.

  They were looking for cocaine, guns, marijuana. Whatever. The sheriff’s deputies were looking for child porn. They had a warrant, too, though they were surprised and a little awed by the presence of the feds.

  Not one of them was polite.

  28

  JUNE 10–11 • SAN DIEGO/EL CAJON

  My sense of irony doesn’t run very deep.

  I was in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown San Diego for three days before all the charges were dropped. No explanation, and nobody apologized.

  My lawyer cost me a good half of my savings, money from Janie’s retirement account that I had not wanted to violate. The lawyer, a large woman in a dark green suit, explained that she had me out on a writ of habeas corpus but there wasn’t going to be any case. Informants had waffled, sources had literally gone south, a bunch of solid leads had turned into string cheese rather than a rope, and they can’t hang you with string cheese.

  I was lucky they hadn’t seized everything I owned. The county still had my computer. They could take weeks to analyze what I had peeped at on the World Wide Web.

  I had overnight become a suspected drug dealer and child molester. My neighbors had probably picked up the story, and the local press, too. Nobody is careful with reputations these days, especially the reputation of an ex-Marine, a Vietnam vet, retired on disability and probably addled with Agent Orange. Who knows how many kids he bayoneted?

  I felt filthy and guilty without having broken a single law.

  I went home and stared in numb admiration at the mess they had made. Walls had been kicked in, holes punched in the ceiling, and old brown insulation pulled down. Family photos had been dumped in the living room and walked over with dusty boots. All my electronic equipment—VCR, old Kenwood stereo, Sony Trinitron, Akai tape deck, CD player—was piled by the door, cases roughly unscrewed and pulled back.

  The videotape was gone.

  They had even taken a backhoe, dug up my fiberglass septic tank, and bashed it open. The whole property smelled of sun-ripened shit. Yellow police tape lay in curls along the drive and all around the house.

  At least they had locked the doors when they were done.

  I picked up broken furniture and a shattered toilet in the front yard and piled it in the garage to sort out later.

  They hadn’t even left me a pot to piss in.

  Janie had made me sell my Colt and my shotgun and all my knives years ago. I was grateful fo
r that. A: I had gotten some money for them and B: I hadn’t posed an immediate threat to the guys in armor and jackboots. I could have died.

  Imagine my surprise when I found a Smith & Wesson thirty-ought-six planted conspicuously on top of a stack of four of my books. My own books, in hardcover, author’s copies, sitting in the middle of my small office. Something I would be sure to look for.

  The rest of my library had been dragged from the shelves and tossed around the room.

  I tried to make sense of the pistol. It was old. Its grip was wrapped in what looked like white medical tape, gone gray with use. Someone had left it behind, just in case I might need it. I considered calling the sheriff’s department, then decided that doing anything without a good think was sure to be counterproductive.

  I had been staring at that damned gun for maybe five minutes when the first phone call came. I picked up but heard only a click, then a long and faraway silence. One of those operations, I assumed, that computer-dials a hundred folks at once but can only respond to ten or fifteen.

  The second call was from Janie. A cloud seemed to drift over, and the house got darker. She asked how I was doing.

  “Not too well,” I said, and began to cry, hearing her voice, missing her so and feeling utterly and devastatingly useless, empty as a discarded doll.

  Janie’s words began to fill me up.

  I took a pee in the side yard and catnapped in the chair. The sea breezes came and went, then the stars. The canyon air was still and I heard the owl in the backyard but couldn’t see it. Finally, I pulled the slashed queen-size mattress outside, shoved it onto the stiff high grass, flung a sheet over it, and lay down.

  The next morning, I sat on the front porch again, this time with a beer in one hand and the tape-wrapped Smith & Wesson in the other. I was entertaining the notion of checking out of this shitty old motel called life. I could be with Janie in the flash of a muzzle.

  I didn’t think about Rob Cousins until he turned up at eight with another man. I recognized Banning from his dust-jacket photos, foppishly handsome. They cast long shadows as they walked up the driveway.

  “You all right, Ben?” Cousins asked.

  Banning stepped over a strip of yellow police tape and waved at me like a professor on holiday.

  My first thought, when I saw them, was that Cousins had abandoned me just like my real son. I felt the heat build. “Fuck you,” I said. “You lied. You set me up. Where were you when they busted me?”

  “I believe you’ve been tagged,” Banning said with a prissy British accent. He didn’t come any closer.

  “Did you bring dinner?” I asked. “Or was that all a setup, so you could plant some coke?”

  Cousins spoke to me as if I were a child. “Did they find any coke?” he asked.

  “Would I be here?” I played with the pistol, sighted along the barrel, and pointed it in their general direction, to show them how useful I could be. “No,” I said. “But not for lack of trying.”

  “What a mess,” Cousins said. “You must be really angry.”

  “I roll with the punches,” I said.

  “We should get you out of here,” Banning said.

  “Why would I want to go anywhere with a couple of fuckheads?”

  “Who called you?” Cousins asked, dripping reason and calm.

  I aimed the pistol straight at him. Janie had explained a lot, how I had been set up, how I was too old to get respect. She wanted to come back and help me put my life together, but Cousins wouldn’t let her. Banning was probably in on it, too.

  Cousins stood close enough I could blow a hole in his chest the size of my fist. He was sweating like a stuck pig. “I’m going to do something a little odd now,” he said. “I’m going to read you some numbers and see if you remember them.” He took out a small strip of paper like a grocery receipt.

  “Why?” I asked. I didn’t know the pull on the Smith & Wesson. It might go off with a tap. I jerked the pistol right and squeezed for practice. The gunshot sent Banning running like a rabbit.

  Short, light pull, but not hair-trigger.

  Cousins flinched but held his ground. “Seven five two four,” he read from the paper.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Now spin the dial on the old combo lock right two turns and go to—” I stopped babbling. His number made sense. It was perfectly reasonable. “Okay.” I listened.

  “Repeat it back to me.”

  “Seven five two four.”

  “Three seven eight one. Again, repeat it back to me.”

  “Three seven eight one.”

  “And the last one, I promise, two six nine eight.”

  “Two six nine eight.”

  “Dear old Ben, I have some news,” Rob said. “Shall we visit Doctor Seuss?”

  I cringed at a flash of green that seemed to pass right over my head.

  “How do you feel now?”

  “All right,” I said, and lowered the pistol.

  “What color did you see?”

  “Green.” I sniffed the air. “Jesus,” I said. “Who cut the cheese?” I tried to place the stink. Bodies and rotting vegetation, like a day-old battleground upcountry.

  Banning retraced his steps up the driveway on short, mincing legs. He wrinkled his nose. “They really got you,” he said.

  “Who?”

  I felt calm but very sad. The phone call from Janie had been a dream. I started to cry and Cousins put his arm around my shoulder. He took the gun and passed it to Banning, who dangled it from two fingers like a dead rat.

  “That’s better,” Cousins said. “Let’s pack up and get you the hell out of here. It isn’t safe.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked. My nose was running and sweat beaded off my chin and soaked my shirt. My stomach and bowels were in a riot. “Christ, I need a shower.”

  “There really isn’t time,” Banning said.

  We picked through the mess and stuffed a travel bag with clothes. I scooped some pictures into a grocery sack and filled a box with my favorite books. Banning took a sledge from the garage and smashed the Smith & Wesson. We didn’t want to be caught with a cop’s drop piece, probably stolen and unregistered.

  Then we left the house, the ghost, twenty years of memories, my whole goddamned life, and I haven’t been back since.

  29

  SAN DIEGO/LOS ANGELES

  “I wanted to thank you for confirming I’m an honest man,” Banning said. Cousins rode shotgun and I sat in the backseat of Banning’s beat-up Plymouth with my boxes. The trunk was latched with baling wire and he thought it might spring open.

  “I didn’t state anything of the kind,” I said.

  We slowed in the commute heading north on 5. There was some chance we’d be pulled over at the San Onofre checkpoint, but we had to get to LA to meet some people Cousins knew and there’s no quick way around la Migra. We were all white, I was no longer a suspect. We took the chance.

  They did pull us out of the line at the checkpoint. They searched the car and gave us the long stare. We were fugitives from something or somebody, they could see it in our eyes. Cousins talked pleasantly. They had nothing on us, so they let us go.

  I hate the law.

  I snoozed most of the way to LA. We were deep in Laurel Canyon when I awoke. Banning drove up a twisting private road to the ridgeline. Late in the afternoon, the tree-filled hollows were sunk in shadow. Quail darted across the cracked asphalt behind us. The air blew sweet with eucalyptus and sage.

  Banning stopped the car before a heavy steel gate. Cousins got out and spoke a few words into a box on a long, curving pole.

  “Our safe house,” Cousins explained, climbing back in and slamming the car door. “This will take a minute. Lots of security to disarm.”

  I was alert after my long nap. Now seemed the time, before we had to deal with anyone new. I could not explain my behavior back in El Cajon. I wanted to apologize, but that wasn’t appropriate, either. Maybe they were the ones who should apologize.

 
“What happened to me?” I asked.

  Cousins looked over his shoulder. “Jail cuisine,” he said. “Someone doped your food when you were in the Metropolitan Correctional Center. They wanted you to kill Rudy and me. That’s why they left the gun in your house.”

  It seemed suddenly hard to breathe, sitting in the backseat, even with the windows rolled down. “Thanks for warning me,” I said.

  “Did you get a phone call from someone you love?” Cousins asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Your dead wife?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  Cousins turned his focus on me like a teacher with a problem pupil. “I’m not sure who actually called, or who doped your food in the jail,” he said. “We suspect there are a number of agents in California, and elsewhere, working to intimidate us or kill us.”

  “So why didn’t I shoot you?”

  “Do you remember, you answered once and got an empty line?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was me,” Cousins said. “The night before, when I brought dinner and dessert, I sprayed some bacteria on your cheesecake, harmless, but infected by my own special phages. I hoped they would give you at least partial immunity against later attacks.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” I said. I folded my arms over my stomach and felt like curling up and pulling a blanket over my head.

  “Ideally, I would have given them forty-eight hours,” Cousins said, so matter-of-factly my fists clenched. I had to hold back from striking him. “By the time you were in jail, you were less than half-protected. When I learned you had been released, I phoned until I caught you at home. You were suggestible, but you weren’t their zombie yet, so I turned the tables. I ran you, in a way—gave you a list of numbers and asked you to describe the colors each one evoked. Then I told you this would take priority over everything else.”

  “You called me first, made me jump through some hoops—and I forgot all about it?”