"Last year some guy fell into the flame and died," Stratton said. "He got drunk and pitched face down into the Eternal Flame. They found him the next day, burned to death. When I saw the story in the paper, I had to wonder about that guy. What was he thinking about that night? Why did he come here, of all places?
I could just see him standing there in front of the President's grave, after all the goddamn tourists were gone. I could see him crying. Sloppy drunk tears.
Staring at the flame and crying like a baby. Then it made sense: If you want to be sad, this is the place. Look out there, Linda. Look at them all. So many you can't even count them. I think this must be the saddest place of all. I think the guy knew exactly what he was doing."
Linda kissed him gently on the neck. Nothing. Stratton was loaded like a spring.
She wondered sadly if their night in Peking had left any tender echo. It would make her job so much easier if it had.
"Can I ask you something?" Stratton said softly. "Are you here to stop them-or me?"
Harold Broom had had about all he could take from the snotty Chinaman. Being cursed in Mandarin was not so bad, but now Wang Bin had begun to call him "fool" to his face, as if it were part of his name. Broom was not a violent fellow, but now he shook his fist at the man in the passenger seat and said, "Shut up before I punch you in the nose!"
Wang Bin merely grunted.
"It's not my fault," Broom said for the tenth time. How could he have foreseen that Mrs. Kevin Mitchell would change her mind about the funeral? How could Broom have known that her husband's coffin would wind up at Arlington instead of the old Mitchell family plot in Baltimore, which would have been just as lovely.
It would have been a cinch.
"Son of a turtle!" Wang Bin snapped.
"These things happen."
"How are we to find Mitchell's grave?"
"Simple," Broom said. "We aren't. There's acres of soldiers at Arlington and not all of them are dead, Pop. They've got crack Marines with very nasty rifles-not peashooters like yours. No way we're going to try to dig up that coffin."
"But this cannot be!"
"Oh, but it is. Your precious Chinese warrior can rest forever. He'll be right at home, believe me. I'm not risking a trip to jail."
The deputy minister snorted. "I must have the third soldier."
"Pop, don't be greedy. There is no way we can pull it off. You want to get shot in the back? Those Marines are genuine marksmen, Pop, and you're old and slow."
Wang Bin stared straight ahead at the highway. "It can be done," he said. "And if it cannot, at least I want to see for myself."
Broom surrendered. They stopped at a camera store in Crystal City and purchased a couple of cheap 35-mms. This way, the art broker explained, they'd look like everybody else on the blue-and-white trams that chugged through the cemetery.
Broom also bought a large canvas shoulder bag to conceal the collapsible shovel and two hand picks. "This is insane," he grumbled. "And if anything goes wrong, you're on your own."
"Meaning what?" Wang Bin asked.
"Meaning I never saw you before in my life."
It was mid-afternoon when Broom drove down the Jefferson Davis Highway toward the national cemetery. He turned left past Fort Myer, then right again on Arlington Ridge Road. He drove half a mile and pulled the car up on a curb. "Get out now," he ordered Wang Bin. "Try to be useful."
The deputy minister silently followed the art dealer on a long sidewalk up a slope, through the gates of Arlington and onto a motor tram. The Chinese and his canvas shoulder bag sat down with a conspicuous clatter. The tram wound slowly up the hills. Wang Bin gazed in wonderment at the burial markers that seemed to march on forever.
"All soldiers?" he whispered to Broom.
"Yes. The Fields of the Dead, they call it."
"How many?" Wang Bin asked.
"Thousands," Broom said. "I checked with a guide back at the office and our friend is supposed to be resting in Section H. Grave number four-four-five. I got a map, but I'm not sure it'll help."
"We have nothing like this in China," Wang Bin marveled. "There is no land for such a place. All our dead are cremated."
"You build temples, we make graveyards. Each to his own."
Wang Bin took a deep breath. "Like Xian, in a way. This is your Imperial Army, is it not, Mr. Broom?"
Stratton spotted them without the field glasses.
They emerged from a copse at the foot of a hill, perhaps one hundred meters from Lt. Kevin P. Mitchell's white cross. They found the footpath and walked side by side, Mutt-and-Jeff silhouettes. Once they stopped to confer, and Stratton noticed the beam of a small flashlight as they bent over together, pointing. A map, probably. They resumed walking, with Broom leading the way.
Stratton slipped away from the oak tree where Linda Greer slept, curled on a damp bed of leaves. He moved in a familiar half-crouch, using the trees and the dappled shadows to hide his advance. He stopped only to watch them, pace them, and anticipate their path up the hill to Section H.
Stratton got there first. He chose a spot slightly downhill, across the footpath from Mitchell's grave, in an older section of the cemetery. Here a six-foot granite marker paid homage to a four-star general and one of his three wives, and it was here that Stratton easily concealed himself.
He had already decided against a confrontation among the tombstones. The park police would arrive swiftly, to be sure, but what would they have-a couple of prowlers? No, it was better to let Harold Broom and Wang Bin finish their task.
The evidence would be obvious, and afterwards the ghouls would be pegged as criminals.
Part of Stratton's decision owed to logic, and part to curiosity. He wanted to see if they would really try it.
Whispering, Broom and Wang Bin passed above him. The two men shuffled off the footpath and began probing grave markers in Section H. Stratton rose from his knees-dampened by the grass-and peered over the general's headstone.
He heard a voice counting: "Four-fifty, four forty-eight… "
And another: "It is here."
The flashlight threw a skittish beam from the ground to the trees to the crosses. Stratton crept out of the tombstones, sliding caterpillar-style along the earth until he reached the paved footpath. From there, braced on his elbows, he studied the grave robbers.
Wang Bin struggled out of the canvas shoulder bag and turned it upside down. The shovel and picks landed with a sharp clink against one of the white crosses.
"This is fucking insanity," Broom muttered.
"Where are your Marines?" Wang Bin chided. "It appears we are alone. You dig first."
"We're going to wind up in Leavenworth!" Broom said.
"There is a fortune beneath your feet. Now dig."
Grudgingly, Broom assembled the portable shovel. He removed his knit golf shirt and draped it across the arms of Kevin Mitchell's cross. As Broom poised at the edge of the grave, Wang Bin took one step back and folded his hands at his waist.
"Keep your eyes open!" Broom instructed. He planted his shoe on the shovel and rammed it into the moist green sod.
The exhumation went on for two hours. Stratton watched the shadows trade places, and measured their progress by the muffled grunts and curses, some in Chinese, some in English. Otherwise Arlington was perfectly still, save for the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns.
Stratton felt himself dozing when the sound of muffled voices arose in Section H. The flashlight snapped on, and he was able to see both of them: Broom, shirtless, sweaty, up to his waist in the pit; and Wang Bin, toweling his own forehead, exhorting Broom from the edge of the grave.
Then the flashlight went black.
Stratton squinted, waiting for his eyes to readjust. When he focused again, the two shadows were moving with belabored haste, a blur of pick and shovel, flinging dirt back into the grave. Then Wang Bin himself dropped to his knees and pressed ragged squares of green sod back into place, like so much carpeting.