“You’re out of line, Mark,” the man said. “I’ll skip that part of your message.”
Mark knew Grimes well; the corporal had almost raised him, but Grimes had never understood the issues between Mark and his father, the gulf that separated them like a lethal moat. It wasn’t only a matter of bands at dockside for returning GIs or patriotic bunting on main streets across the country. Most of the differences between himself and his father were generation problems, philosophy gaps, definitions of “a just war” and “other wars” and the inability to talk sanely and quietly about any of it. And there was something else, too, something wounding and estranging that had come between them after his mother died.
The lieutenant looked at his watch. He was waiting for Sergeant Gordon’s call and only half listening to Grimes now. “... he’s not made of granite himself, Mark, never mind the public image. He can be hurt, too, you know.”
It was true, of course, the lieutenant thought, watching the surface of the gray lake begin to glitter. A fog had come in and the sun broke through in dappled patterns. A light glowed on the base of the phone.
“Grimes, do your best,” Weir said. “Tell my father those dead men on my turf mean as much to me as the casualties at Bastogne or Pork Chop Hill or anywhere else on his terrain. I need him to locate the enemy...”
The lieutenant broke the connection, pushed a button and Sergeant Gordon came on the line. He was calling from Mrs. Lewis’s apartment.
“We found the letter and Mrs. Lewis was right about dates and times. Nothing much else in it except stuff about presents and wanting to make the big time in life. Nice, kind of hopeful, but nothing for us to go on. Mrs. Lewis almost got mugged tonight near the Vets’ Aid on Diversey, by the way. Some stud with balls saved her ass. She’s making us tea right now, and I’m going to look through a stack of letters from Randolph’s mother, see if they give us something. Anything at your end, lieutenant?”
“I’m trying a new approach,” he said. “Suppose you pick me up at Congress and Michigan in about an hour, okay?”
“Will do, lieutenant.”
Mark Weir lived on the near north side in a block of renovated three-story brownstones. His was the basement apartment, running the length of the house, four rooms and as bath, with barred windows, front and back, opening on shallow courtyards. In summer there were potted geraniums on the front sills, and he resolved that if he ever got a cat, he’d keep a catnip tray growing in the kitchen bay.
At home he changed into track clothes, left his apartment and jogged east to Michigan Avenue. He continued over the bridge that arched the river, past the Tribune Tower to the stretch of shops and the apartment buildings and hotels that faced Lake Michigan.
The lieutenant alternated his route every other day. He ran in Lincoln Park often, and sometimes took Delaware or Oak to the Outer Drive and along the lake to Navy Pier. From there, if he had time, he usually jogged back toward the El, the elevated transportation route that circled the town’s original business district. He liked the narrow streets in that area, slatted and shadowed from overhead by the structure of train tracks, the satisfying Chicago sound of old El cars rumbling and screeching above him.
This early frosty morning the lieutenant wore a gray wool cardigan over his jogging suit. Beneath the sweater a .32 caliber revolver in a spring clip was looped to his belt, and under the leather were secured his ID and gold badge. A wristwatch with a small receiver gave him contact with Homicide Central.
Traffic on Michigan Avenue was still light, only a few cruising cabs, morning-shift doormen walking to clubs and hotels and old women from downtown cleaning crews moving wearily toward bus stops and El stations.
From here the lake stretched away from the city like a flat silver platter, the thin sun spreading through the mists. A wind scattered dirt and damp papers in the gutter and ice in the hollows of the sidewalks glittered like bits of broken glass. Street lights were still on, he noticed, their glows paling in the rising daylight. Weir paced himself to the echo of his footsteps and checked his watch as he passed the Art Institute with long, rhythmic strides.
For the last ten years there had never been a cease-fire between himself and the old man, no area of accommodation, not even a no-man’s land where they might have met under a flag of truce to reestablish lines of communication. Yet even for a long time before that something had been missing between them, or maybe missing in himself, he often thought. He remembered his feelings as a kind of emotional overkill, a demand for more love than seemed to be in supply. As a young boy he sometimes felt lonesome for his father, even when they were together on the same Army post, in the same house, sometimes even in the same room. It was an ache he felt acutely but never understood.
General Weir was stationed mostly in Europe and Washington during his son’s teens and university years. Mark had managed a student draft deferment until graduation, then volunteered for service for two years. He went into the Army a private and came out a private. He applied for and received specialized training in communications. He spent a year and a half on various Stateside assignments and the last six months in a suburb of Saigon. Except for basic training, Mark Weir never handled or fired a weapon.
Mustered out of the Army at twenty-three, he transferred his Army savings to a Chicago bank, moved into a small efficiency apartment near the Loop and joined a Veterans Against Vietnam group to publicly protest U.S. military involvement in the war.
A student group at New Trier High School had asked him to speak, and it was there he first met Bonnie Caidin. He allowed her to tape one of his speeches, and some months later agreed to have it printed as a pamphlet for the antiwar student group to stuff in Evanston mailboxes, pass out on downtown street corners and send to the opinion page of the Chicago newspapers and the New York Times.
Mark Weir was never sure exactly what had triggered his final anger or flawed his judgment, or why he wanted to hurt his father so directly, but he had instructed Bonnie Caidin to identify him in the introduction to that pamphlet as the only son of Lieutenant-General Tarbert Weir, United States Army.
Even now, at thirty-four, Weir felt an almost crippling chill as he remembered his father’s rage and scorn. The Pentagon had sent one of the pamphlets to the general in Paris. He had initialed it and sent it back to his son with the scrawled comment: “High-class rhetoric. I’d say, persuasive to cowardly hearts and immature minds but damned close to treason in my judgment. Have I raised a turncoat as my son?”
Mark had written a heated reply: “If civilian criticism of government policy is treason, how would you describe the government’s current lies to its citizens? What would you call our faked casualty reports, unreported bombing raids on a neutral country, deliberate underevaluation of enemy strength to keep this war alive? Is that legitimate representation, or none of the country’s damned business? I kept my mouth shut while I was in uniform, but I will no longer do that. By your own choice, you have been in uniform most of your adult life, and you don’t speak out. By staying in uniform, accepting its power and privileges, your silence abets the lies of the Vietnam conflict. You are committing the ultimate treason. You are not true to yourself.”