I didn’t recognize him, but I knew who he was.
‘Speak to my lawyers,’ I said and shut the door in his face, wondering who’d let him loose on the base.
Cheung and Macri arrived twenty minutes later.
‘We brought some food,’ said Macri, as he came through the open door behind Cheung. ‘Hope you like vegetarian.’
‘I like anything that eats grass,’ I said. ‘Especially if it’s medium rare.’
In fact, I don’t like vegetarian food at all, though I have dined a few times at Summer Love, a little joint on the ground floor of my apartment block. The only thing I like the look of there, though, is Summer herself, who’s hot in a hippy-chick way, with legs so long they could give you a nose bleed just thinking about them.
‘You guys want a drink?’ I asked as I headed for the kitchen. ‘I can offer you single malt or Jacks.’
‘Thanks, but I need something solid,’ said Cheung.
‘I’ll put rocks in it,’ I suggested.
Cheung smiled and shook his head. ‘No thanks. Mind if I set the table?’
‘Go right ahead. How about you, Counselor?’ I asked Macri, passing Cheung some forks.
‘Not for me, either,’ he said, as he divested his briefcase of several pounds of notes and forms and dumped them on the dining-room table.
I fixed a Glen Keith with ice and a little soda and left the kitchen with the bottle so that I’d have an ally with me.
Cheung and Macri sat themselves down at the table, the folders they had brought with them now placed on the floor. Food waited for me on a disposable plate.
‘What’s this?’ I asked.
‘Asparagus and eggplant lasagne,’ said Macri, his mouth already full. ‘It’s pretty good.’
I gave it a go and was pleasantly surprised, though half a pound of ground beef would’ve improved it.
‘I had a visit from the New York Times,’ I told them. ‘A guy called Rentworthy.’
‘What did he want?’ Cheung asked.
‘Dirt. What else?’
‘Twenny Fo and Leila will be called as witnesses, so we can bet on this court-martial getting plenty of media attention, which might hurt or help your case. We’ll see how it goes… Might be worth lodging a petition for the court to be closed.’
‘Won’t happen,’ said Macri. ‘Fink’s got a bad case of ASD — attention-seeking disorder. Next time the Times approaches you, Vin, hear him out before slamming the door in his face. If he’s got something important pertaining to the case, and he’s about to report it, he’ll come to you first. You can always refuse to comment. But we’d rather have some warning.’
‘Who said anything about slamming doors in people’s faces?’
‘He’s a reporter out for a little fame and glory at your expense. What else you gonna do?’
‘Let’s get started with a little background, shall we?’ said Cheung, changing the subject. ‘You’ve got an interesting record, Cooper. I see you’ve been up on assault charges before.’
I gave no response.
Cheung sat back. ‘Cooper, I know this is going to be hard for you, but we’re on your side. Here’s the deal. We ask you questions and you answer them without holding back. And if you think we’re not asking the right ones, then you volunteer the information you think we should be getting. This can’t work any other way, all right?’
I shrugged. I didn’t have a lot of choice.
‘There are twenty witnesses lined up against you, Vin,’ Cheung informed me yet again. ‘Frankly, it’s going to take every trick in the book and a lot of luck to pull this one out of the shitter.’
Macri picked a folder up off the floor. He flicked through it on his lap, eventually pulling out a sheet of paper.
‘So you want to tell us about the colonel you, ah, beat up?’
‘The government dropped the case. It’s not admissible,’ I said.
‘We know,’ Cheung responded. ‘But would you mind filling in the background anyway?’
I sighed. There was a time when I would have found this difficult, but now hashing over the facts of my divorce affected me about as much as scratching a rash.
‘My ex-wife and I were in marriage counseling. The counselor was an O-6 reservist. Turned out that he was regularly counseling my ex privately. I came home and found them in the shower. He was giving her some therapy around her epiglottis at the time.’
Macri glanced at Cheung.
‘As I see it,’ I said, ‘the colonel got the life sentence.’
They seemed puzzled, so I put it together for them. ‘He married her.’
‘What about the two drunk and disorderly charges — one substantiated?’ asked Macri.
‘I went through a bad patch.’
Macri gazed at me. ‘You’re a difficult case, Cooper. With a record like this, you’ll never make lieutenant colonel. Why’re you still in the air force?’
I’d thought about that question plenty of times, especially since Anna’s death. She’d planned to leave the service, and wanted me to go with her. I remember thinking at the time that I just might. Would I have gone through with it? Now that she was dead, I’d never know.
‘You want to hear me say that I probably couldn’t cut it anywhere else?’ I said.
‘That’d be honest, wouldn’t it?’ Macri replied.
‘And here I was thinking this wouldn’t be a pleasant evening.’
Cheung gestured at Macri to pass him the folder. ‘I note that a significant amount of your record is classified, much more of it than I would have expected,’ he said. ‘There are big holes.’ He put his fork down and flipped through a few pages. ‘You studied law at NYU?’
‘Know thine enemy,’ I said. There was a flicker of a smile from Macri.
‘You joined up in time for Kosovo and trained as a combat air controller. You also deployed to Afghanistan as a special tactics officer, and then transferred to the Office of Special Investigations, where you cleared a couple of significant cases.’
‘Beginner’s luck,’ I said.
‘Then come those holes.’ Cheung flipped a few more pages. ‘You’ve earned quite a few commendations. In fact, there is plenty of good here… perhaps enough to outweigh the bad.’ Macri made a note on a legal pad. ‘You’ve got your jump wings, you’re current on High Altitude Low Opening insertion,’ Cheung continued. ‘I see you’ve done a lot of work with Special Operations Command. You deploy to Iraq?’
‘Not officially,’ I said.
‘There’s the Air Force Cross submission pending… Why would you volunteer for personal security ops in Afghanistan? You have some kind of death wish?’
‘I lost my partner. We were close. I needed a distraction.’
‘Can you tell us the circumstances?’
‘Her name was Anna Masters. She died of a gunshot wound to the chest. I was with her at the time.’
They waited for more, but I was reluctant to give it. I freshened my drink.
‘Okay, so your third and most recent deployment to the ’Stan. The mission wasn’t classified. Why don’t you take us through that?’
Cheung sat back and waited for me to begin. I could see what the weeks ahead would be like — every detail that wasn’t classified would be picked over by Charlie Chan and Tony Soprano here, then strategized into a fairytale of life achievement that even I wouldn’t recognize as my own.
‘If I have to,’ I said.
‘You do,’ said Macri.
Kabul
Afghan Interior Minister Abdul al-Eqbal shared the delusion of all politicians who had well and truly reached their use-by date: that his position and power were preordained and that his people would love him no matter what shit he pulled, who he screwed over, or how he behaved.