“I’m telling you straight out. I monitored your call on my car phone,” he told Correll. His smile was tight and ugly. “I like to know what’s going on. That’s how I’ve stayed alive this long.” He had dropped the “sirs.” “We’ve been fucked over good.” Ledge nodded to the projector. “Lee Crowley loaded that film. He checked it out of the lab. Then he left the pass for Selby. In Philadelphia they made a point to let us find out Selby was on his way. Crowley’s gone, his apartment’s cleaned out. Every move they made was to pin us down here. Who sold us out, Correll? You figured that one yet?”
Correll had been nodding thoughtfully. “Not all of it, Sergeant. Not quite.”
With an unhurried move, Ledge drew the .45 from its holster and held it leveled at Correll’s chest. “Step back from that projector.”
“You’re right, of course,” Correll said. “We were set up. But I’d advise you to trust me now—”
Ledge gestured with the automatic. Correll shrugged and stepped aside. The sergeant moved to the control panel and pressed a button to activate the film. The images flowed again, the boats on the lake, the playing fields and brightly striped buses.
“I soldiered with George Thomson,” he said, as if mechanically repeating a litany. “The best time of my life, soldiering with the major in Korea. I shot and killed Jonas Selby. I always hated that stubborn bastard. Thomson watched me. We trusted each other. We were soldiers. We doped Jarrell Selby and got him on the plane back here like we’d been told, good soldiers taking orders.”
Correll studied the sergeant and chose his words carefully. “You deserve every credit. You did exactly what I wanted. Jarrell was a second-generation product. It was essential to keep him close, to study the genetic properties, endowments and liabilities that connected the father and the son...”
On the blazing white screen in front of the two men a stocky figure in a gray twill uniform appeared, Indian features hawklike and vigilant. The image of Ledge.
“That’s what connects me to Jarrell Selby,” Ledge said, nodding at his image on the screen. “And that’s what could hang me.”
Correll said quietly, “You must trust me, Sergeant, the way you trusted the major.”
On the screen, the image of the sergeant drew the .45 from its holster. A pair of golfers pulling carts waved and smiled at him.
“It’s C and A time, Correll,” Ledge said. “Cover Your Ass. Earl Thomson’s never going to serve an hour in prison. He goes free as a bird. So does Lee Crowley. He’ll be south of the border on a government pension with lifetime PX privileges and travel cards. I heard your orders to Quade. He’s split for New York, and your plane is fueling up to wait for you at LaGuardia. It’s a free ride out for everybody but the old sergeant.”
“You’re thinking only of personal survival,” Correll said. “I understand that. But the preoccupation can blind people to intelligent action, Sergeant.”
On the screen, a camera tracked abruptly from the golf course to a stretch of shoreline across the lake. A shadow moved among the trees. Unexpectedly the figure of Jarrell Selby stepped into view, tense as a wild creature, his eyes desperate, dirt and scratches streaking his sensitive face.
Sergeant Ledge pressed a button that froze the frame on the screen. “He’s the danger for me,” Ledge said. “Him and the nigger kids you called your little mice. Don’t bullshit me about survival, Correll. That’s my game, and I play to win, just like you do.”
With a hand on the control panel, Ledge erased the images from the screen. The flat white mat cast a shimmering light through the theater.
“I’m disappointed in you, Sergeant,” Correll said. “You drew your gun from habit. Shooting me would be another mechanical reflex, triggered by panic or fear, which aren’t very reliable impulses.”
Ledge looked steadily at Correll, pressed a flat red button marked ERASE, and listened impassively to the whirring sounds of the film reels as they reversed and irrevocably obliterated and wiped clean every frame of the film shot months earlier in Summitt City.
“I won’t add to my problems by killing you, Correll,” the sergeant said when the erasure was complete. “You and the general have done a fair job of covering ass in Summitt and Saliaris, but I’m not leaving proof around to stretch this stringy neck of mine. I know there’s a copy somewhere, but I’m trusting the major to liberate and destroy it.”
“I’m seriously disappointed in you,” Correll said again. “You’re abandoning the disciplines that made you such a formidable soldier. You’re acting like a green recruit. In the face of the enemy, you’re falling apart. You don’t have the guts to trust and believe in me. You’ve got the mentality of a regular army stiff.” Correll’s voice rose with anger. “You know we’ve been betrayed, but you lack the imagination to try to understand the scope and enormity of that betrayal.”
Correll lifted the Snow Virgin and smashed it violently against the counter supporting the control panel. The globe shattered, shards of glass skittered about and a pool of glycerine spread in a small, thick circle around the broken plastic base. A metal cylinder no thicker than a matchstick lay beside the cracked figure of the Virgin. Another floated on the surface of the fluid seeping from the broken globe. Batteries...
The black plaster base had parted in two sections, as cleanly as if cut by a finely powered saw. The interior of the base contained a tape recorder no larger than a poker chip, with its side angled to fit a beveled receptacle cut in the foundation of the Snow Virgin.
Correll picked up the curved section of the plaster base. The two men studied the hollowed-out section, precisely fitted with reels and fine-spun metal tapes.
In his heart, Correll had expected this. His suspicions had winnowed out every other possibility. It was the only explanation he could conceive of, and yet a protective instinct was still helplessly seeking innocent justifications for these batteries and wires and tape. But all his defenses couldn’t sidestep the inevitable truth. His heart pounded with dangerous, impotent anger. The plastic base was repellent to his touch, as cold and slick as the treachery itself.
Correll placed the broken section on the counter, then watched indifferently as Ledge removed the tape recorders from them and held them in the palm of his big hand.
The day after Jennifer returned from Summitt City she had placed the Snow Virgin on his desk while he’d talked to the dying Senator Rowan. Jennifer had told him about sleeping with Jarrell Selby, about her ambivalent feelings for Jarrell’s brother, and even then the tiny reels had been spinning silently beneath the pious figure of the Virgin. And spinning, spinning, spinning, at his meetings with Thomson, his sessions with General Taggart, his calls to Van Pelt...
The Madonna, whose eyes and cheeks had been painted by his own mother, had been listening.
Ledge was backing away from Correll. The older man seemed barely aware of him now.
As a child, Correll had often puzzled over the riddle of whether the universe was one or many, a flock of birds, for instance, was that one thing, one swooping, darkly cohesive unit, or was it simply a thousand willful creatures soaring and nesting together for a common need and purpose? Was a tree one thing, its leaves another? Jennifer, Fabius, His Excellency, the bishop... Had there been one betrayal or an infinite number and variety of them?
Yet even with this thought, Correll couldn’t bring himself to believe his own mother had been part of the conspiracy, that her dark demons had not been electrocuted in the therapy clinic after all...
Sergeant Ledge had retreated to the main doors of the theater. Holstering his automatic, he put the tape recorder in the inner breast pocket of his twill jacket.