The fight in the bar had been Edmund’s doing. He went there after he asked his Uncle James what really happened on the afternoon he murdered Danny Gibbs.
“I reckon it’s simple,” James Lambert said from the other side of the visitor’s glass. “Sometimes you just gotta to do what’s right cuz a higher power’s telling you to.”
“A higher power?” Edmund asked. “You mean like the General?”
“Don’t know nothing ’bout no General. But I reckon what you’re saying is right if you was in the Army or something.”
Suddenly, Edmund felt emptier and more alone than he had felt in a long time.
“C’est mieux d’oublier,” he said impulsively, and waited for a reaction.
James Lambert was silent for a long time—his expression like stone.
“You best not be visiting me no more,” he said finally, looking him straight in the eye for the first time in eighteen years. Then he motioned for the guard and left.
That was the last time Edmund ever saw him.
He drove around afterward for hours and ended up at an eighteen-and-over bar in Greenville. He’d purchased a tube of Chapstick first and coated the back of his hands so he’d be able to wash off the X with which the doorman would mark him as underage. Edmund did so in the men’s room, stepped up to the bar, ordered three shots of Southern Comfort, one right after the other, and then just started swinging.
“You’re lucky the bar and them two other guys you floored ain’t gonna press charges, Eddie,” said his grandfather, parking the truck. “A good thing you ordered those shots, I reckon, too. Underage drinking and losing licenses—no one wants this to get any bigger than it already has.”
Edmund was silent as he looked up at the sign for the Army recruiting center.
“Sometimes you just gotta do what’s right cuz a higher power’s telling you to.”
A sign—what he had been searching for all along?
“But the Army will fix you up right, Eddie,” said Claude Lambert. “Best thing for your head now, I reckon.”
Chapter 50
Searching.
But drifting now, too.
Basic training, then the assignment to Air Assault at Fort Campbell. More assignments here, more assignments there. Commendations and promotions—E2 up through E5. Sometimes Sergeant Lambert was with women, sometimes he was with men, but the drifting, the new places and new faces helped with the searching; made him forget about it completely for weeks at a time.
His grandfather had been right. The Army kept him focused; kept the fighting in his belly; kept the fantasies of doing to his lovers what he had done to his animals out of his head. Even when he was with the men, for a long time it seemed to Edmund that the only animal he ever thought about was the golden, seal-tailed lion on the crest of his 101st Airborne’s 187th Infantry Regiment patch.
Perhaps that was why he took the ancient cylinder.
Edmund came upon the stash of stolen Iraqi artifacts in October of 2003, while on patrol in Tal Afar, a city north of Mosul. The 101st Airborne’s 187th Infantry Regiment was making a big push to secure the city for the upcoming elections, and Edmund was in charge of a door-to-door sweep to root out insurgents. He killed one man inside the house where he found the cylinder; he’d thought at first the house’s occupants were terrorists, then later realized the two remaining men were part of a smuggling ring.
The house secure, the men arrested, for the briefest of moments Edmund was left alone with the open crate. He didn’t know what the tiny cylindrical object on the top was at first, but knew it had to be valuable because of the other objects beneath it—stone tablets, figurines, a solid-gold jeweled bowl just like the bowl the soldier from the 3rd Infantry Division tried to smuggle back to Fort Stewart.
Edmund had heard about that little incident back in May; knew he could get in big trouble if he was caught stealing, too. But that had been at the start of the war; that had been before the contacts had been put in place in Qatar—contacts who were willing to pay cash on the spot for stolen ancient Iraqi artifacts.
Or so Edmund had heard.
Yes, as hard as it was to get that kind of stuff back to the United States, word on the street was a man with the right connections could make a lot of money in Qatar if he was willing to take the risk. And although Edmund Lambert had never even stolen a candy bar in his life, when he picked up the tiny stone cylinder and saw the lion heads that looked so much like the lion on his 187th patch, impulsively he pocketed it before his soldiers returned.
Afterwards, on his way back to the base, Edmund realized that for the first time since his enlistment his actions had not been his own—a feeling that reminded him so much of those days back on the tobacco farm in North Carolina. And when he was alone in the latrine, when he studied the carving more closely and figured out what the lions on the cylinder were doing, well, Edmund Lambert simply could not believe his eyes.
At first he didn’t know the identity of the bearded man with the body of the winged lion; didn’t know why the lion-headed men were presenting him with impaled bodies, either. And although Edmund had seen similar objects during his time in Iraq, he wasn’t quite sure what the little cylinder was until he looked it up on the Internet. An ancient Babylonian seal, he discovered, most likely depicting the god Nergal.
And, after extensive research, Edmund concluded that the winged god to whom the impaled bodies were being presented had to be Nergal. The Raging Prince, the Babylonians called him; the Furious One; Lord of the Underworld—part man, part winged lion—just like Edmund himself in his 187th Infantry Regiment uniform.
The lion and the wings on the seal—just like his patch. Yes, it was all connected somehow. Edmund could feel it.
He figured the ancient artifact would fetch him a lot of money if he dumped it off in Qatar, but he had no desire to part with it—he didn’t tell anyone about it and studied the seal whenever he was alone. Eventually, Edmund was able to close his eyes and see the carved figures in as much detail as if they were right there before him. He kept the seal on his person always; carried it in his pocket for months while on patrol. His good luck charm, he thought; it got him out of a number of scrapes when others only a few feet away bit it for good.
But toward the end of January 2004, a week before he was scheduled to come home, Edmund Lambert’s luck changed—for better or for worse, he wasn’t sure at first.
His grandfather was dead.
Edmund spoke with Rally on the telephone, and received the news calmly, with little or no emotion, as Rally explained how he found the old man facedown in the cellar.
“Looks like he drank too much of that stuff,” he said, his voice tired and strained with tears. “Heart just gave out is what the coroner is saying.”
“I see,” Edmund said.
“The sheriff was there, too, Eddie, and—”
Rally was suddenly quiet.
“You still there?” Edmund asked. “Rally?”
“Yeah,” Rally said finally. “I’m still here, Eddie. But do you know if the Army tapes these calls?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“Well, I’m not sure how to tell you this, but, well, all your grandfather’s stuff in the cellar—in the workroom—you know what stuff I’m talking about?”
“The stuff for the farm experiments?”
“Well, yeah, but … you see, that’s what he told you all that stuff was for when you was growing up. So you wouldn’t tell no one, and so your ma and grandma wouldn’t worry and give us shit. But, you see, Eddie, that stuff down there we was making for other reasons.”