“What kind of report you think Brother Undean’ll turn in?” Tinker Burns asked, once the analyst was out of earshot.
Still staring at Undean’s back, Haynes said, “ ‘How I Alone Swelled the Crowd at Steady Haynes’s Grave by Twenty-five Percent.’ “
Burns chuckled and made a quick survey of the cemetery slope with its rows of matching white headstones. “When I was fixing up my pass and getting directions, they told me they were burying Steady not far from where they’d buried two other great Americans, Lee Marvin and John Mitchell. How’d you get ’em to plant him here?”
“Isabelle arranged it,” Haynes said.
Burns looked at her. “Blackmail?”
“What else?” she said.
“They know it was you?”
“Of course.”
Burns shook his great head in appreciation, chuckled again and said, “Well, it by God deserves a great lunch and all we can drink.”
Without waiting for their acceptance of his invitation, which he obviously took for granted, Burns asked Gelinet whether she had a car. After she nodded, Haynes volunteered he had come by taxi.
“Then you ride with me, Granny, and Isabelle can meet us there.”
“Where?” she asked.
“What about Mac’s Place?” Tinker Burns said. “If it’s still in business.”
Three
The man with the courtly air and the bald head turned from the seventh-floor window at 1:13 P.M. and dropped into his high-backed leather chair with a sigh just as Gilbert Undean finished the last of his egg salad sandwich on whole-wheat toast.
The man in the high-backed chair was Hamilton Keyes, who had sent down for the sandwich after learning that Undean had not yet eaten. After Undean licked a trace of mayonnaise from the left corner of his mouth, carefully folded the unused paper napkin and stuck it down into the right-hand pocket of his brown herringbone jacket for possible future use, Hamilton Keyes said, “Steady was never in any branch of the service, you know.”
“Wrong,” Undean said. “He was in Korea in ’fifty and ’fifty-one.”
“But not in the service,” said Keyes, leaning back in the leather chair and resting his feet on one corner of the 137-year-old rosewood desk his rich wife had given him as a fifteenth wedding anniversary present. He had given her a copy of the 1915 Woodberry Society edition of The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, numbered (No. 27) and signed by George Edward Woodberry himself. Keyes had acquired the copy at a Georgetown garage sale (where it had been called an estate sale) for $3.50 after realizing it was worth between five and seven hundred dollars.
“We talking about the same Steadfast Haynes?” Undean said.
Keyes smiled slightly and nodded. A careerist, Keyes only recently had realized he had gone as high as he would ever go in the agency. The realization had come not as a shock, or even as a disappointment, but rather as a curious kind of relief, and he now took an almost morbid interest in the progressive atrophy of his ambition.
Undean said, “Well, if he wasn’t in the Army in Korea, what the fuck was he doing there?”
“He was a C.O.”
“Different Steady Haynes then,” said Undean, who had known the courtly man since 1962, when, fresh out of Brown with a full head of hair and even then a certain mannered courtliness, Hamilton Keyes had joined the agency as a probationer.
“Steady was with the American Friends Service Committee,” Keyes said. “The Quakers. He drove an ambulance or carried a stretcher or passed out doughnuts. Something humanitarian. He was attached to the Seventh Division when the Chinese hordes overran it on Thanksgiving Day in nineteen fifty. It was Thanksgiving, wasn’t it?”
“Around in there,” Undean agreed. “He get captured?”
“No, but during the retreat he hooked up with six GIs, all that was left of a rifle company, who were hell-bent on surrendering. Steady argued against it. The ringleader, or lead surrenderee I suppose one might call him, aimed his piece at Steady and told him to shut up.”
“And?”
“And Steady, of course, refused. The ringleader shot at him and missed, probably on purpose. Our Quaker friend snatched a submachine gun, a Thompson, I believe, from the hands of one of the other GIs.” Keyes looked doubtful for a moment. “They did use Thompsons in Korea, didn’t they?”
“Must’ve.”
“At any rate, Steady promised to shoot the first fucker who tried to surrender. The ringleader fired again and this time the round grazed Steady’s left arm just above the elbow. Steady shot him dead. After that he led the remaining five down to Hungnam, where they were evacuated.”
“Leaving his faith behind” Undean said.
“He may not have lost it completely until after the five he led to safety preferred murder charges against him, which was their way of thanking him for saving their lives. The Army couldn’t decide whether to shoot Steady or give him a medal. So they shipped him back to the States and forgot him.”
“That must’ve been when he went back to school” Undean said. “The University of Pennsylvania.”
“Where we tried to recruit him just before graduation in nineteen fifty-five.”
“Tried?”
“They say he laughed at us. Well, smiled anyway. He told our recruiters that if he ever went into the hearts-and-minds business, it would be for money, not country. So he landed a job with one of the big New York ad agencies and made such an impression that three years later they transferred him to their Paris office.”
“This was when?” Undean asked.
“ ’Fifty-eight, I believe. In late ‘fifty-nine, the ad agency’s Paris office was approached by representatives of the Belgian government. The Belgians were concerned that there might be something of a mess in the Congo after independence — nothing to fret about, you understand — but they still thought an American ad agency might be useful in putting the best face on it. The ad agency’s Paris office, for various reasons, said no thanks. So our friend Steady quit, made his own presentation to the Belgians in his quite serviceable French and landed the account. And that’s how he wound up in the Congo during the troubles of the early sixties.”
“And where he met Tinker Burns,” Undean said.
“Apparently. Had you ever run into Burns during your travels?”
“I’d heard the stories about him, but today’s the first time I ever met him.”
“And your immediate impression?”
“White hair. Stiff neck. Smart mouth.”
“Then he hasn’t really changed,” Keyes said. “Except for the hair.” His right palm made an exploratory pass over his own bald head. “Tinker’s used to be coal black.”
“He really at Dien Bien Phu like everybody says?” Undean asked. “Or is that just more bullshit?”
“There were four of them with the Legion there. Four Americans, I mean. Tinker was the only one to survive.”
“How long was he in?” Undean said.
“The Legion? Ten years. From ‘forty-six to ‘fifty-six. Before that he was a paratrooper with the Eighty-second Airborne. A battlefield commission made him a second lieutenant. When he left the Legion after ten years, he was a captain, which, for an American, I understand, is quite extraordinary.”
“Why the fuck would he join the Legion?”
Hamilton Keyes smiled. “If you’d accepted his invitation to lunch, Gilbert, you could’ve asked him. He might even have told you.” Keyes paused. “Like some coffee?”
“Yeah. I would. Thanks”
Keyes picked up his telephone and asked for two coffees. They waited in silence until a young man brought them in on a tray. After the young man left without speaking, Undean took a sip, put his cup down and said, “If Steady wasn’t ever in any branch of the service, why bury him at Arlington?”