With two fingers, Adrian gently touched her chin, as if exploring a bruise. "Are you sure?"
"He was wearing a Marine Corps field uniform and he was a Caucasian. And the only whites operating in the area were Marine Corps snipers. We usually stay away from each other's territories, but somehow our signals got crossed."
"Did you recognize him? Was he someone from your unit?"
"I didn't get close to him. I couldn't. A look through Berkowitz's binoculars was enough, though. It was a good shot, a head shot, right through his nose. Blood and gore and brains were all over his face as he lay there. He was as dead as I've seen anybody, and I saw a lot of dead people. Mostly people I made dead."
"Was it someone from your unit?"
"We all were accounted for that evening. But there were other Marine sniper companies in Elephant Valley. They suffered losses all the time. It's the nature of the profession that sometimes snipers don't come back from patrol."
"And you didn't report this to your commander?"
Gray moved his head left and right, an almost imperceptible motion. "I didn't have the courage. I never learned who my victim was."
"Did Allen Berkowitz have the same trouble you had coping with this?"
"Berkowitz was killed by mortar fire two days after I left Vietnam." Gray continued with his dinner, chewing mechanically and tasting nothing.
"What happened after the accident?" she asked.
"The old-fashioned term for it is a mental breakdown. I had one. My captain found me sobbing, sitting on an upside-down bucket near the latrine. He hid me for several days, thinking I'd come out of it, but I didn't. So he drove me to the Fourth Marine Division Hospital at Phu Bai. They locked me up in a padded ward in a MUST. The kook cell."
"A must?"
"Medical Unit Self-Contained Transportable, a portable hospital that looks like an immense inflated tube."
"You attempted suicide?"
"I don't remember it very well because of the medication the doctors were giving me at the division hospital. I took a couple of stabs at my wrist with a scalpel I stole from a surgery cart."
Adrian reached for his left wrist. She pushed back his sleeve. Pink scars were only slightly visible on the underside of his wrist. She said, "These don't look too bad."
"After I got to New York, I had a plastic surgeon work on the wrist. So now I can pass it off as a childhood accident with a pop bottle."
She looked at his other arm. "You only took the scalpel to one wrist?"
"It hurt too much." He smiled weakly. "I quit after the first wrist."
"What about the scar on your neck Pete Coates talks about. Let me see it."
He pulled down the neck of his sweatshirt.
She said, "It looks like an egg fried over easy."
"The plastic surgeon worked on this, too. You should see the 'before' pictures."
"Any more scars?"
"Couple puncture scars on my arms and legs that don't amount to anything. And I clipped the side of my foot with a .22 bullet when I was seven years old." He tried to generate a waggish tone, but his voice wasn't cooperating. "I still wear a crease of red skin there. Want to see it?"
"I think I'll pass." She finished her wine.
He said, "You are the second person I've ever mentioned the ninety-seventh kill to. You and Mrs. Orlando. You've hypnotized me somehow."
"You didn't tell your ex-wife?"
"Cathryn couldn't handle ninety-six. No sense telling her about the last one."
"Why did she marry you if she couldn't reconcile you with your past?"
Gray spread his hands. "I lied to her about it. At first I told her I was an infantryman in Vietnam and only saw a little action, nothing much."
"When did you tell her you were a sniper?"
"Two years into our marriage I figured Cathryn knew me well enough — knew my good qualities, knew that I wasn't crazy, knew that it was behind me — that she could handle the news."
"But she couldn't."
Gray exhaled slowly. "She couldn't come to grips with me peering through a scope at ninety-six human beings and pulling the trigger. I argued. Christ, I argued. A war was on. They were the enemy. I was doing my duty. Made no difference to her." Gray wet his lower lip with his tongue. "I'm not sure I blame her. It's a hard number, ninety-six. Tough to push it around and come up with anything redeeming. It hit her hard, I guess." Gray paused, then decided to risk the confidence. "We never made love again, not once, after she learned I was a sniper."
"Have you come to grips with it?"
"The first ninety-six, yes. But the last one — the American I left dead in the Vietnam bush, and forever left his family wondering — is something…" Gray hesitated and again looked at Adrian Wade. He measured his words. "It's an inescapable pit of agony for me. That terrible moment is always present, every hour of the day and many hours of the night. You'd think a tough ex-Marine and federal prosecutor like me would be able to deal with it, but I never have. I make do, with my kids, with my job." His voice was barely audible. "But I know now that number ninety-seven is never going to go away."
They stared into the fire for a few moments. The fury of it had abated and now the flames leisurely worked on the blackened logs. Embers glowed at the base of the fire. Smoke twisted and rose up the chimney.
She gently patted his arm. "I'm going to turn in. You'll talk about this more tomorrow, won't you? You won't clam up?"
"Feel free to interrogate me further. It's your job, after all."
She smiled good night at him. She put her plate in the kitchen on her way to his parents' room, where he had made the bed earlier in the day. She closed the door behind her.
Owen Gray sat on the couch another two hours, utterly still, gazing at the fire. When he rose to go to his bedroom only blood-red embers remained.
"Are you on the run?" Andy Ellison asked, bringing his cup of chamomile tea to his lips. The hands shook uncontrollably, and the tea splashed over the cup's sides. His voice was as steady as he could make it but still sounded like he was entering puberty. The rush of confidence he had felt on learning this man was not a DEA agent had quickly evaporated.
"On the run?"
"A fugitive?" Ellison had quickly determined that the stranger knew no colloquialisms or slang, even the most common phrases. The foreigner had learned English from a book, probably an old book.
"Yes."
Ellison sipped the tea, wishing he could control his hands. He was terrified of this big man with the dent in his head and the bony face. The man's eyes were curiously flat, and they seemed to look through things rather than at them. His large nylon bag was on the floor near his feet.
"Who is looking for you?"
"U.S. Immigration Service."
"They want to send you back? To where?"
"To Russia." The big man plunged a cleaning rod into the barrel of the Mosin-Nagant rifle. A scope was mounted on the rifle.
"You handle that weapon like you know what you are doing." Ellison was determined to get this man to like him and therefore spare him.
The Russian said nothing, working the rod in and out. Half of the items in the farmhouse would have been recognized by the homesteader who built the place a hundred years before— the pine table and primitive chairs, the rocking chair, the washstand, a hurricane lamp, the glass doorknobs, and the lacy curtains. The homesteader would have been clueless about Ellison's additions — the poster of John Lennon, a wood tie-dye frame, a glass and brass hookah, a boom box near a rack of Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin CDs, a well-thumbed 1969 Volkswagen van repair manual, an incense bowl, and a bead curtain that hung in the door to the kitchen.
The Russian abruptly asked, "Have you ever been in prison?"