A Visit from the Colonel: Chapter 11 of The Man with the Luminous Eyes
I walked up the stairs to my office, a full two hours late for my meeting with Grimshaw. The office was, unsurprisingly, empty. So my last paying client was gone.
I'd enjoyed those four days of prosperity. I'd really miss the cab rides, the deference from beautiful women in the Northend, the feeling that my life was, finally, inexplicably, and unexpectedly turning a corner.
I sat down behind my desk and lit a cigarette; my last one. I'd have to walk up to Lukasi's and get another carton. That name still scared the hell out of me, though I had no idea why.
I had significantly more important, obvious, and immediate things to be afraid of, I realized. In a matter of four hours, I'd succeeded in alienating two extremely rich, extremely powerful men. I'd probably gone much further than alienation with Patterson; I could only assume, given his commitment to redundant data gathering, that some other poor shamus was taking pictures of me with Lorna. And those pictures wouldn't be posed. Made me wonder if the pictures I'd taken of her were as phony as she'd led me to believe.
Right. Jealous of Lorna. That was a rational response.
I sat behind my desk, smoking in silence, and watching the still heavy snow fall. I'd never had a deeply internal locus of control; my life and motivations had always been as much of a mystery to me as my cases.
But Lorna? In the back of Al's Caddy?
That transcended any of the completely absurd things I'd done previously. True, she was incomparably beautiful—and incomparable in many other ways as well—but I'd never had any (serious) difficulty saying "no" to women, not even in the old days, when the occasional society daughter would take a fancy to the second violinist.
Since the war, I'd had very little need to practice that resistance.
If my own motivations were less than transparent, her's were utterly opaque. She was a woman who could—and very probably did—have any man she wished. I couldn't really imagine that a dusty, third rate, seven-fingered detective would be climbing to number one on her list of prospective—or actual—lovers.
As I sat, with only the sound of my own smoking to distract me in an otherwise utterly silent world, I heard a soft knock on my office door.
I grabbed my .38 and considered shooting through the door—on the assumption that anyone knocking on my door that particular day almost certainly didn't mean me well.
I restrained myself.
The knock was repeated. Soft, but strong, as though the person on the other side of the door could have easily knocked through the door, rather than on it.
"Come on in," I said, trying desperately to sound like the in-control detective I pretended to be.
A huge man entered. 6'4", 280, every pound of it muscle. He had a shaven head and a huge waxed mustache. He could have torn my arm out of its socket and not exerted himself over much.
I knew I'd seen him before, but couldn't begin to place where or when. He reminded me of the picture of Lukasi in the market. But Lukasi was dead. Before the war. And this gentleman was definitely alive.
I stood up, and gestured to the chair in front of my desk. He was wearing a dark, ready-to-wear suit that barely seemed to fit him, a bland tie, and an off white shirt. He appeared to be deeply uncomfortable, as though a suit was something he only wore when going undercover on reconnaissance.
I decided to be direct; my more arcane tactics hadn't been providing a strong return on investment lately.
"Have we met before? You look familiar, but I'm a bit short on sleep today; my memory isn't quite what it should be."
He looked at me with piercing, ice blue eyes for what seemed like several minutes. Then he smiled. A slow, sad smile.
"You don't remember me, Mr. McGill?"
"I'm afraid not. I'm sure it'll come to me. As I say, I've been working on a couple of fairly absorbing cases. Behind on my sleep."
I tried to laugh heartily. The attempt was utterly unconvincing.
"Well, these things happen. I guess I've just got one of those faces," he said. That was absurd; he knew it, and I knew it. This wasn't a guy you'd forget.
But, apparently, I had—though not quite completely. The number of half seen near-memories was growing rapidly.
"You were in the war, Mr. McGill?"
"That I was. In the trenches."
"I knew a lot of good men in the trenches. Sorry about the hand."
"Me too. What can I help you with?"
I was in no mood for light conversation. If he was a paying customer, I'd talk. If not, I was going to go home, sleep, and hope I'd wake up in a different world.
"I'd like some help finding an old friend of mine. Man by the name of Lukasi."
My studied calm cracked for moment.
"You don't need me for that. He's dead. Died before the war. All that's left is his store a couple of blocks north of here."
"Could be a different Lukasi."
"Could be. But it's a mighty unusual name."
I picked up the black cube paperweight on my desk and rolled it around in my hands. I couldn't remember where or why I'd gotten it. I didn't like it, though, not at all, and I decided to throw it out when this guy left. I smoked in silence for another couple of minutes, hoping that the huge guy in the ill-fitting suit would take the hint, and depart gracefully.
He chose not to. Instead, he got up, walked behind my desk, and put a hand the size of loaf of French bread on my shoulder.
"You have to find Lukasi, Sergeant. Your life depends on it."
"Yes sir, Colonel, sir" I said reflexively.
He returned to the seat in front of my desk and sat down, with remarkable grace for a man his size. He was smiling.
I stood up, and came to attention.
"Sit down, Sergeant. Relax. I'm not in uniform. And this is your office, after all." He laughed, a surprisingly genuine laugh.
"I was at the Blue Beret barracks. The one on 4th and Smithton. We were talking about something. About Lukasi? Right? But Lukasi's is just a corner market, a couple of miles north of here."
That reminded me that I was out of cigarettes. The Colonel smiled, and handed me one, graciously.
"We were talking about that, indirectly, Sergeant. The main thrust of our conversation was memory."
"The flag. The trenches. You told me that you couldn't remember them either."
He paused for a moment; there was a sense of collectedness to the man that I'd never before experienced; he wasn't just waiting to speak. He was, perhaps, in some inner world to which I had no access.
"When you told Grimshaw that you're an agent of the Blue Berets? You are, Sergeant. We don't join the Corps, Sergeant. We are, simply, Blue Berets."
Although the Colonel's ability to read my mind was disconcerting, I had no immediate response to finding that I belonged to an organization that utterly terrified me.
He sat, silent. After what seemed several minutes he spoke, very quietly, as though not to be overheard, "Everyone has forgotten, Sergeant."
He paused. When he continued, he seemed to be forcing the words out against an internal, hidden resistance, "No one remembers what happened before the war. No one remembers any other season. No one remembers our enemy. But a few vets know something isn't as it should be. We can't remember, either. But we know something's wrong. Through that knowledge, we're Blue Berets."
I thought back to the times when I'd been on the verge of remembering. The times I'd almost seen something beyond the winter. Beyond the trenches. Beyond my ruined life.
I said, almost to myself, "When I passed out at the barracks..."
The Colonel answered my barely asked question, "You were beginning to remember. And they would strongly prefer that we not remember."
"The War Profiteers?"
"They're the agents. We'll destroy them, one by one. But it's deeper than that."
"Deeper?"
"Somewhere behind this endless winter, Sergeant. Somewhere behind this world that we know is wrong, false. That's where the answer is."
Another dangerous man, sitting in front of my desk, telling me that the world was not as I saw it, felt it, with my remaining frozen fingers.
"For now? All we can accomplish is vengeance. No face for the faceless."
I cringed, remembering Sherry's mutilated corpse.
"As I said, your life depends on finding Lukasi."
"He's dead," I said, numbly. And then, "The picture of Lukasi? in the store?"
"Yes, Sergeant. I know. The picture of Lukasi? It's me."
THE STORY SO FAR: