LITMIR.BIZ

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around a corner, still adjusting his hat on his head. Alan’s reaction was that the guy was only a lieutenant and much too old for a lieutenant, and his menace was all bluff.

      “Mosher,” Miriam Gurion said quietly to Alan. “A shlemiel.” She went toward Mosher as if she was going to beat the life out of him, and he actually stopped, and the look on his face went from menace to guilt to fear in one pass. He said something, and she rapped out a burst of Hebrew that caused him to flinch. He tried to recover, said something that sounded like pleading, and she erupted into more scolding Hebrew.

      She grabbed Alan’s arm. “Come on.” She began to march him away from the gate. Lieutenant Mosher watched them and fell in behind, uttering more pleading noises.

      Alan glanced at his watch, saw that he was going to be late meeting Rose. “Where are we going?” he said.

      “To look at a body.” She snorted. “I said to him, ‘Mosher, where’s the body?’ I thought he was going to piss himself. I said, ‘It’s right where the other one was, isn’t it, Mosher.’ I thought he was going to cry.” She shook her head. “A nice man, actually, but a shlemiel.”

      They were striding along the building that had once belonged to the Fourth Marines. The windows were mostly dark, but he saw fluorescent lights burning in one secondfloor room—Mosher’s office, or some negligible naval function that had been banished here? A door was open at ground level; as he looked, a man stepped into it, heavy-set, ridiculous in long, baggy shorts. He might have been some idler in a small town, curious about outsiders. Alan nodded but the man didn’t respond. Maybe the sun was in his eyes.

      What had once been a parade or exercise ground opened to their right, its gravel partly consumed by grass, and beyond it three identical buildings that would have been barracks. Their windows were boarded over now.

      Alan wondered what Lieutenant Mosher had done to get such duty. He was well over age for a lieutenant, he thought. They walked up a slope and then down the other side. “Here,” she said. She was pointing at a low mound perhaps ten feet high and forty feet long, at the end nearer them a trench that seemed to cut it into two unequal parts.

      Ammunition storage, Alan thought. And that was what Mosher, suddenly speaking in English, was explaining. The British and then the Israelis had used it as an ammunition bunker; then it was judged to be obsolete and it had been used for other things—at one point, the base canteen—and it had served until the Gulf War as a repository for hazardous waste.

      “Then Saddam started throwing Scuds and they were ordered to have a bunker, so that’s when they put in the air conditioner.” He was talking to Alan. “But it’s empty now. Unused. Empty!”

      Alan wondered why he could hear an air conditioner running.

      The beginning of the trench was a flight of concrete steps down to the ex-ammo dump’s steel door. Above it, a windowsized air conditioner wheezed away. She said something in Hebrew, and Mosher worked at the door with a big ring of keys.

      Alan smelled death as soon as the door rasped open. Apparently Mosher did, too; he said, “Air-conditioning is not adequate.” He was sweating and swallowing a lot.

      The interior was cracked, unpainted concrete. It curved overhead to a height of ten feet, darkening where it sloped down to meet the floor at the sides. A line of five electric bulbs in wire cages ran along the center of the ceiling, connected by old-fashioned BX cable. Desks stood in the shadows, their chairs stacked on them along with big typewriters and wire baskets and solid shapes that might have been books. The air conditioner whined. The air smelled of damp and mold and death.

      Miriam Gurion led them to the far end. An old tarpaulin, stiff as a tarred sail, was mounded up there. “I never saw this in my life,” Mosher said. He pulled the tarpaulin, which was heavy and unwilling; Alan grabbed it and helped him lift and fold it back and then pull it completely clear to reveal the dead man.

       Naples

      “I got your list.”

      Dukas looked up from his paperwork. Triffler was standing in front of the desk, his coming into the office unnoticed, his words meaningless. Dukas frowned. “List?” he said.

      “The bunch in DoD. Information Analysis?”

      “Oh, yeah, yeah—” Dukas came back from the Land of Paperwork. “That was quick.”

      “The black DC network. We use drums.” “You know, it doesn’t help for you to keep saying how black you are. In fact, you’re about as black as my Aunt Olympia.”

      “We keep saying it so you guys won’t.” Triffler was hitting keys on Dukas’s computer. “I networked this, but I figure you don’t know how to access it, which is why I came here in my very own person.”

      “I like stuff on paper.”

      “We know you do, Mike. We all laugh about it all the time.” He punched a last key, his long, thin body curved into a bow because he was standing, and a list of names came up on the screen. “Ecco, as they say over here—the roster of OIA.”

      Muttering that Triffler did good work and he thought he’d keep him around, Dukas swung his chair to face the screen and started scrolling down. There were only forty names, and he didn’t have to read all of them.

      “Well, well, well.”

      “A hit?”

      “You done good.” Dukas tapped the screen. “Spinner, Raymond L. Ha!” He was smiling. “How stuff you do does come back to bite you in the ass!”

      “Shakespeare said something like that.”

      “What d’you know about Shakespeare?”

      “Andrew’s a freshman at Brown. A parent’s got to keep up.”

      Dukas looked fleetingly troubled; perhaps he was thinking that when his yet-to-be-born child was a freshman somewhere, he’d be ready for Social Security. He jerked himself away from the thought. “This guy—” Dukas tapped the screen again. “Raymond Spinner. I busted this guy for passing internal fleet information to his daddy, who swings in Washington. I persuaded him to cash out. And now he’s washed up on a beach in DoD—I think Daddy’s been at work again—and he thinks he’s going to fuck me over.” Dukas grunted. “Well, well, well.”

      “You’re going to do something ugly.”

      “Surely not.” He smiled at Triffler. “I’m going to be a good little bureaucrat.” He began to draft an email as a reply that piggy-backed on the one he had received:

       From: Michael Dukas, Special Agent in Charge, Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Naples, Italy

       To: Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Department of Defense, Office of Information Analysis

       Subject: Your request.

       Message: Per 1347.5 Sec. 11, please locate your place in chain of command and justify referenced request. Recommend GS-10 Raymond Spinner expedite.

      “What’s 1347.5?”

      “How the hell should I know?”

      Tel Aviv

      “Light,” Alan said. He could see that a nude body was lying there and that there was shiny metal along one side of him, but he couldn’t see enough. Miriam was burrowing in her handbag and she came up with one that Alan recognized as of a type advertised in the pricier gun magazines—high-intensity, small size, big price.

      The body was lying on a rolling litter, like a low gurney; it supplied the metallic reflection he’d seen. The damage to the man was sickening.

      “Beaten,”

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