LITMIR.BIZ

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detective trusted the man, knew him to be more or less honest, perceptive when he wasn’t too lazy to think. “So?” he said, bobbing his head toward the upstairs. Water, he saw, had spilled down the stairs and was leaking through the ceiling. Broken pipes.

      “I seen it ten times in the last few years. You know. Ex-mil for hire, they’re fucking good at it, fucking Rambos. It’s mafia.” He had been talking to people in the building and could give a quick summary of what was up there—the big room with thin partitions, computers, lots of telephones, some kind of high-tech business. “So they wouldn’t pay off the gangsters, they got hit,” he said with a shrug.

      “Computers? Western money?”

      “I dunno. This is just what the people in the building say.”

      It didn’t click for him. He was slower to reach conclusions but reached sounder ones when he did; maybe that’s why he was a detective. “Let’s have a look,” he said.

      “Fucking mess up there.”

      “No kidding.” He started up the stairs, keeping near the wall where there was less water.

      1441 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.

      Peretz had nothing for him yet, and he wandered down to the JO wardroom for lack of anything to do. Carriers are carriers, your own or somebody else’s: a lot of hours to kill. He wished he had work, or—He thought of Kim.

      Narc was sitting alone at a table. Heading for him, Alan remembered Peretz’s fantasy about the girls’ team; he tried it here. Five pilots were laughing too loud a few feet away; another pair were muttering together with their heads close. Raise the pitch of the laughter, blur your eyes and give them longer hair—my god, it might work! He thought of Peretz’s edged description: insecurity, cliquishness, rivalry …

      “Hey, Narc.”

      “You know we’re gonna be on this boat for five fucking days?”

      “I’m fine, thanks; how nice of you to ask. And how are you this morning?”

      “I’m pissed off. I don’t have a dad to entertain me while I’m aboard, okay?”

      “Okay, okay—sorry. Hey, I haven’t seen Rafe.”

      Narc snorted. “Our pilot and senior chief have already left. Nice, huh? Skipper pulled them back the first chopper they could get. Isn’t that swell! They go, I stay.”

      Alan, despite himself, tuned out the content, listened only to the tone; was this Peretz’s jealousy, preadolescent gossip? He was wondering if Narc could make it as an eleven-year-old girl when Narc leaned forward and said, “I think I’m a better pilot than Rafe—don’t you?”

      “Rafe’s pretty good,” Alan muttered. He was trying to keep from chuckling, and Peretz’s imagery came to him. He let Narc jabber on; inside his own head he was crushing the image of the young girls. Such a petty revenge might be fine for a man who was leaving the Navy; it could only get Alan into trouble. He put the notion aside, thought instead of his father’s comments about his girl.

      “Absolutely,” he said. That was all Narc demanded of him—sympathetic sounds.

      “Right.”

      His father had no right to speak to him like that, he thought, then saw that of course he had; what was galling was that it was such a cheap shot, especially from him. Alan had once heard his father referred to as “Mattress Mick,” knew he was a womanizer.

      “You bet,” he said to Narc’s vaguely heard complaints.

      He felt Narc actually liking him, warming to his support. “I mean,” Narc was saying, “I don’t take anything away from the guy; he put Christine into the net and didn’t total her. Good job. I give the fucker his due. But goddam it, it all started with him trying to land on the wrong boat. Jesus H. Christ! Is that first-class flying? Is it?”

      “Well—”

      “Right! And what’s his punishment? Do you know what his punishment is? Huh?”

      “What?”

      “He’s gotta buy a beer for everybody who repaints Christine. Huh? Get it?”

      Alan didn’t get it. He supposed somebody would paint out the damage to Christine’s facelift—so what?

      “Look, Spy, this is how it goes. When you put a plane on the wrong carrier and it needs work, they repaint it, see, with their logo and their markings. In effect, it’s a plane from this carrier’s S-3 squadron now. Get it? So then it gets sent home to our carrier and it has to be repainted again with our logo and our marks. See? Well, every officer and EM in the squadron will want a hand on a spraygun to say he helped, see, so Rafe has to buy beer for the squadron. Well, what the hell is that? A guy puts a plane down on the wrong boat and we wind up with a fucking beer party. Is that right?”

      Narc was outraged. He was not the brightest guy ever to join the Navy, but he was not far from wrong in believing he had been born to fly. He wanted to be an astronaut. He took it all very seriously.

      “Maybe we could reintroduce flogging,” Alan made the mistake of saying.

      Narc stared at him, finally got it, said, “Your human interaction is piss-poor, did anybody ever tell you that? I’m saying this for your own good. You don’t get along.”

      “Jeez, I thought I was loveable.”

      “See? Always destructive digs. Now, my guess is you were never on a sports team. Am I right?”

      “Actually, I was.”

      Narc’s eyes narrowed. “What team?”

      “Wrestling.”

      “Wrestling! You wrestled?” Narc looked shocked. “Were you any good?”

      Had he been any good? Mostly, he’d been a skinny kid too small for his age who’d spent his adolescence doing the things he most feared because he thought he was a coward—going in the winter without a coat, swimming across a lake at night, wrestling. He’d hated it, and so it had become even more important to do it. Had he been any good? “Nah,” he said.

      For three years, he had learned all the holds, the takedowns and the escapes; he got so good at them that the coach had him teaching other wrestlers. But he was physically weak, and he hardly ever won a match. Then, in the summer after his junior year, he put on a spurt of growth and grew right into the weight class of the team’s best wrestler, the state runner-up. He never got into a match again, was a training partner for the good one. At the season’s end, the coach gave him a letter anyway, something he had desperately wanted, and that night he took it down to the Iowa River and dropped it in, because it was part of his code then that real rewards didn’t come for trying hard; they came for succeeding.

      “I don’t see you wrestling,” Narc said.

      Alan smiled at him. “Ever try it?”

      “Jesus, no. The dumbest guys I ever knew were wrestlers.” Clearly, Alan had confused him. “Do it in college?”

      Alan shook his head, laughing now. “I made sure I picked a college that didn’t have a wrestling team.” In fact, he’d picked a college that had no teams at all, only intramural sports. He had conducted his life like that in those days, with a rigid adolescent morality, rules, abrupt changes of direction. Ironically, he had put on bulk and muscle his first year in college and would then have been the wrestler he had wanted to be. He hadn’t realized that until, his second week in the squadron, he had been packed off to be the guinea pig for a new self-defense course put on by the Marines at Quantico. He had loved it, learned a lot about street-fighting, and had told the skipper it was great. Later, other officers, coming back limping and bruised, had accused him of being a practical joker.

      “I played soccer and baseball,”

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