Heirs of Cain (8 page)

Collins loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. He’d just dispatched his grad assistant to the registrar’s office with the final grades. After she left, he opened a bottle of orange juice, picked up the phone, and dialed Lucas White’s number. Lucas answered on the first ring.

“All done with the dirty work,” Collins said.

“My boy, I’m afraid the dirty work is only beginning.”

Collins said nothing.

“Is it safe to assume you took time out from dispensing great works of literature to study the contents of the file I left with you?” Lucas asked.

“Haven’t opened it.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Lucas muttered.

“Because you know me.”

Such a response would have provoked an outburst from most military commanders. But Lucas White wasn’t like most commanders. He was unique, wise as an owl, pragmatic. He did what the situation demanded, always. His theory: whatever it takes is what you do. That pragmatism enabled him to understand and tolerate what others often referred to as “Cain’s fucking unorthodox ways.”

“Should you get a couple of free minutes, you might give it a quick glance,” Lucas said. “If for no other reason than to justify the expense and effort involved. And to please an old man. Will you do that for me?”

“I trained Seneca. There’s nothing about him I don’t already know.”

“I’m aware. But, please, humor me. Who knows? Even someone as omniscient as you might eventually stumble upon a hidden kernel of information. Stranger things have happened.”

“Enough, already, Lucas. I’ll look at the damn file.”

Such verbal sparring was old hat between the two men, and given their respective personalities, it was perhaps inevitable. It was their way of communicating, of bridging the wide gap separating them, of overcoming their many differences.

And there were many.

Lucas White was a by-the-book soldier, but one who could, when times dictated, bend enough to offer a certain amount of latitude. He could handle those soldiers who drove his fellow officers to early retirement, alcoholism, or both. Soldiers like Collins, who detested everything associated with by-the-book restrictions. The rebels, the hard cases.

There was another reason Lucas could be lenient toward this particular rebel: rebellion was typical for a career soldier’s children. Collins’s father, like Lucas, had been a thirty-five-year military man. Historically, military brats either followed closely in their father’s footsteps or rebelled completely. Seldom was there a middle ground when it came to children raised on military posts around the world. With them, it was either West Point or Haight Ashbury.

Collins rebelled. At least, initially. Later, drawn by some inexplicable pull—perhaps an ironic manifestation of his rebellious nature, Lucas concluded—he broke from his anti-war comrades and, at age seventeen, with his father’s blessing, signed up for a three-year hitch in the Army. The war in Vietnam was heating up, and within eight months after enlisting, Collins was sent into those jungles. It was there, during the final weeks of his first tour of duty in Nam, that his special “talent” became apparent.

The talent for killing.

A talent so enormous, so expert, that any commanding officer with the least bit of wisdom would gladly accommodate it, even if it meant accepting unmilitary behavior. Whatever it takes is what you do. After all, Lucas reasoned, men with such rare gifts are exempt from certain rules that apply to the mediocre among us.

“Jolly good,” said Lucas. “When you finish slogging your way through it, call if you have any questions.”

Collins was silent.

“Advise me as to your planned course of action,” Lucas added. “Most of all, be careful. And may God grant you his blessings.”

“Does God grant his blessings to killers, Lucas?”

This time it was Lucas who was silent.

Lucas White was lenient for reasons beyond peaceful coexistence with Collins. Lucas cared deeply for the younger man. Loved him, really. He regarded Collins as the son he never had. It was a feeling he’d had almost from the beginning.

They first met when Lucas and the boy’s father were stationed together at Fort Benning, Georgia. The two men, both full-bird colonels at the time, had known each other in Korea, but it wasn’t until they were at Fort Benning that they became close friends. Collins was fourteen at the time and a source of great concern to his father, who naturally assumed his son would choose a career in the military. Three generations of Collins men had been career soldiers, and young Michael—the elder Collins refused to call his son Mickey—was expected to follow in their footsteps. At the time, and given Michael’s anti-establishment leanings, neither his father nor Lucas White could see that happening.

“Richard, you may as well get that notion out of your head,” Lucas said to the elder Collins during a lengthy drinking bout. “The more you push him in that direction, the wider the gap between you will become.”

The elder Collins had only nodded. He knew his friend was right.

Lucas, not bound by the chains of family tradition, recognized from the beginning that a career in the military would serve only to waste a near-genius intellect.

Here was a boy barely fourteen who already had a staggering grasp of philosophy, history, music and literature. Condemned to the life of a nomad by his father’s frequent transfers, Michael Collins found friends not in the various military outposts, but in the books he read. Friends as diverse as Socrates and Spinoza, Kierkegaard and Kafka, Thomas Aquinas and T. S. Eliot. Ask him about music, be it Mozart or Dylan, and you could expect a discourse lasting long into the night. Here, Lucas knew, was a mind more fertile than any he’d ever encountered, a mind rich with potential.

More than anything, though, Lucas loved the boy’s audacity. How else can you describe someone who, at the tender age of fifteen, dared to take a graduate class on Nietzsche at the University of Heidelberg? Taking on the great German philosopher on his home turf. How could Lucas not be fond of this child?

Lucas also recognized in Collins an almost total isolation. The boy either didn’t need or didn’t want contact with other human beings, using his books and music to lock them out of his world. Lucas had seen this behavior in other military brats. Indeed, it was a common defense mechanism. To a child who might have to move at a moment’s notice, friendships were heartbreaks waiting to happen. After enough sudden good-byes, a child learned to isolate himself, to back away from making friends. To build walls for protection. But never had Lucas seen this behavior taken to such extremes. With Michael Collins, the isolation was total.

Never in a million years would Lucas have imagined this boy in the military. Yet, it happened. Without warning and completely out of the blue, like a bolt of lightning.

Given the clarity of hindsight, Lucas should have predicted it.

The hint came during a dinner party. One of those informal and boisterous affairs where old warriors discuss past battles through the haze of too many years gone by and too much alcohol consumed. During the course of the evening, when the discussion turned to the Battle of the Bulge, one of the men—Lucas could never recall which one—praised the brilliance of a bit of strategy employed by a certain Army colonel. Upon hearing the comment, young Collins flew into a rage, accusing the officer of a serious tactical blunder that had, only because of a series of outside variables, worked out in his favor. Collins then proceeded to lay out the plan as he would have implemented it, demonstrating with forks, knives, and salt and pepper shakers exactly how his plan would have looked, why it was the proper course to follow, and why it would have succeeded.

Lucas was spellbound by what he was hearing, not only by the boy’s understanding and passion, but by the correctness of what he was saying. Lucas had studied that particular battle and was familiar with the officer in question. Lucas knew that in the early hours after the battle, Eisenhower had recognized the serious nature of the blunder and the great good fortune that followed. Had it not been for luck or divine providence, many GIs would have died needlessly. Lucas also learned that only a handful of officers in high command had this knowledge. The blunder had been well covered up. Or so Lucas assumed until he sat and listened to a fourteen-year-old give a remarkably accurate view of what did happen, what should have happened, and why.

Here was a boy who professed his distaste for anything military yet had a profound knowledge and understanding of military history and strategy.

Lucas should have seen it then. He should have looked beyond the anti-military rhetoric, the rebellion, the screw-all-authority attitude. Perhaps if he’d only dug a little deeper, gotten further inside that iron curtain, he wouldn’t have been so surprised by Michael’s decision to enlist in the Army.

But hindsight isn’t always 20/20. Some things simply are beyond seeing, regardless of the situation. This was one of those instances when perfect vision wouldn’t have been good enough. For nothing, no amount of digging or psychological probing, not even the highest level of imagination, could have prepared Lucas for the way things turned out.

Pete’s place was really jamming, even by the usual Saturday night standards. College kids and professors, thankful for having survived another semester of mutual mental warfare, celebrated together on an almost-equal footing. The curtain of separation had been lowered—at least until next semester. “A temporary détente,” one professor termed it.

Collins spied an empty booth in the corner and led Kate in that direction. The waitress was there before they settled in.

“Pepsi for me,” Collins said, “and a vodka and cranberry juice for the lady.”

Kate reached under the table and squeezed his thigh. He smiled; she winked. “Just a Pepsi?” she said. “You’re being awfully conservative.”

“Conservative is my middle name.”

“Since when?”

“Since always.”

“You couldn’t prove it by me.”

“Perhaps you don’t recognize it when you see it.”

Kate laughed. “If you were conservative, I wouldn’t be with you.”

“I don’t see you as the all-out left-wing radical type. You don’t strike me as someone who stirs the shit.”

“How do you see me?”

“A middle-of-the-road centrist. A pragmatist. You may lean a little left, but not much.”

“Ouch. What a nasty assessment.”

Collins laughed. “Not really. Radicalism, in either direction, is not usually a good thing. Being in the middle may resonate like an uneventful roll of the dice, but it is generally the best bet to make.”

Kate eyed him hard. “You’ve never been a centrist in your life. I see you as nothing but a lifelong rebel.”

“There are plenty of folks who would heartily concur.”

The waitress brought their drinks, told them to wave if they needed anything else, then walked away.

Kate stirred her drink. “Rumor has it that you’re taking a sabbatical next term. True or false?”

“It’s possible. Depends on how some things play out this summer.”

“Came rather suddenly, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything serious going on that I should know about?”

“Not really. I only need a break; that’s all. Too much T. S. Eliot can wear a person down.”

“T.S. would be hurt to hear you say that.”

“Good. It’ll give him something to whine about to his old buddy Ezra Pound.”

“What about the Beats? Don’t you have them on tap next term?”

“They’ll still be here when I get back.”

“Are you sticking around here, or are you planning on leaving town?”

“Leaving town.”

“Anywhere in particular?”

“Not sure yet.”

“Sounds mysterious.”

“More uncertain than mysterious.”

“That man, the one dressed in the Army uniform—it has something to do with him, doesn’t it?”

Collins leaned back against the wall. “You didn’t like General Nichols very much, did you?”

She shook her head. “Too arrogant, too pushy for my taste.”

“He’s a small man who’s spent his life doing secondary jobs. He tries to give an impression of authority, of being important. It’s his way of feeling necessary.”