The Trinity (16 page)

“No problem,” says Robertson, who has been brought from that first edge of sleep by Holliday’s phone call. “I’ll phone you after I talk to the Americans.”

“Cheers.”

Robertson dials the number to the base; he has long since memorized it from the years of reporting drunken sailors in his cell. His phone calls are usually routine, but not this one. He reaches the officer on duty and relays this heaviest of messages.

Monday comes and the news of the murder has spread across the base, cloaking the atmosphere in gloom.

Constable Robertson had contacted the base’s duty officer-of-the-day, who in turn woke up the commanding officer, who immediately contacted the base master-at-arms, Chief Wilson. He tells Chief Wilson of the Scottish police’s suspicions, and he is angry. If something is going on on the base, Wilson had better know about it, and if something isn’t, he had better be able to prove it.

The master-at-arms is flabbergasted. He assures the captain that nothing is going on. There have been no signs of trouble from the barracks, and the only thing that ever really happens is the occasional fight at the enlisted club, but the confrontations are never racially motivated.

Chief Wilson feels that the bloke police are trying to shed responsibility. They’re not mentally equipped to deal with a crime of hate in this country, which is so pastoral compared to the United States.

Maybe, maybe, the captain agrees. But since one of their own is dead, travel to Dundee is temporarily forbidden, and Dundee is added to the list of places that sailors are not allowed to visit: Northern Ireland, Libya, China, virtually every Eastern European country, and Dundee, Scotland.

The announcements are made at the various Monday morning quarters, informal meetings administered by division chiefs or officers, though word of the murder had already circulated through the enlisted barracks late Saturday night and early Sunday morning. With the travel restriction, there is a sense of fear that disrupts the mood of an otherwise very pacifistic existence on the base and in this serene country. Dundee is the nearest city of any size; many shopping trips are ruined and many plans of leisure are indefinitely delayed.

Rodgers, as Crowley has always feared, talks.

There is hushed and sorrowful talk among the handful of enlisted sailors in the disbursing department, sitting in a row of desks inside a crowded room inside the base personnel building. Everyone had some claim of friendship to the dead sailor, even if they just spoke to him in passing. Rodgers isn’t mournful like his co-workers.

“Maybe he deserved it,” Rodgers says, not quite under his breath. He is met by a roomful of arched eyebrows and open mouths attached to bodies frozen in motion.

“How can you say such a thing?” someone asks.

He shrugs his shoulders. “I dunno. Maybe God decided it was time for him to go. He was always acting uppity, anyway. I never did like him, and I don’t know why you all are pretending like you did. I don’t think none of you knew him, anyway. I’m tired of his kind here, playing their music so damn loud in the barracks and dancing and carrying on and such. I’m glad he’s dead.”

The personnel officer, a young and pretty female ensign, hears of Rodgers’s remarks, as there is obvious disharmony in her department. She pulls Rodgers into her office to find out what he meant.

“I just didn’t get on with him too well, ma’am; I figure he shouldn’t be dead. I’m sorry for what I said.” Rodgers knows what he said was foolish.

Crowley hears of Rodgers’s comments. He shares a table at lunch with the young personnel ensign in the separate room for officers in the base galley. She is talking to another officer as he sits at the opposite end of the long table by himself, as he usually does. His day is already miserable from a working point of view, though he is joyous at the weekend’s success. He has been assigned to eulogize Hughes in a memorial service. Hughes happened to be a Catholic, and although his body will be shipped to his native Baton Rouge upon the conclusion of his autopsy, the captain thought it would be prudent for the base to have a service in the chapel. Crowley has always hated funerals. He could never feel remorse at the passing of anyone, except for his mother. His prepared eulogy for Hughes is generic and deeply impersonal, as all his eulogies have been.

His heart stops a beat as he listens to the thin, blonde ensign speak of Rodgers’s comments. She is disturbed and wonders what kind of sick mind the young seaman has to have to say something so callous. She concludes what each of Rodgers’s co-workers has known all along: he isn’t very bright and he has a tendency to speak without thinking.

The priest doesn’t finish his lunch; he picks up his tray and walks back to his desk in the chapel as fast as his pear-shaped frame is able, his body leaning forward at the waist, as if he is bent by the wind. He telephones Hinckley in the supply department and instructs him and Rodgers to come to his house immediately after work.

This they do, both expecting praise from the priest, not wrath.

Crowley’s reception is not as warm as usual. He offers no drink or food, and disappointed, they sit at their usual places on his couch, staring at the freshly lit coal-fire inside the dirty fireplace.

“Listen to me,” Crowley begins, his attention turned to Rodgers, “you are very, very, stupid. I heard what you said. I bet the whole godforsaken base has heard what you said about the heathen deserving to die. You two have to be above board all of the time. I suggest you stop hanging out together for a time. Stay in your rooms, go to the gym, do whatever, but no more hanging out in the club. You can come here Friday, but take separate cabs. There may be extra attention on you right now, Lee, and we can’t drag Mr. Hinckley down with you. Hopefully no one has noticed that you two are friends.

“We will lay low for a while; we will lull the enemy into an artificial respite.”

The pair nod, glad they don’t have to do anything, that the violence can maybe go away for a while.

“Lee, I want to talk to Mr. Hinckley privately. You should go back to base.”

“I ain’t got no money for a cab.”

“Then walk,” Crowley says tersely.

Rodgers slumps out of the room, his head down, his hands in his pockets. He walks out into the darkness of the late afternoon. He didn’t bring a jacket, and he is shivering before he even leaves the house.

When Rodgers is gone, the priest brings Brad a tin of beer and slides the ashtray on the coffee table towards him, indicating that it’s okay to relax.

“We can’t keep him with us,” Crowley says. “He is too stupid to be a part of our Trinity. We have to do something with him. We have to replace him. That is your task for the next couple of weeks. Find a friend. Find a replacement. Distance yourself from Lee as much as possible. Don’t eat with him, don’t walk with him. Don’t do anything with him. By Friday, I’ll know what to do.”

Hinckley remains for an hour longer. Crowley tells him they did the people of Dundee a favor; there is one less dirty creature in their midst.

He gives Brad a five-pound note for the cab ride back to base.

Chris is starting to slip into a routine, though it is a lonely one. He is no stranger to loneliness, but still, he doesn’t like it.

When not at work, he spends time lying on his bed, listening to his Walkman radio, the local stations a beacon from the world that exists outside the barbed wire and guarded gates of the base. He has still not ventured off base, his mind and body too weary from the changing shift schedule to travel even the shortest distances. His off-time is absorbed by eating, reading and sleeping, with the odd load of laundry done at the oddest of hours.

He likes his job, likes the importance of it, the vigilance of it. The messages must keep flowing; if they don’t, the Russians have an edge.

He wants to learn more about his supervisor and sole co-worker, Petty Officer Freeman, and he wonders about her throughout the watches. He starts to reveal himself to her during the long and quiet solitude of the midnight watches. She doesn’t reciprocate.

He tells her about himself at first, with a candidness out of his usual character. He is comfortable with her, as there is a certain amount of intimacy that comes with being inside such a small room for several hours at a time. He tells her how he came to join the Navy, the frustration of life with his parents, and his need to escape from Michigan.

She gives him only the vaguest and simplest of answers to the questions he poses, but is interested in what he has to say. He learns that she has been to college, with a degree in history, and that she is from Maryland and lives off base in a flat above an ironmonger’s shop in Brechin, another nearby village that is much larger than Lutherkirk.

He asks her why she joined the Navy, and if she has a degree, why isn’t she an officer? She just shrugs her shoulders and stares into the blankness above his head. He feels that there is something that happened in her past that forced her to the Navy, and this something is what makes her seem so perpetually sad. He wonders who she is and how she came to be here.

There is a void that Chris feels while not at work, a void that the cigarettes, radio, and books can’t fill. An emptiness made all the more intense by his loneliness. He thinks of the priest who checked him in at the base chapel. He recalls the kind and pale face shrouded by the almost unkempt red and gray hair. The face seemed sort of paternal to Chris. Maybe he could find some comfort in the company of the priest, inside the walls of the chapel.

He decides to go to church.

Friday night comes, and as Rodgers arrives alone at Crowley’s house, he expects the type of reception that came with most of his previous visits. He is disappointed. He is offered a beer, which he takes, but he is not greeted with a smile. He notices this right away.

The priest is nice enough to open the can and pour it into a glass.

A moment later, Brad arrives, his arrival telegraphed by the whining motor of the little Fiat taxicab that brings him hurriedly down the driveway, the gravel complaining underneath the tires.

The priest greets Hinckley warmly, an affable arm put around his shoulder. Crowley gently slaps him on the cheek with his open hand. He, too, takes a beer and they retire to Crowley’s sitting room, neither Hinckley nor the priest looking Lee in the eye.

“Well, Lee,” begins the priest almost nonchalantly, “how would you like to go back home?”

“Really?” Rodgers’s face lights up and he looks hopefully at the priest. “Hell yeah, I’d like to go home. When? How?”

“Soon, but it is going to be tricky, and it will take some courage on your part. Do you think you can handle it?”

“I can handle whatever takes me out of this back-ass-wards country. I can handle whatever puts me back in Missouri.”

“Fine. First, I want you to write a note.” He offers Lee a pen and a sheet of plain white paper.

“Okay. What kind of note?”

“A pretend suicide note. Write whatever you like. Brad here is going to find the note in your barracks room, but by the time he does, Sunday, you’ll be landing in St. Louis. The Navy won’t bother to look for you because they’ll think you have wandered out into the North Sea or shot yourself. Pretty slick, huh?”

The priest shows Rodgers a Pan Am envelope. The envelope contains the tabs of Crowley’s original tickets to Scotland, but Rodgers thinks the envelope contains new tickets for him.

“Whatever you say, sir.” Rodgers begins to scribble furiously:
I hate the Navy and I hate this country and I can’t
take it anymore, good-bye world.
He signs his name the way a small child does, slowly and deliberately, each character of his name very distinct.

The priest stands up and dons a raincoat.

With thoughts of home, Rodgers’s vision is starting to blur, and all he can see is the priest’s face smiling at him. The rest of the room melts away into a multi-colored haze. He sees the priest whisper something in Brad’s ear. Brad takes another sheet of paper and starts writing.

Rodgers collapses. His beer had been laced with crushed Valium tablets from an ancient prescription that Crowley had confiscated from a parishioner with a drug problem years before.