A new and simple sign identified the place as RED, WHITE, BLUE, AND DINNER. Lest anyone misunderstand that only dinner would be served, an explanatory line promised three square meals a day.
The interior layout seemed unchanged from the days when a fraternal order ran the place. The bar was still there, though it no longer operated. The dining room was paved with terrazzo. A long-unused wood dance floor lay in front of a raised bandstand.
In the past, no doubt round tables had been encircled by elegant, upholstered dining chairs. Now there were folding chairs and rectangular tables without cloths.
Lunch service began at 11:30. Now at 11:50, already thirty or forty people were eating or in the cafeteria line. The majority were men, most gray-faced and trembling alkies burned out on booze. Eight women sat alone or in pairs, and though a few might have known a bottle or two, the others appeared just sad, weary, and worn out.
The lunch theme was Mexican. Aromas of onions and peppers and cilantro and limes and warm corn tortillas threaded the air.
Jane stepped to the end of the cafeteria line but didn’t pick up a tray. When she got to the first server—CHARLENE, according to the name tag—she said, “There’s a man comes here to eat. I wonder if he’s been here lately.” She had in hand the old newspaper photo that she’d printed out in the Woodland Hills library Friday morning. “His name’s Dougal Trahern. He doesn’t look much like this anymore.”
Charlene declared, “Lordy, but he looks no way the same these days. The man has thrown himself off some high cliffs in his time, and it shows.” She called the attention of the next server to the photo that Jane held up. “Rosa, give this a look.”
Rosa shook her head in what might have been a mix of dismay and wonderment. “If the fella in that picture had made TV commercials, he could’ve sold a girl anything from perfume to fish sticks. How many buses have to run a man down to change him so?”
“You have business with Dougal?” Charlene asked.
“Yes. If you can give me any lead on him, I’d be grateful.”
“Is he expectin’ you?”
“We met once, briefly. But, no, he’s not expecting me.”
“Good. If he was expectin’ you, he’d duck out the back door just when you were supposed to arrive.” Charlene put down the soup ladle. “Come with me, dear. I’ll take you to him.”
“He’s here?”
“He better be if we are.”
Jane followed Charlene into the busy restaurant kitchen and from there into what seemed to be a kitchen manager’s office with a desk and computer and shelves of cookbooks. For some reason, the two windows were painted black, giving the room a subterranean feel.
Behind the desk sat the bearish man from the library, his hair a wilder mass than she remembered, his dark bristling beard shot through with a bride-of-Frankenstein bolt of white. When Jane and Charlene entered the room, Trahern looked up from his work, his face as menacing as a thunderhead just before a storm broke.
“This fine young lady,” Charlene said, “has business with you.”
“Get her out of here,” Trahern growled, as if his hibernation had been interrupted midwinter.
Charlene took offense or pretended to take it. “I’m a cook, not a porter who hauls whatever you need hauled anywhere you say to haul it. I’m already cookin’ and workin’ the line. You want her out of here, you pick her up and throw her out your own self.”
As she left the room, Charlene winked at Jane.
Trahern aimed the full force of his glower on his one remaining annoyance. “You come here to get your forty dollars back?”
“What? No. Of course not.”
“What is it, then? There’s a long way to Thanksgiving.”
Uncomprehending, she said, “Thanksgiving?”
“Every damn politician and celebrity wants to work the line on Thanksgiving, when the news people come take pictures.”
“I’m not a politician or a celebrity.”
“Then why the hell do you look like a celebrity?”
“I wasn’t aware that I did.” Frustrated by the man’s needless hostility, Jane put the photo of a beardless, barbered Trahern on the desk. “What happened to this guy?”
Trahern turned the photo so that his younger self was looking not at him, but at Jane. “He got wise.”
“So now he does what—menu planning for a soup kitchen?”
“And you do what—rescue babies from burning buildings?”
“DDT—the tattoo. It’s your initials and your nickname, because you took out bad guys the way DDT took out mosquitoes. I read about you years ago. It took me a while to remember.”
His impatience was colored now by alarm. He glanced at the open door between the office and the kitchen.
She said, “You were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, just below the Medal of Honor. At great jeopardy, you rescued—”
“Keep it down,” he grumbled. “What’s wrong with you, barging in here and talking about stuff like this?”
Jane went to the door, closed it. No ready chair was provided for a visitor, but a folding version leaned against one wall. She unfolded it, said, “Don’t mind if I do,” and sat down. “You regret those things you did? Are you embarrassed about them?”
He looked like the wrathful Old Testament God getting ready to throw down some well-deserved punishment on the earth. “This might be hard to understand, lady. But in war, you do the right thing, whatever it takes, and if you come out alive, you know how easy you could have screwed up, so bragging on it is dead-solid wrong. Only assholes do that. I don’t Facebook. Don’t tweet. Don’t Instagram. I don’t talk about the past, and it pisses me off that you remembered that old DDT thing and were able to find that newspaper photo.”
For a long silence, she met Trahern’s fierce stare, and then with relief, she said, “Maybe you’re not a shithead, after all.”
“Is your opinion supposed to matter to me? I don’t even know your name. You have a name, or are you just some anonymous gremlin who spins into people’s lives and wrecks their mood?”
She rummaged in her handbag, pulled a rubber band off a bundle of five forged driver’s licenses, and spread them out on his desk. “I’ve got a lot of names, but none of those are true. My real name is Jane Hawk. I’m FBI on leave, although they might have suspended or dismissed me by now.” She threw her Bureau ID on the desk. “My husband, Nick, was a decorated Marine, received some big medals, including the Navy Cross. Full colonel at thirty-two. They killed him, tried to make it look like suicide. They threatened to rape and kill my five-year-old boy if I didn’t fade. I’ve hidden him. They’ll kill me if they find me. I’ve killed one of them. I know where to find the guy who is the biggest sonofabitch behind it all, but I can’t get at him alone, and I can’t turn to anyone I know because they’ll be waiting for that. I need someone with your exact skills, if you still have any. Skills, that is.”
He watched her as she picked up the forged licenses and the FBI credentials, and as she returned them to her handbag. Then he said, “Why should I care? I wasn’t Marines, I was Army.”
She stared at him, speechless.
He said, “Relax. It’s a joke.”
“I didn’t know you were capable of making a joke.”
“That’s the first in a while.” He looked at one of the blacked-out windows, as if he could see through the opaque pane to a view that troubled him. “You’re desperate or delusional, coming to me.”
“I confess to desperation.”
“Nothing I can do for you.”
“There is if you want to do it.”
“My wars were a long time ago.”
“All wars are one war. And it never ends.”
“I’m not the man I was then.”
“Any man who earned the Distinguished Service Cross is always going to be that man, somewhere in himself.”
He met her stare. “That’s just rah-rah bullshit.”
“Maybe to an Army prick, but not to a Marine’s widow.”
After a silence, he said, “Are you always this way?”
“What other way is there to be?”
6
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