But the photo always had its little mysteries, primarily the magazine in Hargrave’s weapon. It was a twenty-rounder, a short, stubby thing. Why? Why, in an environment rich in both danger and targets, would you carry the smaller, twenty-round magazine instead of the longer, thirty-round magazine? An extra ten .45s could have saved somebody’s, including the gunner’s, life. Swagger could never look at the picture and not wonder.
Well, a couple possibilities suggested themselves. The thirty-rounders weren’t designed until 1942, and didn’t reach general distribution until 1943, so, in the meantime, plenty of twenty-rounders were in use. When the thirties came, no one bothered to collect the twenties. So they were equally accessible throughout the war. Maybe Davis Hargraves, who clearly would have begun the assault on Wana that morning with as much ammunition as he could carry, had used all his thirties and was now working his way through his few twenties. Or—this game was always fun!—possibly he thought General Thompson’s trench broom balanced better with the weight of the twenties, was more maneuverable in the busy, vegetation-clotted, and cratered surface of Wana on that May day. It could be either of those. Or a host of others.
Swagger smiled. He wished he was still a drinking man. Here’s to you, young Hargraves, and your buddy Chavarria, at the point of the spear, doing what had to be done, not because you loved it, but because it was a thing called Duty, and your generation—his father’s as well—had a war dumped in their laps and didn’t whine, complain, explain, they just went out and won the fucking thing, and Davis, standing stoic and stark against the Wana sky, was an emblem of just that.
“You okay?” said Bill.
“Ah! Yeah, fine. That picture, the guy with the Thompson. I always tighten up a little. Reminds me of my father.”
“God bless him,” said Bill.
“And all who went ashore with him. They were the best.”
At that point, his eyes drifted. The photo, blown up so big, revealed itself in ways its publication in books or on the Net never did.
“You always notice something new,” he said to Dr. Tillotson.
“What do you mean?” said the vet.
“I must have looked at that image five thousand times in my life. Yet not to this day did I notice something strange about the BAR that Chavarria is holding. Do you see?”
For those not of the gun, Swagger’s ruminations may have seemed insane. But Dr. Tillotson had hunted on six continents and had the biggest trophy hall in Idaho, except for some oil people. He knew what a BAR was.
“I don’t see anything,” he said.
“Look at the muzzle. He’s removed the compensator. It’s just got a blunt muzzle. He must have been a strong guy, he didn’t need any help holding the thing on target, though a .30 Government kicks like hell, especially in full auto. But—and I’m only guessing here—he must not have liked the upward flash signature the slots in the compensator created. The flash might have blocked his sight. He wanted to see what he was shooting at. I can’t think of anything else that”—that’s when it hit him, hit him so hard, finally, that it knocked him out of the moment, and he had to somehow get back into it enough to finish the sentence—“uh, would explain it.”
He saw in his mind the standard BAR compensator as he remembered it from his own infantry days in the early ’60s. From there, it was a small step to the realization that the odd, twelve-slotted cylinder he had been unable to identify was exactly the same length and, by measurement, also .30 caliber. It wouldn’t have been included in any machinegun.com website or books because it wasn’t technically a machine gun; it was, by definition or sheer whimsy of the Ordnance Department, an “automatic rifle.” So it followed that perhaps at some point, in some forgotten iteration, some godforsaken experiment, or something, someone might have tried to increase the propulsive power of the compensator by enlarging the vault in which the expanding gases were trapped before they spit out of the twelve slots that dissected the roof of the cylinder to hold the muzzle down to counteract the principle of action/reaction. He could recall no such thing in his experience, but, then again, neither he nor anybody knew all the guns in the world.
It made some kind of sense if there had been such a BAR variation.
The hours elasticized into decades, then generations, before he got back to the computer in his house in Cascade.
“How did it go?” Jen called.
“Swell, fine,” he yelled in a tone that meant “I’m obsessed.”
He got on, googled Browning Automatic Rifle.
And that’s when he discovered the Monitor.
It was another second before he realized that that’s what Baby Face was doing in Mavis, Arkansas, in the week after the shooting of Johnny D. He was traveling to San Antonio, Texas, and the shop of Hyman Lebman, the gangster gunsmith and merchant. Lebman would be exactly the sort of man to sell him a Monitor.
Now, what the hell did he need a Monitor for?
Swagger realized: he had to go to San Antonio and visit what was left of Hyman Lebman, what was left of Baby Face Nelson, and, possibly, what was left of Charles Swagger.
36
THE PATIO
624 NOYES
CHICAGO
August 1934
“HAVE YOU EVER heard that term, Charles? Death wish?”
They sat on the patio of the big house.
“No, can’t say I have.”
“Do you have any idea what it could mean?”
This was not Charles’s game. He liked the real, the practical, the hard-edged world. Thinking deeply about things that couldn’t be seen or touched held no appeal for him.
“Well, in the war,” he groped, as the twilight came on and the lightning bugs began their illuminated pulses, “sometimes there’d be men who just couldn’t take it. It was tough, you know, the shelling, the snipers, the raids and counterraids, the mud and filth, the pressure of seeing buddies killed, and, after a while, it was hard to believe in anything, especially the future. It was said—I never saw it in the American army but I heard about it in the Canadian, where we were involved in what they called trench warfare; you know, living in mud, just waiting to get hit, for months and months—it was said that some men just gave up and walked into the German guns. Would that be a death wish?”
“Very good, Charles. That would be a death wish at the most practical level, an immediate response to an immediate and overwhelming stimulus, with no end, no relief, in sight, and all social pressure demanding that you stick it out while everything inside you screamed to run away. Yes, that would be a death wish.”
“But that’s not what you meant. I can tell by your tone. You meant something else, and I haven’t figured it out. I guess in your sense of the term, no, I ain’t never heard of a death wish.”
Where is this going? he wondered. He also knew he did not like not knowing where it was going. He hated not knowing what to do or say, being on the spot like this. What did it prove? How did it help?
“There’s some new theories of how the mind works, Charles. Recent findings in medicine and thought processes. Some folks believe that your mind is divided into two parts. One part, where you live, operate, talk, love, fornicate, work, shoot—whatever—that part is called the conscious. It’s everything you know, feel, or remember. It’s everything you think or believe.”
“Yes sir.”
“But, as I said, some folks believe there’s a second, hidden part to your mind. It’s called the subconscious and it lurks beneath. It never forgets; it harbors urges, secret pains, angers, grudges, even the impulse to resort to violence. And in some ways, at some times, it reaches out and influences what you do. And you don’t even know it. You’re confronted with choice A or B, and clearly A is the best choice but somehow you are compelled to choose B. That’s your subconscious working, influencing you to act, in some respects, against your best interests and to do things that
otherwise make no sense at all. Do you see?”
Not really.
“Well, I suppose it’s possible.”
“Look, say, at these two men, John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson. Johnny, who’s from a conventional and quite decent farm family, is sent to prison early after doing something stupid. In prison, the kings are the bank robbers; he falls in with them, learns from them, and gets his whole education and orientation from them. He, quite logically, wants to please them—they’re his real fathers—and sets out to become the biggest and best bank robber ever. See how it fits together?”
“Sure.”
“But then there’s Nelson. There’s no criminal in his family. But there’s a drunken father who beats his mother in front of him and he feels weak and worthless because he can’t stand up for her. He hates himself. As he grows up, that hatred transfers into a generalized hatred of society. There’s no influence on him, no bank robbers educating him and setting an example for him. It’s all in his mind, and somehow he sees the banks specifically, and society generally, as his father, and now that he’s brave and strong, he has this need to strike at his father. He does so by becoming a bank robber and, unlike Johnny, he’s especially vicious, he likes to kill. He hates law enforcement and takes pleasure in killing symbols of authority, like Carter Baum. That’s his subconscious working on him, making him do things that he doesn’t fully understand but can’t stop doing.”
“He sounds nuts to me,” said Charles.
“He is, in a way. That doesn’t make him innocent, it just makes sense out of him.”
“So you’re saying this subconscious thing can help us catch him.”
“Well, yes, but there is more to it than that . . . Here, let’s have another beer.”
Charles didn’t want another beer. He wanted to get out of there. This whole line of talk was giving him the heebie-jeebies. It was so far above his head.
“Betty, another couple Schlitzes, please,” Sam called, and in seconds she was there with two bottles.
“You two are so serious,” she said. “Now, no more. I’m going to put the steaks on. Charles, how do you like yours?”
Normalcy! How do you like your meat? Another beer? Gravy for the potatoes or not? This was stuff he understood. But then she turned away and he was again alone on the patio, with the humming of insects and the squawking of birds. And Sam.
“See, he may have a death wish in there too,” said Sam. “He hates himself for being so helpless where his mother was concerned. So he thinks he should be punished. So he takes insane risks. A part of him secretly wants the punishment of the bullet, has sought out a dangerous occupation and for that reason is unafraid in battle, because he welcomes the finishing shot. From the outside, it makes no sense. But it could from the inside.”
“Well, when you put it like that, I suppose it could make some sense.”
“I’m going this way not because I’m interested in them but because I’m interested in, and care for, you,” Sam continued. “I want to see you get back to Arkansas, get your youngest boy some high-quality help, make peace with the older boy so that he can understand what a brave and honorable man his father is. He deserves that. You deserve that.”
“I hope it works out like that, sure.”
“But do you really hope it does, Charles? Does your subconscious hope it does? You see, when I look at your heroism, I see something in there too. A crazy recklessness, a willingness to die for the cause, for any cause, for no cause, just to die. That’s why you put yourself way out front at both these shooting events you’ve been through, and I bet that happened in all your other gunfights, going back to raids in the war. It wasn’t just heroism; it was also a subconscious need for death. It was pure death wish.”
“Sam, I don’t feel nothing like that.”
“You can’t feel it. I mention it to get it out in the open, to get you thinking about it. If you get killed, I want it to be because it was Duty, not because you took wild, crazy-heroic, reckless, completely unnecessary chance number two hundred forty-five and you finally cashed out.”
“See,” said Charles, “in a fight you have to be aggressive and reckless. That’s how you win. Get close, shoot straight, keep moving. It’s common sense, not something underneath.”
It was such an odd conversation to have on the patio of a suburban mansion, amid the beauty and serenity of the well-achieved life, surrounded by comfort, ease, the succor of mild weather, the glow of a setting sun. Who could believe such a conversation would take place in such a place?
“Just hear me out,” said Sam. “I think it’s working like this. Somewhere in you is a secret. You’ve buried it way down deep, so deep you’ve trained yourself never to think about it. It’s something you know is wrong, whatever it is, something you did, something you are, that I don’t know, that I can’t imagine. I know you hate it. It shames you. It tarnishes your ideal of yourself, it makes the man you want to be unattainable. You would do anything to make it go away, but you have no tools. It’s an enemy that can’t be shot or arrested; it never goes away and comes out at the worst times. At some level, you believe you should be punished for holding it.”
“Wish my damned life were that interesting. I’m a country boy with a knack for the pistol, that’s all there is.”
“You’re too brave and honorable to ever commit suicide, so the pain just lingers. So you are attracted to behaviors where you could easily get killed. You want God to kill you. You want him to punish you, so you give him chance after chance after chance, starting with the war. Put me out of my misery, you’re saying to him. All those bullets that missed, you just want one of them to hit and end the whole thing.”
“Never heard such stuff,” said Charles. “Honest to god, Mr. Cowley, I don’t have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Nor would you. That’s the point, Charles. This stuff is far below the surface.”
“Well, I suppose I’ll keep my eye on it, then,” Charles said.
“I see other things too, Charles. Your style is solitude. Most of the other men marry and live with their families, or, if they’re bachelors, they share apartments to save on expenses. They’re always around other folks, they’re part of a community. Charles lives alone in a small apartment. He doesn’t hang out with any pals, he doesn’t have any close office friends, he never goes drinking with the boys or bowling or to ball games. He’s pure loner. He’s separated himself from society. Maybe to keep himself pure, maybe because he’s never relaxed around other people, maybe because he’s afraid his secret will come out. It’s not natural.”
“Sir, I’m just trying to do the job y’all gave me best I can. All this other stuff, I don’t know enough to even answer.”
“Charles, you know I was a missionary, and for two years I lived in Hawaii. Those people are different. They have no repressions, they hold nothing back, they just are what they are. Sometimes I think that must be the better way. We hold, hide, bury, smother, pound, deny our feelings, and the result is, we make them worse, not better. The Hawaiians, who act on every impulse and hold nothing back, are far healthier and happier. The only thing our civilization is doing is teaching them to be unhappy like us.”
“Yes sir.”
“So all I am saying, Charles, is this. You can talk to me anytime, and you need have no fear of holding anything back. Nothing can shock me, not after two years in the tropics. And if you uncover a secret, you will find that sharing it with someone who cares is the best medicine in the world. It’s penicillin for the mind.”
“Yes sir.”
“I will be so disappointed, Charles, if you die racing into fire not because you have to but because your subconscious wants you to. What a waste that would be of the many gifts you bring to us. What a loss to your boys, the community, the Division. Charles, together we can work this thing out, I swear.”
“Boys, it’s dinner
time!” yelled Betty.
37
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
August 1934
LEBMAN EMERGED WITH his trophy in both hands, shoulders bent to demonstrate the weight they carried.
“That’s what we came fifteen hundred miles for,” Les muttered to John Paul.
“Almost impossible to find,” said Mr. Lebman, “as Colt only made one hundred and twenty-five, and most were sold to police departments, the Justice Department, and industry security squads. But now and then one comes on the market, and I was in the right place at the right time.”
Les looked at it. The Monitor was John M. Browning’s famous Browning Automatic Rifle for infantry warfare, principally trench sweeping, as reimagined by Colt for law enforcement use. It had a whole list of modifications for lawmen to make it handier, lighter, easier to control, easier to conceal, more portable, and probably more fun. The Colt engineers had shortened both the barrel and the stock, they’d added a stubby pistol grip to accommodate upright shooting (the military BAR being shot primarily prone), the bipod had been jettisoned and a newly designed, expanded compensator had been added, to harness the hot gases of a burst of .30 caliber fire. Colt had not been mindful of what it was truly building, but it was the ideal bank robber’s gun, in that it was powerful enough to penetrate both the bulletproof vests and the car doors and hoods of the typical police department vehicle. It also outgunned most police departments, who couldn’t afford such a high-end product. But with all that power, it was handy to handle in the confines of a car, where, unlike its longer parent rifle, it was unlikely to snag or catch on or get caught in the upholstery. That was its chief value to Les, who saw that cars figured in all future plans.