14

December 1970

Teel told Frank O’Connell, the head of her law firm, that she was going to need a closing pretty fast. He set her with a large housing development and shopping mall in northern Virginia. Her fees for the closing came to $891,000. When she had the cash in hand she called Buffalo, who remained in awe of her as he probably was of no one else alive. “How are we on prison information?” Teel asked.

“What kind?”

“I want six men and five women who have done time for armed robbery. Can you do it?”

“Shit, yes.”

“But it’s got a little twist. I need those same people who did the time for armed robbery to have Army or Marine Corps combat experience.”

“Well, sure—the men. But not the women.”

“Just get me women who were in the Army or the Marines. Okay? That plus about five years in the women’s wing of some state pen will toughen them up just about right. But they all got to have a military background and an armed robbery on their sheet.”

“I’ll go right on it.”

“When you get them, I want you to talk to them for me, one at a time.”

“Is this all about the pure we got comin’ in?”

“Indirectly.”

Buffalo’s top man was a crazy, coffee-colored bookkeeper who could make those ledgers tell the tax creeps anything Buffalo wanted to pay. His name was Dawes and Buffalo knew he was crazy because Dawes was an anarchist. Dawes was actually in the heroin business not for any large score but because he wanted to waste society as fast as it could be flaked away. “They is too many people,” he told Buffalo, “and they is fuckin’ each other up.”

Dawes was crazy but he was smart. He gave out good advice. He’d been working for Buffalo for eleven years, on the down ramps and on the upswings, and Buffalo knew that little Binchy Dawes had a head on his shoulders. So, when Buffalo wanted to think out loud, he thought out loud all over Binchy. Binchy was how William Buffalo pronounced the nickname for Benjamin. Dawes’s full name was Benjamin Disraeli Dawes.

“You know my big connection, Binchy?”

“I know you got it.”

“You know what she ask me today?”

“Whut she ast you?”

“She ask me can I find her six dudes and five foxes who done time for armed robbery one.”

“No kiddin’?”

“The fact.”

“Then she got to be a woman to go with. She got to be an anarchist.”

“She the most. You know what she want them folks for?”

“What for?”

“She want the men to join the army.”

“Join the army? With a war on?” Binchy chuckled. “I got a son in the army, Bill. He a real anarchist. No shit. Went all the way thoo West Point. Number six in his class. He a lieutenant now. Someday he gone be in a real position to fuck up that army for good. What she want them to join the army for?”

“She doin’ something big. A fox like that don’t collect no eleven robbers to work unless it somethin’ very, very big. She gone pay out twenty-fi’ grand to ever one a them—thass three hunnert thou, Binchy—she think big.”

Dawes became very serious. “You got to get my boy in on that, Buffie. We don’t care about the twenny-fi’ gee. My boy is a trained officer of the Army of the United States, an Academy man, an’ there ain’t nothin’ any armed robber can do my boy cain’t do—besides he an officer. She see that inna minute when you tell her. I mean—ever’body know that one devout anarchist worth two bank robbers no matter what.”

Binchy Dawes flew to Washington early the next morning. He rented a car and drove out to Fort Sissons. He sent in word that Lieutenant Orin Dawes’s father had come up from New York to see him on urgent family business. After a twenty-five-minute wait Orin came out. He was a fine-looking boy; brown with caramel eyes like his mother. He had a smart look, like an interesting man, just the way he had always been an interesting little boy. And—Jesus!—he sure looked great in that uniform.

“Let’s take a little spin,” Binchy said. “I won’t take much time.” They got into the rented Plymouth and drove along at an easy pace. The son waited for his father to talk.

“Well—it come just like I always said it would,” Binchy said. “The big chance has come. We can strike the blow.”

“The blow?”

“The chance is here to git to the place where we can bust the government and the army by doing what we know the best to do.”

“What happened, Pa?”

“Something big. Eleven of the messiest cats you ever saw are gonna enlist under orders from the top.”

“What top?”

“We don’t need to know that, Orin. After they in, they report back to my boss. Then they take over and turn the whole fuckin’ army upside-down and I got an okay from William Buffalo to have you lead that buncha weirdoes.”

“That’s pretty hazy, Pa.” He looked glum.

“It’s gotta be hazy! What kinda anarchist outfit would we be runnin’ if ever’ man with a job to do knew the whole thing, step by step of the way? You jes’ let us do the thinkin’, Orin. You get the action part.”

“I don’t know, Pa.”

“Whatta you mean, you don’t know?”

“It’s just that—well, I got picked over everybody else for a big Army assignment, Pa.”

“What assignment?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“You don’ need to talk about it. You can forget it. After a lifetime of plannin’ and trainin’ since you Momma died, we right at the brink, baby. Everything we been plannin’ for.”

“Okay, Pa. What do I do?”

“You just stay right here till we can get you transferred out. If they move you, jes’ tell me where. That’s all you got to do, Orin.”

“Okay, Pa.”

“We ain’t never gone look back, son. This the biggest.”

It took eleven days for Buffalo to line up the convicts. Teel accepted Lieutenant Dawes. She listened to Buffalo read off the prison records, then she said, “Somebody who goes in for armed robbery is only reckless in a certain way. He is an achiever. He doesn’t care what could happen to him in his work because he knows he’s going to win—or forget it. That’s his whole thing, William. He is an artist so he hates authority. He hates the rules. He grabs at being the most dangerous kind of piece man there is. But, at the same time, he doesn’t want to lose. He wants to go on defying everybody and he can’t do that inside any prison. So mostly he’s smart. He is the very prime of the primest. Okay. The instructions are in the money envelopes. You can read them. All they got to do is agree to join the U.S. Army and we take care of the rest, like the governors’ pardons and that kinda jazz. As soon as they get stationed somewhere you tell them to tell you where they are. Then you tell me and we get it all on the road. But that ain’t all, William. For every day over ninety days they are still in that army, every one of those cats is gonna get a thousand a day from you. Okay?”

“Well, sure. Okay. I was just wonderin’ ’bout me. You think it’s good for the business if one a them cats should—uh—like crack open and talk, maybe say it was me recruited them for the Army?”

“Buffie, no way. Not a way for anybody to tell one of them dudes from five hundred other thousand grunts.”

She got home at three o’clock in the afternoon to make her brother Jonas one of the last of the high French meals he was going to have for a long, long time—and he was a boy who liked to eat.

She was going to start him off with a salad of Louisiana crawfish tails with Beluga caviar on top of a lemony mayonnaise with heavy cream folded into it. Then would come sea bass in puff pastry, then some roast woodcock on croutons followed by fat duck’s liver in a truffle salad.

She would let him rest a little then, maybe drink a little mineral water to be ready to eat some more, but with Jonas that was one issue which was never in doubt. A lot of the most of the rest of the world was in doubt for Jonas. She couldn’t figure how the two of them could have been raised in the same very special way, in their very special isolation from the slings and arrows, and have it turn out with her being so sure and he being so unsure. After they had had their farewell talk—Jonas was the one human it was so hard for Teel to say farewell to—she would stoke him up again with a green salad, some prime ribs, then grilled lobster and a crawfish “bush” with all those bitter-tasting veins removed. But she decided she couldn’t do that. Instead she soaked the little shellfish in a milk bath for two hours. They didn’t like the taste of the milk. They wiggled around and purged themselves of all the bitterness without losing any of the taste. She would finish him off with a mousseline of apples and walnuts, polishing its perfection with noyau liqueur, the French almond liqueur known as Noyau de Poissy. If he was still hungry after all of that, she’d crown him with a pot.

They talked all through the meal, not just at the break between. Jonas was about the handsomest black man she had ever seen and that was more beautiful than any man has a right to be. He was as black as she was but twice her size; a huge gentle man with quizzical eyes. In a way he was her little boy.

“The best thing is that you know just what the other men in Three Platoon know—and that’s all. Except you also gone know I am the mover behind it. But—it goes without sayin’, baby, even the wild horses can’t drag that out of you. Okay. Tomorrow you gone in the army for a while but it all comes up roses at the other end. You gone get the finest training in the production of nuclear energy that any experimental physicist at your level ever had, you hear?”

“How you gone do that, Ag?”

“Never mind. Just trust. Say your sister Aggie told you that so it’s gone happen.” She smiled at him tenderly. “Just like everything else I ever said is gone happen, happens. Now you just save yourself. Get along with them six other guys. You got to. But just be friendly; don’t mix in with them. Save yourself so that when all of you get where you’re goin’ your mind will be wide open so you can easy walk away from them without feeling blue and lonesome and settle down to learn everything you got to learn about that nuclear power and how to design it to fit packages our people will be able to walk around with. Okay?”

“Yes, ma’am. What food! But where we gone that I find out all this here?”

“I’m gone tell you so, all over again, just like it was the first time, you gone know I trust you. You gone to China. You gone study with them crafty Chinese.”

“I shouldn’t have asked you.”

“We’re walkin’ up toward the edge now, baby. We gone make it right to the edge—then we gone jump in.”

“Does it make any mind where I check into this army?”

“How do you mean?”

“If I’m gone to China I got to get to Washington first.”

“How come?”

He shrugged clumsily. “A girl.”

“You never said a thing!”

“Not much to say, Ag. Jessa girl.”

“You want to say good-bye?”

He grinned, “Sometimes good-byes can be nice. They can get you results you might not get otherwise.”

Teel smiled back at him. “No, then it doesn’t matter where you enlist. Just remember to tell me where they station you after they take you in.

“One other thing, baby,” she added. “I got you a brand-new birth certificate. You gone enlist under the name of Albert Cassebeer.”

Jonas, who was to be his own man, smiled weakly.