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He looked at the man, short and close to bald, with an ivory mustache and growing beard, smoking a cigarette from a whittled holder. The eyes were crinkled and friendly.
"Pardon?"
"Shooter or looter, boy? You're the new squirrel in the nut. What they got you in for?"
Valentine tried to make sense of the metaphor and gave up. "Murder. Quislings."
"Then you're a shooter. That's those three over there." He turned his chin in the direction of the group with the long-haired man. "I'm Berlinelli. Malfeasance in the performance of my duties."
"Meaning?"
"Looter. I was doing what a lot of other guys were doing, on a larger scale. Siphoning gasoline and diesel out of captured trucks and selling it."
"I thought everyone in prison was innocent," Valentine said, a bit startled at the man's frankness.
"If you're a snitch it's no hair lifted. I'm pleading out."
"I haven't even talked to my lawyer yet. I need to write some letters. You wouldn't know where I could get paper, would you?"
"Who's running your floor?"
"The guard? Young, I think."
"He's a decent guy. Just ask him." He tapped his wooden cigarette holder on the windowsill and winked. "Got to get back to my tribe. It's Grogs and Harpies in here; we don't mix much."
"Thanks for crossing no-man's-land."
"Just a little recon. Mission accomplished."
Valentine asked Young about paper and a pen as they locked him back in his cell. The long-haired man was two doors down.
"Ummm," Valentine said. "Corporal Young?"
"Yes, Major?"
"Could I get some paper and a pencil? I need to write a few people and let them know where I am." And he should write Post and give him the findings of the aborted investigation, which amounted to a few more facts but zero in the way of answers.
"Sure. It's a standard SC envelope; just don't seal it. Censors. I'll slip them under the door gap tonight on my rounds."
"Right. Thank you."
Young unlocked Valentine's door. Valentine couldn't help but glance at the fixture of a secondary bar, a bolt that could be slid home and twisted, fixed to the metal door and the concrete with bolts that looked like they could hold in Ahn-Kha.
"Major Valentine," Young said. "I heard about you on my break today. The fight on that hill by the river in Little Rock. It's . . . ummm ... a privilege."
Valentine felt his eyes go a little wet. "Thank you, Corporal. Thanks for that."
A sticklike insect with waving antennae was exploring his sink. Valentine relocated it to the great outdoors by cupping it between his palms.
He gave the insect its freedom. He used to be responsible for the lives of better than a thousand men. Now he commanded an arthropod. As for the general staff training . . .
"What the hell?" he said to himself. "What the hell?"
* * * *
He met with his military counsel the next day right after breakfast-some sort of patty that seemed to be made of old toast and gristle, and a sweet corn mush. The officer, a taciturn captain from the JAG office named Luecke who looked as though she existed on cigarettes and coffee, laid out the charges and the evidence against him. Valentine wondered at the same military institution both prosecuting and defending him, and, incidentally, acting as judge. Most of the evidence was from two witnesses, a captured Quisling who'd been in the prison camp and a Southern Command nurse lieutenant named Koblenz who'd been horrified at the bloody vengeance wreaked by the outraged women.
Valentine remembered the latter, working tirelessly in the overwhelmed basement hospital atop Big Rock Mountain during the siege following the rising in Little Rock. He'd countersigned the surgeon's report recommending a promotion for her.
